Abstract
In this article, Honneth’s Freedom’s Right is discussed with the intent to assess its potential for offering a view of justice, grounded in social freedom, more adequate than the theories of justice of Kantian descent (Rawls, Habermas). Honneth’s claim that ‘social practices and institutions are “just” to the extent that they are capable of realizing generally acceptable values’ is argued to result in a limited ability to accommodate societal pluralism. Honneth’s freedom-based view of justice is argued to depend on positing one correct view of the relevant value affirmed by the institutions of a well-ordered modern society (i.e. social freedom), one correct view of which institutions concur in what way to the realization of social freedom, and one correct reconstruction of the actual contribution historically offered by said institutions to social freedom. No justification is offered for why just social freedom counts as the supreme value against which modern institutions are to be assessed; for why, in Hegel’s footsteps, the only institutions contributing to its affirmation are still the family (now expanded into the realm of ‘personal relationships’), civil society (now turned into the sphere of relations mediated by the market) and the State (now recast as the sphere of democratic will-formation); and for why the historical unfolding of these institutional spheres can only be interpreted in the ways suggested by Honneth. At a more general level, the question that remains unanswered, and even unaddressed, is how a social freedom–based approach to justice could allow for the oppression-free coexistence of people who endorse rival understandings (a) of the values to be institutionally affirmed, (b) of the relevant institutions and (c) of the significance of these institutions’ respective patterns of development.
It’s a great pleasure for me to offer comments on Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right. I’ve been acquainted with his work for 35 years now, since the inaugural session of the Montagskolloquium organized by Habermas in Frankfurt in April 1983, when Axel presented a chapter from his dissertation on Adorno and Foucault – later to become Kritik der Macht. And ever since I have followed the development of his work: the first formulation of the theory of recognition, then his outline of a social philosophy, then his attempt to draw a moral and political philosophy out of the theory of recognition and now his ambitious attempt not just to reinterpret, but to actually reiterate Hegel’s grounding of freedom in the living culture of a historical formation, in a reconstruction of the functioning of the spheres of personal relations, of the market economy and of democratic will-formation in the 21st century. At each step along this long stretch of time, these developments and way stations have always confirmed my feeling that he certainly counts as one of the most original thinkers in my generation.
I’d like to offer a few comments on the book in the light of the ambitious aims outlined in the methodological introduction devoted to the question ‘how to properly think of justice today’. The great promise of the book is to offer a better account of normativity and justice, more adequate than the normative approaches to justice that draw on a Kantian perspective revisited either along discursive lines (Habermas) or as normative thought-experiments (Rawls in A Theory of Justice). I’d like to raise some questions about both the methodological underpinnings of Honneth’s effort and the application of his method in the reconstruction of the vicissitudes of freedom in the three spheres. I will then proceed in two steps: First, I’ll point to some methodological queries, and then in the second part of my presentation will try to show how Honneth’s way of solving these queries affects his substantive reconstruction of the development of freedom.
Before I get to my first point, however, let me just spend one quick word on the picture of the present philosophical context as described by Honneth in the initial pages of the book, because that description works as a backdrop against which the deep motivation and urgency of reconstructing Hegel’s social view of freedom acquires full clarity. Our context is described as one in which the Hegelian insight into the necessity of keeping together a normative view of justice and its embodiment in spheres of reciprocal recognition would have succumbed to the victory of a Kantian model of justice, where justice means adequacy of the institutional texture of a society to some antecedent and self-standing principle. The Hegelian emphasis on avoiding a separation of ‘institutional facts’ and ‘basic norms’ lives on – it seems to me – not just in the work of Walzer and MacIntyre, mentioned in passing, but is deeply ingrained also in Taylor’s reconstruction of the sources of the modern self and of faith in a secular age and is forcefully operative in three major junctures of 20th-century analytic philosophy: (a) in Wittgenstein’s notion of following a rule as inseparable from grasping the inner normativity of a life form, (b) in the whole continent of the theory of speech acts as a reconstruction of the normativity inherent in the use of language for performing social acts and (c) in Brandom’s scorekeeping inferentialism. Finally, I don’t see, in that overview of our philosophical context, much evidence of how deeply Rawls’ transition towards the framework of political liberalism modifies his view of the just society exactly in the direction advocated by Honneth. ‘Justice as fairness’, as of 1980, 1 claims no other authority than that of being the ‘most reasonable’ focal point of an overlapping consensus among the comprehensive conceptions already endorsed by the citizens of a democracy. No trace of a transcendent standpoint any longer. This is just to suggest that perhaps the prospect, then, for the survival of Hegel’s approach to justice and normativity may be less bleak than the opening pages of Freedom’s Right suggest.
