This article seeks to defend two claims: Firstly, that Universalist ethics in Habermas and Rawls cannot function without some recourse to the Good Life, or human well-being. Secondly, that such ethical reflection must involve formal anthropological considerations. In other words, it must involve a consideration of the Good that also encompasses reflection on what we are as humans. As an example, the paper draws on Habermas’ recent thoughts on ‘species-ethics’. I will argue that 'species ethics' needs to be substantiated and (...) expanded with the help of an 'anthropology of recognition'. (shrink)

Axel Honneth makes initial and promising steps towards what could be called a two-level account of recognition, according to which the normatively substantial forms of recognition represent various manners in which the primordial acquaintedness with others is expressed. It will be argued that Honneth's promising approach must be revised in regard to the issue of intentionality, which may be achieved by reference to earlier critical theorists such as Adorno and Arendt. With such a foundation, critical theory can enter into new (...) fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. (shrink)

This article discusses the self-respect argument for basic liberties, which is that self-respect is an important good, best supported by basic liberties, and that this yields a reason for the traditional liberty principle. I concentrate on versions of it that contend that self-respect is best supported by basic liberties for reasons related to the recognition that such liberties convey. I first discuss the two standard approaches loosely associated with John Rawls and Axel Honneth. Here self-respect pertains to traits and conduct (...) (Rawls) or to one’s personhood (Honneth). It is argued that these approaches fail to show why self-respect is better supported by the liberty principle than certain alternatives worth taking seriously – unless (in the case of personhood self-respect) self-respect is construed in such a narrow way that it is not a condition for autonomy or welfare in any plausible sense. I then identify a self-attitude that I call “a sense of competence”, which at least shows that the liberty principle is more important to autonomy than what we might otherwise have reasons to believe. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines Axel Honneth’s account of social freedom by paying particular attention to the conceptual apparatus of normative reconstruction that is supposed to lend social freedom its explanatory force. More specifically, the article demonstrates, through an immanent critique, that Honneth is unable to follow through with his ambitious view of the capitalist market as an institutional expression of social freedom. Furthermore, Honneth’s inability to derive robust relations of cooperative solidarity from the actuality of contemporary liberal democratic ethical (...) life leads him to posit socialism as a regulative idea. Honneth’s idea of socialism risks succumbing to the very pitfalls that he continues to associate with neo-Kantian proceduralism. Such an aporia poses a particular challenge for Honneth’s attempt at advancing a persuasive neo-Hegelian alternative to neo-Kantian proceduralism. As a means of addressing this aporia, I suggest a possible strategy that Honneth could adopt to retrieve his historically informed and radically reformist conception of justice without unwittingly rendering socialism a purely regulative idea. Such a strategy involves re-Hegelianizing Honneth’s socialism and the idea of social freedom that it seeks to actualize. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel Hegelian view of the relationship between aesthetics and democratic politics. My account avoids the drawbacks associated with approaches that reconceive all of the political in aesthetic terms or reduce the aesthetic to art. Instead, I maintain that the aesthetic is best understood as a distinct relationship of individual freedom. My argument proceeds by highlighting shortcomings of Honneth’s account of democratic Sittlichkeit and then addressing these impasses by integrating aesthetic freedom into the picture. The first two (...) steps of my argument concern the fact that the form of life outlined by Honneth aspires to be a form of free life, yet his account of democratic Sittlichkeit gives rise to two dimensions of unfreedom. The first problem of unfreedom pertains to the scope of freedom. The relationships of freedom incorporated into Honneth’s account fail to turn given social roles into the subject matter of a sufficiently unrestricted practice of freedom. The second problem of freedom concerns conformism. In a final step, I complete my argument that Honneth’s account is unsatisfactory and incomplete by showing that aesthetic freedom is socially valid and thus ought to form part of our accounts of democratic ethical life. (shrink)

The paper discusses non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) as a collective form of protection that, in terms of health justice, benefits groups at risk, allowing them to engage in social life and activities during health crises. More specifically, the paper asserts that NPIs that realize social distancing are justifiable insofar as they are constitutive of a type of social protection that allows everyone, especially social disadvantaged agents, to access the public health sphere and other fundamental social spheres, such as the family and (...) civil society. (shrink)

This paper aims to enrich the idea of the institutionalized sphere of recognition developed by Axel Honneth and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “social field” by combining them. First, it underlines the characteristics that the two viewpoints share. Second, the paper argues that their combination can be mutually beneficial for overcoming some of their respective theoretical limits: the issue of the determination of the amplitude of the social field and the nature of the power that institutions of recognition exercise on (...) individuals. (shrink)

In this article, after retracing the main lines of Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism, I address two objections to it. Firstly, I question the marked substantiality of Honneth’s proposed socialist ‘co...

