Interview

Philosophy and Social Criticism

39(2) 209–221
Recognition and Critical ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:

Theory today: An interview sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0191453712470361
psc.sagepub.com
with Axel Honneth

Gonçalo Marcelo
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract
In dialogue with his interlocutor, Axel Honneth summarizes the way his work on recognition has
unfolded over the past two decades. While he has retained his principal insights, some important
parts of his theory have changed. He comments that if he were to rewrite The Struggle for
Recognition today, he would focus more on institutions and the historicization of recognition
patterns. He clarifies his stance on some contemporary controversial issues, including the crisis
of capitalism, gay marriage, and his quarrel with Peter Sloterdijk. Finally, he sheds some light on
topics much discussed within Critical Theory, such as the relation between theory and praxis
and the possibility of politicizing recognition, and on lesser-known aspects of his theory, namely,
the relationship between his work and literature.

Keywords
Crisis, Critical Theory, Axel Honneth, institutions, praxis, recognition, Paul Ricoeur

This interview took place in Lisbon on 9 July 2010. Axel Honneth was in Lisbon to
deliver the closing keynote speech on 10 July at the International Symposium ‘Reading
Ricoeur Once Again: Hermeneutics and Practical Philosophy’. The interview lasted an
hour and was conducted by Gonçalo Marcelo, who co-organized the symposium.

Reactualizing recognition
[Gonçalo Marcelo] Professor Honneth, it is a great pleasure and honor to have you here
at our school. I have been studying your work and writing about it for some years now, so
I long have been waiting for a chance to speak with you.

Corresponding author:
Gonçalo Marcelo, Centro de História da Cultura, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Avenida de Berna 26,
1069-061, Lisboa, Portugal.
Email: goncalomarcelo@gmail.com
210 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

You are one of these rare thinkers whom people around the world have read and dis-
cussed. You are, I dare say, the keeper of the flame of the Critical Theory tradition.
You recently had your Festschrift,1 a great honor, which reminds us that your work
has attained classical status. However, your work has also undergone intellectual devel-
opment. I would like you now to look back at your work over the past decades. You
started, in The Critique of Power2 analysing the possible connections between Foucault
and Critical Theory, and you later developed, in your seminal book The Struggle for
Recognition,3 a renewal of Hegel’s notion of recognition. Your most recent books turned
to new, different directions, such as the concept of reification4 and the pathologies of
reason,5 to quote your titles. You have also been debating theories of justice, Rawlsian
or otherwise, as we will be hearing tomorrow in your talk on the limits of proceduralism.
My question is, if you were to re-write The Struggle for Recognition today, what
would you change? How has your research on recognition changed in the last few years?
[Axel Honneth] This is a very good but complicated question. I think I have never
thought about it in that way. You are right that there have been many developments since
I finished The Struggle for Recognition, and I would make some relatively technical cor-
rections. I would try to keep the spirit of the book, which means to take inspiration from
the early Hegel in order to develop a kind of social theory. I would keep the idea that we
should look at societies as being somewhat organized around certain patterns of recog-
nition. But I would try to avoid an anthropological misunderstanding. In the book I have
a certain tendency to say that there are three stable forms of recognition which are uni-
versal. The book has a certain ambivalence about this. I could be much clearer in saying
that the spheres of recognition are historically developed. That would be, I think, the
main correction. Briefly put, I would try to historicize the forms and spheres of recog-
nition. Another thing I have learned is to use the concept of recognition more clearly for
the purposes of building a social theory. I would be clearer about the interdependence
between recognition and institutions, which is not in the book. These would be the two
main corrections.
So, on the one hand, there would be no anthropological, never-changing core. On the
other hand – and you also wrote a book on the reactualization of Hegel’s philosophy of
right6 – you would pay closer attention to institutions and perhaps to the way liberty can
unfold in institutions. Is that correct?
Yes.
Can you tell us more about these changes?
I would keep a certain anthropological idea, which is, let’s say, a constitutive formal con-
cept of recognition, namely, that human beings depend on social forms of recognition in
order to develop an identity and to gain a certain understanding and a sufficient form of
self-relation. I would keep that. We cannot think of human beings as not being dependent
on some form of recognition. If they let go of all forms of social recognition, in whatever
form it can come about, they have some difficulty in their own self-development. This is
the anthropological intuition.
I also think I would be much more historical about the different forms in which this
recognition can be established, in the different forms of relationship in which it can be
instantiated. In the book I have a certain tendency to say that there are three forms of
recognition: love, respect and social esteem. And sometimes I mention that these are the
Marcelo 211

