From Hegel to Foucault and back? On Axel Honneth’s interpretation of neoliberalism

Abstract

The article is focused on the role that the question of neoliberalism plays in Axel Honneth’s work. The author aims to show that when Honneth tries to conceptualize the very nature of the neoliberal transformations, he is forced to abandon some of the presumptions that underlie the systematic approach developed in his most important work, Freedom’s Right. It seems to emerge from Honneth’s studies on neoliberalism, not only the difficulty of analysing the capitalist market economy as a sphere of social liberty, as presupposed in Freedom’s Right, but also a much less consensual and teleological image of contemporary societies – an image in which norms and values are always intertwined with mechanisms of power, social integration is always also based on the exercise of domination, force and ideology and the capitalist can also exist without a background of shared normative orientations. The author suggests finally that, in order to give a better account of the neoliberal transformations, one should rediscover the importance of the original Gramscian category of cultural and political hegemony.

Keywords

cultural egemony genealogy ideology neoliberalism normative reconstruction

Introduction

In this article, I would like to critically focus on the role that the question of neoliberalism plays in Axel Honneth’s most recent studies. As I will attempt to show, this aspect of Honneth’s latest research is of particular interest, for several reasons. Firstly, the question of neoliberalism is at the centre, in one way or another, of all the most recent works in which Honneth has developed a diagnosis of the time, combined with an empirically grounded social analysis. In these works, Honneth offered key interpretations of the crises, the paradoxes and the new social pathologies caused by neoliberal transformations. And he shows that in order to grasp these trends, it is necessary to use sophisticated conceptual tools, like the concept of paradox. In Paradoxes of Capitalism, the text that presented the new interdisciplinary research program of the Institute of Social Research, Honneth claimed in fact that what characterizes the neoliberal age is a series of paradoxical processes. While fundamentally normative principles of modernity like autonomy, authenticity and achievement still possess their performative currency, beneath the surface they seem to have lost their emancipatory meaning or have come to represent the complete opposite. ‘In fact, in many instances they have become, in a paradoxical way, mere legitimating concepts for a new level of capitalist expansion’.¹

However, for another reason as well it is worthwhile to consider the way in which Honneth has in recent years interpreted what he himself called the ‘neoliberal revolution’. It seems in fact that when Honneth tries to conceptualize the very nature of the neoliberal transformations, he is forced to abandon some of the presumptions that underlie the systematic approach developed in his most important work, Freedom’s Right. Put bluntly, I wonder if it is precisely Honneth’s discussion of the nature of neoliberal transformations that forces us to question certain fundamental socio-theoretical assumptions grounding the whole project developed in Freedom’s Right and to rediscover conceptual tools more in syntony with the first Frankfurt Critical Theory. What emerges from Honneth’s studies on neoliberalism is not only the difficulty of analysing the capitalist market economy as a sphere of social freedom, as presupposed in Freedom’s Right, but also a much less consensual and teleological image of modern societies – an image in which norms and values are always intertwined with mechanisms of power, social integration is always also based on the exercise of domination, force and ideology and the capitalist can also exist without a background of shared normative orientations.

I would like to prove these theses in the following order: First of all I would like to make a preliminary clarification of the different models of social criticism that Honneth uses in his work. Second, I would like to retrace the way Honneth applies these different models of social criticism to the analysis of the capitalist market and, more in particular, to the analysis of neoliberal transformations. Finally, after having highlighted the tension between two different critical approaches that Honneth developed in regard to these issues, I will ask if, in order to dissolve this tension, we should not rediscover the importance of the original Gramscian category of cultural and political hegemony.