In this article, after retracing the main lines of Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism, I address two objections to it. Firstly, I question the marked substantiality of Honneth’s proposed socialist ‘community of fraternal life’, resulting from the conjunction of the idea of social freedom with the principle of fraternity he derives from the proto-socialists. On the basis of my objections, I then delineate an original theoretical model, denominated ‘socialism through convergence’. While based on Honneth’s concept of social freedom, STC can (...) abstract from the element of fraternity. It is, by consequence, immune to the excess of substantiality of Honneth’s perspective and potentially more attractive for the members of modern, pluralistic societies. Finally, I criticize Honneth’s perspective for under-determining the element of normative social conflicts in the sphere of democracy and normalizing their expression into the forms of an orderly democratic deliberation; consequently, I show how the STC perspective can more effectively account for social struggles and political conflicts. (shrink)

This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...

Scholars like Alison Kadlec, Melvin Rogers and R.W. Hildreth have recently confronted the claim that Dewey’s pragmatism lacks resources to approach issues of power, but they have not given a unified account of what theoretical framework Dewey’s pragmatism provides to grapple with such issues and to articulate standards for social criticism. In this article, I explore one such framework: Dewey’s outline of a social philosophy developed in his Lectures in China. Here, Dewey derives immanent standards for social criticism through sociological (...) and historical perspectives. Such standards are articulated in terms of social relationships of mutuality and recognition in and between groups; on such standards, social institutions and practices are to be criticized in so far as they embody relationships of domination disabling individual development and social and political participation. Dewey’s critical project extends to cultural sources of normative authority, and I further explore his social philosophy in terms of an ‘immanent cultural criticism’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What is “critical” about critical theory? I claim that, to be “critical enough”, critical theory’s future depends on being able to handle today’s planetary climate crisis, which presupposes a philosophy of nature. Here, I argue that Axel Honneth’s vision of critical theory represents a nature denial and is thus unable to criticize humans’ instrumentalization as well as capitalism’s exploitation of nature. However, I recover what I take to be a missed opportunity of what I term as the early Honneth’s (...) original ecological insight, which I reconstruct precisely as a philosophy of nature. Consequently, I identify what I describe as an ecological sensibility in Honneth. This refers to a bodily capability through which humans sensuously can resonate, communicate, and interact – and through that morally engage – with nature in its entire complexity. Furthermore, by virtue of this ecological sensibility, humans can recognize nature’s inherent moral value as a sensuously affected party. Then, the early Honneth’s original insight is recovered as a critical political ecology, which is needed facing today’s climate crisis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine Axel Honneth’s positive theory of recognition. While commentators agree that Honneth’s theory qualifies as a positive theory of recognition, I believe that the deeper reason for why this is an apt characterisation is not yet fully understood. I argue that, instead of considering only what it is to recognise another person and what it means for a person to be recognised, we need to focus our attention on how Honneth pictures the practice of recognition as (...) a whole, which according to him works to make societies into places of greater freedom. This conception of recognition as a freedom-enhancing practice is supposed to provide a solution to a key problem of Frankfurt School critical theory, namely of how to determine the emancipatory practice in which critical theory is rooted, which becomes apparent as soon as one turns to the context in which Honneth originally develops his theory of recognition. At the end of the article, I offer a few reasons for doubting the overly positive picture of the practice of recognition that Honneth provides us with. (shrink)

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home (...) within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice-oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value. (shrink)

Introduction: Foucault and political philosophy -- Marx: antinormative critique -- Lenin: the invention of party governmentality -- Althusser: the failure to denormativise Marxism -- Deleuze: denormativisation as norm -- Rorty: relativising normativity -- Honneth: the poverty of critical theory -- Geuss: the paradox of realism -- Foucault: the lure of neoliberalism -- Conclusion: What now?

