Abstract
Perhaps the most peculiar thing about Zurn’s book on Axel Honneth is its cover – the terracotta warriors of China. Neither Zurn, nor Honneth, nor the Frankfurt School, nor critical theory, nor the theory of recognition or ‘freedom’s right’ have the remotest to do with China, warriors, armies, ancient rulers, and terracotta. Nonetheless, Zurn retells Honneth’s version of critical theory in minute detail, outlining Honneth’s ‘struggle for recognition’, his diagnosis of social pathologies, recognition and market, as well as social freedom and recognition. With the struggle for recognition, the social-democratic Hegelian Honneth has surely established himself as the main representative of the ‘third generation of critical theorists’ (p. 1) after Adorno, Horkeimer, Marcuse, and so forth being the first, and Habermas the second.
In his brief biography, Zurn notes that Honneth was born in Essen, growing up in the ‘bourgeois milieu’ of Horst Honneth, his father a ‘medical doctor’ (p. 2) even though medical doctors are hardly bourgeois – perhaps petit-bourgeois. Essen’s unchallenged bourgeoisie remains the staunchly reactionary war mongering, Nazi supporting, and Jewish prison labour using – and abusing – Krupp family. But soon the 1949-born Axel Honneth moved from Essen to nearby Bochum and later to Berlin and Frankfurt to become the ‘director of the Institute for Social Research’ (p. 3) – critical theory’s main institution. Zurn writes that ‘critical theory must also have a practical purpose’ (p. 5) even though one might be somewhat hard pressed to find such a ‘practical purpose’ in, for example, Adorno’s (1944) seminal masterpiece ‘Minima Moralia’. Beyond that, Zurn notes that Honneth ‘has consistently tied his recognition theory to issues of political economy’ (p. 9), albeit political economy remains rather marginal in Honneth’s recognition work and even more marginal in his Freedom’s Right.
On the latter, Zurn emphasizes that Freedom’s Right is a ‘monumental book’ attempting nothing less than a contemporary re-actualization of Hegel’s 1820 ambitious project, the ‘Philosophy of Right’ (p. 10). Surely, anyone aiming to measure up to Hegel has set himself a most formidable task. Yet this does not seem to have created an awareness that Hegel – unlike Honneth – was not only aware of the current literature on the political economy of his time but also – again unlike Honneth – critically reflected on it. If Hegel himself would have undertaken such a ‘re-actualisation’ (Honneth) himself, he might have included at least some of the political economy literature that occurred since ‘Philosophy of Right’ (1821) in a book on ‘freedom’s right’. One author that Hegel would most likely have included in such a project could have been that of one of his prime pupils by the name of Karl Marx and perhaps Karl Polanyi, Keynes, Schumpeter, Immauel Wallerstein, Leo Panitch, Kenneth Galbraith, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Harvey, Joseph Stiglitz, and so forth. But despite Zurn’s claims, Honneth’s work remains weak on this.
Nevertheless, it remains true that ‘the most influential single thinker for Honneth is undoubtedly Hegel [as Honneth] follows Hegel’s lead rather than Kant’ (p. 12). But stating that ‘Hegel seeks reason and morality in the space of social interactions between persons’ (p. 12) may be overstating Hegel as the latter was at least equally, if not more, interested in reason and morality inside institutions; with the state being among his prime institutions and perhaps corporations being minor institutions (Klikauer 2015a). It beggars belief to claim that ‘humans actually come to have an understanding of themselves only in and through social interactions with others’ (p. 16). As if this was the ‘only’ (Zurn) way we understand ourselves, perhaps indirectly also indicating that institutions like kindergarten, schools, universities, the army, the police, and even down to your local taxation office have no impact on how we understand ourselves. In addition, the Frankfurt School’s writings on ‘Mass Deception’ (Adorno & Horkheimer 1944) and Habermas’ (2006 [1988]) ‘Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’ seem to be as much forgotten by Honneth and Zurn as Enzensberger’s (1974) most illuminating ‘Consciousness Industry’. Perhaps one would not highlight the ‘Blindspot of Western Marxism’ to such a grand extent (Smythe 1977) unless one deliberately sought to protect Honneth from the sharp critique of his own (e.g., Adorno, Horkheimer’s ‘mass deception’ and Habermas’ ‘public sphere’).
