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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, Axel Honneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and cultural critique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than an account of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and its relation to the perils and promise of contemporary social life.
This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s main contributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explains Honneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and its relation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activist movements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice, freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’s theory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic social theorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno and Habermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory and political philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’s corpus, including his major new work on social freedom and democratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guide available.
Axel Honneth will be invaluable to students and scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the most influential theorists writing today.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Key Contemporary Thinkers Series
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Abbreviations
1: Introduction
1.1 A Brief Biography
1.2 Honneth's Themes
1.3 Intellectual Contexts
Notes
2: Individuals' Struggle for Recognition
2.1 The Intersubjectivist Turn
2.2 Self-Confidence and Love
2.3 Self-Respect and Rights
2.4 Self-Esteem and Solidarity
2.5 Antecedent Recognition
2.6 Critical Perspectives
Notes
3: Social Struggles for Recognition
3.1 Conflicts of Interest vs Moral Conflicts
3.2 Social Struggles for Recognition
3.3 Historical Progress
3.4 Critical Perspectives
Notes
4: Diagnosing Social Pathologies
4.1 Social Philosophy as Social Diagnosis
4.2 Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders
4.3 Critical Perspectives
4.4 Recapitulation
Notes
5: Recognition and Markets
5.1 Work and Recognition
5.2 Fraser's Challenges, Honneth's Responses
5.3 Assessing an Unfinished Debate
Notes
6: Social Freedom and Recognition
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Social Freedom
6.3 Social Spheres
6.4 Innovations and Critical Perspectives
Notes
7: Concluding Speculations
Notes
References
Honneth Books
Honneth Essay Collections
Other Honneth Works
Other Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Key Contemporary Thinkers Series includes:
Jeremy Ahearne,
Michel de Certeau
Lee Braver,
Heidegger
John Burgess,
Kripke
Michael Caesar,
Umberto Eco
M. J. Cain,
Fodor
Gareth Dale,
Karl Polanyi
Oliver Davis,
Jacques Rancière
Reidar Andreas Due,
Deleuze
Chris Fleming,
Rene Girard
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir
Graeme Gilloch,
Walter Benjamin
Christina Howells,
Derrida
Simon Jarvis,
Adorno
Rachel Jones,
Irigaray
Sarah Kay,
Žižek
S. K. Keltner,
Kristeva
Moya Lloyd,
Judith Butler
James McGilvray,
Chomsky, 2nd edn
Lois McNay,
Foucault
Dermot Moran,
Edmund Husserl
Marie-Eve Morin,
Jean-Luc Nancy
Timothy Murphy,
Antonio Negri
Harold W. Noonan,
Frege
Severin Schroeder,
Wittgenstein
Susan Sellers,
Hélène Cixous
Dennis Smith,
Zygmunt Bauman
James Smith,
Terry Eagleton
Geoffrey Stokes,
Popper
James Williams,
Lyotard
Copyright © Christopher Zurn 2015
The right of Christopher Zurn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4903-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4904-7(pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8680-6 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8679-0 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zurn, Christopher F., 1966–
Axel Honneth / Christopher Zurn.
pages cm. – (Key contemporary thinkers)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7456-4903-0 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-4904-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Honneth, Axel, 1949- 2. Social sciences–Philosophy. 3. Sociology–Philosophy. 4. Critical theory. I. Title.
B63.Z87 2015
301.092–dc23
2014023353
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Abbreviations
1Introduction
1992 saw the publication in Germany of an influential new book combining diverse lines of research across philosophy, psychology, history, sociology, and political theory by the theorist Axel Honneth. By the time its English translation was published in 1995 as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (abbreviated hereafter as SfR), it was clear that a major new voice in the tradition of critical theory had arrived. The book not only forwarded a number of important original claims but, more importantly, provided a new research paradigm – centered on the keystone concept of intersubjective recognition – for revitalizing interdisciplinary social theory with emancipatory intent. With Struggle for Recognition, it became clear, moreover, that there was a successor third-generation critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (Anderson 2011), one who could claim to legitimately carry on the broad heritage of the first generation – especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – and of the second generation – especially Jürgen Habermas – while at the same time advancing a new, insightful critical social theory sensitive to the changed sociopolitical circumstances of advanced western democracies at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.
The aim of the book before you is to give a general overview of the crucial claims and arguments of Honneth's new critical social theory, as well as assessing some of the substantive controversies surrounding them. This is by no means a complete treatment of everything Honneth has written, nor does it provide an exhaustive appraisal of all of the critical debates on his work. In fact, it will often need to foreshorten important issues and skirt lightly over or even ignore significant detail in the service of usefully concise summary. The intention is thus more modest: a clear, introductory exposition of the core theses of Honneth's own original theory, presented along with balanced assessments of its strengths and weaknesses in the light of prominent alternatives. This introductory chapter provides a brief biography of Honneth (1.1), a preview of the chapters indicating Honneth's crucial theoretical contributions and themes (1.2), and a frame for grasping those contributions in a broader intellectual context of major philosophical, social, and political theories (1.3).
1.1 A Brief Biography
Axel Honneth was born in 1949 in Essen, Germany, and graduated in 1969 from secondary school through the abitur (university entrance exams), also in Essen.1 The son of Horst Honneth, a medical doctor, and Annemarie Honneth, he grew up in a bourgeois milieu, though becoming increasingly disaffected with it while witnessing the new upward mobility amongst the working class in his coal-mining region and taking part in the cultural and political ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s – Bob Dylan has long been a touchstone for him. From 1969 until 1974, in addition to involvement with the student movement and progressive political parties, he studied a variety of subjects at a variety of locations. He immersed himself in philosophy, sociology, and German literature at the universities in Bonn and Bochum, earning a master's degree in philosophy at Bochum in 1974. He then did postgraduate and doctoral work at the Institute of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin from 1974 until 1982. In 1980, during his doctoral studies and growing out of courses he and his co-author Hans Joas had been teaching, Honneth and Joas published an extraordinarily useful and insightful book: Social Action and Human Nature (SAaHN). It outlined the relationship between various theories of social action found in the social sciences and diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions in philosophical anthropology, that is, philosophical theories of human nature. His doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1983, was written under the directorship of Urs Jaeggi on the competing theories of power found in first-generation critical theory (especially in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer) and the work of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault. The dissertation's six chapters were subsequently combined with three further chapters on power in the work of Jürgen Habermas and published by the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag as a monograph in 1985, later translated into English with the title Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (CoP).
