Abstract
Ever since the publication of The Struggle for Recognition (1995), Axel Honneth has been pursuing the Hegelian theme of ‘recognition’ as originally outlined in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1807). The latest instalment is Honneth’s The I in the We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. A quasi-background of this can be found in the idea to move critical theory onto the theoretical and ethical platform of ‘recognition’, as discussed in Fraser and Honneth’s Redistribution or Recognition (2003). To a large extent, The I in the We is a continuation of Honneth’s project. The book has fourteen chapters, divided into four parts: ‘Hegel’s Roots’, ‘Systematic Consequences’, ‘Social and Theoretical Applications’, and ‘Psychoanalytical Ramifications’. What the book does not have is an introduction providing an overall discussion on Honneth’s theme; and nor does it have a conclusion that could have comprehensively discussed ‘what we could learn from all this’.
After a very brief preface, Part 1 begins with a discussion on Hegel’s concept of ‘recognition’, emphasising the fact that ‘Hegel’s text is especially difficult to understand’. In Chapter 2, ‘The realm of actualised freedom’, Honneth positions Hegel’s work in its historical context, outlining ‘the great disturbance caused by the Counter-Reform in Prussia’, which according to d’Hondt (1988), was a period marred by the ‘Carlsbad Decrees’ of 1819, signifying an historical period of state censorship, reaction, and repression. It was in this period that Hegel wrote his second great book, Philosophy of Right (1821), on which Honneth notes, ‘on the whole, the book gives the highly confusing impression’, arguing that Hegel’s ‘three-stage network of institutionalised practices and structures has been completely travelled through [so that] the realm of actualised freedom … will be presented in its entirety’. By this, Hegel meant the stages of family, civil society, and state. This is needed so that each stage can ‘compensate for the flaws that characterise the previous stage’.
In Chapter 3, ‘The fabric of justice: On the limits of contemporary proceduralism’, Honneth highlights the ‘deficits of the distribution paradigm’, perhaps not only because justice is linked to ‘distributive justice’, but also as a response to Nancy Fraser’s ‘distribution model’. For Honneth, justice is a ‘reconstructive’ issue. He notes, ‘this alternative procedure could thus be termed “reconstructive”, because it does not “construct” an impartial standpoint from which to justify principles of justice, but “reconstructs” them out of the historical process of relations of recognition in which they are always already at work’. The chapter on justice is followed by a chapter on ‘Labour and recognition: A redefinition’, in which Honneth – correctly – notes that many intellectuals have ‘turned their backs’ on labour (Klikauer 2012), leaving labour relations dangerously exposed to neoliberal economics, human resources management, and management studies. Honneth argues that ‘to share Hegel’s and Durkheim’s conviction that the capitalist labour market must not merely be a means of increasing economic efficiency, but also a medium of social integration … everything depends on whether we decided to analyse the capitalist market from the perspective of system integration or social integration’. It might be a little problematic, though, to see ‘capitalist labour markets’ as mediums for ‘social’ integration, and not as institutions of ‘system integration’ (Lockwood 1964).
The next chapter is on ‘Recognition as ideology: The connection between morality and power’. Honneth writes, ‘far from making a lasting contribution to the autonomy of the members of our society, social recognition appears merely to serve the creation of attitudes that conform to the dominant system. The reservations about this new critical approach thus amount to the thesis that practices of recognition do not empower persons, but subject them to domination.’ Unfortunately, Honneth neither examines Adorno’s ‘there is no right life in the wrong one’, nor Brink’s recent (2010) critical assessment of Honneth’s recognition in the light of Adorno’s famous theme. The subsequent chapter on ‘Dissolutions of the social: The social theory of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot’ reads very much like an extended book review; and the next, on ‘Philosophy as social research: David Miller’s theory of justice’, while not even mentioning the term ‘recognition’, is of similar make.
In ‘Recognition between states: On the moral substance of international relations’, Honneth applies Hegel and the theory of recognition to the international scene, and to state-to-state relationships among ‘civilised nations’. Honneth notes that ‘the state apparatus cannot be viewed as the executive organ of a collective identity’. In ‘Organised self-realisation: Paradoxes of individualisation’, Honneth discusses Weber and Durkheim, but not the third member of the three grandfathers of sociology – Karl Marx. Hence his discussion on individualisation appears to exclude the economic realm, and the fact that capitalism might have something to do with the ideology of hyper-individualism. In ‘Paradoxes of capitalist modernisation: A research programme’, Honneth discusses ‘The neoliberal revolution’. Neoliberalism might be many things, but it is surely not a revolution. If anything, it might be a reactionary policy directed against workers, the welfare state, and not-for-profit but public institutions as such. The outcome of neoliberalism cannot be described as ‘the misfortune of those who suffer and the good fortune of the prosperous’. There are no ‘misfortunes’ in neoliberalism, but only deliberate and purposefully created policies (Hayek 1944).
The final part of the book starts with ‘The work of negativity: A recognition-theoretical revision of psychoanalysis’, in which Honneth provides forceful arguments on why critical theory should remain linked to Freudian psychoanalytical theories. This theme is continued in the chapter ‘The I in we: Recognition as a driving force of group formation’, in which Honneth reflects on the relationship between groups and individuals. In Chapter 13 ‘Facets of the presocial self: Rejoinder to Joel Whitebook’, Honneth writes: ‘in his essay on “Mutual Recognition and the Work of the Negative”, Joel Whitebook relies on a number of classical theoretical approaches to outline his theses, which represents a strong objection to the so-called “Habermasians”’. While Habermasians appear to claim that markets are instrumental-rational institutions, ‘he [Whitebook] claims, referring to the institutionalisation of the capitalist market economy, that modern societies have managed to produce a social institution in which humans’ capacity for aggression can be expressed in a relatively socially tolerable manner, without entirely losing its destructive force’. The last chapter, ‘Disempowering reality: Secular forms of consolation’, begins: ‘as members of Western culture, when it comes to dealing with the heaviest blow of fate, we have all become naturalists’. The potpourri of themes and issues abruptly ends without a conclusion.
Overall, Honneth’s ‘book’ reads more like a collection of essays that are – more or less – loosely linked. It is not a book in which an author expresses a theme – ‘the-I-in-the-we’, or ‘recognition’ – over 200-plus pages. It is not a comprehensive illumination of ‘the-I-in-the-we’ or ‘recognition’. Instead, some chapters avoid the term ‘recognition’ altogether, while others read like book reviews. Honneth’s collection is not helped by its having neither an introduction to locate his ‘collage of essays’ within an overall theme, nor a conclusion suggesting to readers what one might learn from all this. In the end, Honneth’s ‘hubbub’ (Irish-Gaelic for confused shouting) might just be another example of Karl Marx’s Thesis Eleven: that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; and that the point is to change it. Honneth ‘interprets the world in various ways’, but at no point does he deliver anything to further the cause of emancipation.