Capitalism,Critique and Social Freedom: An Interview With Axel Honneth on Freedom’s Right

In Freedom’s Right, you develop, in the tradition of moral economism initiated by Hegel and Durkheim and then continued by Polanyi and Parsons, a conception of the market as an institution of recognition, which constitutes with the institutions of “personal relationships” and “democratic will-formation,” the democratic ethical life. ¹ In contrast to Marxist and neoclassical theoretical approaches, you propose to conceive the market not as a norm-free system regulated by functional imperatives, but as an institution of recognition embodying the promise of social freedom. Could you define the specific conception of capitalism at work in Freedom’s Right?

Before I answer the question directly, let me introduce a distinction which is already present in Freedom’s Right, even if not too clearly articulated. As we can already learn from Polanyi, the market as such, taken as an abstract institution for coordinating the exchange of economic goods through the principle of supply and demand, cannot exist without social regulations which determine who counts as a participant and what can be legitimately treated as an economic good. This means that all markets only exist within a network of social regulations, so that we can and should speak of different forms of market society. Capitalism is therefore only one specific form of a market society, i.e., one bound to private property in productive, financial, and land capital with their respective rates of return. All that I say in Freedom’s Right about the normative promise of social freedom within the economic sphere is meant to be related to the institution of a market society, but not to its capitalist form. I leave it completely open in my analysis whether these normative promises can be sufficiently realized within a capitalist market society. I even suggest in my reconstruction that this will not be possible, e.g., when I cite with agreement Durkheim’s idea that abolition of the inheritance law is necessary in order to safeguard equality among market participants. In short, with respect to the economic sphere, my study is concerned with the promises of a market society, not with those of capitalism.

According to your intention of creating a theory of justice as social analysis, you carry out a post-metaphysical reinterpretation of Hegel’s “logic of the concept” in the form of the method of normative reconstruction. This method, in contrast to the Kantian constructivist tradition, relies not on abstract and independent normative principles, but, working through a hermeneutical uncovering of the immanent principles of legitimacy of modern societies, takes its normative foundation from social reality itself. Could you set out the preconditions and main characteristics of your method of normative reconstruction?

On a methodological level, inspired by Hegel, I developed a theory of justice by way of “social analysis” in which the criteria of social justice are derived from the normative claims expressed within the various practical spheres of modern societies. In so doing, I intentionally place myself in opposition to Kantian constructivist approaches, which are based on thought experiments or proceduralist methods. In my view, these approaches make two mistakes: on the one hand, they do not take sufficiently into account the concrete historical claims of the participants and, on the other hand, they are obliged to test the possibility of the application of their normative criteria to social reality only through a separate second step. Unlike these Kantian constructivist approaches, the method which I call “normative reconstruction” derives its requirements of justice directly from the norms inherent in the practical spheres of modern societies and has the objective of defining how these norms are articulated in their respective sphere by retracing the social conflicts and struggles over their appropriate applications and interpretations. In using this method, I was hoping that the reconstructions of these social struggles would indicate a directedness toward moral progress which could permit me to define which norms have been realized in a given practical sphere and what could be done now to realize them in a more adequate fashion. In my analysis, when I observed a deviation from the developmental paths thus reconstructed I defined it as a “normative misdevelopment.” When, on the contrary, it appeared that social conflicts and struggles led to a more adequate application of the considered norms, I qualified these reforms as a “moral progress.”

Could you elaborate further as to why you used the method of normative reconstruction and what are its advantages over a constructivist method?

As I mentioned, the advantage of the method of normative reconstruction seems to me that it does not risk the fatal danger that its own normative principles do not fit the pre-given conditions of social reality; it also respects as far as possible the self-understanding of the participants by relying on how they understand the ethical dimension of the social rules they themselves apply in their own actions. In my approach, I therefore start by reconstructing the normative promises which have made the different institutions of modern societies legitimate in the eyes of the participants; and then, I “reconstruct” the conflictual actions and revolts by which they have tried in the course of the last two hundred years to bring about conditions which could help to realize these promises more sufficiently or adequately. By this reconstruction we can learn what those social conditions under which the normative principles of the different institutions could be realized would have to look like.

