Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

To this effect, a meeting was organized in June 2009 in Frankfurt am Main, in the historical building of the Institute for Social Research. Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière initiated a discussion—moderated by the German Philosopher Christoph Menke—around the key theses of their best-known books, The Struggle for Recognition and Disagreement.² Each thinker began by “reconstructing” the theoretical position of his interlocutor. This issued in a debate on the underlying principles of the “critical theory” that each represents, a clarification of their methodological approaches to society and politics, and, finally, a discussion of the possibility of overcoming injustice and of a political transformation of society. Indeed, their discussion centered on the very meaning of “critical theory.” It is a specific task of this volume to help elucidate this meaning.

This book is the result of this short and intense encounter between the two thinkers. What is published here are the texts presented by Honneth and Rancière, the theoretical exchange that took place between them, and a supplementary text from each author intended to provide a deeper understanding of their thinking, their theoretical orientations, and their methods. Honneth’s method has a strong Hegelian spirit. It is marked by a specific way of discussing political issues—and here, more specifically, the political concept of freedom—through an approach he refers to as “social philosophy,” that is to say, a philosophical type of analysis that takes society as an object and relies on the results of the social sciences. Rancière’s method is a radical political questioning based on the principle whereby the social order is contested by any act that presupposes the equality of anyone with anyone and that verifies it (a “method of equality”). I believe that the short yet substantive discussions between the two thinkers represent a model and an excellent starting point for comparative studies into the possible ways of exercising social criticism, and that such comparative work is particularly apt to develop fruitful perspective onto many significant theoretical issues. Each of these practices shows important deficits in the other approach. One focuses on the need to transform society by the advent of social orders of recognition, the other on the affirmation of politics, assuming the irreversible division of the social. Thinking this divergence enlightens the reference to a critical approach in a large sense. This introduction discusses the texts published in this volume, and frames the confrontation between the two authors in relation to the main coordinates of their thinking. Jean-Philippe Deranty’s discussion, by contrast, takes a broader focus and seeks to situate the two models in the overall theoretical landscape, highlighting problems and potentials that each of the two models raises in relation to the general project of a philosophical critique of contemporary society. A substantive bibliography with a specific focus on the confrontation between the “German” and the “French” traditions is provided at the end of the volume to assist students and researchers in comparative studies in critical theory.

Criticism is understood not only in the sense of Kant—that of establishing the conditions of possibility of knowledge—but also in the sense of Marx, namely, as the articulation between theory and practice. It refers at the same time to the act of dispelling illusions that are constitutive of particular social conditions through the constitution of an emancipatory knowledge and to the thinking of the conditions of a free praxis. The critical tradition is not a unified or univocal tradition. Even in the narrow sense of what was retrospectively called the “Frankfurt School,” it is complex: the succession of generations of thinkers is marked by forms of heritage and rupture, appropriations or actualizations that distort and displace the original theory in productive ways. Critical theory was initially the Marxist-inspired method reformulated by Horkheimer in the 1930s, around which he gathered the members of the Institute of Social Research (the members of what is called the “first generation” of the Frankfurt School). In 1937, Horkheimer defined critical theory, in opposition to traditional theory, as a self-reflexive theory, conscious of the social conditions in which it unfolds, and as aiming at their emancipatory transformation.³ The name “critical theory” was then used as a way to disguise an unavowable reference to Marxism—although it was a renewed Marxism read in light of Hegel, against a positivist reading that was current in the discourses of political parties at the time. The idea was to develop a theory that would not accept the socioeconomic reality, and that could question the socioeconomic processes by performing an overall judgment on society and the direction it should take. At the beginning of the 1940s, considering that the sciences, even dialectically integrated into a general theory of social development, could not guarantee criticism anymore, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School took the new shape of a radical dialectic of Enlightenment, and later the shape of a “negative dialectic,” as it was developed by Adorno.⁴ Performing what is commonly referred to as the “linguistic turn,” Habermas argued that the criticism of rationality that had so far been developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School was too one-sided to provide a basis for a renewed theory of society and developed a theory of communicative rationality.

