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of reification: Lukacs,
Honneth and the aims of
critical theory
Anita Chari
Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago, USA
Abstract
This article engages Axel Honneths recent work on Georg Lukacs concept of reification in order
to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable to
theorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneths attempt to reorient the
critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost of
sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysis
of capitalist domination and an analysis of the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beings
toward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. In
order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneths approach, which
focuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukacs emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of the
capitalist social form.
Keywords
capitalism, Axel Honneth, Georg Lukacs, recognition, reification
After decades of neglect, there has recently been a growing awareness in the field of
political theory that a sophisticated critique of capitalism is crucial to understanding the
limits and possibilities of democratic practice in the context of the contemporary
neo-liberal conjuncture. Along these lines, a recent work by the philosopher Axel
Honneth seeks to recuperate a concept that was central to the critique of capitalism
Corresponding author:
Anita Chari, Social Sciences Division, The Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, 5845 South Ellis Avenue,
Gates-Blake Hall, 305, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA.
Email: anitac@uchicago.edu
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the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form. By bringing together
Honneths and Lukacs approaches rather than opposing them, I develop a critique of
reification that reconnects the social-theoretic, normative and political aspects of reification and lays the groundwork for a political critique of capitalism that can aid us in
rethinking the possibilities for democratic practice in the present.
In this article I first gloss Lukacs and Honneths theories of reification, highlighting
their differences. Then I review Habermas formulation of the critique of reification in
order to show the ways in which his communicative paradigm leads to a dichotomizing
theory of reification. I contend that a dichotomy similar to the Habermasian system/lifeworld distinction remains problematic in Honneths theory despite his attempts to
resolve the issue. Finally, I indicate how a more politically relevant critique of reification
might be developed through a synthesis of Honneths and Lukacs theories, in particular
by recognizing the distinct ideas about intersubjectivity implied by their respective
theories.
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much-needed point of contact between social theory and the everyday expressions of
injustice and disrespect, which has long been a blind spot in critical theory. Honneth
writes:
This difficulty a legacy of the sociological anti-normativism that also prevailed in the
older Frankfurt School must now stand at the beginning of any renewal of critical social
theory. For without a categorical opening to the normative standpoint from which subjects
themselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completely cut off from a dimension of
social discontent that it should always be able to call upon. . . . What is needed is a basic
conceptual shift to the normative premises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of
all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of
humiliation and disrespect.12
Honneths reformulation of Lukacs concept of reification takes its lead from the
phenomenology of misrecognition, which stands at the center of Honneths theory.
Accordingly, Honneth effects a theoretical shift from what he perceives as the economism of Lukacs concept of reification to the analysis of reification in terms of recognition. Without such a reformulation, Honneth argues, the theory of reification is
divorced from an account of the normative criteria by which the phenomena of reification can be criticized as well as an understanding of how reification can be experientially
grasped. These normative criteria, on Honneths account, elude a theory that seeks to
ground itself in an immanent critique of capitalism alone, since even the institutions
of the capitalist economy are to some degree dependent upon the normative expectations
placed upon them by members of a society. Honneth writes:
. . . even structural transformations in the economic sphere are not independent of the normative expectations of those affected, but depend at least on their tacit consent. Like the
integration of all other spheres, the development of the capitalist market can only occur
in the form of a process of symbolically mediated negotiation directed toward the interpretation of underlying normative principles.13
Honneth therefore diverges sharply from Lukacs in his decisive decoupling of the problematic of reification from the critique of the social form of capitalism.
Honneth observes a fundamental problem in Lukacs argumentative strategy, which
relies on a social ontology of practice in order to explain precisely why reification is a
form of domination. Reification is meant to refer to a deformed, pathological structure
of practice, a passivity of the subject in relation to other human beings and the objective
world. On this reading, reification appears to be problematic, and thereby subject to critique, insofar as it violates certain ontological presuppositions of human activity. Honneth claims that Lukacs measures pathological, reified practice against the standard of a
non-reified form of practice, a fundamental, originary, active form of interaction
between the human being and the world. Insofar as we relate to the world passively
or as Lukacs called it, contemplatively we deviate from the form of practice that is
proper to the rationality of our form of life. In this sense, Honneth argues that Lukacs
critique of reification is insufficiently justified by his social ontological critique: reified
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forms of practice merit critique not primarily because they contradict certain descriptive
elements of social ontology, but rather because they violate certain moral principles.14
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the myth of a social form without contradictions, where society supposedly no longer
generates the standards for its own criticism. The reception of Lukacs own theory of
reification has been tarred by its association with the pessimism of the Frankfurt School
critique of reification. This tends to foreclose a real confrontation with the theory of reification at the conceptual level.