In his book Das Recht der Freiheit, Axel Honneth develops a theory of social justice that incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their reproduction. This account enables the identification of social pathologies or systemic normative deficits that frustrate individual efforts to relate their actions reflexively to a normative order and inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own. In this article I utilize Honneth’s (...) theory in the diagnosis of a contemporary social pathology, which impedes social recognition and thereby contributes to social injustice. I argue that this particular social pathology – associated with the Second Amendment right to bear arms – has given rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which I call self-defensive. I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account. (shrink)

This article examines the ethical framing of employment in contemporary human resource management (HRM). Using Axel Honneth's theory of recognition and classical critical notions of reification, I contrast recognition and reifying stances on labor. The recognition approach embeds work in its emotive and social particularity, positively affirming the basic dignity of social actors. Reifying views, by contrast, exhibit a forgetfulness of recognition, removing action from its existential and social moorings, and imagining workers as bundles of discrete resources or capacities. After (...) discussing why reification is a problem, I stress that recognition and reification embody different ethical standpoints with regards to organizational practices. Thus, I argue paradoxically that many current HRM best practices can be maintained while cultivating an attitude of recognition. If reification is a type of forgetting, cultivating a recognition attitude involves processes of "remembering" to foster work relations that reinforce employee dignity. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers and philosophers drawing on the German tradition of social philosophy have recently converged in stressing the importance of the concept of reification?first explicitly discussed by György Lukács?for the diagnosis of contemporary social and ethical problems. However, importing a theoretical framework alien to Lukács? original discussion has often led to the conflation of reification with other social and ethical problems. Here it is argued that a coherent conception of reification, free of implausible Marxist and idealist trappings, can be recovered (...) from Lukács? original discussion of it: the socially induced distortion of experience such that what is in fact human action appears as mere natural happening. This phenomenon is to be distinguished from, firstly, instrumentalising objectification of persons and, secondly, person-identification failure, with which Martha Nussbaum and Axel Honneth respectively have equated reification in recent work. Reification, on the understanding of it recovered here, is problematic not just because it is an illusion, but also because it can render moral reasons for action or omission, and grounds of ethical evaluation, invisible to agents, and, moreover, because it can lead people to tolerate as inevitable undesirable situations which could in fact be changed. It can thus ground social criticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Axel Honneth deploys the categories of normal and pathological to explain contemporary society in organic terms. This article concerns itself with how these medical references function in Honneth's work to explain the social world, and what their political implications are. For Honneth, social normality is a normative resource, even if it is only accessible through the study of pathology. Socially accepted norms are taken to reflect legitimate principles, with the early Honneth taking pathology as an individual psychic suffering that (...) results from injustice, and the later Honneth taking pathology as an overextension of the logic of one social sphere into the terrain of another. The implications of Honneth's organic account of society are explored through the lens of a competing “French” account of the norm offered by Canguilhem and Foucault. These French thinkers view socially accepted norms not as reflecting legitimate principles, but as standardizing processes of normalization that stifle normativities that do not conform. It is suggested that Honneth's account of normativity must be articulated with Canguilhem's and Foucault's account of normalization. That said, through the course of the analysis, several unexpected continuities are discovered between these two different traditions. (shrink)

Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We argue that in order to understand the full significance of this ‘intersubjective turn’ for social philosophy, and to strengthen the normative foundation of social philosophy, we need to distinguish several levels of intersubjectivity and, (...) in particular, focus on the somewhat neglected level of primary intersubjectivity. The article will discuss the account of primary intersubjectivity in Honneth’s work. We show that Honneth’s account runs into difficulties, and drawing on recent findings in developmental psychology, we suggest a rethinking of elementary recognition in terms of ‘affective proximity’. This both renders the account less susceptible to criticism and provides a normative perspective that can effortlessly enter into interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