In parallel, a broader form of critical thinking emerged in Europe and in the United States. Critical theory in this broad sense is not a unified theory either, but rather a collection of different styles of critical thinking. Gender Studies, Subaltern or Postcolonial Studies, Ecological thinking, Feminism, and Neo-Marxism can all be placed within this broad current of thought, with thinkers as different as Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Negri, Balibar, Laclau, Mouffe, and Butler as their main representatives.⁵ A section of this critical literature should be analyzed in relation to Marxism, and can be conceived at least as a criticism, if not as a sort of continuation of it. Many of these critical thinkers don’t mention the Frankfurt School. Some of these critical thinkers have occasionally defined their position in reference to the Frankfurt theory: we can mention The Postmodern Condition of Lyotard and a few incidental remarks made by Foucault on his affinity with the Frankfurt School as he expressed the regret that he had not read it earlier.⁶ Critical theory in this large sense operates by mobilizing concepts and methods that are not necessarily strictly philosophical. But a shared purpose among all these thinkers is to use these concepts and methods in order to call into question the relationship between knowledge or discourse and power. In this sense, criticism has also been understood as a diagnosis of the present and as an engaged practice rather than as a mere theory. Foucault speaks of a “critical ontology of ourselves,” which is not to be considered as “a theory, a doctrine, nor even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating,” but “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”⁷

For Honneth, the Frankfurt School filiation is important and explicitly owned.⁸ He also claims other filiations, however, separate from the Frankfurt School but strongly related. The first of these is the Hegelian one,⁹ and, in his early writings at least, a Marxian one. Honneth has always been critical toward the “economicist” dimensions of Marxism, but through his early writings at least, he was initially part of the Marxist tradition in a large sense.¹⁰ Moreover, he does not take up the Frankfurt School filiation without criticizing it. He considers the critical tradition as differentiated and multiform.¹¹ He criticizes some aspects of the research program of the “inner circle” of the first generation of critical theory (the so-called functionalism of this program) while reconnecting with others. Of course, Honneth assumes, above all, a Habermasian filiation, but he also borrows from the first generation of the Frankfurt School and from Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary program of research the requirement to link philosophy to the social sciences in order to criticize society as a whole. Honneth’s theory of recognition entails this link between social philosophy and the contribution of particular sciences. The theory that the intersubjective relations of recognition, at the affective, legal, and social levels, are the conditions of the constitution of an autonomous subject is both rooted in and extended by research in psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, the theory of law, the psychopathology of work, and so on.

Let’s situate his position more precisely within the field. Honneth continues the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory particularly insofar as his theory starts from the “social pathologies of reason.” These are situations of “social negativity,”¹² out of which a theory of society can counterfactually make explicit the social conditions of a good life. Honneth considers that “the mediation between theory and history,” performed notably through a concept of “historically effective reason,”¹³ is at the heart of the theoretical identity of the Frankfurt tradition. According to the conception of criticism this school aims to practice, criticism of society must “couple the critique of social injustice with an explanation of the processes that obscure that injustice”: this “element of historical explanation” must complement the “normative criticism.”¹⁴ Honneth points out the need to theorize the way in which reason is at work in history, in terms of a process of deformation of reason that leads to a neutralization of the normative expectations of citizens, a de-thematization of social injustice in public discussion as a result of which unjust social situations appear as nonproblematic facts. Criticism as he conceives it must neither be abstract or formal nor “give up the normative motif of a rational universal, the idea of a social pathology of reason and the concept of an emancipatory interest.”¹⁵

