the real challenge of our common tradition is being able to show that such a reference point—such demands—are not the result of contingent conflict situations, but rather express the unmet demands of humanity at large. … it designates a normative potential that reemerges in every new social reality because it is so tightly fused to the structure of human interests. This line of thinking can also be formulated such that this “transcendence” must be attached to a form of practice or experience which is on the one hand indispensable for social reproduction, and on the other hand—owing to its normative surplus—points beyond all given forms of social organization. (Fraser & Honneth, 2003) Yet surprisingly, in spite of its indisputable foundational importance to critical theory, critical theorists have rarely sought to defend the idea that their work answers to such an emancipatory interest. We first encounter the contours of such a defense in the work of the young Max Horkheimer, in which, however, it remains associated with Marx's philosophy of history to an extent that subsequent generations of critical theorists have found wanting. In the mid-1960s, this led Jürgen Habermas, in his first systematic work of social philosophy, to attempt a novel account in the form of a theory of knowledge as social theory, which seeks to disclose three human cognitive interests—including an emancipatory interest—in the objective structures of our species’ history. However, this account was ultimately undermined by his reliance on psychoanalysis as a model of human emancipation, suggesting the questionable view of humanity as a collective species subject freeing itself from internal constraints. These failures have recently led Honneth to undertake a renewed attempt to “answer critical theory's most fundamental question” (Honneth, 2017). Honneth proposes, first, a social–ontological view of the plasticity of social norms as the source of recurrent social conflict, and second, a claim that human beings have an emancipatory interest in knowledge that reveals the interests served by their one-sided interpretation and which enables transformative reinterpretation of those norms. In this article, I argue that Honneth's argument, too, is unsuccessful. Or rather, it is at best only partially successful. Honneth's argument remains incomplete, not only because its scope of application is narrower than Honneth seems to think, but also because it neglects the most important object of emancipatory knowledge—and that which I will argue is the central task of a critical theory to provide—namely, a systematic account of the power relations within which dominated groups find themselves. In response to these problems, I develop the outlines of an alternative defense of the idea of an emancipatory interest, which locates the root of emancipatory struggles in the interplay between dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power and the availability of the requisite epistemic and normative resources for discursively articulating these reactive attitudes as shared experiences of moral injury—resources that a critical theory of society must strive to provide. In the article's first section, I expound the history and conceptual content of the idea of an emancipatory interest and the claim that human beings have an interest in knowledge that enables a truly free life. I trace the concept of emancipation back to early Roman law and discuss its subsequent instantiations both in the abolitionism of Frederick Douglass and in Marx's thought. I then discuss the unsuccessful attempts to defend the idea of an emancipatory interest that we find in Horkheimer's and Habermas's work, before I expound Honneth's more recent argument and take issue with it on two counts: First, I argue that Honneth's claim that the plasticity of shared social norms is the social–ontological root of emancipatory struggles is too restrictive, excluding significant emancipatory struggles outside the bourgeois constitutional republics that characterize the narrower historical context of Western modernity. Second, I argue that Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest neglects knowledge of that which human beings require emancipation from: namely, the nature of the dominating power relations to which they are subject. What Honneth identifies, I argue, is but one way that the social order may be receptive to emancipatory struggles, but not the social–ontological root of such struggles. I thus propose that a plausible account of the emancipatory interest must focus not only on conflicts over shared social norms but also, and more fundamentally, on dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power. Finally, I unpack this claim with reference to further discussion of Horkheimer's work and Honneth's earlier work, before concluding. The concept of emancipation refers to a specific kind of social transformation. The subject of emancipation may be an individual or a social group, but the object of emancipation is always a transformation of the status or relationships that the relevant individual or group is positioned in. More specifically, the conceptual structure of emancipation involves both a social relationship of domination and a course of action that simultaneously abolishes this relationship and inaugurates a new one: namely, a condition of freedom. Accordingly, for us—as children of the Enlightenment—any invocation of the concept of emancipation has an inescapably normative pull: it entails, prima facie, a denial of freedom duly owed to someone, a demand for the abolishment of unjustified power that someone wields over another, and a call to arms to meet this demand for liberation in practice. What is involved in claiming that human beings have an interest in emancipation? In a word, it involves the claim that any agent subject to domination has an overriding reason to be freed from domination, no matter their