INTRODUCTION: AxeL HONNeTH’S PROJeCT OF CRITICAL THeORY

INTRODUCTION: AxeL HONNeTH’S PROJeCT OF CRITICAL THeORY 

Danielle Petherbridge

Over several decades Axel Honneth has made a profound contribution to Critical Theory, most notably in terms of defending its normative, emancipatory project and developing a comprehensive theory of society and social action that can provide a framework for analysing social relations of domination. For Honneth, the task of critical social theory requires more than simply mounting a critique of existing social conditions, notably it must also carry the potential for immanently motivating social change. In the tradition of Left-Hegelian critique in which Honneth situates his own project, Critical Theory must therefore consist of two fundamental elements: both a pre-theoretical resource or empirical foothold in social reality which reveals an emancipatory instance or need, but also a quasi-transcendental dimension or mode of context-transcending validity in order to provide a normative horizon from which to critically assess forms of social organisation.  In other words, critical social theory requires a dialectical interplay between immanence and transcendence which can enable critical diagnoses of exiting social conditions to be made.

 

Honneth considers this dialectical method or form of  ‘transcendence within immanence’ to be the defining characteristic of critical social theory in the Frankfurt School or Left-Hegelian tradition.  In Honneth’s view, one of the main problems confronting contemporary critical social theorists today, is determining which instances or experiences can be pre-theoretically located within social reality that also contain ‘system-bursting’ potential to compel change within a given social order.  For the critical theorist to avoid claiming a privileged or paternalistic position, the emancipatory instance or experience that compels social change must be identified within the existing social order and must be of the same normativity or rationality that becomes manifest in new forms of social organisation.  A pre-theoretical interest must “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”.  For Honneth this pre-theoretical condition is identified in a recognition-theoretical stance that provides the normative ground from which critical assessments of social life can be made.

It is in the context of developing this recognition-theoretical approach that Honneth’s work became widely known with the publication of his 1992 book, The Struggle for Recognition.  However despite the prominence of the 1992 book, Honneth’s work cannot be fully understood without locating the theory of recognition within the context of a broader project which has been pursued systematically from his early essays on Marx and Critical Theory, through to his studies on philosophical anthropology in Social Action and Human Nature, and his reappraisal of models of critical social theory in The Critique of Power. It also extends to his most recent work on Hegel, the later essays on object-relations theory, his debate with Nancy Fraser, and the Tanner Lectures published as Reification. The essays in this volume seek to demonstrate the breadth and systematicity that characterises Honneth’s project across these writings and to engage critically not only with the theory of recognition but with the shifts and currents that have shaped Honneth’s model of Critical Theory throughout his work.

1. Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Theory

In The Critique of Power, Honneth traces the theoretical transitions between the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault and Habermas, as a contribution to what he terms ‘reflective stages in a critical social theory’.  With this methodology Honneth understands the ‘history of theory’ he presents as a ‘reflective learning process’ at the level of theory that has a teleological orientation. Significantly, for Honneth, in this trajectory Foucault is posited as the heir to Adorno, and his work is considered to provide a productive development in terms of the project of a critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition. In this sense, Honneth’s own self-understanding is that the studies in The Critique of Power represent a critico-reflexive process with systematic intent that begins with Horkheimer and Adorno, progresses with Foucault’s work, and culminates in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which represents a theoretical advance over previous models of critical social theory. 

In this early reappraisal of the tradition of critical social theory, however, Honneth identifies a common problem in the works of these four theorists – namely, their inadequate accounts of the social and restrictive theories of social action. In this regard, as Joel Anderson shows, Honneth’s project can be situated not only in relation to the continuities, but also the differences with first and second generation Critical Theory in the establishment of his own programme of critical social theory. Although Honneth locates his project in the tradition of Critical Theory conceived by Horkheimer, he contends that the social-theoretical analysis  developed by first generation members of the Frankfurt School was not robust enough to develop a reflexive critique of society nor adequately able to construct the normative grounds for critique. In Honneth’s view, Horkheimer and Adorno’s incapacity to adequately analyse a communicative domain of the social leads to their inability to locate a pre-theoretical resource for critique in everyday life beyond the paradigm of labour and to a one-dimensional conception of power understood in terms of the human domination of nature. Although Horkheimer and Adorno attempted to develop a model of social theory that was able to separate a critical method from the falsely universalising influences of the model of the natural sciences, Honneth argues they fell victim to an account of social life overly determined by the act of dominating nature by failing to develop a more complex account of social processes.  Despite his original insights into a dimension of ‘cultural action’, Horkheimer’s adherence to a philosophy of history structured in terms of the dimension of social labour, prevented him from fully identifying an intersubjective dimension of social action, which could provide a pre-theoretical resource for critique. Moreover, in Honneth’s view, Adorno’s negativism only forces Critical Theory even further into a position in which it is no longer possible to gain access to a socialhistorically grounded form of reflexive critique and is left articulating a pre-theoretical reference point that is located in the experience of modern art. 

Notwithstanding Honneth’s attempts to reconstruct more systematically the project of Critical Theory articulated by first-generation members of the Frankfurt School, it can be argued that Honneth considers the communicative transformation of Critical Theory initiated by Jürgen Habermas offers the most promising conceptual means by which access to a pre-scientific realm of moral critique can once again be established. In this vein, Honneth’s project has been directed towards reconstructing a project of practical reason based on a comprehensive theory of intersubjectivity in an effort to extend Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Honneth attempts to develop an alternative theory of intersubjectivity that can better account for the normative structures that provide the moral basis of both autonomous human action and interaction.

In order to address these concerns Honneth, like Habermas, posits the basis of critique in the normativity that, he argues, is immanent to intersubjectivity. Honneth adopts Habermas’ claim that social action can no longer be defined in light of the subject-object relation, but rather, must be reconceived in terms of the subject-subject relation. For Habermas, the way to avoid the impasse encountered by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, depends on an account of reason and social action that is based on intersubjective cooperation and communication, not self-introspection. In his early essays and The Critique of Power, Honneth then largely accepts Habermas’ critique of Adorno and Horkheimer, that the philosophical-historical dead-end encountered by first generation Critical Theory can no longer be addressed by the philosophy of the subject nor the paradigm of consciousness.  Rather, the moral dilemmas of modernity can only be addressed by an account of morality founded upon the intersubjective formation of identity and communicative interaction.