1. The problem of pluralism in Freedom’s Right
In the ‘Introduction’, Honneth outlines four methodological presuppositions. First, ‘social reproduction hinges on a certain set of shared fundamental ideals and values’. 2 Second, the normative point of reference employed by a theory of justice should draw on a ‘normative reconstruction’ of the values and normative standards embedded in the social routines and institutions that are ‘indispensable for social reproduction’. 3 Third, the above reconstruction of what Hegel called ‘ethical life’ is not just a photograph of the normativity prevailing in society: Only institutions that ‘contribute to the realization of universal values’ – especially the value of freedom – are included, and those which instead represent ‘merely particular values’ or embody ‘backward ideals’ are left out. Fourth, consequently such reconstruction is not merely confirmative, as Hegel philosophical assessment of the Prussian polity is sometimes suspected to be, but also potentially ‘critical’ of existing arrangements, yet always critical in the light of ‘embodied values’: ‘Reconstructive criticism’ never passes judgement on existent institutions and practices on the basis of ‘external criteria’. 4
I want to focus on the second presupposition: ‘social practices and institutions are “just” to the extent that they are capable of realizing generally acceptable values’. 5 Now, if we understood ‘generally acceptable values’ as ‘values generally accepted by the public of a given society at a given time’, we would be hostage to relativistic implications: A caste society, a feudal society, a colonialist society, a racist society and a sexist society would have to be assessed by their standards. The principle of charitable interpretation then enjoins us to take Honneth’s phrase to mean that social practices and institutions are right to the extent that they further values that deserve to be universally accepted, freedom in the first place. Social practices and institutions are to be judged on the basis of their realizing, or failing to realize, these values.
This presupposition entangles Freedom’s Right in one general difficulty that then, going unaddressed, results in a pattern of threefold selectivity on which I’ll comment in the second part of my comment. The general difficulty, which puts the Hegelian model of justice at a disadvantage, relative to its competitors of Kantian descent, is its limited ability to accommodate pluralism. In other words, the closer relation of what is rational to what is real – the bonus offered by a Hegelian approach, relative to the wider gap between facts and norms typical of neo-Kantian approaches – is paid for at the steep price of having the theory depend on one correct view of what is rational and, which is somewhat more perplexing, on one correct reconstruction of what is real. This ‘perfectionist’ bias is signalled, among other things, by the recurrent reference to normative ideas embedded in competing accounts as ‘pathologies’ and to discordant facts as ‘misdevelopments’.
Let me now try to clarify the sense in which this methodological difficulty results in a threefold pattern of selectivity, in the rest of the book – a selectivity that at least in my opinion stands in need for clarification.
2. Normative selectivity
Let me start by what I call ‘normative selectivity’ (selectivity 1). Honneth chooses, along with Hegel, freedom as the keystone of normativity. In part I, he reconstructs ‘negative freedom’ (revolving around autonomy) and ‘expressive freedom’ (revolving around authenticity) as two reductive and inadequate versions of what is best captured by the notion of ‘social freedom’ – namely, being with oneself in institutions that shape relations of reciprocal recognition. A non-Hegelian reader would perhaps like to hear a word of clarification on why just freedom takes precedence over other possible keystone values around which to reconstruct a socially anchored view of immanent normativity. For example, had ‘equality’ been chosen, in lieu of freedom, a different narrative would have resulted (perhaps crude equality, reflexive equality and social equality), and the same if ‘justice’ as such had been chosen. In fact, equality is somehow addressed, in Honneth's reconstruction, under the heading of ‘equal’ or ‘reciprocal’ recognition. And justice stands in a complex relation to freedom. The theory of social freedom, in fact, is both a reconstruction of a superior understanding of freedom as a concept, but at the same time is also the core of a theory of justice presented as alternative to the Kantian views of Rawls and Habermas. Thus one could say that freedom’s position as normative lodestar derives from its offering us a better view of justice.
