Journal of Philosophical Research

© Philosophy Documentation Center  ISSN: 1053-8364

doi: 10.5840/jpr2015111653
Online First: November 17, 2015

BEYOND MORALITY AND ETHICAL LIFE:

PRAGMATISM AND CRITICAL THEORY CROSS PATHS

ROBERTO FREGA
INSTITUT MARCEL MAUSS, CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE
SCIENTIFIQUE

ABSTRACT: This article critically examines two central concepts

in normative theory—ethical life and morality—by comparing the
pragmatist approach with that of Critical Theory. This is done by
way of a close scrutiny of Axel Honneth’s reading of the pragma-
tist philosophers John Dewey and George H. Mead. This focus on
Honneth’s use of pragmatism serves as a port of entry to provide
a comparative analysis of pragmatism and Critical Theory’s ap-
proaches to normativity. As I intend to show, Honneth’s troubles
with making sense of the pragmatist approach to normativity are
a litmus test of some persistent ambiguities at the heart of his
understanding of normativity. I set the stage by reconstructing
Honneth’s reading of Dewey (§ II) and Mead (§ III). That will pro-
vide the background against which to set up a comparison between
the pragmatist conception of normativity and that of Critical Theory,
with a view to assessing their relative validity. I then relate Honneth’s
reading of the pragmatists to his own philosophical project and to
the important place occupied in it by the same dualism of ethical
life and morality (§ IV).

I. INTRODUCTION:
PRAGMATISM AND CRITICAL THEORY CROSS PATHS
In recent years we have seen a trend toward a merging of themes and concepts drawn
from pragmatism and Critical Theory.1 This began with a series of published and unpub-
lished exchanges that Jürgen Habermas had with Richard Bernstein: the conversation
prompted Habermas to initiate the pragmatic and detranscendentalizing turn pursued
much later by Honneth, and now several scholars are exploring ways to fruitfully bridge
these two traditions.2 My aim in this paper will be to move this fruitful conversation one
 Roberto Frega

step forward by looking at Honneth’s use and assessment of pragmatist themes.

Although in this paper I will not be concerned with the symmetric question of
what pragmatism could learn from Critical Theory,3 I take this to be an equally
important and stimulating theme, one that has partially been explored notably with
respect to the use pragmatism could or should make of concepts such as that of
recognition. My focus in this paper will be on normativity, as both pragmatism and
Critical Theory rely on a sophisticated understanding of what normativity is. This
is a broad issue I address through the lens of Honneth’s reading of the pragmatists,
analyzing his strategy so as to bring out what I consider to be an unresolved ten-
sion in Critical Theory, that is, its commitment to the dualism between ethical life
and morality, conceived as separate normative spheres. Although my point may
appear to be mostly critical, my purpose is constructive, for I hope to go some way
toward showing that these two traditions can benefit a great deal from each other
by a process of mutual learning. If we can start up this dialogue, I submit, we will
see how pragmatism can help critical theory free itself from a dualist theoretical
assumption that is not only flawed and implausible but also of little use, or so I
intend to show.
This is how the discussion will unfold. In the next two sections I take up at
some length Honneth’s reading of Dewey and Mead, pointing out what I believe
to be wrong with that reading, and I accordingly restore a more accurate under-
standing of Dewey and Mead’s views about normativity. In so doing I ask what it
was that led Honneth to so misread both authors, arguing that what in either case
stands in the way of an adequate appreciation of the pragmatists is an understand-
ing of normativity shaped by the assumption of a dualism between ethical life and
morality, an assumption that Honneth makes but the pragmatists reject. That will
provide the background against which to set up a comparison between the pragma-
tist conception of normativity and that of Critical Theory, with a view to assessing
their relative validity. Then, in section IV, I relate Honneth’s reading to his own
philosophical project and to the important place occupied in it by the aforesaid
dualism. Having done that, I can point out what is wrong with this dualism, and I
argue at the same time that the pragmatist account of normativity takes us farther
than Honneth’s for leaving it out, adopting in its place an account of normativity as
practice. This latter account, I suggest, can put Critical Theory in a better position
to explain normativity, and I conclude by showing that such a possibility can be
found in Honneth’s reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

II. ETHICAL AND PROCEDURAL THEMES IN

JOHN DEWEY’S MORAL THEORY
II.A. DEWEY’S SUPPOSEDLY UNRESOLVED TENSION
Axel Honneth’s involvement with the pragmatists dates back to at least Struggle
for Recognition (1992).4 But it was only in 1998 that Honneth specifically keyed
in on John Dewey, with two articles that showed how central a role this author
played in Honneth’s own philosophical project at the time, while also testifying
to the continuing relevance of this tradition for Critical Theory.5 In the first of
the two articles—Honneth (1998b)—Dewey’s political philosophy is actually
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

extolled as the most promising and satisfying attempt to date at developing a

theory of democracy. Indeed, Honneth contends that Dewey managed to overcome
the apparently irreconcilable opposition between communitarianism and liberal-
ism—the former republican in outlook, the latter proceduralist—an opposition
which plagues contemporary political theory, and which even Critical Theory, so
Honneth argues, had until then been unable to work out. In the article, Honneth
sought to demonstrate that Dewey “simultaneously conceives of reflexive proce-
dures and political community,” combining “the idea of democratic deliberation
with the notion of community ends.” It is Honneth’s persuasion that for this
reason “Dewey’s theory of democracy contains a third alternative to the liberal
understanding of politics” (Honneth 1998b, 765), an alternative clearly superior
to its competitors.
In that very year, Honneth published an article calling attention to what he de-
scribed as “an unresolved tension in John Dewey’s moral theory.”6 Although equally
appreciative of Dewey’s thought, this article in part contradicted the thesis advanced
in the other, by denying that Dewey can overcome the very dualism treated in that
earlier article, now reframed in terms of the German idealist categories of morality
and ethical life. In both articles, Honneth summarizes his discussion by depicting
pragmatism as a tradition struggling with the central philosophical problem of
modernity, by which is meant the tension between a post-metaphysical and histo-
ricized conception of norms and a post-conventional conception of legitimacy, the
former understanding norms in a historicized, naturalized way as conventional and
context-bound, the latter understanding legitimacy as needing context-transcending
grounds sought in rational-procedural forms of justification. To be sure, I believe
Honneth is quite accurate in his remark that the pragmatist tradition has struggled
with this philosophical problem as intensely as Critical Theory has. But then, as I
will argue, the pragmatist solution to this problem is substantially different from
that devised by Critical Theory, and to some extent it is also superior, in that it is
free of the idealist problems that plague the latter. Here lies, so I want to argue, the
reason why Honneth is brought to misread the pragmatists.
Dewey’s moral theory, as Honneth reads it, is ultimately an attempt to deal with
one of the most complex and challenging philosophical problems of modernity,
namely, how to reconcile universalism with contextualism. Honneth conceptual-
izes this task as that of reconciling Kant with Aristotle, but he could equally have
framed it as that of reconciling Kant with Hegel, and indeed Hegel’s role emerges
quite soon in his treatment of Dewey’s philosophy, as it will in his treatment of
Mead. Honneth heartily subscribes to Habermas’s view that modernity marks our
egress from traditional ways of life and from the accompanying conceptions of
normativity. He equally agrees with him that this transition engenders the need to
couple the customary context-dependent justifications of norms and values with
modern context-transcending forms of justification, the only ones capable of legiti-
mizing norms in the pluralistic setting of modern societies. As Honneth puts it in
one of the several texts in which he turns to this topic, “in taking one’s orientation
almost exclusively from the idea of the good life, there arises not only the problem
of how universally valid assertions are still possible under the conditions of value
pluralism, but also the danger of losing the sense in which persons make moral
 Roberto Frega

demands on others” (Honneth 1998b, 689). A judicious and thoughtful Hegelian,

however, Honneth is only too aware of the pitfalls one is likely to stumble into
by setting out to solve this problem in a purely idealist fashion, this by reason of
“the manner in which an abstract duty consciousness is placed directly opposite
empirical inclinations” (Honneth 1998b, 689) or, coming in from another angle, by
reason of the manner in which an exclusively universalistic account of normativ-
ity deprives agents of the normative resources available within the thicket of their
ethical life (in the sense of this term about to be described). As Honneth senses but
then fails to properly analyze, Dewey struggled with this issue and sought precisely
to reconcile these divergent but equally necessary standpoints.
In a sophisticated blending of classical idealist sources and Habermasian
concepts, Honneth resorts to the traditional notions of ethical life (Sittlichkeit)
and morality (Moralität) to describe the conventional and the universal contexts of
justification, respectively, and to Habermas’s notion of proceduralism to describe
the type of normativity that is distinctive to morality. Ethical life is for Honneth a
normative concept affirming the centrality of the good life. It is a concept that he
brings into relation with Aristotle and then with Hegel, thus building on the idea
that ethical life always refers to values as defined by one’s belonging to a given
community governed by convention and tradition. On the opposite side, morality
identifies the universalistic dimension of a post-conventional, reflexive norma-
tive standpoint that has freed itself of conventional bonds. While morality-cum-
proceduralism gives an account of autonomy, ethical life expresses the individual’s
dependence on acquired social values and norms providing the basis and point of
departure for the process of self-realization and identity-formation. Indeed—and
this is the central point of divergence with pragmatism—Honneth, as well as most
of the Frankfurt School, conceives the community as the locus of ethical life, and
so as reliant on conventional, premodern, unreflective forms of justification. Like
Habermas before him, Honneth understands the notion of community as a premod-
ern form of life latterly replaced by post-conventional forms of social organization.
And, also like Habermas, he understands the history of Western civilization as
marked by a sharp discontinuity between tradition and modernity, a discontinuity
through which morality emerges out of ethical normative orders.
This way of understanding modernity marks a second point of divergence
between pragmatism and Critical Theory, as pragmatism rather insists on the
continuity between tradition and modernity. Indeed, the different narratives
through which modernity is interpreted play a significant role in shaping the
normative accounts developed by these traditions: whereas the pragmatists tend
to extract from the idea of continuity between diverse forms of human life and
levels of societal evolution the thesis of a continuity between what the Germans
termed ethical life and morality, Critical Theorists invoke the social-theoretic
thesis of a radical discontinuity between the modern and the premodern, so as to
ground the normative thesis of a sharp social, historical, and conceptual separa-
tion between ethical life and morality. The effect of this latter strategy, as I will
show, is to collapse a historical reading of the process of modernization into
an epistemological account of the different normative spheres. I take this to be
the most conspicuous shortcoming of the account that Critical Theory offers of
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

