Bernstein, J. M. Review of Axel Honneth, THE PATHOLOGIES OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. NDPR (June 2010).

Honneth, Axel. The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory. Trans. Ladislaus Löb. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. What do we want from political philosophy now? The fundamental enterprise of the discipline over the past half century seems to have been normative reassurance: providing vindication of universally binding ethical first principles as they apply to the basic structures regulating human interaction. One patent cost of philosophically securing reassurance has been the methodological necessity of abstracting the political subject from the concrete institutions in fact constitutive of modern life in general: the nuclear family, the capitalist market, and the liberal state. But what if not just the social identity of the modern subject is constituted through these three forms of social practice, but the ethico-political ambitions and meaning of moral modernity are themselves somehow congealed in the way in which these core institutions are articulated with one another? What if the joining of deontology and methodological individualism simultaneously obscures and deforms both the ethical contours of modernity and the way we as modern subjects live out our commitments? What if the methodological orientations of political philosophy in providing normative reassurance effectively alienate us from political reality? According to Axel Honneth, a fierce version of this thought is a premise of Hegel's social theory. Given its emphatic binding of categorial self-reflection to social reality, Hegel's Philosophy of Right (PR) has had a surprisingly insignificant effect on the politico-philosophical self-understanding of the present. Honneth avers that the most evident reasons for this lack of influence are, first, the belief that PR's apparent subordination of the freedom of the individual to the state has antidemocratic consequences; and second, the belief that the structure of Hegel's argument is bound to the conceptual apparatus of his Logic with its commitment to an ontological concept of spirit. Although running the risk of sacrificing what might be the true substance of PR for the sake of a stripped down reconstruction, Honneth's own commitment to what he terms "our own post-metaphysical standards of rationality" (5) leads him to adopt a method of indirect reactualization. Honneth is concerned with unearthing and validating the deep structures of Hegel's argument through which he is able to reposition the atomistic assumptions of social contract theory as practiced by Locke, Kant, and Fichte by folding them back into the dominant institutions of modern life, "those spheres of reciprocal recognition that must be preserved intact because they constitute the moral identity of modern societies" (5). Terming the dominant institutions "spheres of reciprocal recognition" turns Hegel's project into the forerunner to Honneth's own pioneering study, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (1995). Yet, and here is the hermeneutical rub, the theory of recognition does not transparently play the same formative role in PR as it does in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Honneth's philosophical gamble is thus to see if, by adopting an arm's length approach to Hegel's text its core argument can be reconstructed along recognitive lines. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19887.