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Marx, Honneth and the Tasks of a Contemporary Critical Theory

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Abstract

In this paper, I consider succinctly the main Marxist objections to Honneth’s model of critical social theory, and Honneth’s key objections to Marx-inspired models. I then seek to outline a rapprochement between the two positions, by showing how Honneth’s normative concept of recognition is not antithetical to functionalist arguments, but in fact contains a social-theoretical dimension, the idea that social reproduction and social evolution revolve around struggles around the interpretation of core societal norms. By highlighting the social theoretical side of recognition, one can outline a model of critical social theory that in fact corresponds to the descriptive and normative features outlined by Marx himself. However, the price of this rapprochement for Honnethian critical theory is a greater emphasis on the division of labour as the central mechanism of social reproduction.

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Notes

  1. See footnote 27.

  2. This article is particularly relevant because in it Honneth makes it clear that he rejects the notion of “social labour” precisely because it is not adequate to the theoretical programme Marx had set himself: to “connect the claims of a theory of emancipation to the goal of an analysis of society”. The conceptuality of recognition is developed as a better way to realise precisely that programme: “a paradigm of recognition … could, in my view, be a worthy successor, on a more abstract level to be sure, of Marx’s paradigm of labour. In it the theory of emancipation and the analysis of society can be connected once more in a theory of action”.

  3. See Fischbach’s own attempt to rejuvenate the category of alienation (2007, 2009b). The French commentators propose an interpretation of the famous manuscripts that is markedly original, insisting particularly on the influence of Feuerbach and Hess, rather than Hegel, on the young Marx (Renault 2008b). Other recent work on the young Marx (Chitty 2009; Brudney 2010; Ikäheimo 2011; Quante 2011) by contrast focus more specifically on the Hegel-Marx relation. See in particular Chitty’s and Renault’s contributions in this issue.

  4. Failure to see Honneth’s transcendental use of the ontology of recognition leads to the misguided criticism that his “monism” is reductive, both in descriptive terms (social theory) and in terms of the concepts for social criticism (Bader 2007).

  5. An influential Marxian interpretation of post-Fordism like the one propounded by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2004), which David Harvey has endorsed, is thus compatible with the Honneth-inspired approach to capitalistic evolutions suggested here (Harvey 2005).

  6. This model can in fact be found in sketches in Honneth’s retrieval of Horkheimer’s concept of “cultural action” (Honneth 1991).

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  1. Philosophy Department, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Jean-Philippe Deranty

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Deranty, JP. Marx, Honneth and the Tasks of a Contemporary Critical Theory. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 745–758 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9407-6

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