Habermas reorientation of critical theory away from the paradigm of instrumental
reason, which he argued was bound to an all-encompassing theory of reification,
attempts to redeem the project of immanent critique by recuperating the perspective
of communicative reason. The communicative turn of critical theory is an attempt to
counter the pessimism of early critical theory by revealing the concealed presuppositions
of its critique of modernity, which, according to Habermas, relies on a normative
standard of communicative reason that is immanent in everyday practice. Central to
Habermas project is the rejection of the paradigm of production, the normative model
of human agency underlying the left-Hegelian project of Marx and early critical theory.
The production paradigm of agency, according to Habermas, is at the core of what has
been referred to as the philosophy of the subject, a normative model in which history is
understood as the activity of a collective subject that exteriorizes itself through its productive activity and then reappropriates that which it has exteriorized.25 The general
thrust of de-reifying critique, as theorized by Lukacs, which proceeds by revealing the
historically constituted nature of existing social forms in order to comprehend the possibility of their transformation, is regarded as part of this problematic tradition of the philosophy of the subject. According to Habermas, this tradition restricts the concept of
practice in a way that is unable to account for the immanence of reason to communicative relations themselves, which provides the practical standpoint of critique and
discloses the proper sphere of social transformation. Habermas writes:
. . . the emancipatory perspective proceeds precisely not from the production paradigm, but
from the paradigm of action oriented toward mutual understanding. It is the form of interaction processes that must be altered if one wants to discover practically what the members
of a society in any given situation might want and what they should do in their common
interest.26
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To give an account of its own normative foundations, Habermas contends, the critique of
reification must appeal to the notion of communicative action in order to comprehend the
standard of communicative rationality as itself inherent to the social lifeworld, even
under conditions of reification.
The main point of Habermas reformulation of Lukacs theory of reification is to distinguish between systemic components that remain within boundaries, and those systemic mechanisms which force their way into the domains of cultural reproduction,
social integration, and socialization the sphere of the lifeworld.35 This overstepping
of boundaries constitutes a colonization of the lifeworld, which, according to
Habermas, refers to a more specific and differentiated notion of reification than the one
Lukacs presents. Systemic integration, which Habermas posits as a functional requirement of complex societies, is not in itself problematic, nor does it constitute a form of
reification. It is only when the steering media of the system overstep their boundaries
and penetrate the communicative realm of the lifeworld that the problem of reification
occurs. Habermas concept of society as system and lifeworld therefore aims to understand reification as the colonization of the lifeworld, without resulting in a totalizing
critique of rationalization as such. He can thereby claim that some form of systemic integration that is, of economy and state will be necessary to all complex societies, as
long as systemic structures do not penetrate the symbolically mediated lifeworld.
His criticisms of Lukacs notwithstanding, Habermas explicitly says that his attempt to
reinterpret the problematic of reification is fundamentally influenced by the Marxian critique of capitalism. However, it should be clear that his approach diverges in significant
ways from that of Lukacs, particularly with regard to the way in which communicative
action is conceived as immanent to the structures of linguistically mediated interaction:
the critique of reification in capitalist society is rooted in the structures of communication itself, which contain an ineradicable potential for resistance to the lifeworldcolonizing systemic structures.
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avoid the dualism inherent in Habermas theory, which concedes too much to
systems-theoretic analysis. However, contrary to his own intention, Honneths theory
tends to address the problem by reducing the field of phenomena referred to by
Habermas with the concept of system to the lifeworld, that is, the sphere of social integration, which, rather than solving the conceptual problem, merely displaces it to a higher
level. This helps to illuminate the curious way in which Honneth theorizes reification with
reference to lifeworld concepts alone, as the forgetfulness of recognition, without accounting for the commodity dynamic. Honneths reinterpretation of reification confines the critique of reification to the plane of a purified intersubjectivity. He therefore does not grasp
the critical core of the concept, whose original intent was precisely to explain the peculiarity of capitalism as a system in which intersubjective relations appear as relations between
non-human objects and thereby exert an abstract form of compulsion upon human action.
In order to recuperate the concept of reification for contemporary political theory,
Honneth is certainly correct that the intersubjective dimensions of reification, which
reveal the normative logic of reification, must be theorized in a more explicit way than
in Lukacs text. However, it becomes clear in the exchange between Lukacs and
Honneth, that two competing notions of intersubjectivity must be differentiated. On the
one hand, Honneth theorizes intersubjectivity on the model of interaction between
individuals: in his theory, recognition is essentially extra-institutional in character.
