Axel Honneth: sociology’s contribution to critical theory

In 1930, Max Horkheimer took the opportunity presented by the publication of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology’ and Utopia to refine critical theory’s ambitions against the limitations of sociology’s version of social critique (Horkheimer, 1993).

As Horkheimer sees it, Mannheim reduces the meaning of ‘ideology’ to the dogmatism of an everyday thinking that dresses up particular preoccupations and interests in universalizing pretensions. In doing so, Mannheim’s sociological analysis misses out on Marx’s fundamental interest in distinguishing ‘real insights from the mystifying cloak of ideology’ (1993, p. 149). Critical theory is to carry this interest forward and to unmask the irrationalities and to diagnose the legitimating purposes of ideological thinking. These ambitions for critical theory reappear in Honneth’s contemporary version; however, he now wants to redeem sociology as a vital support role in an interdisciplinary project.

An interdisciplinary undertaking from when Horkheimer took charge of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the early 1930s, Honneth thinks that critical theory has lost its necessary balance and must reunite with its ‘ sociolo-gizing dimension’ (Honneth, 2009). He is careful though to preserve sociology from undue normative burdens. In an interview with Anders Petersen and Rasmus Willig on ‘The Role of Sociology in the Theory of Recognition', Honneth reflects that, done in ‘an accurate way’, empirical research has a certain consciousness-raising effect. However, if sociology takes critique as its explicit objective, it is open to instrumentalization and to manipulation (Honneth in Petersen and Willig, 2002, p. 269). Limited to clarifying certain neglected cultural potentials, sociology is not equipped to arbitrate on the rationality or the worth of particular world views. Indeed, if sociologists are tempted to ‘play the role of political activation’, they can find themselves unwitting servants to externally driven agendas. Honneth’s program for a contemporary critical theory calls for a differentiation between the empirical powers of the sociologist and the diagnostic contribution of social philosophy (2007, p. 4 and 2010, p. 384).

A distinction that Hegel makes between the limited critical interests of everyday cultural self-reflexivity, with its negative judgements on ‘individuals, states and the course of world history’, and a commitment to fully grasp the determinations of ‘positive significance’ that inform such judgements prefigures Honneth’s account of the necessary intertwining of sociology and social philosophy within critical theory (Hegel in Hardimon, 1994, p. 30). Hegel’s account of the mere negativity of an everyday cultural self-reflexivity that judges shortcomings of practices and institutions with respect to their own potentials reappears in Honneth as the ‘descriptive activity’ of the academic sociologist (2007, p. 35). This is contrasted with social philosophy’s interest in disclosing pathological developments through the diagnosis of systemic distortions of ‘basic goodness and rationality’ (2007, p. 30). Honneth’s essay on ‘Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy’ dwells on critical theory’s debt to a complex mix of contributions from social philosophy and sociology. Having its origin in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of civilization, a tradition of social philosophy diagnoses ‘processes of social development that must be understood as preventing the members of a society from living a “good life’” (2007, p. 4). Social philosophy is distinguished from both moral and political philosophies by its commitment to ‘providing an instance of reflection ... within which criteria for successful forms of social life are discussed’ (2007, p. 4). This is an essentially critical orientation that ‘employs concepts such as “bifurcation” and “alienation” as ethical criteria for determining specific modern processes of development to be pathologies’ (2007, p. 4). Modernity’s historicizing self-consciousness requires that the social philosopher’s reflections on pathological developments justify themselves not just with respect to ‘criteria of an ethical nature’ but with reference to empirically identifiable historical potentials. A critical orientation meshes with an emergent sociology ‘inasmuch as philosophical reflection was ... compelled to ground its claims on the results of empirical research’ (2007, p. 4).

Boltanski’s observation that ‘critique’s dependence on sociology has as its corollary sociology’s dependence on critique’ (2011, p. 16) echoes the structural complexity of Honneth's account of mutual limits and dependencies within critical theory. The necessary nexus between the diagnostic and the empirical dimensions of critical theory has, Homieth observes, been severed in the latter part of the twentieth century. In an epoch that is ‘dominated by cultural conservatism’, the empirical researcher has not been able to discover in any systematic way the negative judgements of an immediate consciousness that were to initiate the social philosopher’s reconstructions of untapped societal potentials. Blocked by an affirmative everyday thinking, contemporary social philosophy has sometimes been tempted to reground critique in criteria of an ethical nature. However, Honneth insists that merely speculative thinking cannot be an option for a revitalized critical theory that must present its diagnosis of frustrated potentials as an account of a socially effective rationality. If it is to represent its diagnosis of ‘intact non-pathological relations’ as our achievable potentials for rationality, critical theory needs to find a way back to its sociologizing dimensions (2009a, pp. 21-2).