forms in which recognition appears in the modern world. But I would be much more
explicit in stating this, as we don’t have good reasons to say that in pre-modern societies
we had these three forms of recognition. I make this point much clearer in my debate
with Nancy Fraser.7 This would be the first correction.
The other correction has to do with institutions. I don’t believe that in The Struggle for
Recognition we can find the idea of the institutions of recognition. But I do think that the
forms of recognition are institutionalized as forms of social practices in a society, and I devel-
oped this idea only subsequently, by reading the later Hegel where you see a much clearer
connection between these two aspects. I also undertook many other readings in social theory,
and at some point it became clearer to me that even authors like Talcott Parsons have a certain
intuition about the existence of institutions of recognition, such as the family. Already for
Parsons the family is an institution of recognition. This means that this institution can only
survive when the people who are its members are enacting forms of recognition.
This is quite interesting, because from what you’re saying it seems that the sphere of
recognition that would be more thoroughly revised would be the most fundamental one,
that is, the sphere of love.
Yes, exactly.
In The Struggle for Recognition, the sphere of recognition that would be the more
anthropological one, that is, the one less subject to change, was the sphere of love. Later,
in your debate with Nancy Fraser, you said that there could be some interaction between
love and legal relations. So we can also have progress in the inter-subjective relations of
love.
Yes, this is part of my new book.8 What became clear to me is that we have at least
two different ways in which the patterns of recognition change. The first, and probably
the most interesting one, is internal, which means that institutions or practices of recog-
nition are dependent on some principle, such as love. People who are in these relation-
ships are binding themselves, in their relation to each other, through the principle of love.
They have to incorporate the normative implications, which are inbuilt in the principle of
recognition. But this entails what I sometimes call a certain surplus value, which means
recognition gives people who are in these relationships the opportunity to make other
claims with reference to the same principle.
By this means, the internal praxis of love can change and can even make progress.
The changes in these institutions are the result of struggles in how to understand the nor-
mative implications of the principle. This, for example, is the way love relationships
have developed over the last 200 years. The whole idea that love is a special form of
mutual recognition was not institutionalized before the end of the 18th century. It was
in the Romantic Movement that this idea came up. Before then there were other concepts
of love and of personal, intimate relationships, but with the institutionalization of the
idea of love this specific form of recognition arose. This development has since gener-
ated a number of struggles for recognition, in the sense of struggles over and about how
to understand the implications of what it means to love someone. These kinds of devel-
opments give a certain dynamic to the different fields of recognition. This is one of the
ways the institution of recognition may change.
The other way is that it can be influenced by other institutions of recognition, as, for
example, by legal respect. This is a development that is very clearly described in certain
212 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

sociological theories. Consider that the law intervenes in love relationships by establish-
ing new criteria, by introducing certain necessities of legal respect, as, for example, when
the law recognizes and penalizes the act of rape in marriage.
Or domestic violence.
Yes, or domestic violence. These are very good examples. One pattern of recognition
can invade another.

