Hegel and Ethical Politics Summer School February 2004. Geoff Boucher
At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to understand the meaning of essential terms in the contemporary “recognition debate” in political philosophy. The terms introduced by this paper include: “recognition”; “redistribution”; “moral grammar”; and, “ethical life”. They should have an introductory grasp of the poles in this argument, the stakes of the debate, and the main arguments for “recognition” as the framework for a renewal of Critical Theory. Participants should also be able to understand what “recognition” means concretely, in terms of social esteem, cultural values and individual realization. They should have been exposed to an example of each application that is relevant to current policy debate in the public sphere.
During the last 30 years, there has been a major change in the nature and aims of political struggles in the industrialised world. Social conflicts today are increasingly seen as struggles for cultural recognition. This view replaces the predominant idea of social conflict as concerning socio-economic reforms, which was the dominant paradigm for most of the twentieth century. In the wake of economic globalization and the disintegration of Soviet Communism, a host of cultural conflicts have arisen, revolving upon sexual orientations, racial categories, national identities, ethnic group identifications and religious movements. Instead of social classes locked into struggle, and “national liberation movements” confronting “imperialists,” cultural identities have become the focal point for social conflict, and regional groups confront one another in a “clash of civilizations”. So pervasive and important have these conflicts become that many commentators refer to a “paradigm shift,” from demands for socio-economic reforms to claims regarding cultural identity [Fraser, 1996 #249@2-3, 11-39].
According to the philosopher, Nancy Fraser, political demands for redistributive justice — that is, socio-economic reforms — are being displaced by identity-based struggles for cultural recognition — that is, demands to have certain types of cultural identity, such as indigenous ethnicity or gay identities, accorded appropriate respect and value. For Fraser, “the ‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict”. Today, “group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization” [Fraser, 1996 #249@11]. In other words, the “old” social movement of the trade unions and class-based parties, that organised around class issues and concentrated on social reforms, are being displaced. In their place, “new” social movements have arisen, that organize around identity questions and concentrate on symbolic reforms to the ways communities represent and interact with marginalised cultural groups.
To clarify the scope of this transformation, Fraser makes an analytic distinction between “economic injustice” and “cultural denigration”. On this basis, she constructs a spectrum consisting of ideal types. Her ideal spectrum is polarised between “exploited classes,” suffering economic injustice and demanding redistributive remedies, and “despised sexualities,” enduring cultural denigration and calling for symbolic recognition [Fraser, 1996 #249@15]. In the middle of the spectrum would be groups, such as women and racial minorities, which suffer a combination of economic injustice and cultural denigration. Such groups, she proposes, would be looking for a means to combine demands for redistributive justice with claims for cultural recognition. Fraser’s spectrum, ranging from “redistribution” to “recognition,” has become the landmark analysis in discussions about contemporary identity-based struggles.
The sorts of problems addressed by the concept of recognition include the lifestyle politics of the new social movements and the relation between personal identity and political claims. While the struggle for recognition embraces what has become derisively known as “identity politics,” recognition goes beyond issues of personal identity to include multicultural policy, political citizenship, the ethical questions raised by cultural diversity, ethnic and national self-determination when conducted in cultural terms, and inter-cultural conflict. Many political philosophers with international reputations have intervened in the debate, including Judith Butler [Butler, 1998 #124], Nancy Fraser [Fraser, 1996 #249], Seyla Benhabib [Benhabib, 2002 #823], Axel Honneth [Honneth, 1995 #343], Brian Barry [Barry, 2001 #827], Will Kymlicka [Kymlicka, 1995 #833], Charles Taylor [Taylor, 1994 #840], Alexander Düttmann [Düttmann, 2000 #830] and Iris Young [Young, 1990 #838;Young, 2000 #839]. Recognition claims raise questions of the appropriate remedies for cultural denigration and a conceptualisation of justice capable of embracing the recognition of difference [Connolly, 1991 #829]. The debate has significant implications for multicultural policy and in relation to social integration into multicultural and trans-national political communities [Ong, 1999 #836]. Finally, the debate is crucial to questions of international justice concerning cultural conflict. In this context, the “recognition debate,” as it has come to be known, is a debate on the nature, scope and legitimacy of the “multiple struggles for cultural recognition” that shape the contemporary political landscape.
