Pathologies of Recognition: Axel Honneth and the Renewed Possibility of a Critical Theory of Society

Gary Hazeldine

doi:10.15388/socmintvei.2017.1.10886

Abstract

This article is a critical engagement with the work of Axel Honneth and his significance for contemporary Critical Theory, social explanation, and emancipatory politics. I begin by exploring Honneth’s sympathies for, and criticisms of, both first generation critical theory and Jürgen Habermas’s emphasis on communicative action. I then consider Honneth’s turn to Hegel’s early work on recognition and his emphasis on the underlying forms of mutual recognition, along with the accompanying forms of self-relation/realisation, disrespect and the potential for moral development and resistance. I explore these alongside Honneth’s ‘formal conception of ethical life’ which he hopes can successfully mediate between formal Kantian morality and substantive communitarian ethics whilst also providing him with both a philosophical justification for his normative position and a standard of moral development for evaluating forms of, and struggles for, recognition. I also briefly outline his recent work on reification and recognition before then considering a number of critical responses to Honneth’s project as a whole. Whilst sympathetic to his focus on recognition, my criticisms of his work emphasise his tendency to idealise the notion of recognition, his lack of a sufficient conception of misrecognition, the ideological role that recognition often plays, and ultimately the abstract and procedural nature of his ‘formal’ conception of ethical life.

Highlights

This article is a critical engagement with the work of Axel Honneth and his significance for contemporary Critical Theory, social explanation, and emancipatory politics
I explore these alongside Honneth’s ‘formal conception of ethical life’ which he hopes can successfully mediate between formal Kantian morality and substantive communitarian ethics whilst providing him with both a philosophical justification for his normative position and a standard of moral development for evaluating forms of, and struggles for, recognition
Axel Honneth has been increasingly recognised as an important figure in contemporary Critical Theory and in contemporary social theory as a whole

Summary

The Communicative Turn

The unsatisfactory negativism that Honneth associates with early Critical Theory leaves him in no doubt as to the pressing problem of contemporary Critical Theory: If the Left-Hegelian model of critique is to be retained at all, we must first re-establish theoretical access to the social sphere in which an interest in emancipation can be anchored pretheoretically. The central pathology of contemporary society for Habermas becomes the ‘penetration of systemic forms of steering into the previously intact region of a communicative everyday practice’ (ibid.; 302) Despite this conception of social spheres as systems, Honneth sees Habermas’s approach as having the advantage over earlier critical social theorists due to the serious consideration of moral processes of understanding through his notion of the centrality of communicative action for social reproduction. I argue that his success here is limited and that we witness a repetition of Habermas’s tendency to purify and idealise, transposed to a notion of recognition, and a ‘formal conception of ethical life’ founded on recognition relations which is too formal to produce solidarity or motivate action and which abstracts from difference and particularity Honneth points to his specific resolution of the problems he identifies in Habermas’s work by seeking to broaden what is at stake in our processes of social interaction.

Idealising Recognition

Recognition as Ideology