Institutions (in the most general sense of the word) are not themselves the place of
recognition; recognition takes place in the field of interaction between individuals.
Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault refer to this as an expressive concept
of recognition, whereby institutions are conceived as an external, rather than internal,
condition of recognition and, indeed, of subjectivation itself.37 Institutions can express
or deny recognition, but this very way of figuring the problem tends to render the institutional contexts of recognition supplementary to, rather than constitutive of, individual
demands for recognition. While Honneths expressive theory of recognition captures the
normative content of demands for recognition, its reliance upon an interactionist concept
of intersubjectivity is less able to grasp the material conditions of social struggles. On the
other hand, the notion of intersubjectivity that can be distilled from Lukacs theory is one
in which institutions, the institution of capital, for example, can be understood as veiled
forms of social relations which are in some sense constituted by intersubjective agency.
Therefore, institutions do not merely express or deny recognition in some way that is
external to their constitution, nor can this concept of intersubjectivity be understood
within the model of interaction that is presupposed by Honneths theory. Lukacs pushes
beyond the terms of the purely interhuman intersubjectivity present in Honneths model,
instead understanding interaction in a thicker sense, which can begin to theorize the
material mediations of intersubjective interaction. Furthermore, the stark dichotomy
between system and lifeworld is explicitly ruled out by the Lukacsian position, insofar
as the critique proceeds by revealing supposedly denormativized systemic structures
to be self-obscuring forms of social relations, which can be criticized insofar as they are,
in some sense, a product of human agency, and thus not merely given, necessary, or
objective.
It will perhaps be objected that my attempt to reactualize the critique of reification by
recourse to the Lukacsian model of intersubjectivity harkens back to untenable
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productivist normative presuppositions, which reinstate the long-ago discredited perspective of transsubjectivity. My objective, however, is to begin to unsettle the very
assumptions of the communicative turn of critical theory, which have expelled the productivist model of intersubjectivity outlined by Lukacs from contemporary debates, as
well as the dimension of materiality along with it. One need not reduce this model of
agency to a pseudo-Hegelian caricature whereby de-reified practice is conceived as
nothing less than mind and world coinciding to take the insight that de-reified practice
will have something to do with making social institutions more reflective of human selfdetermination by making individuals conscious of the non-conscious forms of determination inherent in capitalist institutions. If the critique of reification is to have any
relevance for theorizing political practice oriented toward overcoming social domination
in capitalism, I argue that it must be based on a re-examination of the relation between
intersubjectivity and social institutions.
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relations. This has implications for the relevance of his critique of reification to
contemporary political theory.
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so what is needed is an account of how the cognitive process can cause our antecedent
recognition to be forgotten.45 At such moments, Honneth seems to reduce the phenomenon of reification to the realm of affective intersubjective relations alone, ruling out an
account of the mediation of social relations with the structures that constitute them. Even
in terms of Honneths own theoretical trajectory, the focus on the affective identification
of humans with significant others as the basis for a norm of de-reified forms of social
practice lacks the political connotations of the earlier struggle for recognition. In Honneths work on reification, the lack of participatory engagement delineated by the concept of Teilnahmslosigkeit denotes that the primary, active, recognitive stance of the
human being has merely been forgotten, but it is far from clear how this forgetting could
be significant for social theory or political theory. When decoupled from the critique of
fetishism, one must ask whether the concept of reification retains the necessary conceptual force for illuminating contemporary democratic politics.46
A serious consideration of this question cannot ignore the strengths of Honneths
approach, which bring to the fore the crucial normative dimension of the critique of reification, admittedly undertheorized and only implicit in Lukacs account. Furthermore,
I would argue that foregrounding the concept of Teilnahmslosigkeit, as Honneth does,
should be central to the attempt to think the significance of de-reification as a normative
standard of political practice in political theory. Focusing on the lack of participatory
involvement characteristic of reification, this approach could point toward a critique that
searches for points of intervention in autonomized social processes, translating them into
the logic of the political or in Honneths terms, into the normative logic of recognition
by grasping social and economic structures in light of their potential transformation.47
However, this promising line of inquiry is not pursued by Honneth in his study. His analysis indicates the possibility of articulating the normative logic of reification, but a political critique of reification would need to focus on the point of translation between the
normative level of the theory of recognition and the social-theoretic analysis of the structure of capitalism, without reducing capitalism to a system in the Habermasian sense.
