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

1. The most recent is Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 96–98. Previously, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Mésentente et Reconnaissance: Honneth face à Rancière,” in Où en est la Théorie Critique?, ed. Emmanuel Renault and Yves Sintomer (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), 185–199; Deranty, “Jacques Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of Recognition,” Political Theory 31, no. 1 (2003): 136–156. On Honneth, see Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, “Politicising Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition,” Thesis Eleven 88 (2007): 92–111.

2. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); originally La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conﬂicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); originally Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992).

3. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188–243. A critical theory of society is “a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life” (199). It considers the “world which is given to the individual and which he must accept and take into account” as being, “in its present and continuing form, a product of the activity of society as a whole” (200), though the individual sees it as a given imposed on its will from outside. In opposition to traditional theory, critical theory aims at the “transformation of society as a whole” through the “intensification of the struggle with which the theory is connected” (219), for society to be the result of the “conscious spontaneity” of “free individuals.” See also Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, trans. F. Hunter, M. Kramer, and J. Torpey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).

4. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973).

5. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50; Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007), 41–81; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2005); Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005); Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Subjection in Theories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Judith Butler, “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Political, ed. David Ingram (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 212–226. See also Jon Simons, ed., Contemporary Critical Theorists: From Lacan to Said (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Simons, ed., Contemporary Critical Theorists: From Agamben to Žižek (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

6. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 32–50; Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 2, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–226.

7. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 50.

8. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

9. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition; Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Two Lectures, Spinoza Lectures (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 2000); Honneth, Freedom’s Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

10. Axel Honneth, “Domination and Moral Struggle: The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Revisited,” in Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Charles W. Wright (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 3–14. On his distance to Marx, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Les horizons marxistes de éthique de la reconnaissance,” Actuel Marx 38 (2005): 159–178; Deranty, “Repressed Materiality: Retrieving the Materialism in Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition,” in Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 137–164; Deranty, “Critique of Political Economy and Contemporary Critical Theory: A Defence of Honneth’s Theory of Recognition,” in The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Hans-Christoph Schmidt-am-Busch and Christopher F. Zurn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009).

11. He distinguishes an inner circle (Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse) and a periphery (Neumann, Kirchheimer, Fromm, and Benjamin) of the Frankfurt School in Axel Honneth, “Critical Theory,” in The Fragmented World of the Social, 61–91.

12. To recall the core diagnostic concepts used in this tradition to express social negativity, Horkheimer spoke of an “irrational organization” of society. Adorno later analyzed the “administrated world.” Marcuse used concepts such as “one-dimensional society” or “repressive tolerance.” And finally Habermas used the formula “colonization of the life-world.” Axel Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory,” in Pathologies of Reason, 19–42.

16. Axel Honneth, Critique of Power: Reﬂective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

17. On the relation of Rancière to Marx (through Althusser), see Emmanuel Renault, “The Many Marx of Jacques Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross (New York: Continuum, 2012), 167–186.

18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). Rancière participated with Althusser in the book Lire le Capital, by Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Étienne Balibar (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); translated as Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009).

19. Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (London: Verso, 2012).

22. In this book, he relies on a concept of identity from which he will later distance himself. See chapter 2 of this volume, especially pp. 38–41.

23. Althusser, “Ideology and State Apparatuses.”

24. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

25. It is the definition given by Jacques Rancière in “Biopolitics or Politics?,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 91–95.

26. Jacques Rancière, “The Rationality of Disagreement,” in Disagreement, 43–60.

28. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, and the exchange with Nancy Fraser: Honneth and Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003).

29. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), esp. the postscript.

30. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). Such a criticism from Honneth to Habermas is developed in Emmanuel Renault, L’expérience de l’injustice: Reconnaissance et clinique de l’injustice (Paris: La Découverte, 2004).

31. See “Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral: Eine Diskussionsbemerkung zur anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik,” in Anthropologie, Ethik und Gesellschaft: Für Helmut Fahrenbach, ed. Reinhard Brunner and Peter Kelbel (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 101–111.

32. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

33. Including on recognition: Axel Honneth “Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions,” Inquiry 45 no. 4 (2002): 499–519.

34. Honneth and Fraser: Redistribution or Recognition? See also Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (2000): 107–120; and Fraser, “Recognition Without Ethics,” Theory, Culture and Society 18, nos. 2–3 (2001): 21–42.