From 1982 to 1983, he had a grant to do research under Jürgen Habermas at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg. (This is the extraordinary research institute that Habermas was the director of from 1971 until 1983, bringing together some of the brightest researchers in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, social psychology, economics, and other social sciences, an environment which enabled Habermas to develop his massive two-volume magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987)). In the hierarchical world of German academics, each full professor has significant authority over a cadre of lower-status academics, ranging from doctoral students and research assistants to assistant professors and senior research fellows. Accordingly, in 1983, when Habermas again took up his chair in philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Honneth also moved to Frankfurt, becoming Hochschulassistent in philosophy under Habermas. In 1990, Honneth completed his Habilitationsschrift – a major work that qualifies one to move up the academic ladder, often referred to as a second doctoral dissertation. It was titled “Kampf um Anerkennung” (Struggle for Recognition). As noted above, the German publication of a greatly expanded version of this work in 1992 and its translation into English in 1995 (SfR) set the world on notice that a major new research paradigm in critical social theory had arrived.
After his Habilitation in Frankfurt, and a year as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (the Wissenschaftskolleg), Honneth took up a position as C3-professor (roughly equivalent to the American “associate professor”) in philosophy at the University of Konstanz from 1991 to 1992. He was quickly promoted to C4-professor (roughly equivalent to the American “full professor”) when he took up a position in political philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, remaining in Berlin from 1992 until 1996. In 1996, he returned to Frankfurt as C4-professor of social philosophy, a position he has retained until the present. In addition, in 2001 he took up his current position as director of the Institute for Social Research. Since 2011, he has split his time between Frankfurt and New York City, where he is a professor of humanities at Columbia University. Throughout his career, Honneth has given many prestigious lectures, won several awards and honors, and held many visiting academic positions around the world: McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Kyoto University in Japan, the New School in New York, University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Boston College in the United States, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales in Paris, Dartmouth College in the United States, and the Université de Paris (Sorbonne).
Honneth has been a particularly productive scholar and public intellectual, producing a raft of books and articles not only expounding his own unique form of critical social theory, but also insightfully interpreting, selectively appropriating, and critiquing the work of other major thinkers. Bare numbers give at least a sense of the prodigious quantity of his efforts: some seven original monographs, seven further collections of his own essays, twenty-one edited books of work by others, more than 220 journal articles and book chapters, and more than fifty newspaper pieces. As this book could not hope to deal with this mass of material in a systematic way, I have chosen instead to focus on what I consider the core elements of his mature critical social theory. This entails lightly treating or disregarding here much that is of deep theoretical interest in Honneth's corpus, an oversight hopefully justified by relative brevity and clarity. In particular, this book focuses most intently on what I consider the two core works of Honneth's mature corpus –1992's The Struggle for Recognition and 2011's Das Recht der Freiheit, translated in 2014 as Freedom's Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (FR) – while also treating other key works, including his 2003 co-authored book debating Nancy Fraser Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (RoR), his Tanner Lectures of 2005 Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (R), and various essays and other works that are crucial to his mature critical theory.2
1.2 Honneth's Themes
1.2.1 Critical social theory
As I indicated above, Honneth's central aim is to produce an accurate, convincing, and insightful critical social theory.3 One way to understand what such a theory consists of would be to trace its lineage through major intellectual precursors and influences – e.g., Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Freud, Mead, Dewey, Weber, Lukács, Parsons – and through the substantive work of major practitioners who explicitly understand themselves as producing critical social theory – e.g., Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Karl Otto Apel, Seyla Benhabib, Thomas McCarthy, Nancy Fraser, Rainer Forst, Axel Honneth. Another way to understand critical social theory, however, is to define it rather broadly as “interdisciplinary social theory with emancipatory intent.”4 That would then rightly include not only Frankfurt School theorists but also a broader range of critical theories, including feminism, critical race theory, critical legal studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and post-structuralism.
The basic idea of critical theory is to carry out the charge that Marx set for a new journal in 1843: the “the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age.”5 Such a theoretical elucidation starts from a description of current society, a description which must be not only accurate but also particularly attuned to any and all explicit and implicit struggles occurring within contemporary social relations. But description alone is not enough, for self-clarification also requires a satisfactory explanation of why the present situation is as it is – almost surely including historical explanations of how it has come to be so – and why these are the particular struggles and dreams of current social actors. These descriptive and explanatory tasks can only be fulfilled by integrating research across a diverse range of social sciences: sociology, history, psychology, economics, political science, law, etc. – hence the “interdisciplinary social science” portion of my formula.
Producing an empirically accurate, integrated social scientific picture of the present is sufficient to fulfill the tasks of traditional social theory. But to be critical, such a theory must also have a practical purpose: namely, an interest in furthering reason-governed human freedom and well-being, in overcoming unjustifiable or unreasonable forms of constraint or oppression – in short, an “emancipatory interest.” Rejecting the notion that we must simply accept current social reality as given, no matter what its problems, Max Horkheimer insists, in his canonical 1937 article, that: “critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality; and the necessary conditions for such change already exist” (Horkheimer 1992: 227). Of course, change simply for the sake of change is not acceptable; critical theory must also articulate evaluative standards for distinguishing progressive and regressive changes, assessing whether the status quo is acceptable or not, and evaluating the moral adequacy of measures taken to further progressive social change. Horkheimer again: “the self-knowledge of present-day man is…a critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life” (Horkheimer 1992: 198–9). In summary, then, critical social theory is interdisciplinary social theory with an emancipatory intent: it aims to describe and explain current social reality, with particular attention to the actual conflicts and aspirations of contemporary social actors aiming at human emancipation in such a way that theory can help to both morally evaluate contemporary conflicts and contribute to progressive social change.
