Abstract
In his book Das Recht der Freiheit (2011), 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.
In his latest book, Das Recht der Freiheit [Freedom’s Right] (2011), Axel Honneth’s neo-Hegelian theory of social justice gains its most comprehensive form to date, systematically incorporating negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the conditions necessary to their development, reconciliation and reproduction. 1 By normatively reconstructing existing institutions, his work identifies the conditions of reciprocal recognition necessary for individual self-determination and thereby reveals the possibility of social justice. 2 This project is modeled on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, whose ‘central intention’ Honneth identifies as ‘the development of universal principles of justice in terms of a justification of those social conditions under which each subject is able to perceive the liberty of the other as the prerequisite of his own self-realization’. 3 Honneth’s project shares this intention, which is more than just an other-regarding moral point of view or the reflective affirmation of norms actualized in the institutionalized social role one inhabits. Rather, one must come to view the freedom of others as the condition of one’s own freedom. This affirmation is, however, often inhibited by the emergence of social pathologies that upend the necessary and integrated conditions for the realization of freedom. 4 Such pathologies, the identification of which is the task of social theory, represent not psychological ailments, but systematic distortions of recognitive relations, which are primarily attributable to the absolutizing of either negative or reflective forms of freedom. Honneth argues (with Hegel) that both negative and reflective forms of freedom are, if they are to be truly realized, mutually informing and interdependent. Social pathologies thus emerge from a particular kind of one-dimensionality, which inhibits an individual’s ability to intuitively access the norms associated with his or her social roles and thereby generates a particular form of suffering Honneth calls indeterminacy. 5
Unlike his work on the injustices of social exclusion, domination, or disrespect (i.e. forms of misrecognition) 6 – wherein groups are denied institutional recognition and exploited or dominated based on shared racial or gender identities, for example – social pathologies are more fundamental, for they are, Honneth writes, ‘effective at a higher level of social reproduction, where the issue is reflexive access to the primary systems of action and norms’. 7 In his analysis of the social pathologies of negative freedom, Honneth writes that ‘members of particular groups develop tendencies toward ossified behavior, toward an increasing rigidity in social behavior and self-relations, which reveal themselves in hardly comprehensible moods of melancholy and disorientation’. 8 Yet, he adds, ‘empirical inquiries’ are ‘generally too crude to reveal these kinds of vague moods or collective sensitivities’. 9 The evidence of these barely comprehensible and empirically elusive symptoms is therefore sought in their indirect reflection in, for example, novels, films and various works of art. 10
In the following, I make the case for a more empirically evident social pathology in the sphere of legal freedom, which gives rise to a new and agitated form of subjectivity I call self-defensive. I begin with an outline of Honneth’s analysis of the sphere of negative freedom in light of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1), before taking up, generally speaking, an application of Honneth’s theory of social justice to the case of self-defensive subjectivity (2). I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account of social pathologies, as well as his more general commitment to historical progress (3). 11
From Recht to negative freedom
For Hegel, the totality of social conditions necessary for the development and exercise of freedom is what he calls Recht. 12 Recht falls under the category of objective or existing spirit and is nothing other than the concept and actualization of free will, or free will as Idea. 13 The various shapes or determinations of Recht – as civil or abstract right, morality, ethics and world history – constitute, in their expression and interrelation, something akin to justice, rather than simply law or right. 14 Setting aside world history, Honneth can be said to share this paradigm and, following Hegel, incorporates it into his account of the totality of social conditions and institutions necessary to realize and reconcile them (i.e. right, moral autonomy and ethical norms) within the social order and the self-realization of the individual. My focus in the following is on the sphere of legal freedom and subjective right (or what Hegel calls ‘abstract right’) and its corresponding form of social pathology.
