44 The New York ReviewIn Search of Recognition
Peter E. Gordon
Recognition :
A Chapter in the History
of European Ideas
by Axel Honneth, translated
from the German by Joseph Ganahl.
Cambridge University Press,
178 pp., $79.99; $24.99 (paper)All of us need recognition. We need it
from those we love but also from the
state if we are to enjoy our rights as
citizens, and from society at large if we
are to secure esteem for our achieve-
ments. In the absence of recognition we
languish, unloved and unseen, without
legal protection and without the basic
sense that we matter as human beings.
Think, for instance, of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man, in which invisibility
becomes a metaphor for recognition
denied. “I am invisible,” the narrator
writes, “simply because people refuse
to see me.” He feels like a bodiless
head at a circus sideshow, as if he were
encased in “mirrors of hard, distorting
glass.” Others who approach him “see
only my surroundings, themselves, or
figments of their imagination—indeed,
everything and anything except me.”
Because he is denied recognition, he is
robbed of the necessary conditions for
a fulfilling life. “I am not only invisi-
ble,” he says, “but formless as well; and
to be unaware of one’s form is to live a
death.”
Philosophers, psychologists, and the-
orists of social interaction have long
understood that recognition is crucial
to human flourishing. The idea that we
can only be fully human if we are rec-
ognized by others is a central theme of
the tradition of political thought that
runs from Aristotle to Arendt, in which
the political sphere is conceived not as
an empty stage for individual pursuits
but as a common realm in which we
first appear to one another and find our
completion as human beings. Freud
gave this thought a further twist with
his theory of infantile socialization,
according to which our status as moral
agents is due to an early complex of
transactions over love and desire that
must find a proper resolution if we are
to emerge into maturity.
But the same recognition that we
need from others we also require for
ourselves: if we refuse to recognize our
own desires, they distort us from the in-
side and we succumb to illness. Frantz
Fanon, the psychiatrist and theorist of
anticolonial liberation, united these
insights in his claim that our sense of
“human worth and reality” does not
exist prior to our social interaction but
is the consequence of social recogni-
tion. Asymmetries of power, such as
that between colonizer and colonized,
will distort this recognition or render
it inoperative, resulting in structural
injustice and personal distress. A
truly just society would demand what
Fanon called “a world of reciprocal
recognition.”In recent years, no one has pursued
the idea of recognition with greater en-
ergy and acumen than Axel Honneth,
a German- born philosopher from the
so- called Frankfurt School tradition
of social theory. Despite its name, theFrankfurt School was never a school
with a single doctrine but a diverse
group of mid- twentieth- century think-
ers, including Max Horkheimer, Theo-
dor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, and
Herbert Marcuse, who worked as affil-
iates of the Frankfurt- based Institute
for Social Research, founded in the
early 1920s. Though broadly Marxist
in inspiration, the institute’s members
had little patience for the mindless cant
of the organized Communist move-
ment or for the authoritarian bureau-
cracies of the Soviet bloc, which were
socialist in name only. A loose and
interdisciplinary collective of philos-
ophers, psychologists, political scien-
tists, and cultural critics, the institute
was united only in its skeptical verdict
on the capitalist world as a ruinous do-
main in which commodification and
convention prevailed over genuine
freedom.
This grim assessment of modern so-
ciety meant that its members directed
their energies more to criticism than
to the construction of any utopian pro-
gram. Rationalists at heart, they saw
that reason itself had been bent into
an instrument of domination. It was
Horkheimer who first characterized
the institute’s task as the development
of a “critical theory,” a phrase that has
survived despite the gradual transfor-
mation and diversification of its mis-
sion over the past century. After World
War II, when several of the first gener-
ation of critical theorists returned from
their American exile, they were deeply
involved in the reconstruction of dem-
ocratic culture in the German Federal
Republic. They also helped to inspire a
younger generation of critical theorists,
including the philosopher and publicintellectual Jürgen Habermas, now
well past his ninetieth birthday, who is
acknowledged as the leading figure of
that generation.
