What The Hell America!

Honneth is critical of the reductive view, which he associates with Isaiah Berlin, that there are only two kinds of freedom: negative and positive. Negative freedom is usually cast as a right to be “left alone” by the state and by other individuals: as the saying goes, I have a right to swing my fist until it encounters your nose. Positive freedom is more complex and related to the idea of self-determination. On a positive conception of freedom, I am free if I act according to reasons that I have “personally held to be appropriate” rather than for reasons that I feel have been imposed upon me. If I want to express a controversial opinion, but due to fear of social ostracism and marginalization I remain quiet, it’d be odd to say I’d been coerced into silence (i.e., deprived of negative freedom). But I may have internalized reasons for acting that are not the ones I would act on under conditions more conducive to self-realization, i.e, conditions of greater positive freedom.

Honneth thinks fostering both negative and positive freedom for all is important for a just society. In his lucid The Idea of Socialism (2016), Honneth defends the socialist ideal while chastising some earlier socialists for failing to recognize the value of negative freedoms, both in themselves and as a necessary basis for democratic socialism. Nevertheless, he contends, negative and positive freedom by themselves are inadequate. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth argues we need to recognize a third concept of liberty: social freedom. Social freedom is realized through our participation in a community that respects our autonomy. Drawing on Hegel’s description of “objective freedom,” Honneth defines social freedom as

a third model of freedom . . . subjecting the objective sphere of reality to the criterion of freedom. Not only must individual intentions be developed without any external influence, but the external, social reality, must be able to be conceived as being free of all heteronomy and compulsion.

The idea of social freedom has more than a little in common with the better-known republican ideal of nondomination, though Honneth is critical of aspects of republicanism. Republicans argue a person cannot be truly free, even if one is left alone, if they remain subject to the arbitrary will of another. Similarly, the ideal of social freedom implies that, even if I enjoy extensive liberties to do as I wish, they are fickle if I don’t also possess political agency to protect them. Without such agency, someone else might simply decide to restrict or eliminate my liberties with little difficulty.

A classic expression of the link between negative freedom and social freedom can be seen in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and the other authors of course begin by stressing individual’s “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Typically these are associated with the negative concept of liberty. But the founders also believed that to “secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.” Abolishing a government and instituting a new one that respects individual rights would be a paradigmatic exercise of social freedom in a twofold sense. First, it entails abolishing the old tyrannical mode of government through revolutionary agitation. Second, it also involves creating, ideally, a new kind of society where social freedom will be secured on a permanent basis.

Honneth thinks there are three sets of theoretical “resources” for critiquing this state of affairs. The first is the classic Hegelian-Marxist notion of “estrangement” — the idea that the labor of workers is estranged by being bought and sold in the marketplace, turning them into something “thinglike.” Honneth acknowledges there are many difficulties in elaborating this idea, but endorses the Marxist view that work should elevate and help develop individuals’ capacities rather than objectify them.

Second, Honneth appeals to a liberal and republican notion of “autonomy.” In the workplace, individuals are often subjected to domineering forms of coercion and control. Indeed, Marx himself argued as much in Capital Volume I, noting how cherished liberal values of freedom and equality ended at the factory door. Honneth commends the resurgence of interest in this idea by liberal philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and contemporary republicans, affirming the “demand for the absence of paternalism and arbitrary rule in the sphere of social labour.”

The third resource is what Honneth calls “democracy” and is aligned with the defense of social freedom more generally. Honneth stresses that this is different from the republican notion of nondomination. For Honneth, the republican idea of freedom is in some ways just a more sophisticated iteration of the negative concept of freedom, recognizing how political agency is a prerequisite for individuals to be free from the domination of another. This is obviously important, since workers deserve a degree of “autonomy” in the workplace. But Honneth holds that his notion of democracy is richer. In the workplace, it aligns with the positive idea that workers should be collectively self-determining, and that this is an “intrinsic good, namely the greatest possible and most effective participation of all members of a society in the process of democratic self-determination.” This kind of democracy is required to ensure that the “social reality” of the workplace itself is “free of heteronomy and compulsion.”

This ideal is rather abstract, and Honneth doesn’t do as much as he could to concretize it. Partially for this reason, how exactly Honneth’s idea of democracy differs from republican freedom is at times unclear. He does mention worker cooperatives as approximating the ideal of social freedom in the workplace. In well-functioning cooperatives, workers are less estranged from their labor and from each other, since they are able to exercise more of their diverse capacities. They enjoy more autonomy, since they are not subjected to the dictates of unelected and unaccountable bosses, and often enjoy more rights to voice opinions and robust protections against poor treatment. And cooperatives are more democratic since their workers actively participate in decisions that impact them and have a say in who manages them. Honneth thinks cooperative principles should be extended more broadly, including into the family, where women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid household labor.

Honneth is unlikely to ever be considered one of the “sexy” critical theorists, like his Frankfurt School predecessor Theodor Adorno. In The Idea of Socialism, he acknowledges that many have criticized him for being insufficiently radical and seeks to answer that by offering a careful reconstruction and defense of twenty-first-century socialism. That project continues in The Working Sovereign. But it is unlikely it will help Honneth shed accusations of being overly removed from the realm of political practice. Part of this is a matter of style rather than substance. Like that of his mentor Jürgen Habermas, Honneth’s writing is hyper-scholarly and lumbering. His arguments are well reasoned, in no small part because they are filled with qualifications. It’s the kind of writing and thinking that encourages careful intellectual reflection, but hardly serves as a passionate call to arms for political activism.

But the more substantial issue is the Honneth’s failure to theorize about economic power in a sufficiently concrete way. Honneth is undoubtedly aware of the ways in which the ethical life of the community can be distorted by the reification and domination imposed by capitalism. He rightly criticizes older leftists in The Idea of Socialism for failing to take into account how important features of liberal democracy offset that — for instance, by securing rights to freedom to speak and criticize. But the nature of capitalism as a global system of “dull compulsion” is largely occluded in his work, which like Hegel’s remains too focused on the state. For one thing, it is unclear how we could bring about and sustain more democratic workplaces on a large scale without a broader, democratic coordination of the economy at a national and international level — workplace democracy by itself does not address the systemic threats to workers’ freedom and well-being associated with the private, profit-driven allocation of investment. This is something Honneth has not theorized comprehensively.

Nonetheless, The Working Sovereign once again demonstrates Honneth’s masterful command of his subject matter. He convincingly argues that our societies will never be truly free so long as people lack a say in determining the conditions under which they labor, at home or in the workplace. Connected to his broader project, Honneth is also persuasive in his contention that, as long as this freedom is denied in these and other social spheres, the ethical life of our society becomes diminished and unstable. We cease to be a “we” for all intents and purposes — producing a dangerous situation of atomization that helps antisocial tendencies and reactionary ideologies of racism, sexism, and the like to flourish.