35. Joel Whitebook, “Mutual Recognition and the Work of the Negative,” in Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory, Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy, ed. William Regh and James Bohman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 257–291; Axel Honneth, “Facets of the Presocial Self: A Rejoinder to Joel Whitebook,” in The I and the We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Joel Whitebook, “Die Grenzen des intersubjective turn: Eine Erwiederung auf Axel Honneth,” Psyché: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen, ed. Werner Bohleber, 3 (2003). See also Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); Axel Honneth, “The Work of Negativity: A Psychoanalytical Revision of the Theory of Recognition,” in Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, Social and Critical Theory, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell, and Robert Sinnerbrink (Boston: Brill, 2007); Axel Honneth, “Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory: On the Seeming Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis,” Philosophical Explorations 2, no. 3 (1999): 225–242.

36. Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), which is the book made out of the lectures given during the Adorno Vorlesungen in 2008 in Frankfurt on the invitation of Honneth; Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); Christophe Dejours, Souffrance en France: La banalisation de l’injustice sociale (Paris: Seuil, 1998).

37. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

38. Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps: Une lecture contemporaine de la domination et de la servitude chez Hegel (Paris: Bayard, 2010).

39. Samantha Avenshen and David Owen, eds., Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: Sage, 1999); David Couzens Hoy and Thomas MacCarthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994); Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). We can mention the edition by Axel Honneth and Martin Saar of Michel Foucault: Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption: Frankfurter Foucault Konferenz 2001 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). On critical theory, see Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); and Michael Theunissen, “Society and History: A Critique of Critical Theory,” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 241–271.

40. Couzens Hoy and MacCarthy, Critical Theory, 2.

41. Axel Honneth, “Foucault and Adorno: Two Forms of the Critique of Modernity,” in Fragmented World of the Social, 121–131. See also Axel Honneth, Critique of Power.

42. He underlines the difference between Adorno’s account of the problematical character of modern individuality and Foucault’s deconstruction of the subject.

43. Lasse Thomassen, ed., The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006).

44. Couzens Hoy and MacCarthy, Critical Theory, 4.

45. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995).

46. Lyotard, The Differend.

47. On Habermas and aesthetics, see, for example, Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Pieter Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); David Colclasure, Habermas and Literary Rationality (London: Routledge, 2010); Nicholas Hengen Fox, “A Habermasian Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 235–254; Geoff Boucher, “The Politics of Aesthetic Affect: A Reconstruction of Habermas’s Art Theory,” Parrhesia 13 (2011): 62–78.

48. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006), 4.

49. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

50. Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” trans. Jean-Philippe Deranty, Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006); 1–20, which was reprinted in Deranty, Petherbridge, Rundell, and Sinnerbrink, Recognition, Work, Politics, 27–46.

51. Honneth’s perspective differs from Charles Taylor’s. See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

52. Cf. Honneth, Freedom’s Right.

53. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006).

54. The literature of Proust is analyzed by Rancière in Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. by James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

55. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 171–180.

56. Axel Honneth, “On the Poverty of Our Liberty”, text published in this volume.

57. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

1. See note 35 in Katia Genel’s introduction, chapter 1 of this volume.

2. See Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson (London: Continuum, 2011), 87.

3. Two seminal references that motivate this rejection of recognition in the “poststructuralist” paradigm are Lacan’s pronouncement that subjective formation is a process of “misrecognition” (méconnaissance) and Althusser’s embrace and use of the Lacanian argument in his writings of the 1970s, particularly in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 161. Badiou’s more recent dismissal of recognition (notably in Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [London: Verso, 2001], 20) can be read as a contemporary reappropriation of these two core references (indeed, see the reference to the mirror-stage at 21). As Alexander Garcia Düttman notes, however, one of the implications of Badiou’s conception of politics as militant fidelity to an event might well be that it is in fact committed to conceiving of the latter in terms of a struggle for recognition, the struggle, namely, to have an egalitarian event and its practical implications acknowledged against its denial or foreclosure: see Düttman, “What Remains of Fidelity After Serious Thought,” in Think Again: Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Halward (London: Continuum, 2004), 206.

4. Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière, La parole ouvrière (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2007), 7–19; Jacques Rancière, “Heretical Knowledge and the Emancipation of the Poor,” in Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (London: Verso, 2011), 34–57.

5. Faure and Rancière, La parole ouvrière, 8.

7. Rancière, “Heretical Knowledge and the Emancipation of the Poor.”

8. Axel Honneth, “Domination and Moral Struggle,” in The Fragmented World of the Social (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 3–14.

