Doing justice to the past

I Historicism as the positing of ‘modernity’

In order to study the issues raised by the exceptionalist take on the modernist assumption in critical theory, the work of Axel Honneth recommends itself. His theory of recognition is a sweeping, multi-layered theoretical proposition that was developed with the explicit aim of pursuing, correcting and completing the grand tradition of a critical social theory, whose ultimate foundation lies in a philosophical theory of modernity. Recognition theory emerges notably from the critical reception of this tradition, from rereadings of the tradition stretching from Rousseau, Hegel and Marx to Habermas and Foucault. ⁸ The rich conceptual apparatus offered by the theory of recognition provides answers to many specific questions of social and political theory. But underlying those specific concerns is the more fundamental one of giving an account of who ‘we moderns’ are, what we can achieve morally, socially and politically, and what holds us back still in each of these areas. Of all the current models of critical theory, Honneth’s theory of recognition is arguably one in which the modernist moment is the most pronounced and the most explicitly assumed. This is why we focus on it more particularly here, to problematize the modernist assumption that continues to hold within contemporary critical theory.

It is in the most recent formulation of Honneth’s theory of recognition, in Freedom’s Right, that the modernist assumption underlying it is the most explicit. ⁹ The bulk of the book is made up of what he calls ‘normative reconstructions’. These reconstructions are lengthy historical narratives that retrace the transformations over two centuries of specific areas of social life. Those areas are selected by Honneth because he sees in them the institutional realms that provide subjects with the necessary conditions for a full realization of their individual freedom. They more or less correspond, in extensively improved, differentiated presentations, to the ‘spheres of recognition’ already sketched in The Struggle for Recognition. Honneth’s fundamental Hegelian insight about the recognitive logic at play in social reproduction remains in place – that it is by being recognized in a specific capacity by other members of society that individuals can fully acquire that capacity and thereby have the conditions of their autonomy fulfilled. Examples of such modes of recognition and their impact on freedom are those we can expect from the previous book: to be free, we need to be recognized as being legally and morally responsible, as having specific needs fulfilled on the basis of our vulnerability, as being valid contributors to the division of labour, as being valid contributors to the processes by which society governs itself. The bulk of Freedom’s Right thus presents long historical reconstructions retracing the transformations in scope and content of key modes of recognition that define the inclusion of individuals in modern society, through which they can realize the different dimensions of their individual autonomy.

Honneth’s methodological intention with such a focus on the historical destinies of the spheres of recognition chimes in with Hegel’s mature method. On the one hand, the historical reconstructions define the specific meaning these norms and their institutional instantiations have acquired throughout the development of modern society. Instead of producing that content a priori, from the philosopher’s armchair, we can extract the normative logic of key modes of socialization and self-relation, and follow the expansion of those logics, from the shape they have actually taken throughout the history of modern society, that is, for the last 200 years until our present.

However, since those norms and their institutional instantiations are conditions of freedom, the historical narrative at the same time provides the ‘proof’ for their rationality. Hegel’s circular (‘dialectical’) method is wholly embraced by Honneth; this is what is meant by an ‘immanent’ method as opposed to the a-priorist method Honneth sees post-Kantian projects delving in. ¹⁰ The history of normative developments at once describes modern society in its ‘rational’ core and justifies it as a form of moral progress, thereby providing the very standards from which to establish its rationality. The fundamental norm of freedom is what makes this circularity a virtuous rather than a vicious one. Since the concept of freedom requires that it be deployed as universally as possible (in terms of the number of individuals enjoying it and the extent to which they enjoy it); and since modern society corresponds to the time in human history when the norm of freedom actually becomes universal in principle; since freedom therefore becomes social fact through the institutions of modern society; therefore, as a consequence, to describe those institutions is at the same time to draw out their rational content. On that basis then, the moral superiority and thus the progressive character of a number of social developments can be argued, in the positive, when these institutional realities actually deliver on the promise contained in them. In a negative mode, when those institutional realms fall short of the normative promise they contain, we have found a legitimate ground from which to criticize aspects of modern society, and to understand and analyse the emergence of social movements around those failures.

Such combination of thick historical description and strong normative justification delivers a paradigmatic example of a philosophical theory of modernity. As we can see, in such a model the philosophical and the historical are tightly interwoven. The philosopher’s job is to articulate historical realities (institutions, ethical beliefs, forms of social practice, particular events and movements if they signal important normative shifts, and so on) in a philosophical way. But the project is wholly normative, it is not about history for its own sake, for the sake of knowing about the people and societies of previous or of recent times. It is about history only as the element in which freedom can be realized and, just as equally, empirically fails to be realized. Indeed it is about ‘our’ freedom, since only in modern society has freedom become a full social fact, made possible through its key institutions. From this point of view what really matters about history is only ‘our’ present, what promises it contains for us and how it fails us in relation to those promises. This present-focused, normative application of historical work is quite close to what Foucault called an analysis of the limits inherent in our present. ¹¹

Honneth’s historicism then is of a very particular kind: it consists of a modernist position, one we can call ‘exceptionalist’, which is typical of much contemporary social theory. Its key underlying assumption is that the modern form of freedom is superior to earlier forms, and not only more pervasive empirically. As a result this modern concept is sufficiently distinctive in its constituent institutions and practices. A radical break with any preceding social history is thus produced. This version of ‘historicism’ asserts a particular picture of moral progress for the modern world. It also follows from it that once ‘modernity’ is attained, there is a substantial unity within that epoch, for the modern holds itself together in its self-recognition around its core normative principles.