But the point I want to emphasize is that it is unclear what role should be reserved, in a democratic society where legitimate power will have to be exercised, for claims, proposals, projects, movements and initiatives anchored in ‘normative reconstructions’ that revolve around the primacy of justice, of equality, of the pair ‘freedom and equality’, or of ‘social utility’ for that matter. The question then is: Will the key institutions of an ideal society have to be justified in terms acceptable also to those who take such different views of ‘the rational’, or will these views be discounted as less than fully rational? This is selectivity 1, concerning the choice of the supreme value against which modern institutions have to be assessed.
3. Selectivity as to the relevant institutions
This problem of normative selectivity then reverberates onto the selection of the institutional spheres of recognition that form the setting of the narrative of social freedom – the object of part II, where Honneth discusses the partial realization of social freedom in a number of spheres and some of the related pathologies. According to the second methodological presupposition, only institutions that are ‘indispensable for social reproduction’ form the object of normative reconstruction. Thus the problem arises of identifying these institutions correctly. Honneth relies on Hegel and expands the family into the larger realm of ‘personal relationships’, civil society into the sphere of relations mediated by the market and what for Hegel was the State into the sphere of democratic will-formation. A second level of selectivity seems to be operative here. Why in our complex societies are these still the only three spheres where citizens are socialized into social freedom and mutual recognition? Two spheres that Hegel ignored and today appear as equally formative are the educational system and the free churches.
Education is organized in the form of an institution, with its own Sittlichkeit, often known as the ‘latent curriculum’, an institution that is pervaded by its own values, provides civic education and certainly also an education to freedom, at least in democratic societies. It constitutes a locus where young citizens spend a great amount of time for an increasing number of years, where they enter contact with others in a system of roles enjoining reciprocal recognition, it is the first institution that we encounter beyond the family. Why is it not part of the picture? What is the normative argument for excluding schools, universities and the whole realm of education in general from the number of institutions ‘indispensable for social reproduction’?
Religious congregations and churches operating under the premise of freedom of religion in a democratic society may be authoritarian within their own precincts, but certainly their coexistence one alongside others educates their believers to freedom, toleration and reciprocal respect. Their practices accompany the life of the believer from crib to grave and through many rites of passage, providing a texture of shared meanings against which the believers learn to make sense of their life in a context of freedom. Why are they out of the picture?
It is not my intention to propose an alternative narrative for the unfolding of ‘social freedom’. I merely wish to call attention to the fact that the selectivity that was at work in Hegel’s account has spilled over into Honneth’s project (selectivity 2
4. Selectivity as to the relevant processes
Finally, in Freedom’s Right it is operative also a third kind of selectivity that concerns the features typical of the addressed institutions and practices – in other words, a selectivity 3 that operates not just between spheres of social action (say, including the family and excluding the educational system), but also within each of them.
Concerning the sphere of personal relationships, and specifically of the family, it is unclear why the rosy ‘democratization process’ undergone by the once rigid familial roles, which has led the family to represent, ‘in its successful forms the nucleus of all the attitudes and dispositions required for such forms of cooperation [deliberative discussion and decision-making]’, 6 isn’t counterbalanced in the negative by the processes highlighted by Riesman, Sennett, Lasch and Rieff. The shrinking of the family to nuclear dimensions, coupled with the loss of virtually all functions other than favouring affective and generally psychological development, magnifies to an unprecedented extent the impact of parental affective deficiencies in the area of narcissism. The result is the undermining of the ‘inner-directed’ agency required by democratic and reflexive political subjecthood, and the massive growth of a dominant character prone either to a narcissistic longing for mirroring or to idealizing fantasies that could join ranks with whatever remains of the so-called ‘authoritarian personality’. Now, does the approach to justice as the advance of social freedom deliver us hostages to the results of the dispute about which interpretation of the vicissitudes of the family is more accurate? Honneth’s account of personal relations contributes to the picture of justice as the realization of social freedom only insofar as it is the correct one. Thus the alleged superior concreteness of ‘justice as the realization of social freedom’ depends on Honneth’s account of the family being more accurate than competing ones. And this dependency on the one hand raises doubts about the alleged greater traction on reality on the part of the ‘social freedom’ model, on the other raises the question of pluralism now with respect to ‘the real’. If we differ on what is real, if we see a misdevelopment where others see a positive process, do we not end up differing also on what is rational, namely differing on how ‘the family’ contributes to or obstructs the social anchoring of ‘the rational’, ‘the normative’, freedom? What legitimacy can there be for a coexistence of these differences?
