Struggles for Moral Redemption

Abstract

From his earliest writings Axel Honneth has sought to widen and deepen the normative ground of critical theory in order to extend the remit of intersubjectivity to labour. Honneth thus rejects Habermas’s abandonment of labour to the ‘non-normative’ system in favour of reformulating workers’ struggles in normative terms. Nevertheless, Honneth’s alternative to Habermas’ communicative paradigm is restricted to the latter’s culturally bound account of moral agency. Thus in his work on ‘struggles for recognition’ Honneth largely concedes the diremption of ‘morality’ from ‘materiality’ to the detriment of the latter’s emancipatory potential. Honneth then compensates for the lack of substance that results from this bifurcated account of modernity by grounding his own version of ‘undamaged intersubjectivity’ in an underlying ‘philosophical anthropology’. To this extent, Honneth, like Marx and Habermas before him, grounds critical theory, not in the struggles of participants to redeem the normative promise of modernity, but in a social ontology that the latter is tasked to realize.