Titus Stahl

Axel Honneth is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary critical theorists. His oeuvre, which spans more than four decades of writing—from his early engagement with critique in the Frankfurt School tradition to his theory of recognition and the latest discussions of freedom in modern ethical life and the question of socialism—has been enormously influential in the shaping of current critical theory and beyond. Bringing together leading scholars in contemporary social and political philosophy, this authoritative book takes the central themes of Honneth’s work as a starting point for debating the present and future of critical theory as a form of socially grounded philosophy that is geared toward analyzing and critiquing society. Honneth’s writings revolve around five key themes: critique, recognition, freedom, progress, and socialism. His arguments engaging with each of these themes have substantially advanced current debates in critical theory and social and political philosophy more generally. The contributing authors take on these five themes and use them as a springboard to structure their discussion of the future of critical theory in our contemporary moment.

This chapter pursues three aims: First, I propose three different roles that hope can play in political philosophy - one instrumental, one constitutive, and the other justificatory. I then examine three major approaches to political hope, exemplified by Bloch, Rorty, and contemporary liberal authors in order to distinguish three approaches to the justificatory question. I argue that they make opposite mistakes with regard to the importance of hope. Whereas Bloch solves the problem of justification by introducing a metaphysics to support hope, thereby adopting an overambitious concept of hope, Rorty and contemporary liberals assign it too small a role. Based on this discussion, I then argue for my own proposal; the view that, while ethical pluralism rules out any expectation that we can achieve more ambitious forms of community than political liberalism seems to allow, the requirements of justice may still require us to hope for the emergence of such forms of community.

The work of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács is a constant source of controversy in the history of the Frankfurt School. All leading thinkers of that theoretical tradition have struggled with Lukács’s theory. On the one hand, it was an inspiration for their attempts to come to terms with the oppressive features of capitalist modernity. On the other hand, both its political conclusions and Lukács’s actual philosophical submission to Soviet orthodoxy seemed to show that his theoretical framework was deeply flawed in one aspect or another.

The problem of the social foundations of normativity can be illuminated by discussing the narrower question whether rule-following is necessarily a social matter. The problems with individualistic theories of rule-following seem to make such a conclusion unavoidable. Social theories of rule-following, however, seem to only push back one level the dilemma of having to choose either an infinite regress of interpretations or a collapse into non-normative descriptions. The most plausible of these models, Haugeland's conformism, can avoid these objections if it is supplemented with an ontologically reasonable concept of the collective attitude of a group. Groups of individuals who are bound to shared norms by recognizing each other as equipped with a standard authority of criticism have the necessary properties for ascribing to those groups such collective attitudes. Given such a weak notion of a collective attitude, there is hope for a plausible collectivist theory of rule-following.

Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. However, even the models of immanent critique developed in the Frankfurt School tradition seem to privilege principles over particular moral experiences. Discussing the place that particular moral experience has in the models of Honneth, Ferrara and Adorno, the article argues that experience can play an important negative role even for a critical theory that is committed to the necessity of conceptual mediation, as moral experiences can undermine our confidence in the appropriateness of our moral concepts. Building on McDowell’s account of moral perception and Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel’s theory of experience, one can reconstruct Adorno as providing a “radically negativist” approach to immanent critique that takes particular moral experience seriously.

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes.

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic sense in which groups can bear irreducible collective responsibility for oppression. Second, that there are derived forms of individual responsibility for members of dominant groups.

Collective intentionality is one of the most fundamental notions in social ontology. However, it is often thought to refer to a capacity which does not presuppose the existence of any other social facts. This chapter critically examines this view from the perspective of one specific theory of collective intentionality, the theory of Margaret Gilbert. On the basis of Gilbert’s arguments, the chapter claims that collective intentionality is a highly contingent achievement of complex social practices and, thus, not a basic social phenomenon. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, Gilbert’s thesis that certain kinds of collective intentionality presuppose joint normative commitments is introduced. Second, it is argued that, on this view, individual commitments can only constitute the relevant kinds of collective intentional states if there are socially shared “principles of membership” that connect the force of individual commitments to a shared content. Third, it is shown that strong collective intentionality depends on the practical acceptance of shared norms and on the establishment of authority relations through mutual recognition.

