Abstract
Introduction
On occasion, I think that Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch risks underselling the interest and importance of this book. To go by the title, as well as much of the discussion that frames the argument, one could be forgiven for developing the impression that this is largely an intervention in contemporary debates regarding the future direction of Frankfurt School critical theory.
The implications and interest of the argument that is in fact developed, however, are both more focused and much broader than this picture of an intramural scrimmage might suggest. They are more focused in the sense that it is not recognition in general that is addressed here, but rather the prospects of the paradigm of recognition for addressing the rise of neo-liberalism as a response to the crises of Keynesianism, with its consequences in the demise of the social state, increasing inequalities of wealth and ever more precarious conditions of employment. 1 Schmidt am Busch hopes to show that recognition is a paradigm preferable to Habermas’ adaptations of systems theory for addressing these issues, and it is in making this argument that the project acquires significance for those outside the camp of critical theory. On the way to arguing for the preferability of recognition to systems theory, Schmidt am Busch makes a compelling case for the capacities of recognition for the analysis of phenomena at the intersection of politics and economics. While critical theorists will want to take note of this latest salvo in the debates between recognition and systems theory, the analysis of the political implications of labor here is one that must be reckoned with by anyone hoping to understand such phenomena.
In its focus on recognition and work, this book draws on two well-established veins of Schmidt am Busch’s research program. These are joined by a third established area of his research in Hegel, who is very much at the center of this account of recognition. The book is divided into three unequal sections. The first two, discussing Honneth and Marx, together take up roughly half of the book, while the longer, third section is devoted to Hegel.
Part I
After a brief introductory discussion of the position of labor in contemporary politics and its absence from much of the most prominent political philosophy during the second half of the 20th century, Schmidt am Busch turns in the first section to critical theoretical discussions of recognition. The analysis here focuses on the debate between Honneth and Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition, supplementing Honneth’s position with some discussion of his more recent work and Fraser’s with some discussion of the use of systems theory in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action.
The comparison between recognition and systems theory represents a first important level of discussion in this opening section. The recognition paradigm claims that economic interaction is a cultural phenomenon in which a variety of moral norms find their contexts of validity. Systems theory, on the other hand, denies that all aspects of economic interaction are reducible to culture, 2 analysing the economic system as a norm-free space separate from the lifeworld. 3 Schmidt am Busch has two aims here: immediately, he wants to show the capacity of the recognition paradigm for criticism of neo-liberalism; to do this, however, requires a certain amount of preparatory work offering criticism aimed at shoring up Honneth’s treatment of social esteem under the heading of recognition.
Social esteem is the form of recognition appropriate to economic interaction. It is defined by contrast with love, appropriate to private interaction, and respect, appropriate to public interaction (23). In the debate with Fraser, Honneth understands esteem as flowing from social utility rather than individual capacities (46). Employment, in turn, is the institutional form of social esteem (44), as income is the institutional expression of social utility (46–7).
While Honneth is at pains to criticize various ideological distortions of markets, 4 Schmidt am Busch is worried at a deeper level about understanding esteem as competitively achieved, much like income. Esteem, to the extent that it is based on social utility, is subject to relative rather than absolute evaluation (54). An agent seeking esteem will therefore seek to increase her income so far as possible, as well as to minimize the income of others so far as possible (ibid.). This creates a tension between respect and esteem to the extent that respect requires autonomy, which in turn requires disposing of a minimum of material resources (51–2). Thus agents interacting on the basis of respect seek to assure a minimum for one another, even as they undercut that very minimum once they turn to interacting on the basis of esteem (55–6).