The notion of progress we have just described, along with the narrative unity of modernity, have been the focus of some criticism of Honneth’s social theory already. ¹² In the following sections, we develop new criticisms of these moderno-centrist, exceptionalist assumptions, focusing more specifically on the implicit philosophy of history they entail.

The main issue is that the theory of moral progress entailed in the exceptionalist stance unduly homogenizes the periods that are created by its underlying narrative structure. Identifying a radically new normative achievement introduces a division within human history between a clearly identifiable present and its past, which is defined through the supposed absence of that achievement. However, there is an inherent risk in such an approach both for the past and the present to be misrepresented, precisely as they are constructed along a static and encompassing opposition. ¹³ If the division is then made into a principle for investigation, the opposition contradicts, precisely through its positing of a break, the many links of varying kinds that might actually exist between the periods thereby created.

In the next three sections, we highlight specific problems that arise from the homogenizing of historical periods and the severing of historical continuities. Our criticism of a ‘homogenizing’ approach to the past draws its inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of historicism, which we explicate in our final section and which inspires the positive counter-proposals we delineate. ¹⁴ From this Benjaminian perspective, historicism as the projection of a homogenous time onto the past, is the epistemological reflection of a practical failure to attend properly to history. Elsewhere, Honneth himself expressed his sympathy for Benjamin’s argument. On this view, historicism performs a moral injustice precisely because as an apparently rigorous and objective method it in fact contributes to the making-invisible of past moral and political struggles. Such blindness affects the way we view our supposed modern identity just as much as the periods preceding it. In the next three sections, we critically examine the epistemic and moral injustices involved in an exceptionalist take on modernity. We start by focusing on the way in which the recent past, homogenized into our ‘modern present’, risks being misrepresented.

II Homogenizing the present

An exceptionalist brand of modernism not only constructs a particular view of the past, but in so doing creates the risk of flattening out the very ‘present’ day the theory sets itself the task to normatively and critically reconstruct. ¹⁵ In erasing historical connections, a picture of the present emerges which tends to ignore the undercurrents and shadows of numerous ongoing processes situated at different levels of social life. In Honneth’s case, this homogenization occurs by portraying social formations that followed the great revolutions of the late 18th century as forming a single normative present, one continuous line leading to us today. This historical line is supposed to owe its unity to the fact that it constitutes the gradual unfolding of the social conditions necessary for the realization of freedom. Each subsequent generation, with the one universalist concept of freedom as its normative baseline, is supposed to add its definite contribution to this realization. From the perspective of history, however, such a view risks performing an injustice by becoming blind to fractures that might affect this ‘present’ in its very normative structures.

This problem emerges at different levels of analysis. First, it plays out in empirical terms, namely in the assessment of real historical episodes that appear to speak directly against the normative rupture that modernity is supposed to represent. To continue to use Honneth’s model as a paradigmatic case: if what we call our present is reconstructed retrospectively from the perspective of the ideal telos of a full social completion of individual freedom, then specific historical moments can become invisible as a consequence. They are selected out of the modern narrative. Where the social-economic situation was markedly antithetical to the telos – that is to say, when large groups of individuals were denied essential aspects of their freedom – such moments risk being passed over. The plight of the proletariat in 19th-century industrial England and France could be one example here. Colonized people from the late 19th to the mid-20th century are another. The telos of freedom reduces such extensive phenomena to mere deplorable stages in the otherwise ‘good’ developmental narrative of moral progress. At least Hegel’s ‘slaughterbench of history’ metaphor recognized the tragic dimensions of human history, including the modern one. ¹⁶ In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the philosophical reconciliation with the rationality of Spirit’s realization could still be coupled with a historiographical acknowledgement of all the suffering that had been endured, as a kind of horrifying human sacrifice at the altar of freedom. In the de-transcendentalized version on the other hand, there is a serious risk that the sacrifices made in the present become invisible, that empirical struggles and real suffering are moved behind the curtain of an homogenizing narrativization of modern times. This is the first, empirical way in which justice might not be done to the past; in this case, to the recent, modern past.

The problem of exceptions to the unified modernist narrative also plays out at the normative level. For it is quite conceivable that a period covering more than 200 years (on the most restricted definition of modernity), would have in fact created several normative languages. The blindness in this case is not to empirical developments that ran counter to the narrative of freedom, but to normative creations that are specific to sub-periods within ‘modernity’. For instance, one can argue that there is a form of racism specific to modernity. ¹⁷ This modern variant of racism combines the deep-rooted discriminatory logics inherent in the human psyche and in human societies, with elements specific to the 19th-century scientific discourse and mindset, along with forms of 19th- and 20th-century state institutions. Such a combination of elements built up a historically unique formation, a ‘modern’ form of racist thinking, that was obviously deeply influential in institutional practices in most western countries before the Second World War. Arguably, this modern form of racism played a major part in the ideology and the practices of National Socialism. ¹⁸

This last example can be taken at the empirical level, as another, particularly problematic, example of real historical development that dramatically set back the universalistic principles that are supposed to characterize modernity. There is a sense in which the pathos invoked by critical theorists when they use categories like ‘catastrophe’ ¹⁹ or ‘breach in civilization’ ²⁰ for these events has a dual function. Categorizing such events as exceptions insulates us from them by distancing them from the normal state of affairs at the same time as we acknowledge them. Designated ‘exceptions’ therefore have a lesser effect on the analysis of the normative underpinnings of 19th- and 20th-century societies.

