Freedom's Right

The Social Foundations of Democratic Life

Axel Honneth

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745680064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become detached from the sphere that constitutes their "field of application"- namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that have developed within Western liberal democratic societies. These criteria and these claims together make up what he terms "democratic ethical life": a system of morally legitimate norms that are not only legally anchored, but also institutionally established. Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society.

Part I

Historical Background: The Right to Freedom

Of all the ethical values prevailing and competing for dominance in modern society, only one has been capable of leaving a truly lasting impression on our institutional order: freedom, i.e. the autonomy of the individual. Of course, other conceptions of the good, from the deism of the natural order to romantic expressionism,¹ have lent new accents to our experience of the self and its relation to others for over two centuries. But in terms of their social impact, once these values go beyond the narrow circle of an aesthetic or philosophical avant-garde and inspire imaginations within the lifeworld, they are quickly subsumed under the notion of autonomy, to which they ultimately only manage to add new layers. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is nearly impossible to articulate one of these other values of modernity without immediately grasping them as facets of the constitutive idea of individual autonomy. Whether it is a matter of invoking a natural order, idealizing an inner voice, upholding the value of community or authenticity, these are all but mere additional elements of what we mean by individual self-determination. As if by magical attraction, all modern ethical ideals have been placed under the spell of freedom; sometimes they infuse this idea with greater depth or add new accents, but they never manage to posit an independent, stand-alone alternative.²

The enormous gravitational force exerted by the notion of autonomy derives from the fact that it manages to form a systematic link between the individual subject and the social order. Whereas all other modern values refer either to the horizon of the individual or the normative framework of the society as a whole, the idea of individual freedom establishes a connection between the two. Its conceptions of what the individual regards as the good also contain indications of what constitutes a legitimate social order: The idea that the value of human subjects lies in their capacity for self-determination, an idea which has only gradually attained such a dominant position, has changed our perspective on the rules of social interaction as well. The normative legitimacy of the social order increasingly depends on whether it does enough to ensure individual self-determination, or at least its basic preconditions. As a result, notions of social justice and considerations on how to ensure that the way society is organized does justice to the interests and needs of its members have become inseparable from the principle of individual autonomy. Although other ethical aspects might also play an important role in the modern discourse on justice, they are overwhelmed by the value accorded to the freedom of the individual. Conceptions of justice and concepts of freedom have become so intertwined that it has become nearly impossible for us to recognize the specific place that various theories have accorded to the central value of individual freedom. Only after painstaking reconstruction can we see that even these theories of justice place individual autonomy at the centre of all other ethical relations.³ For instance, it took years to see that even the ‘postmodern’ ethic, supposedly critical of the subject, ultimately represents a more deep-seated variety of the modern idea of freedom. These theories sought to tear down what were previously regarded as natural limits to individual self-determination – the biological identity of the sexes or certain conceptions of the human body – by demonstrating their origins in cultural determinations.⁴ Hence no social ethic and no social critique seems capable of transcending the horizon opened up two centuries ago by linking the conception of justice to the idea of autonomy.

What is true for philosophy is no less true for contemporary social movements. Ever since the French Revolution, hardly any group that has struggled for social recognition has failed to paint the slogan of individual freedom on its banners. National revolutionary movements and the champions of women's liberation, the labour movement and the civil rights movement – all have fought against legal and social forms of disrespect they saw as irreconcilable with their claims to self-respect and individual autonomy. The adherents of these social movements were convinced, right down to their moral sensorium, that justice demands equal opportunity for freedom; and even where achieving this aim has meant restricting individual freedom, the postulate of freedom still serves to legitimize these movements’ objectives. In modernity, the demand for justice can only be shown to be legitimate by making some kind of reference to the autonomy of the individual; it is neither the will of the community nor the natural order, but individual freedom that forms the normative foundation of all conceptions of justice.

This close bond between justice and individual freedom, however, is more than a mere historical fact. It is true that the fusion of these two concepts represents the outcome of a centuries-long learning process, in which the classical idea of natural law first had to be freed from its theological framework in order to declare the individual subject an equally entitled author of social laws and norms. The difficult and agonistic path that would have to be travelled before individual self-determination could become the reference point for all conceptions of justice runs from Thomas Aquinas via Grotius and Hobbes to Locke and Rousseau.⁵ But the outcome of this ethical alloy represents more than a fortunate coincidence of two independent conceptual histories. Rather, it demonstrates irreversibly that when it comes to positing just norms, we cannot rely on forces that are not given to individual human minds. Our individual self-determination and our insistence that a social order be ‘just’ are joined by an indissoluble bond, because our desire for justice is merely an expression of our subjective capacity for justification. The ability to question social orders and demand proof of their moral legitimacy is the basis for the whole perspective of justice; therefore, individual self-determination, i.e. the power to arrive at one's own judgements, is not just some contingent human quality, but the essence of our practical-normative activity. To demand justice, to even assert a certain aspect of justice is to strive to (co-)determine the normative rules of social life.⁶ But once we have discovered this internal connection, as soon as we know that justice and individual self-determination are mutually referential, any resort to older, pre-modern sources of legitimacy must appear to exterminate the perspective of justice altogether. It is no longer clear what it would even mean to demand a just social order without simultaneously calling for individual self-determination. Therefore, this fusion between conceptions of justice and the idea of autonomy represents an achievement of modernity that can only be reversed at the price of cognitive barbarism. And wherever such a regression actually occurs, it inevitably provokes moral outrage ‘in the hearts of all its spectators (who themselves are not involved in the show)’.⁷