I. Two models of social criticism

As is well known, since becoming Director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Honneth has undertaken an attempt to revive the legacy of the first Frankfurt School founded by Horckheimer and Adorno. In his many writings dedicated to this purpose, Honneth wanted to revitalize, in particular, the central idea around which the entire project of the Frankfurt School revolved: the idea of a critical theory of society. As Honneth has stated on many occasions, by a critical theory of society is meant first of all a type of social thought, one that is guided by a particular combination of analysis and critique, shared with the whole tradition of Left Hegelianism. The main characteristic of this kind of social critique is that it draws its critical viewpoint extra-theoretically, in a form of ‘intramundane transcendence’. What distinguishes Critical Theory from the very beginning is that it takes on its own legitimate resources, only those norms and principles that are somehow anchored to social reality. It tries then to articulate the rational potentials contained in these norms but repressed by existing powers and social structures. This kind of social critique – according to Honneth – is not reducible therefore to a constructivist or moral model of critique which transcends the accustomed local value horizon by appealing to external, universalistic moral principles, and in so doing ‘runs the risk of claiming an elitist specialized knowledge that can readily be abused for manipulative purposes’.² On the other hand, this model is not reducible even to a hermeneutical critique, which presupposes a certain affirmation on the part of the prevailing moral culture in the society concerned. What is particular to the methodological structure of the critical model of the Frankfurt Critical Theory is the special connection of an immanent procedure to a context-transcending concept of rationality. The critique of society can be based on ideals within the given social order that at the same time can be shown to be the expression of progress in the process of social rationalization.

Honneth, following Habermas, also emphasized, however, to what extent the Frankfurt Institute’s socio-philosophical instruments were not sufficient for the achievement of the ambitious project of a critical theory of society. As Honneth pointed out, two main problems were at work here: One was that the early theory remained trapped within a Marxist philosophy of History that located a pre-theoretical interest in social emancipation only in one class, the proletariat, postulated as a collective subject and formed by individuals that as a result of their shared socio-economic circumstances, should have common interests.³ The other problem was a functionalism that led such a closed theoretical interpretation of the sphere of capitalist domination and cultural manipulation that there could be no room for a domain of practical–moral critique. Both of these elements led the early Critical Theory into a dead end: This approach was theoretically dependent upon a pre-theoretical resource for emancipation, one that could no longer be argued to exist.⁴

Honneth’s great effort over the years has been, therefore, to reactivate the model of immanent critique, outside the philosophical and sociological premises of the first critical theory. To revive a model of immanent critique of society, he originally claimed for a ‘recognition-theoretical turn’. The fundamental idea of this innovative turn is that our interactions with the social environment are driven by tacit recognitive expectations that start to become explicit in negative social experience, such as humiliation and disrespect. Making them fully explicit means elaborating a conception of justice that has a high transformative and universalistic potential. In Kampf um Anerkennung (1992), Honneth (1995) reconstructed, therefore, the normative expectations of mutual recognition that structure the modern social experience (love, respect, social esteem). Even if those expectations change their meaning in social reality and become ideological instruments in a relationship of domination,⁵ they remain potential reference points for the social critique as well as for the struggles aimed at further expansion and realization of social recognition processes.

In Freedom’s Right, Honneth interprets the method of immanent critique partially in a different way. He operates a reconstruction of the institutionalized practices of mutual recognition in modern democratic societies, assuming them as an expression of an already-realized historical evolution of Reason. He reconstructs how ‘social freedom’ – a freedom achieved through cooperative practices – plays an indispensable role in social reproduction and acquires a normatively binding value in three spheres: interpersonal relationships (friendship and love), the market and the political public sphere.⁶ The critical potential within social reality is no longer defined therefore by a primacy of negative experiences, namely experiences of the denial of recognition, including those not yet publicly and politically articulated. In Freedom’s Right, the normative resources on which critical theory depends are the shared fundamental norms and values that are instantiated by the existing social institutions. In that book, therefore, the idea of an immanent critique of society is actualized through the methodology of the ‘normative reconstruction’. In this approach, the criteria of social critique are drawn from the very analysis of those institutions and those practices, isolated in social reality, which embody and reproduce high shared values or ideals. These criteria are then used to expose existing practices in the face of their incomplete implementation of commonly accepted values. The one value that has been most important for structuring the social order of Western modernity is the idea of freedom, understood as autonomy. The first part of Freedom’s Right traces the historical unfolding of the idea of freedom, from negative freedom and reflexive freedom to the idea of social freedom. Social freedom refers to a situation in which individual intentions are not only negatively free of external influence (as required by negative freedom) and autonomously and reflexively determined (as required by reflexive freedom), but also mirrored in and supported by the existing social reality. Like Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right, the second and third parts of Freedom’s Right reconstruct the ways in which freedom, in its different fashions, has been progressively realized and institutionalized in the major institutions of modern European society, including the family, the market and the state.⁷

