Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis

Social pathologies as socially-produced obstacles to human self-realization

Perhaps the most intuitive conception of social pathology is that of socially-created obstacles to human self-realization. Such a broad understanding is not limited to a particular domain of the social, nor to any particular modality or logic. In such a framing, any socially-created obstacle to human self-realization can be analysed and discussed as a social pathology. This approach is of real utility in that it enables a species of critique which is much ‘thicker’ than traditional liberal concerns of ‘political-moral legitimacy’ or ‘injustice’ (Honneth, 2007: 10; Neuhouser, 2012). Framed in this open, ‘anti-theoretical’ manner (Laitinen and Sarkela, 2019: 80), one can see the clear proximity between social pathology diagnosing critique and ethical critiques of the social. The heurism of social pathology, understood in this broadest sense, enables social theorists to conduct analysis of the appropriateness of ways of living, and of the structural restrictions ‘forms of life’ place on subjects achieving self-realization (Honneth, 2000). When held in this broad framing, it is through the exposition, diagnosis and analysis of such social pathologies, that social theorists may ask, in Erich Fromm’s words, ‘whether there is not something fundamentally wrong with [both] our way of life and with the aims towards which we are striving’ ([1955] 1963: 10).

Within this broad, encompassing framing, an analysis of social pathology: (1) operates as a species of critique which is ‘thicker’ than traditional liberal social criticism; and (2) necessitates an implicit understanding of the relationship between forms of social existence and the capacity for human self-realization.

This broad framing of social pathology enables a ‘deeper’, or ‘thicker’ species of critique than that attempted by liberal social and political theory (Neuhouser, 2012). This can be understood in two distinct ways. First, social pathology diagnosis attempts to do more than the critique of injustice. As Neuhouser argues, ‘It is not that the category of injustice is always irrelevant to diagnoses of social pathology, but rather that, even when considerations of justice are relevant, calling a pathology “injustice” under-describes it’ (2012: 629; emphasis added). Obvious examples of such maladies, not fully captured by traditional liberal framings, include the problems of environmental degradation, the logics responsible for global warming, or colonialism. What the diagnosis of a social pathology expresses is the belief that social processes have developed that circumscribe the potential for human flourishing (Neuhouser, 2012). The heurism of social pathology can carry this greater normative and analytical weight. Thus, using this broad conception of social pathology diagnosis, one could present global warming, or better phrased, the plurality of dynamics responsible for global warming, as social pathology (or pathologies), for it represents ‘social circumstances [which] violate those conditions which constitute a necessary presupposition for a good life amongst us’ (Honneth, 2000: 122). This marks a fundamental change in the theoretical register, enabling more foundational and radical social criticism.

Such a diagnosis can be read as ‘thicker’ than traditional liberal critique in a second, equally significant manner. Such analysis is inseparable from a normative ethical judgement: a partisan understanding of the good life, however weak (Honneth, 2000; 2007). It would seem impossible to argue that social pathologies ‘violate…[the] conditions…necessary…for a good life amongst us’ (Honneth, 2000: 122), without some antecedent conception of the good life, or at least some conception of the minimum conditions needed for the good life to be achieved (Honneth, 2000). The debated philosophical justifications for such claims have been discussed elsewhere (Honneth, 2000). What remains clear is that this ‘thicker’ species of critique can be further distinguished by its greater normative load than traditional liberal social theoretical instruments.

Drawing on this understanding of social pathologies as expressing thicker, normatively undergirded critiques of ‘forms of life’, a secondary point of analysis emerges. The diagnosis of social pathologies is an analysis of a limitation or restriction produced by social forces upon human subjects’ capacity to attain the good life (Honneth, 2000). Fromm’s diagnosis of pathologies was accompanied by his explicit normative humanism (Fromm, [1955] 1963: 12), and such an argument appears essential to facilitate this broad conception of social pathology. To argue that social conditions are ‘pathological’ insofar as they inhibit the capacity of social subjects to attain the good life necessitates (at least) two distinct implicit arguments. First, as established above, it necessitates some form of ethical partisanship: some conception of the good life. Second, and perhaps less controversially, it establishes a direct connection between certain forms of social existence, and the capacity for human beings to attain the good life, howsoever formulated. Whether one embraces Fromm’s normative humanism, or restricts oneself to a less ambitious sketch of the relationship between social conditions and human flourishing (or impediments thereto), this broader conception of social pathology necessitates that such a relationship exists.

