Freedom's Right

The Social Foundations of Democratic Life

Axel Honneth

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231530859
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Theories of justice often fixate on purely normative, abstract principles unrelated to real-world situations. The philosopher and theorist Axel Honneth addresses this disconnect, and constructs a theory of justice derived from the normative claims of Western liberal-democratic societies and anchored in morally legitimate laws and institutionally established practices. Honneth’s paradigm—which he terms "a democratic ethical life”—draws on the spirit of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his own theory of recognition, demonstrating how concrete social spheres generate the principles of individual freedom and a standard for what is just. Using social analysis to re-found a more grounded theory of justice, he argues that all crucial actions in Western civilization, whether in personal relationships, market-induced economic activities, or the public forum of politics, share one defining characteristic: they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom. This fundamental truth informs the guiding principles of justice, grounding and enabling a wide-ranging reconsideration of its nature and application.

Part I

Historical Background: The Right to Freedom

1

Negative Freedom and the Social Contract

The idea of negative freedom was born out of the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although even at this time the aim of these conflicts could have drawn attention to the reflexivity of freedom, that is, to the fact that subjects can only want what they reflexively view as right, Hobbes skilfully steers the combating parties toward a negative conception of individual freedom. In one famous passage of Leviathan, Hobbes writes, ‘By Liberty, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of externall Impediments.’¹ At its most elementary level, Hobbes views freedom as the mere absence of external obstructions that might hinder a body’s ability to move naturally. By contrast, internal impediments deriving from the material structure of simple bodies cannot be viewed as restrictions on freedom, because they belong to the individual’s dispositions and therefore are caused by the subject itself. On the basis of this initial, and still naturalistic definition of freedom, Hobbes draws a conclusion about the freedom of human beings who, unlike mere bodies, possess a ‘will’. Human freedom thus consists in being unhindered by external impediments while realizing one’s own aims. A free person is therefore someone who is not faced with obstacles which ‘may oft take away part of a mans power to do what hee would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgement and reason shall dictate to him’.² Therefore, in the case of human beings as well, internal hindrances cannot be regarded as restrictions on freedom, because psychological factors such as fear, weakness or a lack of self-confidence can only be traced to the individual’s capacities, and thus cannot count as external impediments. But more importantly, Hobbes objects to the notion that the type of aims an individual pursues should play any role when it comes to determining whether a certain act is ‘free’ or not. All aims that, according to a person’s ‘own judgement and reason’, are ‘the aptest means thereunto’ are to be regarded as intentions that can be thwarted by external restrictions on freedom.³

For Hobbes, these few extremely paltry considerations sufficiently characterize what he regards as the ‘natural liberty’ of human beings.⁴ What is decisive here is the internal connection he draws – almost unnoticeably – between the exclusion of internal impediments and the potential aims of free action. Because human freedom consists in doing whatever is in one’s own immediate self-interest, any motivational complications vaguely associated with a lack of clarity about one’s own intentions cannot count as restrictions on free action.⁵ The idea that the aim of freedom consists in fulfilling any and all desires, provided they serve the subject’s self-assertion, allows Hobbes to restrict his purview to external sources of resistance. Potential haziness, confusion or restrictions of the human will cannot be taken into account when defining natural liberty, because as observers we are not entitled to judge what a subject should or should not desire.

Before inquiring into the consequences of this minimal definition of freedom for our conception of justice, we must first briefly discuss the reasons for its dominance in the history of ideas. Although Hobbes’ definition of freedom is extremely simple and even primitive, it managed to survive in the face of heavy theoretical resistance and would later, in more expanded form, come to represent the core of a dominant idea of freedom. Thanks to the research of Quentin Skinner, we now know that Hobbes originally sought to counter the growing influence of Republicanism during the English Civil War. By proposing that freedom merely be understood as the externally unimpeded realization of human aims, he sought – with theoretical skill and rhetorical brilliance – to counteract any conceptions of freedom that might encourage the desire for civil associations.⁶ But the political strategy behind Hobbes’ idea of freedom would soon become irrelevant, and what remained was an extremely thin, merely negative formulation of liberty. The fact that it has managed to survive at all and resist all normative attacks even today must be due to a kernel of intuitive truth that virtually transcends all of its strategic usefulness. The reason for this idea’s enduring attractiveness becomes apparent once we pursue the idea of negative freedom beyond Hobbes’ starting point and search for what it has in common with the ideas of freedom that would follow.⁷ As much as Hobbes’ original idea would later be improved upon by Locke, John Stuart Mill or Robert Nozick, the idea remains that the purpose of freedom is to secure a protected free-space for egocentric action, unimpeded by the pressures of responsibility toward others. If individuals in their endless particularity had not been able to constantly appeal to the idea of negative freedom, Hobbes’ theory would never have had a future.