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s discussion of abstract right, as the sphere of subjective freedom and legal personality, is primarily concerned with property right and contract. 15 ‘Not until he has property does the person exist as reason’, says Hegel. 16 The recognitive function of the abstract right to private property is manifest in the contractual relation, which mediates and facilitates social recognition. The subjective will is made objective via the recognitive function of the contract, turning external possession into a property of one’s will recognized by others. 17 The importance Hegel attributes to the role of property in the development of the will could be viewed as compensating for his restriction of subjective right in the political sphere. 18 That is to say, the lack of mediating mechanisms for objectifying one’s will in the political sphere shifts the entire burden of objectification to the private sphere of ownership. Honneth diverges from Hegel’s conclusions on both accounts (i.e. the private and political objectifications of will). In the political sphere, Honneth (pace Hegel) endorses mechanisms of democratic participation and will formation, while keeping his account of subjective right negative, focusing on state-guaranteed rights to ‘a sphere of individual privacy’ – a ‘sanctuary or protected space’, which allows each individual the possibility of ‘radical withdrawal from all social contexts of obligation’. 19 Within this space of negative freedom, individuals can examine and pursue their contingent and personal interests free from the burden of pubic justification ‘as long as they do not violate the principles of positive right we have all approved’. 20 Social recognition, thus, takes the form of respecting each other’s sphere of private autonomy, while also expecting that private pursuits abide by the legal norm. 21
When things are right, so to speak, we have the legally sanctioned latitude or negative freedom to pursue our goals and projects without need to appeal to the rights associated with private autonomy.
22
Yet we must remember that freedom within this legally constituted sphere of privacy is fully realized only when the subjects inhabiting it exercise moral autonomy – i.e. when they exercise reflexive freedom as conscience or rational self-determination – in the evaluation and determination of their goals, which themselves rely on ‘reasons that we pre-reflexively share with our counterparts in interaction’.
23
Similar to Pashukanis’ theory that the legal relation ‘comes into being only at the moment of dispute’ or, more specifically, through the lawsuit, according to Honneth it is only when there is a conflict in the mutual understanding of shared action-obligations that a right is claimed and subjects become strategic.
24
The turn to subjective rights is evidence of a ‘communicative breakdown’, which leads to a strategic disposition suspending the possibility of cooperative relationships with shared goals.
25
Recourse to a subjective right here always creates only a kind of temporary state of exception, in which what is actually at stake – in a sense, an autonomous way of life – is in a way masked or bracketed: The legal person cannot at all reflect or realize the life goals important to them in the manner necessary for their ethical autonomy, for they can always only treat their interactive partners as agents with strategic interests …
26
When subjective rights are mistakenly taken to be the substance of one’s freedom and identity, we witness ‘the gradual reformulation of one’s own concerns and needs into mere legal claims’. As long as a subject thinks and performs in terms of legal personhood, says Honneth, ‘it cannot indeed exercise the kind of reflections or activities, which constitute the precondition for the actualization of life goals’.
30
This is accompanied by feelings of ‘reflective dismay’, melancholy and detachment (i.e. indeterminacy). In our relations to others, we abstract from and thus inhibit the possibility of fulfilling ‘intersubjective action-obligations’ and solidaristic forms of identification. An ‘exclusively juridical image of society’ emerges wherein one becomes merely strategic toward others, invoking rights (rather than reasons) and pursuing litigation and judicial arbitration rather than consensus.
31
At the end of such a shift in attitude, there exists the conviction that my freedom and the freedom of all others has the scope precisely compatible with the law’s required abstractions and thus does not extend beyond its standardizing descriptive borders – instead of individualized needs, only generalizable interests then become realized, instead of well-established norms and values, it reverts to law-conforming principles, and instead of communicative conflict regulation, judicial arbitration almost exclusively takes its place.