Theory and praxis

We are today faced, in many countries, with a social situation that is very hard to
address, partly because of economic and financial causes inherent in our capitalist soci-
eties. I will not say that our situation today is the same as it was in the ’30s, when the
Institut für Sozialforschung was created, but I think there are some similarities, too.
What is the role for the philosopher or the social theorist amidst all of this? What are
we supposed to do?
With respect to this question I probably follow, at least in a broad way, some of
Habermas’ ideas. I would say that the division of labor establishes the difference
between the role of the theoretician and the role of the citizen. The role of theory
should be to provide as good explanations as possible for these developments and espe-
cially explanations for their unintended consequences so that we can understand the
specific pattern of the crisis and the way it unfolds, as well as its effects at different
levels. This is the task of theory. A good Critical Theory, I would say, should be able
to try to provide these explanations. This was the case, I believe, with early Frankfurt
theory. I don’t think they succeeded in all aspects, but at least they tried. They tried to
understand what was happening within Germany and within the western capitalist
countries in the ’30s. They had one main question, which organized their whole per-
spective, namely, why didn’t the proletariat become a revolutionary class? I think that
in order to conduct such an analysis, you need organizing questions. Because when you
are doing Critical Theory you’re not doing ordinary social theory. There has to be a
constitutive question in which you are interested. Foucault would say you need a pro-
blematic, that is, you need an issue around which to organize your research. For the
early Frankfurt theorists it was the question I’ve named. Today one leading question
would be: why is the crisis we’re having today in western capitalist societies not lead-
ing to higher forms or higher degrees of social protest? It is surprising. If you take the
case of Germany – which probably stands out since we have had in the past 10 or 20
years permanent cuts in our social welfare program – the gap between poor and rich is
growing, but we have at the same time an increased de-politicization. This is an orga-
nizing question. It is very difficult to understand. If we compare this situation to the
one we had 40 years ago, where the degree of politicization was very high, we are sim-
ply surprised by the degree of de-politicization we have now. So the question would be:
how is social integration possible today? The answer would have to be sought after in
what Luc Boltanski calls the new spirit of capitalism.9 Obviously, this new kind of neo-
liberal capitalism is able to generate ethical ideals by which it motivates people to
cooperate. That is the problematic, I think, which would have to be explained and to
be solved by Critical Theory today.
Marcelo 213

I’m pleased that you spoke about politics and politicization because I wanted to pose
some questions on that topic. Your work is sometimes depicted as an ‘ethics of recogni-
tion’ that draws on recognition at a somewhat anthropological level, even though we
already saw here today how your perspective here has changed. I recall the end of The
Struggle for Recognition, where you decline to assume which specific kind of society will
attain the telos of granting due recognition to all its members. However, some commen-
tators, such as Jean Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault,10 propose that we ‘poli-
ticize’ your ethics of recognition. This leads us to think that your theory can actually be
used to fight oppression. What do you think about a possible use of your theory in this
way?
I would find it misleading to say that my theory is an ethics of recognition. That
would be too one-sided. The whole idea I have is not a moral intuition, which some
people have, that what is wrong today is that people do not recognize each other suffi-
ciently. For me, that would be like an empty moralism, and it would not be something I
would defend. In that respect, I see myself coming much more from the Hegelian–
Marxist tradition, where you take up already existing accepted norms, so there are
no empty norms that appear to you and that you feel should be realized. Instead, we
are interested in why certain already accepted and institutionalized norms do not mobi-
lize people, are misunderstood, are very vague, are struggled for in different directions,
and so on. I would say that the core of my approach would be more a social theory with
a certain moral-practical intention. The question of how to politicize it is very difficult.
I would say it is not directly the task of the theoretician. I am very optimistic, and it was
one of the bases of all my intuitions that people in their ordinary struggles are already
always taking up the principles of recognition, which are institutionalized in certain
spheres. So they are already speaking the language of recognition. We do not have
to come, as theoreticians, and tell them that they should take it up. They normally have
it. Probably what the theoretician can do is to make the issue more explicit, make it
clearer to them. This approach would be more indirect, I would say. But I wouldn’t mix
up the role of the theoretician with the role of the political organizer. The political
fighter or organizer, the political person, is always an enormously important figure
in our present societies. And I think this person should be an even more prominent fig-
ure. But, in contrast to the communist tradition, in which the party leader was meant to
be the theoretician, let’s say, the Lukacsian communist tradition, I would defend the
separation of the two roles.
My question was on the grounds of principle, even if just as a hypothesis: namely,
what would you think of a politicization of your theory in some sort, whichever way that
might be? I’ll mention a more direct example. Let’s imagine a society where a certain
minority isn’t recognized according to one of its claims, and let’s say that this claim has
a certain universal validity, as it is tied up with notions of equality and social rights. The
people who are struggling for that right are, in some way, fighting for recognition. We’ve
seen the example recently here in Portugal of the struggle for the legalization of gay
marriage. If people in this sort of situation – social actors having a valid claim and
struggling for it – end up defending their cause by the mediation of a theory such as
yours, even if you’re not directly responsible for it, what would you think of that use?
Wouldn’t that be good, in terms of moral progress?
214 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

