Andrew Arato

Arato's essays were collected in the 1993 volume From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies. Despite the richness of his efforts, Arato saw little connection between his exercises in social system analysis and active social movements aiming to transform state socialism. Indeed, he noted that his type of structural analysis blocked perception of what was new about the rising social movements in Eastern Europe and most especially Poland's Solidarność, which emerged in 1980. In the late 1980s, Arato “disengaged” with his project of developing a critical theory of authoritarian socialism for a theory that seemed to better capture what was new and essential about the rising social movements and oppositions in Eastern Europe, while also offering a powerful tool to criticize the inadequacies of Western capitalist democracies, that is, the theory of civil society.

The unique nature of the transitions and the powerful intellectual and political issues of writing a new constitution soon became Arato's prime target of intellectual investigation. He closely followed the political debate surrounding the drafting of constitutions in Hungary, where he maintained continued with such critical intellectuals as Janos Kis, co-founder and first chair of the Alliance of Free Democrats, Hungary's liberal party until 1991. In 1996–97, Arato served as a consultant for the Hungarian Parliament on constitutional issues. In the ensuing years, he published commentary and analysis of constitutional issues in Nepal, Turkey, South Africa and Iraq after the U.S. invasion of that nation in 2003. His analysis of the creation of a new constitution in Iraq resulted in his 2009 book: Constitution Making under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq.

1989 was an epochal year in world history, with the liberation of East European countries from Soviet dominance, the transformation of the USSR, and negotiated transformations of the governments and constitutions of Eastern Europe in 1989–90.

Arato elaborated a theory of “post-sovereign” constitution making, which he considered a key political innovation occasioned by the construction of negotiated transitions from dictatorship to new democratic constitutions in Eastern Europe, but also in South Africa, Spain and other countries. He believed that this particular form of constitution making had pronounced advantages politically and normatively over the traditional model. He declared, “1989 did produce something dramatically new: a political paradigm of radical transformation ..., yielding a historically new, superior model of constitutional creation beyond the revolutionary democratic European models.”

Between his initial 1981 and 1982 articles on Poland and civil society, a full decade passed before he and Jean Cohen issued their magnum opus: Civil Society and Political Theory. Despite its late publication and its intimidating size at 794 pages, the volume quickly became popular. In October 2010, Google Scholar listed over 2,600 publications citing the book. During this time, Arato remained associated with the radical journal Telos. However, the relevance and vitality of the category of civil society for the West became an object for vigorous dispute at Telos, most especially by Paul Piccone, the journal's pugnacious editor. Piccone elaborated his own perspective under the rubric of “artificial negativity,” a theory that failed to see any autonomous cultural dynamics in the current U.S. civil society outside of the state's manipulation and control of a supposedly atomized, narcissistic population of consumers. In the ensuing debates, Arato and Cohen ended their long association with the journal in 1987.

It is precisely to these ideal spaces and rights of social autonomy separate from the state, or civil society, that Arato shifted in his third stage. Such a change in intellectual direction was clearly sparked by rising opposition movement of Solidarność in the exciting developments in Poland in 1980–81, resulting in Arato's early articulation of the category of civil society in his oft-cited 1981 essay “Civil Society vs. the State: Poland 1980-1981.”

Arato's emphasis on social praxis and the concomitant categories of subjectivity, culture and alienation was displayed in his dissertation on the early 20th-century Marxian philosophy of György Lukács. As Arato notes in his 1979 book, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism, the elaboration of a critical Western Marxism with its emphasis on intentional collective action or praxis was also intended as a critique of the authoritarian communist governments in Eastern Europe. Arato's praxis theory and Western Marxism in general privileged the active, democratic participation of groups and individuals in their supposedly collective self-determination, and they criticized orthodox communist parties with their claims to know the true interests of the working class and to be able to make the proper decisions for them in a form of “substitutionalism.” In contrast to the control of the communist state with its enforced passivity of working classes, “true socialism,” said Western Marxists, should be democracy – democracy extended from the political sphere to the economy and indeed to all social institutions. This implicit critique of state socialist societies, however, largely operated at the level of abstract social philosophy. As Hungarian critics Gyorgy Bence and Janos Kis noted, this rebirth of Marxian philosophy in the East “sidestepped the problem of basic class antagonism” intrinsic to the socialist dictatorships of Eastern Europe.

In the second stage of his intellectual itinerary, Arato made this exact turn from social philosophy to the critical analysis of East European social formations during the late 1970s to the early 1980s.

In the late 1970s into the 1980s and beyond, the problematic of civil society spread across Europe, Latin American and Asia as a powerful theory and ideal that could guide social movements in obtainable advances in freedom. “For better or worse,” Arato noted, “Jean Cohen and myself led the discussion [of civil society] in the United States.”

Arato first attended Queens College in New York City, completing his B.A. in history in 1966. Subsequently, Arato moved to The University of Chicago to complete his M.A. in 1968 and Ph.D. in 1975 with a dissertation entitled 'The Search for the Revolutionary Subject: The Philosophy and Social Theory of the Young Lukács 1910-1923' under the guidance of Leonard Krieger and William H. McNeill. In preparation for his dissertation, Arato conducted preliminary research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1970 under the guidance of Budapest School scholars Ágnes Heller, György Markus, and Mihály Vajda.

The first phase of Arato's academic work emphasized the recovery of an early humanistic Hegelian Marxism. Such Hegelian Marxism highlighted the active constitution of the social order through “praxis,” that is, the collective action of interacting groups. Arato's philosophical investigations here paralleled the thought of critical intellectuals in the East and especially the “Budapest School” in a “renaissance of Marxism” during the 1960s and early 1970s. This perspective was also manifested in the philosophical outlook of the American journal of radical theory Telos. Arato served on Telos’s editorial board from 1971 to 1984.

Andrew Arato (Hungarian: Arató András [ˈɒrɒtoː ˈɒndraːʃ]; born 22 August 1944) is a professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School, best known for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory and constitutions and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser and Nadia Urbinati.