normativity.7 It is against the background of this broad opposition that Honneth

approaches Dewey’s moral and political theory, claiming to have diagnosed the
unresolved conflict referred to in the title of his article, a conflict accordingly
cast in terms of the competing perspectives of ethical life and morality in setting
out an account of normativity.
Honneth starts out by acknowledging the central influence of Hegel in Dewey’s
early writings on ethics, especially as it relates to Dewey’s effort to flesh out an
ethical theory centered on the idea of self-realization. Dewey had not yet devel-
oped a social theory, nor had he come to appreciate the importance of naturalism
for ethics, and his thought was still pervaded by an over-idealist Hegelian concern
with securing reconciliation in the face of conflict and struggle.8 Yet, according to
Honneth, what it meant for Dewey to struggle with this Hegelian legacy was to
take up the Kantian injunction of a context-transcending moral standpoint, however
ambiguously Dewey may have done so. Dewey succeeded in this effort, Honneth
continues, only once he cast off his Hegelian beginnings and thus came to the
realization that he needed to supplement a traditional—Aristotelian—account of
“customary morality” with the reflective attitude proper to the modern and post-
conventional world (Honneth 1998a, 696). It is only at this point that Dewey saw
the need to integrate his views about the primacy of the good with a proceduralist
account of how agents espousing competing conceptions of the good can come to
an agreement in a post-traditional world shaped by plural worldviews each having
its own legitimacy. As in the article on democratic theory, in this article, too, Dewey
is explicitly credited with having satisfactorily merged the two main conflicting
strands of moral and political theory, working together what contemporary thought
accounted to be two irreconcilable standpoints.
Dewey, in other words, developed “an ethic of the good” and reconciled it
with a deliberative understanding of morality as a problem-solving activity aimed
at dealing with normative conflicts, those which emerge whenever people, on an
individual or a societal level, espouse different conceptions of the good that lead
them to clash over the ends to be pursued. As Honneth comments, Dewey proceeded
in this endeavor through a broad assessment of the transition to a post-conventional
society, for on this basis he came to view morality as an open process in which
individuals are free to find their own solutions to the moral problems they face. It
is here that proceduralism—and Kantian morality with it—comes onto the scene.
As Honneth says summing up Dewey’s moral thought, “moral theory is to be con-
ceived of as a ‘generalized extension’ or ‘reflective form’ of the ethical deliberation
an individual engages in when he attempts to find general principles which shall
direct and justify his conduct.”9 Dewey’s deliberative approach assigns a decisive
role to rationality in sustaining individual and collective decision-making by mak-
ing it possible to compare and evaluate competing values, alternative courses of
action, and, more generally, the different ends worthy of pursuit. Honneth calls
this approach “prescriptive” and insists in characterizing it as an instantiation of
a Kantian conception of morality that brings to ethical thinking a procedural ap-
proach capable of emancipating the individual from context-bound evaluations
and frames of reference.
 Roberto Frega

One might get the impression, on reading Honneth’s reconstruction, that

Dewey’s moral theory is composed of two parts: on the one hand is a Hegelian
conception of an ethics of self-realization based on a context-bound, conventional
understanding of the good life; on the other, a Kantian conception of morality as
a rational deliberative procedure for choosing among competing ideas of the good
life. Dewey would be a sort of communitarian (Honneth 1998a, 703) with a Kantian
bent, someone for whom proceduralism does not imply universalism. From this
perspective, the only legitimate forms of moral obligation are, for Dewey, “those
obligations we have to concrete persons to whom we owe the positive dimensions
of our identity” (ibid.). And so “for Dewey there exist moral obligations only to
social networks of relationships which have made of us that person we become
when we carry out the act of ethical deliberation” (ibid.). Considering that Dewey
sees humans as essentially social beings, this solution enables him to reconcile the
diverging demands of duty and self-realization. But this also entails, however, that
“it is all but impossible to justify the universalist content of the moral point of view;
correspondingly, in Dewey’s work there is no reference to a principle that could
justify why we are obligated to morally respect all human beings” (Honneth 1998a,
703). The charge against Dewey, then, like the one against Mead, is that he fails
to bridge the gap between the idea of community, which Honneth sees as always
local and bound by tradition and convention, and the idea of humanity, which on
the contrary is universal and post-conventional. In so doing, pragmatism seems to
be irremediably exposed to the menace of relativism.
And that is where Honneth locates the unresolved tension in Dewey’s account.
Consistently with his own views—but not however with the pragmatist—once we
accept the dualism between ethical life and morality, we either fall back on the
communitarian position and expose ourselves to the critique of a post-conventional
morality, or we fully embrace a proceduralist account and then have to provide
the moral standpoint with greater autonomy than Dewey can. Consistently, Hon-
neth cannot see the Deweyan point of introducing a proceduralist account while
rejecting the universalist claim that usually accompanies it on a Kantian approach:
morality, proceduralism, and universalism form a conceptual bundle that Honneth
sets in direct contrast to the bundle formed by ethical life, conventionalism, and
community. How, then, does Dewey measure up to this standard? Honneth identi-
fies three possible routes one could take, three solutions that offer themselves as
ways to meet this challenge. The first two are equally unsatisfactory, and Honneth
rightly recognizes that Dewey shuns both: he neither subordinates the good to the
right nor takes a utilitarian route, attempting to maximize every individual’s good
as a way to gauge the attainment of social values. But the third solution, Honneth
argues, is one that Dewey catches sight of without quite being able to pursue, for
it is informed by a Kantianism that Dewey is not prepared to endorse: Honneth
descries this third solution in Dewey’s idea of an “inclusive good,” a good capable
of holding together both the pursuit of personal ends and interests and the need
to uphold moral duties, “so that those ends in life are favored which best suit the
integration of moral goods” (Honneth 1998a, 704). This means that the obliga-
tions we each have as part of a community figure into our ethical deliberation
on a par with our ideas of the good. That, Honneth is quick to remark, would
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

have been the right solution, making it possible to heed “the moral requirements
of the perspective circumscribed by Kant, without thereby having to surrender
the guiding orientation provided by the trajectory of the Aristotelian question”
(Honneth 1998a, 705).
This is the point where one would expect Honneth to serve up some evidence
in support of his criticism, but he does no more than point us to some “hidden
references that indicate that Dewey has still not completely relinquished the pre-
sumption of a necessary connection between self-realization and being oriented
by community well-being” (ibid.). Honneth believes he has found independent
support for this claim in Dewey’s appeal to the notion of growth as an Aristotelian
way to understand the “inclusive good,” concluding that what ultimately prevents
Dewey from wholeheartedly embracing a procedural account of the normative is
his naturalism. This turns out to be a key point, with Honneth arguing that Dewey’s
naturalistic approach prevented him from understanding the autonomy of morality,
thus blinding him to the need to distinguish personal ends from duties, the former
furthering the broader goal of self-realization, the latter arising out of the need for
mutual respect among moral agents. It follows that for Honneth the idea of growth
cannot mediate between individual drives and the need to constrain these forces
for the sake of social flourishing. In this framework, “the aim of ethical reflection
is no longer the exploration of meaningful and valuable restrictions to one’s own
freedom to act but rather the unconstrained development of an individual need
potential that, because of the natural disposition of human beings, is so constituted
that social disharmony cannot really be generated” (Honneth 1998a, 707). Here
Honneth seems to completely miss the point that just as Mead’s naturalism is so-
cial, so is Dewey’s, and that for this very reason the two pragmatist thinkers can
both embrace a morality of duty within a social-naturalistic account of normativity
that can indeed take conflict and disagreement into account. In fact, Dewey saw
his philosophical task as consisting precisely in an endeavor to solve the modern
problem of reconciling competing and incompatible ethical projects, among which
Dewey listed virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism. In a way that Honneth
fails to see, Dewey accomplishes the very feat precisely where Honneth claims he
fell short of the mark. For Dewey can complete his account of the normative without
in any way breaking the normative world down into two separate spheres—morality
on the one hand, ethical life on the other—and this, in the end, explains Honneth’s
failure to appreciate the logic of Dewey’s argument.

II.B. A WAY OUT OF THE “UNRESOLVED TENSION”

One reason why Honneth cannot see in Dewey’s work an adequate solution to the
normative problem as just explained is that he is looking at a different problem from
the one Dewey is dealing with: Honneth, in other words, appears not to take fully
into account that he is building his argument on texts where Dewey is concerned
not with the question of ethical life vis-à-vis morality but is rather interested in
developing an agent-based theory of moral deliberation. Dewey goes about this task
by taking a first-person perspective,10 and that explains his emphasis on personal
ends. Indeed, it is Dewey’s aim to show that none of the main contemporary moral
 Roberto Frega

theories—deontology, eudaimonism, and virtue ethics—explains successfully

the nature of moral deliberation. Dewey is persuaded that to this end one needs
to integrate the three normative standpoints these theories represent, namely, the
right, the good, and the socially approved (virtue). Here Honneth should have
looked more carefully at Dewey’s notion of conflict, since Dewey insists that
goods and duties present themselves on an equal footing before the moral agent,
who “hesitates among ends, all of which are good in some measure, among duties
which obligate him for some reason.”11 It is even the central, driving point of his
argument that moral theory generally fails because of its tendency to reduce ends
to duties or duties to ends.
From Dewey’s agent-based perspective, in order for a conflict to be moral, it
must involve irreconcilable injunctions. And in order for a moral conflict to be real,
it must set duty against the good, that is, it must pit morality against ethical life.
In a Parisian lecture of 1930 where Dewey clearly anticipates the core arguments
set forth in the second edition of Ethics, the book Honneth is relying on, Dewey
goes so far as to say that
it is characteristic of any situation properly called moral that one is ignorant
of the end and of good consequences, of the right and just approach, of the
direction of virtuous conduct, and that one must search for them. The essence
of the moral situation is an internal and intrinsic conflict; the necessity for
judgment and for choice comes from the fact that one has to manage forces
with no common denominator. (Dewey 1930, lw.5.280)
These “forces with no common denominator” are precisely the duties and the goods
that in Honneth’s view Dewey does not recognize as independent of one another.
Dewey continues thus:
Now I would like to suggest that good and right have different origins, they
flow from independent springs, so that neither of the two can derive from the
other, so that desire and duty have equally legitimate bases and the force they
exercise in different directions is what makes moral decision a real problem,
what gives ethical judgment and moral tact their vitality. I want to stress that
there is no uniform, previous moral presumption either in one direction or in
the other, no constant principle making the balance turn on the side of good
or of law; but that morality consists rather in the capacity to judge the respec-
tive claims of desire and of duty from the moment they affirm themselves in
concrete experience, with an eye to discovering a practical middle footing
between one and the other—a middle footing which leans as much to one side
as to the other without following any rule which may be posed in advance.
(Dewey 1930, lw.5.281)
Shortly after this passage Dewey criticizes the Greeks’ exclusive concern
with the good, in a manner that in historical perspective may be characterized as
Hegelian, illustrating how this way of thinking about the moral sphere paved the
way precisely for the procedural normative stance he identifies with the Roman
and then the modern and contemporary conceptions of law. Moving even further
along in this line of argument, and getting to the crux of the matter, Dewey takes
issue with those who reduce the right to the good of the community (Dewey 1930,
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