It’s complicated. It is a very thin line between what I take as being adequate for Crit-
ical Theory and what I take to be the too direct political involvement of theory. I would
put it this way: I agree that in spelling out the normative implications of already institu-
tionalized spheres of recognition we, as theoreticians, have to try to give the best possible
interpretations of them in terms of moral progress. This means that we have to take up, in
our own theory, the perspective of moral progress. And this belongs to theory. It’s not
coming from outside. This is probably hard to defend, but I would say that theory, if
it can defend a certain concept of moral progress, it is not only allowed but even asked
to defend, in its own language, the higher standards of recognition and therefore the best
practices of recognition. In that sense, I would say that even in theory one could defend
the whole idea of gay marriage, because one could explain why the whole concept of
love does not allow the legal exclusion of certain sexual minorities. That’s theory. It
is something else to invoke that theory in a political manner. Then we are changing the
role from the theoretician to the citizen. Therefore, the line is quite thin between these
two forms. The first is still Critical Theory, the second one is a kind of politics, which
you are always allowed to do, but always in the role of the citizen, no longer in the role
of the theoretician.
Speaking about politics, what is the genesis of your political conscience? Could you
tell us a little bit how you became interested at an early age in politics?
Yes. It took me a long time, I’ll have to say. I come from an area in Germany that was
its industrial center. I grew up as the son of a medical doctor, in an area where 60 to 70
per cent of manual workers were employed in the coal-mining industry. Looking back
now, I think that it was in high school when I first became aware of what I would later
try to explain with the help of the concept of the struggle for recognition. There was a
certain upward mobility, as a whole generation was coming to high school for the first
time. Those members of the working class, who for the first time came to the high school,
felt a certain shame, due to their own class position, which was extremely interesting to
notice. But I noticed that pre-theoretically, let’s say. It didn’t mobilize me directly.
Shortly before the student movement, when I was still in high school, I was strongly
opposed to such movements because I thought they were too radical, too empty in their
goals. I never believed in the proletarian revolution. After I left high school I became a
member of the youth organization of the Social Democrats in that area. This came all of a
sudden, as I wasn’t very politicized before. But it was clearly the opening up of a kind of
cultural struggle against my own class background. Not that I didn’t love my parents, but
I disliked very strongly the empty bourgeois culture in which I grew up. So it was cul-
turally that I came into politics. I was also mobilized by rock music.
Bob Dylan?
Yes, Bob Dylan and reading novels. So I came to politics through cultural experi-
ences. From that time on I tried not to lose contact with political organizations, but that
contact became harder as time went by. I left the Social Democratic Party when I went to
Berlin in 1972, because it was extremely bureaucratized at that time in Berlin. I left it and
became a member of a small socialist group. Much later I became interested in the Green
Party, and when they invited me to give a speech I tried to influence them on the concept
of justice. I never became a member of a party again, though, so I have no political
affiliations.
Marcelo 215

The exemplary role of literature

You were speaking about novels, and I have a small confession to make. I discovered a
very good novel from a citation in your work that perhaps I should have known previ-
ously. I’m talking about Night Train to Lisbon,11 by the Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri
turned author Pascal Mercier. I discovered it from a footnote in Reification.12 I also
discovered Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man13 when reading your remarkable article
on invisibility.14 This leads me to ask: what is the connection between literature and your
own works? Do you find inspiration in literature?
Yes, this is an interesting question. I think I have never talked about that. I have a long
tradition of reading a lot of novels. But this reading was almost always completely dis-
connected from what I was doing in philosophy and sociology. In The Struggle for Rec-
ognition, I do not quote a single novel by which I was inspired. I don’t know why that
changed in later work. It might have had to do with, I have to confess, the influence of
analytical philosophy, because analytical philosophy is often much more open to this
possibility. There are certain philosophers from the analytical tradition – like Bernard
Williams, whom I really admired – who took novels as being phenomenologically the
best description of everyday life. When I became courageous enough to take that per-
spective seriously, I started to read novels or art works in the broad sense, as phenom-
enological testimonies of certain structures of everyday life.
Like Pascal Mercier (Peter Bieri), on the Night Train to Lisbon.
Yes. Peter Bieri, by the way, played a role there. Because he’s a Swiss analytical
philosopher who wrote a book (as a philosopher) on the concept of freedom15 at about
the same time he wrote the novel. There he proposes that we should accept novels to be
the material that a philosopher can take seriously. So, since then, I have done that. I think
that this gives my own writing a certain empirical basis, which I can’t get from empirical
research in sociology because that research is very often too quantitative and not sensi-
tive enough to the nuances in everyday life.
Yes, we should pay attention to the nuances of everyday life. You, for example, are
very attentive to the situations of suffering. In your books, we always find incarnated sub-
jects, some of them who suffer. We are consequently inclined to diagnose our societies
against the backdrop of a somewhat normative standpoint that is showing us the situa-
tion and telling us: ‘You cannot tolerate this!’ We should strive for a society whose mem-
bers are duly recognized!
My question is, why do you think you are so sensitive to suffering? I know these are
matters of justice, but you seem to have a certain solicitude, to use one of Ricoeur’s
notions. If I could ask you to make a small Selbstdarstellung, do you think you can
explain how your attentiveness to suffering situations came to the fore?
It’s hard to say. It’s always hard to diagnose oneself. It might have to do with the sit-
uation I was talking about before. I think I became interested in suffering already in high
school. Partly because I was myself suffering from school! I was an extremely bad stu-
dent. I had to repeat a class, and I just made it to the Abitur [graduation from high
school]. So I was suffering from the institution. But what was much more important
to me were the nuances of suffering in those friends of mine who came from the poor,
proletarian environment. There are many faces suffering can take. They were suffering
216 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