Most recently, Fraser and Honneth have produced a full-scale philosophical exchange in monograph form, deepening and extending the debate [Fraser, 2003 #831]. The debate between Fraser and Honneth is important, because it tries to go beyond the stale opposition between “class politics” and “identity politics,” redistribution versus recognition. Fraser develops what she calls a “perspectival dualism”. All oppressions, she notes, are complex. “Exploited classes” do not suffer only from economic injustice. They also experience a lack of recognition of their social contribution. Likewise, “despised sexualities” do not only experience recognition-related injuries. They also suffer from economic disadvantages, such as obstacles to passing on wealth to their children and job insecurity in some professions. Hence economic class and social status are two analytically distinct, but factually intertwined, forms of injustice, whose remedy is always some combination of redistribution and recognition. The advantage of taking a dual perspective approach, Fraser argues, is that it prevents the reduction of one to the other, and it makes us alert to the potentially negative unintended side-effects of one-sided remedies for injustice. For instance, the welfare state was designed to redress economic inequality. But its lack of recognition remedies has meant that recipients tend to become stygmatised, and the worst affected have frequently been single mothers. Without revaluing care-giving and the feminine associations that influence cultural judgements regarding domestic labour, welfare redistributive measures have actually resulted in new injustices of misrecognition. So, Fraser proposes, what is needed is not a new, super-category that would embrace both misrecognition and maldistribution. We need, instead, a bifocal analysis of every situation, combined with democratic debate and the pragmatic evaluation of the probable effects of every effort at redistribution and recognition. But this does not mean uncritically supporting every struggle that claims to be for redistribution or recognition. By applying what she calls the “norm of participatory parity” — which refers to the material and cultural conditions necessary for every individual to exercise their autonomy as a social equal — it is possible to deal with the difficult cases where claims for recognition conflict with demands for redistribution, and vice versa. I shall return to this at the end of the talk.
Honneth’s alternative effort to overcome the split between redistribution and recognition depends on doing exactly what Fraser says we should not do. Honneth develops a super-category that embraces remedies for both maldistribution and misrecognition. Somewhat confusingly, however, his super-category is called “recognition”. Honneth therefore claims to explain redistribution as a limited instance of recognition. Before doing so, he makes some powerful points regarding the limitations of Fraser’s “dual perspectives” theory. Why, he asks, has she left out political injuries and legal injustices? Indeed, he says, what Fraser’s discussion of “social justice in the age of identity politics,” with its categories of economic maldistribution and cultural misrecognition overlooks, is that the central conflict dynamic of modern society concerns the interpretation of the principle of legal equality. Think of the extension of legal equality into social rights in the welfare state, and of the granting of cultural recognition in the form of minority rights. Think also of the struggles for democracy in former Communist countries and of the many efforts in the Western world to win workplace democracy, regional autonomy and reforms to the representative processes of democratic polities. Should we then talk of economic redistribution, political representation, legal equality and cultural recognition, adopting a “quadri-focal” perspective? But why stop there? And wouldn’t this begin to look like an admission that instead of a theory, what we really had was an empirical list of some types of injustice that had recently come to our attention?
Honneth’s alternative is to think social justice and moral philosophy in the same language — the language of 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 #975@133]. Labour movement research reveals that more important than the material plight of the poor, in their eyes, is their experience of disrespect. Comparison with colonised groups and women’s struggles confirms that this is a generalised experience. 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 #975@133].
So Honneth’s theory of recognition is not about taking one side of the “recognition debate” against the other. Instead, it involves going to the unified root of both demands for economic redistribution and claims for cultural recognition (and legal equality, and political representation, and so forth). Subjects have normative expectations of the social order: “what subjects expect of society is above all recognition of their identity claims” [Honneth, 2003 #975@131]. The moral sources of the experience of social discontent are grounded in the forms of misrecognition: 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.