This teleological perspective, an inevitable element of modernity's self-understanding,⁸ strips the above-described fact of its contingent historical character. For reasons that claim universal validity, we can now regard the idea of individual self-determination as the normative point of reference for all modern conceptions of justice. That which is ‘just’ is that which protects, fosters or realizes the autonomy of all members of society. But even after we have established an ethical link between justice and a supreme value, we still have not determined how a social order needs to be constituted in order to deserve the predicate ‘just’. When it comes to further defining what justice in fact entails, everything depends on how we further define the value of individual freedom, for the idea of autonomy itself is too heterogeneous and multi-layered to determine the standard of justice on its own. Neither the methodological form nor the substantive determinations of such a conception can be appropriately determined merely by linking this conception to the guarantee of individual freedom. Although freedom might constitute the ‘point’ of justice,⁹ this does not yet establish the relation between the ethical goal and the principles of justice, between what is good and what is right. Instead we must offer a rational explanation not only of the extent, but also of the implementation [Vollzugsweise] of the kind of individual freedom that is to serve as a touchstone for a theory of justice.

Ever since Hobbes’ day, the category of individual freedom – both in terms of its substance and its logical structure – has been one of the most controversial notions of modernity. The discourse on the semantic meaning of freedom not only involves philosophers, legal and social theorists, but also social movements that seek to publicly articulate their specific experience of discrimination, degradation and exclusion.¹⁰ In the course of this as yet unsettled debate, it has become clear that as the propagated idea of freedom changes, so does the image and even the methodological conception of justice. By expanding what we view as part of the ‘self’ of individual self-determination, we not only alter the substantive principles of a just order, but also the laws of its construction. The more capacities and preconditions we regard as necessary for truly enabling the autonomy of the individual, the more we must consider the views of those to whom these principles are meant to apply. Hence, in order to justify which idea of justice should be taken as our starting point, we must distinguish between various models of individual freedom; a process of elimination should allow us to find the model of freedom best suited to formulating a conception of justice. We can begin with the observation that in the moral discourse of modernity, in the bitter conflicts over the meaning of freedom, three clearly distinct models have emerged. Upon closer inspection we will see that the differences between these historically prevalent ideas of individual freedom are linked to distinct understandings of the structure and character of individual intentions.¹¹ According to their increasing degree of complexity, we can distinguish between negative (I), reflexive (II) and social (III) models of freedom. Within this tripartite distinction, we will only indirectly address Isaiah Berlin's famous differentiation between merely ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom.¹²

Notes

1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. parts III and IV. In what follows, I do not address the notion of ‘equality’, as influential and consequential as it might be, as an independent value because it can only be understood as an elucidation of the value of individual freedom, as the notion that all members of modern societies are equally entitled to freedom. Everything that can be said about the demand for social equality only makes sense in relation to individual freedom.

2 This is the thrust of Taylor's argumentation: p. 503.

3 A very nice demonstration of the crucial position of individual freedom can be found in Will Kymlica, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

4 See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). For an account of the more general issue, see Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5 See Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

6 This link between justice and the condition of mutual justifiability is the kernel of truth in the notion that ‘justice’ is to be explained with reference to a ‘right to justification’. For an approach that builds on the work of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon, see Rainer Forst, The Right to Justice: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). However, this virtually analytic principle is of little use when the type and extent of permissible justifiability can only be measured in terms of the social and historical conditions needed to determine what can count as ‘justified’ in each case. Without taking account of these normative conditions, which represent the object of normative reconstruction, the theory of justice remains entirely empty.

7 Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of the Faculties, Part 2’ in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings, edited by Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 155.

8 See Axel Honneth, ‘The Irreducibility of Progress: Kant's Account of the Relationship Between Morality and History’ in Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 1–18.

9 See John Rawls’ classical formulations in ‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 17, 4 (1988): 251–76, esp. 251f. Here the key phrase is: ‘justice draws the limit, the good shows the point.’

10 Unfortunately, I am not aware of any investigation on the con­ceptual history of freedom that traces the development of this concept in modern societies while also taking account of the performative interventions of social movements and political parties. For the case of Germany, see Peter Blickle, Von der Leibeigenschaft zu den Menschenrechten: Eine Geschichte der Freiheit in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 2003). Unfortunately, the concept of freedom is not included among the major themes in the otherwise excellent global history of the nineteenth century by Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009).

11 An interesting proposal for distinguishing between three models of freedom, and one which differs from my own, has been developed by Philippe d'Iribarne, ‘Trois figures de la liberté’, Annales HSS, no. 5 (2003), pp. 953–78. D’Iribarne argues that the particularities of these three conceptions of freedom (negative, communicative and reflexive) result from the cultural customs of their respective country of origin (England, Germany, France). I do not pursue these connections any further here.

12 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty,’ in Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166–217.

1

Negative Freedom and the Social Contract

The idea of negative freedom was born out of the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although even at this time the aim of these conflicts could have drawn attention to the reflexivity of freedom, that is, to the fact that subjects can only want what they reflexively view as right, Hobbes skilfully steers the combating parties toward a negative conception of individual freedom. In one famous passage of Leviathan, Hobbes writes, ‘By Liberty, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of externall Impediments.’¹ At its most elementary level, Hobbes views freedom as the mere absence of exte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: A Theory of Justice as an Analysis of Society
• Part I: Historical Background: The Right to Freedom
• Part II: The Possibility of Freedom
• Part III: The Reality of Freedom
• Index