simply from the fact of not being able to invite me to their homes because they were
ashamed of the poverty there and the absence of culture. Also, my first readings of Amer-
ican novels or plays – for instance, the Death of a Salesman16 – have to do with those
experiences. You might remember that play, because there was a cinematic version of
it, a fantastic movie. It depicts the suffering of a father who has lost his job and is
ashamed to tell this to his family. So he is hiding this all the time. He comes back home
as if he still had the job, and he wants to hide the disaster of being without a job. He is
completely ashamed of it but, on the other hand, still tries to escape from the shame. I
became very interested in these forms of suffering. They played an enormous role in the
formation of my interests in the kind of academic training I would undertake.
I also think that there are three key theoretical situations which led me to the whole
idea of the struggle for recognition. One was reading certain historical investigations into
the role of respect in social protests in the proletarian movements of the 1800s.
Like the works of E. P. Thompson?
Yes, E. P. Thompson, Barrington Moore. I was reading these works, and I was very
impressed by them. I thought, this is great, this is what I always thought, that respect
plays a constitutive role. The social actors want to be respected, and that is what it’s all
about. The second key was a small book I read by Richard Sennett,17 the sociologist, on
the injuries of class, which is a fantastic book about Italian immigrants in the USA who
suffered from not being respected to the same degree as ordinary Protestant Americans
were. And then the third key was Hegel. These three influences came together, and led
me to the idea of the struggle for recognition.

Critique and recognition

We now turn to some questions dealing specifically with philosophy. The notion of cri-
tique is fundamental in all post-Kantian philosophy. However, this notion assumes many
different shapes in the works of Hegel, Marx and Adorno. How would you define cri-
tique? Which definition of critique seems to you the better, at both the core theoretical
and practical levels?
There are many discussions revolving around this topic. Let’s just talk about social
critique. I will probably make a distinction between three forms of social critique,
depending on where you want to go. First, we have the idea of normative, external cri-
tique which is, approximately, the Rawlsian understanding of it. You think that you can
develop certain universal norms, universal concepts of justice, and then apply them to the
present, existent society. Then you have the notion of immanent critique, which means
you take up already existing normative beliefs; you believe that these are not realized,
and – this is sometimes the Marxian way of critique – you criticize the existent society
with reference to these somewhat already existing normative beliefs. I am defending a
third model. It would be necessary to show that certain normative ideas and principles
are already institutionalized, which means that they are not only accepted but that they
are somewhat already informing our practices. But at the same time, we are not fully
explaining the normative content of what we are doing. I would call this internal critique.
I am sometimes using the word normative-reconstructive for it because all I am doing
there is to ‘reconstruct normatively’ the principles which we have already accepted.
Marcelo 217