It is impossible here to go further into details.⁸ I want to emphasize only two socio-theoretical aspects of this account, there are important for the further discussion. In the first place, to reactualize the intention of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Honneth follows a theory of society inspired by Talcott Parsons and his action-theoretical model of society. As Honneth writes: ‘The unique characteristic of this model of society [of Parsons, G.F.] is its claim that all social orders, without exception, must legitimate themselves in the light of ethical values and ideals that are worth striving for’.⁹ Second, such an immanent procedure ultimately entails an element of historical teleological thinking. ‘The critique of society can be based on ideals within the given social order because at the same time it can justifiedly show that they are the expression of progress in the process of social rationalization’.¹⁰ Put in another way:

The fact that subjects actively preserve and reproduce free institutions gives us theoretical evidence of their historical value, insofar as through their very allegiance to and preservation of those institutions, subjects indicate that they view the worth of their allegiance, because they are the outcome of a process of historical progress.¹¹

Before recalling how the methodology of normative reconstruction is applied by Honneth to the sphere of market economy, I want to focus now on another model of critique that Honneth uses in his writings. The brief overview of Honneth’s attempt to revitalize the tradition of Frankfurt Critical Theory has been sufficient to prove that in his work he followed mainly a normative-reconstructive version of immanent critique. And this version of immanent critique always entails an element of historical teleological thinking. But in one of the text where Honneth conceptualized the methodology of normative reconstruction for the first time, he explained that normative reconstruction always needs ‘a genealogical proviso’. As he wrote:

To each attempt to carry out an immanent critique of society under the premises of social rationalization must belong the genealogical project of studying the real context of application of moral norms. For without the addition of such a historical test, critique cannot be sure that the ideals it adduces still possess in social practice the normative meaning that originally distinguished them. (…) Today, it is no longer possible to have social criticism that does not also use genealogical research as a detector to ferret out the social shifts of meaning of its leading ideals.¹²

By genealogy, Honneth here means an attempt to criticize a social order in such a way as to show historically to what extent the ideals and the rules that define it can become functional to the legitimation of domination, disciplinary practices and repression. This approach is paradigmatically exemplified by Foucault’s writings – in which he illustrates the transformation of a normative ideal into a degrading social disciplining order – but before Foucault by Nietzsche. For Honneth, in the light of this genealogical proviso, one could also explain the very intention of the Dialectis of the Enlightenment. In order to give an account of the distortion of the original meaning of the normative horizon of the Enlightenment into its barbaric opposite, the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horckheimer, approached Nietzschean genealogy, without negating, on the other hand, their original Hegelian and reconstructive model of critique. They moved from Hegel to Nietzsche, assuming that it was possible to come back to a Hegelian idea of modernity as an unfinished project of rationalization.

In Honneth’s view, genealogy serves therefore as a metacritical standpoint enabling critical theorists to study the real context of the application of those moral norms that have been derived and justified through the methodology of normative reconstruction. But it is significant that, despite emphasizing in his methodological writings the indispensability of a genealogical metacriticism, Honneth did not grant any space to this genealogical work in Freedom’s Right. In this text, the procedure of normative reconstruction is practiced without any ‘genealogical proviso’. This lack of genealogy clearly emerges precisely in relation to the normative reconstruction of the capitalist market and, more decisively, in relation to neoliberal transformations.

Only in those sociological writings that Honneth in the last years has dedicated specifically to the analysis of neoliberal transformations, did he use a genealogical approach. But using this method, Honneth in fact not only shows how to integrate the normative reconstruction of capitalistic market, developed in Freedom’s Right, but in fact calls into question some general assumptions upon which this very reconstruction is based.

II. Problems with a normative reconstruction of the market economy

What does it mean to apply the normative reconstruction to the social sphere of the capitalistic market?