The need to anchor social critique in forms of rationality that develop throughout history is both what Honneth inherits and what according to him is problematic in the first generation of the Frankfurt School. He considers that the normative standards of criticism remain too implicit in this tradition, and that the concept of social reason as a result is not clarified enough. This is why he takes up the intersubjective and communicative perspective of Habermas, whose main task is precisely to provide such a clarification. Honneth’s approach is Habermasian insofar as it is based on the intention to clarify the normative foundations of criticism, in order to avoid a concept of rationality that is too one-sided. He sees such a limited concept at work in Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous book Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as in the sociological writings of Adorno. The diagnosis that reason is reduced to a mere instrumental meaning, that it is tightly coupled with domination, brings about damaging confusions in theory as well as in the sociological diagnosis: according to Honneth, it leads to a form of functionalism. According to him, one should give more place to what Habermas calls the life-world, which constitutes a normative resource in the process of reaching an agreement, but also a resistance to forms of domination. Honneth’s conception of critique, however, is not strictly Habermasian. Starting with The Critique of Power, he attempts to integrate some elements of Foucault’s criticism within the Habermasian framework, notably the dimensions of struggle and conflict.¹⁶

Rancière’s approach is critical of the Marxist tradition insofar as it wrongly poses a disjunction between the philosopher and ordinary people. Rancière started with a Marxist and Althusserian approach;¹⁷ in an important seminar, which became a seminal publication, he commented on Marx’s Capital together with Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, and Pierre Macherey.¹⁸ He then broke with this perspective, accusing it of producing this “epistemological break” between theoretical and everyday perspective. In order to avoid this pitfall, Rancière then took recourse to the archives of working-class discourse (“paroles de la classe ouvrière”) to reconstitute political discourses and practices that would make possible a reconfiguration of political space. Discourses and practices are political in the precise sense that they undo the consensus established by the “distribution of the sensible” (“partage du sensible”); they also call into question the link between social position and the capacities attributed to social positions—that is, the capacity to see, say, and determine what is appropriate for such a position. Rejecting some concepts of Marxism, Rancière is therefore not interested in the masses and their practices, but focuses on “the words and fantasies of a few dozen ‘non-representative’ individuals.”¹⁹ This is, in particular, the intention behind Proletarian Nights: The Workers’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, published in 1981. The materials in this study are the “words, reasons, dreams” of a few characters, “a few dozen, a few hundred workers who were twenty years old around 1830 and then resolved, each for himself, to tolerate the intolerable no longer.”²⁰ The “nights” in question are “wrested from the normal sequence of work and sleep,” “imperceptible breaks in the ordinary course of things”: they were nights “where already the impossible was being prepared, dreamt and seen: the suspension of that ancient hierarchy which subordinates those dedicated to labor to those endowed with the privilege of thought.”²¹ According to Rancière, it is paradoxically in those nights and writings that “the image and the discourse of working class identity” were “forged,” in this paradoxical attempt to tear oneself free from proletarian existence.²² What he calls a fundamental rejection of the established order is opened here through the constraints of proletarian existence. This attempt at a restitution of workers’ voice, far from any reference to class consciousness, is for Rancière the most effective way to undertake the criticism of social divisions that keep everyone in their place.

A paternalistic posture of philosophy is thus attacked by both philosophers, insofar as it is based on a certain inegalitarian logic of emancipation. On this point, Honneth is, like Rancière, skeptical of paternalistic forms of criticism. This appears clearly in his early judgment on Althusser’s theory of recognition as ideology, in which Althusser famously accounts for the constitution of subjectivity through the example of the interpellation of a policeman.²³ This, for Honneth, is typically an approach opposed to the one he proposes. According to Honneth, recognition cannot be exclusively ideological, nor can it “subjectivize” totally: insofar as the desire to be recognized can, when injured, reveal the normative expectations of the subjects, recognition provides a potential interpretative framework for social conflicts.