Honneth's particular brand of critical social theory is rooted in contemporary social struggles for recognition and social freedom. He focuses, as we will see, on quite a broad range of different types of sociopolitical conflicts, ranging from feminist struggles for anti-patriarchal family relationships, to gay and lesbian fights for equal legal rights, to workers' struggles for decent working conditions and egalitarian social justice, and more. His descriptive and explanatory social theory is built around the history, structure, and dynamics of struggles for adequate recognition and increased freedom. Successful struggles end up changing a society's current recognition order by institutionalizing new forms of intersubjective practices that afford social actors the recognition and conditions of freedom they rightfully deserve. Further, the theory's normative standards are constructed out of the moral “grammar” or deep structure of recognition claims. Finally, the theory aims practically to aid in the furtherance of more expansive and morally justified relations of undistorted social recognition and social freedom. Intersubjective recognition provides, then, the “immanent transcendent” for Honneth's theory: it guides interdisciplinary social theory to those emancipatory impulses which are found immanently in present social relations and simultaneously transcend those relations by pointing beyond unjust impediments to full human freedom. The building blocks of Honneth's new paradigm of critical social theory are laid out in the following chapters of the book, of which I give a brief preview here.
1.2.2 Individuals' struggle for recognition
The first main building block of Honneth's theory is an account of personal identity, rooted in social psychology, moral theory, and philosophical anthropology. It aims to answer the question: how do persons develop and maintain their identity, their sense of themselves as practical, moral beings with unique characteristics and distinctive places in the social world? The basic answer Honneth proposes is: individuals only become who they are in and through relations of mutual recognition with others. In short, persons gain subjectivity only intersubjectively. Only when individuals receive positive acknowledgment from others of their own personal traits, standing, and abilities can individuals begin to see themselves as others do and thereby gain an efficacious sense-of-self. Mutual recognition, according to Honneth, characterizes a whole range of intersubjective relations: between parents and children, between lovers and friends, between legal subjects, between participants in labor markets, between commodity consumers and producers, between fellow citizens, between men and women, between members of different ethnicities and races, between members of various civil society organizations, between democratic actors, and so on.
Further, because individuals fundamentally depend on such recognition for the construction and maintenance of their very identity – their sense of themselves as distinct and worthy persons – there is a basic moral demand to be recognized appropriately by others and fundamental moral obligations to recognize others appropriately built into the very structures of intersubjectivity. Honneth provides a typology of different forms of mutual recognition and their role in developing different types of practical identity. As we will see, he focuses in particular on: the importance of relations of care and love for the development of basic self-confidence; legal relations and rights for the development of self-respect; and relations of solidarity for the development of self-esteem. This three-part account of different kinds of recognition is then the basis for Honneth's moral philosophy, where different types of relationships are shown to involve different kinds of interpersonal entitlements and obligations.
Notwithstanding this underlying ideal “moral grammar” built into interpersonal relationships, individuals' expectations of appropriate moral recognition are often violated through inappropriate or destructive forms of misrecognition and nonrecognition: physical abuse, denial of rights, exclusion, denigration, disdain, etc. In fact, as Honneth often points out, it is negative emotional experiences of such disrespect, when our expectations of appropriate recognition are violated, that provide the motivations for struggles to overcome misrecognition – whether those struggles are local and interpersonal (chapter 2) or society-wide and group-based (chapter 3).
1.2.3 Social struggles for recognition
The second main building block of Honneth's critical social theory is an account of social reproduction and social change, rooted in sociology, history, and social and political philosophy. The key idea is that social practices and institutions are integrated and reproduced through specific regimes of recognition. However, those regimes are not timeless orders, but change over history. Even as Honneth regards the basic grammar of intersubjective recognition as part of the fabric of the human condition, the particular roles, expectations, and concrete forms of recognition change through time and differ across distinct societies. Consider, for instance, the massive changes in the roles and obligations of men, women, and children within families – and the very definition of family – over the last two hundred years. On Honneth's account, these changes should be understood as transformations in our society's particular recognition order. Furthermore, the central claim of his historical reconstruction is that such massive changes are driven specifically by struggles for recognition by social actors and groups, struggles motivated by negative experiences of misrecognition. For when members of groups experience misrecognition epidemically – when they notice that all similarly situated persons are subject to the same unjustified forms of disregard or mistreatment – the potential exists for social movements aiming to change an insufficient status quo toward a more just recognition order.
This descriptive and explanatory social theory is also a critical theory, since Honneth proposes to measure change against evaluative standards of progress and regress. He builds a political philosophy out of the three-pronged analysis of recognitional morality, showing how different types of justice claims are made to the broader society by different types of social struggles for expanded or more appropriate recognition. As we will see, he proposes two key measures of progress: inclusion and individualization. Put very simply, societies are better when their recognition regimes lessen discrimination and exclusion on the one hand, and acknowledge the distinctiveness of individuals across more dimensions of personality on the other. These criteria, formulated into a “formal conception of ethical life,” can also be used to evaluate the claims of various social and political movements. Recognition theory thus fulfills the various tasks of critical social theory: describing how societies are integrated and reproduced, explaining a significant cause of social change, assessing the value of such change against the normative standard of undistorted recognition relations, and practically orienting social actors and movements as they further the project of human emancipation and individual self-realization.
1.2.4 Diagnosing social pathologies
As described so far, it will seem that Honneth's project is overly idealistic and optimistic, even if its foundational social phenomena are agonistic struggles among individuals and groups. But this is a misimpression, for Honneth is deeply concerned to present a critique of the present. Such a critique requires normative standards for evaluating what is worthwhile and what problematic – hence the need to develop a social theory that can ground its own moral standpoint. But such a critique then uses that critical social theory to diagnose the present.
