Axel Honneth

Christopher Zurn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745649047, 9780745649030
• eBook ISBN: 9780745686806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

1
Introduction

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 descrip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Contemporary Thinkers Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Individuals' Struggle for Recognition
• 3: Social Struggles for Recognition
• 4: Diagnosing Social Pathologies
• 5: Recognition and Markets
• 6: Social Freedom and Recognition
• 7: Concluding Speculations
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement