The work of Axel Honneth has been seen by many as effecting a major shift in the tradition of critical theory. With its emphasis on recognition, a reflexive theory of democracy, and its defense of modernity as a mode of self-realization and social freedom, his ideas have become highly influential for those sympathetic to a post-Habermasian critical theory which has sought for an alternative foundation for normative philosophical questions. If Habermas and the Kantian-pragmatist program for critical theory that he initiated struck many critical theorists during the 1980s and 1990s as too epistemic and ideal-typical with respect to human rationality and social action, Honneth offers a more humane, more comprehensive view of the human subject, a thicker conception of intersubjectivity, and has made a major effort to turn critical theory toward concerns over identity and non-economic dimensions of power. But the extent to which Honneth’s ideas really constitute a critical theory of society is an open question. I will be concerned in this chapter with laying out what I see to be Honneth’s most salient ideas and to question their bona fides for qualifying as a critical theory of society. Honneth fails to keep in view the centrality of the ways that the logics of social structures under capitalism shape the cognitive and intersubjective patterns of self and society. Essentially, what I will argue here is that Honneth’s ideas and his theoretical reconstruction of critical theory have taken the project of critical social theory away from its radical impulses and morphed it into an essentially neo-Idealist enterprise. I will defend this thesis through an examination of his theory of recognition, his reworking of the research program of critical theory as well as his theory of democracy.
Born in Essen, West Germany in 1949, Honneth studied there and in Munich under Jürgen Habermas. Since 2001, he has been the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt as well as Professor of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt and, since 2011, the Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Honneth’s early work combined French and German social philosophy, but was deeply marked by his defense of Habermas’ intersubjective turn, having been, from 1983 to 1989, Habermas’ Hochschulassistent. His dissertation, published in English as The Critique of Power (1991), was a study of how Habermas’ theory of the social as a communicative system of understanding solved the problems of the social in early critical theory as well as the paradoxes of Foucault’s theory of society as power. This paved the way for his own distinctive development toward a theory of the social not as a system of power, but rather of understanding and intersubjective relations – as a system of recognition. His Habilitation, written in 1990 and published in English in 1995, was The Struggle for Recognition, which essentially marked his theoretical contribution to shape and ground the tradition of critical theory in his theory of recognition.
Honneth’s relation to Habermas is an important one. He follows the paradigm shift laid out by Habermas’ turn toward a postmetaphysical and intersubjectivist model for philosophy and social theory. For Habermas, this meant a shift toward a model of reason that was intersubjective and discursive. The structure of language was the context within which the validity of norms were raised, questioned, and ultimately agreed upon. This meant that the core of critical theory was not simply concerned with diagnosing social institutions and the pathological structures of modernity, as it was for early critical theorists, but was also constructivist as well. Social actors engaged in discursive practices were able to articulate new claims to normative validity, to challenge the encrusted and hegemonic norms and institutions that prevailed within their community, and were liberated from any essentialist conceptions of the person and society. The postmetaphysical turn meant that reflexive forms of intersubjective relations were now the context which would articulate norms without any kind of grounding or foundations (Habermas, 1998).
Honneth accepts the postmetaphysical and intersubjective pillars on which Habermas scaffolds his theory of discourse ethics (Honneth, 1995a, 2007), specifically the move to embrace an intramundane theory for critical theory and the postmetaphysical paradigm of emancipating social action from structural and functional constraints. However, he reacts to what he sees as its limitation through its emphasis on the purely cognitive aspects of discourse ethics and widens the scope of intersubjective relations to include the cathectic and emotional aspects of the psyche. But even here, Honneth draws a line between his own ideas and the early critical theory tradition. Whereas for early critical theorists, the psyche and cathexis bound subjects to the reality principle of consumption, domination, and exploitation via the culture industry, repressive desublimation, or other such mechanisms of conformity, for Honneth it is the cathectic bonding between mother and child and, in time, between ego and alters, that forms the basis for a recognitive approach to moral philosophy rooted in the structures of modern everyday life.
But in addition to this, Honneth’s ideas begin as a kind of disagreement with the focus of Habermas’ paradigm as well as its assumptions. For Honneth, the problem lies in the way that subjects experience domination: ‘They experience an impairment of what we can call their moral experiences, i.e., their “moral point of view”, not as a restriction of intuitively mastered rules of language, but as a violation of identity claims acquired in socialization’ (Honneth, 2007: 70). With this move, Honneth now claims that critical theory should focus on the ways that social relations of recognition can provide us with a normative and descriptive means to measure the extent of social pathologies. More importantly, he maintains that critical theory must restrict itself to this nexus of social relations and abandon critical inquiry into the structural-functional logics of modern society: ‘Critical social theory must shift its attention from the self-generated independence of systems to the damage and distortion of social relations of recognition’ (Honneth, 2007: 72).
One of the core ideas that motivates and underwrites Honneth’s work as a whole is not only his embrace of the postmetaphysical and intersubjectivist paradigm, but also an insistence that this intersubjective lifeworld is shaped by the moral experiences of agents. In the early 1990s, Honneth responded to the question of the salience of critical theory in the following way: ‘All the reflections I have so far presented converge in the thesis that the multifarious efforts of a struggle for recognition are what will enable Critical Theory to justify its normative claims’ (Honneth, 2007: 77). The normative turn is now, for Honneth at least, the proper path for any useful form of critical theory. Indeed, according to him, the work of early critical theorists was too deeply shaped by Marxism, which he claims constrained its capacity to reveal the broader moral struggles that give shape to modernity. Since earlier critical theorists were concerned with the problems of instrumental reason – promulgated by the spread of capital and technical rationality – they were unable to see ‘that dimension of everyday practice in which socialized subjects generate and creatively develop common action-orientations in a communicative manner’ (Honneth, 1995a: 72). The extent to which Honneth’s work constitutes a valid critical theory of society ultimately must rest on the extent to which this basic proposition can shoulder the weight of a critical grasp of power, domination, social pathology, and the concrete form of life characteristic of modernity.