The framing of social pathology outlined above is compatible with many of the alternate conceptions discussed below. What this broad understanding enables is the critique of socially produced impediments to human self-realization, and thus remains essential to the capacity for social theorists to engage in the normatively weighty question of the appropriateness of forms of life for human flourishing.

It could be argued that such a broad, ‘anti-theoretical’ (Laitinen and Sarkela, 2019: 80) conception of social pathology is of limited utility. One could question why such an approach merits the description of ‘pathology diagnosis’, rather than more straightforwardly being presented as a form of ‘ethical critique’. Drawing on Honneth’s (2000; 2007) earlier framings of social pathology, I submit that the social pathology diagnosis derives from the same injunction to question the dominant mores and modalities of the social world: there is indeed a substantial overlap between the broadest definition of social pathology and ethical critiques of the social world. However, following Honneth, I contend that the language and framing of pathology are apposite in that they better carry the weight of something that has ‘gone awry’, something in the social lifeworld that has placed ‘structural limitations…on the goal of human self-realization’ (Honneth, 2007: 10).

To this extent, Honneth and Neuhouser both present Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the social pathologist par excellence (Honneth, 2007; Neuhouser, 2012). In Honneth’s formulation, Rousseau’s work was animated by the desire to show the presence of exactly such ‘structural limitations’. Rousseau can be read as articulating more than an injustice, indeed, more than the exhortation of an ethical critique. Rather, through his analysis and exposition of numerous social pathologies, the citoyen de Genève sought to articulate the breadth of socially produced impediments to human flourishing. Thus, as I establish below, numerous conceptions of social pathology may be said to exist, which, at their broadest, might overlap with, and might be animated by, a similar critical injunction to ethical critique. However, more theoretically specific framings of social pathology, as discussed below, are perhaps best conceived of at greater distance from ethical critique.

Negative self-perpetuating dynamics

The second conception of social pathology can be grasped as a more restrictive framing of the first. Once again, social pathology refers to socially-produced obstacles to human self-realization, yet it restricts the possible candidates to those which exhibit a particular dynamic. In Neuhouser’s framing, we can grasp one conception of a social pathology as a species of self-perpetuating negative dynamic that exacerbates bad situations, and that, once initiated, is almost impossible to halt (Neuhouser, 2012). Annexed to this understanding is the very real possibility that such dynamics may be occurring beyond the consciousness of social subjects. Neuhouser (2012) has identified this conceptualization of social pathology (among others) as being highly prevalent in Rousseau’s work. For illustrative purposes it is worth examining some of the examples Neuhouser puts forward; see below a short excerpt from a longer passage from the Discourse on Political Economy that Neuhouser analyses:

In order to raise these armies, tillers had to be taken off the land; the shortage of them lowered the quality of the produce, and the armies’ upkeep introduced taxes that raised its price. This first disorder caused the people to grumble: in order to repress them, the number of troops had to be increased, and, in turn, the misery; and the more despair increased, the greater the need to increase it still more in order to avoid its consequences. (Rousseau, [1755] 1997: 28–9)

While this conception of social pathology restricts the heuristic to the analysis of negative dynamics, it offers a targeted framing through which to critique socially-produced obstacles to the good life. Neuhouser (2012) persuasively argues that one can easily imagine a scenario where the poverty and social misery, created at T1, necessitate that, even if all future conduct was equitable, the initial social maladies will only be worsened by T2. The framing of such dynamics as social pathologies seems pertinent and enabling.