lw.5.284)—a point that alone ought to have tipped off Honneth to just how far
Dewey did go in exploring the third avenue that Honneth himself singles out as the
most promising solution. Dewey closes his argument by concluding: “There is an
intrinsic difference, in both origin and mode of operation, between objects which
present themselves as satisfactory to desire and hence good, and objects which
come to one as making demands upon his conduct which should be recognized.
Neither can be reduced to the other” (Dewey 1930, lw.5.284). He then brings to
bear a third dimension—virtue ethics, set in the social context of mutual esteem and
appreciation—and with that comes a further, independent normative source. In this
way, the personal, the social, and the legal come to be clearly distinguished. These
passages, along with others that readily suggest themselves, show in no uncertain
terms that Dewey’s moral theory does not risk falling back on the Aristotelian
conception of a conventional ethos, and that flanking that theory is a conception of
rationality offering a critical and reflective basis on which to distinguish a morality
of duty from an ethics of self-realization—precisely what Honneth was looking for
in laying out the question of the distinction between the two normative standpoints
of the good and the right.
That was the first of Honneth’s two questions: the second one was whether
Dewey’s theory can ground a normative notion of right or duty not undermined
by communitarian themes. And this is not a question that can be addressed by
relying on Dewey’s moral writings alone—the only ones Honneth appears to take
into account, save for a single reference to Human Nature and Conduct—because,
as was remarked at the beginning of this section, Dewey’s ethics is framed from
a first-person perspective: he is interested in explaining moral conflict from the
standpoint of the moral agent. This is a perspective from which the validity of
rights, duties, and other moral obligations is taken for granted, in that the agent
experiences such rights and duties as givens in any social situation. And so,
if we are to understand how Dewey conceives of morality and ethical life as
concurrent normative standpoints, we will have to look elsewhere in his oeuvre.
Specifically, and much to Honneth’s surprise, or so I would suspect, we will have
to turn precisely to those writings where the naturalistic standpoint comes into
the foreground, as neither Dewey’s nor Mead’s accounts of normativity are intel-
ligible outside a social-naturalistic framework. In these works, and especially in
Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey develops a conception of social practices as
self-reflective processes, in such a way that not only escapes Honneth’s objec-
tions but, crucially, also lays the groundwork for a more compelling account of
the nature of normativity, without having to rely on the problematic dualism of
ethical life and morality.
The distinction Dewey draws is that between our human constitution and
our social constitution, the former explaining our individual striving for our own
good, the latter necessarily entailing obligations for us. As Dewey explains in
chapter 26 of Human Nature and Conduct, morality is inescapably social, and it
is so insofar as we depend on others for most of what we do. Dewey’s explanation
of this connection is not particularly sophisticated, but it is sufficient to ground
proceduralism without having to encase it in the framework of universal moral-
ity. Just like Mead, Dewey sees the individual and the social as two interfacing
 Roberto Frega

counter-parties constantly in need of mutual adjustment. He sees goods and

duties as constantly in the making and interacting at all levels of social life. From
primitive to modern forms of life, from the family to the state, human beings form
ideas about the good, ideas which cannot be formed or realized outside society
but which, precisely for this reason, always stand the risk of coming into conflict.
From the ground level of social organization to its upper echelons, then, goods
and duties stand in a relation of potential friction, and people turn to deliberation
to look for solutions. To this extent, deliberation is an all-encompassing human
characteristic, not the distinctive mark of a specific societal form or the product
of a specific historical process––I mean modernization. Conflict among goods is
just as ineradicable as conflict between goods and duties, since both are the issue
of social life—their cradle and inescapable context—and conflict is simply part
and parcel of such life.
In an important sense, therefore, Dewey has no place for an idea of morality
as separate from ethical life, not only because he views conflict as endemic to life
in society but also because reconciliation is a fragile and fleeting achievement
constantly done and undone. It follows from this entanglement of morality and
ethical life—and from the nature of their relation: never frictionless, ever given to
conflict—that we need not wait for any specific historical event to give impetus
to critical reflection on social normative practices, and so there is no need to spe-
cifically introduce morality as a complement to ethical life. That is because, on a
pragmatist conception, ethical life is moral from the start, already constitutively
encompassing a struggle for transcendence. Honneth, like Habermas before him,
seems to think that ethical life (in the specialized sense of that which pertains
to ethical life, or Sittlichkeit) consists in a blind and uncritical endorsement of
one’s community values, such that we need to bring in from the outside a critical
standpoint to mediate between our own values and those of persons belonging to
other communities. In this sense, ethical life without morality provides the basis of
individual identity but does not provide the reflective resources needed to critically
evaluate given social values, with the consequence that this critical standpoint will
have to be brought in from the outside.
Dewey has a totally different way of understanding the interaction between
the individual and society, a way rooted in his social psychology. For Dewey, we
are constantly and ceaselessly negotiating with our society the kind of identity
we want for ourselves and the kinds of things we ought to value as good, and out
of this relation comes the constant conflict between the good and the right. That
such conflict is endemic to social life means that there neither is, nor can be, a
stage where society provides integration without engendering a crisis of identities.
Social norms are embedded in human habits, whereas impulsions constantly prod
us individually into devising new ideas of the good potentially in conflict with the
habits that society has built into our personality.12 The need to deliberate and reflect
therefore originates with communal ethical life itself, reflection being a defining
trait of the way human agents relate to their communities. Universality in this
sense is simply the end-result of processes through which local normative orders
are generalized. And that is not something radically different from the kind of pro-
ceduralist reflectivity endemic to any form of human social life. Honneth believes
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

we need universality to become critically aware of our communal identity and to

be in a position to negotiate norms and values with others; for Dewey, by contrast,
this process is native to social life—it need not be imported, as it were—and what
Honneth calls universality is but a specific form this process will take when given
historical circumstances compel us to broaden the horizon of our social belonging.
And so, from the standpoint of Dewey’s social naturalism, the enlightenment
narrative of modernity as a way out of custom and tradition loses part of its ap-
peal. In an important sense, society has always been reflective, at least to some
extent, because reflectivity is inseparable from associated human life; and human
beings have since been applying reflective methods of inquiry to their social en-
vironment, searching for vantage points that will help them solve the normative
conflicts brought about by associated living, by submitting competing normative
frameworks to critical scrutiny, adjusting and negotiating them in light of evolv-
ing social and natural conditions. As Dewey reminds us, the idea of universalism
comes down to us from as far back as the Roman legal tradition, and Mead goes
back even further, tracing the root of the idea to the ancient religions: in both of
these historical sources we have more than just the germ of a self-transcending
and reflective practice—we have the practice itself. If there is any discontinuity
to be found, the pragmatists would tend to ascribe it to our different modes of
inquiry rather than setting it down to a moral failing (or otherwise coloring the
discontinuity in moral terms); what modernity has done, therefore, is intensify this
self-reflective attitude that both Peirce and Dewey conceive as developing through
different stages in the way beliefs are fixed.13 Precisely because social practices
are endowed with a self-critical stance, they are never locked into the norms they
establish for themselves.
Human beings are in this sense never passive recipients of ethical horizons.
While Dewey wouldn’t deny that modernity has brought the critical attitude to a
peak, he would say that different societies embody this critical standpoint to dif-
ferent degrees, and that we can distinguish different types of societies accordingly:
instead of classifying them as either reflective or not, we ought to be looking at the
extent to which they instantiate the reflective attitude. Indeed, as he observes in
reply to an objection similar to Honneth’s, there is a definite advantage to viewing
reflectivity as an immanent rather than a transcendent feature of human experience.
For in this way “We are not caught in a circle; we traverse a spiral in which social
customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies, and this consciousness
is embodied in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions
of social ties, and so on forever” (Dewey 1922, mw.14.226). This makes it possible
to transcend the normative standard specific to our own social group (and thus
move to a higher standard) by essentially taking the perspective of another social
group (one with which we are engaged in a normative conflict) or that of a larger
community we acknowledge we belong to. We thus come to broaden our field of
vision in a generalizing process toward greater and greater encompassment that can
stretch either across space (by looking to society as a whole, or even to the society
of nations, to humanity) or across time, by looking to communities in the past whose
experience is somehow continuous with our own or analogous to it, and which in
this way can offer a basis on which to justify a normative standpoint. As Dewey
 Roberto Frega

remarks, “Human history is long. There is a long record of past experimentation

in conduct, and there are cumulative verifications which give many principles a
well earned prestige.”14 Universality is the dynamic outcome of recursive and fal-
lible processes of self-critique. Or, taking up Hannah Arendt’s terminology, this
“enlarged mentality” is a process rather than a state.
In a way that Mead will make even more explicit, universality is the name
the pragmatists give to this way of advancing in spirals rather than in circles: it
characterizes the whole of human history and makes reflectivity a human endow-
ment rather than the exclusive accomplishment of Western modernity. As Dewey
shows, this reflective way combines the two broad areas of concern we have been
considering in moral theory—the concern with what is good from the individual’s
standpoint and the concern with what is right—and for this reason it takes into
account the self-transcending stance Honneth associates with Kantian morality, a
stance the pragmatists prefer to locate in our social and natural constitution. In the
next section, we will complete the comparison between the pragmatist conception
of normativity and that of Critical Theory by turning to Mead and looking at the
way Honneth understands his theory of the generalized other.

III. THE “GENERALIZED OTHER” BETWEEN

AUTONOMY AND SELF-REALIZATION

III.A. HONNETH’S MEAD: MYTH OR REALITY?

