Geoff Boucher. Hegel Summer School 2005
Axel Honneth’s renewal of Critical Theory in terms of the category of recognition provides an important new conceptualisation of social conflict, one that reunites fragmented sectoral struggles by referring them to a single generative mechanism. His achievement is to have highlighted the normative dimension of political resistance, both in terms of the moral wellspring of political action and the ethical claims inherent in social struggles. Honneth’s insight leads to a reconceptualisation of the normative foundation of social theory. Theorising this in terms of recognition, Honneth states that “what had previously only had the status of generalised empirical findings was raised to the level of a normatively substantive social theory: the basic concepts through which social justice comes to bear in a theory of society must be tailored to subjects’ normative expectations regarding the social recognition of their personal integrity” (Honneth, 2003: 133). Subjects have normative expectations of the social order: “what subjects expect of society is above all recognition of their identity claims” (Honneth, 2003: 131). The basic idea is that the social roles performed by the agent are accompanied by forms of recognition (love, respect, esteem) that form the foundation for morality (intimacy, equality, merit). Agents who experience a violation of these normative expectations are motivated to act for justice. The moral sources of the experience of social discontent are grounded in the refusal of recognition: the violation of the body, the denial of respect and the denigration of forms of life. This is experienced as injustice in a precise sense: individuals affected regard institutional rules that disrespect them as in conflict with well-founded claims to recognition. The experience of social suffering has a normative core, then, because the experience of injustice happens when an institutional rule regulating asymmetrical recognition cannot be rationally justified. Drawing on history (Barrington Moore, E. P. Thompson) and sociologically informed philosophy (David Miller, Avishai Margalit), Honneth proposes that demands for economic redistribution and claims for cultural recognition (and legal equality, and political representation, and so forth) can be understood as the result of struggles for recognition. “[T]he conceptual framework of recognition is of central importance today not because it expresses the objectives of a new type of social movement, but because it has proven to be the appropriate tool for categorically unlocking social experiences of injustice as a whole” (Honneth, 2003: 133).
Nonetheless, despite this suggestive beginning, Honneth’s proposal to rethink struggles for economic redistribution, political democratisation and cultural recognition (collective identity) in terms of three highly abstract “recognition spheres” (love, respect, esteem) is plagued by anomalies. Indeed, Honneth actually contradicts himself. He aims to prove that redistribution is the result of recognition struggles. But he does so on the basis of the claim that material resources are the foundation for the superstructure of recognition claims (Honneth, 2003: 141). This self-contradiction undermines the interpretation of material redistribution as social recognition. Secondly, and surprisingly for a theory of the “struggle for recognition,” Honneth seems to lack an intersubjectively valid principle according to which we should adjudicate struggles for cultural recognition. Indeed, the highest sphere of recognition is extraordinarily indeterminate. In the process of theoretical elaboration, Honneth symptomatically shifts his terminology from “social solidarity” (Honneth, 1995b)to “individual merit” (Honneth, 2003). To this must be added the curiosity that the centrality of struggles for legal rights in modernity makes the role of love and esteem unclear. Finally, the privative categories of the argument (recognition struggles are triggered by violations of subjects’ normative expectations, which means that only extraordinary oppression generates resistance) make transcendence of the existing framework unlikely.
In Nancy Fraser’s terms, Honneth transposes the categories of a moral psychology (based on individuals) onto a theory of social justice (dealing with institutions) and so leaps illegitimately from personal identity to social justice. But at the same time, no dialectical social theory can be content with a mere description of three separate levels of conflict (the economic, the political and the cultural), together with the statement that different forms of oppression (and therefore, different sorts of remedy) operate at each of these levels. Is the social totality merely a constellation of fragments – or do these “structural instances” have a connection? How might their articulation to one another influence the positioning of the individual, so that personal identity and political resistance, while not the same thing, are nonetheless dialectically connected?