particular wants or desires (Roberts, 2017). Indeed, it involves claiming that even agents, who have formed affective attachments to their dominator and in some sense desire to maintain the dominating relationship, nevertheless have a reason to see that domination gone—that is, whether or not they are actually responsive to that reason (Pettit, 2013). Members of a social group, who are dominated by virtue of belonging to that social group, thus have a shared interest in emancipation; an interest in a transformation of the societal structure that abolishes the dominating power to which they, as a group, are subject. And this may be true even if members of that group have formed attachments to and derive significant benefits from life in their subordinate social position. The concept of “emancipation” derives from ancient Roman law, where it refers to the release of a son or daughter from the patria potestas of the pater familias—the legal power that a male head of a household wields over the members of his family, and which he alone has the power to renounce (Nicholas, 2015). Perhaps owing to its provenance in a slave society, emancipation is inextricably associated with the release of slaves from the legal ownership of their masters—as, most famously in modern times, in the case of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. For this reason, the concept of emancipation has also long been associated with the republican tradition, which, in Philip Pettit's recent influential restatement, takes its conception of freedom as nondomination precisely from the paradigmatic example of a slave, who is fundamentally unfree, even if he is allowed by his master to live without interference in his daily life, because he lives under the thumb of his master and remains subject to his arbitrary capacity to thus interfere (Pettit, 1997). Of course, the concept of emancipation is by no means confined to legal and political emancipation from slavery but often encompasses freedom from domination in a more expansive sense. Frederick Douglass—who was born a slave in the antebellum American South but empowered himself through literacy and escaped his bondage to become the perhaps greatest abolitionist of the 19th century—saw the emancipation of the American slaves as grounded in the natural liberty of all human beings, including those living in that most violent and inhuman social condition of enslavement. However, Douglass often employed a more expansive definition of emancipation, which sometimes seems to mirror Kant's definition of enlightenment as “man's emergence from his self-imposed intellectual immaturity” (Kant, 2006). As he formulated this conviction late in his life: “Education … means emancipation. … To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being” (Douglass, 1894). For Douglass, it is clear that an interest in emancipation also implies an interest in the kind of knowledge that enables a truly free life. To be sure, Douglass understood emancipation first and foremost as legal and political emancipation from bondage in the “slave system” of the antebellum South, and he has often been interpreted as a proud advocate of the doctrine of “self-made men,” urging white Americans to give black slaves their freedom, assure fairness in commercial life and otherwise “leave alone” their black compatriots to fight for their own destiny (Blight, 2020). However, he also insisted that without education and knowledge, and without the corresponding ability to demand equal respect in public life, a slave could be “nominally free” in that “he was not compelled to call any man his master, and no one could call him slave,” but he would still remain “in fact a slave, a slave to society” (Coffee, 2020; Douglass, 1894). In this sense, Douglass consistently stressed the need for both individual initiative and education as well as legal and political empowerment of Black Americans to ensure a “social uptake” of their legally emancipated and educationally edified wills (Krause, 2021). Of course, the idea of emancipation also holds a prominent place within Marx's work, which is standardly interpreted as positing that the proletariat has a class interest in emancipation from bourgeois class domination. This is no coincidence, as the republican conceptual vocabulary that came to animate radical republicans and abolitionists such as Douglass in their struggle against American slavery also found its way into early radical-plebian and socialist thought and subsequently into Marx's thinking (Claeys, 1989; Leipold et al., 2020; Roberts, 2016). For Marx, the emancipation of the working class includes a legal and political dimension (from the legal and political institutions of bourgeois society), but it ultimately requires the abolishment of private ownership of the means of production and the whole economic structure of capitalist production relations. The idea of emancipation that we find in Frankfurt School critical theory derives from the Marxian conception, but it is also closely associated with the more expansive definition of emancipation that we encounter in Douglass's speeches and writings, as it explicitly defines the interest in emancipation as including an epistemic or cognitive dimension: an interest in the requisite knowledge for achieving emancipation in practice. In the following section, I shall expound how critical theorists such as Horkheimer and Habermas have sought to account for the foundational assumption that human beings share an interest in emancipation from domination, before, in the subsequent section, I account for Honneth's more recent defense of this claim. In Horkheimer's famous essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” from 1937, in which he first coins the term “critical theory,” he defines traditional theory as a conception of scientific inquiry, which aims at producing a library of knowledge through value-free observation of any given object