Abstract
Axel Honneth Freedom's Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (trans. Joseph Ganahl). New York: Columbia University Press, 2014
Axel Honneth’s most recent book, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, is an ambitious and thought-provoking work of social and political theory. Its main impetus is to provide a Hegelian reading of contemporary Western societies – and thus, so to speak, an actualisation of Hegel’s Philosophy of right. Readers of Honneth’s writings will recognise the hallmark of his previous work. He is committed, more than ever, to a Hegelian lens through which he pursues a methodology that explicitly blends normative argumentation and social theory, a method Honneth refers to as normative reconstruction. Similarly to his approach in The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (Honneth, 1996), Honneth (2014: 125) focuses on a single notion – this time it is freedom – through which he develops a theory of justice on the basis of an adaptation of Hegel’s three ‘ethical spheres’ (the family, the market, and the state).
Carving out his position within the academic philosophical discourse, what is most striking about this book is Honneth’s explicit stance against the prevalence of Kantian and Neo-Kantian political theory, which he characterises as formal and abstract. In contrast, Honneth (2014: 3) develops a contextual theory of justice, which does not begin from purely normative principles, but instead follows Hegel by studying freedom’s ‘structural preconditions actually existing in society’. Honneth (2014: 64) sets himself the truly formidable task of ‘picking up on values and ideas already institutionalized in society … [and] show[ing] through normative comparison … that these established values are not only socially but also morally valid’. In doing so, Honneth seeks to depart from the widespread, ideal-theoretical methodology that is removed from present-day injustices; instead he aims at addressing actual social, economic, and political practices and institutions.
To illustrate, consider the conclusion that Honneth (2014: 111) reaches when discussing the use of Kant’s categorical imperative and the injunction to follow a mental process of universalisation in the case of a colleague who is guilty of ‘harmless plagiarism’. In such a moral dilemma, according to Honneth, Kant’s test would wrongly ignore the binding social ties (such as collegiality and friendship) that militate against treating the friend as you would a stranger. In other words, the ‘criterion for determining what counts as just can ultimately only be judged in terms of the ideals actually institutionalized in society’ (Honneth, 2014: 5).
Whatever the merits of Honneth’s critique of Kantian morality in this particular case may be, it is questionable, we believe, whether it also applies to the more recent, so-called practice-dependent approach to theorising justice, which many view as characteristic of the Neo-Kantian approach of Rawls (cf. James, 2005; Sangiovanni, 2008). After all, this approach holds that the justification of the substantial requirements of a conception of justice depends on the normative ideals inherent in the practices that the conception is meant to govern. For example, principles of fair trade should be justified in light of the point and purpose of the practice of trading countries to mutually rely on their markets in order to augment national income (James, 2012).
Nevertheless, Honneth’s immanent critique appears to offer an appealing alternative normative methodology under contemporary circumstances: postmodern denials of moral obligations are still common, and the ideal-theoretical approaches to political philosophy appear out of touch with social reality. Especially in light of the latter, much is to be said, indeed, for Honneth’s methodology, which starts from already existing normative commitments and problems. As the increasing number of critiques of so-called ideal theory testify, there is a considerable dissatisfaction with theories of justice that neglect social-scientific analyses of the actual (mal)functionings of contemporary cultural, economic, and political institutions. These critiques emphasise, for example, that ideal theory fails to analyse the historic and ongoing practices of oppression and the way in which these practices shape social institutions and widely shared epistemic assumptions (Mills, 2005).
Honneth proposes instead a methodology of normative reconstruction, which represents a balance or equilibrium between theoretical concept and historical reality. Consequently, ‘by following the general determination of what rational subjects can rationally want, the aims these subjects actually pursue with the greatest possible proximity to the conceptual ideal should be gleaned from historically given relations’ (Honneth, 2014: 56). Honneth must take the dual perspective of the philosopher and the social scientist. He must first provide a purely conceptual outline of the aims that all humans should rationally set for themselves in order to compare, second, these aims with the actually existing intentions that individuals possess by virtue of their upbringing in the culture of modernity. In the end, ‘the aims that historically situated subjects pursue as rational beings should emerge in nearly ideal form’ (Honneth, 2014: 56, emphasis added).
Honneth’s argument is predicated on the basic assumption that social reproduction hinges on a set of socially shared fundamental ideals and values. Following Parsons, Honneth argues that ethical values of society flow through an entire arrangement of social practices that guide each individual’s life path. What is important about this model of understanding society, and what makes it particularly suitable as a tool ‘for updating Hegel’s intentions’, is its claim that ‘all social institutions, without exception, must legitimate themselves in the light of ethical values and ideals that are worth striving for’ (Honneth 2014: 4, emphasis added).
At this point we need to ask ourselves: How does this view differ from the abstract position Honneth attributes to the ‘Kantians’? Admittedly, Honneth’s methodology is not proceduralist but it suffers from the very same ills he identifies in the Kantian approaches. Honneth is weary of the ‘processes of justification’ of theories of justice, as promoted by Rawls and Habermas, since individuals cannot engage in democratic will formation in the absence of properly arranged institutional settings. Outside such settings, individuals are not free enough ‘to possess a well-considered perspective and opinion’ (Honneth, 2014: 59). It is up to the philosopher therefore to come up with a blueprint. As Honneth (2014: 59) puts it, he or she must ‘must construct a just order, viz. a system of institutions that guarantee freedom prior to the decisions of first isolated, then unified subjects’.
But Honneth’s argument also fails on its own terms, or so it seems, since he cannot account for whence the values on whose basis institutions are judged as free come, and how they gain legitimacy. The values are either presupposed, elaborated by the philosopher prior to the institutional founding – ‘the single value that forms the basis for the legitimacy of modern social orders is the ethical idea that all subjects must enjoy equal support in their striving for individual freedom’ – or judged and justified by the citizens themselves (Honneth, 2014: 64). In the former case, the critical standards are external to the examined institutions and neglect the normative self-understandings that are already present in these. But in the latter case we need an account of political agency, judgement, and contestation under conditions of pluralism. Yet Honneth, as we argue at greater length below, does not offer such an account.
Before developing our critique further, it is perhaps useful to understand how Honneth employs his methodology to excavate the central role of social freedom for our self-understanding as modern subjects. In Part I Honneth provides a robust philosophical analysis of Western conceptions of freedom as they have been developed since Hobbes. More specifically, Honneth offers a tripartite taxonomy of the modern concept of freedom by distinguishing between negative, reflexive, and social freedom. On the basis of this taxonomy, in Parts II and III he proceeds to elaborate, through a close empirical analysis of Western liberal democracies, how only Hegel’s social conception of freedom has the critical resources to deliver real freedom.
Freedom, according to Honneth (2014: 15), is a foundational value. It is the only value that provides a ‘systematic link between the individual subject and the social order’ (Honneth, 2014: 15). There are other ethical values but none as central as the freedom of the individual. Consequently, for Honneth (2014: 16), justice requires and is exhausted by the promotion of social freedom. This makes it necessary to define it as a value. Accordingly, ‘we must distinguish between various models of individual freedom; a process of elimination should allow us to find a model of freedom best suited to formulating a conception of justice’ (Honneth, 2014: 18).
The first modern conception of freedom is negative freedom. Honneth traces this conception to Hobbes’s idea of freedom defined as the absence of external impediments. Honneth’s (2014: 28) main critique of negative freedom is that it stops short of taking into account individual self-determination, namely the inclusion of subjects’ own aims in a conception of freedom.
This is where Honneth begins the reconstruction of his second conception of freedom, reflexive freedom. Honneth conceives of this conception as focusing ‘solely on the subject’s relationship-to-self; according to this notion, individuals are free if their actions are solely guided by their own intentions’ (2014: 29). This idea of internally guided freedom has historically developed in two different intellectual paths: the Kantian concept of autonomy and an idea of self-realisation we can trace to Herder (Honneth, 2014: 31–36).