My paper reconceptualises the struggle for recognition from within a materialist theory of social action that is informed by the insights of psychoanalysis.[3] I propose that:
Unlike Honneth’s Hegelian categories, then, the categories of recognition I propose are based on empirical sociology and linked to what actually does happen in modern social conflict.[4]
I contend that the locus of recognition struggles is what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the habitus: the symbolically structured sets of dispositions that relate individuals to institutional rules through customary norms. The habitus is the locus of the contestation of institutional rules and the invention of new practices. But the habitus is also the site of ideological interpellation and thus the scene of domination through the introjection of hegemonic norms. Conflict in the habitus is oriented to changing the rules – that is, to having practical innovations accepted as legitimate – and ultimately, to legal rights as the institutional instantiation of a successful recognition struggle. The micropolitical contestation of social reproduction – struggles for recognition, or ethical politics – happens through the re-articulation of various floating elements – social practices, customary norms, ideological discourses – into new discursive ensembles that are ratified through the modification of institutional rules. Transformations of the habitus through the struggle for recognition (equals micropolitical strategies) leads to new institutional rules and finally modified legislation. I propose to call the totality of these micropolitical conflicts “ethical politics.” This level of conflict and the resistance to social suffering – most recently described in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World – is pre-political. Although it motivates social movement activation, it is not necessarily concentrated into a political form. Ethical politics therefore designates the vast multiplicity of conflicts over the interpretation of the norms that guide social practices, a multiplicity that is dispersed throughout the social formation in everyday life contexts.
For Bourdieu, the habitus is a mediating concept – it mediates between individual character, described as a “bodily hexis,” or style of the subject inscribed in corporeal deportment, and the complex structural terrain of an institutional apparatus, described by Bourdieu as the “field.” From the perspective of this materialist theory of social action, the individual is positioned structurally through socialisation in the group habitus – a differentially defined lifeworld, or structure of dispositions based on a practical taxonomy – which defines a whole, socially antagonistic “way of life.” Habitus describes a collective relation to hegemonic norms that explains how, despite enormous individual variation, social groups – as statistical aggregates – tend to exhibit the ideological characteristics that fit them to certain functional roles in the social division of labour. The generative schemes of the habitus are schemes for the interpretation and transformation of social practice. The nature of the habitus as the ideological unconscious of practice creates a “common-sense” world, endowed with an objectivity that is secured by a consensus on the meaning of practices in the world. Habitus is a system of “durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience to rules” (Bourdieu, 1977: 72).
Bourdieu’s point of departure is Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation, which proposes that ideology is an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence. According to Althusser, ideology inserts individuals into functional roles by forming them as “rational and autonomous egos,” who misrecognise themselves as the independent authors of the structural relations whose mere bearers they, in reality, are. Bourdieu objects to the mindless conformism implicit in this perspective and insists that the individual implementation of learned social practices (functional roles) is rule-bound but open-ended, characterised by “regulated improvisation.” The habitus has an endless capacity to engender practices whose limits are set by the historically determinate conditions of its production, a “conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings” (Bourdieu, 1977: 95). So subjects, interpellated as individuals-citizens and as “rational agents,” are not imprinted with a fixed set of rules and procedures. They are endowed with a social sense, or “cultivated disposition, inscribed in the body schema,” that generates a logic of social practice through the internalisation of a practical taxonomy linked to an axiology (Bourdieu, 1977: 15). This symbolically structured field of discursive practices enables agents to generate a potentially infinite range of practices adapting to constant microsocial variation. Nonetheless, Bourdieu strongly criticises the bourgeois apologists for whom this individual initiative amounts to an absolute plasticity of social structures. He points out that despite individual creativity, social groups nonetheless display a “subjective adaptation to objective possibilities” that makes the conform to their exploitation and consent to their domination – in other words, a subaltern internalisation of the limits set by the hegemonic group as the “rules of the game.”
According to Bourdieu, who insists on the economic nature of all social systems, the social antagonism at the core of class-based habitus is displaced into competition for various forms of capital (economic, political, social and cultural). The transformation of social practices happens through competitive strategies based on rational calculations of utility maximisation.[1] Historical transformations in the relation between “structural instances,” or institutional ensembles, in the social formation, are necessarily accompanied by massive dislocation of the habitus of contending social groups. In these conjunctures of historical transition, the common standards that make “peaceful” competition possible become questionable, exposing the taken for granted moral norms that subtend social coexistence between antagonistic classes. This implies that symbolic competition is not only an action strategy of a social group, but also the medium for the formation of collective identity through shared norms (Honneth, 1995a). Thus social conflict and the transformation of the habitus is subtended by a structure of mutual recognition (i.e., ideological misrecognition) and shared moral norms.
