Abstract
In order to find out what exactly critical theory is critical of, one can read many books about the premises of critical theory from Horkheimer to Adorno to Habermas and many more. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth provides some relief here, as Danielle Petherbridge systematically goes through Honneth’s main debates with Habermas, Foucault, Hegel, Mead, and Winnicott. Honneth’s substantial contributions to critical theory to date emerge clearly from those debates. This is what the title of the book promises, and the book is worth reading just for that reason. And yet, the author’s main objective is something else, namely to evaluate ‘the critical purchase’ of Honneth’s reconstruction of critical theory by philosophically scrutinizing his anthropological premise for social critique. Ultimately Petherbridge criticizes Honneth throughout the book for the lack of an adequate theory of power as part of his theory of recognition.
What is the premise of Honneth’s critical theory? The grounds for social critique for Honneth are individuals’ experiences of pathological identity-formation in relation to others (immanent critique), combined with a normative horizon (transcendence) against which the reality of individuals’ everyday lives can be assessed. What reads at first sight like an abstract, general and unassuming basis for social critique means in fact substantial advances for critical theory, as Petherbridge outlines. Honneth continues Habermas’ intersubjective reorientation of critical theory but argues that it is not just communicative action in the lifeworld, but social interaction in all spheres of society that is normative. Since systems are no longer conceived as norm-free, Honneth (together with Hans Joas) expands the reach of social critique beyond the lifeworld and so shifts the normative horizon of critical theory from consensus formation limited to the lifeworld to struggles for recognition in all spheres of society. Most importantly for Petherbridge, in so doing Honneth’s work opens up all spheres of society to a critique of power.
One of the main achievements of Honneth’s reconstruction of Habermas is that he manages to reintegrate work into the realm of social critique, arguing that work is critical to human identity-formation on the basis of recognition. What are merely systemic pathologies for Habermas are pathologies in identity-formation for Honneth. As a result, so says Petherbridge, Honneth’s view makes norms underpinning work accessible to social critique fuelled by struggles to change repressive norms. Petherbridge’s concern is that Honneth assumes an undamaged notion of intersubjectivity or identity as the basis for social critique.
By reconstructing Honneth’s engagement with Foucault in his earlier work, Petherbridge traces how Honneth develops the notion of a struggle which enables him to turn Habermas’ consensus theory into a theory of conflict and struggle over identity-formation. Now intersubjective power relations become part of an ongoing struggle for recognition as constitutive of society (p. 38). For Petherbridge this move provides Honneth with an opportunity to develop a programmatic theory of power (p. 37) which is lacking in Habermas’ framework. However, she argues that with the shift from Foucault to Hegel, Honneth replaces the notion of power/struggle with the notion of power/recognition and thus emphasizes morality rather than power relations. Honneth, so Petherbridge, is not really taking Foucault’s idea of power as relational or intersubjective on board. Rather than accepting Foucault’s notion of power as constitutive of the social and the subject, Honneth separates the notion of power from recognition by conceptualizing intersubjectivity as ‘mutually revealing subjectivity’ (p. 24). Thus, the undamaged identity based on recognition is not constituted through relations, but is already existing and being distorted or damaged by an external (systemic?) form of power. While Honneth criticizes Habermas for separating normative and norm-free spheres, Petherbridge uses Foucault’s idea of relational power to criticize Honneth for making a similar if not the same mistake when he argues that recognition relations do not comprise relational forms of power.
For Honneth, though, what started as a horizontal concept of power ends up resembling Adorno’s notion of ‘totalizing institutions’ – in particular Foucault’s later work which is mainly about the institutionalization of power and lacks a normative dimension (p. 59). But for Honneth an intersubjective approach is essential for social critique fuelled by human suffering as the engine room for emancipatory interests. As Petherbridge herself points out, this is the main reason why he turns to Hegel’s notion of struggle.
Normativity and intersubjectivity, for Honneth, are anchored in social interaction and together make up the ‘normative anthropological premise’ (p. 65) of his work. For Foucault, however, there are no pure norms against which deviations from freedom, emancipation or liberation can be assessed or corrected. The challenge that Petherbridge sees in Honneth’s work is that his normative notion of recognition cannot be tied directly to an ethical moment of intersubjectivity, but exists within power relations. For her recognition is not neutral but might actually constitute normativity as well as power-induced agency by ensuring that ‘the conduct of the other is changed, directed, or motivated’ (p. 77). Again, Petherbridge argues that Honneth does not take these Foucauldian considerations of relational power fully into account. She admits that Foucault’s assumption are often totalizing, but she also insists that recognition is entangled in ‘networks of power’, and within those networks ‘action, freedom, and power imply one another and cannot be neatly separated’ (p. 78) as both Habermas and Honneth seem to do, in her opinion.