Taking normative intersubjective theory as his point of departure, Honneth clearly identifies his own project as an extension and further development of the communicative paradigm initiated by Habermas.  Where their projects begin to differ, is that for Habermas, this means the philosophy of consciousness must be replaced by a philosophy of language, whilst for Honneth this paradigm shift is represented by a broad-based theory of recognition; whilst both agree that the paradigm of labour must be supplemented with one of communication, for Habermas this is linguistically mediated, whilst for Honneth it is conceived as a multi-dimensional notion of communication, including both pre- and extra-linguisticality. Honneth’s emphasis on recognition rather than discourse as the basis for a theory of intersubjectivity can be viewed as an attempt to redirect Habermas’ original idea regarding damaged relations of recognition in the lifeworld. This marks a return to Habermas’ early work on Hegel’s Jena lectures, where he first states, that “liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation, for there is no automatic developmental relation between labor and interaction [yet] there is a connection between the two dimensions”.  This foundational moment in Habermas’ project remains pivotal in Honneth’s own critical reconstruction, as does the turn to the early work of Hegel that inspires his own recognition-theoretic premise in his major work The Struggle for Recognition. 

These concerns to redirect the communicative paradigm can be traced back to some of Honneth’s earliest work, where he begins to develop his own program of critical social theory through his critique of Habermas’ interpretation of Marx.  It is particularly in Honneth’s early work that he carefully begins to provide a reconstruction of the communicative paradigm that can be distinguished from Habermas in three main moves. Firstly, Honneth accepts the shift from the Marxist paradigm of production to the paradigm of communicative action, which also means accepting that the conditions of social progress are no longer located in social labour but rather in social interaction. However, he suggests that the dynamics of social change should not be understood as processes of social rationalisation that take place ‘behind the backs’ of social actors in the form of evolutionary learning processes, but rather in the moral struggles between social groups. In this sense, Honneth attempts to recover the dimension of ‘class struggle’ that he suggests was present in Habermas’ early work but receded as his project developed.

Secondly, where Habermas moves to construct a theory of the universal pragmatics of language with the aim of identifying the specific normative presuppositions that constitute the rational potential of communicative action, Honneth develops a theory of recognition that can articulate the normative intersubjective conditions necessary for autonomy understood in terms of successful individual selfrealisation, thereby reorienting the normative foundations of critical social theory.

Thirdly, Honneth develops a theory of modern society based on a notion of the historical shift to an institutional order of recognition relations, whereby all spheres of life can be organised recognitively, including the organisation of social labour.  This provides a contrast to Habermas’ theory of society that traces the process of rationalisation of communicative action to the historical point at which it results in the development of two distinct modes of integration, characterised in terms of ‘Lifeworld’ and ‘System’. Honneth’s aim is to avoid a differentiation between system and social integration, pitching his analysis at a level that reveals the moral presuppositions underlying all forms of integration. One of Honneth’s main critiques of Habermas is the separation instituted between normatively and instrumentally co-ordinated action spheres, or between social and systemic forms of integration.  In fact, Honneth’s project is pervaded by a distinctive position that fundamentally rejects anti-normative approaches to critical social theory. As the discussion by Nicholas Smith demonstrates, this is a stance that Honneth has maintained with remarkable consistency throughout his work from his original critique of Habermas in The Critique of Power to his debate with Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? Instead Honneth seeks to anchor social normativity at an ontological level and proposes that contemporary diagnoses of social life be oriented in terms of three types of social relations of recognition that are conceptualised in terms of love, law and achievement. This also enables Honneth to award the category of labour greater significance than otherwise given in Habermas’ theory of communicative action, as well as attempting to recover the moral dimension of alienation that is lost in his account.

Taking as his point of departure the original anthropological insights advanced in Habermas’ early work, Honneth moves to develop an alternative anthropological approach that includes bodily aspects, non-linguisticality and mimetic expression. The anthropological premise is one that has underpinned Honneth’s project from the beginning. Most notably this project was originally outlined in his important study Social Action and Human Nature written with Hans Joas.  As Jean-Philippe Deranty highlights, the collection of studies in philosophical anthropology can also be understood as ‘reflective stages’ or ‘traces’ in a theory of intersubjectivity, a learning process at the level of theory that is explicitly anthropological in orientation. In this reflexive-theoretical examination, Honneth and Joas begin with the intersubjective-theoretic insights of Feuerbach and Marx, and move through various studies and contributions to a philosophical anthropology of intersubjectivity in Western Marxism, and then to anthropologies of social action drawing in particular on the German tradition of philosophical anthropology and the work of Mead (which is also pivotal to the later work in The Struggle for Recognition), and finally to studies in ‘historical anthropology’ exemplified by elias, Foucault and Habermas.

For Honneth, all social philosophical research requires a form of anthropological reconstruction. In Social Action and Human Nature, this reconstructive enquiry takes place at two levels: (1) an exa mination of the conditions of the species’ history, and (2) individual development, both of which reveal certain constants or enduring conditions. However, Honneth and Joas caution against any claim that anthropology in this sense be understood as presuming an ahistorical view of human cultures, nor that it is attempting to provide “an inalienable substance of human nature”.  Rather, for Honneth, philosophical anthropology can only provide a reflection upon the human condition in the form of reconstructive method, as an historical enquiry into “the unchanging preconditions of human changeableness”.  Following Plessner and Gehlen, Honneth’s anthropological reconstruction is therefore intended to confirm what “natural invariability [can] help explain universal features of species-specific human historicity and plurality”. In this respect, Honneth explains that philosophical anthropology aims to articulate not what is “fixed and limited … but rather aims at invariant conditions of human historicity”.  