In accordance with your method of normative reconstruction, you seem to develop a form of immanent critique of capitalism. By assuming that there does not appear to be a practical alternative to the market and that neither the problem of exploitation nor that of enforced contracts should be regarded as structural deficits which can only be removed by abolishing the capitalist market, it seems that your critique, at least initially, espouses a reformist strategy. Could you define the formal characteristics of your critique of capitalism?

What you call a “reformist strategy” I would prefer to call—in the spirit of John Dewey—an “experimental strategy.” By letting myself being informed by the claims and ambitions of those fighting to realize normative promises, I try to figure out under which conditions social freedom can adequately be realized within the three social spheres of personal relationships, the market society, and the public sphere of democratic will-formation. This “reconstructive search” will never come to a definitive end, because we can never be fully sure what else has to be given as a social condition for the full realization of social freedom within these spheres—each successful step within these struggles for a better institutionalization of the inherent normative promises reveals further conditions for their full realization.

To identify more precisely your position within the critical literature on capitalism, could you explain why you decided to make what seems to be a kind of ethical critique of capitalism instead of a functionalist or a moral critique?

I am not sure whether I would call my own kind of critique an ethical one. If we differentiate between ethical, moral, and functionalist forms of critique of capitalism, we normally refer in all these cases to differences among the external standards applied for such a critique: in an ethical critique, we apply standards of the good life; in a moral critique, we make use of moral standards like equal treatment or freedom; in a functionalist critique, finally, we presuppose standards of well-functioning, a functioning without crisis or disturbances. But to a certain degree, these are all external criteria, not taken from the self-understanding of the participants, but constructed by considerations of a different sort like moral or ethical reasoning. I wanted to get rid of all these external kinds of critique altogether by applying an immanent form of critique, namely by starting from the institutionally based promises of the different social spheres of modern societies.

Your normative reconstruction of the sphere of “personal relationships” reveals that the capitalist market, driven by its tendencies toward expansion and autonomization, colonizes the realization of social freedom in friendship and intimate relationships. Could you describe the normative principles at the foundation of these two spheres?

In my book, I try to show that friendships and marriage-based families—sexual relationships were not yet recognized as such—were transformed during the 18th century by understanding them more and more as mutual relations in which the partners involved are caring for the self-realization of the other out of free will and affection. In that sense, I believe that the whole domain of personal relationships was from that time on based on principles of social freedom, understood as an uncoerced completion of two or more partners out of affection for each other and for the purpose of helping each other in the difficult process of realizing oneself. On this basis, one has to differentiate between friendships, intimate relationships, and families depending on the kind of self-realization which is meant to be helped by the uncoerced cooperation. My normative reconstruction aims to show that over the last two hundred years these normative principles have become more and more articulated by a slow, conflict-driven process of internal democratization of different forms of personal relationships.

In your analysis of these two spheres, you cautiously mention sociological researches which indicate, on the one hand, that because of increasing individualization and more intense pressure to perform, the existence of personal friendship is seen to be at risk and, on the other hand, that the increasing demand for mobility, flexibility, and constant availability makes it more and more difficult for couples to put into practice the normative rules of intimate relationships because of its “capitalistic reshaping of subjectivity.” What are the main features of your critical diagnosis?

I am generally more optimistic about the sphere of personal relationships than about the other ethical spheres I try to reconstruct in my study. In other words, I believe that friendships, intimate relationships, and families are experienced today as valuable forms of life, because certain internal inequalities have meanwhile gradually been overcome, so that the partners have more equal standing than before and therefore may experience their cooperation as a realization of social freedom. On the other hand, I do see certain challenges resulting from a growing dis-embedding of the capitalist market, which forces the subjects to develop attitudes of self-interest and individual career planning that undermine the commitment necessary for engaging in personal relationships of that sort I have in mind.

What measures would you suggest to countervail the negative effects of capitalism on the recognitional institutions and practices of friendship and intimate relationships?