9. Faure and Rancière, La parole ouvrière, 12.

12. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 53–55.

13. See p. 95 in this volume.

14. Jacques Rancière, “Le concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique des ‘Manuscrits de 1844’ au ‘Capital,’” in Lire le Capital (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 155.

15. See p. 90 in this volume.

16. Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) offers a compelling case for the central role a subject-concept can play across the different levels implied in a project in critical theory.

17. By “hermeneutic,” therefore, I have in mind something different from what Christoph Menke highlighted in his intervention during the discussions in Frankfurt (see p. 108 in this volume). I am pointing not to a dimension of the political struggle itself, but rather to dimensions in Honneth’s and Rancière’s methods.

18. See, in particular, Axel Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy,” in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 3–48.

19. See Heikki Ikäheimo, Anerkennung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); and Ikäheimo, “Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel’s Social Ontology,” in Recognition and Social Ontology, ed. Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 145–209.

20. To refer only to Honneth’s major books, chapter 6 of The Struggle for Recognition, which establishes a substantial link between everyday experiences of “disrespect” and the central role played by the notion in the theory of recognition, and chapter 3 of Freedom’s Right are typical of this side of the hermeneutic moment. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conﬂicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Honneth, Freedom’s Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

21. The second and third sections of chapter 5 of The Struggle for Recognition and the long normative reconstructions that make up the bulk of Freedom’s Right are typical of this historical dimension of Honneth’s hermeneutic methodology.

22. Recall that the three spheres of recognition were initially established as a “phenomenologically oriented typology”: Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 93. This shift is palpable in particular in Honneth’s adoption of Christopher Zurn’s influential analysis of pathologies of recognition as “second-order” pathologies: see Christopher Zurn, “Social Pathologies as Second-Order Pathologies,” in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays, ed. Danielle Petherbridge (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2011), 345–370.

23. See Emmanuel Renault, L’expérience de l’injustice: Reconnaissance et clinique de l’injustice (Paris: La Découverte, 2004); and Renault, Souffrances sociales: Sociologie, psychologie, politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); as well as Renault, “A Critical Theory of Social Suffering,” Critical Horizons 11, no. 2 (2010): 221–241. See also Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (London: Polity, 2014), 28–65.

24. See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).

25. Typical in this respect is the young Rancière’s appeal to Lacanian theory and the friendly gesture toward Jacques-Alain Miller in his contribution to Reading Capital: see Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Étienne Balibar, Lire le Capital (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 147, 185.

26. An interesting exception is constituted by the works of Deleuze and Guattari, whose decidedly anti-Lacanian materialism reaches well beyond structuralist strictures.

27. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009); Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005), 431–440.

28. See Jacques Rancière, “Work, Identity, Subject,” in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, ed. J.-P. Deranty and A. Ross (London: Continuum, 2012), 205.

29. See Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, 21; Rancière, “Work, Identity, Subject,” 207.

30. See Rancière, “Le concept de critique,” 155: “The essential content of the subject-function is being mystified.”

31. See, in particular, chapter 4 of Althusser’s Lesson, “A Lesson in History,” which already connects concrete reference to the historiography of the early labor movement with philosophical and political analysis. In this chapter, Rancière shows that the labor movement was waged in the name of the derided category of “the human being.” The young Rancière concluded that this banished concept was in fact “the point that makes the very design of (Marxist) science possible.” Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, 94.

32. Rancière, Disagreement, 7, 19, 55.

33. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 93.

34. Rancière, Disagreement, 47–55.

35. See Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), esp. 194–200. Forst’s “critical model” of democracy (155–187)—which revolves around the gap immanent to society, between imperfect modes of justification and the critical potential inherent in “strict” justification that can always be acted upon to challenge the former—could be read in parallel with Rancière’s conception of society as constituted around a torsion between factually existing hierarchies and their modes of self-assertion.

36. See, in particular, Honneth, “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today,” in Disrespect, 63–79.

37. See the explicit account in Axel Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 61–63.

38. Rancière, Disagreement, 43.

39. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 13.

40. See, especially, Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

41. See, for instance, Amy Gutmann, Liberal Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

42. See, for example, Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defence of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985).

43. See, for example, Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 21–23.

44. See Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1961), esp. 301; and Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 32; Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which insists on the link between freedom and world-constitution among equals.

45. See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 115–118; Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” in Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (London: Verso, 2003), 141–143.

46. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, note 2, 337.

47. See Axel Honneth, “The Fabric of Justice: On the Limits of Contemporary Proceduralism,” in The I in We, 35–55.

48. Honneth has noted the parallels between his approach and the perfectionist liberalism of Joseph Raz, as presented in Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). See Honneth, “Recognition and Justice: Outline of a Pluralist Theory of Justice,” Acta Sociologica 47, no. 4 (2004): 351–364. There is not the space here to contrast Honneth’s perfectionism and liberal perfectionism. It probably revolves around Honneth’s strong emphasis on social relations as conditions of (perfectionist) autonomy. There would also be strong overlaps with Nussbaum’s capacity approach, notably around the use of an anthropological mode of argumentation. In the article from 2004 just quoted, Honneth still talks about recognition as “quasi-transcendental interest of the human species.”

49. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 43–50.

50. See Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 55–78; Arto Laitinen and Birgitta Pessi, eds., Solidarity: Theory and Practice (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014).

51. See the seminal critique in Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). See also Nancy Fraser’s classical “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69–98; and the first two chapters of Fraser, Scales of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–47.

52. Axel Honneth, “Philosophy as Social Research: David Miller’s Theory of Justice,” in The I in We, 119–134.

53. See Friedrich Engels, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, in Karl Marx—Friedrich Engels—Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960), 7:327–413; Peter Blickle, Die Revolution von 1525 (Oldenburg: Oldenburg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004).

54. See, for example, a recent interpretation of the Spartacus rebellion, which highlights the egalitarian ethos inspiring its leader, against the barbarity with which Roman civilization was treating its masses of slaves: Aldo Schiavone, Spartacus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 52–61.

55. Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification and Subjectivisation,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 65.

56. As when Rancière defines politics as “the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality”: Rancière, Disagreement, 30.

57. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995), 47–49.

58. See Rajchman, The Identity in Question.

59. See the ironic charge by the young Rancière that Althusser’s theory of ideology is, in fact, a version of Durkheimian sociological thought: see Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, 131–132.

60. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2005), 98–99.

61. Ibid., 150. Indeed, the historical examples he uses are examples of collective organization and noninstitutional decision-making.

62. Badiou, Being and Event, 93–101.

64. Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, 94.

65. Badiou, Metapolitics, 52–53, 98.

67. Ibid.: “The task of philosophy is to expose politics to an assessment.”

68. The famous passage in Engels and Marx is, of course, the incipit of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all societies hitherto has been the history of class struggle.”

69. Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste (Paris: Lignes, 2009), 190.

70. See, in particular, L’hypothèse communiste, in which the historical genealogy of egalitarian struggles is most consistently pursued, and the importance of “proper names” is established, notably at 196–198.

71. Indeed, Badiou directly refers to Rancière to contrast his emphasis on the “proper names” that incarnate revolutionary events with Rancière’s focus on the anonymous heroes of revolutions (the Gauny’s of history, we might say).

72. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 48.

73. Rancière, The Names of History, 93.

74. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 75–80.

75. See an explicit acknowledgment in Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité (Montrouge: Bayard, 2012), 90.

76. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006).

77. Rancière, Disagreement, 37: “The modern political animal is first a literary animal.”

78. See p. 102 in this volume.

79. However, this assumption is questioned in other fields, for instance, in the type of anthropological work that confronts its descriptive and normative results with the assumptions and conclusions of contemporary critical theory, for example and most eminently, Jack Goody: see, for example, Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

80. Axel Honneth, “A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation Between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin,” New Formations 20 (1993): 83–94. See Alison Ross, Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image (New York: Routledge, 2014), chap. 4.

81. See Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014).

82. James Tully, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Tully, On Global Citizenship: Dialogue with James Tully (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

83. See, in particular, the chapter from 1999 “To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Critical Theory,” in Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Avenshen and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999), 90–142.

1. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), xii.

1. Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition,’” Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 75 (2001): 111–126.

2. For a similar type of approach, see Axel Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality,” in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 80–96; and Honneth, “Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral: Eine Diskussionsbemerkung zur Anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik,” in Anthropologie, Ethik und Gesellschaft: Für Helmut Fahrenbach, ed. R. Brunner and P. Kelbel (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000), 101–111.

1. Jacques Rancière refers to Jeanne Désirée Deroin (1805–1894), a French socialist feminist; see Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights. The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France, trans. J. Drury (London: Verso, 2014), 108–110, and especially the epilogue; see also Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 41.