As is clearly illustrated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière starts from the way criticism is exercised within society. Here he follows the schoolmaster depicted in the book, Jacotot, who bases his teaching on the equality of intelligence.²⁴ Rancière offers a complete redefinition of what the act of teaching means: it is the ignorant who teaches and produces emancipatory political effects by presupposing equality. What is referred to here and is present throughout the work of Rancière is again a method of equality. The type of criticism that is at stake here is a method of political subversion of the social order. Criticism is not rooted in a genuine subjectivity (as is the case in some readings of Marx or even of Foucault). Critical theory cannot be identified with the scientific account of a posture or a social situation—something Rancière criticizes, in a more or less justified fashion, in Althusser and Bourdieu. Criticism is, for him, an effort to understand an organization of the social, disrupting the positions and challenging the mode of division on which it is based by bringing to light the unrepresented part of society (la “part des sans parts”), the part of those who are not counted and remain voiceless. The concept of the social is thereby redefined. It is not just a concern for power or the outcome of power relations (as is the case in a Foucauldian perspective) or a concern for the truth of politics. The social is rather the result of a division. For Rancière, there are several modes of distributions. One is called the “police,” which assigns places and distributes goods; another is called “politics,” which refers to the act of contesting this assignment in the name of equality. With such a conception of the social, Rancière therefore proceeds without sociological analyses; indeed, he even questions the epistemology such analyses presuppose. This point opposes him radically to the Frankfurt School tradition.

The dialogue that took place in Frankfurt thus opposed two different thinkers, who diverge not so much in terms of the critical traditions to which they are attached or the authors to which they refer (Marx, for example), but rather through their methods and their critical approaches to the social and the political. Rancière concentrates on the elements of “disagreement” that hinder all dialogue. The question of the political determination of the community is shifted to another question, that of the scene on which visibility is defined in terms of the difference between noise and speech. In the third chapter of Disagreement, Rancière refuses the Habermasian view of the political community as based on the possibility of an ideal agreement. For him, the problem of politics begins where the status of the subject who is able to take part in the community is in question.²⁵ According to his analysis, every community is originally divided. In chapter 3 of Disagreement, Rancière clearly locates his conception of politics, by contrast, with what he thinks is a false dichotomy, between the “enlightenment of rational communication” on the one hand and the “murkiness of inherent violence” or “irreducible difference” on the other, or between the “exchange between partners putting their interests or standards up for discussions” and the “violence of the irrational.”²⁶ It is this identification between political rationality and speech situation that constitutes the presupposition of what should instead, for Rancière, always be in question. Rancière takes the example of the statement “Do you understand?” (“Vous m’avez compris”) as the opposite of any performative contradiction. The statement certainly contains an ideal of shared understanding, but on a second reading, it also contains the opposition between people who understand the issues and people who have to understand the orders; therefore, it contains the gap—anchored in logos—between the language of orders and the language of problems.²⁷

By contrast, Honneth’s theory of recognition continues to work within the Habermasian paradigm of communication. Like Habermas, Honneth starts from a social experience: not the exercise of communication from which one can draw the presuppositions of the ideal situation, but something that he thinks is more appropriate or even more immanent to social life. It is in terms of the denial of recognition that the conditions for achieving a good life are grasped.²⁸ Honneth acknowledges and follows partially Habermas’s turn from “critique” to “reconstruction,”²⁹ in which the rules that produce the knowledge and practices of individuals are reconstructed by theory. But Honneth enlarges and corrects the Habermasian framework by taking as his point of departure the negative experiences of being denied recognition and of being treated with contempt in order to bring out the normative expectations, which can become formulated at the affective, legal, and social levels, and which appear damaged or prejudiced in certain configurations of social relations. Thus, if we want the theory to take charge, as Habermas states, of the problems of the people concerned,³⁰ we must start not from the experiences and structures of communication but from the experiences of injustice that the dominated make and by referencing the language in which they express or fail to express them. From this perspective, it is clear that when individuals want to express the fact that they do not manage to flourish or achieve “self-realization” in existing society, they do not refer to experiences such as pathologies of communication. Honneth considers communication to be irreducible to linguistic exchanges because it has corporeal and broad material dimensions, which necessitate an analysis of the nondiscursive, social signs of contempt and of social invisibility. Honneth therefore inscribes his theory in the continuity of the Habermasian communicative turn, but he also shifts the focus toward recognition to address the shortcomings or deficits of the theory of communication.³¹ In the continuity of the normative framework of communicative ethics, his theory broadens and deepens the scope of the conditions of possibility for self-realization by shifting toward the whole array of intersubjective relationships of recognition. He wants to grasp the abstract outlines of communicative reason in a way that has stronger sociological features, searching to anchor it directly in the reproduction of society as a principle of mutual recognition. For Honneth the normative expectations of individuals, which are expectations of recognition, contain a critical potential that can engage a dynamic of social transformation. As a result, criticism for him is the act of bringing to light the normative potential already at work in interactions, the very normative resources that are breached in negative social experiences, and articulating a theoretical framework in which we can do justice to such normative potential.