Chapter 4 reconstructs Honneth's social diagnoses of the present, a third main building block of his theory. I take this to be one of the most distinctive and unique of Honneth's contributions: his attempt to systematically develop a social philosophy oriented toward the diagnosis of contemporary social pathologies, to be carried out in the light of his developed theory of recognition. As Honneth characterizes such social philosophy, “its primary task is the diagnosis of processes of social development that must be understood as preventing the members of society from living a ‘good life’ ” (Honneth 2007f: 4). Alongside clarification of the methodological demands of social diagnosis, the bulk of the chapter is concerned with elucidating four of the specific substantive diagnoses that Honneth has developed, attending to the modern pathologies of invisibilization, instrumental rationalization, reification, and organized self-realization. Two other significant diagnoses – of the pathologies of economic maldistribution and of overly individualized understandings of freedom – are taken up in chapters 5 and 6 respectively. Without previewing all of that content here, suffice it to say that, in this aspect of his project, Honneth shows himself to be an insightful diagnostician of the present, as well as a worthy contributor to the inheritance of the Frankfurt School.
1.2.5 Recognition and markets
In one of the more extraordinary exchanges between contemporary critical theorists, Honneth and Nancy Fraser published Redistribution or Recognition? in 2003, an exchange of views about the adequacy of the recognition paradigm for conceptualizing economic relations, contemporary capitalism, and diverse struggles for social justice. Chapter 5 presents Honneth's theory of contemporary capitalism in RoR, Fraser's various critiques of that theory, and an evaluative assessment of Honneth's actual and potential responses to those critiques. As we will see, this debate is both methodological and substantive.
In part, it is a debate about what kind of intellectual tools are best suited to a critique of contemporary political economy and to carrying on the tradition of critical social theory. Fraser's basic conviction is that misrecognition and maldistribution are two different kinds of social injustice, with different causal factors and dynamics, and therefore different (and potentially competing) remedies. In contrast, Honneth proposes that economic injustices of many kinds, including unjust economic distributions, must be understood as constitutively connected to a society's underlying recognition order. In particular, Honneth is insistent that critical theory should not adopt fundamentally different tools for analyzing economic and recognitional injustices, but should account for changes in political economy in terms of changes in a society's recognition order.
But this is not merely a methodological debate, for Fraser is convinced that a focus on recognition alone is practically unwise, encouraging us to overlook, ignore, or displace economic injustices, often in favor of a politics centered solely on more symbolic and reputational harms. As I try to show in the chapter, there is a natural, but misleading association of recognition theory solely with social movements focused on identity-based forms of injustice, that is, injustice affecting persons on account of “who they are”: female, nonwhite, immigrant, homosexual, and so on. In fact, Honneth's substantive concerns have always been wider than this, and he has consistently tied his recognition theory to issues of political economy: the division of labor, the nature of work and working conditions, the role of unions and corporations, levels of income and wealth inequality, the risk-mitigating function of welfare-state interventions in the economy, the rapid progress of neoliberal privatization, and so on.
1.2.6 Social freedom and recognition
The final building block of Honneth's critical theory is a full-blown social theory by way of an account of the central institutions of modern western societies: friendship, romantic love, the family, morality, law, the labor market, the consumer economy, the democratic public sphere, and the constitutional state. First published in German in 2011, Freedom's Right is an original and monumental book, attempting nothing less than a contemporary re-actualization of Hegel's 1820 ambitious project in Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991). However, this is not achieved in a highly abstract philosophical discourse of pure concepts, but through an empirical history and analysis of those actually effective social movements that have increasingly shaped modern society's institutions around the ambitious demands of promoting individual freedom. While freedom is in fact the keyword of the book, Honneth has not abandoned the notion of recognition. Instead, he argues that real freedom – what he calls “social freedom” – can only be achieved in and through social institutions that sustain and promote appropriate relations of mutual recognition. We might say that while ‘recognition’ is the key to the transhistorical grammar of moral struggles, ‘social freedom’ is the key ambition of recognition struggles in modern society.
Because of the extraordinary scope, detail, and philosophical depth of FR, chapter 6 focuses on three thematic complexes. First is Honneth's distinctive theory of human freedom. To begin, he claims that freedom is, simply, the paramount value of modern life, the one which all other values are arranged around. He argues further that negative and reflexive conceptions of freedom – freedom as non-interference and freedom as setting one's own ends, respectively – are limited and inadequate. His alternative conception of social freedom insists that individuals' actions gain their value and purpose when they fit into a cooperative scheme of social activity. For Hegel and for Honneth, persons are free only when they can be “at home” in their social world: when their own unique motives and intentions can be meaningfully realized in a context of accommodating social roles and obligations.
A second theme of the new book is that the major institutions of modern life – personal relationships, markets, and public political spaces – should be understood as spheres of social freedom. In part, this is an empirical claim: the history of the major private, economic, and political institutional spheres of modern western societies is interpreted as arising out of diverse social struggles aiming to secure expanded social freedom. But it is also a moral claim, for social freedom forms the basis for a moral justification of each of the institutional spheres. The particular practices, social roles, and obligations of friendship, romantic love, the family, morality, law, the division of labor, the consumer economy, the political public sphere and the constitutional state are all justified only to the extent that they facilitate and promote the realization of social freedom for all individuals. And, finally, it is a critical claim: the significant deficiencies and achievements of contemporary institutions, their progressive and pathological aspects, are to be diagnosed in terms of the degree to which social freedom is facilitated, impeded, or frustrated. Thus social freedom is the backbone of Honneth's new, institutionally based critical social theory.