Social pathologies of reason

Freyenhagen has written of ‘social pathology’ and ‘pathology diagnosis’ as representing ‘the distinctive theoretical resource of Critical Theory’ (2015: 131). The framing of ‘social pathology’ used within the Critical Theoretical tradition is highly influenced by the left-Hegelian critique of historically effective reason. Thus, the conception of ‘social pathology’ most familiar to Critical Theorists is of ‘social pathologies of reason’ (Honneth, 2004). Retaining much of the structure of the first conception outlined, ‘social pathologies of reason’ represent instances of limitations of rationality within the social world impeding subjects from attaining self-realization. To crudely surmise the origins of this conception, left-Hegelians broadly strive for a ‘rational’ society, critiquing aspects of social life which fail to live up to the highest possible existing standard of reason (Marcuse, [1941] 1970). It should be stressed that this metaphysically weighty conception of reason exists both in the cognitive capacities of the subject, but more broadly, within the spirit (Geist) of the social. Pathologies of reason represent instances of society failing to attain the highest standards of accessible historically effective reason (Honneth, 2004). As Honneth contends, in their various formulations, left-Hegelians submit that ‘a rational universal is always required for the possibility of fulfilled self-realization within society’ (2004: 341). It is thus equally the cognitive capacities of the social subject, and the material social institutions and processes inhibiting such self-realization, that are framed as evincing deficient social rationality: as admitting to pathologies of reason. Rationality is manifest, and perpetuated, both socially, and in cognitive form: in the subjects themselves. The Critical Theoretical diagnosis of social pathologies thus focuses on both social institutions, and the ideological constructions that interpellate subjects, facilitating social reproduction.

Such a framing of social pathology, carrying this metaphysically weighty conception of ‘reason’, provides a singular register capable of engaging simultaneously with cognitive and social-structural restrictions to achieving the rational society. Honneth draws out how such a lens can be applied across social theory, presenting Marx’s critique of capitalist economics in such a light. Framed as such, Marx can be read as arguing ‘the actual organisation of society…[falls] short of the standards of rationality that are already embedded in the forces of production’ (Honneth, 2004: 340). The market order evinces social pathologies in that it fails to reach the standards of rationality extant within society. Connecting this conception of social pathology with the first, broader outline, one can position this reading of social pathology thus: ‘the methods of distribution of goods and services in capitalist society fail to attain the highest degree of rationality that exists; this sub-optimal social organization prevents subjects from attaining self-realization’.

Similarly, one might view Freud’s analysis of repressive social relations as exhibiting similar pathologies of reason. The inability to engage with sexuality in an unrepressed manner represents, in this light, an irrational social formation. The patterns of socially induced and structured repression can be conceived of as pathologies of reason, socially produced inhibitors to human self-realization, where society fails to achieve the highest standard of reason existing within its potential for social organization.

While this pathologies of reason conception may be critiqued for its over-reliance on an inaccessible and metaphysically weighty Hegelianism, this framing presents a singular rubric which enables the critique of social institutions and socialized manners of thought as ‘pathological’. In direct contrast to the ascendant ‘recognition-cognitive’ framing of social pathologies, the pathologies of reason optic avoids a problematic, and potentially ossifying, binary between the cognitive and the material. In direct contrast to the dominant recognition-cognitive approach, the pathologies of reason framing succeeds in opening both the cognitive, and the manifestly material, to critical analysis.

Pathologies of normalcy

The fourth conception of social pathology that I outline is Fromm’s ‘pathologies of normalcy’ (Fromm, [1955] 1963: 6). Fromm discusses how the validatory impact of mass acquiescence to damaging social dynamics serves to obscure their non-essential and irrational nature. For Fromm, the process through which ‘consensual validation’ functions to deter people from questioning the sanity and legitimacy of fundamental social processes represents an endemic social pathology (p. 14). Fromm’s pathologies of normalcy approach operates at the interface of social interaction and cognitive functioning. Ultimately this framing of social pathology speaks to nothing less than the potential for socially induced mass insanity. As Fromm colourfully articulates, ‘just as there is “folie à deux” there is “folie à millions”’ (p. 15). Fromm’s conception of social pathologies of normalcy serves to equip the critical social theorist with a theoretical tool to unpick the legitimizing effects of mass validation (Ratner, 2014). It is thus the process of mass validation, and the resultant impeded cognitive, and ultimately impeded existential state, that comprise the social pathology. While Fromm’s framework can be read as primarily cognitive, it is equally important to follow Fromm’s indictments of the pathological nature of the social dynamics.

