Special issue article

European Journal of Social Theory

2019, Vol. 22(1) 10–26
Hierarchy, social pathology ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431018768625
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of recognition theory

Michael J. Thompson
William Paterson University, Wayne, USA

Abstract
This article argues that the dynamics behind the generation of social pathologies in
modern society also undermine the social-relational framework for recognition. It
therefore claims that the theory of recognition is impotent in face of the kinds of nor-
mative power exerted by social hierarchies. The article begins by discussing the par-
ticular forms of social pathology and their relation to hierarchical forms of social
structure that are based on domination, control and subordination and then shows how
the internalization of the norms that shape and hold together hierarchical social for-
mations causes pathologies within the self. As a result of these processes, the recognitive
aspects of social action that the theory of recognition posits are unable to overcome and
in fact reproduce and in many instances reinforce the pathologies themselves.

Keywords
hierarchy, Honneth, recognition, social domination, social pathology

A central concern of critical social theory is the diagnosis and overcoming of social
pathologies. The condition of the ‘damaged life’ that thinkers such as Adorno considered
a central problem that plagued modernity was generally understood to be rooted in the
structures and processes that shaped and formed the subjective life and experience of the
individual. One of the key insights of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical
theorists was the thesis that social pathologies are in fact interlaced with the structural
and relational forms of life that constitute capitalist modernity. Viewed in this way, any

Corresponding author:
Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University of New Jersey, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, New Jersey
07470, USA.
Email: thompsonmi@wpunj.edu
Thompson 11

valid critical theory of society must deal with the ways that the structural, objective
(material) organization of society has effects on the cultural, psychological complex of
the self. The basic thesis I want to defend that social pathologies should be conceived as
those structures of social relations that do not enhance or cultivate the common goods
requisite for each of its members’ self-development. I want to suggest that a useful
theory of social pathology describes those structures or shapes of social relations that
deprive the community as a whole of those resources – material, psychic, social-
relational – that can lead to the fullest possible development of each member’s indivi-
duality. Individuals, in this sense, are self-conscious members of an interdependent,
cooperative community of equals who grasp that their own good as individuals is func-
tionally dependent on the common goods and purposes the society holds in common.
More recently, Axel Honneth has once again made social pathology a central concern
of critical theory. According to Honneth, a social pathology is the result of individuals
not properly picking up on the normative content of truly modern institutions that are
built on recognitive processes. In his most recent work, he sees that modern institutions
and social forms instantiate norms that congeal the normative content of recognition
itself, such as the family and the market. The institutions of a modern, democratic ‘ethical
life’ (Sittlichkeit) are what objectifies the ethics of recognition into its institutional and
normative life (Honneth, 2011: 119ff; also cf. Honneth, 2014). In Freedom’s Right, Hon-
neth (2011) has chosen to see the concept of social pathology not as the product of a
pathological society organized around alienating and reifying forces rooted in capitalist
social relations, but rather as a lack on the part of persons to recognize the norms immanent
within modern social institutions, norms that will lead to their pursuing recognitive rela-
tions with others and as allowing those norms to guide their personal and collective
projects. The important point is that in Freedom’s Right there is a disconnect between

[the] actual rationality of norms in social practices and the participants’ reflexive uptake of
these norms (or of their significance) – a disconnect that is itself (purportedly) caused by
some internal dynamics of the norms in question (in contrast to misdevelopments, where the
disconnect is caused externally). (Freyenhagen, 2015: 144)

According to this view, social pathologies are now to be seen not in Marxian terms, as
the by-product of contradictions within the social order, but rather as a result of the lack
of proper recognitive relations which allow the (supposedly) democratic-recognitive
norms of modern institutions to seep into the reflective consciousness of intersubjec-
tively related social agents. The institutions of modernity, such as the modern family and
a regulated market economy, are viewed by Honneth as worthy of our endorsement
because they can allow for the realization of common projects and for each to see that
his or her own self is related to those of others. The failure to take up the norms of these
institutions therefore constitutes a pathology. A non-pathological society, for Honneth,
would therefore not need to change the structure of society itself, but would need to
allow for the proper uptake of modern norms which, he maintains, already possess the
normative content of equality, reflexivity and self-development.
The focus in this article is the extent to which the theory of recognition and its claims
to be a critical theory of society are unable to provide us with adequate and appropriate
12 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