Honneth has also engaged in discussions with his contemporaries.³³ His dialogue with Nancy Fraser on the paradigms of recognition and redistribution as a way to rethink social justice³⁴ is without doubt the most famous, but he also held a very interesting discussion with Joel Whitebook on psychoanalysis.³⁵ Other, lesser-known discussions have also taken place—for example, with the “sociology of criticism” of Luc Boltanski or the psychodynamics of work of Christophe Dejours.³⁶ More recent dialogues that have reconfigured the critical field include the important debates between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek,³⁷ as well as between Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou.³⁸

Apart from those actual dialogues, some important external confrontations—debates on positions reconstructed or even imagined—have also been attempted. Most of them try to establish a dialogue between Habermas and Foucault.³⁹ This is the case with the interesting book by David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory, which confronts two understandings of the “sueños” of reason (which means either the dream or the sleep of reason), which, as in Goya’s famous etching, produces monsters. The reflection on the historical roots of rationality and argumentation is organized along two divergent views of the “critical” paradigm: a Habermasian one represented by McCarthy, the “continuation-through-processing of the Kantian approach to reason”; and one represented by Hoy, who takes the side of the alternatives offered by Gadamer and Foucault, defending the “contingent character of what counts as rational.”⁴⁰ I should also mention the book by Ashenden and Owen pursuing the confrontation between Foucault and Habermas in terms of two conceptions of criticism and the Enlightenment (the continuation of Kant’s critique and a Foucauldian critique conceived as an ethos), reconstructing the response that Foucault might have given to Habermas’s criticism of genealogy. Honneth himself has also made recurrent attempts to set up critical dialogues between his own tradition and a Foucauldian mode of critical thinking. In a number of texts interspersed throughout his career, he has sought to compare Foucault to Habermas, but also to Adorno, insofar as they have in common the commitment to a critique of European reason and they sought to point out the extension of domination that is correlative to the latter’s development.⁴¹ Honneth defends Adorno and his idea of a possible reconciliation of subjectivity and its instinctual and imaginary dimensions—dimensions amputated by civilization—against the attack of human subjectivity in general that he believes to be at work in Foucault’s writings.⁴² In a number of other texts, however, his relationship to Foucault is in fact much closer and he takes to task the Foucauldian legacy. In his early book Critique of Power, for instance, he borrows from Foucault an active conception of social struggle. Finally, we can mention the confrontation between Habermas and Derrida, which combines an effective dialogue and the pursuit of an external confrontation in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, edited by Lasse Thomassen.⁴³

Our critical encounter comes under this twofold perspective: it is both a live dialogue and a confrontation that we can carry out a posteriori. It entails a brief dialogue that took place during a meeting in Frankfurt. Like many of the confrontations mentioned above, the confrontation between Honneth and Rancière also intends to be the beginning of an in-depth dialogue: “This dialectical exercise is by no means meant to end discussion on any of the issues raised.”⁴⁴ The discussion that took place highlights a difference in the theoretical approaches concerning the identification of what is at play in the transformation of society and how such transformation might work, the nature of the social field and its relation to the political, and eventually the very logic of emancipation. It is precisely the differences between Rancière and Honneth that could generate a productive confrontation. By confronting these two influential, divergent critical models, the discussion we propose here and the comparative study we try to initiate highlights in return a number of key aporias that are specific to each thinking but that are also revealed as key stakes in the general project of “critical theory.” More specifically, the confrontation highlights the risk that the theory of recognition might lose its political dimension by becoming an exclusively social theory, focusing on the agents as social and not political actors; and conversely the discussion highlights the risk that the theory of disagreement does not sufficiently think its own institutionalization, its own social translation. By doing without the social sciences, without a sufficiently determined view of the social, it runs the risk of overlooking the political issues that are raised from within the social field.