The idea that the freedom of the individual consists in pursuing one’s own interests unhindered by ‘external’ obstacles touches on a deep-seated intuition of modern individualism, according to which subjects are entitled to a certain amount of individuality, even if their intentions and desires are not subjected to higher principles.⁸ Contrary to his own intentions, Hobbes’ unleashing of the legitimate purposes of free action led to the rise of a concept of freedom whose primary aim is to defend idiosyncrasy. This feature of negative freedom, however, only becomes clear once individuality loses its elitist character and becomes a cultural achievement of the masses.⁹ At the height of twentieth-century individualism,¹⁰ it became apparent that Hobbes’ doctrine was also an expression of the tendency to grant people the opportunity to be narcissistic and eccentric. Both Sartre’s existentialism and Nozick’s libertarianism represent variations on this theme of negative freedom.

On the one hand, the concept of freedom developed by Sartre in his philosophical masterpiece is not tailored to the kind of questions that stand at the centre of modern political philosophy. While the latter deals with the type and extent of freedom that should be granted to the individual, the former primarily focuses on the ontology of freedom.¹¹ But on the other hand, wherever Sartre’s argumentation touches on the conceptual horizon of the lifeworld, his concept of freedom seems to radicalize Hobbes’ concept of freedom. For Sartre as well, though for different reasons, neither a weak will nor psychic burdens represent restrictions on freedom; these internal hindrances are ‘expressions’ of a choice humans have already made about the possibility of existence they choose. At this fundamental level, the will is absolutely free of all attachments. Neither personal biography nor principles, neither identity nor consideration for others restrict us once we are compelled to choose a certain kind of life. According to Sartre, in the moment of existential choice there are no standards by which we could ‘justify’ ourselves to ourselves or to others.¹² Rather, we create ourselves spontaneously, without reflection, drawing on one of the endless possibilities for existence offered to us by human life.

We need only shift our perspective slightly to see that Sartre ‘outdoes’ the concept of negative freedom developed by Hobbes three hundred years prior with naturalist means. If we see the core of such a negative conception not in the idea that only external hindrances can stand in our way, but in the idea that the type of aim we choose reveals nothing about whether we are truly free, then the same tendency to eliminate all reflexivity will become apparent in Sartre’s conception as well. Like Hobbes, Sartre also assumes that a certain degree of deliberation cannot be regarded as a part of the concept of individual freedom; Sartre views such a decoupling as an existential imperative, whereas Hobbes regards it as a normative fact. For both thinkers, therefore, the freedom of the individual merely consists in choosing certain aims, whether they stem from sources of ‘spontaneous consciousness’¹³ or from certain given desires. There is no need for the additional step of reflection, because the justification of aims in the light of higher principles does not represent a part of freedom. This type of freedom is ‘negative’ because a person’s aims are not judged according to whether they themselves meet the conditions of freedom. Regardless of which existential choice one makes, and regardless of which desires are fulfilled, the pure, unhindered act of choice suffices for the resulting action to qualify as being ‘free’.

This evidence of an underlying affinity between Hobbes and Sartre is only meant to support the claim that the idea of negative freedom has become part and parcel of the modern conceptual world because it justifies a striving for individuality. Contrary to his original intention, Hobbes’ proposal that we define individual freedom in merely external terms has contributed to a conceptual tradition in which, today, an action is ‘free’ as long as it can be regarded as an expression of individual choice. In the existentialist pathos of unconditional freedom, we find the endpoint of what once began as the inconspicuous claim that only external impediments pose an obstacle for human action. But even more clearly than Sartre, Robert Nozick demonstrates the radical significance that Hobbes’ concept of negative freedom would one day acquire. Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an instructive example of a methodological perspective on a just order, one whose point of departure is the idea of negative freedom.¹⁴

In his theory of justice, Nozick employs the same concept of freedom upon which Hobbes and Locke based their theories of a just political order. Nozick also conceives of individual freedom merely as the chance to realize one’s desires and intentions unhindered by external obstacles. But unlike these two English philosophers, Nozick does not have in mind the subjects of a monarch who are fighting for religious freedom, but the radical individualists of the twentieth century. For the latter, freedom means being able to achieve as many egocentric, entirely selfish life aims as are reconcilable with the freedom of one’s fellow citizens. From such an individualist perspective, even the mere expectation that one should be reasonable when it comes to fulfilling one’s desires must appear an unreasonable demand, as this would impose a rational restriction on individual freedom.¹⁵ The fact that humans, in their ‘individual existence’,¹⁶ are on their own, and that their aims are opaque to each other given the ‘enormous complexity’ of their drives, inclinations and attachments,¹⁷ means that we can only judge life aims in terms of whether they are reconcilable with the aims of all others. Even these few remarks make apparent just how much Nozick adapts the idea of negative freedom to the conditions that prevail in pluralistic, extremely individualized societies. On this view, the expectation that we subject our desires and intentions to minimal standards of rationality already counts as an ‘external’ restriction of freedom. For Hobbes, the empty form in which we conceive individual freedom is still restricted by the condition that a person’s self-interest be rational, while Nozick removes even this minimal condition: All life aims, however irresponsible, self-destructive or idiosyncratic, must be viewed as part of the aim of realizing freedom, provided they do not violate the rights of others.