means to diagnose and alleviate the problem of social pathologies. The basic reason for
this, I suggest, is that the forces that generate social pathologies, specifically the alienat-
ing and anomic consequences of modern social relations governed by capitalism, under-
mine the socializing prerequisites for recognition, as Honneth has laid them out in his
writings. My thesis is that social pathologies are tied to the specific nature and logic of
capitalist forms of economic life and their capacity to integrate the self into its own
functional imperatives. Furthermore, because of the strong integrating powers of modern
institutions, they are capable of ‘capturing’ the recognition process and colonizing it for
their own ends and purposes. Because Honneth downplays or, perhaps more correctly,
ignores, the hegemonic powers of capital as a social process, he is unable to see that
institutions, such as the family and the market, among others, are themselves embedded
in processes that seek to enhance surplus via hierarchical efficiency. Outside of these
institutions, social relations have degraded. Social pathology is therefore not what Hon-
neth believes it to be, but should be seen in a more objective, ontological sense: as those
structures of social relations that distort individualization processes into heteronomous
and alienated forms of self and consciousness. It is important to stress that social pathol-
ogies are not only defects of the social world itself but also become pathologies of the
structure of subjectivity as well. In this respect we need to come to terms with the ways
social pathologies have the effect of disabling the capacities of the self and the inter-
subjective relations that the theory of recognition holds up as emancipatory.
What I would therefore like to propose here is that social pathologies must be under-
stood as an expression of the distortions of social relations that occur within hierarchical
social contexts and that part of social pathology is the fact that the members of patho-
logical social relations are socialized, so that their reflexive awareness of those pathol-
ogies is severely weakened. This means that hierarchical social inequalities or social
relations based on domination, control and subordination have the effect of transforming
and shaping consciousness but in ways that make a rational-critical awareness of those
structures difficult. In this respect, my first task in this article will be to elaborate the
ways that pathologies of the self are linked with social hierarchies and to point to the
ways that these pathologies shape the structures of consciousness and moral awareness
among subjects. In the end we will be able to see that the theory of recognition offers us
not so much a critical theory of society but rather a failed attempt to combat the powerful
drives and logics of modern social institutions and their embeddedness within capitalist
forms of economic life. I see the problem of embeddedness as a central concern here and
it refers to a problem that plagues much of what now passes for critical theory. The
problem is that the theories elaborated – such as discourse ethics, communicative action,
recognition, justification, and so on – have become neo-Idealist in that they posit a theory
of social action external to the actual social forms, structures and logics that constitute
modern social reality. Once these theories are in fact embedded in these real social
forms, they break down in terms of their critical efficacy. In the end, they become more
neo-Kantian, Weberian Ideal-typical constructions of theory than a confrontation with
the power relations that lie at the root of the ‘damaged life’ of modernity. Indeed, it is in
fact this embeddedness in capitalist society that renders recognition, in particular, impo-
tent as a paradigm for critical theory. Indeed, my central critical charge against
Honneth’s social theory is its idealized conception of social institutions and practices,
Thompson 13

such as the family and the market. Once his model of such institutions is embedded in the
actual, damaged relations of capitalist modernity, it does not possess the structural
integrity to withstand the pressures stemming from the hierarchical and pathological
social forms in which recognitive relations are to be instantiated.
My conclusion here will therefore be that the theory of recognition does not and,
indeed, cannot critically confront the problems of the pathologies of self and society that
emerge in capitalist modernity. The weakness of recognition as a critical theory of
society is that it falls into a neo-Idealism in that it is conceived as a practice and property
of cognition. But once we embed this process into the actual features of social life, the
pathological forces and pressures of hierarchical social relations distort and twist this
process into one that is impotent, for the most part, to serve as a basis for critical
judgment. Indeed, Honneth would no doubt reply to this charge that he is in fact embed-
ding the process of recognition in actual social forms; that his most recent work in
particular focuses on the ways that modern social forms are congealed forms of recog-
nitive relations. But this is not what I mean by the term embeddedness. It is not my claim
that Honneth ignores social forms or the ways that norms and practices permeate the self.
What I do argue is that these social forms are misunderstood and conceived as cleansed
of unique forms of power that administrative-capitalist logics exhibit. What I think
Honneth gets wrong is his theoretical description of these institutions, that they do not
actually map the reality of damaged social relations that result from the increasingly
hierarchical nature of modern social life. The increase in economic inequality, the under-
mining of virtually all forms of social solidarity, of social trust, and the decay of social
bonds outside of formal institutions, all point to a very different picture of modern social
life than Honneth assumes. I believe that the theory of recognition is unable to overcome
its inherent neo-Idealism and that, as a consequence of this, it cannot serve as an
emancipatory interest for modern society. Since the origins of social and self pathologies
are rooted in the social-structural and functional dimensions of social life, the theory of
recognition remains an abstract ‘ought’, a philosophical ideal that is projected onto
modern social life. It is, I contend, a theoretical device whose capacity for political
content is weak and, more importantly, incapable of having a self-transformative impact
on the self and society.

Social hierarchy and social pathology

I want to begin with the problem of social hierarchy. As a first assumption, I take it that
the predominant patterns of social pathology that prevail in modern societies stem from
the ontological priority of hierarchically structured social relations and their effects on
self-formation. Hierarchies are not simply vertically-ordered forms of sociation,
although this is one of their significant features. Indeed, hierarchies that are ordered
based on some kind of consensus or which operate for conditions of common interest –
such as a relation between teacher and students – need not necessarily qualify as a social
pathology. It is only when these relations obtain specific qualities that we can begin to
identify them as social pathologies. The particular problem of social hierarchy is the
phenomenon of social control through the rationalization of its norms and practices as
well as the internalization of these norms and practices into the structure of the self and
14 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

the self’s capacities for self-reflection, moral judgment and social rationality. The pro-
cess of socialization therefore constitutes one of the core features of social hierarchies
since these structures are not accepted by persons in some rational, deliberative way but
because they have been socialized into them, thereby deeply affecting the structures of
the ego. Such social relations are, then, pathological once they achieve heteronomous
powers over its participants’ consciousness; once the self is shaped and fitted into a
hierarchical context that serves the benefits of superordinates. This, in turn, will lead us
to the problem of pathologies of the self, of one’s psychic, cognitive and evaluative
capacities which cannot be separated out from social pathologies. When these aspects of
the theory are put together, we will have before us a basic theory of what social pathol-
ogies are and how they are generated. After exploring this, I will illustrate the kind of
responses at the level of the self as well as societal/cultural level that these pathologies
invoke within agents.