Until recently, Mead has played a greater role than Dewey in Honneth’s philosophy.
Indeed, Honneth credits Mead with having moved closer than anyone else toward
completing the Hegelian project of a philosophy of recognition, for which reason
Honneth acknowledges an equal debt to both Hegel and Mead as the two main
fountainheads for his own project. So steadfast is Honneth in his appreciation of
Mead that he unhesitatingly remarks,
Nowhere is the idea that human subjects owe their identity to the experience
of intersubjective recognition more thoroughly developed on the basis of natu-
ralistic presuppositions than in the social psychology of George Herbert Mead.
Even today, his writings contain the most suitable means for reconstructing
the intersubjectivist intuitions of the young Hegel within a postmetaphysical
framework. (Honneth 1995, 71)
Relying almost exclusively on the lecture series posthumously published under
the title Mind, Self, and Society,15 Honneth reads Mead’s program as an attempt to
explain the genesis of the self starting from the level of social interactions through
what is now generally known as the paradigm of the “generalized other.” As
Honneth observes, for Mead “a subject can only acquire a consciousness of itself
to the extent to which it learns to perceive its own action from the symbolically
represented second-person perspective,” and he is right to point out that Mead
provides on this basis a naturalistic standpoint for explaining Hegel’s theory of
recognition, “insofar as it can indicate the psychological mechanism that makes
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

the development of self-consciousness dependent upon the existence of a second

subject” (Honneth 1995, 75).
It is thus to that psychological—and therefore naturalistic—mechanism that
Honneth now turns, by focusing on Mead’s idea of the generalized other: in it he
sees what promises to be a powerful device for explaining normativity, for it brings
individual conduct into relation with the validity standpoint of larger social aggre-
gates. On the one hand this makes possible an empirical account of the formative
and moral function of recognition (an account we won’t find in Hegel), but at the
same time it also provides the basis for a theory of normativity—and it is here, as
one might expect, that Honneth’s interpretive strategy runs into trouble. Indeed,
once we set out to investigate normativity by a method of empirical generalization,
we will have to ask what kind of generality can be attained by such a method, and
on what bases such generality rests its validity. In other words, we will soon be
faced with the question of whether what we achieve through the generalized other
is morality or ethical life.16
Quite surprisingly, Honneth takes the argument in the direction opposite to
that which one would expect, for he starts out by correlating Mead’s notion of the
generalized other directly with Hegel’s second stage of recognition, where the
individual gains the self-respect that can only be attained under a system of law.
So the main role of the generalized other is understood to be that of explaining
how the individual acquires legal personality. In emphasizing the strong affinities
between the young Hegel and Mead, Honneth remarks that Mead “too conceives
the self-understanding of a person who has learned to view himself or herself from
the perspective of the generalized other as the self-understanding of a legal person.
. . . Rights are, as it were, the individual claims about which I can be sure that the
generalized other would meet them” (Honneth 1995, 78–79). Honneth correctly
observes that Mead singles out rights as especially prominent in typifying what
recognition means, for they are explicit in presenting a form of communally shared
generalized other: rights stand out as an explicit statement of a community’s values
and normative order. Therefore, sticking to the Hegelian language in which Honneth
couches his analysis, what Honneth sees in Mead’s concept of the generalized other
is not the ethical relation between the individual and the group (or the plurality of
all relevant groups)—this is the relation through which our identity is forged as
individuals, and which is keyed to Hegel’s third stage of recognition—but primarily
the legal and moral form of relation expressed by the notion of rights:
with regard to the relationship of recognition that Hegel introduced under
the heading of “law” [Recht] as a second stage in his developmental model,
the conception of the “generalized other” represents not only a theoretical
amendment but also a substantive deepening. Recognizing one another as
legal persons means that both subjects control their own action by integrat-
ing into it the community’s will, as that is embodied in the intersubjectively
recognized norms of their society. For, once partners to interaction all take
on the normative perspective of the “generalized other,” they know—recipro-
cally—what obligations they have to each other. Accordingly, they can also
both conceive of themselves as bearers of individual claims, claims that the
other knows he or she is normatively obliged to meet. At the individual level,
 Roberto Frega

the experience of being recognized as a legal person by the members of one’s

community ensures that one can develop a positive attitude towards oneself.
(Honneth 1995, 80, emphasis added)
So what prompts Honneth to locate Mead’s generalized other in Hegel’s
second stage as a model of recognition is its universal form, since universality is
what sets recognition at this second stage apart from recognition at the other two
stages. It is thus by reason of this relation to the universal that Honneth interprets
the formative and constitutive role of the generalized other.17 Which is to say that
through the psychosocial mechanism of the generalized other, we gain a sense of
self-respect once we see how others recognize us as having the same fundamental
traits they ascribe to themselves. The generalized other thus enables us to consider
ourselves as having an equal standing with others in society, by virtue of our shar-
ing a set of essential traits with them. And with the sense of self-respect comes a
sense of duty accompanying our awareness that we are autonomous agents having
“the quality of morally responsible agency” (Honneth 1995, 80). Honneth does of
course realize that this understanding of the generalized other stands in the way of
a full appreciation of Hegel’s third level of recognition, where we gain self-esteem
as a result of others in society recognizing our distinguishing traits, as opposed
to those traits which put us on an equal footing with everyone else on a universal
basis: whereas in this latter sense (on the second level) we are in the sphere of
norms, in the former sense (on the third level) we are in the sphere of values. This
dualism between values and norms does something analogous to what results from
the dualism between ethical life and morality: it cuts the normative along the same
sharp and troubling dividing line.
It is in Mead’s dialectic of the “I” and the “me” that Honneth sees Mead’s
distinctive contribution to the advancement of the theory of recognition:
in every historical epoch, individual, particular anticipations of expanded rec-
ognition relations accumulate into a system of normative demands, and this,
consequently, forces societal development as a whole to adapt to the process
of progressive individuation. And since subjects can defend the claims of their
“I”—even after social reforms have been carried out—only by anticipating
yet another community that guarantees greater freedoms, the result is a chain
of normative ideals pointing in the direction of increasing personal autonomy.
(Honneth 1995, 84)
The dialectic involved here is that between individual self-realization and legal
recognition, two processes whose potential unfolds in tandem.
At this point, however, Honneth is faced with a problem: if the dialectic
between the “I” and the “me” accounts for the second stage of the struggle for
recognition—where self-respect is achieved through the expansion of legal rights—
what mechanism can be said to govern the necessary third stage of recognition?
Or, stated otherwise, if the generalized other accounts only for morality and
norms, what mechanism can be said to account for ethical life and values? The
question comes up inevitably, because Honneth posits a sharp dualism between
these two dimensions, and because the two forms of recognition pertain to two
distinct normative spheres: “From the perspective that one takes towards oneself
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

in internalizing that sort of ‘generalized other,’ one can only understand oneself
as a person with the same characteristics of morally responsible agency that all
other members of society possess” (Honneth 1995, 87). As a consequence, it is
to another psycho-social dimension that Honneth will have to look to explain the
functioning of the ethical life. The exclusionary condition introduced with the
“only” entails a spurious distinction between two kind of “me’s,” a distinction
not to be found in Mead but prompted by a need to fit him neatly into a Hegelian
distinction among three separate and autonomous normative spheres. As in his
treatment of Dewey, in reading Mead Honneth equally refuses to accept that the
distinct needs of autonomy and self-realization are answered by the pragmatist
through a monist account of normativity. He finds therefore himself compelled
to wedge into Mead’s argument a spurious distinction that winds up “doctoring”
Mead’s account of normativity.
As anticipated, Honneth’s solution to the problem he finds in Mead’s concep-
tion of normativity consists in introducing a distinction between two supposedly
different conceptions of the “me,” a distinction based on a structurally analogous
distinction he assumes to hold between two supposedly different attitudes of the
“I,” corresponding to the normative contexts of ethics and morality. As Honneth
puts it, “the demands of the ‘I’ can be distinguished on the basis of whether the
context in which they are to be met is that of individual autonomy or personal
self-realization” (Honneth 1995, 82). Honneth therefore assumes that next to the
“me” that instantiates the universality of legal norms and constitutes the response
to the main or dominant dimension of the “I”—the moral dimension and not the
ethical—there should be another, different “me,” one not tied to the universalistic
process of generalization of norms but to the particular communities the individual
belongs to. Honneth is convinced that Mead’s account of the generalized other
is unsuited to explain self-realization, because it conceptualizes the interaction
between the agent and society merely in terms of integration with society in its
present or future form: “If one is to realize the demands of one’s ‘I,’ one must
be able to anticipate a community in which one is entitled to have those desires
satisfied” (Honneth 1995, 82). An agent’s ability to anticipate such a community,
Honneth submits, takes place entirely within the normative context of morality
and autonomy, and so it does not make for self-realization. Hence the distinction
between two conceptions of the “me”: there is the me of “normative control,”18 and
next to it is “the ‘me’ of individual self-realization,” which “requires that one be
able to understand oneself as a unique and irreplaceable person” (Honneth 1995,
87). On this second interpretation, “the ethical concept of the ‘generalized other’
that Mead would have arrived at, had he considered the idealizing anticipation of
subjects who know themselves to be unrecognized, serves the same purpose as
Hegel’s conception of ethical life” (Honneth 1995, 88).
Honneth expresses himself in counterfactuals here because he realizes he is
stretching Mead’s text beyond what Mead could possibly have meant. And the
reason he cannot find an “ethical me” alongside the standard “moral me” is simply
that no such distinction can be found in Mead’s writings. This is why Honneth ap-
pears to have had a tough time producing textual evidence for his reconstructive
argument. In fact, this whole argument rests on a single supporting passage he
 Roberto Frega

believes holds the key to the problem of finding in Mead’s system the grounds of
an ethically oriented normative standpoint: the solution, Honneth contends, lies
in the principle of the division of labor, for we can find here a form of recognition
based on an individual’s fulfillment of social expectations.19 And so, at the price
of predicating an entire argument on a single passage, Honneth can finally claim
that “Mead’s idea represents a post-traditional answer to the Hegelian problem of
ethical life. The relationship of mutual recognition in which subjects can know
themselves to be confirmed not only with regard to their moral commonalities but,
beyond this, with regard to their particular qualities, is to be found in a transparent
system of the functional division of labour” (Honneth 1995, 89). Mead, according
to Honneth, fails to see that through the generalized other we can pursue ethical
goals, rather than only acting in light of moral norms:
Just as one can understand oneself, in light of shared norms of action, as a
person possessing certain rights vis-à-vis all others, one can see oneself, in
light of shared value-convictions, as a person of unique significance to all.
But, for understandable reasons, Mead tries to equate the ethical goals of a
post-traditional community so completely with the objective requirements of
the functional division of labour that the problem actually challenging him
slipped through his fingers unnoticed. What he lost sight of was the issue of
how to define the ethical convictions found in a “generalized other” in such
a way that, on the one hand, they are substantive enough to allow any and
every individual to become conscious of his or her particular contribution to
the societal life-process and yet, on the other hand, they are formal enough
not to end up restricting the historically developed latitude for personal self-
realization. . . . The difficulty, therefore, that Mead broached (only to ignore
it again) consists in the task of equipping the “generalized other” with a
“common good” that puts everyone in the same position to understand his
or her value for the community without thereby restricting the autonomous
realization of his or her self. For only this sort of democratized form of
ethical life would open up the horizon within which subjects with equal
rights could mutually recognize their individual particularity by contribut-
ing, in their own ways, to the reproduction of the community’s identity.
(Honneth 1995, 90)