Honneth's interest in reconnecting critical theory with its missing empirical ground draws him to a reconstructive strategy that seeks to excavate the ‘facts’ in order to find their sociological preconditions and their normative underpinnings. This method must negotiate deep tensions within contemporary critical theory. While it has to grasp the affirmative moment of critique, it must do so in a fashion that repudiates any appeal to external determinations or unjustified speculations. Reconstruction is to counter a form of social criticism that ‘tries to bracket or transcend the accustomed local value horizon by appealing to external, universalistic moral principles’ (2009b, p. 44). At the same time, reconstructive criticism distinguishes itself from a model of critique that only operates locally and fails to break out of hermeneutical procedures of an immanently self-critical present in order to broach the ‘additional step’ that the ambitions of critical theory require. Homieth is wary about the image of a normatively unstructured society that informs Boltanski’s proposal to critical sociology that, abandoning unmasking ambitions, it address itself to the critical capacities of social actors as they struggle to live with the incoherencies of ideological justifications (Boltanski. 2011, p. 43; Honneth, 2010, p. 388). By contrast, the ideology critique intentions of critical theory must be underpinned by the ‘normative validity of the immanently raised ideals’ that speak to their ‘embodiment of social reason’. Guided by the Left-Hegelian aspiration to identify the underlying rational structure of the

Sociology’ and critique 29 modern world, critical theory has to locate ‘transcendence in immanence’, and sociology and social philosophy are called upon to make matching contributions (2009b, p. 50).

Honneth’s reconstruction of the affirmative in the ‘actuality’ of modern life yields the thin anthropological claim that humans have ‘a constitutive dependence on the recognition of others’ (1995, p. 163). This positivity is deduced from a diagnosis of idealizations that leave their empirical traces in the patterns of our dissatisfactions and sufferings. Responsive to the weighty diagnostic ambitions of a critical theory tradition, Honneth is not satisfied with tracking particular expectations that are generated within, and frustrated by, institutionalized settings of intimate life, the legal and civil domains, for ‘[a]gainst the tendency to reduce social criticism to a project of normative, situational, or local opinion, one must clarify the context in which social criticism stands side by side with the demands of a historically evolved reason’ (2009a, p. 21). Critique cannot just appeal to the expectations that turn up in the institutionalized spheres of modem life as experiential disappointments and frustrations. It also has to take the measure of these empirically acquired meanings against a reconstruction of modernity’s fundamental value ideals. Paring the everyday struggles for recognition back to their conceptual fundaments, the social philosopher finds that ‘true freedom’ most adequately grasps itself as a struggle against those conditions under which the subject relates ‘through an act of its will, to an object in the world that remains foreign because the subject cannot recognize it as an extension of its own self (2012b, p. 22). The subject ‘only finds its way to true freedom by being “with itself’ in this “other” in such a way as it experiences the other’s characteristics or particularity as something which it can identify’ (2012b, p. 22).

Honneth asserts that, ‘[i]n a way that may be unique’ to it, critical theory ‘insists on a mediation of theory and history in a concept of socially effective rationality’ (2009a, p. 21). However, while this might be a necessary' ambition for the critique of neoliberalism, its sufficiency will depend upon the traction it is able to get against neoliberalism's distinctive bundle of ideological strategies. It was noted earlier that neoliberal resignifications seek to appropriate all alternatives to market ways of thinking and so critique is called upon to diagnose distortions and to represent costs. Taking his cue from the ideology critique intentions of a critical theory tradition, Honneth does not underestimate the tasks. However, it appears that his account of the efficacy of sociology’s contributions to critique is at odds with his diagnosis of the challenge that neoliberalism as ideology poses for it.

