Axel Honneth’s Critical Response to Habermas’s Critique of Marx

Year 2019, Volume: 13 Issue: 2, 155 - 171, 31.12.2019

Anthony Lack

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth have each criticized Marx’s emphasis on human labor as the most fundamental concept in any critical theory of society whose goal is human emancipation. Habermas’s critique resulted in the development of Discourse Ethics, a Neo-Kantian approach to normative criticism and social justice. Discourse Ethics obtains its universal basis by marginalizing the non-rational, such as reactive emotions and various forms of desire for recognition that often underlie and motivate the social criticisms whose aim is human emancipation. I argue that Honneth’s Neo-Hegelian theory of recognition is a productive response to two problems in Habermas’s overly cognitivist and rationalist approach. These are the problem of the role of emotions in moral motivation, on the one hand, and the problem of locating acceptable boundaries between public issues of moral right or justice and private issues of ethical life or well-being. The strengths of Honneth’s approach are clarified through two brief exegeses of classic works in political theory, Peter Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment and Joel Feinberg’s “The Nature and Value of Rights.”

Keywords

Honneth, Habermas, Marx, Hegel, Recognition, Discourse Ethics

References

• Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self. Routledge, 1992.
• Feinberg, Joel. The Nature and Value of Rights. The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 4, no 4, 1970, pp. 243-60.
• Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique, no. 35, 1985, pp. 97-132.
• Habermas, Jürgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press, 1979.
• ---. Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. MIT Press, 1993.
• ---. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1990.
• ---. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press, 1984.
• Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Honneth, Axel. “An Interview with Axel Honneth,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 65, Autumn, 1993, pp. 31-43.
• ---. The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy. SUNY Press, 1995. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Selected Works in Three Volumes. Progress Publishers, 1969.
• Strawson, P. F. Freedom and Resentment. Unwin Hyman, 1974.
• Taylor, Charles. “Language and Society.” Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, MIT Press, 1991.
• ---. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited and introduced by Amy Gutman, Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. Routledge, 1971.