The flourishing of different forms of personal relationships depends on clear-cut limitations on institutional demands stemming from role-obligations we have because of our participation in other social spheres. Instead of indicating concrete measures, I therefore would prefer to only outline the direction of my answer: each sphere has to be so limited that its demands on the individual subject do not create role-obligations which interfere with the commitments necessary for our engagement within the other spheres—the market, for example, has to be so regulated that it leaves us sufficient time, motivation, and creativity to remain worthwhile friends, active lovers, and good-enough family members.

In the normative reconstruction of the market-mediated sphere of consumption, it appears that a stable set of moral demands to socialize it in order to realize its underlying promise of social freedom has been formulated since the nineteenth century. Could you describe the specific normative embodiment of social freedom in this sphere?

The economic sphere of consumption promises from its beginning in my view that via a division of labor and a mutual concern for the wants of the others all basic and “true” needs will be sufficiently satisfied. Taken seriously, that presupposes that each one has the opportunity to find out his or her “true needs” and that these non-manipulated needs are taken into account within the sphere of production. Without certain institutions within the sphere of consumption, which help by “discursive mechanisms” to coordinate between publicly articulated needs and production, such a form of social freedom would not be possible.

Although we have seen some relative progress toward placing the sphere of consumption under moral principles over the course of its history, your analysis concludes that the current lack of discursive mechanisms to influence companies, the growth of a private consumerist mentality, and the fragmentation of consumers represent normative misdevelopments. Could you set out this critical diagnosis in further detail?

Those are indeed the deficiencies in the sphere of consumption, which I have identified in my normative reconstruction of the last two hundred years. Besides some progress through establishing political agencies for consumer protection and by the development of what is called “moral consumption,” what we can observe today is an almost unlimited capacity of industrial enterprises to manipulate economic demand—the individual consumer seems completely helpless today, because he or she is isolated and some of his or her more basic needs can hardly be satisfied due to a complete privatization of the respective goods.

What solutions would you propose to overcome the normative misdevelopments of the sphere of consumption?

A democratization of the sphere of consumption, which only can go hand in hand with a democratization of the sphere of production. For good reason, I restrained myself in the book from speculating too much about the direction the economic sphere has to take in order to allow social freedom to flourish there; but if pressed on this question I would follow some ideas of Diane Elson who, in an article on “Socializing Markets,” proposed to start with an empowerment of already existing consumer councils along with a diversification of property rights in the direction of an increase of individual rights of household members to common property, something like a basic income. ³ With such preconditions, one could think of much stronger consumer councils with the regulatory power to determine to a certain degree what kinds of goods have to be produced in the common interest.

In your normative reconstruction of the labor market, guided by the interpretation of Hegel and Durkheim, you observe that a continuous struggle for socialization has occurred since the nineteenth century, and that moral demands to realize social freedom in this sphere remain largely identical from then until the present day. Could you define the normative foundation of the labor market sphere?

The normative promises the labor market implicitly includes seem relatively obvious to me: that every able person will have a fair chance to find the kind of work suited for his or her own competences, that this occupation provides him or her with the economic income necessary for living a “good enough” life defined relative to cultural standards, and that the respective occupation is sufficiently complex to be understood as a contribution to the overall division of labor. Some of these normative requirements are already found in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; others were later stressed by Durkheim and his school.

If under the pressure of long workers’ struggles, several social achievements were won in this sphere, notably during the period of “organized capitalism” from 1945 to 1975, a significant number of them have been dismantled in the course of the 1990s with the liberalization of the labor market. The reduction of income, the increased deregulation and precariousness of employment, and the growing requirement that wage laborers make themselves “marketable” and internalize external demands have led you to qualify the neoliberal transformation of capitalism as a normative misdevelopment. Could you define the main features of your critical diagnosis of the labor market?

That is relatively easy to understand, when you take the normative standards I have just outlined as a criterion. I would call any new labor market measure which violates already established settlements moving toward the normative standards mentioned above, instances of misdevelopment—take, for example, the rapid “casualization” of jobs, the rapid growth of flexible labor, the undermining of what is called by David M. Kotz “co-respective competition,” the penetration of market principles within large corporations. All these developments can easily be understood as misdevelopments.