Modern racism ²¹ is a thorny issue for a universalistic narrative like the one developed by Honneth. For this particular form of racism could be upheld by people who also held firmly to the universalistic ideals that are supposed to have been first asserted through the political revolutions of the late 18th century. For many ‘enlightened’ people in the West, there simply was no contradiction between the universalism of status and rights on the one hand, and racist views and their consequent policies on the other. The point of a race-based view of humanity is precisely that not all humans are equal – and therefore universal principles need be applied only to those worthy of them. Versions of this discourse should be differentiated in their structure and effect, from developmental models to essentialist ones. It is an open question as to where a key thinker like Kant, for instance, should be placed in this spectrum. Kant is exemplary as the most consistent of philosophers who, according to recent influential readings at least, saw no contradiction in being both radically universalist and holding exclusionary views. ²² The same issue can be raised in relation to gender or to the class racism displayed by privileged classes towards proletarians in the 19th century, where once again Kant seems to be a case in point. ²³ Critical theorists might wish to eliminate such modern normative discourses from the core of their account of modernity. But to do so would leave the ensuing account of modernity at odds with a full understanding of its history.

The examples we have just cited indicate that ‘modernity’ is likely internally splintered in relation to its normative foundations along several axes. To see how complex these issues are, we can quickly show three simple ways to think about modernity’s internal conflict, captured in one famous text by Foucault. This also serves to demonstrate that the argument just made, which was launched in reference to Honneth at first, can just as well be taken up in relation to other paradigmatic critical theorists.

First, there is the developmental, thresholds view of modernity. On this model, the telos of a full realization of freedom goes through a series of steps. Apparent factual setbacks in fact might point only to such thresholds, or indeed merely contingent setbacks being encountered. This would be Honneth’s view, but would also chime in with at least a possible reading of Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’, since the latter posits the value of freedom as the foundational principle of the modern ethos and encourages a processual view of how that freedom is to be realized. ²⁴ The problem with this view is that it risks underplaying the dark sides of contemporary society, as we have seen. It might be crucial by contrast, for simple historiographical reasons but also for critical and indeed for political reasons, to insist on negative phenomena (like modern racism, for example) as sad achievements of modernity. These are not just a remnant or an aberration, but something made possible by modernity, something that defines ‘modernity’ just as much as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This might be what Foucault has in mind when he defines Enlightenment as ‘testing the limits’ of our self-understanding as moderns, to uncover the dark side of modernity, either as it actually occurred or as it could or might occur. ²⁵

Another classical view of modernity is that it is in fact split between a properly ‘modern’ and a new mode of organization, a ‘postmodern’ one, pointing to a new way of conceiving of our ways to know, our ways to exert power over each other, and our ways to relate to ourselves. ²⁶ In this case, though, an epistemological Pandora’s box appears to have opened up. For what assures us that those periods now distinguished, a modern and a ‘postmodern’ one, are themselves homogeneous? Clearly, 19th-century capitalism is not the same as pre-Second World War capitalism, and the latter is itself different from post-Second World War, and indeed from post-1970s and post-2008, capitalisms. ²⁷ But if that is true, then why should such diversity not concern also the normative underpinnings of social formations? Once one begins to break apart periodizations in this way – and Foucault’s methodological discussions of periodization insist on this point as well ²⁸ – where does one stop? On the other hand though, if one breaks apart the ‘present’ too much, what kind of ‘homogeneous’, ‘general’ and ‘systematic’ conclusions will we be able to draw, as Foucault still requires of the critical theorist? On the basis of what sufficiently general norms will we be able to launch any kind of criticism? ²⁹

Modernity could also be harbouring contradictory currents, say, a movement of universalization of deontic statuses, versus counter-movements harking back to older exclusionary logics (based on class, citizenship, religious confession, and so on). Is this what Foucault has in mind when he claims that modernity should actually not be understood as a historically situated period but rather as an ethos, such that we would need to distinguish between the contemporary (modernity as a historical period) and the modern (modernity as an ethos), and the contemporary world would entail both modern and counter-modern tendencies? ³⁰ Here the problem is that one can no longer rely on an immanent historical method to justify the norms of social criticism, since the society one critically approaches harbours contradictory normative logics within itself. If, as Foucault claims, modernity harbours more than one ethos – modern and counter-modern – how do we know that the counter-modern is not in fact the proper way to define the modern as contemporary? Even if we just assume that freedom is the foundational value of the time, how do we know what a ‘modern’ conception of freedom actually entails and how do we separate it from a conception that is in the present but as a logic corresponding to a contradictory logic?