Honneth’s work therefore emerges out of the Habermasian break with early critical theorists and it embraces what I term a ‘neo-Idealist’ reworking of critical theory. By this I mean a type of theory that isolates intersubjectivist processes of social action that are nevertheless devoid of the material and structural-functional sources of social power that shape and orient them. The neo-Idealist therefore invests critical potency in these abstract forms of social action – say, communication, discourse, recognition – and believes them to possess a critical power against social pathologies and to promote a more humane and rational community. By viewing Honneth’s theory of recognition in this light, we can see how this strand of critical theory has recalibrated its concerns away from the structural and systemic nature of social power and domination and toward the phenomenological and micro-relational levels of sociation. I will tease out the implications of this theoretical move after rehearsing Honneth’s theoretical ideas and models.
If Honneth’s concern with early critical theory is its under-investment in the concept of ‘morally-motivated struggle’ (Honneth, 1995b: 1), it is because he sees its alliance to a structural and functional understanding of modernity as problematic. Since he is concerned with essentially constructing what we can call an non-Marxian, non-Freudian, and non-Weberian brand of critical theory, his move toward a theory of recognition is the descriptive and normative vehicle for this new approach. Honneth’s paradigm rests on a reconstruction of Hegel’s concept of recognition fused to pragmatist theories of social action, along with the psychoanalytic theories of thinkers such as Donald Winnicott that bolster the model. It is essentially constructed via two different but parallel paths. First, Hegel’s theory of recognition is seen to constitute a theory of the development of consciousness that occurs through stages of struggle which give rise to ‘a moral potential that is structurally inherent in communicative relations between subjects’ (Honneth, 1995b: 67). This occurs because, for Hegel, ‘conflict represents a sort of mechanism of social integration into community which forces subjects to cognize each other mutually in such a way that their individual consciousness of totality has ultimately become interwoven, together with that of everyone else, into a “universal” consciousness’ (Honneth, 1995b: 28).
The limit of this approach, however, is that it remains trapped in a speculative framework that fails to grasp the action-theoretic side of modern social theory. This, he argues, can be fulfilled by the second path of constructing the model by grafting George Herbert Mead’s thesis of subject-formation onto Hegel’s theory of recognition. Here, Honneth offers a core argument about the nature of self-formation. The thesis is that recognition carries with it a symbolic-interactionist dimension that provides the subject with the second-order capacity to see himself as a subject through interaction with an other: ‘a subject can only acquire a consciousness of itself to the extent to which it learns to perceive its own action from the symbolically represented second-person perspective’ (Honneth, 1995b: 75). Recognition now can be seen as a process of identity–and self-formation that develops a practical identity for the subject over time. It is this core process of identity-formation that bears much of the weight of the theory, since it is Honneth’s claim that recognition is both a formative and evaluative theory. On the one hand, it is the means by which we form our sense of self through others and our self-conception of our identities. This then leads us to have a kind of base line for how we are respected by others. We seek to have our identities recognized not only by discrete others, but through the legal and political system itself. The ‘struggle for recognition’ is therefore the means by which modern subjects seek to change and assert their desire for respect and for their identities to be accepted by the society to which they belong.
Honneth maintains that individuals articulate an identity and a sense of self-worth from the very processes of social relations that constitute them. But these relations are recognitive relations in that we receive approval and recognition for our actions and for who we are from others. This creates within us a sense of integral identity that constitutes our self-identity as an individual: ‘human individuation is a process in which the individual can unfold a practical identity to the extent that he is capable of reassuring himself of recognition by a growing circle of communicative partners’ (Honneth, 1995a: 249). This intersubjective pattern of communication allows for the transfer of emotional ties between subjects such that a practical identity is able to emerge. This begins in childhood, with relations to parental and specifically ‘maternal’ relations that develop into a desire for respect and dignity in the world as adults:
Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of ‘maternal’ care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their own actions as the universally respected expression of their own autonomy. (Honneth, 1995b: 118)
To the extent that this happens, we can speak of the existence of an integral sense of self that is formed through recognition that comes into tension with the existing social relations that frustrate or deny this recognition in later stages of social development. Hence, the concept of ‘disrespect’ [Mißachtung] comes to the fore which constitutes what he calls a ‘moral injustice’ which, he claims, ‘is at hand whenever, contrary to their expectations, human subjects are denied the recognition they feel they deserve. I would like to refer to such moral experiences as feelings of social disrespect’ (Honneth, 2007: 71).