To overcome these normative misdevelopments, what countermeasures would you envision?

Given present conditions, a realistic perspective would be, first, to reinstate some of the regulations already established in former periods, including some right of co-determination by workers, firm, and satisfying labor contracts that overrule flexible occupations and fixed-term contracts, certain accomplishments with respect to what was called within the trade-union movement the “humanization of work.” Only after having regained these standards would it in my view be possible to continue the struggle for an increase of social freedom, where it had ended with the neoliberal countermovement. Here, again, if pressed, I would turn to the proposals outlined by Diane Elson, which include some feasible ideas how to “socialize” the labor market.

In your normative reconstruction of the “democratic will-formation sphere,” you observe that a process of struggle to realize its promise of social freedom has been underway since its emergence in the eighteenth century. Could you define the specific embodiment of the promise of social freedom in this sphere?

Here I am more or less following Habermas’ idea of the democratic public sphere, which includes, according to him, the normative promise to equip everyone who is affected by certain political decisions with the symbolic and material means to participate “without fear and shame” in the public debates necessary for the formation of a common will on those decisions. This includes much more than having at one’s disposal the economic prerequisites for standing up in public. It also presupposes democratic schools that are available to everyone, a media system which takes as its central task to inform everyone about relevant matters and different perspectives on them. In one passage in Freedom’s Right, I try to summarize all these necessary preconditions, and it becomes immediately obvious that to establish them all sufficiently would be a never-ending task for an undeterminable future. ⁴

In your analysis of the “democratic will-formation sphere,” you consider that the commercialization of the media, the class character of the constitutional state, and its inclination toward capitalist interests represent normative misdevelopments. Could you explain in greater details what are your critical diagnoses?

Here I am not alone. There are a lot of convincing analyses today demonstrating the degree to which the process of democratic will-formation is undermined by many circumstances, from a failure of the public media due to their dependence on profit-making to the inadequate equipment of young kids from poorer and lower classes with requisite knowledge and democratic competences and the growing dependence of political decisions on capitalist imperatives. This last point is probably the most important in creating either a growing apathy within the population or a tendency toward populist right-wing parties in our Western countries—the more the feeling dominates within the public that the results of its own will-formation have no impact on political decision making by the government because of seemingly unmovable constraints set by economic imperatives, the less active it will be in participating at these processes of will-formation.

What solution would you suggest to overcome these normative misdevelopments?

Again, the task ahead of us to revitalize the democratic public sphere is enormous and cannot be outlined from the desk of the philosopher. Besides the reinvention of a truly democratic media and the establishment of a successful public school system available to everyone, the main task would consist in destabilizing the broadly shared conviction that capitalism in its given form is somewhat unchangeable, so that no political intervention has any chance of success. To a certain degree, I therefore believe that the precondition for any recovery of a trust of the public in its own democratic power would be a successful undermining of the dominant economic theory which makes us believe that the given conditions of capitalist market can only be changed at the price of enormous economic disadvantages—the true enemy of a revitalization of the democratic sphere is the discipline of economics as it is taught today in our leading universities.

If we consider your individual analyses of social spheres as a whole, it emerges that the normative foundation of your critique of capitalism is freedom. To explicate the full meaning of your normative criterion, you discuss three kinds of freedom in the first part of your book: negative, reflexive, and social freedom. Could you define the most important traits of each of these?