In the pages of Freedom’s Right dedicated to the ‘We of the Market Economy’, Honneth clarifies that normatively reconstructing the market economy means first of all pursuing a fundamental goal. It means demonstrating the inadequacy of all those market theories, prevailing today, according to which capitalism represents ‘a norm-free system’ without any demands for normative consent. This is how the capitalist economy is described, for example, by Marxist economic theorists and Neoclassical economists, but also by Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action in the tracks of Luhmann. According to all of these approaches, albeit for different reasons, the exchange processes in the capitalist economic order underlie functional restraints – be it capital accumulation or profit maximization – that are sufficiently strong to exclude any possibility of inner normativity. Against these theories, Honneth argues that it is impossible to examine the functional imperatives to which economic decisions are subjected in total isolation from the expectations of meaning and legitimacy held by market participants, ‘as if their normative reactions of self-doubt, feelings of injustice, expectations and role obligations were not a part of the market itself’.¹³

To clarify this approach, Honneth picks up on the tradition of moral economism. He finds value in a basic idea in the thought of authors like Hegel, Durckheim, Parsons and Polanyi, up to contemporary thinkers such as Etzioni and Hirsch. The idea here is that the market economy relies on an ethical framework of pre-contractual norms because it is only under this normative condition that it can garner the consent of all economic actors.¹⁴

When Honneth proceeds to define these ethical norms, he locates them in the principle of cooperation, another way of defining the idea of social liberty. As Honneth explains: ‘The individual self-interest constitutive of market behaviour must be able to fulfill the normative condition that all participants can understand it as a suitable means for the complementary realization of their own respective purpose’.¹⁵

The corollary of this presumption is the following:

If this reflection on the prevailing, generally accepted norms no longer takes place, then we can expect not only a disruption of the market mechanism itself, but also a subtle or publicly articulated withdrawal of legitimacy on the part of the population.¹⁶

In the light of these principles, the normative reconstruction applied to the market economy, in an idealizing manner, attempts to uncover the path in the historical development of the capitalist market that has led to a gradual realization of its underlying principles of social freedom – principles that secure its legitimacy, and have emerged under the pressure of social movements, moral protests and political reforms.¹⁷

Honneth does not fail to underline that the efforts to realize social freedom in the market economy have continually been undermined by different factors, like the overwhelming economic power of major corporations. Nevertheless, for him, it is possible to reconstruct an ascending line, the culmination of which is represented by the set of social achievements reached in the social democratic age. This is the historical period 20 years after the end of the Second World War when a state-regulated capitalism emerged in the developed countries of the West that was able to create a welfare-state arrangement. In this phase, not only were the conditions for effective forms of equal opportunity significantly improved in the realms of education, social policy and labour policy; in all key areas, the normative integration of capitalist societies showed moral progress far beyond what had previously been taken to be compatible with the basic requirements of capitalism.¹⁸

This ascending line of social conquests broke at the beginning of the 1980s.

The social democratic age ended when the processes of deregulation of the market started, which, in the countries of Western Europe, led to the dissolution of the so-called ‘organized capitalism’.

Three processes primarily characterized these transformations.

First of all neoliberalist trasformations mean the weakening of (welfare) state regimes guaranteed by the nation-state – a weakening related to economic globalization, the growing power of global firms and the internationalization of financial flow.

Secondly, the neoliberal transformations can be described as the spread of shareholder-oriented management, which weakens the influence on firms from other groups, like worker’s organizations.

Another characteristic of neoliberal transformations is the progressive erosion of the normative status of wage labour, caused by a deregulation of the labour market that has resulted in precarious employment relationships.¹⁹

It is clear that in the light of the methodological and socio-theoretical framework that underlies Freedom’s Right, all these developments are interpreted as misdevelopments and regressions. But Honneth recognizes something more: in the light of these trends, it is the very method of normative reconstruction that encounters particular difficulties. What makes the normative reconstruction difficult is not so much the neoliberal transformations as such, but the lack of an adequate critical response to them. Regarding the sphere of social labour in particular, Honneth observes, based on empirical studies, that although the neoliberal transformations are subjectively registered and regarded as unjust, they have given rise, up to now, to almost no collective resistance, such as the kind termed ‘outrage’ by Hegel.²⁰ For Honneth, this lack of collective resistance can only be partially attributed to the new forms of work, which, in contrast to the past, often lack the potential to recognize belonging to a social group with the same interests, as well as the possibility of recognizing corporate counterpower. There is a deeper tendency that Honneth tries to underline. Before he can explain the absence of publicly visible ‘outrage’, he must refer to a shift in the moral image of the market. The capitalist market is no longer seen as an institution that should satisfy basic criteria of reciprocity and cooperation, but rather as a struggle between individuals for the pursuit of their own profit, a struggle in which everyone is the sole master of her own success or failure. One symptom of this change is the dissemination among all sectors of workers of forms of self-blame for those failures that are interpreted as personal failures in one’s working career. Other symptoms are dynamics of self-commodification and reification of one’s own personal qualities.