domain. Accordingly, traditional theory understands social inquiry as logically independent of the ends for which social–scientific knowledge is used in practice, which means that traditional theory blinds itself to the way in which social–scientific knowledge is used to maintain and reproduce an unjust societal structure. By contrast, critical theory is conscious of its social function—it is explicitly “aimed at … emancipation, and has the transformation of the whole as its end” (Horkheimer, 1988b).1 the idea of a reasonable organisation of society that can meet the needs of the whole community [is] immanent in human labour but not presently grasped by individuals or the public spirit. A specific interest is required to understand and observe these tendencies. (Horkheimer, 1988b) This argument rests on two premises. The first is that, in modern bourgeois society, the established organization of society systematically produces suffering and privation; “Contemporary misery is tied to the societal structure” (Horkheimer, 1988a). This means that an understanding of the causes of experienced misery requires insight into the nature and modus operandi of the societal structure. The second premise is that the way in which misery is systematically produced by the basic structure of society is epistemically opaque to those subject to those injustices—that they lack the requisite knowledge for comprehending and efficaciously acting on their interest in a reorganization of the basic structure of society. in this society, not even the situation of the proletariat is a guarantee for the correct understanding. No matter how much the proletariat experiences the senselessness and continued growth of privation and injustice on itself, this consciousness is prevented from becoming a general social force by the differentiations in its social structure advanced from above and the personal and class-based interests whose oppositional nature only breaks through in extraordinary circumstances. (Horkheimer, 1988b) Accordingly, Horkheimer argues that the proletariat's experience of class domination is a necessary but by itself insufficient condition for grasping their collective interest in emancipation. It is the task of theory—a critical theory of society—to enlighten individuals about the nature and causes of structurally produced misery and allow individuals to grasp their interest in a reasonable society. Moreover, only if critical theory is able to produce knowledge of the societal structure that actually enables emancipation in practice is the theory validated: “For all its insight into individual steps of progress, and for all the agreement of its elements with state-of-the-art traditional theories, critical theory has no other authority on its side than the interest in freedom from class domination that it incorporates” (Horkheimer, 1988b).2 Horkheimer thus conceives of critical theory as a form of reflection on emancipatory struggles, which seeks to inform and guide those subject to dominating power, and which “understands itself as the theoretical side of the struggle to rid the world of existing misery” (Horkheimer, 1988a). The demand for a universal realisation of the bourgeois idea of justice must also lead to a critique and practical transformation of the society of free exchange, in whose self-conception this idea originally won its content. The demonstration of a contradiction between the principle of bourgeois society and its actual existence brings the one-sided determination of justice through freedom and the one-sided determination of freedom through mere negation [i.e. negative freedom] into consciousness and defines justice in a positive sense, through the outline of a reasonable society. (Horkheimer, 1988a) Yet in Horkheimer's early work, this account of the claim that human beings have an interest in emancipation is often ambiguous. As we saw at the beginning of this section, he sometimes suggests that the interest in a reasonable organization of society is “innate in every human being,” and, at other times, he claims—echoing Marx—that it is “immanent in human labour.” In fact, Horkheimer may have simply assumed the existence of such an interest as part of his overall commitment to Marx's materialist philosophy of history. This has left subsequent generations of critical theorists, who have been less inclined than the young Horkheimer to wed their theories wholesale to historical materialism, without a systematic account of the emancipatory interest. It was precisely this perceived lacuna in critical theory that Habermas sought to fill with Knowledge and Human Interests, to which we now turn. Habermas's project in that book is exceedingly ambitious. Its animating idea is an attempt to rethink epistemology or the “theory of knowledge as social theory”—to offer an account of the “cognitive interests” that ground and guide different domains of scientific inquiry with reference to certain basic or primordial ways that human beings relate to the world in the course of human history (Habermas, 1986). According to Habermas's argument, modern science has developed along three branches: the empirical–analytic sciences, the historical–hermeneutic sciences, and the critically oriented sciences. The empirical–analytical sciences comprise the natural sciences and the social sciences when concerned with drawing general inferences from observation of social reality. The historical–hermeneutic sciences comprise the human sciences, concerned with the interpretation of meaning. Finally, the critically oriented sciences include the social sciences and the human sciences when concerned with what Habermas calls “reflection.” According to Habermas, each of these three scientific branches of knowledge expresses and incorporates a fundamental cognitive interest that human beings have in this specific domain of knowledge, and which correspond to three primordial human ways of relating to the