In other words, philosophical anthropology takes changefulness itself to be a social constant but also seeks to confirm what is constant in human changefulness. In this context, philosophical anthropology is not viewed as a foundational science, but rather as a form of autonomous self-critique on and of the social and cultural sciences that is reconstructive in method. The studies provided in Social Action and Human Nature are therefore intended as a ‘contribution’ to the project of theoretical self-reflection, a “discussion of anthropology with systematic intent”. 

From the very early work on philosophical anthropology, Honneth has been intent on establishing the normativity inherent to intersubjective relations, which initially with Joas, he traces back to its materialistic manifestation in the work of Feuerbach. In the first instance, therefore, the work of Feuerbach and Marx are foundational for this anthropological project. For Honneth, Feuerbach is not only central to establishing the relationship between anthropology and historical materialism, but also crucially he is credited with being “the first to take into consideration both epistemologically and substantially the significance of the specifically human structure of intersubjectivity”. That is, he reveals “an a priori intersubjectivity of the human being”. 

Moreover, in Honneth and Joas’ reconstruction of philosophical anthropology, several studies in what they term ‘historical anthropology’ also assume a significant position. Not only Habermas, but also elias and Foucault are credited for contributing to an historicisation of anthropology that highlights the ways in which these “natural preconditions of social action [can be traced] in such a manner and to such a degree that their historical and cultural plasticity becomes evident…”  In this sense, they argue that a reflexive philosophical anthropology must take account not only of the organic bounds of the human being, but also “the historical process through which human nature has shaped itself within [these] organically set bounds”. 

The interpretations of elias, Foucault and Habermas, can therefore be read as contributing important insights to a historically sensitised philosophical anthropology of intersubjectivity. Honneth’s understanding of philosophical anthropology is therefore alert to the ways in which historical and cultural processes have shaped and changed subjectivity, especially the fashioning of subjectivity of and through the human body, and it is in this sense that Foucault’s work is of interest as a contribution to ‘historical anthropology’. It is notable, then, that both Foucault and Habermas figure predominantly in Honneth’s early work prior to The Struggle for Recognition in terms of his reconstruction of reflexive stages towards a theory of intersubjectivity and in the outline of his own programme of critical social theory.

2. The Social as a Field of Struggle: Honneth’s Reading of Foucault

For Honneth, this reconfiguration of the intersubjective paradigm also requires an intersubjective-theoretic notion of power that can account for the conflictual aspects of a more broadly conceived version of communicative action and provide a more comprehensive critique of the structures of social domination. It is in this respect that Honneth puts Foucault’s analysis of strategic interaction to work with Habermas’ theory of communicative action in an attempt to develop a reflexive critique of power and domination. Despite arguing that Foucault lapses into a systems-theoretic analysis of power, Honneth suggests that Foucault’s understanding of the social as a domain of strategic interaction is instructive for developing an intersubjective-theoretic notion of power that is lacking in Habermas’ account.  Significantly, this enables Honneth to articulate a much broader notion of interaction and give much greater credence to social domination. In this way, Honneth develops an account of the social that perceptively analyses a relational notion of power at a micro-level, at the level of everyday interaction in the lifeworld. Honneth therefore conceives domination in broad terms, not just at the level of systemic production, nor in terms of the colonisation of the lifeworld but in everyday interactions, thus avoiding the false opposition between a norm-free domain of power and a powerfree domain of communication that he argues results from Habermas’ theoretical presuppositions.

Certain currents in Foucault’s work represent an attempt to conceptualise what Honneth has termed a ‘struggle-theoretical intuition’ that offers an alternative to Habermas’ systems-theoretic analysis and gestures towards a conception of social development as “a process of differentiation mediated by social struggles”.  Moreover, Foucault’s account of the social as a field of agonistic struggle provides an  important counterbalance to Habermas’ account of the social in terms of consensus and mutual understanding. For Honneth, Foucault’s intersubjective-theoretic notion of power in terms of the ‘practical intersubjectivity of struggle’, provides an alternative to Habermas’ restrictive account of power rendered in either systemic terms, or otherwise as a distorted form of communication. One of Honneth’s unique achievements is to bring together through reconstructive critique, the insights contained in Habermas’ ‘intersubjective-theoretical turn’ with Foucault’s motif of the struggle-constituted notion of the social. 

Honneth’s immanent critique of Foucault in The Critique of Power is important not only in terms of the project of articulating the centrality of struggle to the paradigm of the social, but also, to the articulation of an intersubjective-theoretic notion of power. Foucault’s work, it might be argued, provides an under-acknowledged nodal point in the conceptual history of intersubjectivity that Honneth traces throughout his own work. To be sure, in Honneth’s view, the action-theoretic account of struggle and power within Foucault’s work is ultimately cancelled out by what he identifies as a countervailing tendency towards systems-theoretic explanations typified by the analysis in Discipline and Punish and the idea of power-wielding institutions. His contention is that the action-theoretic premises of Foucault’s work that elucidate an ongoing process of social struggle are contradicted by his analysis of disciplinary power in which the subjectivating practices of social institutions such as the school, prison and hospital form a totalising form of power. Honneth carries this critique of structural and systematising forms of institutional analysis through to his later work, avoiding all forms of functional explanation. However, some critics have questioned whether Honneth has provided an adequate account of the role of institutions in the processes of subject-formation, even in its recognitive forms. In his contribution to this volume, emmanuel Renault provides a critical analysis of what he perceives to be Honneth’s inadequate account of institutions and institutional power. He contrasts what he considers to be Honneth’s uni-directional notion of institutions as ‘expressions’ of recognition with an alternative notion of institutions as ‘constitutive’ of recognition, by drawing on Foucaultian and Weberian stances.