It can be questioned here if Honneth provides too selective and too pessimistic an account of the new social conflicts in the capitalistic market in recent years. More importantly, Honneth here risks contradicting certain points he had always affirmed, as for example in the exchange with Nancy Fraser, where he strongly criticized the reduction of social suffering and moral discontent to just that part of it which has already been made visible in the political public sphere by publicity-savvy organizations.²¹

But still another point should be underlined here. Once Honneth has reached this conclusion, he must in fact deny the assumption with which he began, which justified the idea that the market too is a sphere of social freedom. As we saw, the initial assumption was indeed that the capitalist economic market, like all modern institutions, draws its legitimacy from a shared background of ethical norms and more specifically from an idea of cooperation. In the presence of economic developments that radically contradict these normative expectations, the consequences should have been a crisis of legitimacy of the market, expressed in social struggles and conflicts.

In regard to neoliberal transformations, Honneth not only diagnoses a lack of resistance, but also a shift in the cultural interpretation of the market. And this shift – as Honneth admits – poses a problem for the whole normative reconstruction, not only because this reconstruction ‘cannot rely on normative countermoves’ within the social reality.²² The difficulty in applying to procedures of normative reconstruction arises also from the fact that this shift, in the moral interpretation of the market, means assuming that it is possible to argue what was categorically excluded at the outset: namely that the market economy can also exist without an ethical shared background of expectations of solidarity and cooperation. Moreover, Honneth’s diagnosis of the neoliberal transformations in Freedom’s Right leads to a further consequence: The norms of solidarity and cooperation that he has reconstructed in the movements and social struggles of the past, in the light of the present situation, seem to end up turning into just what Honneth initially wanted to exclude: that is, expressions of an external critique of capitalism, which relies not on normative potentialities based on the moral grammar of the institution of the market economy, but on the normative forces of collective subjects, based on political cultures – like socialist, communist or Catholic – that are external to the market and that are not shared by all the agents of the market itself.²³

III. A genealogy of the paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism

If we now turn to the sociological writings that Honneth in the last years has dedicated specifically to the analysis of the neoliberal transformations, we are faced with a very different and more convincing approach.²⁴

In these texts, not the critical method of analysis is the normative reconstruction, but rather a genealogical approach. This means that the neoliberal transformations are interpreted not merely as misdevelopments or interruptions of the ascending line of the social reforms of the social democratic age. The neoliberal transformations are described rather as a paradoxical inversion of the modern vocabulary of emancipation: an inversion that does not interpret the idea of social freedom in a different way, but rather delegitimates this idea as such.

Honneth referred in particular to the analysis of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in the book The New Spirit of Capitalism. The starting point of this study is the assumption that capitalist practices require justification, because they cannot mobilize sufficient motivational resources by themselves. The main thesis of the book is that contemporary neoliberal capitalism has succeeded in mobilizing new motivational resources on the basis of the critical objections to Taylorist or Fordist work structures. In this way, the ‘winners’ of the neoliberal structural change ‘[have] successfully managed semantically to recoin the central standards of the spheres of law and the economy so that their normative meaning is almost exclusively customized to their own respective prospects of employment’.²⁵

The concept of paradox serves to describe this process. This concept intends to refer to a practical conversion of normative intentions that emerges when, precisely through the attempt to realize such an intention, the probability of realizing it is decreased. For example, the normative progress signified by the social generalization of individualism in the social-democratic era, which led to an increase of biographical freedom, has in a peculiar way turned into its opposite under the pressure of the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism. Today, the appeal to the idea that subjects understand their occupations not as fulfilling social duties but rather as steps in their experimental self-realization justifies dismantling the privilege of membership in a firm, dissolving legal status guarantees and expecting increased flexibility.²⁶