world: the empirical–analytic sciences incorporate a technical interest in understanding and controlling the natural environment; the historical–hermeneutic sciences incorporate a practical interest in self- and mutual understanding; and the critical sciences incorporate an emancipatory interest in freedom from domination and ideological illusion. These cognitive interests are understood as knowledge-constitutive in the sense that they are conditions of possibility for knowledge in its three different branches and as rooted in the objective structures of humanity's species history through the corresponding social domains of labor, language, and domination (Herrschaft). Without going deeper into Habermas's complex argument, what concerns us here is Habermas's apparent difficulty with justifying this last claim that the emancipatory interest is somehow grounded in a ‘definite means of social organization [Vergesellschaftung]’: namely, the practice of domination (Habermas, 1986). The problem is twofold: First, Habermas develops an argument with reference to Kant and Fichte that the emancipatory interest is inherent in reason as such—which, however, seems to run counter to his intention of grounding the cognitive interests in a domain of social practice. Second, Habermas chooses to liken the struggle against domination in the course of human history to the process of emancipation from internal constraints that an individual analysand experiences in psychoanalysis. As Honneth argues, this analogy has the unwelcome implication that human emancipation writ large is construed as a process of self-reflection by a collective “species subject” freeing itself from internal constraints, rather than as a struggle between social groups (Honneth, 2017). Habermas has pretty much conceded this last point in later work (Habermas, 2009), and he long ago abandoned the project of recasting epistemology as social theory and the corresponding language of “cognitive interests” in favor of a universal pragmatics of communicative rationality and a theory of social evolution that focuses on the “rationalisation of the lifeworld” (Ibsen, 2023). Much like the account of the emancipatory interest offered by the young Horkheimer, Habermas's account in Knowledge and Human Interests must thus ultimately be considered unsuccessful. However, these unsuccessful attempts to defend the idea of an emancipatory interest have seemingly left critical theory without its defining reference point in social reality, motivating Honneth's more recent attempt to “answer critical theory's most fundamental question.” Honneth's defense of the assumption that all human beings share an interest in emancipation proceeds in two steps: First, he offers a social–ontological argument for the claim that social conflict or struggle is inevitable and bound to arise in any human society. Second, he argues that this social–ontological argument at the same time discloses the kind of knowledge necessary for human emancipation. In support of the first step in this argument, Honneth distinguishes four positions, each with a distinctive take on the inevitability of social conflict. The first position is the Rousseau–Kant view that social conflict is rooted in the natural human predisposition for “unsocial sociability”—or the drive to satisfy one's “amour propre,” in Rousseau's terms—i.e., the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency connected, however, with a constant resistance that continually threatens to break up this society,” which is driven by a deep-seated drive to distinguish oneself from others (Kant, 2006). The second position is the Freudian view, which sees social conflict as anchored in the infant child's conflictual psychological relationship with their parents. The third is the Marxian position, which, Honneth argues, sees the root of social conflict in the class structure of society. Fourth, and finally, the view that Honneth calls the Hegel–Dewey position holds that “social conflict is inevitable in all societies simply because the norms accepted by their members will again and again give rise to new moral claims that cannot be satisfied under existing conditions and whose frustration will therefore result in social conflicts” (Honneth, 2017). Honneth quickly dismisses the Rousseau–Kant and the Freudian positions, since both ultimately refer to predispositions that further individual conflict rather than struggle between social groups. Perhaps more surprisingly, Honneth also rejects the Marxian position, in part, he argues, because Marx does not offer a genuine social–ontological thesis but rather a historicist view that sees class conflict as an ineliminable feature of society only up to the point of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society. According to Honneth, however, the most serious grounds for rejecting the Marxian position are its reductive economism: “The Marxian doctrine of class struggle fails above all because it views all conflict among groups or classes as economically motivated, whereas historical reality suggests that experiences of injustice and of frustrated hopes have had far greater motivating power” (Honneth, 2017). By contrast, Honneth sees much greater potential in the Hegel–Dewey position. According to this fourth view, “the source of recurrent social struggles is thought to lie in the fact that any disadvantaged social group will attempt to appeal to norms that are already institutionalized but that are being interpreted or applied in hegemonic ways, and to turn those norms against the dominant groups by relying on them for a moral justification of their own marginalized needs and interests” (Honneth, 2017). That is to say, the Hegel–Dewey position—which Honneth endorses and elaborates—locates the root and inevitability of social conflict in the hermeneutic plasticity and openness of shared social norms, which can always be turned against the ruling interpretations