According to Honneth, the young Hegel “set out to reconstruct the ethical formation of the human species as a process in which, via stages of conflict, a moral potential that is structurally inherent in communicative relations between subjects comes to be realized” [Honneth, 1995 #343@63]. Reconstructing Hegel’s theory of practical self-realization in the light of empirical social psychology, Honneth aims to produce a system of ethical life composed of different stages of recognition, corresponding to different types of autonomy.
[T]he sequence of forms of recognition follows the logic of a formative process that is mediated by the stages of a moral struggle. In the course of their identity formation and at their current stage of integration into the community, subjects are ... transcendentally required to enter into an intersubjective conflict, the outcome of which is the recognition of claims to autonomy previously not socially affirmed [Honneth, 1995 #343@69].
Drawing upon the social psychology of Mead, Honneth, “aims to make the struggle for recognition the point of reference for a theoretical construction in terms of which the moral development of society is to be explained” [Honneth, 1995 #343@71].
The formation of self-identity during socialisation implies the adoption of a “decentred perspective,” whereby the ego imagines itself as another and regards itself from the standpoint of the other, thereby forming a conception of self-identity. This identity is referred to as the “me”. Once the ego enters social interaction, normative expectations are generated and a corresponding practical self-identity is formed. This leads to a gradual generalisation of the “me” in the course of the socialisation of the infant. Because the mechanism of personality formation consists in adopting the normative perspective of one’s neighbour, the frame of reference for one’s practical self image must gradually expand along with the circle of partners to interaction [Honneth, 1995 #343@77]. This process generates the category of the “generalised other,” where “the process of socialisation per se involves the internalisation of norms of action that result from a generalisation of the action-expectations of all members of society” [Honneth, 1995 #343@78].
The individual’s entry into the social world proceeds, then, through the internalisation of socially valid norms that include the perspective of the generalised other. Consciousness of one’s worth accompanies social identity in the form of “self-respect”. The general basis for self-respect is the existence of legal rights. Yet this framework is an incomplete form of recognition insofar as the equality of capacities affirmed in legal recognition denies the uniqueness of biographically individuated subjectivity.
The existence of a plurality of “me’s” in response to a multiplicity of social contexts is unified by the transcendental existence of a singular subjectivity — the “I” — that acts as the spontaneous centre of social subjectivity. The singularity of the subject is located at the level of the “I” [Honneth, 1995 #343@81]. The “I” is the locus of the response of the individual to the norms of the community.
The practical spontaneity that marks our action in everyday life is to be traced back to the achievements of an “I” that, as in the case of cognitive self-relation, is opposed to the “me” as an unconscious force. Whereas ... [the me] harbours ... social norms ... [the I] is the collection site for all the inner impulses expressed in involuntary reactions to social challenges” [Honneth, 1995 #343@81].
The I therefore forms a reservoir of potential psychical energies that have not yet been deployed in identity formation. The conflict between the “I” and the “me” explains the emergence of social struggle as originating in intrapsychic conflict between the “me,” as representative of community norms, and the “I,” as a creative force that continuously transcends fixed horizons. “The existence of the ‘me’ forces one to fight, in the interests of one’s ‘I,’ for new forms of social recognition” [Honneth, 1995 #343@82].
The realization of the ‘I’ demands a perspective complementary to the “generalised other,” namely, the anticipation of a future society [Honneth, 1995 #343@83]. Where the ‘me’ acts in conformity with the “generalised other,” the ‘I’ acts in anticipation of a future community, from whose perspective it “will have been” a singular subjectivity. The existence of the ‘I’ acts to introduce “an element of normative idealisation into all social practices":
[I]n every historical epoch, individual particular anticipations of expanded recognition relations accumulate into a system of normative demands, and this, consequently forces societal development as a whole to adapt to the process of progressive individuation [Honneth, 1995 #343@83-84].
