Axel Honneth: justice is not only about shares, but about being seen

The commonest way of accounting for injustice in modern society runs through distribution: who gets how much?

Axel Honneth has spent close to half a century showing that the question is incomplete. Behind people's anger, behind the feeling of having been humiliated, behind the decision to fight, he sees another demand at work: recognition.

Born in 1949, Honneth is today Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, and continues to direct the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He came up inside the Frankfurt tradition in the 1980s as Jürgen Habermas's assistant, and then reinterpreted that tradition's central problems through a theory of his own.

Three forms of recognition#

The Struggle for Recognition, published in German in 1992, became one of the most influential books in contemporary political philosophy.

Its point of departure reaches back to Hegel — to the master-slave dialectic we discussed here yesterday. A human being is not a self-enclosed subject; to constitute himself as a person he needs others to recognise him in particular ways.

Carrying that idea into the theory of modern society, Honneth distinguishes three distinct forms of recognition.

Love. Being seen and valued in close relationships. Its correlate is self-confidence — the capacity to trust one's own needs and feelings.

Legal respect. Being acknowledged before the law as an equal bearer of rights. Its correlate is self-respect.

Social esteem. Having one's contribution counted as valuable by society. Its correlate is a sense of self-worth.

The strength of the theory lies in this threefold division, because each form has its own characteristic violation: mistreatment, the denial of rights, and humiliation. And each violation gives rise to a different kind of struggle.

Why humiliation is a political question#

The real upshot of Honneth's framework is that a person's humiliation or exclusion is not merely a psychological problem. It is a moral and political one.

On this reading, social struggles are not only about the sharing out of resources. People are also fighting over the answers to three questions:

Do you see me? Do you accept me as an equal? Is what I contribute worth anything?

The theory has proved illuminating for women's movements, for labour movements and for the struggles of minorities over rights. But it would be misleading to reduce it to what is now called identity politics.

For Honneth, recognition is a wider concept, one that explains the basic structure of a person's relation to society. The devaluing of a worker's labour, the exclusion of a citizen from decision-making, the denigration of a group's culture, the failure to treat an individual as an equal before the law — these apparently different situations may point to one and the same underlying problem.

“Freedom cannot be achieved alone”#

In Honneth's later work the concept of social freedom moved to the centre.

Modern liberal thought largely defines freedom as the individual's being left alone by others. Honneth argues that this is not enough: certain forms of freedom can be realised only with other people.

Democratic freedom is the clearest case. No one can be democratic on his own. The formation of a political will requires communication, mutual recognition and collective decision.

On this understanding, “I” and “we” are not opposites. Some forms of freedom become possible only inside a “we”.

The inference is a striking one in view of today's democratic crises. If democracy amounts to nothing more than the ballot box, and if citizens do not regard one another as equal political subjects, then democratic life weakens even where the institutions formally remain standing.

Now it is labour's turn#

The theme of Honneth's most recent work is working life.

The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship — in German Der arbeitende Souverän — reopens the relationship between the world of work and democracy.

The book's thesis is that relations at work are not simply a matter of economic production. Workplaces may play a part in how people develop democratic habits and learn what a shared life demands of them — or they may not.

The question here is a practical one. A person who all day long is party to no decision, whose voice is not heard and whose labour goes unseen, is nevertheless expected to be a democratic subject at the ballot box in the evening. Honneth asks whether that expectation is realistic.

The book takes up the relation between democratic participation and a fair, transparent division of labour.

One question in three states#

Honneth's half-century can be read as the transformation of a single question.

• The 1990s: why do people struggle for recognition?
• The 2010s: under what social conditions can a person be free?
• Today: how do working life and institutions make democratic citizenship possible?

In all three the same move is at work: thinking about freedom not as an individual space secured by the state or by law, but through the quality of the relations people form with one another.

The objections#

Honneth's theory has not gone uncontested.

The main objection concerns how far the concept of recognition can carry the explanation of social conflict. Some critics argue that the demand for recognition can itself take exclusionary forms — that one group's search for recognition may turn into the exclusion of another.

A second objection is aimed at his growing reliance on Hegel in recent years. An approach resting on a historical and normative reconstruction of social freedom, it is asked, may not adequately account for the material dimensions of social relations: property, capital, class. Nancy Fraser's long-running argument with Honneth is the best-known instance of this line: for Fraser, recognition cannot stand in for redistribution.

Honneth's reply is that the two are not opposed. Distributive regimes themselves rest on a hierarchy of values.

Why read him#

Honneth's relevance gathers into a simple question:

What is it that actually makes a person free?

A higher income? More legal rights? The state's leaving him alone? Or being acknowledged by the society he lives in as a valuable, equal and respected subject?

Honneth does not choose among these. In his framework, freedom, justice and recognition cannot be prised apart.

That is why his theory places humiliation, invisibility, devaluation and the stripping of dignity from labour alongside economic inequality, as part of the problem of justice.

His contribution, perhaps, comes to one sentence: justice is as much about how people see one another within a society as it is about how much each of them receives.

In Turkish#

The Struggle for Recognition has been translated into Turkish as Tanınma Uğruna Mücadele. Sosyalizm Fikri (The Idea of Socialism) and Şeyleşme (Reification) are also available in Turkish. No Turkish translation of The Working Sovereign has yet been announced.