Efficient markets are alienating if they inhibit us from recognizably caring about one another in our productive activities. I argue that efficient market behaviour is both exclusionary and fetishistic. As exclusionary, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care alongside their market behaviour. As fetishistic, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care in their market behaviour. The conjunction entails that efficient market behavior inhibits care. It doesn’t follow that efficient market behavior is vicious: individuals might justifiably commit to efficiency because doing so serves (...) the common good. But efficient market systems nevertheless have significant opportunity costs. The discussion yields a range of desiderata for non-alienated economic organization. (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)

Few have treated the critical literature on neoliberalism as an object of study in its own right. Those that have question the literature’s partisanship, theoretical coherence, and explanatory power, denouncing it as a thinly veiled form of leftist politics. Rather than leave the matter there, I pick up the thread and ask the following: if the critical theorization of neoliberalism is a leftist pursuit, what does it do for the left? How does the critique of neoliberalism affect the left’s self-understanding, (...) coherence, direction, and future? In this article, I argue that the critique of neoliberalism defines today’s political left via the negation of its neoliberal Other, is the ideological–discursive means by which the left articulates its diverse constituencies, and builds theoretical resources necessary for the left to go beyond marriages of convenience and achieve unity. Regarding the latter, the literature augurs a left battling for the subjectivity of popular actors, with solidarity, social freedom, and democracy as both the weapons and the stakes. I conclude the article by reflecting on what often goes missing in the literature – namely, Kapitalkritik and socialism – and the significance of these omissions for the left in light of the arguments above. (shrink)

This paper examines the justice of unconditional basic income (UBI) through the lens of the Hegel-inspired recognition-theory of justice. As explained in the first part of the paper, this theory takes everyday social roles to be the primary subject-matter of the theory of justice, and it takes justice in these roles to be a matter of the kind of freedom that is available through their performance, namely ‘social’ freedom. The paper then identifies the key criteria of social freedom. The extent (...) to which the introduction of an UBI would meet these criteria is then examined, with a focus on the social role that stands to be most affected by an UBI, namely that of the worker-earner. It is argued that while an UBI is likely to be only partially effective as an instrument of specifically social freedom, its main justification lies not here, but in securing a basis for the subjective freedom that social freedom presupposes. (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...

Contemporary Marxism may seem to have been eclipsed by the dominance of Left-liberalism in egalitarian thought. Since Rawls, the liberal tradition has made a robust contribution to the argument for distributive justice, whilst Marxist orthodoxy regarding the “withering away” of the state has seemed unhelpful in comparison. However, most Left liberals are wedded to several claims that constrain the ambition and depth of the egalitarian project, claims which can be shown to be wanting in light of the socialist commitment to (...) distribution on the basis of need, as well as the Marxist critique of alienation. This paper explores the potential of Marxism to address some of the limitations of contemporary liberal egalitarianism. (shrink)

Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate capitalism itself. We can then see how hard capitalism makes it to take risks for the collective. Chibber’s solution is to shift people from ‘individualistic to solidaristic’ ways of thinking through lived practices, rather than the arts. This review argues, however, that by excluding the culture industry from encouraging solidaristic ways of (...) thinking, Chibber removes a crucial tool in the socialist armory: the way in which artistic representations can help us see ourselves and the world differently. (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)

The challenge of realizing the democratic power of publics through public sphere remains acute but not hopeless. While claiming that Habermas communicative social theory offers a way forward in spite of a productive but constraining turn towards a modified social liberal frame, nonetheless three limitations of the theory are identified. The first bears on the insufficiency of the sociological evolutionist description of society relevant to the public sphere drawn from classical sociological accounts of differentiation and integration. The second identifies learning (...) theoretical limitations of the normative interactionist, proceduralist account of democracy and democratization potentials. And the third observes on the disconnection between the theory of communicative reasoning from, on the one hand, the critique of pathologies of reasoning, and, on the other, from its implications for lifeworld rationalization. These identified limitations are intended to provide new impetus to radically rethink the public sphere as intrinsic to solving contemporary problems of democracy that Habermas’s more recent account of deliberative theory, with the public sphere merely supplementary, cannot fully do. Yet, with Habermas, this should be on the basis of advancing the communication theory of democracy. (shrink)

This article contributes to the debate on automation and justice by discussing two under-represented concerns: labour justice and equality. Since automation involves both winners and losers, and given that there is no ‘end of work’ on the horizon, it is argued that most normative views on the subject – i.e. the ‘allocative’ view of basic income, and the ‘desirability’ views of post-work and workist ethics – do not provide many resources with which to address unjustly unequal divisions of labour involved (...) in technological innovation. This article problematises these common responses reframing the problem from the perspective of labour justice. While the allocative view assumes that labour justice follows ‘spontaneously’ from income redistribution, the desirability views are chiefly interested in either defining or contesting the meanings of work for individuals, overlooking the interdependent nature of work and concerns of equality other than autonomy. Two conceptions of labour justice are thus applied to the problem: Paul Gomberg’s contributive justice, and Iris Young’s democratic division of labour. Instead of deciding between them, the normative core of ‘contributive parity’ is suggested as a critical standard for assessing unequal labour structures, and for envisaging a future in which technology can be an ally in making social cooperation fair. (shrink)