For Honneth, “the result is a chain of normative ideals pointing in the direction of increasing personal autonomy” [Honneth, 1995 #343@84]. The historical development of the species is therefore at once a moral progress towards freedom through the expansion of rights. “Because subjects are forced, under pressure from their ‘I,’ to constantly loosen the constraints on the norms embodied in the ‘generalised other,’ they are, to a certain extent, psychologically required to do what they can to expand legal recognition relations” [Honneth, 1995 #343@85]. This rests upon examples where normatively broadened conceptions of the social community become the motive force in social movements. There are two aspects of this extension of norms: the expansion of individual freedom and the universalisation of norms [Honneth, 1995 #343@86]. The universalisation of norms consists of the expansion of the scope of legal recognition (extension of citizenship, expansion of rights, development of social rights). By contrast, the expansion of individual freedom involves the satisfaction of the “I” by means of the development of abilities and traits through which the subject convinces themselves of their unique value in the social world [Honneth, 1995 #343@87]. These relations become the basis for mutual recognition between subjects.
The difference between the universalisation of norms and the expansion of individuality involves the distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical forms of recognition. While legal recognition is symmetrical, recognition of one’s unique contribution to society is asymmetrical. Where, in legal recognition, one judges all others equally, the self-esteem that arises on the basis of personal realisation supposes the possibility for a distinction of quality. The highest stage of mutual recognition involves the recognition of individual biographically individuated personhood. Honneth designates this as “solidarity”. This brings Honneth close to communitarianism, in that “the extent to which the social integration of societies is normatively dependent on a shared conception of the good life is a question that lies at the centre of the debates between liberalism and communitarianism” [Honneth, 1995 #343@91].
According to Honneth, pre-capitalist societies are characterised by an “alloy” of social status and legal rights. A person’s “honour,” linked to hereditary social privileges, determined both their legal situation and the extent of social esteem accorded to their “station”. With the advent of capitalism, social recognition becomes differentiated into three distinct “media": personal intimacy, legal rights and social esteem. The bonds of affection govern sexual, familial and friendship relations. Legal rights are accorded equally to all citizens, independently of status. The concept of honour is replaced by the meritocratic principle of achievement, linked to the work ethic of capitalist society.
Based on psychoanalytic research and empirical evidence, Honneth proposes that love relations are the basis for identity formation. Honneth traces the dialectics of identity formation through the stages of maternal affection for the infant, the gradual independence of the child and the maturation in the adult of love and friendship relations balanced between dependence and independence. The strengthening of the ego through bonds of affection tempered by independence leads to the socialisation of a subject capable of the mature exercise of autonomous judgement. Conversely, lacking the ability to form affectionate bonds, individuals become asocial and cannot enjoy any forms of social recognition. Love is therefore “the structural core of all ethical life”. According to Honneth, the norm governing intimacy is the recognition of the singular needs of the individual, and the corresponding ideal is “love,” defined somewhat claustrophobically as “being oneself in another”. The negation of love, Honneth claims, is the violation of the body. Moral progress in intimacy, by contrast, might include the elimination of role-clichés and essentialist cultural stereotypes.
This is all somewhat dusty, and additionally Honneth appears to have a highly idealized conception of the institution of marriage. Throughout most of human history marriage has not been a medium for the development of intimacy, but rather the vehicle for the virtual enslavement of women and the transmission of property through the male line. Honneth’s notion that love is the basis for ethical life, so long as it is linked to marriage, is distinctly idealist, because it neglects the institutional reforms that are necessary before intimacy can become distinct from domination and possession.
While love relations are limited by “elective affinities,” legal forms of recognition encompass the entire society in modernity. Modernity involves the functional differentiation of legal rights from communities of value. The structure of legal relations is really only completed by modernity, which regards all persons as free and equal. Indeed, the central characteristic of modern legal rights is that they are distinct from social roles, so that all persons are equal before the law. Honneth argues that the distinction between tradition-bound and post-traditional law implies a development in reciprocity and therefore the full realization of the perspective of the generalised other.
“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, 1995 #343@109].
Conversely, one can count as a bearer of rights only when one is recognised as a member of a (political) community.