For Honneth, something similar has happened to the performance principle, which continues to form the normative basis for the competition for respect and status in capitalist economic life. While it was originally erected against the undeserved wealth of the aristocracy, was successfully used by the labour movement to gain better wages and social security for its members and was finally deployed by the women’s movement to enhance the social status of housework, this principle of recognition has in recent years been so recoined by ideological campaigns that it no longer seems to reward abilities or actual effort, but only professional success as measured monetarily.²⁷

It is not possible to follow in detail here Honneth’s very inspiring diagnosis of the paradoxes of the neoliberal age, and of the social pathologies that they generate, in terms of new forms of alienation, reification and ideological justification of exploitations. In this context, I would rather underline only one point.

Honneth’s diagnosis of neoliberal capitalism is certainly a very important integration of the analyses that are developed in Freedom’s Right. They explain, for example, the origin of that shift in the cultural interpretation of the market which in Freedom’s Right is more registered as fact than historically reconstructed. But in the passage from normative reconstruction to genealogy, from Hegel to Foucault, as we might say, Honneth also offers a very different account of capitalist economy.

While in Freedom’s Right, Honneth, following Parsons, describes Western capitalist society as a social sphere that owes its legitimacy to a shared background of ethical norms, in his sociological diagnosis of neoliberalism, following Boltanski and Chiappelo, Honneth describes capitalism as a set of practices that transforms itself basically according to functional constraints, instrumentalizing the normative orientations of other social spheres. While in Freedom’s Right, according to the principles of functional normativism, developments that contradict ethical norms of recognition embodied in the institution of the market should necessarily produce social movements and moral protests, in sociological texts, the same transformations are legitimized through new ideological mechanisms that create a new cultural hegemony or a new prevailing moral interpretation of the market. While in Freedom’s Right, the fact that subjects actively preserve and reproduce the institutions of capitalist market provides theoretical evidence of their historical value, in the sociological texts on neoliberalism, the maintenance and reproduction of institutions that embody normative commitments are read mainly as a function of the internalization and inculcation of disciplinary power relations. Here once again the idea emerges that has long been seen as central to the very idea of a Critical Theory: namely, that there is often a significant gap between de facto and genuine acceptance of the legitimacy of existing social institutions.

IV. Conclusions

The permanent struggle for the cultural hegemony

I now move to the conclusion of this article.

I have tried to show that when Honneth comes to speak about neoliberalism, he is forced to abandon certain socio-theoretical presuppositions on which the very project of a neo-Hegelian theory of justice as theory of society is based. Confronting the dynamics of neoliberalism, the theory of society and the methodology of normative reconstruction, on which Freedom’s Right is based, appear inadequate. To give coherence to the different perspectives on capitalism that Honneth offers in his writings, it would be necessary to give another account of it. An account that views the market economy – in a more realistic way – as an ever-contested institution involving different views and political orientations: such as a view that sees it as a social institution enabling the mutual satisfaction of interests or as an institution that only serves individual advantage.

To sum up: what Honneth ultimately shows us is not which normative premises the capitalistic market is based on, but the interpretation of the capitalist market that prevailed in a certain period, the social democratic age, through the efforts of particular collective subjects (labour movements, charity organizations, bourgeois parties and state organs), guided by particular political cultures not shared by all, like the socialist, the communist and the Catholic, in their battles to establish social rights, to humanize labour and permit opportunities for co-determination. In the last decades, another view of the market has prevailed, through the efforts of other subjects, other interests, other values, and in a way, this view was more functional to the process of capital accumulation.

The capitalist market is therefore not an institution based on ethical consent on the idea of social freedom. It is rather a field of battle between different normative views of liberty, but also between multiple power relations, material interests and functional restraints.²⁸ If it is an institution open to different political structurations, the predominance of one form over the other depends on the prevailing cultural and political hegemony of one view over the other. Whereas in recent years, we have experienced a real shift of cultural hegemony, in the context of which we are now confronted with the task of rediscovering another idea and another vision of the society, in order to create another cultural hegemony.

Footnotes

Notes

References

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