On the one hand, this tension undercuts the explanatory potential of the paradigm of recognition. On the other, it appears to reproduce the systemic colonization of the lifeworld familiar from Habermas (67) suggesting that the recognition paradigm has in fact not managed to offer an alternative to the critical theoretical use of systems theory. What is needed, Schmidt am Busch argues, is not a return to systems theory, but rather a return to the origins of recognition. The key claim here, announced at the end of the introduction, is that Hegel is correct to identify a Honneth-style regime of meritocratic esteem as compensatory and deficient (9–10), one to which we have turned in the wake of the breakdown of social structures of recognition resulting from transformations of the work world effected by the rise of neo-liberalism.
Part II
The second section of the book takes up what Schmidt am Busch identifies as a Marxian theory of recognition, along with its connection to human relations of production. He assumes that the social scientifically problematic aspects of Marx’s analysis rule out accepting his critique of capitalism in toto (76), but suggests that aspects of that critique might well be useful for the enrichment of contemporary critical theory (75).
Of particular interest in this context is the generation of esteem (or the affirmation of oneself and others) available in Marx’s account of human production relations, particularly the place given to the recognition of oneself and of others in the process of the objectification of the self through labor (77–8). Schmidt am Busch patiently works through the various forms of affirmation in production identified by Marx, having to do with the relationship of the producer to himself, the needs fulfilled by his labor and the consumer of the product, but cannot resist introducing Hegel into the analysis to help make sense of Marx.
In part, this is because of Schmidt am Busch’s claim that the account Marx develops here is his appropriation of Hegel’s account of labor (78). More importantly, Schmidt am Busch turns at this point to the Hegelian notion of respect to show the one-sidedness of Marx’s account of human production relations (122, 136). This account is supposed to provide for human flourishing by fulfilling the need for the individuation of oneself in labor and the fulfillment of social needs through that labor, not to mention the expansion of human freedom in the process. Where production and consumption are organized through market exchanges, community is injured to the extent that each is a means for the other (106, 141). What is more, producing for exchange alienates the producer from his labor. Thus, for Marx, production can only be a truly human activity under human production relations (106–7).
Drawing on Hegel, Schmidt am Busch makes the following argument: if I am to objectify my individuality through my labor, I need to be able to determine my labor. I cannot do this, however, if my labor is too closely connected to social necessity (131–3). In essence, Marx connects the members of society together too closely, constructing his picture of human production relations by universalizing and essentializing Hegel’s account of love (144). Marx’s individual is insufficiently mediated with respect to the community, and as a result Marx’s theory of human production cannot be explained by his account of individual objectification through labor (151).
It is difficult to articulate the nature of the place this section occupies in the argument of the book. While it is clear that the first section presents the problematic, and the third section develops a response, the analysis of Marx hangs uncomfortably between the two. On the one hand, it offers an enriching discussion of a variety of possibilities for esteem and affirmation in the context of production relations. On the other hand, it is not entirely clear what Schmidt am Busch sees in Marx that he does not see in a more useful form in Hegel.
Part III
The third section of the book is explicitly dedicated to the recovery of the resources offered by Hegel for critical social theory. Schmidt am Busch claims that the turn to Hegel provides the resources for responding to the major questions of the first two parts: what sort of critical theoretical analysis can be developed of neo-liberalism from the paradigm of recognition; and how can a fully developed account of recognition remedy the insufficient mediation between individual and state that was diagnosed in the Marxian picture?
Mediation and the restoration of respect is provided by the Hegelian structure of the state, composed of the family, civil society and the political state (171). The state itself is the adequate realization of the free will (167), providing the imperative to respect the ‘personal individuality’ of its members in specific juridical and economic practices (181). Thus autonomy is restored, along with individuals’ liberty to dispose freely of their property, including the capacity to labor. Free disposition over the capacity to labor provides an endorsement of markets over a planned economy from the perspective of recognition (197). Only by determining the price at which I offer my capacities to labor can I be said to have disposition over those capacities. Anything less would fail to respect that disposition. This is not to guarantee my success in these market exchanges.
