Social Freedom and Self-Actualization: "Normative Reconstruction" as a Theory of Justice. Issue 2 (21st May 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: McNeill, David N.
• Is Part Of: Critical horizons. Volume 16:Issue 2(2015)
• Page Start: 153
• Page End: 169
• Publication Date: 2015-05-21
• Subjects: Critical theory -- Periodicals; 142.05
• DOI: 10.1179/1440991715Z.00000000045
• Languages: German
• ISSNs: 1440-9917

Abstract

<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>In <italic>Freedom's Right</italic> Axel Honneth seeks to provide a theory of justice by appropriating Hegel's account of ethical substance in the <italic>Philosophy of Right</italic>, but he wants to do so without endorsing Hegel's more robust idealist commitments. I argue that this project can only succeed if Honneth can offer an alternative, comparatively robust demonstration of the rationality and normative coherence of existing social institutions. I contend that the grounds Honneth provides for this claim are insufficient for his purposes. In particular, I argue that Honneth's claim that "justice and individual self-determination are mutually referential, " even were it to be accepted, would be insufficient to underwrite his more robust identification between the normative foundations of justice, autonomy and reciprocal self-realization. In the final section of the paper, I turn to Honneth's analysis of the "social institution" of friendship, which he, following Hegel, holds up as a paradigmatic instantiation of social freedom understood as, in Hegel's words, "being with oneself in another" (<italic>Beisichselbstsein in einem Anderen</italic>). I argue that an analysis of the normative import of friendship wholly in terms of mutual recognition misses an important aspect of the kind of self-realization that friendship makes possible.</p> </abstract>