and the social interests that they serve at any given point in time. Furthermore, Honneth argues, since this view refers to norms that are necessary conditions of possibility for social integration, and “the norms enabling social integration result from a reciprocal empowerment on the part of all individuals to be liable to others’ criticism for misapplications of these norms,” the Hegel–Dewey position represents a genuine thesis of social ontology (Honneth, 2017). First, agents need to learn that any existing norm is amenable to a range of quite different interpretations, because it does not itself specify to whom and exactly in what way it is to be applied. Second, they need to develop an understanding of why, or on the basis of what interests, specific interpretations are dominant within an existing social order. Taken together, the awareness of the plasticity of social norms and the awareness of the reasons for their one-sided interpretation amount to what is known as “emancipatory knowledge.” The thesis, in short, is that oppressed groups have an interest in acquiring this type of knowledge insofar as their goal is to change interpretations of existing norms in their own favor. (Honneth, 2017) Critical theory is nothing but the continuation, by means of a controlled scientific methodology, of the cognitive labor that oppressed groups have to perform in their everyday struggles when they work to de-naturalize hegemonic patterns of interpretation and to expose the interests by which these are motivated. The insights generated in this way quite without any reference to standards of scientific inquiry are the undisciplined germ which a critical theory should bring to fruition within the sphere of the established sciences. (Honneth, 2017) According to Honneth, the emancipatory interest—and a critical theory of society, which answers to this interest—can thus be understood as anchored deep within the ontology of any social order, since emancipatory social struggles are ultimately driven by the ineliminable hermeneutic openness of shared social norms and the concomitant possibility of contesting narrow or one-sided ruling interpretations that exclude the interests of oppressed social groups and serve only those of the few. I believe there is much to be said for Honneth's argument. Indeed, I want to argue that his account of the social–ontological anchor of social struggles succeeds in showing, at least, why any social order integrated through shared norms is always vulnerable and potentially receptive to contestations of established interpretations of those norms, and that dominated groups in those contexts indeed have an interest in knowledge that enables such transformative interpretations. However, I also want to argue that his argument is ultimately unsuccessful, since it suffers from two basic problems. First, I will argue that Honneth offers an overly restrictive account of the basis of emancipatory struggles—one that is perhaps too wedded to Western modernity and insufficiently sensitive to emancipatory struggles that do not take place in the context of established bourgeois constitutional republics.3 In this sense, his argument too remains a historicist thesis, rather than a social–ontological one. Second, I will argue that he ultimately provides an inadequate account, not only of the object of “emancipatory knowledge”—i.e., the epistemic content of what dominated social groups must know in order to emancipate themselves—but also of the dynamics that drive dominated social groups to engage in emancipatory social struggle in the first place. In this section, I first offer three counterexamples that cast doubt on whether, in the Hegel-Dewey position, Honneth has truly identified a universal social–ontological anchor of social conflict, and, second, I develop an alternative account of both the object of emancipatory knowledge and the dynamics of emancipatory struggle. When individuals realize that not they alone but an entire group of similarly positioned people are denied appropriate recognition within some structure of socially practiced norms, their only recourse will normally be to call into question the established interpretations of those norms by articulating creative and more inclusive re-interpretations guided by their own particular concerns. (Honneth, 2017) As a historical observation about some of the paradigmatic social struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, this is surely an intuitively plausible claim. However, it may also, to some extent, be restricted to the paradigmatic emancipatory struggles of Western modernity, as we can quite easily identify significant historical cases in which ruling social norms are so narrow and exclusive not only in their established interpretations but also in their fundamental semantic scope that the only available option for dominated social groups is to engage in radical normative innovation or overthrow ruling social norms altogether. One such example is surely the ruling racist norms of strict racial segregation and discrimination that governed Apartheid South Africa—which were not, as in the case of the post-Reconstruction American South, a kind of parallel universe of locally institutionalized racism within a federal constitutional republic founded on ideals of liberty and equality, but rather inscribed into the legal architecture of the South African state—and which thus left the oppressed majority population of Black Africans little alternative but a wholesale repudiation of those norms (Harrell, 2009; Marx, 1992). A second example is the subaltern politics in colonial India described by Ranajit Guha, in which, as Guha famously argues, the Indian colonial bourgeoisie achieved dominance but never hegemony, and where peasant insurrections and other forms of resistance to colonial rule were precisely not undertake
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Mar 27, 2024
Joshua Brandt 