The ideas of ‘respect’ [Achtung] and ‘disrespect’ [Mißachtung] rest on a prior model of self-development that is produced by a struggle for identity and recognition. This moves through the initial stage of childhood and then into the secondary stage of an assertion of one’s right to be recognized as who one is. But the model then culminates with a form of society that has been shaped by these struggles for recognition that in turn grants social integrity and respect to individuals. A new conception of Hegelian ‘ethical life’ [Sittlichkeit] now opens up, one which is ‘now meant to include the entirety of intersubjective conditions that can be shown to serve as necessary preconditions for individual self-realization’ (Honneth, 1995b: 173). Since personal identity is seen to be intersubjectively structured and constituted, the model of recognition provides, according to Honneth, a convincing paradigm for a critical theory of society. It meets, in his view, the theoretical conditions of post-metaphysics, of an intramundane, practical, and intersubjective account of social action. But all along, the model that he espouses, and which plays an almost axiomatic role in his entire social philosophy, is that the process of recognition is endogenous to human sociation and secure from the infiltration of exogenous social forces. It is this basic idea that gives Honneth’s work its cohesiveness, systematicity, and, ultimately, I believe, is also its greatest weakness. For how can the theory of recognition, even if we accept its basic premises as valid (which, I believe, we cannot), help us in the face of those who explicitly reject the recognition of others? How can it make a political contribution to the problems of nationalism, xenophobia, religious privatism, or ethnic particularism? Indeed, to what extent can we say that the internal or ‘intramundane’ concept of critique that Honneth elaborates can have any capacity to make those who refuse to recognize the other, do so? (cf. Kauppinen, 2002). It is unclear that it can, and one reason is not so much its moral humanism, but its weak theoretical-explanatory accuracy in understanding the contours of modern power and society.
With his basic model in place, Honneth now begins to see recognition as a kind of lens through which the various categories of critical theory are to be reinterpreted. So, in his attempt to reconstruct the theory of reification, he claims that what Lukács misses in his elaboration of the concept is that it ‘can be conceived neither as a kind of moral misconduct, nor as a violation of moral principles, for it lacks the element of subjective intent necessary to bring moral terminology into play’ (Honneth, 2008: 25–6). Of course, Lukács’ intent was to problematize the capacity of members of the working class to be able to conceive of their own objective interests within capitalist society. This meant that reification was not simply a freezing of the cognitive capacity of these subjects, it also entailed a normative normalization of the social facts that constituted the given reality around them (cf. Thompson, 2017). Lukács effectively sees that the powers of the systemic level of society – such as capital’s social rationality – colonize and defectively shape the cognitive and epistemic powers of subjects thereby having effects on their evaluative and critical powers.
In place of this view, which in many ways was foundational for much of early critical theory, Honneth maintains that we must see reification as a ‘forgetfulness of recognition’, or, in a more complex way, a ‘process by which we lose the consciousness of the degree to which we owe our knowledge and cognition of other persons to an antecedent stance of empathic engagement and recognition’ (Honneth, 2008: 56). This is a more sophisticated claim about the process of recognition. Honneth’s basic idea is that recognitive relations precede cognitive and epistemic capacities, what he terms the ‘ontogenetic priority of recognition over cognition’ (Honneth, 2008: 42). This thesis deserves considerable attention since it essentially serves as the root argument for the theory of recognition, and the justification for it serving as a comprehensive paradigm for Honneth’s reworking of critical theory. Indeed, it can be said that Honneth’s claim rests on the plausibility of this thesis. The reason for this is that, as in his earlier Struggle for Recognition, recognition is posited as an unsullied process of self-formation. This then serves, according to the model, as the basis for further instantiations of the thesis. As such, Honneth believes we must shut down the structural-functional and systemic aspects of modern society and move forward with an action-theoretic argument for moral development. But if we can show that this is not the case, that recognitive relations are embedded in and shaped by already existing social and cultural forces rooted in social totality, then the structural integrity of his model weakens significantly.
Essentially, what Honneth claims is that research into developmental psychology as well as the intuitions of certain philosophical arguments (e.g., those of Mead, Dewey, Sartre, and Cavell) demonstrate that the emergence of the capacity for cognition is dependent on the ability of the child to develop an emotional attachment to a parent thereby creating the preconditions for the second-person perspective. What this means is that the child is unable to develop his cognitive capacities without communicative interaction with someone to whom he has forged an emotional attachment. The reason for this is that the child ‘learns step by step and through the perspective of a second person to perceive objects as entities in an objective world that exists independently of our thoughts and feelings about it’ (Honneth, 2008: 43). The child’s development of cognitive capacities is dependent on an emotional recognition of an other because it fosters the development of an objective (i.e., cognitive) perspective that decenters the egoist relation to self and world. It is only through my ability to put myself in the place of the other that I can really form a developed sense of self-relation and cognitive capacities. But even more, Honneth maintains that emotional forms of recognition are prior to and preconditions for cognition itself.
Honneth’s claim that empathic relations precede and make possible cognitive capacities and a neutral relation to the world is not problematic on its face. But he does make a crucial and, I think, fateful error by seeing this process as somehow relevant for later stages of moral cognition and social life. Recall that his reconstruction of reification, for instance, is one that claims that it is a ‘forgetting’ of this necessary relation between recognitive empathy with an other and reason itself. But this is problematic on several levels. First is the crucial problem of the way that this cathectic relation between the developing ego and the psychological parent is portrayed as a disembedded process. Indeed, the socialization process has been consistently seen as a kind of recognitive relation between ego and alter, but this cathectic relation between the two also shapes value-relations that are embedded in the specific historical and sociological context of those agents. Indeed, the fact that the child develops a cathectic or empathic relation to an alter may in fact open the ego up to the development of the second-person perspective and to cognition, but this process is also inseparable from the installation of value-orientations that can shape and orient moral-cognitive capacities. Indeed, there is little question that the mere fact that empathic relation between child and psychological parent exists means that there is something normatively progressive or rational about the recognitive relation. One can develop racist or exclusionary beliefs about the world through the empathic connection with the parent just as one can develop more egalitarian values. This can lead to the regression of the subject and the failure to develop and articulate a fuller sense of autonomy.
