June 23, 2022 45subjective turn.” The emphasis on
language alerts us to the fundamental
insight that human beings are not iso-
lated monads but subjects who flourish
only when we are drawn into broader
networks of socialization where our
individuality can be realized and ac-
knowledged. As Christopher Zurn has
argued in Axel Honneth: A Critical
Theory of the Social (2015), Honneth,
like Habermas, is chiefly a philosopher
of intersubjectivity. But Honneth’s at-
tention is directed less to language as
the medium of communication than
to the phenomenon of recognition it-
self. How is it that recognition happens
at all, and what do we mean when we
say that one person has recognized an-
other? In what ways does recognition
form the very scaffolding of our per-
sonal and social world? How does our
understanding of justice and freedom
presuppose that the demand for recog-
nition has been satisfied, and what does
it mean for our social world if we find
that the bonds of recognition have been
violated or denied?
Such questions have preoccupied
Honneth throughout his career, from
The Struggle for Recognition (first pub-
lished in German in 1992) to Freedom’s
Right: The Social Foundations of Dem-
ocratic Life (2011), along with a range
of specific interventions such as Reifi-
cation (2012) and The Idea of Social-
ism (2017) and the spirited exchange
with the political philosopher Nancy
Fraser in their co authored book Redis-
tribution or Recognition? (2003). De-
spite noteworthy shifts in perspective
and emphasis, he has shown remarkable
consistency in his central insight that
recognition should serve as the singular
foundation for critical theory.Why does recognition matter?
Perhaps the easiest way to grasp its
importance is to consider infant devel-
opment. Object- relations theorists such
as Donald Winnicott and Jessica Ben-
jamin have shed light on how our ear-
liest experience of love equips us with
the capacity for affective identification
with others even while we also learn to
exercise our independence. The infant
may begin life in a condition of symbi-
osis and dependency, but it must gradu-
ally slacken the bonds of love so that it
can negotiate the challenge of achiev-
ing the proper balance between attach-
ment and self- possession in a shared
social world. A child who does not
learn this balancing act may become a
dysfunctional adult who is either patho-
logically dependent on others or inca-
pable of loving at all. But the crucial
discovery of object- relations theory is
that without this early trial of differen-
tiation, we could not become mature,
socially competent individuals. I first
become a self only by emerging out
of the undifferentiated oneness of my
infancy. But the challenge of “reality-
acceptance,” as Winnicott called it, is
never complete. While in loving rela-
tionships the original desire to merge
with another person survives, I am al-
ways confronted with the fact that both
objects and people in the surrounding
world have an independent reality be-
yond my needs.
Intersubjectivity, then, is the birth-
place of subjectivity. To develop this
insight, Honneth borrows extensively
from Hegel, whose understanding of
human history as a dialectical narra-
tive of freedom exercised an enormousinfluence on later social theorists,
including the young Marx. Honneth
places special emphasis on writings
by Hegel from his years as an unsala-
ried lecturer at the University of Jena,
where he wrote his System of Ethical
Life (1802), an early and relatively un-
derappreciated work in which recog-
nition has central importance. Those
who are not specialists in Hegel typi-
cally cite the fascinating if frustratingly
brief “master and slave” chapter from
his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in
which the contest for domination ap-
pears as an important episode in the
unfolding drama of human freedom.
But it is chiefly in the earlier study that
Hegel developed the insight that true
selfhood emerges from the matrix of
recognition. The individual can only
become an individual if recognized
as such. Eventually Hegel came to see
that freedom itself is a state of recip-
rocal recognition that involves “being
with oneself in another.”
Honneth has made this insight into
the cornerstone of his own philosophy.
Our social life in the broadest sense
can be understood as a “recognition
order,” in which we first come to ex-
perience ourselves against an intuitive
background of shared purpose and sol-
idarity that is directed toward a com-
mon idea of the good. Every society has
developed its own distinctive recogni-
tion order that leaves its mark on each
of its three major spheres—family, law,
and the public realm. Honneth believes
that critical theory should begin with
an analysis of that recognition order
and the norms that support it.For political philosophy, this insight
has two important implications. First,
it means that when we look at the so-
cial world we should not conceive of its
problems as ones we might remedy by
developing moral standards that could
be imposed on it from the outside. The
“ought” cannot be something external
to the “is.” Instead we need to look for
the normative resources that are al-
ready available to us in the world as we
find it. In other words, we have to iden-
tify the “ought” within the “is.” This is
a broadly Hegelian theme that was also
of cardinal importance for Marx, who
in an 1843 letter to a colleague wrote,
“We develop new principles to the
world out of its own principles.” One
might say that it is this idea that most
distinguishes the Hegelian strand in po-
litical philosophy from its competitors,
including the more Kantian variety
(such as that of John Rawls) that has
tried to develop general principles of
justice in relative abstraction from the
concrete facts of our social existence.
For Honneth and for thinkers in the
Frankfurt tradition of critical theory, it
follows that political philosophy should
not turn its back on the discoveries of
the empirical social sciences such as
sociology and psychology, since those
fields may provide us with clues about
the principles that already obtain in
our moral life. In this respect if not in
others, Honneth has remained faithful
to the original interdisciplinary agenda
of the Frankfurt School founders.
A second, more intriguing impli-
cation is that arguments in political
philosophy should proceed in a neg-
ative fashion. No recognition order is
perfect, of course, and improving the
bonds of recognition is a moral im-
perative. But calls for greater justiceESMOND AND ILIA
AN UNRELIABLE MEMOIR
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