So there are three forms of social critique. But critique, you see, is changing its role and
its meaning in the different fields, depending on how you use it. And there are other uses.
Art critique, for instance, is something completely different. As for me, I am only talking
about social critique.
I can’t resist asking you this question, as some of my work revolves around it. Paul
Ricoeur made a good contribution to the widening of recognition theory with his book, The
Course of Recognition.18 While Ricoeur recognized your tripartite recognition model as
the major contribution to recognition, making you the leading figure of recognition the-
ory in our times, he nevertheless criticized your model as perhaps being too demanding.
He asked: when will each of us feel he or she has been fully recognized? Don’t we risk
arriving at a situation of ‘bad infinity’, where an all-demanding subject would insist on
being recognized in all aspects whatsoever of his or her life? Can’t we have a truce in all
this struggle and perhaps recognize the other before demanding recognition for our-
selves? To be honest, I’m not sure this critique is entirely fair. I think Ricoeur must have
only read The Struggle for Recognition and not your later works, but I must still ask: Do
you think that we could arrive by any other means than struggle at a society where all
members receive due recognition, where there isn’t the attitude of disrespect?
I would say no. But I have a much more positive conception of struggle. When I was
reading Ricoeur I was surprised that he seemed to take struggle as being something very
close to war. The opposition he’s working with is war and peace. This is not how I am
thinking. You see, I take struggle as being an enormously productive force in our human
life-world. And it takes thousands of forms. It starts with the young baby, who is strug-
gling against his or her parents. It’s what’s happening in classrooms in different forms. It
slowly changes the way we understand the principles of recognition, the way we under-
stand ourselves, and it slowly helps to make our societies normatively better. So the first
difference is that I have a productive, positive understanding of struggle. I’m more inter-
ested in the small, everyday forms of struggle and not in the big struggles which are, I
think, what Ricoeur has in mind. The second aspect to which I am opposed is that what
he describes as ‘bad infinity’ I would describe as productive infinity. And in this – in
what concerns the productivity of infinity – I think I must be closer to Derrida than I
am to Ricœur, because I contend that these norms of recognition – be it equality, be it
love – have a normative surplus, an inbuilt normative demand, that we will never really
be able to fully institutionalize. But this means that we as human beings have a perma-
nent demand imposed on ourselves, a demand to make things better. And I don’t see why
that should be considered bad. In that sense, I have another constitutive intuition. I think
that an infinite demand is a productive requirement for us to live our everyday lives in
interaction. The systematic point is that Ricoeur believes that we should think of recog-
nition first as a one-sided act of grace – something like the gift – whereas I think that this
is what comes second. I would always put reciprocal forms of recognition first. This
means that we should understand recognition as something that is happening between
subjects, not strictly from one subject to the other. So recognition is in itself a mutual,
reciprocal interaction.
But I guess the real question here would be: can recognition really be an entirely vol-
untary act, can it stem solely from the subject, or can it come from outside him or her, in
a certain sense?
218 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

It is neither voluntary, nor does it come from without. I would say that our nor-
mal attitude towards other human beings is that we recognize somebody in the
expectation that he or she is recognizing us. And that is so because we belong to
the same species.
That might come from the intuition stemming from the direct, face-to-face contact . . . ?
Yes. This is how the young Heidegger as well as Fichte and Hegel saw it. They have
the intuition that recognition is a mutual process, because both sides are presupposing
that they belong to the same species as rational beings. And therefore, I think that the
voluntary, one-sided gift is another case. It is definitely an enormously important event
of life. But it is not how we should understand recognition.
But perhaps that process of voluntary recognition plays a role, too. For example, in
the cases of invisibility, when we realize that by not attending to the other what we are
doing is something wrong from a normative standpoint, then we start to seek actively to
recognize the other. There’s a voluntary aspect of recognition in that process, isn’t
there?
Yes, sure. I don’t want to deny that. But even in that case of the voluntary act of rec-
ognition, the question would be whether it is done only under the presumption of a
mutual recognition.