In Honneth’s own analysis, the engagement with Foucault’s work only convinces him that the centrality of a notion of ‘struggle’ for a critical social theory can only be achieved by replacing Foucault’s notion of power/struggle, with a morally motivated concept of social struggle drawn from Hegel’s early writings. Nonetheless, the insights taken from Foucault’s work form an important contribution to Honneth’s working out of a notion of social struggle that is later incorporated into the theory of recognition, one that several authors argue has receded in his later work. This issue becomes especially important in relation to Honneth’s later conceptualisation of ethical life in The Struggle for Recognition, where he posits a ‘provisional end-state’ of social struggles within a horizon of social relations of solidarity. With this later move, questions have been raised about whether Honneth retains the ‘agonistic’ aspects of a theory of recognition that were evident in his early work, particularly in terms of the consequences this may have for a politics of recognition.  In his contribution, Robert Sinnerbrink suggests that by foregrounding the morality, rather than the politics of recognition in his later work, the action-theoretic model of the social as a field of social struggles that was a crucial inspiration for Honneth’s early reconstruction of critical social theory is deemphasised in Honneth’s subsequent work, an observation Honneth concedes in reflecting upon his own work in his ‘Rejoinder’ to this volume.

However, despite the productive contributions of both Foucault and Habermas to the project of critical social theory, Honneth concludes that neither theorist is able to accomplish the ambitious task outlined by Horkheimer, that is, to provide a comprehensive action-theoretic account of the social nor the basis for a reflexive critique of power. 

In the end, neither Habermas nor Foucault adequately conceptualises an action-theoretical account of the key dimensions of ‘culture’ and ‘social struggle’ that Horkheimer originally articulated. Honneth’s response to both Habermas and Foucault, therefore, is to attempt to develop an expanded notion of recognitive-communicative action that is applicable to the coordination of action in all spheres of social life. The consequence of Honneth’s own reconstruction of a more broadly conceived theory of communicative action is that he also attempts to redefine the analysis and critique of domination, and to incorporate a notion of conflict and social struggle as central to the paradigm of the social. Honneth is therefore compelled to look elsewhere to bring together a notion of social struggle and conflict together with a normative theory of society and social action, and this reorientation becomes the defining element of his project in The Struggle for Recognition. 

3. The Theory of Recognition

To accomplish the task of bringing together a notion of social conflict and a normative theory of society, Honneth turns to Hegel’s Jena philosophy of recognition, which for him provides the means to reconstruct Foucault’s struggle-theoretic insights in normative-theoretic terms. Through an intersubjectivistic reading of the early works of Hegel, Honneth develops a theory of recognition which is posited as the normative ground for a model of critical social theory. The concept of recognition is intended to provide a framework for analysing social conditions of individual self-realisation and the development of social relations and institutions. The normative foundation of recognition is grounded anthropologically and conceptualised as an originary notion of undamaged intersubjectivity which is understood to provide the fundamental preconditions for successful subject-formation and the development of ethical life.

With the interpretation of Hegel developed in The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth posits recognition as the normative ground of sociality and conflict and develops the three-sphered model of normative recognition relations and corresponding practical self-relations that has become synonymous with his mature project. This recognitiontheoretic ideal forms the basis of Honneth’s model of a formal concept of ethical life and the means by which he attempts to justify his particular model of critical social theory as an evaluative framework for analysing the conditions for full human flourishing. The three intersubjective patterns of recognition constitute Honneth’s version of a good or ethical life in the sense that they provide the conditions for successful identity-formation or the development of an ‘ethical personality’.  The three spheres of love, law and achievement, which recall Hegel’s divisions between family, state and civil society, are central to the development of three corresponding forms of practical self- relation. The formal concept of ethical life is to be understood as a normative ideal in which specific patterns of recognition enable individuals to acquire the self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem necessary for full self-realisation. Honneth wants to suggest that this ideal is not merely a theoretical construct but that it is pre-scientifically located in the structure of intersubjective social relations and can offer an evaluative framework from which to critically assess the general conditions for successful subject-formation within existing forms of social organisation.

Such an orientation towards ethical values is, however, not intended to provide a substantive notion of the ‘Good Life.’ Rather, Honneth wants to account for a notion of ethical life in formal terms only: the three interdependent patterns of recognition are intended to account for successful self-realisation in an abstract manner in an effort to avoid embodying particular visions of the good life. The anthropological structures of recognition are intended to provide a context- transcending claim to validity that is universally applicable regardless of historical or socio-cultural context. The forms of recognition associated with love, rights, and achievement as Honneth presents them, therefore, “do not represent established institutional structures but  only general patterns of behaviour”, which he argues, “can be distilled, as structural elements, from the concrete totality of forms of life”.  In this volume, Max Pensky and Bert van den Brink both question whether post-traditional values can indeed be extracted from all versions of the good life, and raise numerous issues about the compatibility of Honneth’s concepts of social solidarity and the formal concept of ethical life with modern social complexity and ethical pluralism. Honneth argues, however, that the notion of ethical life is not a theoretical proposal that intends to determine once and for all which values might constitute an ethical life. The development of substantive values must be left open to historical change and to the future of social struggles.  Honneth therefore also attempts to justify the contextimmanent features of recognition by leaving the model open enough to account for the particularity of socio-cultural and historical contexts in which recognitive identity claims are made. Nonetheless, he posits that the content of the three conditions of recognition is thick enough to offer normative criteria for successful identity-formation that extends normative theory beyond the scope of deontological or Kantian approaches that are based on self-determination and moral autonomy alone.

With the construction of a formal concept of ethical life, Honneth attempts to traverse a middle path between communitarian and Kantian models on which normative criteria can be based. In contrast to communitarian approaches, Honneth accounts for ethical criteria and structures of identity-formation without returning to a relativistic option that would seem to offer no way of distinguishing between better or worse notions of the good life. On the other hand, Honneth questions not only whether the formal criteria of Kantian-based theories thin out our anthropological understanding of the human condition too much but he also suggests they fail to explain the motivational basis for adhering to formal criteria. He maintains that deontological theories are too weak to be able to account for the motivational source for morality; nor can they convincingly establish a connection to a pretheoretical emancipatory interest. 

