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]). For Honneth, recognition relationships provide the optimal entry point for social research (see also McNay, 2008 : 47). The subject’s experience of denied recognition, of intersubjective ‘disrespect’, is held to possess remarkable insight, signalling a disconnect between society’s ‘moral grammar’ and the contingent norms of its practices and institutions (Honneth, 1995 [1992
With Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition , a restrictive and ‘domesticated’ account of social pathology emerged. 1 In this chapter, I show how variations on the ‘pathologies of recognition’ framing achieved dominance across social theory which problematically impacted applied social research. As Onni Hirvonen, a leading
Critical theory once offered a powerful, distinctive approach to social research, enabling sociologists to diagnose the irrationalities of the social world across institutions and forms of thought, even within the subject’s deepest desires. Yet, with the work of Axel Honneth, such analytical potency has been lost. The ‘domestication’ of critical theory stems from the programme’s embrace of Honneth’s ‘recognition-cognitivist’ understanding of social problems; where all social maladies are understood to lie, ultimately, within the head of social subjects and within the intersubjective relationships they enact. This book explores the manifold limitations of this dominant understanding of social pathologies and builds towards an alternate theoretical infrastructure, drawn from a marriage of insights from Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. While Honneth’s critical theory leads to researchers exploring all social problems as ‘pathologies of recognition’, a return to Fromm and Marcuse reminds critical theorists that power precedes subjectivation and that a wide range of pressing social problems exists which are invisible to the recognition framework. As such, this book urges critical theorists to once again think beyond recognition.
‘recognition-cognitivist’ understanding of social pathology which drew out of the ‘intersubjective turn’. The foundations upon which the contemporary Frankfurt School research project are built need to be urgently re-examined. The understanding of social pathology which dominates today is problematic politically, philosophically, and social
In Part I , I argued that Axel Honneth’s ‘recognition monism’ must be dispensed with in favour of a critical theory true to the founding insights of the Frankfurt School. This requires a return to the original social-theoretical foundations of critical theory, characterised by their distinct framing of social pathology. Rebuilding such an
Most of today’s nominal ‘critical theorists’ have abandoned their tradition’s Marxian heritage (see Thompson, 2016 ; Kouvelakis, 2019 ). Axel Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition ( 1992) , and his more recent Freedom’s Right ( 2014) , typify this reverse-entryism. Such a ‘domestication of critical theory’ 1 is characterised by the embrace of neoliberal norms
)ontological uniqueness is constituted in terms of differential effects of environment in relation to the different locations in space/time and through the differential effects on actions exacted as a consequence of time irreversibility. Every time an individual acts, they both reproduce the past and differentiate themselves in terms of it. Such a model of the self means that the issue of the separability of persons is assured. The politics of recognition In seeking to distance himself from Hegel, Foucault’s conception also stood opposed to viewing ethical comportment in terms of
designates the recognition on our part that, as Pippin puts it, ‘we always require . . . a narrative account of why we have come to regard some set of rules or a practice as authoritative’ (Pippin 1999 p. 68). The idea of all-inclusive immanence therefore no longer forces one to invoke obscure notions like the ‘self-determination of the concept’, because what is at stake amounts to nothing more than the fact that legitimation of all kinds in modernity has to include reflection on the sources of our decisive notions in the concrete history of a human community. The task of
reactive and reflexive ‘attitude’ corresponds to what one ‘sees’, one could say, moreover, that perceptually recognizing the nature of a human being as being a moral person is an essential aspect of ‘seeing’ human beings and that ‘aspect blindness’ in this respect (Stanley Cavell speaks here of ‘soul-blindness’) means having lost the capacity to perceive human as humans and, accordingly, to treat them humanely. Thus the fundamental form of moral recognition of other human beings as moral persons with a right to justification corresponds to a specific capacity for moral
divinity?55 While the field of feminist theology is as diverse and plural as feminism in general, there is, nonetheless, a general recognition that the institutionalisation of Western religions has inscribed sexual difference in ways that have profoundly limited women’s participation at the level of practice. But, more importantly, there is also a general acknowledgement that women’s participation in religious discourses has also been proscribed at the level of imagination. Women’s sex-specific divine imaginary, at least within much of Christian history, has virtually