Bourdieu proposes that the different habitus relate phonematically, that is, the “marks of distinction” are structured through difference. The distinctive worth of a lifestyle therefore has two dimensions – internally, it is structured through shared norms, and externally, it relates competitively to all of the other lifestyles in a hierarchical gradation of social status. These shared norms within a habitus do not define separate moral universes – in which case there would not be competitive struggle, but class warfare – but differentially defined moral interpretations of common normative ideals. The very space of inscription of the competitive struggle – the existence of a symbolic “axis” that enables groups to compare their relative social worth in competition for social honours and material resources – is held by certain ideals that define what we might call the “ethical imaginary” of a social formation. In modernity, empirical evidence suggests that these ideals are “need,” “equality” and “desert” (Miller, 1999). The habitus therefore defines an interpretive community that systematically disagrees with other communities on the interpretations of how normative agreements apply to social institutions. With Honneth’s critique of Bourdieu, then, the institutional rules (social norms) that constitute the habitus are not just positive facts to which individuals relate competitively as rational actors seeking to maximise their benefits. Instead, they are intersubjectively decided norms based on mutual recognition – and individuals relate to these norms, in a misrecognition characteristic of the “rational ego,” as if they were mere positive facts. It is therefore to the dialectics of recognition and its impact on these intersubjective norms that we have to turn.
I intend to proceed on the assumption that these remarks are sufficient to indicate the place of Honneth’s “struggle for recognition” in the framework of a materialist theory of social practice and to locate “mutual recognition” within the concept of ideological misrecognition. They also motivate my next observation, that Honneth systematically conflates mutual respect and the legal framework of modernity, leading to his subsequent description of the main conflict dynamic in modernity in terms of “legal recognition.” Against Nancy Fraser’s conception of dual struggles for economic redistribution and cultural recognition, Honneth notes that the rigid distinction between cultural recognition and material redistribution leads to her overlooking “legal recognition” (Honneth, 2003: 136). Along these lines, Honneth is able to show how the legal framework now permeates economics and culture. The main conflict dynamic of modern society is the interpretation of the scope and application of the principle of equality (Honneth, 2003: 151-152). This struggle unfolds in the medium of law, “which promises all members of society equal respect for their individual autonomy” (Honneth, 2003: 152). The principle of legal equality, he states unequivocally, constitutes the egalitarian dynamic of modern society.
In this light, Honneth interprets the welfare state as an effort to bring the selective principle of social esteem (individual achievement plus material resources) within the domain of legal recognition, by transforming merit claims into social rights. “The development of social welfare measures can be understood such that individual members of society should be guaranteed a minimum of social status and hence economic resources independently of the meritocratic recognition principle, by transforming these claims into social rights” (Honneth, 2003: 147, 149). Likewise, the legal framework that enforces mutual respect between sexual partners increasingly regulates intimate relations. The application of the equality principle beyond a certain political threshold leads to social rights, and so collectives shortcut the principles of merit and care by making minimum economic welfare and bodily security into imperatives of public law. So Honneth concludes that “the changes that take place in the capitalist recognition order with the emergence of the welfare state can perhaps best be understood as the penetration of the principle of equal legal treatment into the previously autonomous sphere of social esteem” (Honneth, 2003: 149) and into the sphere of intimate relations.