In making this distinction among three forms of individual freedom, I follow to a large extent proposals Hegel made in his Philosophy of Right. If we start from the famous bifurcation between “negative” and “positive” liberty as developed by Isaiah Berlin in his famous article, where negative liberty means the absence of any hindrance to the realization of one’s own intentions and positive liberty refers to self-determination by respecting some higher good, it soon becomes obvious that this list cannot be complete: it doesn’t allow us to take forms of freedom where the realization of my intention is dependent on the realization of the intention by somebody else into consideration, so that it is only the intertwinement of our intentions which allows the uncoerced exercise of individual freedom. ⁵ It is my strong conviction, as expressed in the book, that this third category of freedom, which I call social freedom, is somewhat neglected in our modern self-understanding even when it is inevitable to explain the specific characteristics of certain constitutive relationships like the one between democratic citizens or friends and lovers. The thesis that the form of social praxis exemplified by democratic will-formation and personal relationships constitutes an independent category of freedom has been an undercurrent in political-philosophic thinking since Hegel. Hegel himself believed that the two forms of freedom, which Berlin would later label as positive and negative, did not reach the highest level of freedom, which ought to be available to members of modern society. Instead, he conceived of a third stage of freedom, which he called “objective freedom,” a term whose meaning remains contested by scholars. The basic thought Hegel proceeded from is woven into the terminology of his philosophical thinking, but can be rendered independent of this framework in a much simpler form: the conception of freedom in the negative sense, according to which it is required that there be no impediments to the exercise of the will in the external world fails in Hegel’s view to consider that such subjective intentions can be truly free only when they are independent from causal force and thus anchored in self-posited reasons. Kant, following Rousseau, had similarly concluded that the will can only be free when its content is determined by rational considerations. Hegel argues that this Kantian view, however, leads to the equally peculiar consequence that there is no guarantee that self-determined intentions can actually be realized in the objective world. From the defects of these two concepts of freedom, Hegel developed a synthetic view according to which the complete idea of individual freedom would only be achieved if the self-posited resolutions of the will can be thought of as furthered or “willed” in or even by reality. For Hegel, this was possible in those “ethical” spheres of modern society in which the freely chosen intentions of participants intertwine with one another, complement one another, and thus find “willed” fulfillment within social reality. I take up this Hegelian line of thought in order to propose a tripartite distinction among negative, reflexive, and social freedom, which all have their constitutive place within the institutional structure of modern societies.

Could you explain how these three kinds of freedom are instantiated in institutions of recognition and how the interactions among them might secure a well-balanced combination permitting human subjects to be free?

Again, following Hegel, one could say that our normative idea of negative freedom has found its best institutional expression in the domain of law or individual rights, the task of which is to secure the private autonomy of each citizen equally, while our idea of reflexive freedom in the Kantian sense has best been institutionalized in a cultural system which requires us—without any sanction by the state—reciprocally to respect the autonomously determined moral convictions of the other. And the idea of social freedom as I have defined it after Hegel has been institutionalized as a regulative normative ideal within those social institutions which I call after Talcott Parsons’ “relational institutions,” namely those in which I can realize my own intentions only under the condition that the other participants realize theirs in an intertwined way—I have in mind here personal relationships, the economic market understood as a mechanism for peaceful coordination, and the public sphere as the domain of democratic will-formation. The participation in each of these five social spheres allows the individual person to be recognized in very different aspects of his or her subjectivity, be it the capacity to make himself or herself independent of others, the capacity for moral self-determination, the capacity to express and realize natural desires, the capacity to contribute to the division of labor, or the capacity to form an ethical-political conviction in deliberating with others. What I do not want to say now is that the aggregation of these five forms of positive self-relationship makes the subject feel completely at home within the social world of modern societies. There will always be a split between him and her and the institutional world because of the inaccessibility and indeterminacy of one’s own nature—but beyond this unavoidable fissure between subjectivity and the social world, for which the best form of articulation would be irony, the possibility to participate successfully in all of these social spheres of action constitutes what one could call “a good life” under the conditions of modern societies.

Your conception of social freedom, which might, as a first approximation, be conceived as “the will of oneself willed by others,” seems at the same time to assign freedom to the individual and to refer to something beyond him in the form of a relation of mutual recognition with others. Could you specify what your conception of social freedom is?