The thrust of my argument is that the social-relational structures that shape the values communicated in the early socialization process (and beyond) are embedded not simply in the family, but that the family is embedded in a social context of norms, values, and logics that shape it and thereby the socialization of the child. There is no protected sphere of parent–child relations that is not permeated by norms of consumption, of attitudes toward race and gender, and so on. Indeed, this has been a core finding since Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality (1950) as well as Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941): It is in the power of alters to shape the cathectic, evaluative, and cognitive layers of the personality, and these relations are not without content, they possess world-views and value-orientations about a basic, axiomatic moral structure which comes to shape different relations to others and the world (cf. Rokeach, 1960). What this implies is that the power of recognition to bind the emerging ego to authoritarian, reactionary, liberal, or any other kind of value system is not anathema to Honneth’s thesis. Why then should we be persuaded that recognition has the power to confront and overcome the powers of socialization, social power, domination, and alienation? What Honneth fails to see is the way that the ‘ontogenetic priority of recognition over cognition’ fails to remove us from the distorting effects of pathological social relations and structures and yet still preserve the process itself. Indeed, it is sullied by the pathologies of the socio-cultural context within which they occur (cf. Thompson, 2013).
Further, as socialization proceeds, the reinforcement between recognition and value-systems only continues to grow. As the ego develops institutional mechanisms reinforce certain value-orientations and undermine others; they select and emphasize certain goals and aims and weaken or delegitimize others. But these values themselves are rooted in the domain of social facts and institutions that operate according to logics of power and interests that are expressions of the social-relational structures of power that pervade any community. Indeed, recognition now becomes entangled in a series of overlapping processes, institutional norms, social facts, and structural-functional processes from which it can only extricate itself philosophically – in other words, in the mind reflectively, not from within the practices and actually-existing social forms of capitalistic society. The point of early critical theory now comes more into focus: it correctly diagnosed the powers of instrumental reason, the culture industry, mass society, and exchange value to be able to infiltrate and increasingly to saturate the culture and the social relations that produce and shape the self. Indeed, Fromm held that relations of care and love express healthy, creative expressions of self- and other-relations, but Fromm sees all too clearly that it is the abolition of modern capitalist society that will be able to allow for the more genuine unfolding of such relations. This is because Marx plays a significant role in relation to (Freudian) psychology: insofar as the social structure shapes the formation of the personality structure, it is the organization of society that precedes and shapes the social-relational forms of life in which intersubjectivity is embedded. The key point here is that Honneth has ripped the intersubjective and recognitive relations out of this richer and more critical theoretical architecture. To be sure, Fromm’s ideas on this matter point to the fact that critical theory already held that recognitive relations would be distorted by structural and functional forces. To point theoretically to recognitive relations as a humane alternative to social pathologies is simply not enough to combat the systemic and functional pressures of social power and domination. To suggest that these relations are immanent to and potentially critical of those pathologies may indeed also be simply a misguided view of social reality.
Now a clearer picture of the weaknesses of Honneth’s critical theory can be glimpsed. In order for us to enter into his system, we must be persuaded that recognitive relations are constitutive of the totality of society instead of being constituted by the totality. If the former is the case, then we can accept his ideas about recognition leading to a more democratic, humane form of modernity. But if the latter is the case, then it cannot. Honneth believes an emphasis on the social relations of recognition are somehow separate from the pathological forces of modernity that early critical theorists pointed to as destructive and dehumanizing. They would not have been hostile to the goal of creating humane forms of social existence, but they would have taken it for granted that the structures of rationality, of the patterns of consciousness generated by mass society, of the institutional imperatives of capitalist society as well as the irrational psychological forces unleashed by the repressive and authoritarian reactions to modernity, were more than significant blockages for the supposed power of recognition to overcome. As Lois McNay insightfully points out, ‘the spontaneous and innate nature of the desire for recognition is an example of how, in late modernity, disciplinary structures have been so thoroughly internalized by individuals that they become self-policing subjects’ (McNay, 2008: 133).
Honneth, however, does not seem to take these insights into account in any meaningful sense. Instead, he persists along the path of a moral philosophy that relies on a social theory bled of systemic and functional content. He sees, in short, the power of recognition as resistant to the reifying, alienating, and instrumentalizing powers of institutionalized instrumental rationality that pervades modern culture. Indeed, Honneth maintains that: ‘the basic concepts of an analysis of society have to be constructed in such a way as to be able to grasp the disorders or deficits in the social framework of recognition, while the process of societal rationalization loses its central position’ (Honneth, 2007: 74). But as I have been showing, it seems like an increasingly brittle thesis in the face of the reality of modernity. I think this becomes more obvious in Honneth’s turn to constructing a democratic theory based on the idea of social freedom that he sees as the result of the theory of recognition and the kind of social forms to which the practice of recognition gives rise.
The theory of recognition becomes a kind of nucleus for a normative theory of modernity that Honneth will seek to defend as a theory of justice and a theory of democracy. He comes to rely more on Hegel, fused with pragmatism, but it is an anti-metaphysical reconstruction of Hegel that prioritizes social relations of recognition as the unifying idea. The basic germ of this development in his thought is summarized when he argues that
Hegel seems convinced that we can talk about ethical structures or ethical living conditions only where at least the following conditions are met: there must be patterns of intersubjective practice that subjects can follow in order to realize themselves by relating to each other in such a way as to express recognition through the way in which they take account of each other morally. (Honneth, 2010b: 54)
Hegel’s theory of ‘ethical life’ [Sittlichkeit] is now seen to be a complex of communicative social relations where recognitive relations come to constitute a modern theory of a just society where individual self-development can unfold. Freedom is now circumscribed by this reconstructed Hegelian view where ‘“ethical life” frees us from social pathology by creating for all members of society equal conditions for the realization of freedom’ (Honneth, 2010b: 49).