Remarks in Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, about his distance from ‘the Marx problem’ in social critique underlines Honneth’s repudiation of ideology critique that wants to marshal alienated human potentials in direct opposition to capitalism’s purely repressive settings (2014, pp. 180-1). Honneth situates critique as a reconstruction of the corruption of a human need for recognition that is also to be found within the idealizations of reciprocal and cooperative interactions upon which a well-functioning market depends. An essay that Honneth co-authored with Martin Hartman, ‘Paradoxes of Capitalist

Modernization: A Research Programme’, elaborates the concept of ‘institutionalized normative surplus’ that is central to his reconstructive criticism (2012a, p. 171). This has the marks of a theory of radical needs. Critique is to interpret and galvanize frustrated needs for recognition to establish their potentials to ‘assert and prosecute legitimizable claims that point beyond the established social order’ (2012a, p. 171). Responding to needs for change that arise from tensions between expectations and institutionalized constraints, the efficacy of critique will only be secured under those sociopolitical conditions in which ‘capitalist imperatives are [relatively] neutralized’ (2012a, p. 171). Honneth and Hartman are persuaded that strategic imperatives that intend reducing all claims to the terms of market thinking were relatively weakly felt in the social democratic era and this permitted ‘an exceptional degree of normative progress’ (2012a, p. 172). Everything’s changed now and since the late 1970s, we’ve been dealing with a neoliberal revolution that has not only seen the winding back of steering powers of the welfare state but also the erosion of expectations that had provoked the emancipatory needs that provided the grounds for a reconstructive critical theory (2012a, p. 174). Neoliberal ‘reversals' of the normative expectations of the social democratic era have been particularly felt in its resignifications of the meaning of individual autonomy (2012a, p. 179). No longer a bundle of romantically charged expectations that encountered bureaucratic capitalism as their limit, individual autonomy has ‘crept into economic processes as a professional and behavioural requirement’ (2012a, p. 179). The neoliberal revolution destroys normative surpluses in every sphere and reciuits what had been critical motivations to support its conflation of capitalism with modernity itself. We witness this reinvention as we contemplate emancipatory investments in new intimacies reappearing as demands upon selfstarting ‘entreployees’ who are ‘expected not only to dutifully fulfil externally given production quotas, but also to bring communicative and emotional skills and resources to bear to meet project goals they are more or less responsible for setting' (2012a, pp. 179-80).

Wagner observes that Honneth’s reconstructive strategies depend upon a ‘fairly optimistic view of history and of the subjects and relations of communication’, and he draws attention to Honneth’s own observation that ‘where social relations are ethically entirely destroyed and demoralized, a reconstructive theory of justice becomes helpless’ (Wagner, 2012, p. 45). As ‘normative surpluses’ dry up under neoliberal resignifications, the sociologizing dimension of the social-philosophical nexus necessary to the viability of immanent critique unravels. Neoliberalism’s rerouting of emancipatory expectations undermines the radical needs whose demands for satisfaction had pointed beyond the established social order. The ‘perplexing’ situation of critique in the neoliberal age sees the systemic blocking of its sociological dimension and the thr eatened return of speculative appeals to ‘criteria of an ethical nature’.

Published in English as a major essay titled ‘Reification and Recognition: A New Look at an Old Idea’, Honneth’s 2005 Tanner lectures revisit his preoccupation with contributions of sociology and social philosophy to an interdisciplinary critical theory. This time he focuses on the necessary input of a

Sociology’ and critique 31 social-philosophical diagnosis of social pathologies that result from a systemic ‘forgetting’ of our primary relations to others as a ‘recognition of their existence as persons’ (2008, p. 75 and p. 85). Honneth is doubtful that, with its heightened wariness of philosophical anthropology, a historicizing age could accommodate a ‘social-ontological explanation’ of pathological social developments (2008, p. 21). However, he remains persuaded that social critique must include judgements about irrational distortions of the present and can’t entirely manage without a social-philosophical diagnosis of ‘our constitutive dependence on the recognition of others'. The danger, though, is that the attention to the conceptual requirements of critique might displace critical theory's equally important focus of the conditions of its practical efficacy. In this regard, Honneth’s critics have raised pertinent questions about how critique that locates its 'normative kernal' in the a constitutive need for recognition is supposed to cash out as 'a motivating force to change the institutions and practices that systematically block mutual recognition in the present’ (Jay Introduction to Honneth, 2008, p. 10; Lear, 2008, pp. 131-43; Deranty, 2009, pp. 463—4). The problem seems to rest with the function that falls to an isolated social-philosophical dimension of critique. With the erosion of‘normative surpluses' in a neoliberal era, the channels for a sociological contribution to critique are blocked and a speculative social philosophy is, apparently, obliged to take over the normative burdens of ideology critique.