Honneth argues that an approach that re-configures an anthropology of recognition relations, and combines it with the problem of an ethical imperative from the vantage point of the intersubjective conditions for self-realisation, is a far more convincing way to ground critical social theory. Although he retains a commitment to a Kantian- derived idea of individual autonomy he also argues that because it has the character of a mere ‘ought’, it is too far removed from the everyday moral experiences of social lifeworlds and forms of ethical life to have any motivating validity. As Antti Kauppinen suggests Honneth’s theory of recognition does not merely account for the capacity for autonomy but the social and psychological conditions for exercising autonomy.  For Honneth, “the possibility of realizing individual autonomy depends on being able to develop an intact self-relation through the experience of social recognition”.  A subject can only achieve autonomy if she is able to acquire the necessary forms of self-relation – self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem – through participation or involvement in corresponding forms of social recognition.  In his contribution, Carl Göran Heidegren reconsiders the qualitative value and complex nature of these patterns of recognition and outlines an ethically ‘thicker’ conception of interpersonal interactions that might mediate between what he terms recognitive attitudes and expressions of recognition. 

Honneth’s own means of articulating the necessary structural conditions for a formal concept of ethical life is provided by the connection he makes between the necessary experience of the three forms of intersubjective recognition, the three corresponding forms of self-relation, and the forms of social organisation required to ensure successful selfrealisation.  This structural recognition-complex is grounded on “an anthropological conception that can explain the normative presuppositions of social interaction”.  For Honneth, there is a developmental logic between the three forms of self-relation that a subject acquires through processes of socialisation. Firstly, a subject must acquire basic self-confidence attained through loving relationships in which she has the capacity to express her own embodied needs and know they will be met by the care of significant others. Secondly, this basic self- confidence is a prerequisite for the subject to be able to secure a positive feeling towards herself as a person worthy of self-respect because she is considered a morally responsible and autonomous being equal to all others in the context of legal relations. Thirdly, this principle of equality before the law subsequently provides the capacities required to experience oneself as an individual who is valued for her contribution to society as well as deriving a sense of self-worth in the knowledge that she is integrated into a shared value-community.  In Honneth’s view, the three forms of recognitive relations “represent normative perspectives with reference to which subjects can reasonably argue that existing forms of recognition are inadequate or insufficient and need to be expanded”. 

In Honneth’s view, the three patterns of recognition constitute standards for ‘healthy’ forms of social relations against which ‘pathologies’ or ‘misdevelopments’ of social life can be identified and potentially transformed. The key to understanding Honneth’s approach is the connection he makes between anthropology, social philosophy and the diagnoses of social pathologies which is central to his method of critical social theory. As Christopher Zurn explains, in his reconstruction of the tradition of social philosophy, Honneth identifies the diagnosis of social pathologies as one of the defining characteristics of the discipline, a method which is intended to elucidate forms of social suffering or ‘abnormal’ forms of social development that inhibit full human flourishing.  In this respect, it might be argued that Honneth’s more recent work has not only been dedicated to the further development of the theory of recognition but also to analysing a range of social pathologies, most notably in his essay on ‘invisibility’ and the Tanner lectures on reification.

4. Recognition as the Basis for a Critical Social Theory: Anthropological or Historical Justification?

This philosophical reconstruction sheds light on Honneth’s defence of anthropological arguments in terms of the intersubjectivity of recognition and the construction of a formal concept of ethical life as the basis for the project of critique. In keeping with this conceptual approach, Honneth also explains processes of social change in relation to the structural interconnection between the three patterns of recognition. According to Honneth, it is the deep-seated normative demands intrinsic to the structure of recognition-relations that compels individuals and groups to struggle for expanded forms of recognition and new forms of social organisation. 

Honneth explicitly makes the link between normative theory and the intersubjectively constituted motivational aspects of his critical social theory on the basis of a theory of injustice. As Rainer Forst enumerates in his discussion of the debate between Honneth and Fraser, contexts of justice are always primarily contexts of injustice, even though for Forst, they also presume a specific context of justification. For Honneth, social domination can only be adequately critiqued if we begin from the experience of injustice, that is, normativity can only be derived negatively, not on the basis of ideality. This is a premise that has endured from his earliest essays through to his most recent work. In the final chapters of The Struggle for Recognition and essays such as “Disrespect”, Honneth identifies misrecognition or the “social dynamics of disrespect” as the means by which he can explain an emancipatory interest structured into the fabric of intersubjective relations. Honneth argues that the social struggles of disadvantaged groups with whom he initially identifies an emancipatory interest, are “not motivated by positively formulated moral principles, but by the experience of having their intuitive notions of justice violated. The normative core of such notions of justice is always constituted by expectations of respect for one’s own dignity, honor or integrity”. When subjects fail to receive the intersubjective recognition they feel they deserve, they experience this lack or denial of recognition as a form of moral injustice or as “feelings of social disrespect”. Honneth argues that the denial of recognition may cause the entire personality of the subject to collapse because human subject-formation is so critically dependent on the experience of recognition. It is for this reason that when deepseated normative expectations of intersubjective recognition are not met, people react with negative feelings of “shame, anger, or indignation”.  This internal connection between a deep-seated emancipatory interest in recognition and feelings of disrespect, furnishes Honneth with the core explanatory concept of a “moral grammar of social conflict”. 

In his more recent work, however, Honneth has sought to delineate more strongly the conditions of social recognition that are open to historical change and normative progress, and those that are deep-seated human constants. Although the historicist dimension was present in The Struggle for Recognition, notably, it was more explicitly defined in relation to the two recognitive conditions of law and achievement.  Significantly, in The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth exempts love from the potential for normative development, arguing that only relations of law and achievement are open to the possibility for progressive change. 