If we look back once more on the examples of social freedom I mentioned earlier—democratic will-formation, love, and friendship, and finally, for socialists, economic production—the first element to note is that the participating subjects must understand themselves as members of a “We” without, however, losing their individual independence. To be sure, the actions they want to carry out are bound up with the assumption of complementary actions on the part of others, which demonstrates the reciprocal taking-up of the perspective of the “We.” But this in no way suggests that they together constitute a collective which acts like an enlarged “I.” With Philip Pettit, we can label the social ontological position by which this intersubjective exercise of freedom can best be grasped as “holistic individualism.” This concept assumes that the realization of certain human capacities requires social groupings and thus entities that can only be described holistically, but does not in any way preclude the existence of independent individuals. Why, nonetheless, should individual actions that presuppose a community of cooperative subjects be understood as exemplifying a particular class of freedom? What is so distinctive about such unforced intertwining of actions that makes it justifiable to introduce a new category of freedom alongside the existing concepts of negative and positive freedom? Here, in my view, Hegel and Dewey point toward an answer. Both are of the opinion that the distinctiveness of the reciprocal process of unforced intertwining of ends lies in the fact that the contribution of each is experienced as willed by the other. In contrast to all other actions, which can either be understood as “negatively” or “positively” free, this class of cooperative actions shows that we can each assume the consent of the other and thus can carry out our own action with a consciousness of unforced responsiveness. Not only is there no expectation of arbitrary interference from partners to the interaction; more than this, one can trust that what one freely does will also be freely wished by the other or all other participants. In more systematic terms, the uncoerced nature of a communicative action is here increased because both sides know of each other not only that they are performing a freely chosen action but also that the carrying out of this action fulfills an autonomously generated intention of the other. Hegel emphasizes above all the cognitive side of the exercise of social freedom as it should exist in the reflexive structure of commonly shared knowledge. Dewey much more starkly stresses the affective side, in the enjoyment of experiencing how one’s own actions are seen by others as preparing the way for completing their own ongoing actions.

After having shown the importance of the value of freedom compared to other modern normative principles, you assume, along with Hegel, Durkheim, Habermas, and Rawls, that it forms the basis of the legitimacy of modern society’s social order and, consequently, place it at the center of your normative reconstruction and your critiques. Could you justify why the value of freedom constitutes the normative foundation of your critiques and why this normative criterion is more attractive than others competing criteria?

I think I can answer this question relatively concisely: individual freedom—in the different forms it takes—is the highest value in our modern societies because all the other values can be justified only with reference to their contributive or instrumental role for actualizing individual freedom. To give you only one example, if I take the communitarian value of social bonding and communal experiences, it becomes in my view obvious that these goods can only be explained or justified by reference to what they contribute to the realization of one’s own freedom, namely the experience of being in a playful accordance with others.

In Freedom’s Right you rely primarily on a detailed account of social struggles and institutional structures of recognition to justify your critiques normatively. Yet it seems that there is still implicit in the background of your theory a formal anthropology which asserts that the subjects need the necessary conditions of recognition to fulfill their needs, interests, and aims, and through their practices of mutual recognition, realize their freedom. Could you explain what—if anything—is the role of your formal anthropology of recognition in Freedom’s Right and how do you articulate it with your account of the institutional structures of recognition?

The anthropological ideas which I am presupposing in my institutional account of modern societies are extremely thin and do not go beyond what you can find in other theories of the same tradition, such as those of G. H. Mead or Charles Taylor: it is a universal condition for gaining a consciousness of one’s own freedom and of subjectivity to be in one form or another respected in the eyes of the others. This universal condition finds, as Hegel has shown convincingly, different institutional articulations depending on culture and history.

To characterize your normative position further, it seems that if your implicit formal anthropology of recognition and the reference to the contextualized but “universal” character of freedom and its normative “surplus of validity” open a path to a quasi-transcendence for your critique’s normative justification, your detailed account of modern institutions of recognition and their substantive normative principles balances the former conceptualizations with a form of contextualism. ⁶ Could you situate your normative perspective in the relativism and universalism debate and explain in which respect the normative justification of your critique goes beyond contextualism?

My own approach hopes to overcome all forms of pure contextualism by articulating strongly the “surplus of validity” built into all institutional norms which regulate our actions within modern societies. In addressing this surpassing meaning of all the relevant ideas of freedom constitutive of our regulated activities within different spheres, it becomes clear that the full realization of this meaning is a task ahead of us that can never be completed.