Hierarchy and social relations

My argument begins with the following thesis: hierarchical social relations have con-
stitutive and causal powers over the formation of the self and the psychological features
and cognitive capacities of each individual. What this means is that the material structure
of society is of primary importance to the psychological, cultural, and non-economic
features of any society (cf. Thompson, 2016). I think we should understand the concept
of social pathology as the existence of social relations that constrain, frustrate or cause
the inability of individuals to be able to have proper healthy connections to other human
beings as well as possess significantly healthy relations-to-self. In this sense, social
hierarchies play a central role in the formation of such pathologies. As I see it, we should
look toward the features of the social hierarchies and the ways that they are able to create
and sustain certain normative and cognitive aspects of the self in order to understand the
deep-seated grooves of pathologies of the social on the pathologies of the self.
Hierarchies are of a multifarious form, in families, between racial or ethnic groups,
between class groups, and so on. There are two key features of hierarchical groups. First,
their genesis lies in some basic sense in the existence and protection of economic surplus.
Group hierarchies are found least where there is a lack of economic surplus. As Sidanius
and Pratto argue, the ‘lack of economic surplus does not allow for the development of
highly specialized social roles, such as professional armies, police, and other bureau-
cracies facilitating the formation of expropriative political authority’ (1999: 34–5). A
second core feature of hierarchies is that they are sustained and stabilized structures of
relations that have causal powers over the processes of self-consciousness and self-
constitution of its members. And they are pathological to the extent that these relations
are extractive or expropriative as well as encourage non-reflection on its basic legitimacy
and existence. What this means is that hierarchies constitute not only a structure of
inequality, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a pattern of roles and functions that
grant that hierarchy its stability and its actual existence as a social fact.
The key issue here is that the hierarchical pattern is not simply a matter of the
structure itself, but more essentially of the constitutive rules and norms that pattern that
relationship. These rules, norms and values are not simply larded onto hierarchical
Thompson 15

structures, they are in fact constitutive of that hierarchy itself. This is an important point
to stress since it seems to me to go to the heart of any valid critical theory of society. The
key thesis here is that capital – as a social process – is constitutive of social forms and the
logics of the relations of those forms. This thereby forms the developmental context for
social integration as well as the psychological dynamics of personal individuation. The
key idea here is that the pathologies of reason and reflection that infect the reflective
capacities of subjects are rooted in the various ways that these norms and values under-
gird consciousness (Thompson, 2017). Hierarchical relations are ultimately social-
ontological relations: they do not possess material existence, even though they may in
fact be rooted in an inequality of resource control. Rather, the essential features of the
unequal relations of any hierarchical group are constituted by the norms and practices of
that group and its activities: the norms and intentional behaviors of that group’s members
literally create the reality of the hierarchy itself.
One way this becomes manifest is how the rules of consciousness that govern our
actions and our intentionality in general become attuned to the rules that govern the
institutions in our world. The existence of social facts, as John Searle has insightfully
pointed out, requires that the status that we assign to things possess ‘deontic power’, or
the capacity for that rule to generate a duty on behalf of the agent (Searle, 2010). Thus,
our cognition becomes shaped by the institutional realities into which we are socialized.
This is an important issue to stress for my thesis of embedded versus neo-Idealist
approaches to human rationality. For neo-Idealist theories, such as Honneth’s thesis
about recognition, the capacity of recognition is viewed as a phylogenetic capacity and
then plays itself out via idealized relations between persons. In an embedded conception
of the matter, this capacity must be understood as taking place within and to become
constituted by the social forms, norms, institutions, structures and functions that already
prevail in the given social context. The ontogenetic expression of recognitive relations
are shaped and structured by the pre-existing structures and functions that constitute the
institutions of the society (Athens, 2012). In my view, the crucial flaw in the theory of
recognition is that it cannot withstand the problem of embeddedness, i.e. when placed
within real structural-functional contexts of power, domination, and control, it cannot
realize its emancipatory or critical promise but instead can lead to a cementing of
legitimacy of an irrational social order.
Now, in order to elaborate how hierarchy is a central concern in this respect, we need
to stress its essence not as a material phenomenon, but rather as a social-ontological
phenomenon. What this means is that the various roles, persons, rules, values, etc. that
permeate the hierarchy are not simply regulative of that hierarchy, but constitutive of it.
In this sense, the robustness of the hierarchy itself is only as strong as it is rooted in the
cognitive and normative consciousness of its members. In terms of cognitive capacities,
the very forms of knowledge we have about the social world are underwritten by these
normative rules about the status, role, and function of different persons and things. Since
each hierarchy possesses its own internal set of rules and justifications, it requires each
person to be socialized in particular ways into those institutions. But the key insight here
is that cognition and social structure are in fact intertwined; they are dialectically related
in that each shapes and causes the other, they have causal reciprocity on one another. In
this sense, hierarchies become pathological when they are organized for the unequal
16 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

benefit of a minority of the group. It would be rational to submit to the authority of a

teacher, say, who has hierarchical powers over her students. And these students and
teacher can only be who they are in that setting once they behave and think according to
the rules and norms of students and teacher. But when such an organization exists for the
benefit not of all, but of a particular portion of the hierarchy, then we can see a social
pathology morph into a pathology of the self. The core idea here is that intersubjectivity
is shaped largely by prevailing hierarchical structures and the norms and constitutive
rules that these structures emanate.
Overlooking the importance of hierarchy and the ways that it creates a social-
ontological and subjective reality is a serious flaw of recognition theory. One way that
Honneth commits this error is in his thesis that the market constitutes a sphere of social
freedom. His basic claim is that market relations foster and rest upon recognitive rela-
tions between individuals. He maintains that

the market can only fulfill its function of harmoniously integrating individual economic
activities in an uncoerced way and by means of relations of contract if it is embedded in
feelings of solidarity that precede all contracts and obligate economic actors to treat each
other fairly and justly. (Honneth, 2011: 331)

This gives rise to a consciousness of solidarity (Solidaritätsbewußtsein) which is

achieved through the web of recognitive relations allowing each to see that others are
cooperative partners (Honneth, 2011: 327ff). The market is not only a place for self-
interest, but also presupposes a recognitive community where ‘the coordination of
merely individual material calculations can only succeed if the subjects involved ante-
cedently recognize each other not only legally as parties to a contract, but also morally or
ethically as members of a cooperative community’ (p. 331).
Here we see the central importance of embeddedness since modern market economies
are distinct from the market society that predominated during the times of Adam Smith
or Hegel through their embeddedness in capitalistic forms of production and consump-
tion. The private ownership of capital, of the resources that shape and structure market
relations, are intrinsically hierarchical and, as such, there exists a crucial blockage on the
part of social actors to cognize others as cooperative partners and increasingly as com-
petitors, as superordinates or subordinates, and so on. The crucial error here is in not
seeing the strong ontological primacy of social hierarchy and its effects on the supposed
powers of recognition to create conditions of social freedom. In this sense, the hierarch-
ical relations do not reside in the phenomenological lifeworld of the interaction between
market actors, but in the social structures, functions, roles and logics that capital dictates
for their very activity. Indeed, it is for this reason that first-generation critical theorists
paired Marx’s theoretical insights with Weber and Freud in the first place: they were all
too aware of the powers of rational domination on the formation of the ego. Nevertheless,
what is crucial here is that the hierarchy of control over resources, over institutional ends
and norms, as well as other non-economic spheres of life that shape the value-patterns
and practices of the community as a whole are invisible if we adopt Honneth’s inter-
pretation of the market as the sphere of social freedom (see Jütten, 2015).
Thompson 17

Capitalist dynamics now come more clearly into view as a central pathology of
society and self insofar as they elaborate a series of nested hierarchies that are orga-
nized for the unequal benefit and interest of a particular subset of the community. But
what is even more central, and what the originators of critical theory had solidly in
view, was the problem of how administrative-capitalist societies shaped and affected
subjectivity by deforming the general social-relational nexus of all aspects of social
life. The family, civil society, politics, self-relations – all were seen to be corrupted by
the central problem of the reification of consciousness due to the transformation of
social relations under capitalism and the technical-instrumental organization of mod-
ern life. This stemmed from the violence done to the social-relational structures and
practices of society as a whole. The pathology of consciousness here is rooted in the
pathology of society: since each member of the hierarchy needs each other for that
hierarchical group to be what it is and do what it does, the pathological moment
becomes apparent once we consider the extent to which hierarchical group relations
and their increasing technical-administrative logics absorb more and more aspects of
personal and social life. The more that these hierarchies are ordered according to the
economic logics of surplus extraction, the norms and values of consumption, and so on,
the more that social relations become shaped and infected by their logics and the more
that the self becomes ingrained within such logics as well. The process of recognition is
therefore thrown into this pathological context and one way to see its effects is in the
development of the subject under such conditions.

Socialization of the ego

Hierarchies therefore have causal powers that sustain and re-create them. But the locus
of where this occurs is at the cognitive level of the subject. This does not render the
phenomenon Idealist, but rather demonstrates the fundamental dialectic between exist-
ing social reality and the formation of consciousness (cf. Thompson, 2016: 91 ff.). One
way that this occurs is through the absorption of constitutive rules into the basis of social
consciousness and of the cognitive and evaluative powers of the agent as well. The
crucial test of the thesis of recognition as a critical theory of society rests, in my view,
on the question of whether or not recognitive processes of self-formation are able to
resist and push back against the powers of self-constitution rooted in the prevailing
hierarchical structures of society and the values and norms that they make ambient. If
we accept the thesis that hierarchical social relations are oriented toward unequal surplus
benefits for a particular sub-group of the community, then we can see that this is only
pathological to the extent that these hierarchies have the power to shape social relations
from being equal, openly reflexive ones toward ones that enhance and perpetuate an
inequality between members of the group.
Since hierarchies are structured by norms and cognitive rule-following, the more
functionally robust a hierarchy is, the more that the intersubjectivity between subjects
is constituted by these structural-functional relations. One of Honneth’s core arguments
about the autonomous efficacy of recognition is that it is an ‘independent sphere of
action’. As he puts the matter:
18 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