Recognition is a fundamental good that corporations ought to give to employees, a good that is essential to their well-being, and thus, recognition should be among the central notions in our understanding of organizations and in any theory of business ethics. Drawing upon the work of Philip Pettit and Robert Brandom as well as themes from instrumental stakeholder theory, I develop a complex notion of recognition involving both status recognition and capacity recognition and argue that this account meets three fundamental (...) desiderata of any adequate account of business ethics: It makes salient key normative features of the practice of business. It articulates a genuine ethical demand that is not reducible to the economic imperatives typical of self-interested actors. And it is compatible with the strategic demands that organizations face to remain competitive. Status recognition involves treating others as persons whose rights are legally enshrined. Capacity recognition involves treating others as persons possessing specific capacities. When corporations accord these forms of recognition to employees, they promote their well-being in a fundamental way and they promote the long-term success of the firm. Thus, recognition represents an underappreciated concept that may further contribute to theory development in business ethics and organization studies and more ethical business practice. (shrink)

What is the connection between the surge of populism and the deflation of electoral support to traditional left-leaning ideological positions? How can we explain the downfall of the Left in conditions that should be propelling it to power? In its reaction both to the neo-liberal hegemony and to the rise of populism, I claim that the Left is afflicted by what Nietzsche called ‘a democratic prejudice’ – the reflex of reading history as the advent of democracy and its crisis. As (...) a result, the Left now undertakes to recover democracy by resurrecting the growth-and-redistribution policy set that was a trademark of the ‘golden age’ of social democracy in the three post-war decades. This nostalgic gesture, however, is leading the Left into another predicament, which I call the ‘paradox of emancipation’ – while fighting for equality and inclusion as essential conditions for democratic citizenship, the Left is validating the social order within which equality and inclusion are being sought – namely, order shaped by the competitive production of profit which is the root cause of our societies’ plight. The analysis concludes with a proposal for building a counter-hegemony against neo-liberal capitalism by means of enlarging the Left’s focus beyond its traditional concerns with inequality and exclusion, to address also the injustice of growing social and economic insecurity – a harm whose reach surpasses the working poor. Reformulating an agenda of social justice around issues of economic insecurity that cross the ‘class divide’ would allow the Left to mobilize a broad coalition of social forces for radical and lasting change in the direction of socialist democracy. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 25-46, January 2022. This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine (...) of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (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)

This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel (...) idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship’s loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with an explanation of friendship’s (...) institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity’ juxtaposed with Honneth’s recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution personal relationships make to morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship’s institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity. (shrink)

While the framework of social pathology remains a crucial tool for critical social theorists, there is confusion and debate surrounding the precise nature of the heuristic. The core argument of this article is that while the diagnosis of social pathology harbours radical potential as a critical device, recent developments have led to the ascendancy of a restrictive, recognition-cognitive understanding. I argue that this has displaced alternate, more radical framings. To illustrate the changing face of the heuristic, this article opens by (...) articulating the merits and demerits of five predominant conceptions of social pathology. The second section elucidates the turn to increasingly view social pathology in a manner compatible with just one of these five framings. By drawing on, and extending, the existing critical literature, I seek to demonstrate the relative limitations of such an understanding. Throughout this analysis, I argue for the continued relevance of social pathology diagnosis, the need for sustained critical scholarship, and the dangers of embracing too readily the turn to an exclusively recognition-cognitive understanding of social pathology. (shrink)

For generations, critical social theorists have turned to the framing of ‘pathology’ to provide a theoretical infrastructure for their critique. Such an approach famously undergirds much of the Frankfurt School’s canonical work. Axel Honneth, current chair of the Institute of Social Research, continues this tradition. While Frankfurt School approaches have largely tied pathology diagnosis to a critique of historically mediated reason, a plurality of alternate conceptions exist. With the ascendancy of an intersubjective approach to critical social theory, the pathologies of (...) the social have increasingly been comprehended as ‘pathologies of recognition’. Advocates of such a framing point to the ease of establishing an immanent basis to their critique, and of the empirical evidence supporting the need for recognition. Yet, today’s academy is increasingly spilt between those who embrace a ‘pathologies of recognition’ framework, and those who consider the development a ‘domestication’ of the Critical Theoretical tradition. This special issue brings together contributors from both sides of this divide. While the optimal framing of social pathology remains contested, the contributors to this collection are committed to furthering forms of social critique which transcend the limited liberal framings of injustice and illegitimacy. (shrink)