The chapter of The Sane Society that prefigures ‘Can a Society Be Sick? The Pathology of Normalcy’, where Fromm outlines his conception, evocatively presages his analysis. Discussing the past century, Fromm comments on the history of ‘mutual slaughter’, of friendly nations who become enemies, before becoming allies once more, often within the course of a single generation. He comments that while this is well known to all, we continue to ‘paint…[our enemies and allies]…with appropriate colours of black and white’ (Fromm, [1955] 1963: 4). For Fromm, this condition has acquired an even greater urgency, as humanity teeters towards nuclear apocalypse, in wait ‘for a mass slaughter which would…surpass any slaughter the human race has arranged so far’ (p. 4). Fromm contends that indeed the history of ‘the last three thousand years’ is typified by ‘destructiveness and paranoid suspicion’ (p. 4). Such social irrationality is not limited to disastrous foreign policy, but can be found in ‘our direction of economic affairs’ (p. 5), the ‘sadistic phantasies [sic]’ of contemporary arts, and even in the typical allocation of the waking hours (p. 6). Fromm is moved to conclude that:

if an individual acted in…[such a manner]…serious doubts would be raised as to his sanity; should he, however, claim that there is nothing wrong, and that he is acting perfectly reasonably, then the diagnosis would not even be doubtful any more. (p. 6)

Fromm’s capacity to declare the social order ‘insane’ derives from his meta-ethical formulation of ‘normative humanism’, as discussed above (p. 12). Fromm holds that there are right and wrong solutions to the questions of human existence. The continued dominance of inadequate conditions is due to mass social acquiescence to the naturalness and logicality of the ‘wrong’ status quo. Society’s capacity to reproduce in its current, ‘wrong’ form, is contingent on the existence of this pathology of normalcy. Fromm’s analysis is driven by a desire for radical praxis; the remarkable capacity for subjects to acquiesce to, and operate within pathological normalcy is insufficient for human self-realization. The true nature of the pathology is that while it may seem that ‘what [man]…may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with mankind’ (p. 15); such a loss can never be mitigated. For Fromm, it can never be a question ‘of individual adjustment to a given social reality, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence’ (p. 14).

Under conditions of pathological normalcy, Fromm submits that the wider population fails to identify the magnitude of the deviations from the conditions necessitated by normative humanism. Fromm makes it clear that if the populace were conscious of the meta-social insanity that it was operating under, his categorization would not be applicable. The essential nature of this species of pathology is the ‘socially patterned defect’ that obscures the limitations of the social order (p. 15). As Fromm argues, ‘the individual shares…[this defect]…with many others’, so that he is ‘is not aware of it as a defect’, thus ‘his security is not threatened by the experience of being different’ (p. 15). Ultimately the pathology is both instigated and perpetuated by ‘consensual validation’ (p. 14). As Fromm argues:

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is ‘folie à deux’ there is ‘folie à millions’. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact the millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. (pp. 14–15)