32
Honneth’s alternative explanation for this social pathology is found in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, wherein he argues for the social-ontological ‘priority of a kind of elementary recognition’, which conceives of reification as the forgetfulness of recognition. 36 In Das Recht der Freiheit, Honneth argues that we must take into account ‘the “ideological” effect of a growing orientation of political discourse toward the medium of law’ as well as the juridification of, for example, families and schools (particularly since the 1960s), in an effort to ensure state protection for vulnerable groups. This expansion of juridification into new areas of contemporary life, insinuating rights into once informally regulated social relations, increases the chances that social disputes will allow the ‘conciliatory potential’ of communicative action to be forgotten. 37 When the grammar of institutions is evermore juridical, it takes only ‘an unusually quick increase in choices for action in everyday social life’, he writes, ‘to compel subjects – in order to unburden themselves – to cling to their legal claims and to eventually comprehend their own freedom only in a legal sense’. When this strategic unburdening and deployment of right turns back against the subject, morphing from a tool to be wielded into a determinate norm in subject formation, this social pathology can give rise to self-defensive subjectivity. 38
One-dimensional freedom: Self-defensive subjectivity
One week after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December of 2012, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre articulated the mantra of a growing libertarian tendency in the USA: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’. 39 In the wake of a violent breakdown, an unimaginable massacre, it was an expression of force and counter-force, a kind of post-liberal social mechanics of coercion stripped of all social normativity. The background condition for such a claim is that the social is being rendered suspect and dangerous, a space of vulnerability for this distinctively American kind of rights-centric subjectivity, the Second Amendment right to ‘bear arms’ at its core. Historically, there have been analogous forms of libertarian subject identification, with the right to privacy or property (e.g. ‘possessive individualism’) – both of which have been prominent in American libertarian thought and practice – but I argue that we are bearing witness to a dramatic shift in the importance, the intensity of identification and the historical understanding of this particular constitutional right.
It was just 5 years ago that the US Supreme Court decisively reinterpreted the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). 40 It was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court established for the first time that the right to bear arms was an individual right. A subsequent decision, McDonald v. Chicago (2010), addressed the question of jurisdictional scope in Heller, ruling that individual states could not (according to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) abridge this right. 41 And in the wake of Heller we find the emergence and proliferation of the so-called Stand Your Ground Doctrine at the state level (now in 22 states), which represents a radicalization of the Castle Doctrine.
The Castle Doctrine – derived from English common law, but having its origins in Roman law – holds that acts of self-defense in private spaces and on private property, such as in one’s home or vehicle, carry certain protections and immunities. More specifically, one is not obligated to retreat while in these private spaces and the use of deadly force there is considered justifiable with a lesser burden of proof. This doctrine is radically transformed, making a qualitative leap in abstraction, with Stand Your Ground insofar as the spatial conditions for these immunities and protections – i.e. the condition associated with private spaces and private property – have been dropped. Said another way, the right has been abstracted away from its spatial and property conditions, resituated in the abstract subject, and borne by it wherever it finds itself, including in public spaces and institutions.
Accompanying the individuation of this doctrine into an unbounded private right has been the expansion of the social spheres in which it can be lawfully exercised with a firearm. The proliferation of open-carry and concealed-carry laws has transformed institutions and spaces to accommodate the right of this new self-defensive subject. Arkansas recently became the 45th state to allow open-carry and even more states allow concealed-carry. 42 In 2011, only 1 state allowed concealed-carry on campus (Utah), now 5 states do and more will soon follow. 43 In July of 2013, North Carolina approved concealed-carry in bars and restaurants and Kansas approved the expansion of concealed-carry into state and municipal buildings – Mississippi expanded this right in 2011. Several states have recently expanded concealed-carry to churches and daycare centers and Obama signed legislation to expand concealed-carry into national parks.