Whatever account of modernity’s normative tendencies one adopts, the conclusion we are interested in here is the following: the first way in which critical social theory might not do justice to the past is if it fails to account for the alternative normative formations of its recent past, that past that is close enough to form part of the history of our present. But it seems as though any homogenizing talk of contemporary societies under one banner (as ‘modern’ societies) risks falling into that trap. So, the unity of a modern period beyond the merely proximate in time remains problematic because the normative underpinnings of modern ideals seem to be splintered on closer inspection.

Realizing that the modern period is normatively more complex than often portrayed leads us to extend the sceptical interrogation and to question the nature of historical continuity and discontinuity. In the next section, we will show how the ‘pre-modern’ past has a greater normative complexity than modern-exceptionalist accounts suppose, and that there are numerous significant connections to be acknowledged between the pre-modern past and the present.

III Homogenizing the ‘pre-modern’: Epistemic injustice

The exceptionalist assumption in social theory can also bring about a homogenization of the ‘pre-modern’ past. We wish to emphasize the pre-modern era overall, for a larger view of injustice, informed by a wider set of normative discourses, and the countless expansion of social struggles, enriches our view of the present in important ways. The exceptionalist stance towards modernity cuts us off from that breadth and depth. And with such a stance come several kinds of injustices to that past.

The first injustice is simply epistemic. In contemporary social theory, the reference to modernity often comes with an implicit contrast with a ‘pre-modern’ past about which assumptions are made, notably regarding the normative values held at different times in that past, which simply do not correspond to the facts. In his recent dialogue with Jacques Rancière, Honneth, for instance, has made the following claim about the absence of a universalistic notion of social equality in the Middle Ages. Again, rather than arguing specifically against Honneth, we refer to this passage as a statement that makes explicit an assumption that is prevalent in much contemporary critical theory:

Isn’t the idea that we should treat one another as equals the result of a relatively late process of moral learning in human history? My suspicion would be that people in a number of earlier periods in history wouldn’t have been able to make sense of such a demanding idea of equality. They probably wouldn’t have been able to interpret their own claims as claims for equality, because they were living in a world that did not have social equality as part of its normative vocabulary. And if this were true (of the ancient Greek world or the Middle Ages), then it would be strange to presuppose an egalitarian desire. I would not even know exactly how to spell it out. ³¹

The tension between the hierarchical underpinning of societies in the Middle Ages and the egalitarian potential of its Christian principles produces many of the social struggles that punctuate this period. Thus came the tensions within monastic orders in the 12th and 13th centuries, as they were caught between a strict hierarchical structure based on social status and the attempt to follow the key Christian message according to which ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’. Jacques Dalarun shows how the resolution of this tension led to innovations in the administration of orders and the elections of the leaders. Such developments already signalled proto-democratic values; for example, the idea that leadership functions should be awarded on competence, and that everyone therefore was equal in status, independent of class or gender. ³³ In another area, many historians have emphasized the depth of autonomous self-government at the communal level, whether in village life or in the corporations. ³⁴ In these cases, the strong hierarchical framework organizing society as a whole harboured very large pockets of social life in which collective decisions were made through majority vote of all. The (usually, but not always) male representatives of the collective participated on a principle of political equality at these local levels. These communal organizations also harboured strong values of solidarity through the collective management of common resources that were essential to each and every one. While Honneth might be correct in a very broad sense about the absence of a fully universalist dimension in demands regarding social and political equality of status, nonetheless the norm of equality was far from being ignored. Rather, egalitarian practices were thoroughly institutionalized in specific contexts through long periods of pre-modern times.

The contradiction between status hierarchy and the universalism of the Christian dogma emerged regularly and became a focal point in the many social upheavals that traversed the pre-modern times in Europe. ³⁵ These (very numerous) episodes of social revolt are crucial because they make visible the normative framework that underpinned those societies. ³⁶ As it turns out, in many cases the demands made by the insurgents and the moral grammar that structured their actions already pointed to some of the norms that only modern times are supposed to have entrenched. As Samuel Cohn has shown with the famous example of the Ciompi of Florence, if one uses the taxonomy of social movements developed by Charles Tilly, then the movement of 1378 has to be described as ‘modern’ to the extent that it used universal forms of conscription in a struggle waged with the explicit purpose of gaining control of the central power in order to introduce general economic, social and political change. The first revolt of the Ciompi made it possible for all men, whatever their previous professional affiliation, to be represented in communal elections, and indeed to be elected to the most important offices. Cruder forms of these demands had provided precedents in many revolts in northern Italy, some well antedating the late 14th century. Revolts were waged to the cry of ‘The people!’, demanding significant extensions of status recognition (political or economic, depending on circumstances).