The problem is that this theory of the invasion of rights claims into social esteem and intimate relations effectively means – in Honneth’s terms – a denial of justice, because the equality principle is not applicable in these domains. His politically motivated support of the welfare state sits uneasy beside his ethically grounded claims that “love” and “esteem” cannot be rationally governed by equality principle. This explains Honneth’s belief that cultural recognition is irrational (Honneth, 2003: 168) and that the normative ideal of intimacy is not autonomy but relatedness (Honneth, 1995b: 105). Honneth is trapped in a paradox: on the one hand, the main egalitarian dynamic of modernity is what he calls “legal recognition,” meaning the spread of social rights into the recognition spheres of intimacy and esteem. But this amounts to a collapse of the differentiation of recognition spheres into “legal recognition.” On the other hand, what makes modernity progressive with respect to traditional societies is precisely that the functional differentiation of modern institutions is the result of the normative differentiation between the recognition spheres of intimate relations, mutual respect and social esteem. So the logical result of Honneth’s position is that the main emancipatory dynamic of modernity tends to reverse the progressive differentiation of recognition spheres that lends modernity its moral identity in the first place.
It is necessary to separate mutual respect from the legal framework – any position that neglects this elementary distinction between moral norm and institutional rule (by conflating them) risks becoming an uncritical theory. For if struggles for recognition concern the framework of customary norms that guide social practices, and these are cemented through the adoption of new institutional rules, then recognition struggles cannot be equated with the formalised framework of the law. At best, recognition struggles provoke the political mobilisations that seek to have customary norms and institutional rules ratified in the legal code. Honneth’s key term, “legal recognition,” is itself a contraction of two conceptually distinct domains – the mutual recognition of autonomous subjects and the legal code. That Honneth’s position is a conflation can be illustrated by the way in which mutual respect has led to civil rights, political democracy, liberty and equality, human rights, legal reforms, cultural recognition and multicultural societies, and so forth. In other words, a single recognition principle can be applied in diverse institutional contexts with results that go beyond mere “legal recognition” alone. All of these involve the application of the principle of mutual respect between autonomous subjects on the basis of the unconditional demand for equality and liberty. Conversely, it is possible to be accorded formal rights yet denied respect. This is the situation of groups whose special disadvantages mean that their parity of participation in social processes prevents the meaningful exercise of these formal rights. Unthinkable for Honneth, this is a situation where despite apparently benevolent institutional structures and in the absence of the denial of rights, the subject nonetheless suffers from a lack of respect.
Indeed, Honneth’s description of mutual respect between autonomous subjects needs to be retraced without this conflation. Honneth claims that:
“Legal recognition” refers, in the first place, only to the situation in which self and other respect each other as legal subjects for the sole reason that they are aware of the social norms by which rights and duties are distributed in their community (Honneth, 1995b: 109).
The statement implies a distinction between mutually binding social norms and their inscription in legal rights. To recognise every other human being as an autonomous person means to act, with regard to all of them, in the manner normatively mandated by the characteristics of moral responsibility.[2] Yet the capacities that determine a morally responsible social agent are subject to historical change and social variation (for instance, the inclusion of women into political institutions at the start of the twentieth century).
My perspective supposes that claims for mutual respect are distinct from legal relations. Indeed, the legal framework mediates recognition claims to institutional structures because it is within legal frameworks that new practices sediment as institutional rules with binding force. A recognition claim is therefore twofold: it involves the claim that a certain demand be recognised as legitimate – which means, that a certain political community affirm an interpretation of the principles of social justice, “need, equality and desert,” as social norms – and it demands that the speaker be recognised as the bearer of the corresponding right. This implies the necessity for a reformulation of the relation between recognition struggles and the legal framework and a reconceptualisation of the historical emergence of social rights.
The scope of legally supported rights has expanded considerably during the last two hundred years, because of the expansion of recognition claims along these three axes. For Honneth, this represents an expansion in the scope of rights and their progressive extension into spheres – for instance, intimacy and solidarity – previously regulated by other principles (Honneth, 1995b: 114). But against the conceptual background of a separation of mutual respect from legal rights, we can see that this is because the minimal basis for democratic citizenship includes needs (social rights), equality (civil rights) and desert (political rights).