The dramatic expansion of this Second Amendment right in public spaces and institutions is matched only by the intensity of subjects’ passionate, exclusive and immediate identification with it. Indeed, at risk of sounding hyperbolic, this right is increasingly rendered synonymous with freedom as such. Although, as Hegel rightly says, ‘a determination of right gives me a warrant, but it is not absolutely necessary that I should pursue my rights’, 44 in this pathology of legal freedom we find that one cannot do otherwise. In this context, the loss of the distinction between the juridical formulation of needs and the needs themselves is empirically evident to the extent that subjects feel compelled to exercise their right perpetually. Means and ends have collapsed into each other, for the right to bear arms necessitates that one does bear arms, hence the rapid transformation of public institutions to accommodate the increase in firearms. In this radical identification with a subjective right there is no evaluative distance available, no intuitively accessible normative guidance to assess the practical efficacy of its use, because the right itself is identified with freedom. 45 Given this normative restriction, not to exercise this right is to be unfree, as well as irresponsible and dangerous, leaving one constantly vulnerable to harm. As a Representative in Colorado stated during a debate about concealed-carry on my campus: “Most of the mass killings that we talk about have been affected in gun free zones. So when you have a gun free zone, it’s like saying, “come and get me””. 46
The subject-constituting ‘passionate attachment’ to the Second Amendment right – with its juridical accommodation in new spaces and its identification with freedom and thus its constitutive role in subject formation – has two additional consequences. 47 First, we are witnessing a new revisionism in American legal history and a recasting of past and present struggles for recognition (and thus for freedom) in the language of this private right. The clearest example of revisionism concerns new interpretations of the Second Amendment itself, in part because they rely almost entirely on an originalist standard. 48 Long dormant as an issue of constitutional debate, there has only recently emerged a concerted effort to undermine the long-held collective right interpretation of the Second Amendment and replace it with an individualist reading. 49 This move has inverted the Second Amendment rationale from ensuring a collective and regulated force to defend the state to a means of citizen protection against state tyranny. Another example is the appropriation of the rhetoric of women’s rights and self-determination in the argument that gun ownership is a solution to sexual assault. Conversely, gun regulation is asserted to be a major contributor to rape culture, particularly in arguments about extending concealed-carry to university campuses. Ignored are misogynist norms that validate sexual violence or contribute to violent forms of masculinity and sexual objectification; the same norms that contribute to an abysmal record of women being criminally prosecuted when they do act in self-defense. Missing is discussion about education and social obligations to create mechanisms of accountability, reporting, safe spaces, or the acknowledgement of the statistical prevalence of statutory rape, acquaintance rape, and guns taken from and used against victims. Similar revisionism is found in abolitionist and civil rights history, with National Gun Appreciation Day recently inaugurated on the Martin Luther King, Jr, holiday weekend and rise of the refrain that if black Americans had had guns throughout US history, we would not have had slavery or Jim Crow. 50
The second consequence of the passionate attachment to this particular abstract right concerns the agitated, enemy-constituting nature of self-defensive subjectivity. This is consistent with Hegel’s description of the othering logic of legal personality in the Phenomenology, wherein the dissolution of fundamental forms of social recognition constitutive of individual identity leads to fully externalized social relations. This de-socialization of subjects turns the social into a category of vulnerability and negative externality – the ‘soulless community’, as Hegel called it. Others are perpetually viewed as suspect and this suspicion is constitutive of a permanent defensive stance or vigilance in everyday social interaction. There is also a Hobbesian, self-perpetuating logic of insecurity at work here insofar as those who, while not sharing in this form of abstract identification or concept of freedom, rationally respond to the proliferation of firearms with concern for their own safety and therefore consider carrying a firearm. The self-defeating logic at work, however, is that the more intense the identification with this abstract right becomes, the more it is singularly associated with freedom, the less defensible, less free and more impoverished this subject turns out to be. ‘Their impotent self-consciousness is the defenseless enclosed arena of their tumult’, writes Hegel. 51
Concluding remarks
Honneth’s analysis of social pathologies and mapping of the multidimensional and mutually informing spheres of freedom in Das Recht der Freiheit have facilitated the above diagnosis, yet my analysis deviates somewhat from his own. Honneth claims, for example, that pathological juridification involves the forgetting of a prior form of social recognition, which follows from an over-reliance on legal freedom in times of social division and normative indeterminacy. This over-reliance problematically becomes transformative as juridification overtakes and reductively reconfigures one’s stated (extra-juridical) needs. Again, this is said to be happening at a higher level of social reproduction, inhibiting reflexive access to systems of action obligations, rather than merely manifesting as forms of misrecognition and social exclusion. My assumption is that Honneth has in mind a condition in which there is a weakening of our normative second nature such that the default position in times of uncertainty is strategic juridification to which we become habituated. The implication is that the nature of strategic action within this indeterminate condition remains juridical, confined to maneuvering within the legal order to seek advantages or adjudicate disputes. Honneth rightly views this instrumentalist move to the register of abstract right as a false form of liberation from indeterminacy insofar as we affirm, not ethical norms and obligations, but a formalistic retreat from them. Yet Honneth assumes that existing institutions are sufficiently capacitated to resolve these social pathological tendencies toward abstraction and juridification. This follows in part from Honneth’s perception of social pathologies as more episodic and less empirically pronounced than the Marxist tradition would argue, and this in turn informs his more general commitment to a progressive philosophy of history.