In Redistribution or Recognition?, Honneth reassesses these early formulations and attempts to add an historicist dimension to his analysis of the development of the three spheres of recognition and accompanying forms of practical self-relation. It is only once the family becomes a distinctly privatised and separate sphere, and when we can speak of the emergence of a distinct phase of ‘childhood’ in which a specific model of primary care is fostered and the concurrent development of a modern notion of love, that it is possible to conceptualise ‘love’ as a specific form of recognition-relation that is crucial for selfconfidence and the expression of embodied needs; it is only once rights become universalised and disaggregated from forms of status and privilege that it is possible to speak of a form of self-respect that is attributed to all individuals on the basis of their status as an autonomous human being accorded equal rights; and this, in turn, requires that rights be separated from status and that the contribution individuals make to society enabling them to feel esteemed for their contribution, becomes further individualised and ‘meritocratised’ and open to contestation in regard to the values that determine the recognition of individual achievement. 

Significantly, Honneth now argues that moral expectations of social recognition cannot be exclusively justified with reference to an anthropological model: “Rather, such expectations are the product of the social formation of a deep-seated claim-making potential in the sense that they always owe their normative justification to principles institutionally anchored in the historically established recognition order”. Moreover, he now specifically attributes the “differentiation of the three spheres of recognition” to the historical development of “bourgeois-capitalist society”, and emphasises the profound normative structural transformation that emerges with modernity as initiating the shift to a social-recognition-order.  Honneth has therefore more recently acknowledged that the anthropological structures of social recognition alone cannot adequately provide justification for grounding a critical social theory. He now more strenuously attempts to maintain a form/content distinction, suggesting that only the form of moral expectations of recognition represents an invariant anthropological feature whereas their content depends on the different ways in which they become institutionalised and differentiated within in any given society. 

Furthermore, in order to sustain a basis for critique, Honneth now incorporates a notion of “validity surplus” which he suggests is internal to the three forms of recognition, arguing that: “…each principle of recognition has a specific surplus of validity whose normative significance is expressed by the constant struggle over its appropriate application and interpretation”.  All forms of recognition, including love, therefore are now conceptualised as containing an internal conflict dynamic that ensures each is open to permanent contestation and development with regard to the way in which they are applied, institutionalised and interpreted.  However, for Honneth, socially institutionalised forms of recognition never exhaust their normative potential, rather each form of recognition has a surplus of validity that is never fulfilled and that is open to the promise of continual expansion and the potential for ongoing learning processes.55 The content and mode of institutionalisation of each form of recognition is therefore permanently open to rational debate and dispute and subject to publicly reasoned forms of justification. This aspect of subjecting recognition to ‘the space of public reason’ is an element that  Honneth has also begun to emphasise more strongly in recent work.

However, the notion of validity surplus does not just apply separately to each of the three spheres of recognition, it also applies to the general development of social relations of recognition. Honneth now argues more definitively that in order to justify a form of context- transcending validity that extends beyond a particular social context, the notion of a surplus of normative validity needs to be complemented by a theory of moral progress. Honneth’s assessment for the need for a concept of moral progress particularly arises in the context of justifying the basis of a recognition-theoretical concept of justice in his debate with Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? There, Honneth addresses the problem of identifying a pre-theoretical basis for critique that does not merely entrench prevailing social conditions. As he had already identified in The Struggle for Recognition, the issue is to be able to differentiate between progressive or reactionary forms of social struggle and to be able to critically assess “the developmental direction [of] present-day social conflicts…”59 In Honneth’s view, a theory of progress is required in order to avoid a form of ethical perspectivism or a form of justification that gives new social movements a privileged or elitist status.

 

and expands as a result of interpretative conflicts. See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, ff. 35, p. 192.

55 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 186.

56 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 145.

57 See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?; Axel Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology”, in eds. Bert van den Brink and David Owen, Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

58 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 263.

59 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 182–3.

60 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 116; Axel Honneth, “Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Priviso: On the Idea of ‘Critique’ in the Frankfurt School”, in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009.

Nonetheless in Redistribution or Recognition? as well as in later work, Honneth continues to maintain the primary anthropological claim articulated in The Struggle for Recognition with recourse to a “distinctively human dependence on intersubjective recognition” and the normative conditions for self-realisation that this entails.  This has also crucially involved proceeding ontogenetically by developing an anthropologically derived model of subject-formation that has recently been expanded with further recourse to object-relations psychoanalysis.

5. Intersubjective Dependency and Subject-formation

In developing an anthropological foundation for a normative theory of intersubjectivity and socialisation in The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth further extended Hegel’s theory of recognition with anthropological features drawn from the work of G.H. Mead and Donald Winnicott. This unique combination of theoretical resources became the defining characteristic of Honneth’s work, providing the basis for his well-known tripartite theory of recognition, which structures an intersubjective theory of subject-formation and normative forms of socialisation. In his articulation of a recognition-theoretic model of subject-formation, Honneth initially emphasised the compatibility of Mead’s and Winnicott’s accounts of individualisation through socialisation. For Honneth, both are originally understood to hold similar views about the subject’s psychic organisation as a process of internalisation of the communicative patterns of interaction partners.  With recourse to object-relations theory, Honneth’s original intention in The Struggle for Recognition was to extend Mead’s intersubjective account of socialisation beyond the internalisation of moral consciousness to the centrality of primary affectivity for successful subject-formation.  For Honneth, this also meant further developing Mead’s notion of the ‘I’ in psychoanalytic terms, seeking to explain it as a pre-conscious source of innovation by which new claims to identity emerge and are asserted. Accordingly, an individual’s future ability for the articulation of his or her needs and desires is understood to be dependent on conditions of support and care from significant others. Only with a particular quality of primary care can the individual be confident enough to allow for the creative exploration of his or her inner impulses without fear of being abandoned. This emotional, body-related sense of security provides an underlying layer that forms the psychological prerequisite for the development of all further attitudes of self-respect.