The differences between our two authors, within this complex community of tradition, were readily apparent even before the meeting occurred. Anticipating the encounter, one would hardly expect the presuppositions of each approach to be compatible. As mentioned, in his key work of “political theory,” Disagreement, as well as in many other texts, Rancière has criticized theoretical approaches focused on the social. For him, the logic of the social is opposed to the logic of the political, insofar as the former rests upon an assignment of positions. The process falling under the concept of government, organizing the gathering of individuals and their consent in a community, is based on a hierarchical distribution of places and functions. As such, it falls outside of politics; it is part of what Rancière famously calls “the police.” These assigned positions must be challenged by the assertion of equality, an assertion that takes place through the specifically political act of “subjectivization,” which entails a disruption of the unequal relations underpinning the mechanisms and practices of the social sphere. Such a specifically political process is therefore always also a way of “verifying equality.”⁴⁵ From Rancière’s perspective, one could object to a theory of recognition that it presupposes the logic of the social without challenging it, although this is not really the case in Honneth’s theory. In the text presented in this volume, “The Method of Equality,” Rancière rejects once more the methodological presuppositions of critical approaches, shared by certain forms of Marxism as well as a critical sociology of a Bourdieusian type, that take social inequalities as their starting point and call for a transitional process from apparent inequality to an equality that would be achievable in the future. Rancière therefore proposes nothing less than a redefinition of emancipation: the unequal logic of emancipation, in which the social sciences and critical philosophy play the role of translator of a certain kind of subjectivity and of a relay for emancipatory knowledge (this is the dimension of the ideology critique), is rejected in favor of emancipation conceived as the radical affirmation of equality. In On the Shores of Politics in particular, emancipation is defined as the set of practices guided by the presupposition of the equality of anyone with anyone and the will to verify it. Furthermore, the critique of identification is supplemented by a critique of communication. Instead of analyzing, as does Habermas, the procedure that makes it possible for subjects or citizens to reach a consensus, one must question—by insisting on the fundamental dimensions of injustice, on prejudice (tort), on the dimension of disagreement or even of the différend⁴⁶—the very constitution of the political community and consequently the possibility of communication.

Through these two dimensions—the critique of identification and communication—Rancière’s political perspective is linked in a very original way to aesthetics, which is also redefined in the process. Such an aesthetic perspective is not strongly present in the second generation of the Frankfurt School.⁴⁷ Rancière indicates on numerous occasions that he intends to reelaborate the meaning of what is referred to as aesthetics. In The Politics of Aesthetics, for instance, aesthetics “denotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consign art to its effect on sensibility.” Rather, it “refers to a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes a certain idea of thought’s effectively).”⁴⁸ To the extent that the social distribution of places is conceived as a distribution of the sensible, aesthetics redefined in this way has an inherent political dimension. Rancière considers that the division between the visible and the invisible, between what is speech and what is noise, is what is at stake in politics.

Another difference between Honneth and Rancière appears as a result, namely, the emphasis on the moral dimensions of individual and social existence. While normative expectations and moral experience are at the core of Honneth’s theory, Rancière criticizes an “ethical turn” in politics and aesthetics, a turn he makes explicit through arguments drawn from the analysis of works of art.⁴⁹ For Rancière, the outcome of such a turn is a lack of distinction between fact and law, between being and ought, and the dissolution of the norm into facts. Rancière’s analysis of the “ethical turn” does not mean a return to moral standards, but the removal of the division that the very word “morality” involves—the division between law and fact—and finally the transformation of the political community into an ethical community that is supposedly a single substance, made up of one and only people.⁵⁰