The peasant rebellions of the 14th century in France and England arose out of a sense of outrage as the superior classes did not hold up their parts in the social contract of the time. While the labouring classes often seemed to broadly accept their lot consisting of working for the benefit of the orders of ‘those who pray’ and ‘those who fight’, it was on the understanding that those in return would fulfil their own key functions, either of maintaining the ultimate source of truth and justice (the Christian dogma), or of defending the whole of society, against external attacks and against internal dissent, through the administration of earthly justice. In both cases, there were strong moral and indeed political standards on what a right completion of those roles would consist of. Breaking those standards was perceived as a breach of the social contract, and in many circumstances led to major revolts. ³⁷ This comes out very explicitly in Piers Plowman, the literary companion to the uprising of the English peasants of 1381. In this amazing text, the full contradiction of the ideological structure of the time comes to light, as on the one hand the hierarchical status order is not challenged in a direct way, ³⁸ yet Piers Plowman, the poor labourer, is portrayed as the only true Christian in a society in which the other two orders have usurped their power. ³⁹ So no universal equality of social status exists in fact, and full equality is only rarely demanded (although it is already imagined in several passages), and yet at the very least something like a functional equality between the orders is explicitly expected and expressed. ⁴⁰ Analysis of the French Jacquerie of 1358, and other peasant revolts, shows a comparable pattern. ⁴¹ Historiographical analysis of the Middle Ages, then, can contribute to giving modern norms much greater temporal relief and thereby added normative depth, precisely insofar as comparisons and connections can be drawn that are not simply ones of exclusionary contrast. Indeed, different forms of egalitarian and democratic practices ‘leap out’ at us, notwithstanding the presence of deep inequality and bitter social struggles, indeed precisely as the ultimate normative horizon of such struggles. These examples protrude from the past for us precisely because of our recognition in them of something we can ourselves identify; a common, or comparable, horizon that places them within our constructive, imaginative reach. ⁴²

We can identify other significant episodes and structures relevant to other fundamental norms, like those around practices of intimate relationship. When Honneth dates the beginnings of friendship as an institutionalized form of social freedom towards the very end of the 18th century, and only for privileged men, he forgets the importance of the values of solidarity and brotherhood that animated and made successful the institution of corporations and fraternities in the Middle Ages. ⁴³ Gervase Rosser’s meticulous study of ‘the art of solidarity in the Middle Ages’ demonstrates the depth and importance of feelings and institutions of friendship throughout the time. Companionship and ‘brotherly love’ at the level of everyday life were explicit goals and ideals of the confraternities. ⁴⁴ The individual and social importance of friendship in medieval society is reflected in a rich body of theological and philosophical literature dedicated to it. Many of the most influential theologians sought to direct the emotional, moral and social force of friendship towards Christian goals. Rosser argues that ‘the model of Christian friendship inherited from Augustine, which, through mutual exposure transforms the individual and leads, through the action of love for other human beings, to God, would shape the philosophy of the later medieval fraternities’. ⁴⁵ The importance of this institution for individuals in medieval society cannot be overstated and should not be downplayed by retrospectively taking more recent ideals of friendship as the only true normative standard. ⁴⁶ In any case, as the historians show us, it is simply wrong factually to state that strong emotional feelings of attachment between people were socially institutionalized and thereby became a possible condition of ‘social freedom’ only at the end of the 18th century. This example shows once again that there is more to be said for the forms of life evident in the Middle Ages as being in some way comparable with, or indeed illuminating in their distance from, contemporary institutions.

Honneth himself presents the ‘hermeneutic’ claim that we must make use of the past to make sense of our own moral projects. A retrospective view establishes the conceptual model of freedom. ⁴⁷ Freedom in this sense relies on a specific sort of ‘memorial’ relationship, to the extent that it requires an individual to identify imaginatively with struggles for freedom that have already been. ⁴⁸ But from this it does not follow that modern individuals are limited to recognizing only modern partners in freedom.

In the examples we gave, it was a matter of an epistemic justice to the past, of representing the situation accurately by not making exaggerated claims on behalf of a posited modernity. The epistemic injustice can lead us to overlook and therefore slight our old partners in freedom, who have struggled for norms that possess a connection to our own. This basic kind of epistemic injustice, one of factual error where the pre-modern is overlooked in favour of more recent history, leads to a moral kind of injustice. A moral injustice dealt to more ‘distant’ times still has critical and political implications for our stance towards our present. There are moral and political links, beyond merely epistemic ones, to be recognized. In the final section, we try to delineate several links of this kind.

IV Critical theory beyond narrow modernism

What we are arguing for is an expanded and more significant reactivation of the historical elements that critical theory relies on in its attempt to articulate the principles underpinning the practices and institutions of contemporary societies. Critical theory should not homogenize the past, whether recent or further afield. We are not trying to erase the real differences between, for instance, the Middle Ages, the 18th century and the present. Rather, the methodological point is that normative continuity and discontinuity are highly complex across history. At the same time, our claim should not be confused with the claims made in the debate around ‘multiple modernities’. Our approach is close to the ‘multiple modernities’ one as we also insist on the diversity of the present. But the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ continues to take the modernist break for granted. This break, however, should be considered as a problem to be discussed. ⁴⁹ And this is because, or so we want to argue, continuity and discontinuity exist simultaneously. There are several kinds of each that may ‘coexist’ between historical phenomena. In any case, we must avoid the generalization that discontinuity has priority. Sometimes, as we have seen with the example of racism, there are new normative creations of the recent past, despite long histories of exclusion and oppression of people groups. But for other phenomena, and despite the discontinuity in social organizations, we have shown that important principles, like equality, have retained their moral significance from long ago, and can be shown to have them for the future.