The chapter focuses thirdly on various methodological innovations and problem areas raised in Honneth's ambitious new project. Particular attention is given to FR's accounts of social integration, value consensus, progress in history, and the diagnosis of the present, as well as the bold claim that a philosophical theory of justice must be developed out of a concrete, empirical social analysis. Although Freedom's Right heralds a major deepening of Honneth's critical social theory, it is not a departure from his long-standing emphases on the constitutive character of intersubjective recognition for social reality and the potentially dynamic energies of social movements for emancipatory transcendence of the limits of current society.
1.3 Intellectual Contexts
An important aspect of Honneth's work is that – as do many other German theorists – he develops his own theory through appreciation and critique of the work of other theorists. This presents a sometimes formidable challenge for new readers, as Honneth's writings presume significant familiarity with the texts and authors being interpreted, often assuming real knowledge of most of the great thinkers of the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. Furthermore, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish when Honneth is merely reporting the ideas of others, is also endorsing those ideas or, more subtly, is taking a hint or latent suggestion from another's text and polishing it into an original component of his own theory. To be sure, such distinctions get easier the more one knows of Honneth's own theory, but the challenges remain even for the initiated. One aim of this book, therefore, is to present a summary of Honneth's theory that can be readily grasped by readers without presuming such specialized knowledge and interpretive facility. Thus the book largely avoids exegesis of the full breadth of what Honneth himself draws upon: three centuries of western philosophy, sociology, political science, law, cultural theory, literature, psychology, economics, and history.
The point of this current section, then, is simply to post a few road signs to some of the most prominent of those traditions for Honneth as a way of locating his oeuvre in its intellectual contexts.6 In the end, the best way to explore the connections between Honneth's thought and its intellectual contexts is, simply, to read his own writings on the relevant thinkers. They are not only remarkably subtle and insightful interpretations of his predecessors and contemporaries; they are also unmatched for revealing what is living and vibrant therein for contemporary philosophy and social theory.
1.3.1 From Kant to Hegel
Honneth's theory of recognition has antecedents detectable in ancient Greek theories of friendship, in Renaissance humanist revivals of classical thought, in Scottish and English moral sentiments theory of the eighteenth century, and especially in Rousseau's groundbreaking insistence on the essentially social character of human personality (Neuhouser 2010). Nevertheless, the most influential single thinker on Honneth is undoubtedly Hegel, whose thought forms the cornerstone of Honneth's two core works, SfR and FR. Of course, Hegel himself was deeply indebted to Kant, as is Honneth, though in ways less explicitly acknowledged.7
One fundamental aim Kant and Hegel share is to vindicate the universality and justifiability of the great Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, freedom, equality, democracy, solidarity, and justice. Honneth is likewise deeply committed to these ideals, but follows Hegel's lead rather than Kant's as to how to conceptualize and justify them. What I mean by this can be seen in three transformations in Hegel's treatment of these ideals, transformations central to Honneth's own project. The first transformation is the conceptualization of these ideals in intersubjective and social terms, rather than in subjective and individual terms. Rather than adopting the Kantian strategy of finding the faculties of reason and the demands of morality within the minds of isolated thinkers, Hegel seeks reason and morality in the space of social interactions between persons. It is hard to overemphasize how important the turn toward intersubjectivity is for Honneth – as we will see in every chapter of this book, it is quite simply at the core of all the concepts of his critical social theory, including the key notions of mutual recognition and social freedom.8
A second Hegelian transformation is the move from the timeless to the historical. For not only does Hegel propose taking reason and morality out of the solitary minds of individuals, but he argues that their particular shape, structure, and content is not eternal, transcending all epochs, as Kant claims, but instead develops over time, in and through human history. The strategy for vindicating the ideals must shift then as well. Rather than advancing a priori arguments from pure reason, Hegel (and Honneth) advance teleological, developmental arguments. Our current ideals of reason and morality are not simply the ones we happen to be stuck with, but are justifiable (to the extent they are) because they can be shown to have resulted from a progressive process of learning, error correction, and refinement. In short, our ideals are worthy only as a result of human progress.
A third Hegelian transformation is to take the central Kantian moral and political ideals – of respect for individual autonomy, categorical duties to others as moral equals, and justice through individual rights and the social contract – and place them in a specific historical context – modern ethical life. In part, putting morality into ethical life means acknowledging that our particular moral and political ideals are historical ideas, found paradigmatically in contemporary western societies, and developed as progressive transformations of older ideas. For instance, our prioritization of freedom and individuality over communal obligations and conformity is not a result of the formal demands of pure, timeless, abstract reason itself, but a fact about our own modern values and concrete mores. In part, it also means that abstract formal reasoning about our duties must be understood in a broader context of substantive evaluation and ethically significant practices and institutions. Finally, putting morality into ethical life also means acknowledging with Kant the force of moral rules and just laws, but with Hegel seeing the force of such rules and laws as itself derived from the worth of them to what we as humans value. While morality surely makes obligatory demands on us as Kant emphasizes, those demands are seen in the Hegelian vision as justified only because obeying such demands ultimately facilitates what we value as worthy and good in the first place. In short, on the Hegelian transformation that Honneth embraces, the right is embedded in the good.
1.3.2 Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud together stand for a generally critical and suspicious stance toward overweening philosophical claims for the powers of human reason, each in their own way seeking to deflate the pretensions of rationality, reasoned morality, subjectivity, self-transparency, conscious self-direction, and reasoned social organization.9 Such deflation was achieved by showing how these supposed attributes of Enlightened cognizers were actually illusions, and how some other factors beyond reason actually determine the shape and content of rationality, morality, consciousness, intentionality, and social organization. Of course the real drivers of human phenomena – the real, explanatory causal factors – are different according to each thinker's own theory. For Marx, it is a society's particular mode of economic material production that is the real explainer of human phenomena; for Nietzsche, it is the schemes of meaning that have maximized feelings of power and vitality; for Freud, it is the organization and dynamics of unconscious libidinal drives in the psyche. Whatever the real is for each thinker, however, the key claim is that the surface appearances of reason, morality, and subjectivity are not to be trusted as revealing the way things actually are. The (three different) conceptions of the real then count as the “Others” of reason.