Pathologies of recognition

While the aforementioned conceptions have been stalwart influences on critical social theory, the much-chronicled ‘intersubjective turn’ made rapid inroads on previously dominant understandings of social pathology (Varga and Gallagher, 2012). It was the idea of recognition, and of ‘struggles for recognition’, which truly reoriented discussion on the ‘pathological’ in social relations (Kok and van Houdt, 2014; Laitinen, Sarkela and Ikaheimo, 2015: 5). Chronologically, this challenge to the ‘productivist bias’ of much Critical Theory (Jay, 2012: 5) can been traced to Charles Taylor (Heywood, 2007). The success of his Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, with its accessible prose, served to bring ‘recognition’ to the forefront of the imagination of both activists and critical social theorists (Heywood, 2007: 316). For Taylor, the absence of due recognition ‘can be a form of oppression’ can ‘imprison…[subjects]…in…false distorted, and reduced mode(s) of being’ (Taylor, 1994: 25). While Taylor’s work served to locate recognition at the centre of critical social theory from the mid-1990s, it was Axel Honneth’s engagement with recognition which is ‘generally acknowledged’ as ‘presenting the most ambitious agenda…utilizing the idea of recognition in contemporary social theory’ (Laitinen, Sarkela and Ikaheimo, 2015: 6). For Alexander and Lara, Honneth has succeeded in creating an entire Critical Theory derivative from the central tenets of the recognition theoretical outlook (1996: 126–36). It must be explicitly stated that Honneth’s wide-ranging engagement with recognition extends far beyond discussions of social pathology.

The basis for what has become known as Honneth’s critical theory of recognition was first published in 1992 as Kampf um Anerkennung and printed in English three years later as The Struggle for Recognition. Drawing on Mead’s psychology, and Winnicott’s object relations theory, Honneth sought to build a ‘social theory with normative content’ derived from Hegel’s Jena writings acceptable in today’s ‘condition of post-metaphysical thinking’ (Honneth, [1992] 1995: 1). Thus, displacing metaphysics with empirical psychology, sociology and psycho-analysis, Honneth presented the utility of viewing the entirety of the social as a network of recognition relationships. Honneth presented the foundational social institutions as essential for generating different forms of intersubjective recognition. The spheres of the family, the market, the legal system, inter alia are all understood by Honneth as sites for demands of, and representing the potential for, rational, equitable recognition relationships. For Honneth, feelings of ‘disrespect’ and ‘injustice’, which catalyze protest and agitation, evince ‘relational disorders’ that should be ‘assessed within the categories of mutual recognition’ (Honneth, [1992] 1995: 106). Such obstacles to achieving recognition became the newly constituted pathologies of the social: pathologies of recognition. The ‘recognition turn’ thus redefines, and builds upon, previous conceptions of social pathology.

The framing shares structural similarities with the left-Hegelian analysis of defective reason, insofar as the focus is on the irrational nature of recognition dynamics, and locates the analysis in both the social, and in the cognitive capacities of the subjects. Analysing ‘pathologies of recognition’ exposes ‘failures of recognizing recognition relationships successfully’ (Hirvonen, 2015: 209) in the social world, and the ‘cognitive disconnects’ (Zurn, 2011) social patterns inculcate in subjects, inhibiting their capacity to recognize the other.

One can also see a clear connection to the broader conception of pathology outlined: irrational relations of recognition inhibit social subjects from achieving the good life. Recall that Honneth has no intention of eschewing normative content. Indeed, Honneth is at pains to outline his ‘weak formal anthropology’ (2007: 42), the requirement for intersubjectively derived ‘love’, ‘respect’ and ‘esteem’, all essential for self-realization. Elsewhere Honneth goes so far as to justify his ‘weak formal anthropology’ (Honneth, 2007: 42) as a means of discussing ‘formal conceptions of ethical life’ (Honneth, [1992] 2005: 171–9). The conception of social pathology as patterns of recognition relationships that inhibit self-realization appears prima facie a progressive development on older understandings of social pathology.

One of the more problematic and reductive implications of this transition is the manner in which Honneth presents his critical theory of recognition as a means to comprehend the totality of the pathologies of the social. In an extended debate with Nancy Fraser, Honneth contends that indeed even contestations over the distribution of resources are best conceptualized as ‘specific kind(s) of struggle(s) for recognition’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 171). As I discuss in the second part of this article, while the recognition turn has tremendous potential and insight to offer critical social theory, a move to a reductive, cognitivist and singular lens to view the social, jeopardizes the critical potency of the pathology diagnosing tradition.