Insofar as Honneth speaks of the structure of capitalism at all, however, he tends to
operate with a rather problematic understanding of its processes, claiming, for example,
that even seemingly anonymous economic processes are determined by normative
rules.48 This has left Honneth vulnerable to the charge for example, by Nancy Fraser
that he reduces the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.49 Frasers critique raises the important question of whether Honneth grants any exteriority to the recognition order of capitalism, or rather whether capitalism is ultimately no more than its
recognition order.50 Honneth has described his project as guided by a kind of moral
monism, which argues that any normatively substantial social theory must discover
principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open
up the prospect of desirable improvements.51 In other words, as Honneth argues in The
Struggle for Recognition, recognition is the moral grammar of social conflict. Therefore, even struggles that make claims for redistribution in the terms of class struggle,
or in anti-capitalism terms, presuppose a moral logic of recognition as the basis of claims
to redistribution. Marxist theory, according to Honneth, tends to sacrifice the logic of
recognition to a metapolitical theory of the dynamics of capital to secure its scientific
claims. This is self-contradictory, he claims, insofar as it must simultaneously conceive
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against the institution of private property itself, setting up democratically organized rural
cooperatives of agricultural producers on occupied lands.57 The structure of politicization in this movement invokes a translation from the analysis of capitalist domination
to the forms of intersubjective practice that could alter those structures into de-reified
political forms. Similarly, the Water Wars against the privatization and commodification of public water in Bolivia, in India, and in other parts of the world are yet another
example that suggests that many political struggles today cannot be comprehended
solely within the logic of recognition, nor can they be reduced to claims of redistribution.
These are struggles against reification and they highlight the importance of a critique of
reification that takes into account both the intersubjective and material dimensions of
reification to theorizing democratic struggles in the present.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Patchen Markell, Axel Honneth, Moishe Postone, John McCormick, Jacinda
Swanson, and J. J. McFadden, for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this article, as well as
to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for fellowship support and the Institut fur
Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main for office space during the writing of this article.
Notes
1. On the neo-liberal articulation of the economy and politics, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as
Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005); and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).
2. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1971).
3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage
Books, 1977).
4. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marxs Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), part II, ch. 4, pp. 12383.
5. Certainly Marxs early writings focus on the question of the subjective stance of the worker in
relation to the object of labor; however, his analysis there is not posed in the terms of a critique
of commodity fetishism.
6. On this point see Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture
(London: Routledge, 1991) and Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone
Books, 1994).
7. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 90.
8. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On the term social philosophy, which is somewhat different than political
philosophy or social philosophy, in Honneths usage, see Axel Honneth, Pathologies of the
Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy, in The Handbook of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 36998.
9. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical
Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).
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10. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
11. Axel Honneth, Redistribution as Recognition, in Redistribution or Recognition? (New York:
Verso, 2003), p. 132.
12. ibid., p. 134.
13. Axel Honneth, The Point of Recognition, in Redistribution or Recognition? (New York:
Verso, 2003), pp. 2501.
14. For a discussion of social-ontological critique, see Honneth, Pathologies of the Social.
15. Honneth, Reification, p. 24.
16. The Heideggerian inflection of Honneths reading of Lukacs is noteworthy, although I will not
deal with this theme in this article. In addition to Honneths chapter (ch. 2) on Heidegger and
Dewey in the original German version of the work, Axel Honneth, Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie, 2nd edn (Suhrkamp, 2005), see Lucien Goldmann, Luk
acs and
Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
17. Honneth, Reification, p. 27.
18. ibid., p. 31.
19. ibid., p. 36.
20. ibid., pp. 416.
21. On this point see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of
Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
22. See John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition,
Revolutionary Studies series (London: Routledge, 1998); Michael Lowy, Georg Luk
acs:
From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: NLB, 1979).
23. Friedrich Pollock, State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations, in Critical Theory and
Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge,
1989), pp. 95118.
24. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
25. See Seyla Benhabib, The Origins of Defetishizing Critique, in Critique, Norm, and Utopia:
A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
pp. 4469.
26. Jurgen Habermas, Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 82.
27. On the distinction between labor and interaction, see Jurgen Habermas, Labor and Interaction:
Remarks on Hegels Jena Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. Viertel (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1973), pp. 2678. Before Habermas, Hannah Arendt proposed this distinction explicitly
in contrast to the Marxian concept of labor. See Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx and the Tradition
of Western Political Thought, in Social Research 69(2) (Summer 2002): 273319.
28. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. xxxii.
29. Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 242.
30. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 358.