But even this extreme variation on the meaning of negative freedom, which gradually detaches freedom from any internally limiting conditions, does not change the fact that the methodological perspective on justice remains largely the same. Almost without exception, the formulation of a just political order begins by portraying a fictional state of nature. With descriptions that vary in terms of strength and comprehensiveness, these authors posit how social interaction might have taken place in the absence of a political authority.¹⁸ But before these descriptions take on a more narrowly defined methodological function, they usually serve to give some plausibility to the hardly uncontroversial premise of negative freedom. The individuals that are imagined to have lived in this pre-political order are assumed to accept as few restrictions as possible and to act solely according to their own desires. The extremely minimalist notion of freedom employed in all theories of justice in the Hobbesian tradition is thus projected back into a state of nature, making the presumption of natural bonds and mutual affection simply unthinkable. The result is that humans are assumed to be isolated beings whose primary interest consists in acting according to their own preferences with as few hindrances as possible.¹⁹

Beyond this core commonality, however, the various versions of social-contract theory differ significantly when it comes to defining the state of nature in detail. The further these theories move away from Hobbes, the more they tend to restrict subjects’ striving for freedom by imposing moral laws. Although they retain the notion that human beings naturally strive to pursue their interests with as few restrictions as possible, they impose external limits on this egocentric instinct, which also derive from a kind of natural law that is assumed to be valid.²⁰ To this day, it is not entirely clear how such imperatives of natural law can be reconciled with the striving for negative freedom. Either we must understand obedience to moral principles as an inherent element of freedom, which would mean that we would no longer be dealing with a purely negative concept, or we must view this obedience as a mere reaction to external circumstances, which would entail massive restrictions on negative freedom even in the state of nature. Any attempt to do away with the drastic war-like character of Hobbes’ state of nature by implanting moral restrictions necessarily runs up against the limits of the model of negative freedom. After all, the effectiveness of such a morality could only be conceived as a type of individual self-restriction, meaning that freedom would contain an element of reflexivity from the very start.²¹

However these conceptual difficulties might be resolved in each individual case, the fictional state of nature has retained the central role it is bound to play in theories of negative freedom. The principles that are to prevail in a political order are always determined in the same way: a thought experiment, a kind of fictitious questionnaire presented to subjects in the state of nature. What kind of a political order would free individuals be willing to consent to if their aim was to improve their overall condition? It is easy to see that even this procedure of justification employs a principle of consensus; any answer given to the question of how a legal order should be designed is only justified on the condition that, hypothetically, all subjects in a pre-political state could consent to it. What is equally apparent is that the variations on this legal order always depend on the moral principles that have already been projected into the state of nature. The alternatives run from Hobbes’ coercive state, which he justifies without the use of founding moral principles, to Nozick’s ‘minimal state’, which he justifies normatively by presupposing a significant amount of moral restrictions within the state of nature. What is most important for our purposes, however, is the fact that this procedure of justification reveals the type of social justice that arises from the perspective of negative freedom.

Obviously, the concept of freedom at the heart of these theories affects the status and scope of their conceptions of justice. This begins with the fact that such a thought experiment only offers subjects the choice of pursuing purely individual calculations. Any considerations other than those of strategic prudence are filtered out by simply presupposing that individuals are merely interested in preserving and securing their own freedom. This restriction then shows up in the outcome of the thought experiment, whose future validity relies solely on subjects’ strategic consent. Any political and legal order derived in this manner can only count on the approval of its subjects to the extent that it succeeds in fulfilling each of their individual expectations. In this kind of legal order, subjects have no opportunity to examine and refresh their consent to political measures by participating in the drafting and revising of legal principles. Instead they are conceptually restricted to a one-shot act of approval, which means that they can only judge the legitimacy of the political order according to their own individual interests. By presupposing merely negative freedom, the theory prevents citizens from viewing themselves as the creators and ‘renewers’ of their own legal principles, for that would require that we ascribe an additional, higher-order element to the striving for freedom, one that would justify the assumption that subjects have an interest in cooperating with all other subjects.²²

But there is more to the issue than these two outcomes, because the concept of negative freedom also asserts itself in the extent and even the shape of the principles of justice formulated by these theories. Because this concept assumes that the individual’s will to freedom will rationally be restricted to the desire to encounter as few restrictions as possible, the principles of a just political order can only convey the value of freedom by ensuring as much space for personal decisions as possible. Such a liberal conception of justice can thus ...