The distinctive mark of social freedom is the mutual recognition among individuals that fulfilling social obligations constitutes the conditions for the realisation of others’ aims. It is the mutual recognition of complementary role obligations that characterises the social relations that realise social freedom. More specifically, social freedom requires that individuals’ intentions are ‘interlaced’ in a way that constitutes a form of cooperation (Honneth, 2014: 125) – a way of acting together.
At this point, having laid out the three conceptions, Honneth gets to the heart of his argument. ‘Only the idea of social freedom formulated by Hegel is truly capable of attaining a novel perspective on the question of a just order’ (Honneth, 2014: 54). The problem with ‘Kantian proceduralist approaches’ is that they presuppose an entire culture of freedom, yet they cannot regard such institutions as having been justified (Honneth, 2014: 55). Honneth is concerned with the gap between the justification of a just order and its application. He believes that ‘if we give a sufficiently careful description of the objectivity of freedom, then an overview of the communicative practices and institutions which define the conditions of social justice should emerge’ (Honneth, 2014: 55, emphasis added). It is this ‘sufficiently careful description of the objectivity of freedom’ and the associated ‘communicative practices and institutions’ which Honneth believes is missing from these Kantian proceduralist approaches.
True to his methodology of normative reconstruction, in Part II Honneth begins the work of connecting the conceptions of freedom to their institutionalised spheres of action. Negative freedom has come to be institutionalised as legal freedom, while reflexive freedom has become institutionalised as moral freedom. Both forms of institutions are prerequisites for real freedom, but because of their limitations, they engender distinct pathologies.
Historically, the modern legal system guarantees individuals a space of private autonomy to which they can ‘retreat from all existing role obligations and attachments in order to explore the meaning and aims of their individual lives’ (Honneth, 2014: 72). The problem with legal freedom and subjective rights that come with it is that they do not encourage examination of individuals’ ideas of the good, incentivise intellectual exploration of different life aims, or revise our existing conception of the good. Legal freedom’s pathology is that it prevents individuals from reflecting on their life aims as well as involving the legalisation of social relations, which may inhibit communicative action that is oriented towards mutual understanding. Thus, for example, ‘when we invoke our guaranteed right to free speech, we necessarily relate to others who contest our right in a way that prevents us from grasping the others as addressees of what we intend to say’ (Honneth, 2014: 85).
Reflexive freedom is institutionalised in the sphere of moral freedom. Honneth traces this development to the ‘dissemination and popularisation’ of Kant’s notion of autonomy in social reality, which empowers individuals to adopt a perspective from which they can oppose existing norms and propose new systems of norms (2014: 104). The limitation of this institution is that it presumes a detached, unbiased perspective ‘from nowhere’ (Honneth, 2014: 108). This process of rational abstraction leads to either ‘uninhibited moralism’ resulting in autonomisation, social isolation, and loss of communication, or to ‘morally justified terrorism’ when individuals come to regard all means as morally justified for attacking an unjust social order (Honneth, 2014: 118).
In Part III Honneth reconstructs the realisation of social freedom within the three social spheres of personal relations, the market economy, and democratic will formation. He juxtaposes the historical formation and present shape of these three spheres with the normative promise inherent in their distinct logics so as to judge the depth and kind of their ‘misdevelopments’. From this normative judgement, then, it is but one additional step to pinpointing the institutional changes required to remedy the diagnosed normative deficits.
In the sphere of personal relationships, social freedom consists in the self-realisation that individuals afford one another by mutually recognising their personalities’ essential features. Contemporary friendships enable individuals to experience someone having a sincere interest in each other’s own personalities without any ulterior motives. Since the 1960s friendships across all parts of society embody this kind of social freedom (Honneth, 2014: 138). Today they form resilient social foundations of democratic life, although high expectations in the labour market as well as egoistic orientations threaten them.