Even as Honneth's work is certainly neither aimed at, nor resulting in, a thoroughgoing debunking of reason, morality, and self-consciousness – his project is after all Hegelian – he nevertheless displays throughout his writings a real sensitivity to the importance of remaining skeptical and critical of the pretensions of rationality, self-transparency, and self-determination (exemplary here is Honneth 1995a). And the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud on his writings is clearly detectable, even if often in the background.
Marx is unsurprisingly the least in the background since the Frankfurt School tradition is a major part of so-called “western Marxism.” Honneth's earliest essays from 1980 and 1981 critique his mentor Habermas's theory for insufficient attention to the deep ways in which class cleavages and everyday experiences of work in late capitalist societies may influence moral categories and provoke social struggles (Honneth 1995g, 1995j). Further, by 1989, it is clear that Honneth intends his theory of recognition as a replacement for Marx's theory of labor, all in order to better fulfill Marx's more general intentions of connecting social theory to a critical theory of emancipation (Honneth 1995b). Finally, central Marxist concerns are also expressed in Honneth's work: the importance of a society's political–economic relations; the nature and value of work; the existence of class-based domination; the injustice of massive economic inequality; and the capitalist pathologies of ideology, alienation, reification, and commoditization.
Nietzsche's influence on Honneth is more indirect. While Honneth is certainly not carrying out a Nietzschean program of skeptical irrationalism or revaluation of all existing values, I would suggest that Honneth is deeply influenced by the Nietzschean theme of the politics of interpretation. As we will see, for Honneth, struggles for recognition revolve centrally around the meanings, symbols, concepts, and values that collectively make up a particular society's recognition order. Consequently, a struggle against misrecognition or distorted recognition is often, practically speaking, a struggle to revalue contemporary meanings, interpretations, and values in order to change institutions and practices.
Finally, Freud's influence on Honneth is substantial, though usually mediated through later generations of psychoanalytic research, particularly object relations theory.10 As we will see especially in the next chapter, more recent psychoanalytic research is absolutely central to Honneth's work. Emotions are at the center of his intersubjectivist theory of the self and individual identity development, and that theory is aimed at a central topic of psychoanalysis: the conditions of healthy psychological development and an undistorted ego identity. But psychoanalytic themes are also central to his social and political theories of interpersonal and familial relations, of political culture and democratic interaction. Love and solidarity are, after all, both central categories for his political theory of justice, as we'll see in chapter 6. And of course, Honneth stresses the importance of morally reactive emotions – such as indignation, shame, guilt, and sympathy – as motivators for social struggles.
1.3.3 The Frankfurt School
Honneth's overarching aim is to produce a critical social theory: an interdisciplinary social theory aiming to diagnose the emancipatory perils and potentials of the present. Although Hegel is the single theorist with the greatest influence on Honneth, it is clear that the Frankfurt School – that diverse group of intellectuals collected around the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany – has had an equal if not greater role in the development and nature of Honneth's thought.11 After all, it was the first generation – most prominently Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse – who gave the name “critical theory” to the intellectual endeavor that Honneth explicitly aims to continue. And Honneth's work is deeply influenced by his mentor, the leading second-generation Frankfurt School critical theorist Jürgen Habermas – Germany's preeminent public intellectual and most influential philosopher and sociopolitical theorist of the last fifty years.
Although Honneth's theory of recognition has been broadly influential across many research paradigms, he sees his work as carrying on the Frankfurt School tradition, albeit with quite different tools than those of the first two generations. His second published article, from 1979, is on Habermas's critique of Adorno (Honneth 1979). His first book, The Critique of Power, published in German in 1985 and subtitled Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, provides an intellectual history of the Frankfurt School (and Foucault) that also builds a new critical theory out of the strengths and weaknesses detected in predecessors' theories. This intention has continued in his writings up to the present; for instance, he considers the recent essays in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009 [2007]) a positive argument for the “timeliness of Critical Theory” (vii).
Beyond his own publications, moreover, Honneth has been the driving force behind the revivification of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and its work in producing empirical social science with an emancipatory intent.12 Since becoming the director of the Institute in 2001, he has brought in new researchers and funding, developed empirical research programs,13 edited a dedicated book series from Campus Verlag of Institute work entitled “Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology and Social Philosophy,” now in eighteen volumes (the first volume in the series: Honneth 2002b), and begun an excellent new academic journal WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (New Journal for Social Research), subtitled, in a deliberate echo of the original 1930s' Frankfurt School journal, Die Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.
Honneth has also argued for a specific conception of what is distinctive about the Frankfurt School brand of social philosophy. “Social philosophy” according to Honneth is a broad tradition – including not only Frankfurt School theorists, but also Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Lukács, Freud, Plessner, Arendt, and Foucault – where theory aims to diagnose misdevelopments in society, that is, social pathologies (Honneth 2007f). The Frankfurt School is that specific form of social philosophy which has consistently focused on social pathologies of reason or rationality (Honneth 2009d).