What I have referred to as self-defensive subjectivity emerges from a social pathology in the sphere of negative freedom, which – consistent with Honneth’s account – undermines the recognitive dimensions of trust, solidarity and justice. This acute form of juridical abstraction and identification impedes self-reflective access to social norms as well as our ability to freely navigate various subject positions (e.g. juridical and moral). Less consistent, however, is (1) the essentially suspicious and adversarial, and not just instrumental, nature of self-defensive subjectivity with Honneth’s description of the ‘action-impoverished (or passive) personality’. This inherently defensive disposition has been accompanied by the devolution of the state’s monopoly on violence to the citizenry, which raises the issue of conflict and thus (2) the second point of divergence. Although Honneth does speak of conflict as having an originary role in the emergence of juridical pathologies, he appears to have in mind conflicts between individuals. In Das Recht der Freiheit, he uses the examples of a child custody battle in the movie Kramer v. Kramer and the extra-judicial quest for justice pursued by Heinrich von Kleist’s character Michael Kohlhaas in his novella Michael Kohlhaas (1811). 52 In both cases, Honneth is illustrating how the model of freedom in the legal sphere comes to function ‘as a model for identity formation’ 53 or how deployments become attachments constitutive in subject formation such that ‘from all of subjectivity only the shell of the legal person remains’. 54 In the case of the juridical pathology contributing to self-defensive subjectivity, however, we find an originary group conflict in which group identities, such as racial and gender identities, are always already oppositional and constituted by social relations of misrecognition. This challenges any absolute distinction between social misrecognition and higher-order pathologies. Lastly (3), given the depth and scope of the empirically evident pathology I have outlined, the nature of its associated form of subjectivity, and the extra-judicial outcomes it has produced – such as de-criminalized individual violence – puts into question the capacity of existing institutions to mitigate pathological tendencies and with it Honneth’s progressive historical narrative. I elaborate on these three points of divergence in closing.
(1) Although Honneth’s analysis of reification differs greatly from that of Lukács, his notion of an indeterminate subject resembles the ‘contemplative’ nature of Lukács’ fragmented, reified subject. Both are calculating, instrumentalist and detached in their relations and perception, which results from a process that ‘destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community’, says Lukács. 55 Self-defensive subjectivity is, however, agitated and adversarial in its defensive posture. Like the self-defeating character of legal personality in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the subject ‘withdraws into the certainty of his own self; he is that substance as the positive universal, but his actuality consists in his being a negative universal self’. 56 This condition is the result of social de-identification that engenders not stasis or indeterminacy, but suspicion and a predilection for violence. This unmediated identification with abstract right and the desire for ‘unfettered freedom’ reductively conceived, while not quite fitting Hegel’s description of ‘elemental beings raging madly against one another in a frenzy of destructive activity’, does share a structural affinity with the inherently unstable and progressively unwinding ‘empty shell’ of Hegel’s Rechtszustand. 57
Jay Bernstein has recently attempted to identify the structural – or what he calls ‘metaphysical’ – source of anger in this new libertarian tendency. For Bernstein, it is connected to the revelation of dependency: ‘[W]hat has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions’. 58 The individuals come to realize that their radical individuality is constituted by social conditions and relations beyond their control, which is simultaneously experienced as a loss of the illusion of autonomy. ‘In fury, I lash out’, says Bernstein. ‘I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing’. Relating the constitutive anger of this subject to an experience of loss is helpful, but it is the kind of loss that cannot be mourned and, as Wendy Brown notes, ‘aggression is what emerges in the space of unmourned losses’. 59
(2) Like Honneth’s appeal to the distinction between political relations of recognition and ‘primary systems of action and norms’, Bernstein wants to isolate a non-political experience of loss from politicized conflict: ‘Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political’, he writes. This move reinscribes, however, a dualist bias in the theorization of subjectivity and subjection. It de-politicizes the (metaphysical) categories of right and autonomy, which, in our case, elides the raced and gendered origins of the libertarian forms of identification in the first place. 60 Although the seemingly universal status of legal personality was problematic in its own right, Hegel was fairly explicit that it was a subject position reserved for the masculine. In the context of primary systems (Honneth) and metaphysics (Bernstein), we encounter a subject without qualities.
