Disrespect

The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

Axel Honneth

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Over the last decade, Axel Honneth has established himself as one of the leading social and political philosophers in the world today. Rooted in the tradition of critical theory, his writings have been central to the revitalization of critical theory and have become increasingly influential. His theory of recognition has gained worldwide attention and is seen by some as the principal counterpart to Habermass theory of discourse ethics.

In this important new volume, Honneth pursues his path-breaking work on recognition by exploring the moral experiences of disrespect that underpin the conduct of social and political critique. What we might conceive of as a striving for social recognition initially appears in a negative form as the experience of humiliation or disrespect. Honneth argues that disrespect constitutes the systematic key to a comprehensive theory of recognition that seeks to clarify the sense in which institutionalized patterns of social recognition generate justified demands on the way subjects treat each other.

This new book by one of the leading social and political philosophers of our time will be of particular interest to students and scholars in social and political theory and philosophy.

Part I
The Tasks of Social Philosophy

1
Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy

Like all areas of theoretical investigation over the past two hundred years, philosophy has undergone a process of differentiation that has led to the development of a number of subdisciplines and specializations. Although the classic threefold division into theoretical, practical, and aesthetic philosophy continues to determine philosophical curricula and introductory texts even today, new specializations barely fitting the old pattern have long since emerged in philosophical academia. Especially in the field of practical philosophy – originally a discipline comprising only ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of law – this new development has given rise to a multiplicity of disciplines, and the lines dividing the individual subspecialties are beginning to become increasingly blurred. Indeed, there are few who could say with any great certainty just where the lines are drawn between moral philosophy, political philosophy, the history of philosophy, and cultural philosophy.

In this complex terrain, social philosophy in the German-speaking world has become an increasingly residual discipline. Indeterminate in its relation to neighboring fields of study, it functions by default as an overarching organization for all practically oriented subdisciplines, a normative supplement of empirically oriented sociology, and an interpretive diagnosis of present socio-economic circumstances.¹ Going back to the early days of utilitarianism in the Anglo-Saxon world, on the other hand, an understanding of social philosophy has been developed that is greatly similar to what is considered “political philosophy” in Germany: the study of the normative questions that arise wherever the reproduction of civil society depends on state intervention (the preservation of private property, the punishment of criminals, healthcare, etc.).² Although this undertaking has the advantage of clearly defining the task of social philosophy, it inevitably causes the latter a certain loss of identity, for social philosophy no longer consists in an independent object domain or a distinct set of questions, but is reduced instead to a marginal strain of political philosophy.

If we take these two developments together, it isn't difficult to notice that social philosophy currently finds itself in a precarious situation. In the German-speaking world, it is on the verge of degenerating into an awkward discipline while, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, a restriction of its theoretical domain has already rendered it a subdiscipline of political philosophy – so much so that it hardly seems to possess any independent features at all any more. In order to counteract both these dangers, I argue that social philosophy is primarily concerned with determining and discussing processes of social development that can be viewed as misdevelopments (Fehlentwicklungen), disorders or “social pathologies.”

In what follows I will attempt to specify the claims and tasks inherent in this conception of social philosophy so that its relation to neighboring disciplines will become sufficiently clear. First of all, I will reflect on this discipline's history, in order to lay bare the outlines of the tradition in which it has been assigned the task of diagnosing social misdevelopments. This variety of social-philosophical reflection has its origin – if not in name, then at least in subject matter – in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of civilization. In its analyses, it employs concepts such as “bifurcation” and “alienation” as ethical criteria for determining specific modern processes of development to be pathologies (I). This tradition underwent a significant enrichment with the emergence of sociology, inasmuch as philosophical reflection was hereby compelled to ground its claims on the results of empirical research. Drawing on the founding fathers of sociology, I will investigate how social philosophy in the twentieth century developed into grand philosophical systems which sought to come to terms with the historical experiences of fascism and Stalinism (II). Finally, this historical reflection will allow us to give a rough outline of the theoretical claims and specific questions characteristic of social philosophy. Since its primary task is the diagnosis of processes of social development that must be understood as preventing the members of a society from living a “good life,” it relies upon criteria of an ethical nature. Unlike both moral and political philosophy, therefore, social philosophy can be understood as providing an instance of reflection (Reflexionsinstanz), within which criteria for successful forms of social life are discussed.

I From Rousseau to Nietzsche: the emergence of social-philosophical inquiry

Even if Thomas Hobbes gave the discipline its name in the middle of the seventeenth century,³ it wasn't until a hundred years later in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that social philosophy truly came into being. Under the title “social philosophy,” Hobbes sought the legal conditions under which the absolutist state could gain the stability and authority necessary for pacifying religious wars. The contractual solution he proposed in Leviathan derived solely from the question of how the bare survival of state order could be secured under social conditions in which there is an ever-present conflict of interests. But as Rousseau started work on his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in the middle of the eighteenth century, this question had all but ceased to be of any interest to him. He was less interested in the conditions under which civil society could be preserved than he was in the causes leading to its degeneration. In the hundred years that transpired between these two works, the process of capitalist modernization had made so much progress that a sphere of private autonomy was able to emerge in the shadow of the absolutist state. Within the early bourgeois public sphere, which included the enlightened representatives of French royalty and was still without any possibility of political influence, modes of interaction developed that would later provide the life-world framework for capitalist commodity exchange.⁴ This in turn gave rise to a form of social life that would have been unrecognizable to Hobbes. Under the increasing pressure of economic and social competition, practices and orientations arose that came to be founded increasingly upon deception, dissembling, and jealousy. It was upon this form of life emerging along with these modes of behavior that Rousseau, with the acute perception of an isolated loner, set his sights. What primarily interested him was whether this form of life still retained the practical conditions under which humans could lead a good and well-lived life. With this theoretical change of stance, Rousseau got modernity's project of developing a social philosophy under way. Unlike political philosophy, it would no longer seek out the conditions of a correct or just social order, but instead would attempt to ascertain the limitations that this new form of life imposed on humans' self-realization.