According to Honneth, reciprocal recognition is an attempt to establish a positive practical relation to oneself. This does not necessarily mean that we should take a psychologizing approach or that we should refer to a political concept of identity.⁵¹ Honneth relies primarily on concepts and schemes from sociology to reflect on the social conditions of self-realization. Consequently, an approach that is too directly political, one that ignores the successive steps in the institutionalization of normative expectations, as revealed by the theory of recognition, cannot satisfy Honneth. In the last decade, Honneth has turned to Hegel’s method in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The key methodological question he now asks to approach the political is, what type of practices is institutionalized in our societies in such ways that forms of reciprocal recognition are thereby produced and entrenched? Honneth views capitalist societies as institutionalized orders of recognition, and this institutional dimension is increasingly present in his writings.⁵² He forges an enlarged concept of justice by bringing out three forms of institutionalization that concern the consideration of the needs of the individuals, their moral autonomy, and the contribution of the individuals to society. There are thus three normative principles that express something about the moral demands that modern individuals can legitimately raise: the principle of love, of juridical equality, and of performance. Those established principles of modern societies constitute standards for “immanent” social criticism. From this perspective, justice is the outcome of the transformation of the orders of recognition: the result of the back-and-forth movements and tensions between institutionalized principles and unsatisfied claims for recognition expressed by individuals. The notion of justice that is at stake here is far removed from Rancière’s revolutionary irruption of equality. Historical evolution demonstrates an expansion of the relations of recognition (the telos of this theory), and criticism proceeds in an immanent way, by articulating the pathologies of society through normative diagnoses, that is, by highlighting gaps between established principles and their actual social realization. Far from being rejected in their content or for their methodologies, the social sciences constitute an essential element in such a critical epistemology. Honneth’s concern with the social conditions of self-realization thus hardly seems compatible with Rancière’s theory, notably because of the role he confers on social sciences in order to bring out these conditions. The sense of the political is also dramatically shifted: in contrast to an influential model like the theory of Rawls, Honneth continues to raise political questions within the framework of social theory.

Lastly, insofar as the question is also the question of the relevance of critical theory today, we have to specify at least how those forms of criticism are linked to democratic practices. Honneth proceeds to an immanent criticism of the different orders of recognition in our democratic societies; the question of democracy is shifted to the question of the social conditions of possibility for the participation of citizens in the public sphere. For his part, Rancière exercises a radical criticism of the “hatred of democracy,” in the name of the democratic principle of the affirmation of a radical equality.⁵³ For him, democracy refers neither to the form of a representative government, nor to the liberal capitalist society; it is originally a scandal to the hierarchical underpinning of society, namely, the government of the multitude, of those who don’t have any title or competence.

During the discussion, each philosopher identified something in the other’s approach or method that seemed to contradict the critical project of social transformation he purported to defend. Rancière’s intervention is based on a critique of the specific conception of the subject and its identity that, according to him, are presupposed by the theory of recognition. He argues that this theory runs the risk of forgetting the moment of disagreement. The struggle for recognition is based on a polemical concept of recognition that entails both a structure of identification and conflict over this identification. But the presence of a different concept of recognition, which presupposes preexisting identities, could vitiate the polemical dimension of this critique. Rancière insists that the demand not to be assigned to an identity must be heard. Taking the first sphere as a case for his demonstration, he argues that the relationship of “love” between mother and baby should actually be thought along a “Proustian model,”⁵⁴ which leads to a different conception of identity. To the conception of identity that underlies the theory of recognition, he opposes the idea of “subjectivization” conceived as dis-identification. Moreover, he criticizes the prejudicial implications of the conception of identity at work in the dynamic of recognition: the telos of this dynamic entails the hypothesis of a kind of ethical progress. Rancière puts neither the identity nor the integrity of the person at the core of this dynamic of recognition, but rather equality.