2. Pierre Bourdieu, La misère du monde (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993); English version: Bourdieu, Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

1. “Le travail à la tâche,” in Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (London: Verso, 2012), 81.

1. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Critical remarks and suggestions for further distinctions are found in Raymond Geuss, “Auffassungen der Freiheit,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 (1995): 1–14; and Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, trans. Joseph Ganahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), section A.

2. Dieter Henrich, “Zerfall und Zukunft: Hegels Theoreme über das Ende der Kunst,” in Fixpunkte: Abhandlungen und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 65–125, esp. 65.

3. On this conception of reason, see Dina Emundts and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, G. W. F. Hegel: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2002), 69–75.

4. I am alluding to the social ontology of John Searle, which bears some surprising but as yet unexplored similarities with Hegel’s theory of objective spirit. See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), esp. chap. 2.

5. On the historical presuppositions of Hegel’s own philosophy of right, see the famous passage in his preface stating that reason has attained actuality only in the present, G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

7. On this process of a successive extrication of spirit (conceived as subject) from “natural necessity,” see Hegel, Philosophy of World History, 44–123. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. M. Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), §552, 229. Concerning the method of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which is here described as “genealogical,” see Christoph Menke, “Geist und Leben: Zu einer genealogischen Kritik der Phänomenologie,” in Von der Logik zur Sprache: Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress 2005, ed. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005), 321–348.

8. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §4, pp. 35–37.

9. Ibid., §§11–32, pp. 45–62.

10. Ibid., §11–13, pp. 45–46.

12. Ibid., §14, pp. 47–48.

13. Ibid., §15, Addition: “It is inherent in arbitrariness that the content is not determined as mine by the nature of my will, but by contingency; thus I am also dependent on this content, and this is the contradiction which underlies arbitrariness.”

14. See Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §484, p. 217: “But the purposive action of this will is to realize its concept, freedom, in the externally objective realm, making it a world determined by the will, so that in it the will is at home with itself, joined together with itself: the concept accordingly completed to the Idea.”

15. For this reason, volume 3 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia introduces the concept of “custom” (as “habit, temper, and character”) directly after the first mention of “objective” freedom, that is, freedom that has been “shaped into the actuality of a world” (§484): for its “authoritative power” to exist, it needs to be “impressed in the subjective will, not in the form of feeling and urge, but in its universality,…as disposition and character, and is the will’s custom.” Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §485, p. 218.

16. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §7, Addition, pp. 41–42.

17. See my own attempt at explicating this idea: Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right, section A, III, esp. pp. 82–87. Despite some disagreements, my work is indebted to Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 1.

18. On this expansion of the concept of right in Hegel, see Ludwig Siep, “Philosophische Begründung des Rechts bei Fichte und Hegel,” in Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 65–80.

19. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §20, p. 52.

20. On the socializing function of ethical life, see Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. part 3. Hegel himself offers a vivid description of the processes by which modern subjects are socialized in his lectures on aesthetics, when he discusses the historical and social preconditions of romantic art. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), esp. 517–519.

21. This becomes especially clear in Émile Durkheim’s distinction between morals of the family, professional ethics, and civic morals in Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge, 1992).

22. See Hegel’s sober summary in Philosophy of Right, §157, pp. 197–198. Of course, this list and also the subsequent characterizations of the three ethical spheres are no longer indicative of the great efforts of sociological condensation and conceptual abstraction that were required to carve out the specificity of social freedom. On the analysis of the market economy alone, see Birger P. Priddat, Hegel als Ökonom (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1990).

23. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §165, p. 206; Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §518, p. 229.

24. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §182, §187, p. 220, p. 224.

25. Ibid., §264 and §268 on patriotism, p. 287, p. 289.

26. See, among others, Susanne Brauer, Natur und Sittlichkeit: Die Familie in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 2007).

27. Michael Theunissen. “The Repressed Intersubjectivity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Hegel and Legal Theory, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3–63.

28. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§34–104, pp. 67–131.

29. Ibid., §§105–141, pp. 135–186.

30. A. O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

31. See the transcript of Hegel’s 1819–1820 lecture on the philosophy of right: G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 in einer Nachschrift (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), esp. 187–207. The section on civil society makes repeated reference to the “outrage” that the poor must justifiably feel in view of their situation. In this context Hegel also speaks of an “emergency right” to political revolt.