III.B. MEAD’S NORMATIVE CONCEPTION:

SELF-REALIZATION COUPLED WITH AUTONOMY
There are several reasons why Honneth’s reconstruction of Mead’s conception of
normativity is puzzling, but I will confine my remarks to the matter at hand, at-
tempting to make sense of Honneth’s insistence on keeping the dualism between
ethical life and morality and forcing the pragmatists into that box. Honneth assumes
that autonomy and self-realization are not just distinct goals, but goals requiring
distinct normative contexts, so much so that we cannot pursue them through the
standard dialectics between the “I” and the “me,” because this only enables the
pursuit of moral goals, not ethical ones. That is the main reason why Honneth sets
out on a quest for two distinct attitudes of the “I” and two corresponding forms of
the “me.” As I will illustrate, Mead takes a completely different strategy to fulfill
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

the distinct normative requirements of autonomy and self-realization. Mead cer-

tainly agreed on the need to distinguish duty from self-realization as two different
sources of normative requirements, but surely he did not see fit to enclose them
into two separate normative contexts.
If we are to see clearly into Mead’s conception, we will first have to recognize
that the socializing process he calls the generalized other cannot, in his view, be
reduced to the function of producing moral and legal personality: social interac-
tion mediated through the generalized other is not just meant to explain our self-
understanding and mutual recognition as bearers of rights in our capacity as equal
agents universally endowed with the same moral powers, summarized under the
heading of autonomy; the generalized other is instead a device of broader scope,
intended to account for autonomy and self-realization as integrated, interlocking
parts of the same whole. And it is not by recourse to any dualism or any special
conceit that Mead seeks to articulate self-realization with autonomy, for he rather
relies to this end on a conception of community as a self-reflective practice.
But to see how Mead does this, we will have to go back for a moment to the
way Honneth understands the two normative goals of self-realization and autonomy.
Self-realization lies in the process through which we pursue the goals that matter
to us, a process through which we each construct our identity. Two background
conditions need to be met, on this Hegelian conception, in order for self-realization
to be at all possible: first, there must be socially shared norms and values defining
a normative frame of reference; and second, we must each be free to act as we
choose, so that our actions can be judged as good or bad depending on how well
they embody the norms and values forming the socially accepted frame of reference
(Honneth 1995, ch. 5). Autonomy is instead the Kantian notion of our capacity to
respect others on an equal footing as human beings, the idea being that we must
each be recognized as having human dignity by reason of our possessing certain
basic moral traits (which may change over time but which at any given time are
considered essential to what it means to be a human being). The distinction between
these two normative spheres—that of self-realization and that of autonomy—is
framed by Honneth by way of two partly overlapping arguments. According to the
first framing, self-realization is achieved in relation to values and the good, whereas
autonomy pertains to the sphere of duty; according to the second framing, self-
realization unfolds in the domain of a conventional construction of identity, whereas
autonomy is exercised in the post-conventional domain of reflective agency. As we
will see, however, this categorization turns out to be quite problematic.
At several places—including Chapter 26 of Mind, Self, and Society, the very
chapter Honneth relies on in his account of Mead’s conception of self-realization—
Mead not only makes it explicit that our identification with the generalized other
is moral as well as affective and ethical, but he also provides specific examples of
this form of identification, such as patriotism and competition in sports. The latter
example is one in particular that Mead goes back to more than once, and it specifi-
cally contradicts Honneth’s claim: if we are playing a sport as part of a team, we
will certainly be gaining self-respect by complying with the group’s shared norms
(a normative frame of reference). Yet at the same time we will be building our own
identity and developing our self-esteem as a result of our taking the group’s values
 Roberto Frega

as our model, living up to that standard in our way of playing that sport. Through
the same activity, therefore, sportspersons gain recognition by understanding what
they share with others (autonomy) and by developing their own distinctive person-
ality within the group (self-realization). Yet both dimensions have to be accounted
for by the same generalized other, which explains not only how we interiorize
duties and norms—a “universal” morality—but also how we realize ourselves by
forging a unique personality. We each introject a group’s norms; we each identify
with its values, narrative, and self-image; and we each contribute to the group’s
success by our way of playing. Now, this is a typical form of I-me relationship that
is molded according to what Honneth has called the ethical or evaluative I, rather
than the moral one, for what comes into play here is an “expressive me” in search
of identity and recognition. We are in Hegel’s third stage, where recognition takes
place exactly as it should according to Honneth’s model, and self-realization can
come about only on condition of espousing a community’s values and principles
and taking them as the normative standard for our actions.
What puts Honneth on the wrong track as concerns Mead’s conception of
normativity, aside from relying on a single passage, is that in this single passage,
appearing under the heading of “self-realization,” Mead is actually discussing the
psychological need to achieve superiority. Yes, Mead does bring up the functional
division of labor, but not to exemplify self-realization per se: he is rather looking
to show that the drive to be superior and outstrip everyone or otherwise assert
oneself can be consistent with communal life so long as it does not get in the way
of social ends.20 Indeed, the meaning of Mead’s argument in that passage is quite
different from what Honneth supposes: Mead wants to show that the feeling of
superiority need not be judged through a moral lens: it is also amenable to ex-
planation in naturalistic terms, and that is how it can be constructed as consistent
with social life. As Mead puts it, “the superiority is not the end in view. It is a
means for the preservation of the self.” And if we choose this means, then “we
have to distinguish ourselves from other people and this is accomplished by doing
something which other people cannot do, or cannot do as well” (Mead 1934, 208).
This can be done in several ways and settings: in any area of life—professional
or otherwise, among friends and family or in public, even in recreational activi-
ties—we can strive to excel and stand out or make a statement, and this is okay
so long as it winds up contributing to the wellbeing of the relevant community.
This is even understood by Mead as an essential function of normative social
orders, that they let this drive express itself in socially useful ways. Here the
term community as used by Mead is to be understood as a broad concept ranging
from small groups bound by affective ties to the whole of humanity, as can be
appreciated by Mead’s treatment of patriotism and internationalism.21 Mead’s
point applies equally to the division of roles within a family, to the social division
of labor, and to the contribution we can each make by volunteer and community
work, among other ways, in what would now be referred to as civic society. Here,
as well as in work activities, we seek to distinguish ourselves from others, and if
we have been properly socialized, we would achieve such distinction by actually
“soaking up” communal values.
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

This argument is so conspicuously and clearly stated in Mead that one cannot
but wonder, again, how Honneth could have missed it. I take the view, as previ-
ously noted, that if Honneth fails to see the pervasiveness of self-realization in
Mead’s thought, it is because he is concerned to preserve the dualism of ethical
life and morality, and this concern forces Honneth to eject self-realization from its
natural home, which is to be found in the relation between the individual and the
community where the social self is shaped, and where autonomy is consequently
also achieved, in combination with self-realization. As we saw with Dewey, Mead
himself avoids drawing any sharp and formal distinction between the normative
context of universal morality and that of conventional ethical life: the two contexts
are viewed as inextricably intertwined, combining to form the complex web of
relationships that binds individuals to the different communities they belong to.
For Mead self-realization is inextricably personal and social, in accordance with a
model closer to that of Hegelian ethical life than Honneth admits. In a fragment on
ethics from 1927, Mead writes: “Those ends are good which lead to the realization
of the self as a social being. Our morality gathers about our social conduct. It is as
social beings that we are moral beings. On the one side stands the society which
makes the self possible, and on the other side stands the self that makes a highly
organized society possible” (Mead 1934, 385–386). Or, as Mead points out in an
article published in 1915, “even the most selfish end must have the form of a public
good, to have any value to the private individual, otherwise it cannot be his to have
and to hold” (Mead 1964, 164).
In Mead’s social conception of the self there is no conceptual space for dichoto-
mizing the individual and society in the way Honneth implies. Self-realization is
something we inevitably do from the start by engaging with various communities
and with their generalized others. That self-realization is our own realization as
social beings means precisely that we can accomplish as much only insofar as we
integrate into these communities. Which is precisely the opposite of what Honneth
claims in his contention that Mead “wants to uncouple the intersubjective precondi-
tions for self-realization from the contingent value-premises of a particular com-
munity. The ‘generalized other’ upon whose ethical goals I depend in wanting to be
assured of social recognition for my chosen way of life is supposed to be replaced
by the rules of a functional division of labour, as something more objective” (Hon-
neth 1995, 89). Nothing could be farther from Mead’s thought. We should bear
in mind, too, that our taking the role of the generalized other does not, in Mead’s
view, amount to an uncritical endorsement of traditional values and norms. Mead
does not decouple the normative process of becoming autonomous from that of
self-realization through social integration, because our relating to the generalized
other is not—as Honneth would have it—confined to the normative dimension in
which we interiorize norms. As Mead clearly explains, what the social relation
involves is our taking the attitudes of the generalized other (Mead 1934, 158),
and these attitudes involve the whole menu of items that go into the making of the
social self: this includes our engagement not only with norms but also with values.
Honneth fails to appreciate the conceptual richness of Mead’s notion of attitude,
thus failing to see that the moral and the ethical, autonomy and self-realization,
are both included in the process Mead describes as our taking the attitude of the
 Roberto Frega