In intimate relationships people display mutual affection and love. The ‘physical union’ that is achievable through them ‘fosters people’s self-confidence’ and contributes to ‘a previously unknown kind of ease in everything they do’ (Honneth, 2014: 151). While intimate relationships previously have been restricted to married couples, they are now in principle open to every member of society, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Within families social freedom becomes a reality as family members respond to each other’s needs in a communicatively determined manner that responds to all family members’ individuality (Honneth, 2014: 164–166). A relatively novel development is that, as people tend to live longer lives, parents increasingly experience care from their children for considerable stretches of time. Consequently, modern families at times constitute communities of solidarity across time (Honneth, 2014: 165). Problematically, though, job insecurity, low wages, and expectations of flexibility make it difficult to nurture long-term relationships of this kind. This is particularly unfortunate due to the family’s importance for the formation of democratic competencies such as tolerance or mutual perspective taking (Honneth, 2014: 174–176).
In his characterisation of the ‘inner normativity’ of market relations, Honneth heavily relies on Hegel and Durkheim’s account of ‘moral economism’ (2014: 198). This economism means that market transactions need to legitimate themselves through market participants’ fulfilment of non-contractual moral obligations. Unless market transactions are underwritten by a shared embracement of moral obligations such as honesty, solidarity, and fairness, those who participate in these transactions cannot view them as acceptable (Honneth, 2014: 181–182). Only when market participants recognise each other as members of a ‘cooperative community’ can they ‘grant each other the right to maximize individual utility’ (Honneth, 2014: 192).
On the basis of this account Honneth then goes on to analyse ‘misdevelopments’ that arise when consumers and producers do not complement each other’s efforts to realise their interests. In the sphere of consumption, several problems have been recurring ever since the 19th century: the unavailability of essential commodities, ‘unethical’ consumption, and the manipulation of consumers’ interests (Honneth, 2014: 200–202). Groups like the 1960s student movement tried to find solutions to these problems. However, given the recent revival of status-related consumption, Honneth concludes that a renewed discursive moralisation of the market from below is sorely needed.
In addition, ever since the spread of industrial labour, several factors have impeded the realisation of social freedom in the labour market. The work in factories has contributed to alienation, inner emptiness, and impoverishment. This has led to many calls for ‘humanising work’, worker co-determination, and salaries that reflect, following the very logic of the bourgeoisie, the workers’ achievement (Honneth, 2014: 230–231, 231, 237). The institutions of the welfare state first created by Bismarck responded to these calls and were developed further after Second World War. However, this period of ‘organized capitalism’ ended with the ‘segmentation of the labour market’ (Honneth, 2014: 239, 243). In the 1970s classes of technically highly qualified executives and white-collar salaried employees emerged and the service sector expanded. The liberalising economic policies in the 1990s, in turn, led to a more general separation of the labour market into core and periphery. Those working in the periphery consequently suffered from lower salaries, the loss of job security, and the hollowing out of social insurance schemes. Honneth is perplexed by the absence of a collective political response to these conditions, and considers ‘a massive individualization of responsibility with regard to people’s career biographies and occupational destinies’ as the root problem (Honneth, 2014: 248). This tendency to accept bad individual choices as apology for the status quo is incompatible with the idea of market relations as an instantiation of social freedom.
Honneth rightly states that critics of capitalism often view the market as zone free from moral considerations (Honneth, 2014: 176–177). Such critics therefore argue in defence of implementing externally justified, legal restrictions to market exchanges. The purpose of such restrictions is to bring about – as judged by reference to a normative standard that is external to market processes – morally more desirable outcomes. In response, Honneth correctly points out that economic theory itself provides an internal normative justification for setting up and maintaining market processes that these critics tend to neglect.