To explain the precarious balance between independence and attachment in primary affective relationships, Honneth provides a recognition-theoretic interpretation of Winnicott’s work, which emphasises the lasting significance of prelinguistic interactive experiences for subject-formation. In Honneth’s view, Winnicott’s work, makes it possible to reconceptualise Hegel’s notion of love as a form of recognition or ‘being oneself in another’ in empirically verifiable terms and provides a more robust means of theorising recognition than Mead’s social psychology. The engagement with object-relations theory initially furnishes Honneth with two fundamental criteria in the development of a theory of recognition. Firstly, it provides him with the central category of ‘symbiosis’, which becomes the defining feature of what he terms a theory of ‘primary intersubjectivity’. Secondly, he views object- relations theory as providing a more empirically oriented account of Hegel’s dialectic between dependence and independence, now recast as the struggle to find a balance between mergence and separation in early childhood.  In this respect, Honneth argues, that object-relations theory is especially suited to a ‘phenomenology of recognition’ because “it can convincingly portray love as a particular form of recognition only owing to the specific way in which it makes the success of affectional bonds dependent on the capacity, acquired in early childhood, to strike a balance between symbiosis and self-assertion”.  In Honneth’s reading, Winnicott’s work is central to the articulation of a theory of socialisation that emphasises the importance of early primary relations for securing the necessary balance between attachment and independence that is fundamental for both successful self-development and the basis for all future forms of recognition relations.

In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth views the object-relations theory of Winnicott as particularly amenable to extending the intersubjective insights and account of self-realisation first provided by Hegel and Mead, however, in subsequent work Winnicott’s object- relations theory, particularly his account of subject-formation and primary affectivity, comes to replace the former centrality of Mead’s social psychology.  It is possible to argue that Honneth’s reconstruction of Winnicott’s theory around the central concepts of symbiosis and primary affective relations, subsequently became the primary reference point for the theory of recognition, and anticipates the turn to an ontology of affective attunement in his recent work Reification.

Several theorists, including Iris Marion Young, Amy Allen and Johanna Meehan, have criticised Honneth’s notion of love and the mother-infant dyad upon which his theory of recognition is founded as blind to the dynamics of power that are also operative in primary relationships.  They contend that Honneth’s model of affective care as a relation of mutual recognition overlooks the fact that the motherinfant relation is in fact structured by “asymmetries of power, dependence and unreciprocated labour…”  As Allen enumerates, even though the primary relation between parent and child might be constituted by love, it is also inevitably an asymmetrical power relationship. In her contribution to this volume, Meehan supports this claim arguing that Honneth’s model of the infant-caregiver relation moves too seamlessly between the normative and the descriptive, not only screening out forms of power but also problematically conceiving such relations as mutually recognitive. She also argues that there are other ways to conceive of early forms of relationality between infants and primary care-givers both within developmental psychology and psychoanalysis that do not posit a primary mergent state but rather highlight the distinctiveness of the self from the first days of the infant’s life.

In response to other critical exchanges, particularly with the psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook, Honneth’s use of the concept of symbiosis as a primary intersubjective category has also come under scrutiny. Whitebook argues, that the existence of at least some form of ‘prereflexive proto-self’ is difficult to deny as it is evident that infants “bring much to infant-mother interaction that is specifically their own”. Moreover, the development of a body-scheme presupposes the existence of a least a ‘bodily ego’ which is constituted by “the infant’s distinct physiologically determined repertoire of dispositional states”. This in turn, “becomes the fundament upon which more elaborated and reflective forms of selfhood are constructed”.  Recent research in developmental psychology such as that conducted by Stern, also challenges this view of an initial subjectless state, drawing on numerous studies that point to the existence of at least an emergent or core sense of self from the earliest phases of life.  The work of both Stern and Whitebook poses questions about the complex genesis of the subject, and about what the nature of the ‘inter’ of intersubjectivity actually refers to. In those exchanges, Honneth has been urged to consider whether the category of symbiosis can do the work required and whether it can be conceptualised in the manner he originally intended. His recent position and further work on psychoanalysis and objectrelations is framed with the feasibility of the central category of symbiosis in mind and represents a modification to his theory which takes into account some of both Whitebook’s and Stern’s considerations, which he further reiterates in his ‘Rejoinder’ in this volume.

In recent essays, Honneth has modified his account of the notion of an originary undifferentiated state as the basis of the theory of recognition and reconsiders the way in which the motivation for the struggle for recognition is conceptualised. It is the ‘permanent striving’ to recreate momentary or episodic moments of fusion with the primary care-giver that compels “the subject to rebel again and again against the experience of not having the other at our disposal”.  Honneth clarifies his most recent position in the following terms:

I now assume that the impulse to rebel against established forms of recognition can be traced to a deep-seated need to deny the independence of those with whom one interacts and to have them, ‘omnipotently’, at one’s disposal. We would then have to say that the permanence of the ‘struggle’ for recognition stems not from an unsocializable ego’s drive for realization but rather from the anti-social striving for independence that leads each subject to deny, again and again, the other’s difference. Honneth acknowledges that this explanation constitutes a shift away from his earlier thesis that the ‘struggle for recognition’ is motivated by a particular kind of moral experience that stems from negative feelings of being unjustly or inadequately recognised. Rather, the thesis now proposed is that struggle or conflict is a response to an anthropologically posited human need to recreate the experience of symbiosis and thereby negate the independence of the other. It is this primary negative experience that compels subjects to seek to deny the independence or recognition of the other but also, he suggests, to recreate a mergent state by seeking security in a homogeneous community when subjects feel threatened. 

In more recent work on object-relations theory, the primary concept of ‘affective recognition’ has noticeably begun to emerge as an ontological category. Honneth now continuously emphasises that the primordial experience of symbiosis is purely an affective category rather than being a cognitive process or one of moral experience.  In other words, it is only by experiencing a primary affective relation, whereby the infant is first attached to and ‘affected’ by a primary care-giver, that she can in secondary process begin to internalise the normative expectations and viewpoints of her interaction partners and begin to develop a sense of self.  This primordial sense of recognition is understood to provide a sense of affirmation that is confirmed in expressive and affective gestures towards the other, according them social validity. 