I propose to replace Honneth’s category of intimate relations with material need. This is because I am interested in the acts of identification formative of political subjectivity – i.e., citizenship – that can lead to forms of distributive justice. The main problem with Honneth’s position (aside from his claustrophobic conception of love) is that while sexual love is undoubtedly the main site of the struggle for recognition, it cannot found an institutionally binding norm of distributive justice. With the transition from pre-capitalist production, where the extended family is the main unit of economic production and social reproduction, to capitalism, where production is centred on the enterprise unit, the family becomes radically particular in relation to the general institutions of society (economy, state, civil society). This means that family relations cannot found a norm for the distribution of material resources, i.e., an institutionally applicable principle of social justice. To the contrary: mutual respect is the only appropriate norm of justice for intimate relations. Honneth introduces the category of love because he considers that struggles for recognition arise from personal identity, whereas I hold that personal identity is only articulated to (and not foundational for) political subjectivity. I think that Honneth’s position may also be an Hegelian legacy – with potentially deleterious implications – of the alignment of recognition spheres with institutional structures (the family as the institution corresponding to affective care). Honneth’s notion of affective care can only lead to the humanitarian injunction to alleviate suffering, but not to a principle of justice that might regulate the allocation of resources. Unlike love, need is grounded in categorical needs not arbitrary desires. Although material need is subject to interpretive claims, in the light of David Miller’s discussion of need, equality and desert, this does not rule out applying the distributive principle of “to each according to their needs” as a norm of justice (Miller, 1999).
The needs in question are “categorical” or “fundamental” – that is, they are ultimate necessities, not instrumental means to some end – that fall into two categories: the quasi-biological general facts about the human condition, and the “historical and moral” component to needs discussed by Marx. By “need,” then, is meant both the biological minimum necessary to sustain the human body and the material capacities necessary for a minimally decent human life (Miller, 1999: 210). Biological needs must not be stretched beyond their limits so as to present (as Maslow does) ideals belonging to the “good life” as aspects of “health.” Historical needs do not depend upon individual interests, but upon shared social norms. Needs beyond the biological minimum are historically and culturally variable, because they “have to be defined in terms of social norms about what constitutes a minimally decent life” (Miller, 1999: 212). The social norms in question are best understood as a set of functional capacities, as defined by Amartya Sen, which every person (in a certain social formation) is expected to be able to perform and whose minimal level is determined dialogically. The “historical and moral element” to need that Marx refers to includes the living standards normal to a whole way of life, the social expectations generated by the division of labour, the legacy of political settlements that have a historical efficiency, and so forth. The conflictual character of material needs, combined with the widespread popular diffusion of the notion that “need” is a category of moral evaluation, makes the distributional maxim, “to each, according to their needs,” transitional in the classical Marxist sense. That is, needs claims can be applied today, arising from popular practices in social conflict, but insofar as they contain a utopian potential, they point beyond capitalist relations. “To each” is neither idiosyncratic (subjective), nor dependent upon a conception of the good life, and as Miller demonstrates, it can apply to a market society characterised by scarcity. When it does so, however, the principle sometimes involves selecting the lesser injustice as a basis for policy.[5]
Indeed, as Seyla Benhabib has demonstrated, under conditions of relative scarcity, there is a strongly utopian dimension to need interpretation by subaltern groups (Benhabib, 1986). This is because the subject who speaks of their needs cannot separate – for instance, by means of a scientific analysis or a calculus of benefits – their subjective desires, based on normative expectations, from their material requirements, based on objective functions to be performed. Because “need” involves capacities, it potentially opens onto questions of substantive equality and the relation of human needs to the natural world. This definition of “need” indicates the conflict potential of this dimension of recognition, because it is susceptible to two, opposite interpretations. Indeed, this indicates the difference between progressive and conservative interpretations of need: for a conservative, need is both asymmetrical and hierarchical – the satisfaction of material needs necessarily involves hierarchy in the distribution of the means of production. There is consequently an asymmetrical distribution of goods based on this hierarchical distribution of means of production. By contrast, for progressives, need is asymmetrical but non-hierarchical – the elimination of certain forms of private property eradicates gross disparities in wealth, but the satisfaction of needs is a question of the material singularity of the subject and so the distribution maxim, “from each, to each,” invokes an unequal distribution of goods.