With Honneth’s shift from Foucault’s ‘account of struggle and power to a Hegelian notion of morally motivated struggle’ (p. 82), the link between recognition and intersubjectivity becomes the irreducible anthropological premise that cannot but be normative and hence constitutes the starting point for social critique. Here Petherbridge claims that Honneth does not acknowledge the subject/object relations that are primary to Hegel’s text (p. 90). Honneth’s interest starts when Hegel refers to recognition, the family and love where he anchors the development of self-confidence in intersubjective forms of recognition, that is, love relationships. In contrast, legal recognition cannot provide intersubjective recognition since it does not take individual particularities into account. Petherbridge puts against Honneth’s argument that Hegel introduces a concept of power as a form of relation where ‘a living individual confronts a living individual, but their power of life is unequal’ (pp. 94–5). According to her, Honneth ignores Hegel’s discussion of recognition and power with, for example, criminal acts being merely understood as ‘incomplete recognition’ (p. 97).
It is a strong claim of Petherbridge to call Honneth’s interpretation of Hegel ‘somewhat unrepresentative of Hegel’s position’ (p. 101) by making intersubjectivity a primary form of ethical life and the struggle for recognition a secondary condition of interaction. As a consequence, she claims that the discussion of power, of negative normativity, is sidelined, reducing intersubjectivity to purely normative forms of interaction. For her it is not at all clear that all modalities of relation in Hegel’s writing are connected to an underlying primordial concept of recognition or that Hegel equates struggle with recognition, let alone inadequate forms of recognition. To the contrary, she argues that some of Hegel’s texts about more destructive or negative forms of power could be read as competing with Honneth’s reading of recognition (p. 102) because not all forms of relation in Hegel’s writing can be reduced to recognition alone (p. 103) which, as Petherbridge herself acknowledges, Honneth does not actually deny.
Honneth’s advancing exegesis of Hegel further establishes ‘recognition as the normative ground of all sociality and conflict’ (p. 106). Struggle now is not just seen as a transgression. Now it also means the struggle for mutual recognition underlying all social relationships and a struggle to expand the normative basis of recognition in society. By making primary love relations essential for successful identity-formation, Honneth goes even further than Hegel by saying that successful primary love relations and consequently self-confidence are also essential for participation in public life. In particular the latter, so Petherbridge, is a claim that cannot easily be found in Hegel. With the aid of Hegel, Honneth understands recognition as both a normative and an anthropological concept and, most importantly, as an a priori normative basis of society in contrast to a Hobbesian a posteriori social contract emerging from a war of all against all. With recognition at the core of intersubjectivity and social interaction, institutions such as the family, the market and democratic politics become the manifestation of ‘recognition relations that develop out of formative patterns of social interaction and the history of social struggles’ (p. 119).
Petherbridge criticizes Honneth’s claim that intersubjectivity, and with it recognition, is a first-order category and suggests that it might be ‘the result of a learning process’ (p. 121) instead. By equating intersubjectivity, recognition and normativity, she argues, Honneth conceptualizes recognition as normative only, excluding other forms of intersubjectivity and social interaction such as power and strategic action which are reduced to mere pathologies of recognition.
In search of a theory of personality-formation that was missing in Hegel, Honneth turns to George Herbert Mead. The main point he takes from Mead is that the development of the self is dependent on other selves and not a Hegelian spirit. ‘Old universals’ are called into question and the reflexive capacities of the individual are brought to the fore. Petherbridge, however, claims that Honneth excludes the subject-object relations focusing on subject-subject relations only. In The Struggle for Recognition Honneth claims Mead as a theorist of recognition in that he turns Mead’s theory of functional self-development into a theory of normative change based on recognition processes. It is in particular Hegel’s notion of rights-based recognition and Mead’s notion of a ‘generalized other’ that for Honneth equally hold the idea of reciprocity, of mutual behavioural obligation (p. 140). Maintaining Hegel’s notion of love as the basis of the theory of recognition, Honneth uses Mead’s theory to reinforce love, right and achievement, and with them the three corresponding forms of self-relation (self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem) in his theory of recognition.
Mead’s struggle between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ provides Honneth with the motivational grounds driving social normative change that was missing in Hegel’s dialectic between dependence and independence. For Petherbridge, though, Honneth reads recognition into Mead’s theory. In her opinion, Mead was more interested in aspects of ‘social control’ (p. 139) and maybe an understanding of recognition as a function of power. This, so Petherbridge, is ignored by Honneth, and she once again criticizes him for not taking account of power relations and ideologically shaped forms of recognition since he seems to assume an ‘unreflective internalization of norms’ (p. 142). She claims that Honneth too readily equates psychic with social conflict. She acknowledges, though, that he has recently more or less abandoned Mead’s approach and has instead turned to ‘object-relations psychoanalysis’ (p. 146) for a reconstruction of primary forms of intersubjectivity.