Honneth’s prominent place in this
tradition is uncontested. Although he
was not technically a student of Haber-
mas’s, he completed his dissertation
while on a fellowship at the Max Planck
Institute in Starnberg, which Habermas
directed, and he went on to serve as an
assistant in Frankfurt, where he con-
ducted seminars with Habermas. After
a series of appointments in Konstanz
and Berlin, he returned to Frankfurt
in 1996 to assume Habermas’s chair in
social philosophy, and in 2001 he took
over as director of the Institute for So-
cial Research. Honneth stepped down
from the position in 2018 and now di-
vides his time between Frankfurt and
Columbia University.
Many have claimed that critical the-
ory has been transformed to such a
degree that one can no longer say that
its adherents have a common mission.
It may be that what originally inspired
it and maintained its integrity was not
Marxism but the fear of fascism, since
the threat of its rise in the 1930s and
the prospect of its resurgence in the
1950s held together the institute’s di-
vergent tendencies. What survives
today is more a philosophical style than
a substantive program. Those who see
themselves as allies of critical theory
remain rationalist in disposition, and
they see philosophy not as conceptual
analysis but as a social practice that is
oriented toward an ideal of universal
emancipation.
This stripped- down definition allows
for various streams of thought and di-
vergent opinions as to what critical the-ory should be.^1 The institute’s original
building from the 1920s was destroyed
in the war, but today it is still housed
in the austere postwar structure across
the street from the old campus of the
Goethe- University Frankfurt. The
memory of the institute’s first genera-
tion still haunts the surrounding neigh-
borhood, known as the WestEnd. The
brightly painted faces of Adorno and
Horkheimer glare down at passersby
from a university wall, and in the in-
stitute’s kitchen, a photograph shows
Adorno in an unusually cheerful mood.
Across the hall is his old piano, well
maintained and still in tune. But the
continuities should not be exaggerated.The question of how critical theory
has changed over the past century has
provoked much debate. It is a com-
monplace view that the first- generation
critical theorists fell into a cul- de- sac
of absolute despair. The promise of en-
lightenment—that reason should make
us free—no longer seemed tenable, es-
pecially after the horrors of Auschwitz
were revealed. But this skeptical ver-
dict on human rationality seemed to
rob critical theory of the resources it
needed to justify its own philosophical
efforts. Habermas, despite his great
admiration for Adorno, described this
dilemma as a “performative contradic-
t io n .” I n h i s ow n work he s ou g ht t o pl a c e
critical theory on what he considered a
new and more secure foundation, and
to rescue it from its apparent defeatism
by turning to a kind of rationality that
inheres in communication itself.
It is sometimes said that with Haber-
mas, critical theory took a “linguistic
turn.” Beginning in the early 1980s
with the publication of his pathbreak-
ing two- volume study, The Theory of
Communicative Action, he sought to
show that the simple fact of our com-
munication with others already bears
within itself the promise of an unco-
erced consensus. We often stray from
this ideal insofar as we use language
strategically to secure assent from
others by manipulation rather than
argument. But in seeking to make
ourselves understood, we cannot help
but presuppose the ideal of a mutual
agreement that would rest upon noth-
ing besides reasons that we give to one
another in good faith. Although he has
been much criticized for unworldly ra-
tionalism, Habermas was acutely aware
of the inequalities in power that distort
and even disable a consensus forged
through reason alone. All the same,
he has never permitted his realism to
vitiate his pragmatic faith that commu-
nication implies “the unforced force of
the better argument.”
Still, the emphasis on language is
only part of the story. More impor-
tantly, critical theory after Habermas
took what has been called an “inter-Sigrid Calon: SC Series, 6, 2020Sigrid Calon/Picture Room(^1) In Frankfurt for many years there was
a year- end soccer game in which gradu-
ate students had to choose to play on the
Hegelian or the Kantian team, a sym-
bolic if Pythonesque contest between
two major factions of the institute, as
embodied by two esteemed philoso-
phers, Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst.
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