Axel Honneth’s philosophical reflections always had significant historical dimensions, but it is only recently, in Recognition. A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, that he has attended to the history of recognition as a concept. This essay examines the cogency and the implications of this turn to intellectual history in the theory of recognition. The first section summarises the main historical claims put forward by Honneth. Section two raises critical doubts regarding three aspects of his narrative: the cultural contexts (...) that are said to have influenced particular conceptions of recognition; the conceptions of recognition that are supposed to be tied to national cultures; and the method of linking particular meanings of recognition to national cultures. The third section broadens the scope and attempts to show why this turn to intellectual history, despite some shortcomings, raises tantalising questions for recognition theory, and beyond it, for critical theory. (shrink)

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that (...) they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today. (shrink)

What if education were not about becoming something, making something of yourself, becoming some thing? What if we were to consider education as becoming-world? These questions are posed against the background of the current populist nationalist backlash against the consequences of globalization, along with growing anti-intellectualism and anti-democratic sentiment. How can education contribute locally and globally to fostering and safeguarding the very possibility of democratic practices against the neoliberal consecration of reified social relations? Becoming Things, Becoming-world contributes to contemporary discussions (...) in philosophy of education by developing a vision of a critical educational cosmopolitanism founded upon a renewed critique of reification. While cosmopolitan education has often been articulated in terms of an ethical and political response to globalization, this thesis proposes a different outlook. I argue that the idea of cosmopolitan education predates the onset of what we now term globalization, and that it provides a meaningful conception of education beyond the present socio-political condition. Moreover, I propose to rethink cosmopolitan education as a critique of reification, i.e. a critique of social relations taking on the character of mere things. The critique of reification helps to foreground aspects that have previously been neglected and marginalized in educational cosmopolitanism, such as its economic-material dimensions. At the same time, a critical cosmopolitan perspective is needed for a timely de-centering of critical social theory. Re-assessing the Cynic tradition and drawing on critical theorists such as Gerard Delanty and Axel Honneth as well as on New Wittgensteinian philosophers as Alice Crary, I advance a post-universalist understanding of cosmopolitanism. This is based on dynamic social relations and a broad understanding of rationality which includes imaginary aspects as well as the education of our sensitivities. Cosmopolitanism is understood as a lived practice which critically challenges reified social and cultural relations, including the strictures of particular socio-economic structures. The notion of reification is distinguished from other forms of alienation, objectification and instrumentalization and is deployed to characterize lasting distortions of our relations to each other, to the world and to ourselves. Against any idealizing take on communicative practice, I show that language, knowledge, and education do not necessarily counter-act reifying tendencies. Indeed, they themselves can become sources for enhancing processes of reification. A fresh look at the critique of reification allows us adequately to describe and understand the interrelation between contemporary capitalism, the forms of subjectivity it produces and the possibilities of democratic education and education towards democracy. Such an understanding is needed in face of the apparent impossibility of imagining a society, and envisioning an education, beyond the conditions formulated by contemporary neoliberal policies. Education as becoming-world maintains a hopeful outlook on the possibilities of our globalizing and pluralizing social reality as well as a keen focus on the tensions and challenges that this poses for contemporary educational endeavors on individual as well as structural levels. (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)

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)

In keeping with the radical openness of his theory of democracy, Habermas avoided pre-determining the ideal mode of economic organization for his favoured model of deliberative democracy. Instead of attempting a full-blown derivation, in this article, I propose adapting the Rawlsian method of comparing different political–economic regimes as candidate applications of his theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. Although both theorists are seen as endorsing liberal democratic world views, from the perspective of political economy, the corollary of (...) their conceptions of democracy would arguably veer elsewhere: in Rawls’s case, into the territory of property-owning democracy or democratic socialism, and in Habermas’s, into any political–economic regime which guarantees the real exercise of full political and discursive liberties against the background of legitimate lawmaking. The ultimate aim of this article is to discuss whether a concrete conception of democratic socialism, if any, is compatible with Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Economists now have the data to generate a high‐resolution picture of the economic inequalities within the very top fractions of income and wealth and between the top‐most fractions and others that have emerged since the early 1980s. I shall refer to these inequalities collectively as “the new inequality.” I argue that the moral value of solidarity can be used to raise pointed moral questions about the new inequality. In most cases, however, I shall raise such questions without answering them. For (...) I contend that solidarity functions more usefully as part of an articulate hermeneutic of suspicion—that is, as a central element in skepticism about economic inequalities and their justifications. Seeing that it functions in this way, we can see one contribution religious ethics makes to an inquiry into the new inequality. (shrink)