Key to this concept of democracy is not only the Hegelian view of modernity as an ethical life defined by intersubjective–recognitive relations, but also a Deweyian theme. Dewey’s understanding of democracy is one based on collective problem-solving and the capacity for individuals to find an identity within a cooperative framework toward common ends and purposes. For Honneth, this is an important aspect of a ‘reflexive’ understanding of democratic community. Dewey therefore adds something to the discursive insights of contemporary political theory: ‘Although Dewey shares with Arendt and Habermas the intention of criticizing the individualist understanding of freedom, he sees the incarnation of all communicative freedom not as intersubjective speech but as the communal (gemeinschaftlich) employment of individual forces to cope with given problems’ (Honneth, 2007: 222). In his more comprehensive discussion in Freedom’s Right, Honneth goes on to advance the idea that the family, friendship, and market society enhance and promote social freedom by allowing individuals to connect and complete their needs for recognition through relations with concrete others (Honneth, 2011: 232ff.). All the while, however, these social relations of love and friendship and mutual needs satisfied by market relations weave a deeply uncritical account of the class-based structure of modern society (cf. Jütten, 2015; Foster, 2017).
And now we can see Honneth reconstruct the wheel of intellectual history, for we are brought back to a kind of Idealism in the sense that non-structural forms of sociation are privileged at the expense of institutional forms of power and the pressures of domination and power on social relations and self-development. The problem essentially comes into focus once we see that Honneth’s is essentially a theory of sociation without society – at least without a conception of society that has any systemic or structural features with causal powers. As a result, social action is seen to be constitutive of society as a whole. Relations of reflexive, recognitive, and communicative forms of action are taken, on this view, to be the generative source for critical consciousness. This leads to institutions and norms that congeal the normative content of recognition itself. The institutions of a modern, democratic ‘ethical life’ [Sittlichkeit] are those that objectify the ethics of recognition into its institutional and normative life (Honneth, 2011: 119ff.). It should be noted that this was precisely where Marx came into critical conflict with Hegel’s philosophical ideas. But even prior to that, Hegel himself saw that the state had to be the crowning achievement of modern ethical life because it was only through the objectification of the principles of freedom and right that there could exist a stop gap to the pathologies generated by civil society modern market relations, something that also runs against Honneth’s ideas. Hegel was moved here by an appreciation of Machiavelli’s realism and the kinds of conflicts that would occur due to the realities of interests (cf. Pöggeler, 1979) and Marx was clearly moved by the overemphasis on Idealism to secure the common good of a society increasingly dominated by systems of power (namely capital) that outstripped the capacity of agents to control its dynamics.
Another issue is the reliance on pragmatism and the symbolic-interactionist ideas of Mead in particular. The central concern here is the way that Mead – and Honneth as well – deal with the problem of power and domination. Mead’s views on social power and domination specifically are often overlooked in favor of his social-psychological thesis about the development of the social self and the second-person perspective. But Mead actually saw domination as a problem not of modern societies, but rather of pre-modern societies (cf. Athens, 2012). For Mead, in the modern world, we are dealing with processes not of dominance and subordination but of sociation; the concern moves away from hierarchies and the static formations of social structure to processes and systems based on social equality. This assumption is made for the purpose, it would seem, to isolate and bring out the bare bones of sociation for his own purposes. But we choose to see what we want to see, in this regard. Mead, like Honneth, cleanses sociation of all forms of power, dominance, subordination, and dependence. One of the core findings of early critical theory, however, was that this is precisely not the case. Instead, the problems of power and dominance are able to distort and deform the self and social relations, thereby blunting the critical powers of reason.
The point of this project of uniting Hegel and Mead is to found a theory of social life, one based on recognitive relations, that can serve as a postmetaphysical theory of democratic ethical life. This leads to another decisive problem that goes unconsidered by Honneth: namely, by shearing Hegel’s ideas of their metaphysical power, we are left with no metric for critique, no ground to be able to possess any genuine, rational critical judgment. Recall that Honneth wants to persuade us that processes of recognition lead to struggles for social respect and dignity. But it was Hegel’s view that this was not possible because the concept of right is not something that we agree upon, its origins lie in its capacity to achieve universality. Honneth’s response to this is clear: he argues that, in fact, recognitive relations shape our understanding of what we accept as universal, i.e., norms of respect and mutuality that should undergird modern, free institutional structures and norms.
But there is more to this argument, as Hegel sees it. His idea is more demanding in that modernity be based not on particularity, but on an individuality mediated by universality. The problem here is to discover what is particular and what is universal. Respecting and recognizing a woman’s choice to wear a hijab does not, at least on its face, satisfy the Hegelian idea of modernity since the demands of reason require some critical interrogation of such a choice (which is itself a product of particularist and pre-modern norms), and this requires supplying reasons that are universalizable and which promote the freedom of self and community. In other words, for Hegel, the act of recognition cannot simply be an Arendtian acceptance of the other’s or my own practices, beliefs, and norms, nor can it simply be the expression of a Habermasian consensus. Modernity, rationality, requires that there be reasons for one to accept those norms, beliefs, and practices and that these reasons resonate with some kind of universal categories. For Hegel, we recognize one another as reason-givers, and a modern form of ethical life is held together not simply by the practice of recognition, but also by the reasons we give to one another. But these reasons themselves must have criteria for counting as reasons, and this is why Hegel links his Philosophy of Right with his Science of Logic. The basic idea is that individuals in modern societies are able to articulate reasons for their practices and beliefs that take the common interest into account, and this requires that we see that the purpose and end of our association with one another is rooted in the development of the self as well as the totality.