There are moral and political links with the past that do not rely on direct causal links or temporal proximity. The general model that we follow, of an ethical injunction that proceeds from the past, takes its cue from the conception that Walter Benjamin famously developed in his ‘Theses’ on history, which Honneth himself reconstructed in an early text. ⁵⁰ Our criticism of a ‘homogenizing’ of the past qua past of injustices and qua past of struggles against injustice follows from Benjamin’s famous text. ⁵¹ For Benjamin, the criticism of progress and historicism is conducted on ethical and political grounds, and not only on epistemological failings. The historian’s task includes a moral and political dimension: she has the obligation of recognizing something about the past, redeeming and protecting the dead from their enemies. That is the sense of the ‘claim’ of the past, and the ‘weak messianic power’ of the present that Benjamin mentions. ⁵² What sort of recognition is this? This act reaches across times to join two disparate parts, constructing a momentary identity, like the Jacobins with ancient Rome. Supposed distance in a ‘homogeneous time’ is cancelled here. Honneth describes this bridging of the past as an interactive process, but how can one interact with the dead? The movement is never simply retrospective according to Benjamin. ‘Our coming was expected on earth’ he writes. ⁵³ We have been appealed to from the past, Benjamin argues, left tasks to complete that had been tragically left undone; a claim exists upon our abilities. By answering to that claim, the historically minded critic of the present really does enact an effective change on the past that had reached out to the future. And changing the past also means changing the present. ⁵⁴ We can recognize retrospectively what was denied. Suddenly, the issues of the present are testified to by a new host of witnesses. Their experience of suffering is now addressed to us. Our response must address theirs. We therefore become morally bound to a preceding group through historical work, and these groups become witnesses to the present.

Alongside the historiographical oversights of ‘modernity-centric’ historicism then, there are normative reasons why we should not agree with the posit of an absolute modernist break. The implications of the concept of a normative modernity would cut us off from the moral and political witnesses of the past. However, having uncovered in the preceding sections some substantial episodes that annul the idea of a normative historicism, we can now use those events to identify several productive avenues of this moral and political relationship with the past for critical theory. Two of these are of a generic nature that should hold for all historical investigations; two are more specifically tied to our present predicament and norms that are at stake today.

To begin with, we owe to past generations an acknowledgement of their suffering and their struggles against injustice, for freedom and equality as such, despite the distance that might separate us from them. For ignoring the struggles and demands of past generations is to repeat their suffering and the injustice they suffered from a second time over. ⁵⁵ This is a risk taken by an exceptionalist modernist stance.

A hard modernist account could still claim to be open in principle to the claims and demands of ‘pre-modern’ times. But the implications of a strict modernist boundary-setting between historical times make such a claim problematic. First, an exceptionalist position leads to the implication that we cannot know today for sure what it is the French and English peasants of 1358 and 1381, or the Florentine artisans of 1378, were really struggling against, and what they were demanding. This epistemic gap would seem to make any identificatory moral projection with their fate and their struggle problematic. Historical prudence commands that we avoid projecting our ideals into theirs, and that in turn makes any sympathy for them appear naïve at best. Second, if we assume that it is only in modernity that universal claims can be made to equal social, moral and legal standing, then, as Honneth stated in our quotation above, it is in fact doubtful that those struggles were struggles against injustice in the sense that we give it today, that is, as struggles driven by a need for emancipation in the general sense of the term. Some historians, for instance, interpret lower-class movement, particularly of peasants, as driven by a nostalgia to return to a more stable past, one in which they were actually still dominated by their lords. ⁵⁶ And so it is not just that their sense of justice and injustice was different from ours; in fact, it is even possible that they were not driven by a sense of justice and a rejection of injustice at all, if by justice and injustice we understand specifically the idea of full realization of the conditions of freedom for everyone.

Against these objections, the examples taken above demonstrate that while granting the historical prudence that needs to be maintained, serious historiographical information and well-grounded historical hermeneutics actually require of us that we view many forms of social struggles in past, ‘pre-modern’ societies, as arising from a sense of unjustifiable, socially caused suffering and the rupture of a moral contract. Even though this sense of injustice is undeniably couched in terms different from ours, was founded upon justifying languages that are no longer ours, it is nevertheless a language we can still make sense of today. We are not sealed off from these worlds. ⁵⁷ Whether we look at it teleologically as a precursor of some of our achievements or indeed of some of our failings (as in the case of racism, for instance), or non-teleologically as just a kindred struggle by fellow beings, for something that resembles at a formal level what we ourselves demand when we demand equality or freedom or solidarity, or as a form of exclusion and hatred that has features homologically comparable to ours, the facts and their contemporary interpretation require acknowledgement.