In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition.

This book discusses the concept of immanent critique, i. e. whether there is a form of critique which neither just applies empirically accepted standards nor independently justified norms but rather reconstructs norms which are immanent to social practices. It surveys both political theories of criticism (Walzer, Taylor, MacIntyre) and contemporary critical theories (Habermas, Honneth) for how they describe such forms of critique and develops a new model of immanent critique. For this purpose, it takes up both contemporary social ontology theories and the discussion about rule-following. The book argues that we can speak of immanent rules as far as persons can practically recognize each other as members of rule-governed practices if they attribute each other defeasible normative authority. Finally, it describes the consequences of the adoption of such a model for our description of a practice of critique and analyzes both first-order immanent critique and the second-order critique of reification.

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere.

This working paper examines the notion of "immanent critique", a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique - a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members - from both external and internal critique and examine three questions that a theory of immanent critique has to answer (a social ontological, an epistemological and a justificatory question). After surveying some of the classic accounts of immanent critique in part two, I then distinguish two varieties of immanent critique, a hermeneutic and a practice-theoretic approach. Drawing on theories in recent analytic philosophy, I finally argue for a practice-theoretic approach to immanent critique that locates the relevant norms in a practice constituted by mutual recognition.

The Hegelian insight that subjectivity depends on recognition has been taken up by two competing traditions: Post-Hegelian theories (Honneth, Brandom) take recognition to be a precondition for a critical stance of subjects towards society. In contrast, theories of subjection (Althusser, Butler) take the dependency of subjects on subordinating relations of recognition as undermining their capacity for critique. I argue that this worry has not been taken seriously enough by the post-Hegelian tradition, especially by its model of immanent critique. However, theories of subjection ignore that the very structure of recognitive relations supports critical capacities that can never be fully effaced by ideology.

How are changes in the social order of recognition to be evaluated normatively? We argue that the conventional means of liberal philosophical theories of justice are insufficient to answer this question. This is for three reasons: First, relations of recognition are neither basic rights nor distributable goods, but rather constitutive for the meaning of those rights and goods which constitute the object domain of distributive theories of justice. Second, relations of recognition provide the framework for many questions of justice, outside of which they make no sense. Third, the focus of contemporary theories of justice on basic rights risks supporting colonialization tendencies of purely legal forms of recognition. As an alternative, we discuss hermeneutic theories of justice and a conception of social freedom as inclusion and individualization.

Hegels Begriff der Freiheit, zugleich Fundament und Schlussstein des Gebaudes einer Philosophie, wird oft als Signatur der problematischen Konstellation "Moderne" gelesen, die Hegel nach eigenem Anspruch mit seiner Philosophie "in Begriffe fassen" wollte. Hegels Werk ist durchzogen von "falschen" oder irrtumlichen Vorstellungen, die sich Subjekte und Kollektive von Freiheit machen konnen, so dass man sagen kann, Hegel habe mehr Zeit und Muhe in die Kritik zu kurz greifender Freiheitsbegriffe als auf die Ausarbeitung eines positiven Begriffs moderner Freiheit verwandt. Dies nicht einfach nur deshalb, weil Kritik eine wesentliche Aufgabe der Arbeit des Negativen und damit des Begriffs darstellt, sondern weil diese Irrtumer auch wesentliche Momente der modernen Idee der Freiheit sind. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beitrage diskutieren zentrale Formen der in Hegels Augen unvollstandigen Momente der modernen Freiheit in Recht, Moral, Kunst und Religion und werfen die Frage nach den Bedingungen und Grenzen von Hegels Freiheitsbegriff auf.

Although the critique of reification is a core commitment of critical theories, there is no widely accepted account of its normative foundation. In Lukács’s original analysis, this foundation is provided by a strong concept of practice which is, however, not acceptable from a contemporary point of view. I argue that the systematic character of reification theory can only be upheld if this concept is replaced by a more intersubjective notion of normative practices. Reification can then be analysed as a second-order pathology of social practices, as an inhibition of reflexivity by their normative shape. The normative justification of such critique, however, turns out to be more context-dependent than it is usually imagined.