According to Axel Honneth, Adorno's very idea of social critique is self‐defeating. It tries to account for what is wrong, deformed, or pathological without providing any positive yardstick. Honneth's idea of critique is a diagnosis of chronic dysfunctions in the relations of recognition upon which the society in question is grounded. Under such conditions of misrecognition, institutions that embody what he calls social freedom regress to negative freedom. However, such a deficit‐based notion of critique does not square with Honneth's own (...) diagnosis of our present: namely, the transformation from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. In fact, Honneth's diagnosis is very much in line with Adorno's idea of late capitalism as a society of “total integration.” Adorno's matching conception of critique, it is argued, avoids the problems Honneth runs into. At the basis of Adorno's critical idiom are two key points: an explanation of how social relations can be functional while contradictory and an account of social domination that is diffused throughout society while being differentially experienced by different classes. Adorno's answer to Honneth's concern, regarding the lack of a positive yardstick, is that it is domination that gives meaning to our idea of freedom, rather than the other way around. (shrink)

The article is focused on the role that the question of neoliberalism plays in Axel Honneth’s work. The author aims to show that when Honneth tries to conceptualize the very nature of the neolibera...

This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique (...) of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAxel Honneth’s theory of recognition has been criticised for presenting a deficient concept of work and the normative significance of work. In recent years Jean-Philippe Deranty, among others, has suggested that Honneth could overcome this deficiency by reintroducing into his mature theory the critical concept of work that first appeared in his 1977–1985 writings. My paper critically reconstructs and assesses Deranty’s position. I argue that Deranty has understated the extent to which his research direction diverges from Honneth’s. Rather than simply (...) nuancing Honneth’s existing philosophical system, Deranty’s work exposes some of its conceptual limits and points beyond it. (shrink)

This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship’s embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship’s normative freedom is made possible by its weak ‘institutional connectivity’. To clarify that point, the (...) article illustrates friendship’s resistance to the reifying tendencies of therapy culture and then draws the gendered boundary of friendship’s freedom with reference to the position of heterosexual cross-sex friendship in the heteronormative social imaginary. The article concludes by way of argument for a differentiated approach to friendship and suggests that the analysis of its freedom provides significant clues concerning the work that remains to be done towards equal gender relations. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the theoretical contributions of Axel Honneth, particularly in his works, The Struggle for Recognition and Reification, aiming at diving deep into the debate on the contemporary ideological expressions and their incidence in the process of subjective constitution in teenage years. This particular interest springs from the need to interweave the concepts of reification, forgetfulness and recognition within a fruitful theoretical field in order to interpret a project work called Hip-Hop: cultures and identities, developed with teenagers (...) in a public school in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. From our point of view, the concepts of reification and forgetfulness are fundamental to identify how the conservative ideological expressions are present in the imaginary of adolescents in the contemporary world. Although rereading the concepts of reification and forgetfulness, as proposed by the author, is regarded as essential for understanding the ideological expressions that are based on and guided by consumption. However, even though we acknowledge Honneth's efforts toward moving forward with the concept of reification, it is crucial to emphasize the mediation concept Lukács explored in his work, History and Class Consciousness, so as to elucidate how the forgetfulness of the primary recognition relations is processed. (shrink)

An analysis of how the sphere of work can be considered to instantiate norms of recognition, even when those norms give rise to paradoxes and ideologies surrounding how work ought to be done and the goods at stake in it.

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights.