generalized other. This means that we embark on a path at once moral and ethical,
the former having its ideal limit in our recognition of universal human rights, the
latter finding that limit in our construction of a cosmopolitan self.
Another aspect to be borne in mind for a correct grasp of Mead’s original
normative standpoint is that if we still want to maintain a distinction between self-
realization and autonomy, then we should look at the way Mead analyses not the
relation of the I to the me, but that of self to society. As the reader may know, the
dialectic between the I and the me does not get much attention in Mead’s published
works, where Mead rather focuses on two other kinds of dialectic: one between
the self and society, the interaction between which yields action, and the other be-
tween impulses and reflectivity, whose interaction instead is what makes possible
our self-realization and moral autonomy.22 Likewise, when Mead comments that
“we import the conversation of the group into our inner sessions and debate with
ourselves” (Mead 1964, 358), and in so doing we bring society in conversation with
our impulses, he is not taking us through an exercise in Kantian moral theory: the
society we bring within ourselves to give shape to our impulses is the society that
through the generalized other speaks to us not only about norms and duty but also
about values and the good. As we have seen, the generalized other acts as a source
of norms as well as of values, and that makes the Hegelian dualism of ethical life
and morality quite useless as a theoretical device for explaining normativity. That
an individual sees as his own goods what he takes to be good for the community is
a thesis that Mead generalizes up to the level of rights, bringing autonomy and self-
realization to an exceptional degree of proximity. As Mead comments in an article
on the theory of rights that Honneth does not consider, “the individual in society
does in large measure pursue ends which are not private, but are in his own mind
public goods and his own good because they are public goods. . . . Insofar as the
end is a common good, the community recognizes the individual’s end as a right
because it is also the good of all, and will enforce that right in the interest of all.”23
And now we come to the third way in which Honneth winds up superimposing
his dualism of morality and ethical life onto Mead’s conception of the normative
world. Very simply stated, Honneth’s dualist premises prevent him from seeing
that Mead firmly rejects any view of morality as the sphere of self-critical autono-
mous attitudes over against ethical life as the sphere of conventionality. I will not
elaborate on this point, for I have insisted enough on Mead’s aversion to categorial
dualisms, but it would be remiss on my part not to point out, in this regard, how
Mead subscribes to the thesis that distinctions ought to be conceived in functional
rather than substantive terms, and this is how he uses the qualifier universal: he
so qualifies the generalized other such as it applies not only to the “logical com-
munity of discourse,” or humanity,24 but also to any group of any size, no matter
how tight-knit it may be as a community of values.

In the foregoing discussion we have seen how Honneth’s reading of the

pragmatists reveals certain patterns owed to the sharp separation he understands
there to exist between ethical life and morality, a separation he considers to be a
noncontroversial assumption in normative theory. We see this assumption at work
also in Honneth’s examination of Mead’s treatment of norms: Honneth criticizes
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

Mead for having a too weak conception of legal validity, believing that Mead
reduces that concept to the fact of collective acceptance, “the fundamental fact
that one can count as the bearer of rights of some kind only if one is socially rec-
ognized as a member of a community” (Honneth 1995, 109). Honneth considers
that universal morality is required to disentangle our moral and legal personality
from our social individuality. Following Hegel, Honneth endorses a “diachronic”
narrative according to which modernity brings in a new way of conceiving the
legitimacy of legal norms and the ascription of rights and duties: no longer is such
ascription based on one’s class or status in the social hierarchy but rather rests on
a principle of universal equality under the law; no longer is the relevant criterion
one’s place within the community, or what is expected of one who occupies that
station, or again the “social esteem accorded to individual members of society in
light of their social status” (Honneth 1995, 110–111), but rather an idea of universal
citizenship. A second theme is then superposed to this historical narrative: it is that
of the “synchronic” distinction between the two coexisting normative spheres of
norms and values, the former being the locus of autonomy and the latter of self-
realization. So, whereas the first theme unfolds entirely within the normative context
of the law, the second theme juxtaposes two normative contexts: those of ethical
life and morality. It is at this level that we find the distinction, made possible by
the emergence of post-conventional morality, between the ethics of self-realization
and the morality of autonomy as separate yet interdependent dimensions of an
agent’s standing.
This reconstruction clashes however with the Meadian analysis, which care-
fully avoids any superposition between the diachronic and the synchronic theme:
autonomy he addresses through his theory of universality, while self-realization he
addresses through his two-layered conception of the generalized other. Although
Mead would certainly agree with Honneth in treating modernity as characterized by
a tendency toward universalization, in a manner unknown to any previous epoch,25
he replaces however the distinction between ethical life and morality by a functional
distinction between forms of social interaction. On the one hand, we belong to local
communities to which we are bound in personal ways and in which we develop our
ethical as well as our moral dispositions. On the other hand, our bonds and sense
of belonging are constantly being put to the test, both as a result of our individual
impulses and as a result of our bringing different types of generalized other into
conflict. With modernity, this latter trend has seen an impressive upswing, to be
sure, but has not changed in nature. Thus in modernity we have come to inhabit a
much larger number of local communities than was customary in the past, and we
are also increasingly exposed to the need to emancipate ourselves from each of
these communities, in a self-transcending effort whose limit lies in the cosmopolitan
embrace of humanity as the highest and most abstract form of generalized other,
understood as the largest community and all-inclusive context of ethical life. This
historical and psychosocial process of abstraction from the local “helps to generate
the ‘impartial spectator’ that assists us in making moral decisions by transcending
the provincial” (Aboulafia 2010, 81).
It bears pointing out, however that what is essential here is the avoidance of
any stark opposition of the local against the universal, of ethical community against
 Roberto Frega

moral humanity: what matters is instead the process, a process of self-transcendence

that pushes human individuals and societies to progressively broaden the horizons
of their understanding, from one circle to a larger one, and to a larger one still.
So, as can easily be appreciated, local attachment and universalism are for Mead
twin and inseparable tendencies built into our social constitution. The generalized
other is intended to describe both from the start, equally capturing our attachment
to local groups and our constant endeavor to overcome these attachments so as to
engage with larger and larger communities.
In conclusion, the project of grounding normative theory in a dualism between
morality and ethical life can be found to suffer from several weaknesses when
viewed from a pragmatist perspective. First, Honneth appears to equate the quest
for universality with the Enlightenment project that gave birth to the idea of a post-
conventional morality, thus reducing universality to a cultural product of Western
history. Mead, by contrast, gives greater breadth to this quest by framing it as an
inherent human feature, not confining it to any specific area of thought or human
activity, for he sees religion and economics as two complementary instantiations of
universality, encompassing between them the whole of that human quest. Second,
Honneth confounds the historical question of the evolution of law (the diachronic
theme) with the analytical question of the distinction between morality and ethi-
cal life (the synchronic theme). In Mead’s account, by contrast, the centrality of
law is preserved within the normative sphere, even as we understand law as a
component of a larger normative complex in the overall process toward individual
self-realization.26 Third, Honneth’s conception of normativity requires equating
morality with universality and self-realization with local attachments, and this is
an implausible assumption. Mead claims, on the contrary, that universality governs
any process through which we engage with a generalized other, and in this way he
can provide an account of self-respect richer than Honneth’s, by making it possible
to understand self-respect as emerging from social intercourse at any level. Fourth,
Honneth’s account presupposes an understanding of community as a traditional,
conventional, pre-reflective form of social life. This contrasts with Mead and the
other pragmatists, for whom the conventional and the post-conventional are both
embedded in the community to varying degrees, which makes it easier to explain
how self-critical and reflective processes can arise out of traditional or conventional
ways of living, since critical reflectivity—on what I would call an “emergentist”
conception—is in there from the start. And fifth, Honneth’s account is predicated
on a grand theoretical and historical hypothesis about modernity and is overly
concerned with the historical process through which modernity has come about.
And that, too, contrasts with Mead and the pragmatists, who instead rely on much
lighter assumptions, so the validity of their account is less exposed to the failure
of a complex and controversial theoretical edifice.

IV. FROM NORMATIVE SPHERES TO NORMATIVE PRACTICES

IV.A. TOWARD A PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF NORMATIVITY
This historical excursus was needed to show to what extent the pragmatist under-
standing of normativity resists the dualism of ethical life and morality on which
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

Critical Theory builds its own conception of normativity.27 And with that done we
can look to the possibility of an alternative account of normativity, a possibility that
Honneth comes close to seeing when he locates pragmatism outside the classification
that would have us choose between communitarian and proceduralist approaches
to normativity. What Honneth is not ready to concede, however, is that if we are
to overcome the dualisms he urges us to dismiss, we have to also drop the dualism
of morality and ethical life he maintains at the heart of his theory of normativity.
It is this conflict that drives his reading of the pragmatists astray. As the foregoing
reconstruction of the debate between pragmatism and Critical Theory has shown,
pragmatism succeeds in avoiding dichotomizing norms and values precisely be-
cause it embraces a nondualistic understanding of normative contexts. The idea
deserves to be further explored, and that is what I will be doing in this last section,
by generalizing some of the conceptual implications that flow from a pragmatist
account of normativity as it emerges out of Dewey and Mead.
For pragmatism in general, and specifically for Dewey and Mead, this dichoto-
mization of normative contexts is both puzzling and unnecessary. Not only does
it introduce an unneeded discontinuity between contexts of justification that from
an agent’s perspective are instead continuous, but it also gets in the way of any
finer analysis aimed at introducing further distinctions among normative contexts
of different types. Pragmatism essentially asks here: Once we have acquired the
Hegelian normative standpoint, and once we have acknowledged that modernity
has dramatically multiplied our forms of reflectivity, what is the point of main-
taining a conceptual opposition between morality and ethical life, or of confining
autonomy and self-realization to distinct and compartmentalized spheres of social
life? As I commented earlier, both Mead and Dewey would readily admit that the
revolutions of the modern era have profoundly and irreversibly transformed our
self-understanding and ways of life.28 Yet neither of them would agree that this
transformation consists in our having acquired a hitherto unavailable critical ca-
pacity. (And a lot of ethnographic work in recent decades has shown the extent to
which premodern ways of life are indeed neither traditional nor conventional, and
that reflectivity, rationality, and criticism can be found in most human societies.)
As Dewey has shown in The Quest for Certainty, the central issue is rather the
extent to which the resources of critical thinking have been turned to advantage.
And that is why pragmatism resists the effort to set up dichotomizing contrasts
between universality and contextuality, autonomy and self-realization, morality
and ethical life.
To understand why the pragmatists need not rely on this dualism, we need
to recall the pragmatist conception of society, marking its difference from that
which one finds at the root of Critical Theory. Specifically, we need to consider
that pragmatism methodologically avoids setting traditional ways of life against
the forms of life distinctive to modern society.29 This approach owes its origin to
the distinction Ferdinand Tönnies (Toennies 2001) drew in the late 1800s between
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, a distinction that has since been part of the basic
vocabulary in European sociology, especially through the discipline’s founding
fathers, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The distinction and the accompanying
approach are rejected by Dewey and Mead alike, who accordingly see no need to
 Roberto Frega