Honneth carried out his own immanent reconstruction of Rancière’s theory, based on the second and the third chapters of Disagreement. He questions the desire for equality, which drives the process of political transformation in Rancière’s theory, and suggests there could be an anthropological given at work here, which Rancière would have to acknowledge. It would be an anthropological given insofar as it is not thought of as taking specific forms depending on the historically changing structures of societies. Honneth attempts to demonstrate that, according to this conception of the political, the transformation of society must be considered as coming under an external critique in Rancière’s work—and this leads to a problematic notion of politics. On the one hand, the police order, criticized in an external way, is depicted and thought in a manner that is too rigid for Honneth, as a totally regulated order. Honneth is criticizing here a failure to grasp the complexity of society. The dynamic through which actors reinterpret the normative principles and subvert them is left in the shadows. On the other hand, confining the political to an interruption of the police order does not appear to him as a satisfying way to conceptualize the political, notably from the perspective of the different types of struggles for recognition. Honneth undertakes an immanent critique of the normative principles called into question by actors who feel themselves misrepresented by them and who seek to reinterpret them. Taking up a Hegelian perspective, he considers that the validity of the normative principles of recognition depends on their social effectivity and enforcement. In his most recent work, he takes increasingly as the object of his work the institutional orders of society and the way institutionalized principles of recognition are insufficiently realized.

This debate between Honneth and Rancière thus provided the opportunity to raise a number of significant questions to each of the two approaches: in order to progress in the elucidation of what is a criticism of society, the encounter was the occasion to ask Rancière if there was a place for an analysis of the social in critical theory, and to ask Honneth what the political signification of his conception is. The next two texts, which make the presuppositions of each author explicit, further advanced the understanding of the stakes and difficulties of a contemporary critical theory.

Rancière opposes a “method of equality” to the method of inequality prevalent in critical theory and sociology today. According to this method, equality surges into the social order and enables a political “subjectivization” as discussed above. It is opposed to the constitution of subjectivity as the realization of an identity, even one of personal integrity, as Honneth theorizes it. Rancière is critical of Marxist and even Frankfurt critical theories (he also cites social history and cultural sociology as “discourses of disciplines” that sustain a discourse of competencies), which, according to him, begin with the assumption of inequality and as a result cannot but return to it once again. The explanation of domination and exploitation as coming from the ignorance of the mechanisms underlying social relations leads one in a circle; individuals are dominated because they are ignorant of the laws of domination, and they are ignorant because they are dominated. This kind of explanation inscribes equality in the future—the future of the passage from passivity to activity—that presupposes dissymmetry once again and thus leads back to inequality in the end. Rancière takes aim here at philosophical and sociological methods that operate on the basis of the ancient Platonic identification between social hierarchy and the hierarchy of the souls, and that ground “scientifically” the correlation between social activity and individual, in particular mental, capacities. To this method of inequality, Rancière opposes a method defined as a verification of the presupposition of equality, which consists not merely in aiming for future equality, but in directly producing its effects, precisely by positing it as an “axiom” in the first place. Such a method therefore does not rely on the critique of ideology and illusion (opposing ignorance and knowledge), but rather on the distribution of the sensible and the contestation of the consensus related to the distribution of subjective and social positions.

Against the objections expressed by Rancière, Honneth makes explicit the normative groundings of the realization of integrity. Already in The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth recalled the necessity—related to a “de-substantialized” concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit)⁵⁵—to rethink the historical evolution of modernity toward greater recognition, without anchoring this evolution in the Hegelian metaphysics of the self-realization of the spirit. On the basis of a new interpretation of Hegel, Honneth poses this question afresh and clarifies his immanent conception of criticism. In his essay “Of the Poverty of Our Liberty: The Greatness and Limits of Hegel’s Doctrine of Ethical Life,” which we are publishing here, Honneth addresses specifically the problem of freedom, which is now the core concept of his normative model. According to him, a differentiated concept of freedom or liberty, one that is adequate to the plurality of the exercises of liberty in our modernity, can only be elaborated in relation to ethical life. Rereading Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he shows that in order to fully grasp this concept, we need to insist on the social and institutional foundations of freedom. Individual freedom can only be realized through social institutions, under the condition that the individuals “are equally able to participate in the institutionalized spheres of reciprocity, that is to say in families and personal relations, in the labor market, and in the process of democratic decision-making.”⁵⁶ By relating to institutions, individuals also relate to themselves since subjective identity is dependent on other-relations for its formation: this is the sense Honneth gives to the Hegelian term “spirit.” Spirit is the concept of a reflexive relation to oneself that leads subjects to conceive the objectivity of social reality as a product of the activity of rationally self-relating subjects.