Motivating Reasons and the Reality of Power: On Rainer Forst’s The Noumenal Republic

Abstract Rainer Forst argues that justification can mediate between normative and empirical social analysis because political power works by shaping the reasons through which agents think, act, feel, and understand their world. I question Forst’s conception of power and the account of agency that underlies it. First, Forst risks treating motivating reasons as sufficient explanations of agency, obscuring structural forces such as racism, class domination, economic decline, and social humiliation. Second, his empirical use of justification presupposes a weak guise-of-the-good view of motivating reasons, which may struggle to account for expressive and affectively driven action within political and social life.