31. On the concept of the lifeworld, see Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action,
vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1987), pt VI.
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Chari
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
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ibid., p. 359.
ibid., p. 358.
ibid., p. 360.
ibid., p. 374.
Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K.
Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, Politicizing Honneths Ethics of Recognition, in Thesis Eleven 88 (February 2007): 99100.
For a fascinating working-out of this thought, which shows the specific way in which Marx
sought to expose Hegels logical categories as categories of social existence, see Lucio
Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. L. Garner (London: NLB, 1973).
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige Und K~
orperliche Arbeit: Zur Epistemologie Der Abendl~
andischen Geschichte (Weinheim: VCH, 1989), p. 37 [my translation].
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 31.
Luk~acs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 84.
Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 256.
On this point see Thomas McCarthy, Complexity and Democracy: or the Seducements of
Systems Theory, in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermass Theory of
Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Whether my critique is applicable to Habermas later
works, in particular Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), which does not focus on reification, cannot be addressed
here.
Honneth, Reification, p. 79.
ibid., p. 58.
On this point see Deranty and Renault, Politicizing Honneths Ethics of Recognition. They
note that Honneth makes a conscious effort to avoid referring to it [his theory] as a politics of
recognition, and that while His reluctance to discuss the political and his focus on the ethical
has good reasons within his theory, his avoidance of the political is symptomatic of a weakness (p. 92).
One brilliant attempt at such an analysis is Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 254 (emphasis added); one exception to this tendency
is an article delineating the new research program of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, where Honneth and Martin Hartmann present a concrete theory of the paradoxes of capitalism, in which a certain kind of structural analysis plays a greater role. See
Martin Hartmann and Axel Honneth, Paradoxes of Capitalism, in Constellations 13(1)
(2006): 4158.
See both of Nancy Frasers contributions to Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), for a discussion of this criticism. For a
thorough discussion of the way in which Honneths theory constitutes a response to the
shortcomings of historical materialism, which nevertheless tends to overcompensate for
these shortcomings and thereby to repress the material mediations with which intersubjective
interactions are mediated, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, Repressed Materiality: Retrieving the
Materialism in Axel Honneths Theory of Recognition, in Critical Horizons 7(1) (2006):
605
606
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
606
11340. See also Jean-Philippe Deranty, Les horizons marxistes de lethique de la reconnaissance, in Actuel Marx 38 (2005): 15978.
While I concur with Frasers critique, I disagree with her argument that a two-front strategy
that combines analysis of recognition and redistribution into one normative model suffices to
solve the problem. In my framework, reification undercuts the binary between redistribution
and recognition, which remains trapped within the framework of a liberal democratic politics.
Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 254.
ibid.
In this regard, Honneths theory of recognition looks surprisingly more like Jacques
Rancie`res autonomous conception of politics than is immediately apparent, although
Rancie`re would reject the strong moral overtones of Honneths theory of social struggle as
well as Honneths Hegelian conception of moral progress. What is somewhat similar in both
theories is the focus on the experiential dimension of the political, as well as the delineation of
the structure of emancipation demands for equality, although expressed in economic or
social terms, contain an immanent political/ethical logic that is not reducible to the economic
or sociological dimensions of the struggles. See Jacques Rancie`re, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For Rancie`res
own discussion of the relation of his theory to the theory of recognition, see Max Blechman,
Anita Chari, and Rafeeq Hasan, Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle:
an Exchange with Jacques Rancie`re, in Historical Materialism 13(4) (November 2005):
285301. See also Jean-Philippe Deranty, Jacques Rancie`res Contribution to the Ethics of
Recognition, in Political Theory 31(1) (2003): 13656.
Honneth, The Point of Recognition, p. 250.
For a discussion of this point, see Etienne Balibar, Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation,
Transformation, Civility, in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. C. Jones, J. Swenson and C.
Turner (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 139.
Nancy Fraser has recently addressed this issue with her theory of abnormal justice, which
diagnoses the contemporary situation as one in which the very metapolitical conditions of
justice, that is, its subjects, institutional sites and norms of adjudication, are themselves
placed radically in question. See Nancy Fraser, Abnormal Justice, in Scales of Justice:
Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), pp. 4875.
For a discussion of this movement see David McNally, Another World is Possible: Globalization & Anti-capitalism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006), especially ch. 6. See also
Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil
(London: Latin American Bureau, 2002), esp. part II and part IV; and George Meszaros,
Taking the Law into Their Hands: The Landless Workers Movement and the Brazilian
State, in Journal of Law and Society 27(4) (2000): 51741.