Today, social theory based on Marx can regain its critical potential only if the functionalist
prioritizing of the economic sphere is dropped and the weight of other domains of action is
brought to bear: an analysis in which the achievements of all remaining spheres has been
investigated as contributing to the one systemic aim of material production must give way to
a research program that investigates the historically specific interrelationships of indepen-
dent spheres of action. (Honneth, 1995a: 5)

But as I am arguing here, this perspective does not seem plausible, let alone desirable.
For if we see social hierarchy as a constitutive system of rules, norms, practices, and so
on and if their existence is made possible by economic surplus, then it seems difficult, if
not impossible, to separate intersubjective spheres of action from the structural-
functional skeleton of social hierarchy.
Indeed, in modern society, it seems even more that these hierarchies are economic-
based than before in terms of their purpose and social aims and more and more spheres of
social life are absorbed into the logic of economic growth and the expansion and defense
of oligarchic forms of wealth. As Marcuse put it in his diagnosis of the ‘affluent society’:

Today total administration is necessary and the means are at hand: mass gratification,
market research, industrial psychology, computer mathematics, and the so-called science
of human relations. These take care of the non-terroristic, democratic, spontaneous-
automatic harmonization of individual and socially necessary needs and wants, of autonomy
and heteronomy. (Marcuse, 1978: xix)

Economic surplus is either the direct aim of social hierarchy (corporate structures, class
structures, etc.) or its indirect aim (law, education, cultural values, etc.). It is hegemonic
enough within our social and cultural life to be taken as determinative of more and more
of our social relations.
Hierarchy is therefore deeply problematic for the self because of its integrative power.
One reason for this is that, as Louis Dumont has argued: ‘Hierarchy is not, essentially, a
chain of superimposed commands, nor even a chain of beings of decreasing dignity, nor
yet a taxonomic tree, but a relation that can succinctly be called “the encompassing of the
contrary”’ (1970: 239). What Dumont’s thesis indicates is that the nature of hierarchical
group power is such that subordinates are encompassed by the superordinate. The sub-
ordinate is therefore a part of but also distinct from the superordinate. What this means is
that a hierarchical relation can only exist so long as superordinates are able to enclose their
subordinates within the field of their control. In modern hierarchies, this is even more
essential since they rest increasingly on the success of the legitimacy of the values and
norms that hold them together instead of physical or emotional coercion. The ego therefore
does not simply face intersubjective relations with others, it also absorbs and internalizes
the norms and cognitive rule-following that constitute hierarchical group-relations. In this
sense, the problem of what Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto call ‘consensuality’ emerges as
a crucial force on the socialized ego. As they see it, consensuality refers ‘to the degree to
which social representations and social ideologies are broadly shared within the social
system’ (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999: 47). The more hierarches are able to embed their logics
of norms, values as well as cognitive and evaluative rule-following within the structure of
Thompson 19

the subject, the more that the intersubjective relations among individuals will perpetuate
and ‘naturalize’ the prevailing social-structural relations.

Reification and social domination

Thus far, my thesis has been that hierarchical group relations are constituted by norms
and cognitive rule-following that shape not only the consciousness of individuals, but
also the intersubjective relations that socialize them. The relevance of this for the theory
of recognition is that it entails the fusion of social structures of inequality and the
intersubjective relations that socialize the ego. A result of this process is the problem
of reification or that pathology of consciousness that blocks the powers of reason from
being able to organize one’s experience rationally and to contest the pathological struc-
tures within one’s social world. The problem of reification is therefore one that retards
and inhibits the subject’s rational-reflective as well as his rational-reflexive powers.
Indeed, as George Gabel has insightfully noted, this leads the subject toward a condition
of ‘defocalization of thought due to the appearance on the scene of privileged systems
(collective egocentrism) with regression to a pre-dialectical stage similar to child
thought’ (1975: 56). Such a condition is brought about due to social-relational structures
that shape consciousness and cognition. At its most significant level, the reification of
consciousness becomes problematic when individual subjects become socialized into a
social order so thoroughly that they lose conscious awareness of the very domination-
relations that pervade their world. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, domination relations
become reified once they ‘achieve the opacity and permanence of things and escape the
grasp of individual consciousness and power’ (1977: 184). In both cases, we are dealing
with the problem initially diagnosed by Georg Lukács (1971) and the theory of reifica-
tion of consciousness.
The link between the reification of consciousness and the structural-functional reali-
ties of hierarchical social systems becomes apparent when we see that the ego is success-
fully socialized only when it accepts and internalizes the value-patterns of the social
world (see Israel, 1971: 255ff, as well as Thompson, 2013). Reified consciousness is the
result of the acceptance and internalization of these heteronomous value-patterns and
value-orientations to the extent that the hierarchy is maintained and each member of the
hierarchy does not question its moral or political validity. The implications of this
phenomenon for the theory of recognition are that it brings the problem of social pathol-
ogy full circle. Now we are confronted with a social totality that will encompass and fit
the desire for recognition within its parameters. As long as the hierarchy remains beyond
the horizon of critical consciousness, as long as the hierarchy is able to have its value-
patterns become part of the internal cognitive and evaluative patterns of the self – i.e. the
more that the reification of consciousness is the fruit of the socialization processes of
hierarchical institutions and group-relations – the more recognition will be subjected to
these ends and not to proposed emancipatory ends that thinkers such as Honneth main-
tain are intrinsic to it. Rather, the result of this process is not a growing critical-moral
awareness of social or moral wrongs, but an increasing passive acceptance of the status
quo and the increasing efficacy of the domination of those social relations, or of the
many by the few. What the theory of recognition is unable to confront, as I see it, can
20 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

now be seen as the problem of embeddedness – or the problem of how recognitive

relations cannot be seen as separate from structural-functional systems, but as absorbed
by them into their own logics and norms.