Rousseau had already taken such a social-philosophical approach in a text published in Geneva five years previous to the publication of Discourse on Inequality. A question posed by the Academy of Dijon, “whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to the restoration of morals,” offered him the opportunity to sum up his critical reflections on civilization for the first time.⁵ Filled with pathos, but lacking conclusive argumentation, the text contains a rough sketch of all those observations that would later make up the substance of his finished theory. According to Rousseau, the process of civilization is accompanied by another process in which human needs become increasingly refined – a process relegating humans to a position of dependency upon artificially constructed desires, thus robbing them of their original freedom. Humans' loss of their natural feeling of security leads further to a decline of public morals, since the emerging necessity of a division of labor is accompanied by the need to attain social distinction, which causes pride, vanity and hypocrisy to predominate. Both the arts and the sciences ultimately take on the role of reinforcing authorities in this context, since they provide the individualizing inclination towards boasting and bragging with new possibilities of expression.⁶ In his negative answer to the Academy's question, however, Rousseau makes hardly any reference to the criteria he employs in his critical assessment. Although the text makes it unmistakably clear that the spheres of individual liberty and public morals are what provide the standard for evaluating the ethical quality of social life, it remains mostly unclear how we are to conceive the ideal forms of both these spheres. Without a conception of these forms, we are unable to ascertain processes of “loss” or “decline.” Wherever Rousseau laments the decline of public morals, his standard of comparison remains the very same political public sphere that he, like many of his contemporaries, believed to have been realized in the ancient polis. Yet wherever he criticizes humans' cultivation of ever-increasing needs by claiming that this process has been accompanied by a loss of individual liberty, he invokes the ideal of a pre-historic state in which humans supposedly lived in natural self-sufficiency. This theoretical conflict marks Rousseau's writings up until his Discourse on Inequality, in which he provides a significantly expanded and theoretically more substantial version of his critique of civilization.⁷ In this text, likewise composed as an answer to a question posed by the Academy of Dijon, Rousseau resolves the tension between historical and anthropological standards of evaluation in favor of the second option; a specific, natural form in which humans relate to themselves functions here as the critical reference point in his diagnosis of the modern way of life.

This time, even though the Academy's question concerned the causes leading to “unequal conditions among men,” Rousseau took advantage of the opportunity in order to formulate a critique not only of social injustice, but of an entire form of life. Even the formal construction of the text makes clear that he had come to take a significantly more differentiated view of the methodological problems facing a critique of civilization. In the first part of his analysis, he sketches a powerful image of the state of nature with numerous references to empirical observations. This sketch then serves in the second part of his analysis as a contrasting background, against which the pathologies of the modern form of life clearly come into focus. The mere outline of the text makes it apparent that Rousseau draws the criteria for his critical diagnosis from a state that must have existed before the development of society. Yet to this day, it remains unclear how he intended the methodological claims supposedly bound up with this sketch of the natural form of life to be understood. Given the many contemporary research findings referred to in the first part of his analysis, we might be tempted to see Rousseau as having set himself the scientific aim of developing an empirically substantial theory. However, the one-sided and highly exaggerated result of his investigation supports the assumption that has come to be held by the majority of Rousseau scholars, namely that the text instead constitutes an attempt at a methodically conscious idealization, primarily intended to provide a striking, contrasting background for his critique of the times.⁸ His sketch of the state of nature focuses on two primal human characteristics whose existence is in no way substantiated by the sources he draws upon. According to Rousseau, before the process of socialization causes the human subject to emerge from its natural form of life, it is characterized by a drive towards self-preservation, as well as by a capability for sympathy. The first characteristic, amour de soi, signifies little more than the minimum of narcissistic self-preoccupation required for individual survival in a hostile environment, whereas the second characteristic, pitié, indicates the natural compassion with which both humans and – to a lesser degree – animals react as soon as they see their own kind suffer. According to Rousseau, these two drives limit each other in such a way that the struggle for survival in the state of nature can only take on the more moderate form of an all-sided concession of autonomy. In opposition to Hobbes, Rousseau insists on the fact that our stirrings of compassion constantly impose moral shackles on our survival impulse, yet without entirely suffocating the latter's necessary reproductive function.⁹

However, this impulse-guided morality is not what Rousseau takes to be the central particularity of the state of nature he has constructed. As his often used expression “natural morals” indicates, it is sympathy that, on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I: The Tasks of Social Philosophy
• Part II: Morality and Recognition
• Part III: Problems of Political Philosophy
• Index