Following Marshall’s political sociology of citizenship, Honneth identifies a cumulative development in modern rights-claims. The scope of legal recognition has expanded considerably during the last two hundred years. Contemporary discussions distinguish:
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. This is because struggles for recognition have resulted in a continuous development in the legally safeguarded capabilities regarded as the minimal basis for democratic citizenship [Honneth, 1995 #343@114].
Honneth’s conception of legal recognition is certainly the strongest aspect of his alternative and the weakest part of Fraser’s argument. He is, for instance, able to show how legal recognition now permeates economics (the notion of “deregulation” indicates the extend to which legal norms have become embedded in market mechanisms) and culture (most identity claims, he demonstrates, are really demands for equal treatment by removing obstacles to social participation). The principle of legal equality, he states unequivocally, constitutes the egalitarian dynamic of modern society.
The differentiation of legal rights from social prestige does not mean the end of esteem relations or social status. In accordance with capitalism, social esteem in modernity tends to be granted in line with the “achievement principle”. Unlike legal recognition, social esteem is asymmetrical, that is, persons are esteemed hierarchically and not equally. This is an exceedingly difficult theoretical point. Esteem could be:
At various times, Honneth has espoused each of these. His tendency to change his mind, combined with the lack of open acknowledgement that a new perspective involves revision, implies an uncertainty in his position. To a certain extent, these different constructions of social esteem are mutually implicated. However, his most recent position is that modernity is characterised by social esteem based on social achievement in the division of labour. It is significant that as Honneth has increasingly endorsed this principle, the concept of solidarity has progressively been eliminated from his theoretical vocabulary, replaced by individual “merit” and moral “desert”.
Honneth accepts that the concept of merit springs from the capitalist work ethic and relies upon cultural ascription for the evaluation of an individual’s social contribution. The achievement principle is normatively skewed towards the model of investment — specifically, towards the model of an increase in cultural capital, preparatory to working, i.e., intellectual preparation for a specific activity. The legitimation of a distribution arrangement depends in general on cultural values to ratify the social esteem accorded to specific activities. Essentialist ideology, however, refuses to recognise the work of oppressed collectives as “achievement”. For instance, gender functions as a cultural value that legitimates an unequal distribution of material resources, by determining the social esteem of the different segments of the social division of labour. “[W]hen they do not take the form of mobilising social rights,” Honneth proposes, “redistribution struggles are definitional conflicts over the legitimacy of the current application of the achievement principle” [Honneth, 2003 #975@154]. Social groups, responding to disrespect for their accomplishments, throw evaluative models into question and fight for increased esteem. Women, for instance, are “struggling for social recognition of their own reproductive activity within the household as equally valuable social labour” [Honneth, 2003 #975@Kreckel cited 154]. On this basis, Honneth considers women’s struggles for equality to be the paradigm for distributional conflicts in the modern world.
While Honneth does not directly state here that he regards the capitalist achievement principle as morally progressive, his discussion is distinctly ambiguous. “The individualist achievement principle,” he accepts, “is ... the one normative resource bourgeois-capitalist society provides for morally justifying the extremely unequal distribution of life’s chances and goods” [Honneth, 2003 #975@148]. Nonetheless, he advocates restricting leftwing mobilisations to the three existing norms of love, rights and merit. Sometimes, more positively, he talks of a democratisation of the division of labour (which, however, he ruled out in Struggle for Recognition as “too demanding”). This latter, however, would contradict the asymmetry of esteem-based recognition.
According to Honneth, the expansion of social esteem relations can lead to individuation and inclusion. Individuation refers to the expansion of the aspects of human subjectivity that are recognised as legitimate social contributions — for instance, the notion that sporting or artistic genius is a valid contribution in its own right. Inclusion designates the extension of recognition relations to incorporate more persons as members of a moral community, or more values as contributions to this community. Distinct from citizenship — which is a question of legal recognition — inclusion can be exemplified by the recognition of new values (for instance, multiculturalism) and recent arrivals (for instance, the recognition of the social labour of non-citizen immigrants in contemporary Germany).