However, Zurn is right on the mark when highlighting that the neo-Hegelian Honneth makes ‘barely a mention of the very famous passage on the master-slave dialectic’ (p. 27). And indeed, Honneth hardly ever places anything he writes into one of Hegel’s key illuminating philosophies (Holz 1968; Kojève 1947). Perhaps avoiding Hegel’s Herr und Knecht philosophy assists in keeping up the social-democratic hallucination that present society has not much to do with political economy, capitalism, and class.
In that way, the structural pathologies of present day global capitalism, manifested not in a trickle-down effect but rather in the sucking up of massive wealth from the poor to the rich (Oxfam 2016), can be camouflaged neatly in the grand illusions of just being a minor ‘mis-recognition and non-recognition [representing a] a threat to the personal integrity of individuals’ (p. 50). Moreover, we learn that the ‘conflict-of-interest model of social struggles is the dominant model in twentieth-century social science’ (p. 56) with the hidden transcript: it is a thing of the past and obsolete today. To cement this further, Honneth, according to Zurn, seems to be a firm believer in Marshall’s model:
18th century represents a struggle for civil rights, 19th century for political rights, and 20th century for social rights. (p. 61, cf. p. 81)
Re-distribution struggles (Fraser & Honneth 2003) – as outlined throughout Zurn’s book – as much as struggles over economic rights, are also vanishing into thin air. As a consequence, ‘the idea that labour conflicts are about struggles for appropriate interpersonal treatment’ (p. 65) moves to centre stage. Honneth does not seem to think that there is a struggle for emancipation from capitalism. Still, there are Europe’s 20+ million ‘officially’ unemployed, precarious workers at minimum wage (or below), and there are also the labourers in the global sweatshops (Ness 2015). Their struggle for a decent income is actually – as Honneth claims – about ‘appropriate interpersonal treatment’. This is slightly insulting.
To get even further into the social-democratic hallucination of a world in which capitalism simply doesn’t exist, Zurn writes that ‘critical society theory must be formed around this central modern idea of human well-being’ (p. 75). Perhaps a few nicely set up corporate wellness programmes should do the job (Cederstrom & Spicer 2015). And these hallucinations do not get better when claiming ‘Honneth’s account [of] recognition politics fully includes conflict over economic matters’ (p. 86). Sadly, they do not. On the positive side, however, Zurn very occasionally manages to mention that perhaps ‘Honneth’s theory renders an overly rosy but one-sided picture of subjectivity’ (p. 96). It does indeed.
However, one needs to counterbalance such rare statements with the overall picture of the book signified in statements like, ‘since critical social theory intends to further emancipation, it must be prepared to explain the root cause of the social pathologies it diagnoses’ (p. 114). Yet Zurn’s book on Honneth, as well as Honneth’s own writings, hardly achieved that. Being aware of these shortcomings, Zurn demands that ‘critical theory will need to provide theoretical resources for transformative social change’ (p. 115). But this can hardly be achieved when being convinced that ‘labour [is] a central medium of mutual recognition’ (p. 130). Set against that is the fact that 200+ years of capitalism, neoliberalism, Managerialism (Klikauer 2013) and Human Resource Management (Klikauer 2015b) do everything they can to prevent this from happening – a fact conveniently avoided, un-discussed, and unmentioned by Zurn and Honneth.
With that, Zurn moves to ‘Honneth’s new magnum opus’ (p. 155) on freedom’s right, noting that ‘Honneth distinguishes three main models of freedom evident in modern thought and society: negative freedom, reflexive freedom, and social freedom’ (p. 157). There simply is no longer a struggle for economic freedom. Zurn notes that ‘a person manipulated or brainwashed … (whose) desires are implanted by others may act without interference, but we would not call her actions free’ (p. 158). Again and again, one finds such statements without any deeper and meaningful analysis of, for example, the global US$500bn advertising behemoth (Klikauer 2016) or Hollywood, and Fox News, and so forth set up to engineer what Adorno and Horkheimer have so pointedly diagnosed as ‘mass deception’.
Instead, capitalism’s pathologies are individualized and personalized even to the level of claiming that ‘women’s autonomous and authentic choice [is to] seek personal fulfilment through a professional career’ (p. 162) even though deforming oneself to ‘measure up’ (e.g., key performance indicators) to the more often than not male dominated and deliberately engineered demands of a ‘professional career’ that may hardly be a ‘step back from oppressive’ (p. 170) managerial regimes moving towards ‘universally justifiable standards of gender equality’ (p. 170). Some feminists might even be tempted to argue that adhering to male dominated standards (of professionalism, for example) hardly constitutes emancipation.