Honneth’s position on the central category of recognition theory – social esteem – is subject to a conceptual indeterminacy that lets it gravitate from social solidarity to individual merit. Secondly, the process of the elaboration of the “struggle for recognition” is one in which Honneth shifts from sympathy for communitarianism to declared liberalism. This is a consequence of Honneth’s belief that individual identity is the standard for the evaluation of recognition claims. Finally, although Honneth accepts that historical social formations generate different definitions of social esteem (for instance, honour, merit) he tends to regard merit as the final possible definition of esteem. Although Honneth begins to theorise recognition by discussing the ways in which “the social recognition of a lifestyle and of the values it symbolically represents thus depend on the degree to which the currently held norms of action and value conceptions have found social acceptance,” this notion is abandoned in practice (Honneth, 1995a: 200). While Honneth accepts the possibility that a new definition of social esteem might arise, when confronted by the concrete possibility in the form of cultural recognition, instead of considering it a contender as a new definition of (postmodern?) social esteem, he invents a fourth recognition sphere ad hoc. He claims that “with the demand that a minority communal culture be socially esteemed for its own sake, the normative horizon of both the equality principle and the achievement principle is definitively exceeded,” but “there is no possibility of normatively demanding the positive evaluation of ways of life” because this is the result “of a process of judgement that escapes our control” (Honneth, 2003: 167-168).
Honneth’s position is grounded in two considerations. Politically, Honneth’s “teleological liberalism” is founded on the notion that ethical life provides the conditions for individual realization (Honneth, 2003: 177-178). Philosophically, Honneth supposes that this is equivalent to complete self-identity – a pre-Freudian notion that reintroduces the equation of transparent self-reflexivity with self-identity characteristic of the philosophy of consciousness. The gravitation in the meaning of social esteem is therefore overdetermined by its philosophical context and Honneth’s political stance. Indeed, in the final analysis his position is not too different from that of Hegel. Honneth supposes that social esteem provides for two developments – social inclusion and personal accomplishment – but only concentrates on personal accomplishment. As far as social inclusion goes, Honneth appears to be an assimilationist rather than a multiculturalist, as he seems to assume that this means the incorporation of fresh population groups within the rubric of the same social norms. Social inclusion does not, therefore, lead to the deconstruction (and reconstruction) of existing social norms. So where personal accomplishment leads to a deepening of social norms, social inclusion is merely an extension of the existing normative framework. Despite his criticism of the capitalist principle of individual merit, then, he cannot avoid endorsing this principle.
Nothing in the proposition that the requirements of the “I” determine social esteem means that this must have an individual form. Indeed, in traditional societies the honour principle is collective, not individual. The “I” orients to a future community from the perspective of which it will have performed singular, deserving acts. Honneth is correct to claim that “only demands that potentially contribute to the expansion of social relations of recognition [gains in individuality or inclusion] can be considered normatively grounded, since they point in the direction of a rise in the moral level of social integration” (Honneth, 2003: 187).
I believe that social esteem is a complex recognition “sphere” composed of two, articulated components: a relation to the division of labour and a form of identification that supplies the main form of ideological cement to the social formation.
I propose that “individual merit” is not a specification of “social solidarity,” but its opposite, and that not one, but two conflicting principles regulate modern social esteem. Fundamentally, Honneth affirms the centrality of “legal recognition” because he denies the existence of an egalitarian dynamic in the struggle for the recognition of an actor’s social contribution. That is, he claims that social esteem is asymmetrical (hierarchical) and therefore ascribes egalitarianism to legality. Honneth’s denial of the possibility of an egalitarian form of social esteem is connected to the assertion that esteem is necessarily hierarchical. But this neglects the possibility that esteem could be non-hierarchical (equal) but asymmetrical (graduated). The form of social esteem that would have these characteristics is social solidarity.