Through all their disparateness of method and object, the various authors of the Frankfurt School are united in the idea that the living conditions of modern capitalist societies produce social practices, attitudes, or personality structures that result in a pathological distortion of our capacities for reason.…They always aim at exploring the social causes of a pathology of human rationality. (Pathologies of Reason: vii)
Another distinctive theme of Frankfurt School theory, according to Honneth, has been a central commitment to building theory around a point of “immanent transcendence,” something within actual society that simultaneously points beyond it. The basic idea is that the various elements of critical theory – the analysis of society, the diagnosis of pathologies, the justification of evaluative standards, and so on – must all be systematically connected to something found in actual, everyday social life, something that also points to a better, more emancipated, and reasonable form of life.14 As Honneth puts the idea: “within the given relations, an element of practice or experience must always be identifiable that can be regarded as a moment of socially embodied reason insofar as it possesses a surplus of rational norms or organizational principles that press for their own realization” (RoR: 240). Different varieties of Frankfurt School theory can be seen as embracing different elements of immanent transcendence: the workers' movement for Horkheimer et al. before World War II; aesthetic and mimetic experience for Adorno after the war; language and public communication for Habermas; and struggles for recognition and social freedom for Honneth.15
A third, and crucial, theme unites the work of Habermas and Honneth: the turn to intersubjectivity. Whereas the first generation of the Frankfurt School seemed to be always searching for some form of undamaged subjectivity as a critical point of reference, both Habermas and Honneth decisively turn toward undamaged intersubjectivity – intact forms of social interaction – as the critical reference point of immanent transcendence. For instance, the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead's startlingly original empirical arguments that humans actually come to have an understanding of themselves only in and through social interactions with others are a touchstone for both Habermas and Honneth. To be sure, Habermas focuses on the rational structure of language itself – for instance, in his claim that every speech act raises simultaneously three validity claims to truth, moral rightness, and sincerity. Honneth undoubtedly endorses the broad Habermasian argument that “the moral potential of communication is the engine of social progress and at the same time also indicates its direction” (RoR: 242). But he intends, as we will see, to find the inherent, progressive normative content that points toward emancipation in the very structures of social interaction – specifically in the diverse practices of reciprocal recognition – rather than in the structures of language, as does Habermas. To put it simply, whereas Habermas prioritizes undistorted intersubjective language, Honneth looks to undistorted intersubjective recognition.16
1.3.4 French social theory
French social theory has seen a renaissance since the end of World War II, and Honneth has been an insightful reader and interpreter of much of it. The work of the preeminent French post-structuralist Michel Foucault has received the most systematic attention, especially early in Honneth's corpus; later references become less frequent. There is a chapter on Foucault in his early co-authored book on philosophical anthropology (SAaHN: 129–50), and Foucault's theory of power receives sustained critical attention across three chapters in Honneth's first monograph (CoP: 99–202). The social theory developed by the phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre later in his life in order to analyze colonialist domination also receives appreciative treatment, particularly since that theory is built around struggles for recognition (SfR: 145–59). In addition, other prominent French social theorists have been the object of individual essays and sporadic references: the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (Honneth 1995i), the phenomenologist of embodiment Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Honneth 1995c), the psychoanalyst of social imaginaries Cornelius Castoriadis (Honneth 1995h), the sociologist of cultural power Pierre Bourdieu (Honneth 1995d), and the sociologists of moral beliefs Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (Honneth 2012c). Finally, we can point to two more programmatic essays from the mid-1990s that explicitly come to terms with post-structuralist critiques of the ideal of the autonomous subject (Honneth 2007b) and of the ideal of universal morality (Honneth 2007e). The latter essay also contains explicit treatment of the ethical thought of Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida.
However, it is difficult to accurately assess how influential all of this has been on the core conceptions and arguments of Honneth's own theory. In many ways, he is explicitly sympathetic to much of the empirical and concrete social analysis that these thinkers have produced. They are important touchstones for exploring themes such as the hidden suffering caused by modern social life; the fragility of subjectivity and autonomy; our persistent lack of self-transparency, self-knowledge, and self-control; the ethical importance of particularized care, concern, and benevolence toward the singular and unique other; the central role of distinct webs of symbolic and evaluative meanings and understandings for practices and institutions of social interaction; and, especially, the many ways in which the social is a field of ineliminable confrontation, conflict, and disagreement. But at the same time Honneth never endorses the skeptical and relativistic conclusions that are often taken to follow from post-structuralist theories. Indeed, rather than embracing such denials of reason, truth, and moral progress – for instance, Foucault's picture of social history as simply one contingent historical organization of power/knowledge regime after another, or Bourdieu's reductionist account of norms as mere symbolic currency in a relentlessly strategic competition for cultural capital – Honneth in fact joins the project of vindicating such ideals, the project that stretches from Kant through Hegel and on to Habermas. In the end, it is perhaps safest to say that Honneth is surely an admirer of the empirical social insights of much French social theory, even as he is emphatically not in agreement with the skeptical methodological and normative consequences it is usually taken to have.
1.3.5 Political philosophy
Debates in normative political philosophy, especially those begun after the 1971 publication of John Rawls's groundbreaking Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971), form an important context for Honneth's work. A good way to get a sense of the distinctiveness of his project is to see how it resonates and contrasts with other contemporary political philosophies, both ideal and critical.
The clearest contrast with Honneth's project – and with all critical social theories – is provided by ideal political philosophies. The basic aim of such philosophies is to articulate and justify ideal principles of justice, rightness, legitimacy, and so on. The justified principles are usually understood as true and perfect simpliciter, that is, true for all time and perfect in the sense of there being nothing better or more ideal. In other words, ideal political philosophy focuses first – and often only – on explicating and defending the ideal normative standards for any perfect society. This is the primary aim, for instance, of John Rawls's celebrated theory of justice as fairness. Rawls's work is directed almost entirely at developing “strict compliance theory”: “I shall assume that…the nature and aims of a perfectly just society is the fundamental part of the theory of justice” (Rawls 1971: 9). The idea here is that we must first possess perfect principles of justice and the like – justified as true by pure moral/philosophical arguments – before we can go on, in a second and derivative step, to do “non-ideal” or “partial compliance theory.” Only then do we move into the messy and opaque world of social reality, delicately but not directly applying some of our ideal principles, in suitably modified and qualified ways, in order to attempt to deal with the “pressing and urgent matters…that we are faced with in everyday life” (Rawls 1971: 9). Unfortunately, as a matter of fact about intellectual life, such pressing and urgent matters often receive short shrift in the actual debates that dominate political philosophy, as theorists focus almost entirely on matters of ideal theory alone.