conceive communities as the custodians of ethical life, and who likewise have no
qualms about recognizing the community as a locus of reflective and procedural
practices, either—precisely what Critical Theory cannot bring itself to do, for it
cannot turn its back on the idea of community as the abode of conventional ethical
life, a phenomenon that modernity would have irreversibly swept away.30
Certainly, the concept of community tends to blur distinctions between differ-
ent dimensions of social life, and to this extent Critical Theory—building on the
Hegelian analysis of ethical life and taking advantage of contemporary sociological
analysis not available to Mead and Dewey—has done us an invaluable service in
providing a conceptually more sophisticated understanding of social life. Habermas
and Honneth have both given us an armamentarium of socio-theoretic concepts
much more accurate and pliant than what we could previously have looked to, and
they have shown us a way to bring philosophical and sociological perspectives to
bear in tackling the problem of normativity, yielding results that outstrip anything
the pragmatist camp has so far produced. In reading the process of modernization,
however, both of these philosophers tend to superpose the historical-sociological
theme of the progressive differentiation of the spheres of social life onto the
conceptual-analytical problem of the distinction between normative contexts,
and paradigmatically between ethical life and morality, as if the former theme
(historical-sociological evolution of morality from ethical structures) directly
implied the latter (conceptual-analytical difference between the two). Worthy of
consideration in this respect is Honneth’s tripartite classification of relationships
into the personal, the legal, and the communal, a classification which Honneth
derives from Hegel’s Jena writings, and which serves as a way to identify different
and partly autonomous social spheres where individuals act, build their identities,
and engage in normative practices. Still within the tradition of Critical Theory, this
tripartition can be further expanded, by following Rainer Forst (2002) in adding to
these three spheres a fourth, what he calls ‘political deliberation’—and with that
we have four distinct normative contexts.
With that differentiation among normative contexts before us, we are prompted
to ask at least two related questions. The first one, which I cannot take up here, is
whether these four spheres actually cover the whole normative field or whether we
should seek out distinctions identifying further normative dimensions, thus plural-
izing normative contexts in such a way as to obtain a view of the normative world
even richer and more granular than that offered by Critical Theory.31 This, however,
would require that the idea of normative contexts or spheres be replaced by that
of normative practices.32 The second question is how to interpret the distinction
originally set out between ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and morality (Moralität), and in
particular whether the two spheres the distinction marks out are to be understood
as continuous or discontinuous. As we have seen, Critical Theory would go with
this latter solution, for it sees a basic discontinuity between the two and thus sets
out to lay the foundation on which to justify that separation,33 whereas pragmatism
takes the opposite view, finding the different normative contexts to be bound by a
basic continuity, and considering universality as a limit-concept, thus envisaging
a progression from local communities to the most general of all communities, that
of humanity as a whole.
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

Both of these strategies answer the need for a conception of universality suited
to the needs of normative theory: the former is a substantive conception, the latter
a functional one. To be sure, these two conceptions, and the accompanying un-
derstanding of rationality, continue to be at odds with each other and to yield two
contrasting sets of normative implications. But I think that this is where we can see
at their best the respective potentials of pragmatism and Critical Theory in facing
the momentous issues of normativity that the legitimation crisis of modernity lays
at our doorstep.

IV.B. DO WE REALLY NEED A DUALISM OF MORALITY AND ETHICS?

For all the reasons detailed above, Honneth’s failure to understand Dewey’s and
Mead’s conceptions of normativity strikes me as being at once surprising and re-
vealing. Surprising because, as we saw, he came so close to an adequate account
of their views: he did see that Dewey and Mead were heading in the same direc-
tion as he was, but he could not see how they were doing so. Revealing because,
caught in the explanatory scheme he draws from German idealism and from a
sociological reading of modernity, he cannot conceive reflectivity, proceduralism,
and the critical attitude as general traits inherent in any form of social functioning,
modern or otherwise. And so, in the effort to provide an account of reflectivity,
he is forced to invoke the theoretical and historical discontinuity that comes with
the modern notion of reflective morality. The pragmatists are after the same kind
of solution to the contemporary legitimation crisis that he, too, is after. This he
does realize, and for this reason he extensively engages with them on precisely
this issue. Yet their solution cannot fully satisfy him because it does not fit into
the theoretical mold of the narrative of modernization he shares with the tradition
of Critical Theory.
Still, I do believe the pragmatist account outlined in the last section should
appeal to Honneth, and there are several reasons for that. First, the account
provides adequate room for proceduralism within normative theory under the
rubric of “rationality as inquiry.”34 Second, it shows how context-transcending
normativity arises out of socially determined contexts, in a way that agrees with
Hegel’s social account of normativity.35 Third, it makes it possible to differenti-
ate normative contexts in a way that is consistent with, and indeed richer than,
Honneth’s tripartite distinction, since it enables us to conceive a potentially
indefinite plurality of normative practices. And fourth, the account answers
Honneth’s concern to revive Hegel through an anti-metaphysical lens: if we look
at Honneth’s project over a ten-year period and consider how its focus shifts from
the young Hegel (the Jena writings) to Hegel’s mature philosophy of right—with
the attempt to bring Hegel to bear on the problem of modernity such as we know
it today (an effort that can be appreciated in Honneth’s most recent writings,
especially in Honneth [2014])—we would see just how much Honneth would
find himself in accord with a pragmatist account of normativity along the lines
of what I am putting forward.
Let us unpack this last point by looking at the main claims Honneth defends
in his 2001 book on Hegel’s philosophy of right (Honneth 2010).36 Honneth rejects
 Roberto Frega

the established scholarship that views abstract right, morality, and ethical life as
complementary spheres in Hegel.37 He highlights by contrast the alienating character
of abstract right and morality as incomplete and merely negative forms of liberty
liable to bring about that particular social pathology he calls underdetermination,
this in contrast to ethical life, which in this reading is entrusted with liberating
us from that condition. So, whereas in reading the pragmatists Honneth tended
to lay emphasis on right and morality as the distinguishing marks of modernity,
in this reading of Hegel’s later philosophy, Honneth is instead very much on the
side of ethical life as a complete, liberating, and reconciling form of social life. In
his remarkable effort at redeeming Hegel’s philosophy of right interpreted as the
theoretical framework for a theory of justice, he insists on Hegel’s understanding
of morality as essentially based on our individual capacity to grasp the rational
content of norms that are social in content. Here, in speaking of our ability to
rationally assess norms embedded in the social situation, Honneth is no longer
invoking the emancipatory power of post-conventional and procedural forms of
moral reasoning: he is instead now explicitly referring to forms of social normativ-
ity that belong to ethical life and that individuals find already out there, and that
are nevertheless rational.
The forms of social normativity making up this substratum belong to our
ethical life, and yet Honneth is providing this as an account of morality, not of
ethical life. And what explains this peculiarity is that Honneth’s reading empha-
sizes Hegel’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, found to be inadequate as
a context-blind criterion. Honneth accordingly rejects the solipsistic ideal of the
individual appealing to a universal conscience removed from the worldly affairs of
the moment: this is only seen in rare times of crisis, when the individual does have
to look beyond the scope of existing social norms; but otherwise, in the ordinary
course of practice, we have to see morality as tacitly embedded in our ethical life.
Far from being an overarching normative standpoint, morality embodies an appeal
to moral consciousness that we must resort to selectively, “whenever there are
sufficiently good reasons to question the rationality of institutionalized practices”
(Honneth 2010, 40).
Honneth has thus come around to a view of normativity as a fully socialized
phenomenon, with no further need to resort to the independent standpoint of moral-
ity, whose absence he previously took to be evidence that the pragmatist normative
program failed to do what it set out to do. Indeed, in reading the mature Hegel,
Honneth now proceeds from the view that “our norms and values have absorbed
enough rationality to be regarded as a social context whose moral guidelines we must
generally consider to be beyond doubt” (Honneth 2010, 41). Morality is reframed
as a negative, incomplete concept of liberty, whose modern autonomization and
absolutization in a positive concept becomes a major cause of social ills that social
philosophy is called in to remove by reconciling us with the rational sources found
in our forms of social life (Honneth 2010, 44). Having pushed freedom and abstract
right into the background, Honneth is finally in a position to claim—in accord with
the pragmatists—that interpersonal obligations and the personal good, autonomy
and self-realization, are bound up as inextricable parts of our ethical life (Honneth
2010, 56), so much so that the latter is now conceived by him as encompassing not
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

only the conditions for personal self-realization but also the norms and obligations
we must heed in pursuing our own good. One is therefore prompted to ask: what
else is this reality—understood as “objective spirit,” as the object of a process of
“normative reconstruction”—if not an illustration of the kind of normative account
I have shown to be at the heart of the pragmatist conception of normativity?
By way of a closing remark, it is quite something to see how in this conscious
effort to bring Hegel back into the contemporary conversation, Honneth applauds
Hegel’s attempt to locate universality within socially situated normative practices in
accord with a normative paradigm that in crucial respects feeds right into Dewey’s
metaphor of the spiral and into Mead’s ideal of cosmopolitanism. What is remark-
able about this moment of agreement is the turnabout that in 2001 Honneth did
to get there, endorsing what only a few years earlier he had rejected, namely, the
idea of a society-centered normative standpoint, which does not require shoving
society aside to reach morality, in that universality can be found within our forms
of social relation, provided “a subject’s chances of individualization will grow in
proportion to his capacity for generalizing his own orientations.” As a consequence,
“for Hegel, this decentration of the subject can meaningfully advance only as far
as the boundary drawn by the general concerns of a concrete community, for he
believes that the strict form of universalization . . . is appropriate only to a special
case in which a social lifeworld has lost all generalizable norms and practices”
(Honneth 2010, 62).
I cannot go further into this analysis. But the quoted passages do reveal the
extent to which Honneth’s appropriation of the later Hegel (setting aside the
earlier Hegel) falls in line with the pragmatist account of normativity. And this
program—that Honneth conceives in 2001 and completes in his last book (Honneth
2014)—by taking a resolutely Hegelian standpoint and abandoning any residual
Kantian inflection, reveals a vision of normativity decidedly closer to that of the
pragmatists. Although neither Dewey nor Mead assigned any prominent role to
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the concepts and ideas presented in that work do offer
a basis on which to proceed in bringing out some of the deep convergences that can
be found to exist between Critical Theory and the pragmatist tradition. So, what
I hope to have accomplished here is to show the extent to which pragmatism and
Critical Theory share common concepts and principles in the theory of normativity,
in that both of these traditions try to locate the emergence of norms within normative
practices whose main epistemological trait lies in their being self-reflective. This
shared paradigm enables both traditions, each in its own way, to assert the social
foundation of normativity,38 but in a way that does not amount to reducing norma-
tive justification to de facto legitimacy. The one point to note is that the pragmatist
solution is more sure-footed in locating the normative resources of critical thinking
and reflectivity within society and practices than are any of the solutions devised
by the proponents of Critical Theory, including Honneth.