The first section of this article introduced five different understandings of social pathology. I commenced by discussing the broadest conception, borne of the ethical injunction to critique the social world, which engages with any socially produced obstacles to subjects achieving the good life. Next, I outlined a more restrictive conception of social pathology, which views social pathologies as necessarily evincing self-perpetuating negative dynamics. To this end, I engaged with Neuhouser’s analysis of a section of Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy. I then outlined the orthodox critical theoretical, left-Hegelian understanding of social pathology. I discussed how such a framing offers a singular lens capable of engaging with both irrational social structures and their cognitive manifestations. The discussion then moved to Fromm’s understanding of social pathologies of normalcy. Finally, I outlined the most recent transition in the critical framing of social pathologies: the move to a pathologies of recognition framework. I will discuss this conception in more detail shortly. As established, while some of these conceptions interact seamlessly and derive logically from each other, others sit in relative isolation, even proscribing the critical potential of alternate understandings.

The purpose of this discussion has been twofold: first, to clarify these competing and diverse understandings of social pathology to enable us to better grasp what is meant by the heurism. Second, the discussion served to foreground my critique of recent developments in the literature surrounding social pathology. My analysis is indicative of the true breadth of understandings harboured within the framing of social pathology. To a greater or lesser extent, this discussion has served to make evident the radical critical potential that the pathology diagnosing heurism offers contemporary social theory.

The ascendancy of the recognition-cognitive conception of social pathology

The critical discussion on social pathology was significantly influenced by Christopher Zurn’s intervention (Freyenhagen, 2015). Zurn argued that social pathologies ‘exhibit a similar underlying conceptual structure, that of second-order disorders’ (2011: 345). Such disorders operate through a ‘fundamental disconnect between first-order contents and the subjects’ reflexive grasp of the origins and character of those contents, where that gap systematically serves to preserve otherwise dubious social structures and practices’ (p. 348). Zurn’s framing of social pathology is considerably closer to a structure that one would traditionally associate with ideology, and he indeed argues that:

Marx’s articulation of a theory of ideology…is a good example of the conceptual structure…central to Honneth’s attempts to reinvigorate the practice of social critique through the diagnosis of social pathologies: namely, the grasp of social pathologies as second-order disorders. (p. 346)

Zurn must also be credited with explicitly marrying this cognitivist framing with Honneth’s critical theory of recognition. Zurn’s intervention represents a move towards understanding social pathologies in both a cognitivist and a recognition-theoretical manner. It is this particular conception of social pathology that I term ‘recognition-cognitive’. As Zurn establishes clearly below, it is ideological acts of recognition which represent the reality of social pathologies.

Honneth seeks a way of identifying, in the act of the recognition relationship itself, which markers we could use to say that it is an ideologically distorting, rather than a socially productive, instance of interpersonal recognition. His answer is basically that acts of recognition are ideological when there is a substantial gap between the evaluative acknowledgement or promise that the act centres upon, and the institutional and material conditions necessary for the fulfilment of that acknowledgement or promise. (p. 349)

Freyenhagen rightly comments that Zurn’s formulation serves to locate social pathologies solely ‘in the head’ (Freyenhagen, 2015: 136). Such an approach fails to equip social theorists with the essential tools to identify problems existing in the broader social world; conceptual tools previously offered by the broader conceptions of social pathology expressed above. Freyenhagen reads Zurn’s conception of social pathology as stating that ‘the problem is how people interpret the world, not that it needs changing at a fundamental level’ (Freyenhagen, 2015: 145). What Laitinen describes as the ‘institutional reality’ of social freedom is untouched by Zurn’s characterization (Laitinen, 2015: 44). It should be noted that while Freyenhagen and Laitinen both critique the restrictive and cognitivist nature of Zurn’s framing, the heightened limitations produced by Zurn’s marriage of the cognitive with the recognitive is left unaddressed. I shall return to this critical lacuna shortly.