To grasp this possibility, let us examine David Miller’s proposition that meritocracy, taken to its logical conclusion, is the harbinger of socialism. Meritocracy would involve the eradication of all barriers (such as gender and race ideologies) that prevent the unbiased assessment of an individual’s social contribution, as measured through market mechanisms. But it would also involve the elimination of forms of inherited advantage and differential opportunity (such as private schools and elite universities) that “weight” the financial appreciation of individual merit in favour of the wealthy. These are Miller’s “two cheers” for meritocracy. The absent third cheer arises when we consider the problem of comparing radically different social roles in the division of labour. While it might be possible to eliminate the obstacles to a fair comparison between manual labourers, or between middle managers, it is not possible to compare labourers and managers – or so Miller thinks. Thus there is the required asymmetry within groups – some individuals contribute more within their cohort in the social division of labour than others, and are consequently differentially recognised – but there remains a hierarchy between groups. Miller can only offer “two cheers” for meritocracy as a “harbinger” of, but not a transition towards, socialism.
Social solidarity means the democratisation of the division of labour, leading to a principle of social esteem that is asymmetrical but non-hierarchical. “Impossibly demanding” for a liberal such as Honneth, this is the only way to eradicate the substantive barriers to the recognition of the social contribution made by excellent performances of functional roles (“according to their capacities”). I therefore oppose all interpretations of social solidarity in terms of mutual assistance (“one big union”) or value consensus (the Hegelian interpretation). Again, social solidarity, understood as the democratisation of the division of labour, is transition in the required sense: although this can become a distributive norm (for instance, it can form the basis for legislation on salary capping), it necessarily points beyond any hierarchy in the labour process. Secondly, social solidarity is not necessarily a question of individual achievement, and so it admits of the possibility for the inclusion of the lifestyles of cultural groups as legitimate social contributions.[6]
Both Honneth and Miller concentrate exclusively on the possible financial definitions of modern social esteem, neglecting the major form of social performance for which modern citizens are awarded honours and esteemed for their social contributions – the political community. The role of the political community is constitutive of the dimensions of personal identity relevant to modern citizenship, as the communitarian critics of liberalism have demonstrated. I claim that this takes two antagonistic forms. On the one hand, the hegemonic form of social esteem is for individual contributions to the quasi-organic, imagined community of the nation state. On the other hand, the no less imaginary unity of the political republic is the subaltern form of social esteem in modernity. But this does not mean (as it does for some communitarians) that we need to return to a politics of the common moral good.
This idea is drawn from the contemporary revival of civic republicanism (eg., Quentin Skinner, Hannah Arendt, Jean Cohen, Chantal Mouffe), where the political community is not an instrumental association (liberalism), nor a union for a substantive purpose or moral order (communitarianism), but an identification with the republic qua regime of participatory democracy. According to Claude Lefort, modern society is characterised by the “dissolution of the markers of certainty,” meaning that political legitimation is not final and an absolute guarantee cannot be found. Instead of a moral guarantee for the political order, political republicanism advocates identification with a dialogically generated “grammar of political conduct” – an accepted set of norms for the resolution of social conflicts. Those rules prescribe norms of conduct in social performances and identification with these rules generates political identity. Certainly, this is a form of identification and involves the formation of conscience, the imposition of guilt on the subject, misrecognition of the constitutive character of the political republic for a constituted object (the state), and so forth. This means the existence of common political principles – égaliberté – rather than a substantive moral order. The emancipatory ideal that constitutes political identity is not the harmonious society with its singular moral order, but the political republic grounded in the unconditional demand for equality and liberty. This form of political subjectivity is theorised in for instance Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx and exhibited, for instance, in republican Spain and Russia in the civil war.
Benhabib, Seyla (1986). Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honneth, Axel (1995a). The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press.
Honneth, Axel (1995b). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Honneth, Axel (2003). “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser.” Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Eds. London and New York: Verso, 110-197.
Ignatieff, Michael (1985). The Needs of Strangers. New York: Viking.
Margalit, Avishai (1996). The Decent Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Miller, David (1999). Principles of Social Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moore, Barrington (1978). Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Scott, James (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, James (1990). Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb (1972). The Hidden Injuries of Class. Cambrdige, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, Edward (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
Thompson, Edward (1991). Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. London: Merlin.
Todorov, Tzvetan (2001). Life in Common: An Essay in General Anthropology. Lincoln, NE: Northwestern University Press.