This means that for Hegel recognition was not the object, but the mechanism allowing rational agents to comprehend the essential properties of social life: specifically that each was not a self-formed, independent subject but rather ensconced in webs of interdependencies that could be brought to rational reflection and consciousness only under the conditions of modernity. And once this was grasped by rational agents, it would shape and guide their rational wills. Recognition was an entry point, not an axiomatic thesis that underwrites all of Hegel’s political ideas. Honneth’s reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right seems to be at odds with Hegel’s actual intentions, since Hegel is not interested in the phenomenon of recognition per se, but in the institutional, objective socio-political forms that a modern society engenders and which can instantiate freedom (cf. de Boer, 2013). He thereby distorts Hegel’s project and reads the totality of its argument through one narrow feature of his philosophical system.
Now, Honneth would no doubt respond that he is keeping to this insight, that he is exploding the subjective bias and moving us into the intersubjective, recognitive paradigm where actions and ideas become sublated. His basic insight is that the Hegelian Idea (Idee) is to be recast as the objectification of those institutions that can better instantiate and reflect the recognitive and intersubjective properties of a reflexive form of freedom (Honneth, 2011: 123 and passim). Now the claim achieves a political form. But this is not the point: the principle behind Hegel’s claim is metaphysical, not based on the recognition process of intersubjective agents alone. And there is a reason for this. Reason cannot be seen as inherent to the social processes and relations found in everyday life. Rather, reason is the product of reflection and of negation, in particular, the negation of the reality principle that props up everyday life. Early critical theory was based on this assumption and the various problems associated with the frustration of this capacity among modern subjects. But the post-Habermasian turn toward intersubjectivity has rooted critical consciousness in the contours of everyday speech-acts and, for Honneth, recognitive acts. The problem that reasserts itself is that Honneth does not allow for the ways in which recognition can – and more often than not, is – a mechanism for securing power and hierarchy than eroding it. Simply recognizing others can have the effect of fostering affirmative attitudes and ideas about the status quo rather than a critical, negative attitude toward it.
But to return to my main point, if we allow for a non-metaphysical path for moral theory, then we must simply accept what gets refracted back to us through our existing structures and practices. We have no way to judge whether the identities that are seeking recognition promote freedom since the identities of the prostitute, the fisherman, or the philosopher have no meaningful differences. Indeed, all can be equally ‘recognized’ by a community dishing out attention (or ‘respect’ [Achtung]) to others’ identities, but not critical evaluation of those identities. And there are reasons for being critical of different identities to the extent that they may develop as reactions to defective relations; or they may be expressions of forms of subjectivity that falsely seek to reject or escape the implications of alienating and reifying social structures. Recognition then, for Hegel, must play a different role than it does for Honneth. For the former, it is the phenomenological process that leads to a transformed cognition of the agent by revealing the ontological structure of social relations that make up the essential structure of human life; but for Honneth, in its postmetaphysical form, it becomes embedded in intersubjective practices that have no criteria for validity other than those practices themselves. In this instance, the norms brought to bear by the processes of recognition form the criteria for judgment.
But should we see this as a valid argument? The main problem with this philosophical path, as I am trying to show, is that it rips the process of recognition too far out of its embeddedness within the actual, objective processes of society itself and that the purpose of critical reason must be to allow thought to counterpose something better to what is existent and pathological. Hegel’s later work is focused not on the intersubjective mechanisms of mutual recognition, but on the objective social forms – institutions, laws, norms, and so on – that shape objective spirit. This is important because, as I will show below, this opens up the possibility that these objective social forms, as later critical theorists were able to show, have causal and formative powers on individuals and their development. Now, Honneth’s claim is that this is precisely what he is doing. He is arguing that we can judge and critique any social form by assessing the extent to which it can secure ‘the intersubjective conditions of individual self-realization to all’ (Honneth, 2010b: 7). But what it lacks is a realist confrontation of the ways that power operates and shapes the institutions and norms of the community. The essential problem is that intersubjectivity can be a tool for recreating domination and power just as it can be one for shaping humane relations.
But now the concept of a social pathology is shifted from being generated by structures within modern society – economic, cultural, whatever – to a failure on the part of agents to absorb the norms of modernity itself (cf. Freyenhagen, 2015), i.e., the norms of recognition itself. But not everyone struggles for the kind of recognition that Honneth has in mind. There is no criteria given by Honneth to know when identities that seek recognition are valid or not valid; no way to tell whether or not the kind of weakened egos produced by late capitalism are evincing identities produced by the alienation they experience. The theory of recognition does nothing to help us discern these levels of self-understanding because the self has been too eroded by its embeddedness in intersubjectivity to be able to assert itself.
One of the results of this series of problems with Honneth’s theories is that we see critical theory entering into a phase where critique is to be detached from a confrontation with the economic and structural organization of society. This should be seen as problematic for any project of critical theory since its distinctiveness was to highlight the ways that social structure shapes and affects the subjective and agentic structures within persons. The social is not, on this view, constituted by intersubjective social practices. Rather, it is an ontological domain that is distinct from that intersubjectivity and possesses causal powers separate from it as well. In this sense, one of the central charges that can be brought against Honneth’s attempt to reorient critical theory is that it fails to take into account an insight that has galvanized all critical social science. This can be described as what Karl Popper once termed the ‘unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions’ (Popper, 1969: 342). What this means is that human sociality and social actions produce congealed social formations of social facts that come to possess their own logics and causal powers. These logics are not totally autonomous from agents – indeed, agents themselves are the ultimate purveyors of those social facts – but they accrue a kind of power to socialize and to have an ontology all their own. They become systematic, acting behind the conscious volition of individual actors, forming the context within which social relations unfold and operate (cf. Garrett, 2009).