Social embeddedness, recognitive failure and consensuality

The crucial question that must now be raised is whether or not the process of recognition,
as thinkers such as Axel Honneth and his followers have elaborated it, has the capacity to
resist, question, and transform the web of norms, intentional mental states and cognition
of those shaped by hierarchical forms of life. Can it, in other words, provide the self with
a means by which he or she will be able to possess an awareness of social pathologies, or
will these pathologies shape the recognitive processes themselves? As I have endeavored
to show above, a major reason why I think we should reject this position is that recog-
nition is a neo-Idealist theory that, on its own as an autonomous process, cannot generate
an emancipatory interest. The problem I have hinted at is one of embeddedness which
denotes the fact that intersubjective relations of recognition are inscribed into the
already-existing structural-functional relations that constitute hierarchical group-
relations. Once we see recognition in these real terms, it changes its logic and its social
and subjective consequences. As a theoretical test, I believe that the critical potential of
recognition fails because once it is placed within actual structural-functional contexts,
the remaining insights of the theory break down and cannot sustain themselves.
We have to recall that Honneth sees his theory of recognition as both a critical capacity
as well as an emergent property of our practices of sociation. He argues that recognition is
‘a moral potential that is structurally inherent in communicative relations between subjects
[that] comes to be realized’ (Honneth, 1995b: 67). What this entails is that recognitive
relations, rooted in mother-child relations and then developing through higher moral stages
of socialization and self-development will give rise to a moral awareness of our desire to
be recognized as a self and the need to grant that same recognition to others. This will
happen through conflict – but a conflict of recognitive demands:

conflict represents a sort of mechanism of social integration into the community which
forces subjects to cognize each other mutually in such a way that their individual conscious-
ness of totality has ultimately become interwoven, together with that of everyone else, into a
‘universal’ consciousness’. (p. 28)

Finally, what this will mean is that a social situation is created where the community is
essentially underwritten by self-conscious recognizers whose recognitive statuses allow
them to unfold their identities. Such a society is ‘now meant to include the entirety of
intersubjective conditions that can be shown to serve as necessary preconditions for
individual self-realization’ (p. 173). All of this is premised on the social-
psychological process of recognition, but this process is not construed as existing within
actual concrete social relations of power and the causal powers of institutions and their
powers of socialization. Embeddedness is therefore this very reality of what happens
when we think of recognitive relations in the light of these actual concrete processes of
power and hierarchical social-structural relations.
Thompson 21

Embeddedness, therefore, as I see it, leads to two central problems for the theory of
recognition and its claims to a critical theory of society. First is what I will call here
recognitive failure which denotes the problem of not recognizing the ethical status of the
other because of the tendencies of authoritarianism, racism, ressentiment, or other
reactionary impulses. Second, is the problem of consensuality which is a condition where
the recognitive relations bolster support for, rather than criticism of, the prevailing social
relations by being coopted by the formative powers of those institutions themselves. In
the former, one recognizes only particular others and excludes others from moral rec-
ognition. The problem here is that the theory of recognition cannot deal with these
problems from within and we are pushed back into the liberal categories of tolerance.
Here the problem can be more succinctly stated as one of ontological precedence. In
other words, do recognitive relations precede the normative powers of the social struc-
ture or is the social structure and its norms shaped and/or affected by the processes of
recognition? As I see it, recognition is embedded within these structures and their norms,
not the other way round. And this has deep consequences for the lack of critical con-
sciousness and moral awareness of the self. Indeed, we can accept the thesis that Honneth
and thinkers like Robert Brandom have defended – one that is essentially Hegel’s basic
claim in the Phenomenology of Spirit anyway – that self-consciousness is a product of
reciprocal, recognitive relations with others, but this does not get us very far outside of
considering the actual concrete contexts within which these recognitive relations play
themselves out. In other words, it is crucial to see that the mechanisms of recognition can
be, and generally are, shaped by the structures and functions of existing social institu-
tions and social relations. Hence, the pathology of the self can be understood via the
deformation and warping of recognitive relations. As Brandom points out:

Insofar as recognition is de facto not symmetric, it cannot be reflexive. I cannot be properly

self-conscious (recognize myself) except in the context of a recognition structure that is
reciprocal: insofar as I am recognized by those I recognize. (2007: 137)

Brandom’s treatment is perhaps equally as anti-sociological as Honneth’s, but it does

contain within it an account of how self-constitution is linked with recognitive relations
with others. What is crucial here is that Brandom emphasizes that self-consciousness is a
function of recognitive relations with and by others. When we place this into actual
concrete social contexts, it implies that self-formation will be a function of the structures
of recognitive relations as they are warped by hierarchical forms. The kind of self that
will be produced by embedded recognitive relations is not necessarily the morally aware,
critical self ready to struggle for its recognition as a free, self-developing being. Rather, it
is more likely to be one who seeks refuge and ego-comfort from a dehumanizing world.
In any case, it seems unlikely to produce critical attitudes and movements for radical
social change outside of cultural reforms.