The concept of a “moral grammar of social conflict” should now be becoming clear. Social groups, responding to violations of intimacy, disrespect for their rights or denigration of their accomplishments, throw evaluative models into question and fight for their needs, for equality or for increased esteem. By coining the expression “a moral grammar,” Honneth is referring to three important aspects of this process.
I shall examine each of these three aspects in turn. Taken together, they explain how the moral grammar of social conflict leads to an expansion of ethical life.
The advantage of a recognition theory is that the normative evaluation of conflicts happens in the same language as claims are made in. “What motivates individuals or social groups to call the prevailing recognition order into question and to engage in practical resistance is the moral conviction that, with respect to their own situations or particularities, the recognition principles considered legitimate are incorrectly or inadequately applied” [Honneth, 2003 #975@157]. This is the “motivational basis of all social conflicts” [Honneth, 2003 #975@157].
According to Honneth, the moral grammar of social conflict involves the moral dialectic of the universal (principle) and the particular (group): “one can always appeal for a particular relative difference by applying a general principle of mutual recognition, which normatively compels an expansion of the existing relations of mutual recognition” [Honneth, 2003 #975@152]. For instance, the central conflict dynamic of modern society is the interpretation of the equality principle of legal recognition. The battle for legal recognition happens by asserting a specific “difference” in the lifeworld which has not received sufficient legal consideration [Honneth, 2003 #975@152]. “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 in to social rights” [Honneth, 2003 #975@147]. In this light the welfare state is regarded as a penetration of legal recognition into social esteem.
Honneth applies his (unspoken) idea of a syntax of recognition claims to analyse the “politics of identity”. Contemporary demands for recognition break into two main camps: individualistic demands for lifestyle legitimacy, and collective claims for cultural recognition.
Individualistic recognition involves the removal of barriers (social discrimination) that prevents group members from enjoying universal basic rights through equal legal treatment.
Communal recognition involves the demand for recognition of cultural autonomy and value. There are three objectives visible in contemporary claims-making:
The moral syntax of the conflicts now being conducted around “identity-political” questions in liberal democratic states is essentially determined by the recognition principle of legal equality [Honneth, 2003 #975@169]. In their vast majority, identity political claims involve not a “struggle for cultural recognition,” but an expanded struggle for legal equality.
The moral order of a society, expressed in terms of three “spheres of recognition” (love, rights and solidarity) constitutes the “recognition order,” or “ethical life,” of that society. The framework of ethical life is not the same as its institutional structure. Hegel’s mistake, in Honneth’s view, was to assign an institution to every recognition principle, and to make the principles into a teleological sequence instead of three relatively autonomous normative spheres. However, since the central institutions of capitalist society require rational legitimation through generalisable principles of reciprocal recognition, social reproduction is dependent on a basis of moral consensus [Honneth, 2003 #975@157].
“In modern society, the conditions for individual self-realization are only socially secured when subjects can experience intersubjective recognition not only of their personal autonomy, but also of the specific needs and particular capacities as well” [Honneth, 2003 #975@189].
Conversely:
“Every human subject depends essentially on a context of forms of social interaction governed by normative principles of mutual recognition; and the disappearance of such relations of recognition results in experiences of disrespect or humiliation that cannot fail to have damaging consequences for the individual’s identity formation” [Honneth, 2003 #975@173].
The normative integration of societies happens only through the institutionalisation of recognition principles (social integration is a process of inclusion through stable forms of recognition). For Honneth, it follows that political ethics and social morality have to adjusted to the quality of the social recognition institutionalised in a social order. “The justice or well-being of a society is proportionate to its ability to secure conditions of mutual recognition under which personal identity-formation, hence individual self-realization, can proceed adequately” [Honneth, 2003 #975@174]. It is possible in this context to speak of an emancipatory interest of humanity in the dismantling of social asymmetries. Indeed, the normative structural change of a society can be traced back to the impetus of a struggle for recognition. This leads to moral progress, because the demand for social recognition possesses a surplus of validity that transcends its context of application, leading to an increase in the quality of social integration.