6. Reification and the Primacy of Recognition

In his recent work Reification, Honneth extends the affective concept of recognition in a manner that signifies a significant reconfiguration of the category. Honneth now posits an affective form of recognition as a primary, existential mode of relatedness or ‘being-in-the-world’ that is prior to all other forms of human relation. He also explicitly refers to this originary affectivity as a ‘transcendental condition’ that is prior to the three normatively oriented forms of mutual recognition previously outlined in The Struggle for Recognition.  In other words, Honneth now posits a two level order of recognition: recognition refers, firstly, to an elementary form of recognition at a social-ontological level and, secondly, to the three normatively derived forms of recognition – love, law, and achievement – conceived in terms of a formal notion of ethical life. Honneth considers that this “ ‘existential’ mode of recognition provides a foundation for all other more substantial forms of recognition in which the affirmation of other persons’ specific characteristics is at issue”.  

Honneth compares this primordial form of ‘recognition’ with Heidegger’s notion of ‘care’ or ‘attunement’, Lukács’ notion of ‘engaged praxis’, Dewey’s notion of ‘practical involvement’ and Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’. In order to construct this elementary notion of recognition, Honneth reconstructs what he perceives to be a second, ‘unofficial’ reading of Lukács’ analysis of reification in History and Class Consciousness, where reification is understood as a deviation from a ‘correct’ or ‘genuine’ mode of relating to the world. According to Honneth, reification can be understood as the temporary loss, concealment or ‘forgetfulness’ of the elementary form of recognition. In Honneth’s view, therefore, Lukács’ concept of reification presupposes “a more primordial and genuine form of praxis, in which humans take up an empathetic and engaged relationship towards themselves and their surroundings”. 

In this reconceptualisation, the notion of recognition is substituted for Lukács’ conception of engaged praxis and Heidegger’s notion of care, to identify “the structure of a specifically human mode of existence”. This existential form of recognition as ‘involvement’ or ‘attunement’ designates an affective and engaged mode of interaction with the world. Moreover, Honneth contends that this recognition stance indicates an “empathetic engagement in the world, arising from the world’s significance and value, [that] is prior to our acts of detached cognition”. Recognition here indicates that in our interactions with the world, we do not primarily take a contemplative, detached or cognitive stance but rather assume a positive or affirmative practical engagement, an existentially conceived notion of “caring comportment”. 

Honneth critically contrasts this ontological conception of recognition with “communicative” or “intentional” stances. In this later work he notably argues that Mead’s notion of perspective-taking is inadequate because it lacks an account of the antecedent emotional attachment that is required before subjects can learn to take the perspective of the other.  Honneth now argues that reciprocal perspective-taking is a “kind of intersubjective stance [which] is always already connected with an element of positive affirmation and emotional inclination, which is not sufficiently expressed in the attribution of rational motives”. 

Honneth had already begun to develop this theoretical stance in his conception of the ‘moral epistemology of recognition’ with affective and expressive affirmation at its core.  For Honneth, recognition means much more than merely ‘perceiving’, ‘identifying’ or ‘cognising’ the other in terms of acknowledging the other’s identity. Rather, ‘recognition precedes cognition’ both ontogenetically and conceptually; it refers to an affirmative affective stance towards the world that precedes all forms of interaction or recognition, a premise that Alessandro Ferrara critically discusses in his contribution to this volume. Moreover, in the later work, recognition refers to a pre-cognitive affirmative stance not only towards others, but also the self and the world, and is the very condition of rational thought and all further moral or ethical orientations.

In order to legitimate this primordial recognition stance, Honneth once again emphasises the fundamental importance of affectivity in ontogenetic development. Drawing on developmental psychology, particularly the research of Peter Hobson and Michael Tomasello, Honneth highlights the child’s affective attachment to a significant care-giver as fundamental to his or her ability to adopt the perspective of a second person. Developmentally a child requires emotional or affective receptivity to another before the capacity for cognition and the ability to take a decentred perspective is acquired. Leaning on Adorno’s notion of ‘libidinal cathexis’, Honneth contends that an openness or receptivity to the world and ability to perceive an external reality requires an originary attachment to a concrete other that is oriented by love. He also assumes that it is only through this primary affective attachment that subjects learn to take a ‘recognitional’ stance to nonhuman objects. Honneth therefore takes up Adorno’s idea that the “human mind arises out of an early imitation of a loved figure of attachment”.  By imitating the meaning given to an object by a significant other, the child also internalises the value that object has for another subject. 

In response to critics of his Reification lectures, Honneth has attempted to further modify his claims and to defend his recent socialontological stance, arguing it is possible to separate out the second order normative orientation of recognition understood in terms of a formal concept of ethical life, from a more anthropological notion of recognition understood as an ‘affectedness’ or ‘antecedent identification’ towards others, our self, and nature. The normatively oriented forms of recognition represented by love, law and achievement are then considered to be normative extensions of this elementary form of recognition that are “filled-out” historically.  Honneth clarifies that he means to argue that the ontological notion of recognition refers merely to a primary ‘receptivity’ or ‘affective engagement’ that is a precursor to all other forms of human action or interaction but does not determine the particular stance taken towards another person. As he explains: “Love and hate, ambivalence and coldness, can all be expressions of this elementary recognition as long as they can be seen to be modes of existential affectedness”.  In this respect, perhaps one of the most striking characteristics in Honneth’s more recent amendments to the theory of recognition is the shift from the centrality of the notion of social struggle to one of primary affect.

These latest reconsiderations and emendations to the theory of recognition reveal fruitful potentials for further research and the expansion of a rich vein in Critical Theory. Honneth’s generous engagement with his critics has been characteristic of his work from the beginning and his “Rejoinder” in this volume provides not only a comprehensive and engaged dialogue with his interlocutors but also further clarifications and points of departure. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, Honneth has made an enduring contribution to Critical Theory and his preparedness to engage in critical debate continues to create the opportunity for the productive reworking of Critical Theory. 

I would like to warmly thank the authors for their contributions to this volume, and especially Axel Honneth for his extremely generous participation and response to these essays.