V. CONCLUSIONS
What conclusions can be drawn from this extensive comparison between the ap-
proaches that pragmatism and Critical Theory take to normativity? What I think is
 Roberto Frega

instructive about Honneth’s misreading of pragmatism is that it shows how these

two traditions are actually closer than what might otherwise appear, and this in two
ways. First, by setting the record straight on the pragmatist conception of normativ-
ity, we can show that what Honneth presents as unresolved and unsolvable tensions
at the heart of that conception actually do find a solution. And in the second place,
even more importantly, what comes to light as we set out to rectify Honneth’s mis-
reading is the possibility not only to reconcile Critical Theory and pragmatism on
the question of normativity, but also to solve some abiding problems that several
scholars have identified in Critical Theory. These problems, as I have tried to show,
stem from the mighty legacy of German idealism, a legacy with which pragmatism
struggled for decades, and which both Mead and Dewey believed to have put in
perspective, while holding on to its most important and enduring achievements.39

ENDNOTES
1. The term Critical Theory will be uppercased throughout this article to signal the fact that
I only use it to refer to the Frankfurt School and to those who directly draw on that tradition.
2. Among the several contributions to this debate from a pragmatist perspective, see del
Castillo (2011); Decker (2012); Midtgarden (2012); Ray (2004); Shalin (1992). For a cri-
tique of pragmatism from the perspective of critical theory, see White (2004). For a reply
to White’s critiques, see Hildreth (2009). For a cross-reading of pragmatism and critical
theory see Owen (2007) and Markell (2007). Andreas Hetzel (Hetzel et al. 2008) argues
persuasively that important lines of convergence between pragmatism and critical theory
can already be found in the works of those thinkers in the first generation of the Frankfurt
school. (Jaeggi 2014) confirms this trend.
3. A theme I have explored in (Frega 2013a).
4. In Honneth’s first published book (1993), Mead is quoted only once and no reference
is made to Dewey.
5. Honneth will resort again to Dewey’s theory of democracy in his last book, (Honneth
2014), where Dewey remains the central reference for his vision of democratic ethos.
6. Honneth (1998a). It is remarkable, even baffling, that none of the three extensive
monographs devoted to Dewey’s ethics published in the last decade should take Honneth’s
analysis into account: Pappas (2008) makes no more than a passing reference to Honneth’s
text in a footnote, and not even a single mention anywhere can be found in either Lekan
(2003) or Fesmire (2003). This reflects the pragmatist tradition as a whole, which has overall
disregarded Honneth’s contribution to its own advancement.
7. The social-theoretic bases of this account have been laid out by Habermas in his mas-
terwork, The Theory of Communicative Action, which grounds an account of normativity
by drawing heavily on Durhkeim’s and Weber’s understanding of modernity. I examine this
theme and criticize Habermas’s unresolved dualism of morality and ethical life in (Frega
2013b). The view that pragmatist social theory cannot be reduced to the Durkheimian and
Weberian conceptions of modernity is aptly illustrated in two recent articles by Hans-Joachim
Schubert. See Schubert (2006; 2011).
8. This is a position Dewey arrived at under the influence of an idealist reading of Hegel.
As recent works have pointed out, Dewey’s move away from Hegel should rather be seen
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

as a move away from idealist readings of Hegel. Like Mead, Dewey will remain faithful
to a social conception of normativity and rationality traceable to Hegel. In an important
sense, this constitutes what Dewey called “the permanent deposit” of Hegelian thought in
his philosophy. See Good (2006) and Shook and Good (2010).
9. Honneth (1998a, 698). The expressions within single quotation marks are from Dewey
and Tuft (1932).
10. See Pappas (2008).
11. Dewey (1930, lw.5.279). On Dewey’s treatment of conflict and more generally on his
moral theory, see also (Dewey and Tuft 1932).
12. In an even more sophisticated way, Dewey observes that habits result from an ongo-
ing negotiation between the individual and society, and so that “conduct is always shared”
(Dewey 1922, mw.14: 16).
13. What Peirce dubbed methods for the fixation of beliefs and Dewey termed “stages in
logical thought.”
14. Dewey (1922, mw.14.165). For a detailed account of Dewey’s conception of normativity
along these lines, see (Frega 2012b).
15. Joas (1985) has cautioned us against reading Mead on the basis of such a restrictive
pool of sources. Compare da Silva (2010), stressing the need to rely more extensively on
Mead’s published writing. As I discuss in the reconstructive part of this section, Honneth
could easily have avoided some of the mistakes he makes if he had not confined himself to
Mead’s posthumously published lectures and had instead also taken into account the work
Mead published during his lifetime.
16. On Mead’s understanding of universality, see Aboulafia (2001), offering what is argu-
ably the most compelling account to date: through the concept of “functional universality,”
Aboulafia shows that Mead’s contexualism is compatible with a claim to universality. As I
have shown above, a functional conception of universality can already be found in Dewey’s
conception of normativity as a correlate of his conception of rationality as inquiry.
17. In so doing, Honneth appears to take a direction opposite to the one he followed with
Dewey, even though the underlying logic is the same: instead of viewing Mead as exclusively
and reductively concerned with communitarian forms of normativity, he views him as having
what appears to be an equally exclusive and reductive concern with universalistic forms of
normativity.
18. This is a conception of Mead’s “me” that Honneth shares with Habermas. Aboulafia
(2001, 67–73) offers a critique of Habermas’s account of Mead’s dialectic between the “I”
and the “me” and discusses the philosophical implications of that account in shaping the
debate on conventional and post-conventional approaches to normativity. As I illustrate in this
section, Honneth’s misreading of Mead is not entirely consistent with Habermas’s, but the
two are strikingly similar in their forcing Kantian themes on the pragmatists. Like Habermas,
Honneth tends to see the “me” essentially as a device for explaining social control and the
interiorization of norms. But unlike Habermas, he “concocts” a second “me” to deal with
those expressive and identitarian traits of the “I”-“me” relationship that cannot be reduced
to social control.
19. It should be remarked that in (Honneth 1998b) Honneth equally overemphasizes the role
of the division of labor in Dewey’s political philosophy.
20. One has to wonder whether Mead, had he been around to edit his lectures, would have
organized his discussion more cohesively, so as not to risk throwing the reader off course.
 Roberto Frega

21. See Mead’s “National-Mindedness and International-Minded-Ness,” in Mead (1964). I

do not think that Marilyn Fischer’s recent article on Mead’s internationalism (Fischer 2008)
raises significant objections to my interpretation. I would, however, refer the reader to it for
the counter-arguments Fischer offers to Mead’s alleged cosmopolitanism.
22. An example of such interdependence can be found in Mead’s article “National-
Mindedness and International Mindedness,” in Mead (1964).
23. “Natural Rights and the Theory of Political Institutions,” in Mead (1964, 163).
24. See Mead (1934, 157–158).
25. Note here the originality of Mead’s argument, with its implicit distinction between
universality and generality: the former has been with us from the start; only the latter is a
development of modernity. For Mead, the generalized other is by definition universal, what-
ever form it may take; what changes is only the degree of its generality, or the basis of its
application (the universe to which it applies). Thus, nothing is more general than humanity,
yet the generalized other such as it applies to this group is no more universal than that which
applies to any other social group, no matter how small or local.
26. I cannot digress now, but Mead’s account of normativity is fully compatible with a his-
torical account tracing out the genesis of modern rights and of their philosophical meaning,
as Honneth himself acknowledges (1995, 118).
27. See (Frega 2013b) for an account of how this problem affects also Jürgen Habermas’s
philosophy and, to a significant extent, the work of Rainer Forst.
28. On this aspect see Dewey (2012).
29. This is essentially the dualism framed by the distinction between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft, a dualism in which Critical Theory grounds its analysis of modern society. As
Joachim Schubert has recently pointed out (2006; 2011), an alternative account had already
been developed by the Chicago school of sociology—an account consistent with and directly
inspired by Dewey’s and Mead’s theories, and especially by the pragmatist conception of
community. Indeed, the pragmatists never dichotomized between local-communal and
modern-universalist forms of life, and they accordingly built their conception of society from
the outset on an idea of continuity between primary and secondary forms of association, a
continuity that cannot in any way be reconciled with the dichotomy between Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft. Accordingly, as Schubert correctly points out, the classical pragmatists
and the classical German sociologists had two quite different ways of understanding what
a community is, and as I have shown, “this understanding leads to very different social-
political theories” (Schubert 2006, 54). This difference is revealed, for example, in the fact
that for Cooley “the enlargement of primary-group ideals involves by necessity the enlarge-
ment of democracy, whereas no theory of democracy derives from Tönnies’s conception
of Gemeinschaft” (Schubert 2006, 55). I thank Torjus Midtgarden for bringing Schubert’s
article to my attention.
30. One need only consider that Dewey saw in the idea of the “Great Community” the form
of social order capable of solving the tensions brought about by the crisis of traditional local
communities through the advent of modern society (Dewey 1927). Dewey’s insistence in
maintaining the notion of community at the heart of his theory of democracy should be read
in light of his refusal to dichotomize modernity and tradition and not as a nostalgic turn to
pre-modern forms of life.
31. I have tackled this question at some length in Frega (2013b).
Beyond Morality and Ethical Life: Pragmatism and Critical Theory

32. See (Frega 2013b; 2014) for more extended analyses of the theoretical implications of
a practice-based approach to normativity.
33. As I will be discussing shortly, Honneth takes a more complex view: while in the texts
so far considered he explicitly defends the thesis of a basic discontinuity, in Honneth (2010)
and especially in Honneth (2014) he appears to move much closer to the pragmatist view,
for the residual function is now left to morality instead.
34. See (Frega 2012b) for an extended account of this notion.
35. See Frega 2012a and Frega 2014.
36. The English translation of this book was published in 2010. I will not venture here into
the much more complex question of how close the pragmatists are to the “real” Hegel, as
Honneth’s reading of Hegel is certainly far from uncontroversial.
37. See Neuhouser (2003); Wood (1990); Hardimon (1994) for recent examples in this
tradition.
38. In Dewey’s apt framing of the point, “Morality is Social” (Dewey 1922).
39. Torjus Midtgarden, Filipe Carreira da Silva, and Mitchell Aboulafia have read previous
versions of this papers. I’m grateful for their useful suggestions as well as for those of two
anonymous reviewers of this journal.

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