1. Bourdieu’s description of the “surface appearance” of social practices is not so distant from forms of Marxism reconstructed through Rational Action Theory. Where he differs radically is in insisting that the ends of the agent (their definition of the good life and therefore of the utilities to be maximised) are historical and social.
2. As Honneth notes, “in obeying the law, legal subjects recognise each other as persons capable of autonomously making reasonable decisions about moral norms” (Honneth, 1995b: 110). He neglects to mention, though, that these subjects accept the legitimacy of the social norms that underlie the legal relation – otherwise, moral respect would mandate resistance to unjust laws. Hence Honneth is completely mistaken to suppose that that the Kantian concept of moral respect is correlative to “legal recognition” (Honneth, 1995b: 112).
3. In a future paper, I aim to combine the insights into the dialectics of recognition outlined in Hegel’s Phenomenology with contemporary theories of social antagonism to reconstruct the dialectics of universal and particular that Honneth claims are central to recognition struggles. Using psychoanalysis, I aim to separate individual identity from social identification, to introduce a gap between micropolitical struggles for recognition and institutionalised forms of social justice. My central contention is that there exists a relative disjunction between struggles for recognition in the habitus and the institutional structure of the social formation. This analytical distinction corresponds to the difference between diachrony and synchrony, rather than to the distance between the individual and the social. The dynamic framework of ethical life emerges from a dispersed multiplicity of micropolitical struggles in highly localised contexts and it informs the normative basis of institutional structures, without being their foundation. Instead, legal relations mediate the relation between ethical life and institutional norms. Hence the majority of struggles in modernity are legal struggles for rights claims.
4. See the following: (Ignatieff, 1985: ; Margalit, 1996: ; Moore, 1978: ; Scott, 1985: ; Scott, 1990: ; Sennett and Cobb, 1972: ; Todorov, 2001) (Thompson, 1991) (Miller, 1999: ; Thompson, 1963).
5. Miller clarifies how needs are susceptible of calculation and can therefore be used as the basis for the allocation of social resources – that is, they can be the foundation for a principle of distributive justice. Following Sen, he supposes that needs can be assigned a partial ordering (Miller, 1999: 214) and his main model for this is battlefield triage, which sorts the injured into terminal cases, heavily wounded but treatable cases, and flesh wounds only. Under triage, the badly wounded receive the most attention: the terminals are palliated until they die, while the lightly wounded are bandaged and sent back into the line. This harsh example is meant to underscore the following policy guideline – that the worst off do not necessarily receive the lion’s share of finite resources, as equality of outcome is the relevant evaluative standard. Miller states that “since perfect justice is unattainable, we should adopt the policy that minimises the injustice in the final outcome” (Miller, 1999: 217). Alternatively, the guiding policy can be subject to intersubjective deliberation and political dialogue – we are now off the terrain of ethical politics and into the domain of political action.
6. The alloy of need and desert has to be explained. Honneth’s acceptance of hierarchical forms of social esteem blinds him to the central defect of his effort to theorise redistribution as recognition: the “alloy” of material resources and social esteem in modernity is not explained, but simply registered as a fact. The risk here is that recognition theory become an uncritical theory because key facts regarding the specifically capitalist dynamic of modernity are registered not explained. Honneth explains that pre-modern social formations are characterised by an “alloy” of social esteem and legal recognition. Modernity exhibits a differentiation of recognition spheres, as a result of which the legal framework separates from the merit principle. But then Honneth claims that material resources act as the base for the superstructure of individual merit. Instead of regarding this as a modern “alloy” of need and desert, we need to refuse Honneth’s collapse of institutions onto recognition relations. The “base-and-superstructure” relation between material resources and cultural recognition is an effect of the way in which the capitalist mode of production articulates institutional structures – it is the form of the “specific gravity,” or hierarchy of effectivity, that operates between economics and culture. From this perspective the value differentiation of modernity is incomplete. Indeed, the most radical form of recognition claim in modernity is symmetrical, that is, aims against all hierarchy and privilege. The autonomy of need and desert, then, is an agenda item on the unfinished project of modernity, not an ethical fact that the Left should rely upon.