Recognitive failure
It seems clear that the basic ontogenetic process of recognition can be basic to all of us
without it becoming a tool for critical reflection or a progression of moral conflicts or
22 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

moral consciousness and awareness. One way that this can occur is through seeing the
dialectic of intersubjectivity and social structure. But putting this aside for the moment, a
recognitive failure can also occur within pathological social contexts that exhibit reac-
tionary, particularist and/or narrow traditionalist value-orientations. In this sense, one of
the core insights of the first generation of the Frankfurt School’s researches – that of
authoritarianism and the social psychology of social dominance – has been sidestepped
by recognition theory. But this is an expression of its neo-Idealism, not a compelling
feature of its novelty. What is clearly problematic in this is that there is no sense of the
actual ways that social relations and structures shape and distort the ideal theory of
recognition and its promise for a more inclusive form of community.
A recognitive failure is a common occurrence in modern societies. It happens when
individuals refuse or are unable to cognize the other as an equal and it occurs not only in
the class stratification of hierarchies, but also in the ethnic, racial and gender hierarchies
that compose power relations. The key argument here is, again, an embeddedness ques-
tion: can the developmental process of recognition overcome the discriminatory biases
that emerge when hierarchical group relations foster inequalities between those groups?
A crucial flaw in the disembedded, neo-Idealist version of the theory is that it cannot
account for the ways that developmental recognition occurs within contexts of isolation
from other groups or within social or familial contexts where certain ‘legitimizing
myths’ that justify the given hierarchies are able to proliferate and form the basis for
the developing ego’s world-views (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999: 103 ff.). Why should the
racist – no matter how mild his views – the sexist, the xenophobe or the homophobe
recognize the other? The persistence of these views, especially when linked to author-
itarian attitudes, is significantly less pliable than Honneth’s thesis assumes. Recognitive
failure is not an exception to the theory’s basic claims and structure, it exposes its most
basic, most fundamental weakness. Indeed, hierarchies do not provide for a robust social
context for the development of recognitive moral awareness. Perhaps the reverse is more
likely the case, as has been evinced in recent years in advanced industrial societies where
increasing economic inequalities and their consequent social anxieties have expanded
the misrecognition of others, this despite the expansion of the market, the de-
hierarchization of the family, and other features that Honneth claims are evidence of
the increase of modern forms of social freedom.

Recognition and consensuality

I now come to a perhaps more widespread and more problematic consequence of the
embeddedness of recognition. Since the problem of embeddedness entails the problem of
cooptation of recognitive processes, it is more likely that recognitive relations between
subjects will lead to attitudes of consensus with the prevailing social order rather than its
critique. As I noted above, consensuality is a problem where the prevailing social
attitudes and values that are made ambient by the existing social institutions are absorbed
by subjects and form a kind of implicit legitimacy linking reified consciousness with the
imperatives of the social institution itself. Embedding recognition in actual social con-
texts exposes it to warping by those contexts and their socialization logics. One reason
for this is pointed to by Talcott Parsons and his attempt to theorize the process of
Thompson 23

socialization as the internalization of social value-patterns. As Parsons sees it, their

exists a ‘socializing effect’ that consists of a ‘reciprocal role relationship’ between ego
and alter. Although he does not employ the term ‘recognition’, it is clear that Parsons has
in mind here the same process of recognition of the other by the ego and the emergence
of the ego into a socialized space of reasons. As Parsons argues:

The socializing effect will be conceived as the integration of ego into a role complementary
to that of alter(s) in such a way that the common values are internalized in ego’s personality,
and their respective behaviors come to constitute a complementary role-expectation-
sanction system. (1951: 211)

The reciprocal relation between ego and alter is, for lack of a better word, a recognitive
relation since each responds to the other as possessing certain statuses. But the issue that
Parsons raises – but which contemporary theorists of recognition do not – is that these
reciprocal and recognitive relations take place within a given social-relational context.
The problem is that this social-relational context is not highly pliable, but constrained by
the aims and logics of the institution and system within which it is nested. As a result, the
problem of legitimation becomes crucial. For Parsons, ‘Legitimation is the primary link
between values as an internalized component of the personality of the individual, and the
institutionalized patterns which define the structure of social relationships’ (1960: 175).
What this now entails is that recognitive processes embedded in institutional contexts,
lead – if these institutions are successful – toward socializing agents into their own
legitimacy and into being constituent members of those institutions. If we see this from
a more macro-sociological level of analysis, this means that the tendency of recognition
to disrupt such institutions is nominal at best; what is more likely is that recognitive
relations will cement and socialize agents into the prevailing order. And in this sense, the
problem of hierarchy I described above becomes a more pernicious problem: for now,
the power of hierarchical social structures to shape value-patterns and value-orientations
and to socialize the ego into its value-scheme grants these hierarchical relations legiti-
macy in some basic sense as well as the roles, norms and practices that constitute them
deontic power. As such, consensuality begins to emerge among significant segments of
the population where each shares in the prevailing value-patterns that ground hierarch-
ical group-relations.
Indeed, even if we cede that recognition is a phylogenetic feature of human devel-
opment, what we cannot accept is that its ontogenetic manifestation is not constituted by
the structures and processes of capitalist economic life and its pathologies. Looking for
respect/recognition from others within hierarchical contexts generally leads not to an
awareness of moral wrongs, but to justificatory attitudes toward those authority-relations
themselves (see Lane, 1959; Sidanius and Pratto, 1999; Solt, 2012; as well as Cobb and
Sennett, 1972). The key issue here is that social pathologies are not only matters of
subjective suffering (Renault, 2010) but rather of defective social relations that warp
relations that ought otherwise be maintained by cooperative and interdependence.
Indeed, in such a case, recognition would facilitate the unfolding of a more inclusive
form of self-development – but the key problem is that this would be the effect not the
cause of the more egalitarian social structures that were already in place. But the more
24 European Journal of Social Theory 22(1)