Contemporary ethical politics must therefore orient to love, equality and merit, taken together as the idea of social justice. This means recognising the individual in their neediness, legal equality and social contribution. Honneth advances empirical research into social justice (David Miller) to support this contention.
For Honneth, the Supreme Good is the goal of identity formation, “in the name of individual autonomy” [Honneth, 2003 #975@181] — the purpose of social equality is to enable the personal identity formation of all members of the society. By this he means “ego-strength acquired through socialisation” [Honneth, 2003 #975@179]. Hence his self-description as belonging to the tradition of “teleological liberalism”. He designates his position as “teleological” because he seeks to embed normative conceptions (an hypothetical idea of the just society and the good life) in a conception of progress, in order to evade relativism.
On this basis, it is possible for Honneth to evaluate contemporary recognition claims. There are two fundamental axes: the socialisation of the individual and the moral integration of the society. Cases are to be judged according to the processes of individualisation (new parts of the personality opened to mutual recognition) and inclusion (more persons included within existing recognition relations). “Just” to be measured according to the conformity of a claim to the principles of need, equality and desert. Therefore, a demand that conformed to the moral grammar and syntax of modern ethical life, and led to individualisation or inclusion, would be a justified claim.
“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 #975@187].
Honneth suggests two examples of justified recognition claims:
Honneth rejects any philosophy of contemporary history based on a paradigm shift from “interest” to “identity,” “equality” to “difference,” “redistribution” to “recognition”. Indeed, such an approach risks overlooking the main form of social struggle today, the extension of legal rights into love relations and social esteem. According to Honneth, so-called distribution conflicts can be expressed as recognition struggles. This is essential to his claim to provide a new, unified framework for Critical Theory. His claim, however, rests upon the proposition that social recognition acts as base to the superstructure of material distribution. He speaks, for instance, of groups gaining “greater social esteem and hence more resources” [Honneth, 2003 #975@152]. This (massive) claim is not supported by any empirical evidence. Instead, it rests upon the observation that the social integration of capitalist society depends upon the moral resources of ethical life. This neglects the dimension of system integration, and the material needs of the human body. In Honneth’s schema, “needs” are relegated to the sphere of intimacy — they play no role in political economy, apparently. But it is at this relatively autonomous level that material interests form. Of course, the political expression of material interests always takes place in the light of cultural interpretations of needs, claims and capabilities. That relations of representation and interpretation happen between needs and discourses — that needs are socially and historically constituted — does not, however, unless we have gone capitulated to contemporary discourse idealism, mean that interests are produced by culture. It just means that they are transcendentally constituted by social processes. Honneth’s old position maintained an unbridgeable division between needs and recognition. His new position lacks a robust empirical realism in respect of natural processes and material interests. It is not an improvement, but a step backwards.
Honneth’s position is weakest when it comes to the most interesting aspect of “new” social movement research — the claims for cultural recognition that transcend both equal rights and merit-based esteem. He speculates, somewhat half-heartedly, that a fourth recognition principle might be emerging, only to claim that such claims cannot be evaluated, because they involve a “process of judgement that escapes our control”. This position deserves to be called reactionary: our judgements of the value of other cultures are learned responses informed by a history of colonialism. Honneth’s bewilderment before the emergence of demands that do not fit his schema of contemporary ethical life is evidence for the limitations of a theory of moral progress that depends solely upon privative categories — it ends up justifying the existing norms and overlooking new principles.
Honneth is correct to refuse to identify recognition relations with institutional structures. He rightly points out that legal recognition permeates the economy, for instance. He is also correct to say that Fraser’s perspectival dualism cannot speak of “social integration” and “system integration,” cultural practices and economic practices, because these are substantive dualisms, not analytical distinctions. Yet Fraser’s position is more compelling on social theoretical grounds than Honneth’s “recognition monism”. One solution might be to accommodate Honneth’s insights within a substantive dualism, by regarding recognition relations as normative components of the cultural aspect of social practices.