The self to be defended in self-defensive subjectivity is a raced and gendered self, whose pathological turn most likely results from the destabilization of institutionalized forms of identity privilege rather than from a condition of normative indeterminacy. In particular, I am referring to the withdrawal (or perceived threat of withdrawal) of state-supported relations of male and white supremacy. The unmourned loss is then the loss of a certain structuring attachment associated with state institutions and is acutely felt in the confluence of an economic recession and the election of a black president. This might begin to explain why libertarian rage has been targeted at the state, rather than at financial institutions, whose malfeasance precipitated the crisis, and why such rage has not led to disengagement, but rather re-engagement to ‘take the country back’. We find an intense focus on traditional voter mobilization, fielding candidates and, once in office, aggressive wielding of state power. Not to dismantle the state, as is so often claimed, but to redirect it – to roll back minority access to the ballot box or blunt it through gerrymandering; reverse the feminist gains in reproductive rights; and cut back on social services thought to benefit non-white communities. The instigation is therefore not the state as such, but the state that potentially redistributes traditional white, male privileges that facilitate economic gain, political power and access to forms of cultural expression. To use the language of Charles Mills, we are witnessing a reaction to violations of racial and gender contracts. 61
Despite the pathological identification with an abstract and subjective right, which Honneth’s work helps us to diagnose, its actualization is gender- and race-specific, informing an ongoing and vicious political struggle. The perceived threat of the state, then, is not the violation of the institutional conditions of mutual recognition, but the possibility of their actualization. And the anger stems from a subject injured not by unequal treatment, but by the mitigation of gender and racial privilege. Tyranny for the self-defensive subject is, therefore, the tyranny of a universal threatening to be concretized.
(3) Finally, the above diagnosis of self-defensive subjectivity problematizes Honneth’s assumption that existing institutions are sufficiently capacitated to resolve emergent social pathologies. Honneth is generally committed to a progressive historical narrative, animated by a moral learning process, which increasingly realizes a comprehensive notion of freedom in the social institutions of democratic ethical life. I did not give much attention to this historical commitment in my reconstruction of Honneth’s theory above, because social pathologies are taken by him to be limited, regressive tendencies, which existing institutions have the normative resources to reverse or absorb. That is to say, social pathologies are, according to Honneth, not so profound or structural as to corrupt entire social institutions and thereby put into question a progressive historical narrative. One can read Honneth’s critique of Lukács, for example, as an attempt to reconceptualize the process of reification in a way that makes it open to amelioration within existing institutions, rather than being a generative force and fundamental characteristic of the institutions themselves. In this way, Honneth can avoid the conclusion that the praxis of reified subjects is ‘structurally false’, which would necessitate the kind of radical negation of social institutions Lukács supported. 62
The social pathology related to self-defensive subjectivity, however, involves systemic institutional and legal transformations that have implications far beyond the forgetting or remembering of an antecedent form of recognition. It emerges from a structural shift and since the juridical conditions for its associated practices are newly emerging and expanding, it is not clear what institutional capacities exist to mitigate their development. Speaking of social pathologies of legal freedom, Honneth writes that ‘instead of communicative conflict regulation, judicial arbitration almost exclusively takes its place’. 63 The juridification of informal, norm-governed social relations described by Honneth creates more litigious and legally strategic subjects. However, in the case of self-defensive subjectivity, which rises in tandem with the de-criminalization of violence, strategic action includes not just ‘judicial arbitration’, but pulling the trigger as well. Together, these developments challenge the assumption that the normative resources of existing institutions are sufficient to sustain the progressive historical learning processes to which Honneth is committed. 64