For Honneth, these pathologies relate to ‘the moral saint’ (p. 171) even though our ‘social world is seen as … fundamentally corrupt’ (p. 172) – thankfully, capitalism itself is not pathological. Hence, one finds substantial sections on ‘personal relations’ (p. 172f.) in Zurn’s book. From there, it is only a minor shortcut to the neoliberal Hayekian hallucinogenic belief ‘that market relationships allow a form of social cooperation that is in the individual interest involved’ (p. 176). Contrary to ‘market-believer’ Honneth, the real world of managerial capitalism has moved on. This has been most perfectly expressed by one of Managerialism’s main ideological flagships, the Harvard Business Review, when its former editor made the following stunning admission:
Business executives are society’s leading champions of free markets and competition, words that, for them, evoke a worldview and value system that rewards good ideas and hard work, and that fosters innovation and meritocracy. Truth be told, the competition every manager longs for is a lot closer to Microsoft’s end of the spectrum than it is to the dairy farmers’. All the talk about the virtues of competition notwithstanding, the aim of business strategy is to move an enterprise away from perfect competition and in the direction of monopoly. (Magretta 2012: 80–81)
Surprisingly, Honneth seems to disagree with Habermas when noting that ‘markets … are distinctively not norm-free systems’ (p. 176) ending Habermas’ strict separation between capitalism (amoral) and the lifeworld (moral). Beyond that, Honneth’s markets are still very capable of damaging what moral philosophy knows as personhood. In other words, whenever Honneth speaks of recognition inside markets, it is no longer between the Kantian individual in itself. Under the market, recognition occurs when the market inserts itself between ‘person-person’ recognition so that these recognize each other no longer as full persons but as market participants defined as ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’. Market guided recognition creates a ‘person-market-person’ dehumanising mis-recognition. Virtually, the same occurs in the labour market where not one person hires another but a human resource (HR)-manager (buyer) hires a human resource (seller). The human has been all but eliminated (Bolton & Houlian 2008).
And in these relationships, Honneth’s hallucinogenic ‘domestication of the labour market’ was not ‘achieved […] by using a moral vocabulary’ (p. 180) but rather by the sheer force of ‘organised labour [and] collective bargaining rights’. The history of collective labour is hardly a history of ‘please-be-nice’ capitalism using Honneth’s ‘moral vocabulary’ as many labour historians (e.g., Hobsbawn, Thompson, etc.) have shown. This is and will continue to be so (Ness 2015). There simply are very few if any ‘reciprocal relations of solidarity across classes’ (p. 181), especially when capital has made its intentions very clear:
‘There’s class warfare, all right’, Mr. Buffett said, ‘but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’. (Stein 2006)
The ‘cultural industries and the mass media’ (p. 185) have aided this process even though this remains de-recognized by Honneth. As a consequence, it is not just the mass media engineered ‘civic apathy, disenchantment with politics, and individualistic depoliticization threatening the engines of democracy’ (p. 189), but also capitalism, corporate mass media, lobbying, and the outright buying of politicians. These are not the ‘perils of democracy’ (p. 189) but what occurs when Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum – there is no democracy without socialism and no socialism without democracy – has been deliberately broken by capitalism and its agents. But Honneth’s hallucinations continue with claims such as ‘the recent disembedding of markets’ (p. 197). What has happened under neoliberalism is a move from ‘state embedded markets’ into ‘market embedded states’ in which states and democracy have to show ‘market-conformity’ as the German chancellor Merkel noted correctly.
Finally, Zurn reaches his conclusion in ‘concluding speculations’ when noting that Honneth’s work fits into ‘the general mould of critical social theory’ (p. 206). From the perspective of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, this might be seen as somewhat problematic; but from the increasingly social-democratic position of Habermas, Honneth’s work is indeed a version of Habermas rather than Hegel. Put simply, Hegel spent almost his entire life hiding from the Prussian censor (D’Hondt 1988) while the philosopher pair Habermas and Honneth are part of the established system. In the end, it appears as if under Honneth critical theory seems to move further and further away from its original ‘aim … of furthering human emancipation’ (p. 206). Instead, on Zurn’s reading, Honneth’s work seems to fit more into the line of moderately liberal philosophies as expressed by, for example, John Rawls. To live up to the ideals of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory ‘requires [not] expanding Honneth’s critical social theory’ (p. 212), but it needs a radical reformulation away from Honneth’s social-democratic attempt at appeasing capitalism.