Capital is therefore not simply a social fact, it is an accumulation of social facts, with logics, institutional instantiations, and constitutive power over and through subjects. It is therefore also a set of institutions and norms that shape social structures and functions and also were created prior to the socialization and development of individuals socialized into it. It acts, therefore, as a force on their development and a force shaping the social relations and, therefore, the relations of recognition that shape us. Our sociality is not simply reducible to recognitive relations as Honneth would have it. Indeed, sociality possess a second-order reality (indeed, a metaphysical reality) that exists even more powerfully than those first-order, recognitive, relations. Indeed, one can plausibly assert that Honneth wants to rewind social theory and simplify human sociality to this first-order level. The second-order level of sociality consists of the accumulation of congealed practices, norms, and concepts that any society possesses into systems that shape the lifeworld of subjects. These congealed practices, norms, etc., achieve objectivity and formative effects on subjects because they have causal powers; and they obtain these causal powers once they are able to embed themselves sufficiently in the consciousness of subjects through socialization processes that embed norms (cf. Elder-Vass, 2015). Indeed, this is what thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and Simmel saw as particularly unique to modernity: the capacity of these institutions and logics of practice to divest themselves from the conscious control of agency. Alienation, fetishism, the ‘tragedy of culture’ thesis, and so on, are exemplars of these kinds of problems. Honneth ignores does this to such an extent that it is difficult to find the practical relevance of his ideas for explaining real social problems as well as the continued pathologies that infect modern societies.
One reason for this is that the central insight of early critical theorists was that the rationalization of social institutions and their increasingly hegemonic logic was imbuing social relations with the very values and personality systems that would continue to reproduce and instantiate those logics of power that maintain the prevailing reality. In this sense, Honneth’s sidestepping of Marx is deeply inadequate as well as problematic. He claims, following Habermas’ critique of the ‘production paradigm’ (Habermas, 1976), that Marx’s ideas have little relevance for critical theory today because they are based on an outdated model of human action, namely that of homo laborans and the notion that all social action can be reduced to social labor (Honneth, 1995a: 3–91). But Marx’s more important contribution is not to the theory of human action per se, but rather to the logics of modern social institutions and those very logics being shaped by the processes of capital; and this further entails that these processes are not only economic, but increasingly absorb more aspects of social reality (cf. Thompson, 2016). When we understand this, we see that Marx’s thesis – one that critical theorists accepted as basic, it seems to me – is that there exists a logic of social power and social life that capital creates and which in turn shapes the kind of ontogenetic processes that Honneth claims are the root of recognition and the font for a normative validity for critical theory.
Marx’s deeper, more radical claim is that we cannot view society as being simply accumulations of any simple practice, but that there exist systems which shape and orient the lifeworld of its participants. Capital, for instance, is not simply ‘congealed labor’, it is a complex of norms, institutions, practices, etc. that shape the social relations and self-understanding of subjects, coordinate their activities, shape the structural forms within which they interact, shape their ideational and normative consciousness, and so on. And it is the objectivity of this ensemble of social facts that is capital and its capacity to have power over the community as a whole that Marx sees as important because it affects the ways that social life reproduces itself through individuals. For one thing, it is able to shape the very striations of sociality itself which means that, for Marx, mutual recognition would be an abstraction in the sense that it is not constitutive in its own right but is rather constituted by the prevailing social facts and relations that are governed by the objective ensemble of social facts. From a Marxian point of view, recognition is inherently abstract because it is embedded in the phenomenological and micro-relational levels of society rather than the systemic and functional structures that shape those levels of interaction. Hence, recognitive relations fail to achieve truly critical content and they lack a capacity to serve as a means to grant critical insight into the structures of modern forms of power. Marx and other critical theorists, Habermas included, accepted a distinction between systematic levels of social life and the phenomenological lifeworld that constitutes the micro-relations of everyday life. Honneth rejects this distinction and, as a result, is able to overstate the case for recognition as a mechanism of social integration and one that can also pick up on mis-recognition as a signal to normative struggles (cf. Borman, 2009: 946ff.).
This problem highlights the ways that the social acts on subjects and subject-formation. This is related, of course, to the problem of unintended social repercussions and the ontology of social facts I discussed above. However, it entails a specific problem, one that can be described as what Harry Dahms has usefully called ‘the constitutive logic of the social’ (Dahms, 2018). What this means is that the domain of social facts has deep constitutive implications on self-formation which entails the persistence of domination as an internalized and routinized phenomenon. The key issue here, one of which early critical theorists were keenly aware, was that the social arrangements of capitalist society –imbued with bureaucratic, instrumental rationality and reification, as well as reification and commodity fetishism – overwhelmed the subject and disabled capacities for critical reason. We cannot, in this sense, achieve the overcoming of these forces through the social relations that are embedded within them. Once we see that this is the case, we find that Honneth’s normative theory is without any valid social-theoretical ballast. The key issue for critical theorists has been that the basic relations between people (e.g., recognitive relations) are generally unable to withstand the infiltration and socialization pressures of these complexes of social facts and the constitutive logics that they bring to bear on the subject. This does not mean that recognitive relations do not exist or have any ability to shape consciousness, it simply means that it is open to the same infiltration of attitudinal and cathectic problems that the personality suffers under conditions of inequality, domination, and dehumanized relations under modern social formations.
