부산대학교 도서관

Needs matter. The concept of needs figures importantly in contemporary policy-making. Furthermore, it plays a significant part in many of the vexing social, political, economic, and ethical challenges encountered today. Consequently, that concept - alongside the related concept of capabilities - has been addressed by several important and influential analytical philosophers. Amongst others, these include Miller, Nussbaum, Doyal and Gough, and Sen. This dissertation argues that these prevailing approaches to needs in analytical political theory are untenable. That untenability can be traced to a shared attempt to ground needs in an extra-political normative foundation. Such attempts reflect certain de-politicising tendencies characteristic of contemporary analytical political theory. The result has been a bifurcated debate over needs in which analytical political theorists end up embracing either an abstract universalist naturalism, or an arbitrary cultural relativism. Neither of those approaches, however, can theorise needs adequately. Because those issues follow from the presuppositions of analytical political theory itself, they are irresolvable without a radical change in approach. I provide a solution by developing and deploying an alternative ontological and epistemological framework. That framework is derived from a novel reading of Marx's work, hitherto unexamined in this context. That novel reading generates a performative understanding of need which grounds needs in neither nature nor culture, but instead in repetitive citational practices. By understanding needs performatively I show that they are constitutively political, since their performative accomplishment involves the following: political struggles, possibilities for human social agency, and significant political stakes. A Marxian approach built on this basis eschews orthodox theoretical attempts to expunge or transcend the politics of need, because it understands political theory as a form of immanent critique and practical intervention. Because my Marxian approach embraces the politics of needs in that way, it provides a compelling alternative to prevailing orthodoxies.