We do need a lot of precise historical information to be able to read Piers Plowman, or to understand the issues at stake in the revolt of the Ciompi in Florence, or the peasant revolts of the 14th century. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose a relative similarity that enables acknowledgement and a basic identification with their aggrieved state, even if the exact content of their demands seems utterly distant. When Foucault turns to the Nus-Pieds revolt of 1625 and reconstructs the origin and the form of their revolt, the great historian of social formations has no problem identifying this revolt as the beginning of a long historical line, the continuous history of the state-backed institutions of legal punishment that stretches all the way to the very lecture at which he reawakens this historical event for his contemporaries, to make sense of the present. ‘No need to explain why this example is relevant’, he tells his audience in the midst of a Paris in upheaval, in which police violence and state repression are his main concerns at the time. ⁵⁸ When he famously describes his genealogical work as ‘insurrection of dominated knowledges’ in another set of lectures, it is quite possible that he has in mind the example of the Nus-Pieds. ⁵⁹ This would mean that Foucault has no qualms in relating contemporary struggles for freedom to very old ones, and in drawing lessons from the latter for the former. In these lectures, to retrieve the oppressed knowledges of the past, to make a history from below, is for Foucault to try to counter the modernist danger of doubling past oppression with present indifference. Historical practice shows us then that there is no absolute epistemic barrier to acknowledgement of pre-modern injustice.

The second general form of justice we owe to the past is not negative, but positive. Through the construction of careful analogies and comparisons with prior historical episodes, critical theory enriches its normative vision. For example, guilds and fraternities not only provided recognition, companionship and material support but were also able, on the basis of the social force they represented, precisely as a result of the provisions they offered, to challenge the institutions of power and gain greater political influence. Indeed, in some exceptional cases such as in Florence, guilds were able to achieve more egalitarian forms of direct political representation. Such an example should not be romanticized. The many aspects of social exclusion and political manipulation prevalent in these historical examples need not be overlooked. And yet they can still provide a positive alternative example (in the strong sense of the term), notably as an idealized model to contrast with the caricature of democracy that many modern liberal democracies have become. For all their flaws, the history of corporations can serve at the very least as a historical demonstration of the necessity of socially based support for vulnerable individuals and how political participation can be founded upon such support.

To take another example, some reconstructed forms of direct participation in communal life as occurred in long periods for the villages and communes of the Middle Ages can also act as catalysts for political imagination. It is not certain that contemporary political representation in the ‘lands of the free’ actually fares so well on a democratic scale by comparison. The past can therefore be studied as a ‘reservoir’ of normative experiences available to be drawn upon and learned from. This, as Honneth himself has highlighted, is most strikingly the role Quentin Skinner sees in the retrieval of a suppressed republican tradition. ⁶⁰ The same gesture that Skinner makes in relation to Roman republicanism, as it is rearticulated at the time of the English civil war, can be made in relation to other forms of political and social justice: for instance, once again, communal self-government, as a model for a decentralized form of government; or craft-based solidarity as a means to provide social support and political agency.

In the second set of relations – the third and fourth forms – we have specific, substantial normative links that tie us to a particular past. As historians of the ‘longue durée’ would argue, modern Europe has a long gestation period. ‘We moderns’ directly, however distantly, benefit from structures, labours and achievements of previous ages which made the ‘achievements’, and thus the prosperity and freedom, of the following times possible.

Third, to focus again on the negative side first, the suffering and the struggles that critical theory should not want to sever itself from are not just located in a general past. Those struggles do not count simply as general cases of human suffering and of revolt against it, but also as being directly related to our present predicament, through causal, genealogical links, beyond the ‘mere’ link of human belonging. This is a key lesson to be drawn from Benjamin. The angel of history moves towards the future with his head turned towards the past. This refers quite specifically to the ‘primitive accumulation’ Marx described so vividly at the end of volume 1 of Capital, that is, all the episodes of large-scale violence that made possible the emergence of modern capitalism in Europe. This protracted violence targeted populations in European societies, particularly the peasant communities who were forcibly removed from the land and transformed into a property-less workforce subject to incredibly harsh legal control, and of course also non-western populations who provided the slave workforce, as well as the markets that were brutally opened by colonial expansion. ⁶¹ In these famous chapters on primitive accumulation, Marx insists with a great degree of pathos and overwhelming graphic details on the incredible levels of violence that made modern capitalist society possible. Perhaps an unintended effect of his text is to present the rise of modern society not as a history of moral progress after all, the conquest of freedom for all, but rather as a descent into hell for the majority, a definite worsening of the situation for most. For all their economic, moral and political limitations, the medieval corporations, villages and the independent city-states ⁶² in fact appear in this part of Capital as benign institutions by comparison with what started to emerge from the 16th century onwards. ⁶³ And so, as Benjamin describes, a composite montage from the industrialist and the medieval past conjointly forms a ‘constellation’. We see that this is a two-way relation that not only teaches us something about today, but ‘redeems’ the past by recognizing the subjects of that past as fellows in a process of living interaction. ⁶⁴ Honneth has reconstructed this argument himself, showing how the fact that cries of suffering in the past were not listened to means that people were denied recognition of their moral rights. Later generations for whom there is some direct historical, genealogical line with the victims of history, are able to continue, or alternately symbolically and indeed materially ‘atone’ for, such ostracizations. From the perspective of the present, this means that an alternative image of the past, like those we have sought to gather here, should jolt us into acting in the present in a new way. ⁶⁵ We can see here what meaning the Foucaldian term of ‘genealogy’ can have: no longer to open up ways to liberate ourselves from our past by showing the contingencies we inherited from it; but to open up ways to atone for the suffering stemming from our past, which in some sense ‘makes’ us today. Failure to atone for this past of suffering, failure to hear the ‘oppressed insurrected knowledges’ of that past, would not just be to commit a ‘crime’ of epistemic and moral indifference, as above, but in this case, to remain accomplices of a historical injustice. To maintain a social organization based on historical violence and oppression is to commit a present injustice to the past victims of that violence in reaffirming an exclusion that it was in fact our chance to reverse.