Intersubjectivity, pathologies of reason, reification and

technology
I think we agree. I want to come back to the aspects of normal, everyday behavior now
because I find your critiques here very sharp and interesting. You focus a lot on the daily
behavior of people, in order to show how apparently small gestures of ‘normal’ behavior
can in fact contain deviations from the somewhat normative standpoint and can have
grave consequences. This is the case, for instance, as we have just said, of not attending
to the other, in the case of invisibility. You also speak, at the end of your book on
Reification, about possible reifying behavior (in this case, the constructivist kind of
behavior) by people who seem to be constantly acting, apparently changing their identity
according to what they think other persons’ expectations are at some given point. You
give two examples: job interviews and social networking. Do you think intersubjective
relationships are impaired by technology? If intersubjective relationships are fundamen-
tal, what are the mutations they are forced to undergo when they are mediated by tech-
nologies like social networking?
That is too big a question! It has different sides. In the cases I wanted to mention at the
end of Reification, I was interested in the following question: Do the developments, the
structural changes in our present society, invite us to take on a constructivist view of our-
selves? I think there is a certain tendency here, especially with certain patterns that come
along with neo-liberal capitalism, which invite us to take that constructivist stance with
respect to ourselves. I don’t know whether I would say that technology is responsible for
this altogether. But I guess that certain developments in the media are playing here a sim-
ilar role, even if they don’t intend these consequences, because probably nobody wants
them. By having certain technological forms and certain interactive media like the inter-
net or some televised reality shows, which are the results of the media’s increased
Marcelo 219

publicity of people, there are certain unwanted effects – namely, to encourage attitudes
of self-constructivism. For example, if you take internet dating, there is a certain ten-
dency that goes along with that new medium which almost provokes us to force our-
selves to construct something out of ourselves. I want to be that specific person in the
eye of the other. But, because the other is not present, he or she cannot control that pro-
cess. This is not the normal face-to-face interaction, which normally prevents this con-
structivist attitude. But here, when I’m alone and using the internet for dating, I am
somewhat almost invited to take this position. I try to form myself, and I try to form
my inner experiences in such a way that I think the receiver wants to perceive it. In that
sense, yes, I would say there is a certain danger that goes along with new forms of media
that increase that kind of attitude.
So the problem is not of technology in and of itself but of certain uses of it. Do you
have any other examples of reifying behavior besides the ones you mentioned in your
book?
The strength of the book resides in the fact that if you take reification literally, and I
think you should, there are very few cases of it. Normally, people do not reify other peo-
ple. If you think that the biggest institution of reification was slavery, and that it assumed
that people who are treated solely as means don’t have a soul, this happens very sel-
domly. Even if you take another person as a mean for your ends, you want to be dealing
with a human being, not a human object. So there are relatively few cases of real inter-
subjective reification. I think the danger of reification is much bigger in what concerns
the self-relationship. There are probably a lot of developments going on in that area
today. This has to do with certain structural changes in the ideology of present-day capit-
alism. It is a capitalism of recognition, in the ideological sense. This capitalism is work-
ing through an affirmative, albeit artificial, promise of recognition. It promises
recognition for people in different forms. It is promised by the capitalist market, namely
by certain capitalist enterprises, that if you become a staff member or something of that
sort, you’ll be recognized as part of the company. So, recognition plays an enormous role
in this ideology! This is new, and it has a relation with self-reifying behavior. I think
there is a connection between this ideological development of capitalism today and the
tendency of self-reification.
You have this interesting notion of the pathologies of reason. Could you tell us what
they are, and which ones affect us the most in our time and age?
I think that this is a fundamental, constitutive concept for Critical Theory. Its insight is
that by means of the structural organization of societies, some of our rational capacities
are restricted and others are invited to grow. This is the whole idea behind the notion of
instrumental reason. It is a pathology of reason because a certain structure of our society
privileges only one dimension of our rationality. I think that it is enormously important
for someone in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory to defend that
concept, which means to always be interested in how the present structure of our soci-
eties privileges and disprivileges certain dimensions of our rationality. Of course a lot
of this assessment depends on how you understand rationality. But it is enormously
important to have that intuition. This means to try to understand in what sense the
neo-liberal forms of capitalism are encouraging or blocking certain dimensions of
our rationality. What I said before about the increase in the attitudes of
220 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2)

self-constructivism could mean that what is really privileged is a certain artificial ration-
ality, namely, that we can create our own inner experiences, that we can create our own
relations to others.