What is surprising, however, is that Honneth neglects in his reconstruction of this internal normativity important aspects of the literature on welfare economics – with the notable exception of its founder, Adam Smith (Honneth, 2014: 177–185). Instead, Honneth bases his reconstruction mainly on the works of social theorists like Hegel, Durkheim, and Parsons. This neglect is unfortunate, on the one hand, for the rhetorical or strategic reason that those who have strong ties to the discipline of economics may be reluctant to engage thoroughly with a reconstruction that is – with the exception of Polanyi – based predominantly on the insights of social theorists. On the other hand, it is also problematic that Honneth’s account lacks any reference to the Pareto criterion, according to which one economic arrangement is preferable to another if in that arrangement at least one person is better off and none is worse off than in the other. Closely related, the so-called first fundamental theorem of welfare economics states that fully competitive markets fulfil this criterion and are therefore Pareto efficient. So there is a clear sense in which welfare economics, which represents the foundational method and subject matter of economics as scholarly discipline, relies upon and defends the normative justifiability of market relations.
Furthermore, this neglect is also unfortunate because it would have enabled Honneth to juxtapose the concept of Pareto efficiency with that of social freedom. After all, in line with the logic of Pareto efficiency, the concept of social freedom emphasises that market relations are meant to promote everyone’s self-realisation or preferences. Thereby both Pareto efficiency and social freedom provide a similar rationale as to why all market participants should endorse and be motivated to comply with the social obligations that flow from an acceptance of such normative concepts.
Honneth might insist that social freedom is founded on the action-theoretic insight that people’s intentions are interlaced when acting together as market participants, and that this aspect is neglected by the criterion of Pareto efficiency. Yet this still leaves open two ways of understanding the relation between social freedom and the Pareto efficiency. Does social freedom simply bring out one additional, complementary aspect of the normativity of market relations that Pareto efficiency has overlooked so far? Or is it rather the case that social freedom provides a competing normative understanding of market relations?
Moving on to the third ethical sphere, that of democratic will-formation, Honneth identifies social freedom as consisting in the discursive construction of intersubjectively valid beliefs that shape public policies (Honneth, 2014: 254). In this ethical sphere, Honneth examines the formation of the public sphere, the constitutional state, and the political culture. A key theme recurring in all three dimensions is the idea of a nation as an imagined community that provides a fulcrum for creating and maintaining an inclusive public discourse. From the 19th century onwards this idea was meant to serve various functions. It was meant to ensure that arguments would travel across class boundaries, that a costly state bureaucracy would appear as legitimate, and that people would be motivated to participate in political processes.
Processes of transnationalisation, however, have intensified the cultural pluralisation of Western societies. Thus, the idea of a nation, with its ethnic connotations, is no longer apt for fulfilling these various, ‘enabling’ roles for public discourses. But this is only one problem of realising social freedom through democratic will formation. Other challenges arise from the increasing number of transnational political problems as well as from self-referential and entertainment-oriented media. New forms of political solidarity and communication need to emerge. Only then can the institutions of the state and of transnational political authorities be viewed as ‘intellectual organ[s]’ of the kind that ‘implement the result of the social freedom exercised by citizens who reach an understanding’ (Honneth, 2014: 304–305).
Freedom’s Right, we fear, does not offer an account of new forms of political agency. Honneth concedes that the imagined community of the nation is no longer able to provide the required solidarity for establishing communicatively and inclusively the demands of social justice (Honneth, 2014: 328). National boundaries have become porous, and the enduring co-existence of a plurality of understandings of the good has rendered any cultural idea of the nation obsolete. Moreover, any theoretical account of political agency, judgement, and contestation will, once again, consist in a philosophical construction. Thus, whatever counts as just or unjust institutional structure according to such an account would also rely on abstract, philosophical thought.
To conclude, our evaluation of Honneth’s book is ambivalent. Honneth’s critical stance vis-à-vis purely ideal-theoretical approaches to political theory is compelling. Yet the alternative he offers suffers from a potentially serious deficiency. While Honneth rejects freestanding justifications of principles of justice, his account appears to be freestanding in that it is not borne out of the political process itself. What is more, what the realisation of social freedom ultimately requires concretely remains an open question, in particular because Honneth finds no suitable substitute for the problematic concept of the nation. Hence we doubt that Honneth has successfully achieved his aim of establishing normative reconstruction as a superior methodology to proceduralism.