that social relations (and hence recognitive relations) become embedded in capitalist
imperatives, the more that they will produce selves that are inert in the face of elite
interests and power; the more that critical attitudes will become attenuated and the more
that the perverted subject will search not for social justice in objective terms but rather in
subjective terms. The self, in other words, now seeks refuge in identities and commu-
nities that can provide it with the requisite nourishing that it cannot obtain from the social
world.
Mechanisms of constitutive power therefore entail certain effects on our subjectivity
and agency that also disable the critical potentiality of theories of social action that
assume that our critical awareness is rooted in our everyday practices, such as commu-
nication or recognition. This is because the culture of capitalist society is such that the
alienating effects of everyday life are constituted so that the ego folds back in on itself
and becomes a refuge from the increasingly dehumanizing world of damaged social
relations. This ego is now in less of a place to challenge the social order and more likely
to create a protected space of identity that seeks its affirmation from others. As Marcuse
insightfully notes on this problem:

The ego that has grown without much struggle appears as a pretty weak entity, ill-equipped
to become a self with and against others, to offer effective resistance to the powers that now
enforce the reality principle, and which are so very different from father (and mother) – but
also very different from the images purveyed by the mass media. (1970: 50)

The weakened, withered ego that Marcuse describes should be seen not only as a con-
sequence of damaged social relations, but also as a counter-thesis to the idea that
recognitive relations embedded in the ‘intramundane’ fabric of everyday life are unable
to articulate selves with the psychological resources requisite for moral-political
resistance.
If we take this view of the thesis of reification seriously, then its affects on the
socialization of the self and its cognitive needs to be considered. Through internalizing
the constitutive rule-sets of the prevailing social institutions via the routinization of their
norms and practices, they come to be reified in the cognitive and intentional structures of
consciousness. This conceals from view much of what is objectively pathological within
the society, such as the ways that our social relations are structured, the kinds of ends and
purposes of our social institutions, and so on. These objective features therefore have
consequent subjective implications for the self. The eclipse of autonomy, the erosion of
the critical ego, therefore, are a product of the kinds of social-relational structures and
functions that predominate and constitute the self and the cognitive and evaluative
aspects of the person.
As capitalist society continues to absorb the institution of the family, colonize its
practices and infiltrate it as a sphere of values and norms, the more the self will become,
as Heinz Kohut notes, ‘understimulated’ and, as a result, become withered and con-
stantly in need of fulfillment to prop it up. For Kohut, this was because the family in
modern society has increasingly become distant and the child’s psychological develop-
ment ‘psychologically undernourished and its cohesion weak’ (1977: 275). The result is
that recognition, again, can and indeed does become oriented not toward an awareness of
Thompson 25

the unjust social order, i.e. toward a critical consciousness worthy of the rational political
aims of critical theory, but a narrow identity politics where each yearns for the comfort of
having one’s identify ‘recognized’ and therefore serves as a psychological bubble pro-
tecting it from the alienating, dehumanizing powers of administrative-capitalist society.
We can therefore see that one of the core struts of Honneth’s social-theoretic devel-
opment of the critically aware self – the recognitive relations of the family – are far from
immune from the exerted effects of power-laden and hierarchical social structures. As a
consequence, the more developed ego’s search for meaning and for psychological com-
fort is expressed in various forms of exaggerated subjectivity, an over-emphasis on
identity, a culture of narcissism and an increasing inability to achieve forms of social
solidarity that address material forms of power. These are instead displaced by the
collective effervescence of group affiliations formed to compensate for the insecurity
of the weakened ego. In such circumstances, recognition fosters escapism rather than
political awareness, engagement and critique; the withered ego requires it as a flight
from the effects of concrete power rooted in uneven, non-democratic resource control.
Recognition now no longer delivers on a promise of self- and social emancipation and
increasingly looks as if its best role is as a purely normative theory of how things ought to
be rather than how a rational, critical consciousness can be unfolded. In the end, this may
be the fatal limit of recognition theory: that it is not a dialectical theory of consciousness,
but a neo-Idealist, noumenal process that can hold out for us only a wish of how society
ought to function without a real generative seed for it to become concrete, to become
actual. But as I have shown, this project is not of much use as a critical theory of society,
despite its academic success. Critical theory must avoid the temptations of neo-Idealism
and instead return to the path of a critique of culture that is fused to an increasingly
unequal, unjust social order.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biography
Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory, in the Department of Political Science,
William Paterson University, New Jersey, USA. His recent books include The Domestication of
Critical Theory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory (editor,
Palgrave, 2017), and the forthcoming The Specter of Babel: Political Judgment and the Crisis of
Modernity (SUNY Press) and Twilight of the Self: The Eclipse of Autonomy in Modern Society
(Stanford University Press).