This risk creates a certain amount of social instability. Individuals make bad choices, and the establishment of a class of the poor threatens to undermine the practice of respect (202). The abstract right that serves as the institutionalization of personal respect fails to establish the affirmation of persons that requires social esteem in the forms of an honorable life and social belonging (226–7). Respect alone cannot secure an honorable life for all individuals, thus abstract right must be completed by the institutions of the police and the corporation (227).
The police and the corporation stabilize economic activity by securing the fulfillment of particular individual interests to the extent necessary to assure the possibility of an honorable life. 5 In slightly different ways, these two institutions restrict economic activity so as to mitigate the risks encountered by individuals in the various labor activities they undertake. Schmidt am Busch sees in the operation of the police and the corporation the basic ideas of the social state and social democracy, where the distribution of risk among groups of individuals and assurance of a level of sustenance maintain stability and the practices of respect.
So what critical potential might this reading hold? Schmidt am Busch here reintroduces the concerns of Part I, specifically the demise of the social state and the rise of neo-liberalism as a response to the crisis of Keynesianism. The key critical claim advanced from the Hegelian perspective has to do with individuals’ seeking the greatest possible difference between their incomes and those of others. The free market appears to be oriented towards a sort of winner-take-all capitalism, where modest gains are consolidated to produce the ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole’ and ‘misery, agony of toil’ and all the rest at the other. 6
The problem is the deficient, compensatory search for the recognition of esteem in a competitive context (249). This search represents a danger to freedom (260), in its tendencies towards instability and the degradation of respect (260–2). The locating of recognition in the corporation’s functions of providing professional qualification and evaluation mitigates the competitive nature of esteem. There are fewer comparisons between professions, since each profession belongs to a separate corporation with its own codes of recognition and respect. 7 Markets and their regulation are both shown to be necessary for recognition, maintaining a place for both esteem and respect.
Summative criticism
Contrary to what one might think from the preceding discussion, Schmidt am Busch denies that the Hegelian analysis is an argument for the reactualization of social democracy (281). In support of this claim, he points to two problematic aspects of social democratic labor regimes, namely the spread of Taylorist labor and the restricted access of women to market labor (282–3). Given the care with which he develops the vast majority of his arguments, this one seems extremely brief and rather unsupported. In order to show that the Hegelian analysis provides no reason to prefer the reactualization of social democracy, it would seem to be necessary to show that Taylorist labor and the restricted access of women to market labor are inevitable components of the organization of labor under social democracy.
It might in fact be possible to make such an argument, perhaps leaning on questions of efficiency, labor supply and structural unemployment, but Schmidt am Busch makes no such attempt here. Indeed, at the point in the argument at which one might expect him to turn from the criticism of neo-liberalism to the development of positive suggestions capable of addressing the problematic aspects of that regime, he returns to questions largely internal to critical theory, regarding the status of economic norms and the relative merits of the paradigms of recognition and systems theory. I find this particularly unfortunate given the clarity, care and perspicacity with which Schmidt am Busch develops so much of his analysis. His prior work is some of the best in philosophical discussions of labor, and the work done here deserves broader application.
In particular, and connected to the two issues Schmidt am Busch identifies as problematic under the social democratic organization of labor, the Hegelian analysis deserves to be put into conversation with two of the most promising research programs beyond the ken of critical theory for understanding the contemporary world of work: care work and post-Fordism. The former has done much to advance our understanding of what labor can look like on both sides of the market/non-market divide and to question the identification of ‘labor’ with ‘market labor’. While the latter has had less influence within philosophical circles, the work of people like Hardt and Negri has significantly expanded the horizon of criticism of contemporary neo-liberalism, posing important questions about the contemporary relevance of Marx. Given Schmidt am Busch’s attention to the extent to which aspects of Marx’s project provide useful resources for contemporary critique, an engagement with these sorts of research projects beyond the bounds of critical theory would be the final step in an argument that recognition is a necessary principle for a critical theory hoping to account for the important social and political realities that confront us at the intersection of economics and politics, not to mention the struggle for recognition in the world of work.