There are many other contemporary examples of such ideal political philosophies beyond Rawls's own liberal egalitarianism, ranging across other forms of liberal egalitarianism (e.g., Ronald Dworkin), social contract theory (David Gauthier), libertarianism (Robert Nozick), socialism (G. A. Cohen), utilitarianism (Peter Singer), and many more. Clearly, Honneth's theory resonates with the substantive concerns of many of these theories, if not all. Like consequentialism, it is concerned with human well-being; like social contract theory and liberal egalitarianism, it sees individual freedom as the preeminent value; like socialism, it is concerned that economic arrangements facilitate the self-realization of all persons. But its method for understanding these substantive concerns is quite different.
The opening sentence of Freedom's Right directly critiques the methods of ideal political philosophy: “One of the major weaknesses of contemporary political philosophy is that it has been decoupled from an analysis of society and has thus become fixated on purely normative principles” (FR: 1). In contrast and following Hegel, Honneth proposes that “a theory of justice must be based on social analysis” (FR: 1). According to this conception, political thought ought to begin with the institutional reality of actually existing society, elucidate the basic underlying values that serve as the integrative glue of those institutions, demonstrate that those institutions are themselves legitimate to the extent they fully facilitate those values, and thereby contribute to a critique of existing institutions when they insufficiently or imperfectly embody and facilitate those values. In short, rather than approaching existing society with values that are philosophically justified independently of existing reality, political theory should be immanently constructed out of the actual values that integrate a given society.17
Of course, an ideal theorist might object that we cannot take existing values as justifiable simply because they exist – that would be to court the danger of endorsing any and every status quo social consensus, no matter how unattractive or horrific. Agreeing that this is a real danger, Honneth's theory attempts to show, in a deeply Hegelian manner, that modern society's values and central institutions are in fact legitimate since they are historically superior to older values and institutions. In particular, as we will see in chapter 6, the central institutions of society – personal relationships, the economy, and democratic public life – are themselves justified because they more adequately facilitate the realization of the social freedom and appropriate recognition of each person than did earlier institutional orders. Although Honneth has only recently stressed this in FR, it is clear that his philosophy has proceeded this way at least since SfR, according to which “processes of social change are to be explained with reference to the normative claims that are structurally inherent in relations of mutual recognition” (SfR: 2). Thus methodologically, Honneth's project has been consistently distinct from ideal political philosophy: a normative reconstruction of actually existing practices and institutions, attuned to the ways in which they facilitate or frustrate the values of mutual recognition and social freedom.
We should also note that such a method implies a very deep interdependence between empirical social analysis and normative analysis, rather than the traditionally strict division of labor between social science and philosophy, between empirical and normative issues. For while Honneth's normative analysis gains its content – immanently justified values – from existing social reality, his social theory sorts and organizes the mass of social phenomena according to those very same immanent values. Ideal political philosophy, by contrast, strictly separates its own issues of the elaboration and justification of perfect ideals from various empirical questions that are the proper province of (supposedly value-free) social sciences. As a critical social theorist, Honneth envisions an inevitably tight connection between interdisciplinary social theory and its emancipatory intent.
While liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, and utilitarianism have been the dominant traditions in the last fifty years of political philosophy – usually pursued as ideal political philosophy – there are a host of alternative types of political thought that have arisen distinct from this mainstream. Such “critical political theories,” to coin a phrase of convenience, have focused on substantive issues often shunted aside by mainstream theories or have pursued alternative theoretical methodologies. We can further contextualize Honneth's work by seeing how many of their focal concerns overlap and intersect with his.
Honneth's work resonates with central themes of communitarianism: the critique of social atomism in contemporary societies, of unbridled egoistic individualism leading to social anomie and feelings of alienation. Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer engaged in a sustained back and forth with Rawls and other liberal political philosophers – itself an update of disputes in political philosophy between Hegel and Kant. In fact, Honneth originally framed his project through these debates. For instance, the capstone idea in SfR – the idea of a “formal conception of ethical life” – is itself developed as a solution to the cul-de-sac that Honneth argues both liberals and communitarians had arrived at in their debate (Honneth 1995f). Unsurprisingly, Honneth and many communitarians pursue theories of justice through social analysis and are methodologically indebted to Hegel, even as the substance of Honneth's theory of justice – preeminently concerned with freedom – is much more left-Hegelian than the usually more conservative right-Hegelian prioritization of collective goods by communitarians.
With socialism and Marxism, Honneth shares several central concerns: with exploitation and alienation of employees in unbridled, deregulated labor markets, and with the ways market structures can undermine the normative content of personal relationships and the democratic public sphere. To be sure, quite unlike Marxism, Honneth does not reject capitalism wholesale, seeing market relations rather as structured by inherent moral content and as potential spheres for the realization of individuals' social freedom when properly institutionalized.
Recognition theory has often been strongly associated with multiculturalism, perhaps largely due to the powerful influence of Taylor's essay on the politics of recognition (Taylor 1994, originally published 1992). Indeed, Honneth shares multiculturalism's central concern with problems of cultural denigration and marginalization – and shares its key philosophical claim that individual self-respect and self-esteem are indissociably connected to social structures of recognition. However, it is quite misleading to reduce the broad diversity of what Honneth understands as recognition struggles to merely cultural battles over “identity politics” and state policies accommodating multicultural differences. As we will see, Honneth's aim in theorizing recognition and freedom is much broader than this, attempting to delineate the moral grammar of modern family life, law and rights, constitutional democracy, the workplace, economy, and so on.
Feminist social movements, furthermore, are cited by Honneth as examples of salutary and successful struggles for expanded recognition and social freedom, and his recognition theory provides useful normative categories for analyzing the diversity of much feminist politics (Zurn 1997). While Honneth is surely no radical calling for the overthrow of the sex–gender system, he clearly counts many of the signal aims and (partial) achievements of feminism as progressive: overcoming gender-specific discrimination in various spheres of life, deactivating the moral denunciation of sexuality, increasing open communication and negotiation within families, overcoming the unequal gendered distribution of care work, securing laws against rape, abuse
