Introduction

Critical theorists have long grappled with the problem of conceptualizing an emancipatory interest that individuals have vis-à-vis society. In order to ground a critical perspective, it should be something that individuals both identify with and are motivated by, but that is actualized only in a partial, distorted form in a society characterized by injustice and irrationality. This introduction suggests that the kind of autonomy involved in the life arc of modern professional persons provides an intuitive illustration of the kind of freedom that develops within the institutional framework of society. It presents the thesis that Hegel’s concept of reconciliation provides the best available conceptual framework for theorizing this emancipatory interest. It presents reification as a systematic blockage that prevents persons from recognizing and accessing the freedom-actualizing potentials of a social order.

Concluding Remarks

These concluding reflections consider whether the paradigm of freedom through reconciliation articulated in the previous chapters is either too abstract or too accommodating to existing society to be considered genuinely emancipatory. It defends the book’s focus on law as a key site of reconciliation by highlighting the law’s role in identifying and transforming role-based social expectations. It also offers that while the type of object-relations psychoanalysis Honneth appeals to is not, by itself, sufficient to dismiss the concerns raised by “the culture industry,” it does suggest a mode of ego formation connected to a certain kind of ironical attitude toward the social world, through which inclusion in social systems structured by something like Habermas’ proceduralist paradigm of law could be experienced as emancipatory, despite that paradigm’s unfinished character.

Rawls’ Liberal Right Hegelianism

This chapter argues that Rawls is a vitally important theorist of reconciliation: he maintains that autonomy is a matter of coming to find that one’s needs and values are reflected in the laws citizens are subject to. It shows how A Theory of Justice employs an account of moral psychology to posit a relationship between individual and society that is actually more harmonious than what Hegel has in mind. It then demonstrates that, by abandoning crucial elements of this moral psychology, Rawls’ account of autonomy comes closer to Hegel’s idea of reconciliation, but by doing so, he is compelled to lean heavily on the publicity that law provides in order to make the prospect of mediation between private identity and the public conception of justice credible. As such, Rawls tends to have a one-sided, overly affirmative conception of social institutions as repositories of value and principle.

Totality Fractured, Reconciliation Deferred

This chapter traces the influence trajectory of Hegel’s idea of freedom as reconciliation in the critical theory tradition, as it develops in the hundred-plus years after Hegel. Its interpretive question is why Marx, Lukács, Horkheimer, and Adorno have an increasingly dim view of the legal-political manner in which Hegel explains reconciliation. It reads these authors as progressively spelling out a more coherent rationale for this position, with Lukács filling in gaps in Marx’s critique of Hegel, and Horkheimer and Adorno doing something similar for Lukács. It emphasizes Lukács’ conception of reification as a capitalist society’s “form of objectivity” and the grounding that Horkheimer and Adorno give this notion with Freudian ideas about ego formation and instinctual nature. It closes by formulating a series of hurdles that a theory wishing to update Hegel’s model of freedom through reconciliation needs to clear, in light of this left Hegelian critique.

Actualizing Social Freedom

Honneth’s theory of social freedom is in many ways a direct update of Hegel’s notion of freedom as a matter of “being at home with oneself in another,” actualized through ethical life. This chapter follows Honneth’s reconstruction of the norms and values underwriting mutual recognition among the various institutional spheres of modern life. But because Honneth rejects Hegel’s objective teleology, he does not repeat Hegel’s contention that freedom is actualized through reconciliation; instead, Honneth holds that freedom is a matter of developing the affirmative self-relations that inclusion in social spheres promotes. This, the chapter argues, commits Honneth to notions of the transparency of society and the potentially non-repressive nature of inclusion within it. Although Honneth innovatively calls on object-relations psychoanalysis to back up these contentions, the chapter argues that this move is not successful and that Honneth’s theory needs to incorporate the kind of reflection on society involved in reconciliation.

Reification and Reconciliation in Habermas’ Theory of Law and Democracy

Habermas’ theory represents the most coherent combination of reconciliation and reification considered herein. Habermas remains attuned to the concerns raised by Adorno that the functional differentiation of society may undermine the autonomy of the individual (through “the colonization of the lifeworld”), but resists the inexorability of Adorno’s conclusions by conceiving of a democratic society’s legal system as the medium through which discourse could consensually shape the “interchanges” between system and lifeworld. However, Habermas effects this synthesis by abstracting away from the psychoanalytic issues that concerned Adorno and Honneth, and by thinking of his proceduralist paradigm of law as ungrounded in the type of substantive legal paradigms that normally allow persons to identify with the system’s underlying values. The chapter concludes that Habermas is left with a too-attenuated relationship between the rationality of socialization and democratic governance, and persons’ usual first-order notions of meaning and value, to be genuinely emancipatory.

Reconciling Individuality and Sociality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

This chapter explores Hegel’s concept of freedom through reconciliation. It begins by considering how Rousseau conceives of freedom as a kind of self-authorship made possible not just by living under just laws, but also by recognizing and affirming those laws as just. Hegel finds fault in Rousseau, insofar as Hegel believes that in order to be reconciled to society, one has to be able to recognize it as rational, something he thinks Rousseau cannot do. After describing how Hegel thinks we come to know things as rational, the chapter argues that one acquires a sense of society’s underlying rationality through participation in the institutions of “objective Spirit.” Crucial here are the institutions—in particular, the Estates—that mediate between individuals’ particularity (in civil society) and the universality of the state. It criticizes Hegel for being ill-equipped to distinguish between the actualization of freedom and individuals’ merely passive incorporation into social systems.