Recall that one of the salient limitations of traditional theory, especially as pointed out by Horkheimer (1972), was its inability to grasp the ways that self-reflection and the subject’s cognitive capacities to grasp the object were distorted by the pressures of social and institutional forms that made ambient certain logics and ways of thinking that socialized knowledge in particular ways. With the move toward the pragmatist and phenomenological, Honneth brings us back full circle to this pre-critical situation while promoting it as an advance for critical theory. For he maintains that the experience of disrespect provides agents with the needed normative motivation for critical reflection rather than a lapse into a subjective or ideological form of consciousness that has been created to protect the ego from the dehumanizing processes and reality of an instrumentalized, alienated, and exploitive existence. The practical identities that unfold within the alienated and reified forms of life that prevail under modern capitalist societies, are more refuges from modernity than intrinsically meaningful expressions of individuality.
Herein lies a central weakness of the pragmatist enterprise, one that Honneth inherits: namely that by dissolving critique into the intersubjective practices of social agents, we have no way to formulate a concrete, objective standpoint for judgment. As Max Horkheimer, in his critical reflections on pragmatism made clear, a central problem is that ‘it may be taken to refer to the desires of people as they really are, conditioned by the whole social system under which they live – a system that makes it more than doubtful whether their desires are actually theirs’ (Horkheimer, 1947: 53–4). What Horkheimer’s critique conveys is the idea that pragmatism essentially conceives of the subject as oversocialized: the self essentially dissolves in intersubjectivity. Honneth seems to embrace this unproblematically. Part of the problem with this move is that critical consciousness has to also achieve a standpoint that lies external to what exists. As Joel Whitebook usefully puts the matter, to think of a critical self is to ‘picture a self that can stand outside the world – outside of any given traditional world – and evaluate it. And this capacity, in turn, has generally been viewed as a necessary anchoring point for critique’ (Whitebook, 2001: 272). But the pragmatist theory of the self and society that Honneth utilizes is one that relies on the lifeworld at the expense of system; that over-invests recognitive relations with the capacity to generate an ontological viewpoint for critique. The question that pragmatists are unable to tackle is the extent to which ideas generated by reflexive reason-giving can actually achieve critical status. How can we secure the lifeworld, within which this reflexive reason-giving and reason-responding occurs, from the distorting pressures of the social system? Honneth simply sidesteps the issue. It seems to me that no critical theory can adopt such a stance.
Indeed, the use of pragmatism is itself a move into a non-critical framework insofar as its model of social action is cleansed of the realities of social systems of power and domination. Indeed, whereas critical theorists look to the power relations that shape social interaction and socialization processes, Mead’s and Dewey’s theories about social interaction assume not power relations, but a more idealistic model of ‘sociation’ as the essence of social action (Athens, 2012). Sociation and social action is thereby confused with society as a totality itself. As a result, Honneth’s theory of recognition and his approach to modernity shows no way to immunize themselves from the ways that power relations, the structural-functional logics of institutions, and so on, are able to infiltrate the symbolic and phenomenological domain.
Hence, social power as a concrete form of domination where the structures and processes of the community are shaped is passed over in favor of micro-interactional forms of social action. We are asked instead to accept the view that a critical theory of society should be about the practical identities of individuals concerned with the normative goals of identity, dignity, and respect. But this simply reproduces the kinds of questions that early critical theorists saw as emerging from a society and culture marked by exploitation, alienation, and reification. They knew all too well that the growing conformity of individuals toward the efficient imperatives of the technical and economic goals of modernity were such that the symbolic domain of culture as well as the psychological realm of the individual would come to passively accept these concrete power structures; that the development of the ego and the self would be predicates of those power structures. The key question therefore is the extent to which social structures precede the affective bonds between people, the social relations of recognition of respect and dignity that he sees as normatively valid. The weakness of the approach is therefore that it lapses into ‘neo-Idealism’ (Thompson, 2016), by which I mean the dis-embedding of ideational and noumenal structures of consciousness from the objective, structural, and functional processes that have constitutive power in shaping the self and social relations. Neo-Idealism brings us away from a critical model of social relations shaped and oriented by power structures and logics and toward one where critique is generated from the phenomenological, micro-relational activities of everyday life. But critique needs more than this since it requires us to adopt an ontological vantage point from which we can call into question the structures and systems of power.
None of these critical remarks are intended to detract from Honneth’s impressive attempt to construct a normative theory of modernity and social interaction that has genuinely humane implications and intentions. It would be absurd to maintain that Honneth’s contributions to moral philosophy do not have an impact on the way that we can think about critical theory, especially the need to keep in view the distortion of recognitive relations as a valid category of social pathology. He offers a highly sophisticated and deeply profound way to think about human sociality and the ways that recognition can foster a richer context for the formation of self-actualization and agency (Honneth, 2015). But it ignores far too much of what early critical theorists saw at the heart of the critical enterprise. And this is where Honneth’s project of reworking a critical theory of society falls mortally short. Ultimately, the great limitation of Honneth’s ideas lay not in their intellectual originality, but in their inability to provide us with a critical vantage point outside of the phenomenological lifeworld of social agents. A return to a critical theory with radical political intent would be one that teases out the mechanisms of systemic power and relates them to the degraded forms of agency and subjectivity that derive from it. It would also seek, in addition to this diagnostic program, to provide normative ideas of what a more humane, more just, and more rational society should consist. Honneth can help us with the latter, but not the former, and there should be little doubt that both are required to maintain critical theory’s salience in a new century.
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