A similar problem affects the reconstruction of market relations. I cannot enumerate all the positive aspects and the ‘misdevelopments’ that Honneth detects in the sub-spheres of consumption and of the labour market. I will only mention two major processes that seem to me in need of closer attention. Against the degradation of working conditions only the counternarrative of union-sponsored ‘Mitbestimmung’ is mentioned, with no mention at all of the fact that the infamous Taylorian ‘scientific management’ – immortalized by Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’ – was buried as early as 1928 by the sense, derived from the work of Elton Mayo and shared by leading entrepreneurs, that failing to protect the personal dignity of the worker would result in ‘low morale, poor craftmanship, unresponsiveness, and confusion’. 7 From then on, Taylor’s inconsiderate project of making the worker an appendage of the machine gave way to a manner of organizing labour based on at least the semblance of a notion of solidarity in a common endeavour. 8 The point is that this view of management presupposes that workers are recognition-seekers and not just utility-maximizers, and that an organization is all the more effective the more its leadership leads through exemplarity and integrity and is capable of integrating difference. 9 Why is the contribution of this crucial development to social freedom not part of the picture?
Second, among the market-related ‘misdevelopments’, a fleeting mention is made 10 of the neoliberal deregulation of financial markets, mostly with regard to its effects on the labour market, the flexibilization of employment, the fall of wages and the ideology of individual responsibility for one’s fate in market-related turns. Why should social freedom in the sphere of market relations be so selectively connected with the labour market and not instead with the momentous hijacking of the economy by finance? According to Stiglitz, 40% of all profits in the United States are made out of financial investments, not productive ones, and according to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) the mass of financial assets circulating in the global market exceeds the world GNP by 12 times, a mass with no connection to the real world but mobilized only in connection with fantasies of rapid profit. I cannot go into the details of this ‘misdevelopment’, except for pointing to two aspects overlooked in Honneth’s account. First, rent is back and, far from constituting a remnant of premodern time, is outgrowing profit coming from the manufacturing and service sectors and brings rampant social inequality, inheritance privilege and modified stratification in its wake; second, disembedded financial markets exert a new absolute power against democratic processes, with all the attendant problems and the temporary lack of remedies. Again, the partiality of an account of the nexus of market relations and freedom that does not take these developments into account can hardly go unnoticed. My point is philosophical, not about the current subjection of democracy to the market, which we can separately discuss. Doesn’t the ‘concreteness’, the seeming ‘greater traction on reality’ of a Hegelian-type view of justice in the end entangle us in disputes about these specific matters? How do we identify then the one correct account of the relation of markets to freedom? And what happens if we disagree on this score: Do we also have discordant views of justice?
Finally, concerning the sphere of democratic will-formation, the successor to Hegel’s idea of the monarchical State, Honneth provides a thorough reconstruction of the history of the public sphere. But then he credits Durkheim, Dewey and Habermas for a ‘third model of democracy’ alternative to both representative and plebiscitarian democracy – a model whose contours remain somewhat unclear. Its core is the idea that in a properly functioning public sphere, ‘a constantly revisable consensus develops which can, if need be, come about by compromise; its directives are then transformed into binding resolutions made by the political authorities in charge’. 11 And finally, Honneth denounces as a ‘theoretical folly’ the fact that ‘contemporary theories of justice are guided almost exclusively by the legal paradigm’. Instead, theories of justice should rather rely on ‘sociology and historiography’, because these disciplines are ‘more sensitive to changes in everyday moral behavior’. 12 No principle of legitimation is discussed, not a hint at the need for rethinking the separation of powers in societies much more complex than those of Montesquieu’s and Hegel’s times, not a word on the revolution brought about by the Ackerman–Rawls dualistic model of democracy, none on Bickel’s countermajoritarian objection, or on the struggle between an ‘abstract’ originalist understanding of the constitution and the idea of the ‘living constitution’ as potentially capable of bringing the law in dialogue with the new advances in freedom being elaborated in the struggles of the public sphere, as it did happen during the Civil Rights Revolution.
To sum up, the idea that thick descriptions of processes of affirmation of social freedom would free us from the ‘burdens of judgement’ and from the ensuing fact of reasonable pluralism may prove a wishful thinking. At the end of this long journey, we are left with the question of pluralism – ‘How should those who either identify different institutions as crucial for social reproduction or agree on which institutions are relevant for freedom but subscribe to different accounts of their relevance live together without oppression?’ – which, by the way, is the question that Rawls in Political Liberalism just starts from.