Finally, there are also more ‘positive’ contributions to mention. Benjamin phrases it in this way: cultural treasures, he writes, ‘owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries’. ⁶⁶ The fact of anonymity here, for Benjamin, is itself a ‘horror’ and a ‘barbarism’ that is in need of ‘redemption’. It is horrible and barbaric to the degree that the official historical archive (and hence insufficiently problematized present judgements that inherit this archive) inevitably associates such achievements with only the victors of history. But when it comes to our own social and political inheritance, the fact that this horror exists does not mean we want nothing to do with that heritage. In this case the things we inherit are also good. It is a matter of changing the relation to that heritage in a way that once again does not double an oppression and instead retrieves the achievements of the anonymous. Benjamin therefore breaks with a method of ‘empathy’ and recommends a ‘detachment’ towards official historiography, so as not to inadvertently continue overlooking those who have been rendered silent. It is a matter of problematizing and actively counter-acting the prejudice of anonymity. ⁶⁷ In terms of our argument, we can define the idea of a cultural treasure as follows: the institutions and norms of freedom that make a positive contribution to social life today are indeed ‘cultural treasures’ to be cautiously maintained, refined and extended when possible.

This fourth kind of link is a specification of the second more general type we described above. But the link here is more than acknowledging the facts of a longue durée. For in this historically substantial instance, it leads us to the recognition that social achievements we admire today are the product, however indirect the mediations, of a specific, if ambiguous, cultural heritage. The critical theorist has the task to remedy the silence, restoring an image of the medieval past, for instance, as something due to that past, as the redemption of anonymity, but of also clarifying that it is this past, and not another, and that this past is our past. Doing justice to the past is to bear witness to the toils of our forebears, their struggles against injustice, their attempts at expressing their grievances, their suffering and their hopes, all of which, in specific cases, paved the way for some of the rights and freedoms we might enjoy today.

Critical theory today often stresses the ruptures between ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ historical periods, as it highlights the normative underpinnings of society as of relatively recent invention. In doing so, however, such a project runs the risk of unfairly caricaturing the past on either side of an exaggerated break. Positing the modern period as too strongly normatively exceptional has consequences for the history that provides the very standards for social criticism. If so-called modern social movements are the only conceptual sources for a normative critique, then critical theory will blinker its potential for critique. If the longer views of social struggles for norms such as freedom and equality are overlooked (and so our present seems more positive), then the description of actual progress is weaker to that extent. If critical theory is to do justice to its normative resources, as a matter of historical accuracy and nuanced reconstruction, then it should not be modernist in an exceptionalist sense.

More deeply, critical theory, in mispresenting or simplifying a part of the past, will also fail to meet moral claims that the past delivers to us. Past struggles should be acknowledged, as a normative, indeed as a direct political matter. Present-day wealth and social structures and all that they enable have deep historical roots. The moral links – complex, subtle and easily overlooked – deserve remembrance. Ignoring such claims would risk cutting critical theory off from more nuanced and sympathetic historical-theoretical images of the past, an action that has moral and political consequences. Freedom, equality and solidarity are testified to clearly and substantially by historical records and scholarship well beyond the bounds modernist accounts give to them. Once we recognize that our predecessors, however distant, themselves struggled for freedom in their own ways, then we cannot refuse them ‘community’ with our own moral projects. Their past makes a demand on us: a demand to recognize what justice was for them; and affects concretely what justice would be today. An injunction for us is placed against meting out the same injustice that those in the past received.

Not only then are there epistemological and methodological problems with exceptionalist periodizations. There are multifaceted moral and political claims that the past has on us too. We do the past an injustice when we unfairly represent it, or disconnect it from the generation of our own social conditions. Most especially, we do the past an injustice when we homogenize our view of the past into simple, reified oppositions through simple breaks and periodizations. We can interpret the ongoing efforts of historians to uncover that past and dispel false images of it often as indirect (and oftentimes today, direct) responses to such a demand. Critical theory should fruitfully engage with this scholarship. Critical theory, too, must be able to take account of it in the memorial reconstruction it makes of the present in light of its past. Although we have used Axel Honneth’s theory as exemplary of the kind of homogenizing modernist narrative that we have criticized, Honneth has also articulated the very principle of our argument of a moral demand for justice from the past. ‘Every present is therefore connected anew to the unatoned victims of history through a moral band which consists in the silent demand that their personal integrity be restored retrospectively by admitting them into the moral community of mankind.’ ⁶⁸ That is what we have sought to do here – to connect once more to the experience of suffering and rebellion against injustice from distant periods, that we might do justice to the past.