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

This article aims to shed light on some core challenges of liberating social criticism. Its centerpiece is an intuitively attractive account of the nature and difficulty of critical social thought that nevertheless goes missing in many philosophical conversations about critique. This omission at bottom reflects the fact that the account presupposes a philosophically contentious conception of rationality. Yet the relevant conception of rationality does in fact inform influential philosophical treatments of social criticism, including, very prominently, a left Hegelian strand of (...) thinking within contemporary Critical Theory. Moreover, it is possible to mount a defense of the conception by reconstructing, if with various qualifications and additions, an argument from classic—i.e., mid twentieth-century—Anglo-American philosophy of the social sciences, in particular, the argument that forms the backbone of Peter Winch’s _The Idea of a Social Science_. Winch draws his guiding insights from the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, and one of the payoffs of considering Winch’s Wittgenstein-inspired work against the backdrop of Hegel-inspired work in Critical Theory is to contest the artificial professional strictures that are sometimes taken to speak against reaching across the so-called ‘Continental Divide’ in philosophy. The larger payoff is advancing, by means of this philosophically ecumenical approach, the enterprise of liberating social thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most scholars' comprehension on labour are ambiguous because of the variety of philosophical contradictions embedded in their plausible theories being not explicitly stated but irrationally taken for granted. We, therefore, inquisitively direct sole attention to social spacetime in which, and by which, labour in totality takes place. And then consider the division of labour in natural spacetime as just the appearance of the alienation of labour in social spacetime by our Marxist renewal of the notion of labour - thus (...) manifesting its benefaction to an essential up-to-date explanation of human being, on which a labourer could struggle to survive as still a human being within social spacetime, to fight against the almighty empire of capitalism in the era of globalisation. RESUMO A compreensão da maioria dos estudiosos acerca do trabalho é ambígua em razão da variedade de contradições filosóficas embutidas no fato de suas teorias plausíveis não serem explicitamente declaradas, mas presumidas de modo irracional. Nós, assim, inquisitivamente, dirigimos nossa total atenção ao espaço-tempo social no qual, e através do qual, o trabalho ocorre, em sua totalidade. Em seguida, consideramos a divisão de trabalho em espaço-tempo natural como apenas uma aparência da alienação do trabalho em espaço-tempo social, segundo nossa renovação marxista da noção de trabalho - assim manifestando seu benefício em uma explicação atualizada do ser humano, segundo a qual um trabalhador deve lutar para sobreviver como um ser humano parado dentro do espaço-tempo social, lutar contra o todo-poderoso império do capitalismo na era da globalização. (shrink)

Following Axel Honneth, I accept that recognition is integral to individuals’ self-realization and to social justice and that instances of misrecognition are injustices that cause moral injuries. The change in approach to misrecognition that I advocate is to replace a macrosocial top-down picture of misrecognition, such as Honneth’s typology, with a fine-grained phenomenological picture of multiple dimensions in misrecognition behaviors that offers greater explanatory power. This paper explains why a multidimensional view of misrecognition is needed and explores the various ways (...) that engagement with pathological norms or disengagement from individuals lead to injustices of misrecognition and how understanding behaviors in terms of these two dimensions—norms and individuals—illuminates causes of injustice. The multidimensional view of misrecognition replaces Honneth’s binary view of misrecognition as the contrary to recognition without replacing Honneth’s conceptions of the value of recognition. (shrink)

This thesis critically analyzes Axel Honneth’s theories of misrecognition and struggles for recognition and argues for two main conceptualizations to address shortcomings in his theories. The first conceptualization is that recognition and misrecognition behaviors are better understood along three dimensions of engagement—norms, individuals, and actions. We can use this multidimensional view to identify misrecognitions in which the problems are in vertical recognition, either disengagement from norms or engagement with problematic norms, and misrecognitions in which the problems are in horizontal recognition, (...) during which there is insufficient or improper engagement with other individuals. The multidimensional view of misrecognition overcomes Honneth’s overly positive picture of recognition and lack of a robust account of misrecognition and shows how negative recognition fits into the normative structure of social life while acknowledging the positive value of recognition. The second conceptualization is an expanded view of struggles for recognition that takes such struggles beyond group political conflicts into everyday social experiences. I identify two problems in Honneth’s formulation of struggles for recognition: his premise that emotional experiences of disrespect motivate struggles for recognition is contradictory without an account of individual agency, and his theoretical reliance on political resistance movements neglects other paths responses to injustice can take. To address these problems, I argue that there are two types of struggles for recognition, affirmational and rectificatory, and that individuals’ familiarity with affirmational struggles enables them to engage in rectificatory struggles against injustice. Individuals respond to injustice in varied ways other than organized political action, and this is significant for critical theory. The common thread in these two conceptualizations is the importance of individuals’ normative experiences in ethical life and social change. Power structures shape social relations, but individuals actively instigate many instances of injustice. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze Axel Honneth’s theory against the background of some of the criticisms that Amy Allen levelled against it. His endeavor seems to partially compromise his ability to identify the domineering forms of power that the subject does not acknowledge consciously and affectively. I will argue that, despite some significant limitations, Honneth’s theory has become increasingly able to analyze social negativity since The struggle for recognition. Also, in both defending Honneth’s methodology and delimiting its scope, I (...) aim to contribute to the debate between two understandings of power: power as ‘domination’ and power as ‘constitution’. (shrink)