In a similar way Petherbridge scrutinizes Honneth’s use of Donald Winnicott’s object-relations theory with which Honneth further reconceptualizes Hegel’s notion of love as a form of recognition, as ‘being oneself in another’. This allows Honneth to recast Hegel’s dialectic between dependence and independence as a struggle between symbiosis and ‘separation in early childhood’ (p. 149). The symbiotic stage is seen by Honneth as preceding subjectivity as well as being a primary form of intersubjectivity (p. 151). Building on Jessica Benjamin’s theory, Honneth identifies the process of detachment of the child from the mother as the motivational force for a struggle for recognition. In this way Honneth is able to reconstruct Hegel’s dialectic between dependence and independence through an object-relations theory and translate it into a lifelong dynamic of granting and denying recognition to others. The symbiotic experience represents a ‘zero-point’ of recognition (p. 162) which individuals strive to recreate all their life.
Building on others’ critique, Petherbridge claims that Honneth overlooks ‘asymmetries of power, dependence and unreciprocated labor’ (p. 153). For her the subject does not originate in a power-free context. She suggests that we look at theorists such as Daniel Stern, who begin from an interactionist viewpoint rather than a symbiotic one. Honneth has addressed many of those criticisms and now sees infants as having an elementary sense of self (p. 161). Not taking these more recent texts by Honneth into account, Petherbridge concludes that ‘the interplay between intersubjectivity, subjectivity, conflict, and power cannot be accounted for by his theory of recognition as it stands’ (p. 164). What started as a broad-based theory of intersubjectivity, mostly by criticizing Habermas, has been narrowed down to a theory of recognition and even further to a notion of primary affective interdependence (p. 164) which, according to Petherbridge, negatively impacts Honneth’s parameters of critical social theory including a critique of power (p. 164).
What Petherbridge’s systematic reconstruction of these debates demonstrates is that Honneth achieves two things. On the one hand, he establishes recognition as an anthropological foundation underpinning all social interaction. On the other hand, these existential and elementary forms of recognition have a historic dimension which means what exactly they hold is ‘open to historical change and to the future of social struggles’ (p. 168) for recognition. What is constant is the anthropological need for recognition as form, while the contents of the three forms of recognition are subject to historical changes. In the latter sense, the three patterns of recognition also act as counterfactual ideals that allow a critical evaluation of specific institutionalized norms in terms of love/neediness, law/equality and cooperation/achievement (p. 171). This allows a critical view of the degrees of social integration which can be understood as successful when it simultaneously allows social inclusion and individualization. A struggle for recognition in that sense argues for an expansion of the normative base for recognition to increase the number of people included and at the same time expands individuals’ opportunities to successfully express their personal traits and abilities. In my opinion and in line with the premise for social critique mentioned at the very beginning of this review, Honneth’s theory of recognition has a lot of critical purchase to offer in this sense.
Petherbridge, however, is not convinced of self-realization as a ‘context-transcending’ foundation of critique and concludes that Honneth ends up overburdening ‘the category of recognition as both anthropological-ontology and tripartite normative theory’ which ‘resulted in a retreat from the early dynamic and broad-based approach to both philosophical anthropology and intersubjectivity’ (pp. 180–1) which he developed often in contrast to Habermas.
Petherbridge’s main point of critique is that anchoring normativity and recognition in an anthropological need for intersubjectivity prior and independent of power relations results in a power-concealing construction. Despite Honneth’s earlier engagement with Foucault’s notion of relational and constitutive forms of power, he ends up conceptualizing power one-sidedly as domination (p. 189), potentially preventing individuals’ self-realization. Even a more recent distinction between ideological and normative forms of recognition does, in Petherbridge’s opinion, not completely solve the issue of comprising negative as well as positive patterns of power and interaction rather than positioning them as opposites. Moreover, she claims Honneth ‘reinstitutes a separation of action types between norm-free and power-free forms of action’ (p. 199), for which he criticized Habermas in his earlier work. Petherbridge concludes that ‘power and normative forms of relationality need to be theorized simultaneously as forms of social relations that mutually and continually condition one another’ (p. 200). Without taking these forms of social relation into account, normative and power-based forms of intersubjectivity as enduring human capacities cannot successfully be critiqued.
The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth is not an easy read, but it does illuminate and successfully reconstruct the debates with which Honneth over the years has developed, changed and advanced the premises of critical theory. Petherbridge’s criticisms of Honneth all home in on the question of power. As a reader she convinced me that this is an important question, but she did not convince me that the lack of a relational theory of power provides sufficient grounds to criticize Honneth’s theory of recognition. The question that remains open for me is why mutuality, intersubjectivity and the granting/not granting of recognition are seen as non-relational. The very meaning of those words implies a relationship with others from which society and individual identities ultimately emerge rather than being unearthed as pre-existing. The criticism that Honneth’s theory of recognition lacks a theory of power is more valid as a question rather than a criticism. Answering it would add to the purchase of Honneth’s critical theory, but it does not diminish its critical purchase as it stands.