Critical Theory today and its influence on society

I have two final questions for you. I must say I truly appreciate your work and surely
believe that the Critical Theory tradition is alive, well and productive. There have been
some provocative debates about it, though. First, then, what motivated your recent
polemical debate with Sloterdijk on the topic of taxes and tax-spending in Germany? And
finally, would you please also say a bit more about what you are doing in Frankfurt now:
what are the main activities you are undertaking, and how can we, given that we are situ-
ated on the periphery of Critical Theory, learn more about these activities?
There was this article by Sloterdijk in a leading German newspaper,19 which pro-
voked me to such an extent that I thought I had to react.20 I was astonished that no one
was reacting because it was an article where someone who has a certain intellectual
capacity and who plays a certain intellectual role in Germany–someone who is gaining
international respect in certain countries–was seriously making the proposal that the rich
should stop paying taxes, because to have to pay taxes is shaming for them. And this was,
I must say, the deepest attack on my deepest convictions that I have ever experienced.
Because I always thought, concerning this matter, that the correct understanding was
exactly the opposite of his proposal – namely, that those who are really ashamed are not
those who have to pay taxes but those who are living on welfare. Therefore I provoked
the debate by reacting in a very sharp way. That led to a discussion about taxes in
Germany, which I think is important. The result was interesting, namely, that even most
members of the rich class in Germany don’t deny that they have an obligation to pay
taxes. Even today, some of them mentioned that they thought taxes should be increased.
So it is interesting to realize that in what concerns the subject of taxes the normative sta-
bility in Germany is very high.
As the director of the Institute for Social Research, I always try to influence the pub-
lic, which means in Frankfurt that those who come first are not only the students but ordi-
nary citizens. So what we are doing is having regular discussions, debates and lectures in
the city, not in the university. We are going out to other places like libraries and theaters
in the city, and we present either debates or studies on several topics, such as aspects of
today’s crisis. That’s one way I try to connect theory with the social environment. There
are other activities, too. I try to influence publishers to undertake some translations. I try
to organize series of books. As an editorial member of a few journals,21 I try to encourage
the right topics in those journals, and so on. As intellectuals, we are playing all these
roles at once, and I think we have to play them. We have to take very seriously the fact
that sometimes you are working at your desk, but that many times you are working for
the public, too. You should always try to build bridges toward the public and find the
right ways to inform and to inspire the public and the public debate. These are the instru-
ments I am now using to promote the commitment of Critical Theory to the public.
Professor Honneth, I thank you for this remarkable interview.
Thank you.
Marcelo 221

Notes
I wish to express my gratitude to the Centro de História da Cultura da Universidade Nova de Lis-
boa for having provided the conditions that made this interview possible and to George Taylor
and Todd Mei who helped in the editing process.
1. Sozialphilosophie und Kritik. Axel Honneth zum 60. Geburtstag [Social Philosophy and Cri-
tique: Festschrift for Axel Honneth for his 60th Birthday], ed. Rainer Forst, Martin Hartmann,
Rahel Jaeggi and Martin Saar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009).
2. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K.
Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
3. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J.
Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
4. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
5. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. J. Ingram
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
6. Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, trans. L. Löb
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
7. Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical
Exchange, trans. J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke (London and New York: Verso, 2003).
8. Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit [The Right
to Freedom: Outline of a Democratic Ethics] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011).
9. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliot (London and
New York: Verso, 2005).
10. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, ‘Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recogni-
tion’, Thesis Eleven 88 (February 2007): 92–111.
11. Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon, trans. B. Harshav (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
12. See footnote 4, p. 92.
13. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).
14. Axel Honneth, ‘Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘‘Recognition’’’, The Aristotelian Society
LXXV (supp. vol.) (Bristol: 2001): 111–26.
15. Peter Bieri, Das Handwerk der Freiheit. U¨ber die Entdeckung des eigenen Willens [The Hand-
work of Freedom: On the Discovery of Free Will] (Munich: Hanser, 2001).
16. Arthur Miller, The Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
17. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).
18. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2005).
19. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Die Revolution der gebenden Hand’ [The Revolution of the Giving Hand], The
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13 June 2009), available online @: http://www.faz.net/-00m3x9
20. Axel Honneth, ‘Fataler Tiefssinn aus Karslruhe [Fatal Profundity from Karlsruhe]’, Die Zeit
40 (25 September 2009), available online @: http://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen?
page¼1
21. Axel Honneth is an editorial member of the journals Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie,
European Journal of Philosophy, Constellations and WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift fur
Sozialforschung.