Social Freedom and Self-Actualization: “Normative Reconstruction” as a Theory of Justice

David N Mcneill

doi:10.1179/1440991715z.00000000045

Abstract

In Freedom's Right Axel Honneth seeks to provide a theory of justice by appropriating Hegel's account of ethical substance in the Philosophy of Right, but he wants to do so without endorsing Hegel's more robust idealist commitments. I argue that this project can only succeed if Honneth can offer an alternative, comparatively robust demonstration of the rationality and normative coherence of existing social institutions. I contend that the grounds Honneth provides for this claim are insufficient for his purposes. In particular, I argue that Honneth's claim that “justice and individual self-determination are mutually referential,” even were it to be accepted, would be insufficient to underwrite his more robust identification between the normative foundations of justice, autonomy and reciprocal self-realization. In the final section of the paper, I turn to Honneth's analysis of the “social institution” of friendship, which he, following Hegel, holds up as a paradigmatic instantiation of social freedom understood as, in Hegel's words, “being with oneself in another” (Beisichselbstsein in einem Anderen). I argue that an analysis of the normative import of friendship wholly in terms of mutual recognition misses an important aspect of the kind of self-realization that friendship makes possible.

Highlights

In Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth presents what he calls a “normative reconstruction” of the historical development of the institutions and practices he takes to be normatively central to modern liberal democracies
If Honneth is right that we, as “children of a materially enlightened era, cannot hold onto the idealistic monism in which Hegel anchored his dialectical concept of Spirit,” if we are “forced to find another footing on which to base his idea that objective Spirit is realized in social institutions,” that footing must be fairly conceptually robust if we are to be warranted in the claim that a rational articulation of those institutions will provide us with a theory of justice
He contends that a theory of justice must provide robust normative criteria against which to assess the legitimacy of existing social institutions and practices

Summary

Introduction

In Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth presents what he calls a “normative reconstruction” of the historical development of the institutions and practices he takes to be normatively central to modern liberal democracies. In so doing, Honneth self-consciously follows “the path Hegel laid. Without Hegel’s commitments, we would need to provide a comparatively robust argument for the substantial coincidence of the normative foundations of contemporary social institutions with the demands of justice before we follow Hegel in, as Honneth puts it, “revers(ing) the relationship between legitimating procedures and social justice,” and this will be the case even if we accept, with Honneth and with Hegel, that “we grasp subjects as truly ‘free’ only on the condition that their aims can be fulfilled or realized within reality itself.”11 It will be, perhaps, useful at this point to distinguish between two ways in which we can try to appropriate Hegel’s method in his practical philosophy. One does not accept what Fabian Freyenhagen has identified as Adorno’s meta-ethical negativism, that is, the claim that one can found a normative theory on an immediate experience of the injustice of the current social order, one will need to provide some alternative account of our mode of access to these normative principles. My own favoured approach is broadly Aristotelian, a point that will be of some significance in the final section of my paper

Social freedom and self-actualization

Aristotelian friendship and self-actualization

Conclusion

Notes on contributor