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Toward a political critiqueof reification: Lukacs,Honneth and the aims ofcritical theory

Anita ChariSocial Sciences Division, University of Chicago, USA

AbstractThis article engages Axel Honneth’s recent work on Georg Lukacs’ concept of reification in orderto formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable totheorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient thecritique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost ofsacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysisof capitalist domination and an analysis of the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beingstoward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. Inorder to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to con-temporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneth’s approach, whichfocuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukacs’ emphasis on the prac-tical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of thecapitalist social form.

Keywordscapitalism, Axel Honneth, Georg Lukacs, recognition, reification

After decades of neglect, there has recently been a growing awareness in the field of

political theory that a sophisticated critique of capitalism is crucial to understanding the

limits and possibilities of democratic practice in the context of the contemporary

neo-liberal conjuncture. Along these lines, a recent work by the philosopher Axel

Honneth seeks to recuperate a concept that was central to the critique of capitalism

Corresponding author:

Anita Chari, Social Sciences Division, The Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, 5845 South Ellis Avenue,

Gates-Blake Hall, 305, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism36(5) 587–606

ª The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0191453710363582

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587



prevalent in a strand of western Marxism – reification – in order to highlight its relevance

for understanding features of contemporary social reality. Rather than simply returning

to the influential analysis of reification by Georg Lukacs, Honneth invokes the category

of reification with a crucial twist. Lukacs used the concept to link a particular form of

economic life, capitalism, with an unengaged and passive stance that individuals take

toward the social world that is prevalent, even socially necessitated, in capitalist society.

By contrast, Honneth argues that the most important aspects of reification can be under-

stood in the terms of a theory of recognition, as a wholly intersubjective phenomenon

whereby human beings lose sight of their originary affective and engaged relation with

others in their social world. In this article, I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient the

critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost

of sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-

economic structure of capitalist domination and the unengaged, spectatorial stance

human beings take toward the social world, showing how they together impede emanci-

patory social transformation. While Honneth’s turn to reification is no doubt motivated

by the intuition that the concept has relevance for the analysis of social injustices related

to the structure of social life in contemporary capitalism, his decisive separation of the

critique of reification from the critique of political economy leaves him with too thin an

understanding of the socio-economic aspects of capitalist domination that the category of

reification is intended to describe and critique.

If this is the case, the question of why Honneth operates with such an emaciated

understanding of the processes of reification remains, and it is a question that is crucial

to understanding the central challenge that critical theory faces today: to formulate a

politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism. I go about answering

this question by exploring the way in which Honneth’s theory of recognition both

responds to problems generated by the ‘communicative turn’ of critical theory initiated

by Jurgen Habermas, and yet unintentionally reproduces them. An analysis of Honneth’s

work on reification invites a discussion of how the concept of reification has been refor-

mulated prior to the first generation of the Frankfurt School. My study reveals that

Honneth’s concept of reification inherits a repressed version of the distinction between

Habermas’ concepts of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ that tends to effect a sharp distinction

between intersubjectivity and communicative action on the one hand, and the structural

critique of capitalism on the other. Honneth therefore deprioritizes the socio-economic

aspects of reification on the basis of a purified concept of intersubjectivity. Purged of its

material mediations, Honneth’s approach to intersubjectivity leads to a concept of reifi-

cation that is inadequate to the task of criticizing capitalist forms of domination or to the-

orizing radical democratic political practice today. To the extent that critical theory

remains bound to the dichotomizing framework of the communicative turn, I argue that

it will be unable to formulate a politically relevant critique of contemporary neo-liberal

capitalism, as the borders between the economy and the political are being articulated in

new ways that confound its assumptions.1

In order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification

applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Hon-

neth’s approach, which emphasizes the normative aspects of the critique of reification,

with Lukacs’ emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and

588 Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(5)

588



the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form. By bringing together

Honneth’s and Lukacs’ approaches rather than opposing them, I develop a critique of

reification that reconnects the social-theoretic, normative and political aspects of reifica-

tion and lays the groundwork for a political critique of capitalism that can aid us in

rethinking the possibilities for democratic practice in the present.

In this article I first gloss Lukacs’ and Honneth’s theories of reification, highlighting

their differences. Then I review Habermas’ formulation of the critique of reification in

order to show the ways in which his communicative paradigm leads to a dichotomizing

theory of reification. I contend that a dichotomy similar to the Habermasian system/life-

world distinction remains problematic in Honneth’s theory despite his attempts to

resolve the issue. Finally, I indicate how a more politically relevant critique of reification

might be developed through a synthesis of Honneth’s and Lukacs’ theories, in particular

by recognizing the distinct ideas about intersubjectivity implied by their respective

theories.

Lukacs: reification and capitalist subjectivity

In ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, Lukacs argues that reification is

the central social pathology of capitalist society.2 Reification is above all an unengaged,

spectatorial stance that individuals take toward the social world and toward their own

practices. Reification is characterized by a lack of participatory involvement (Teilnahm-

slosigkeit) in social objects, whereby humans apprehend ‘things’ in the world as inert

objects to which human consciousness merely conforms rather than actively constructs.

More specifically, according to Lukacs, reification is a form of consciousness that is

uniquely constitutive of capitalism. It is the subjective stance that individuals take

toward a society in which the economy exists as a separate, self-grounding and autono-

mous realm of social life, operating in a way that is seemingly independent of human

will. By drawing attention to the ways in which the independence and objectivity of the

economy function as a form of appearance or illusion that itself perpetuates the dominat-

ing social structure of capitalism, Lukacs makes explicit an unconscious link between

subjects’ everyday practices and the dynamic of the capitalist economy. The concept

of reification therefore describes the ways in which individuals in capitalist society fail

to recognize that the economy is constituted by human practices, even as it appears to be

an autonomous and self-perpetuating dynamic.

Lukacs explicitly relates the critique of reification to the critique of ‘commodity

fetishism’, theorized by Marx as a form of relation between humans that is disguised

as a relation between things. Taking Marx’s lead, Lukacs claims that if the unengaged

attitude of reification characterizes human consciousness in capitalism, this has some-

thing to do with the peculiar structure of capitalist social life itself. In Capital, Marx

referred to this field of problems with the idea of fetishism, which describes how social

relations in capitalist society appear in the form of ‘things’ – as commodities – whose

actions and movements come to be regarded as beyond the domain of human agency.3

Commodities take on a life of their own, alienated and separated from the laborers that

produce them. According to Marx, the fetish character of the commodity, which veils

the social labor that produces the objects of human need, is the central structural feature

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of capitalism.4 No longer rendered meaningful by social relations external to labor, as in

pre-capitalist societies, in capitalism labor takes on a self-grounding form, thereby

rendering invisible its status as a social relation. The fetish character of labor consists

in the fact that it is a form of social mediation that obscures itself from the experience of

social actors, thereby taking on the character of non-conscious social determination.

Labor under capitalism therefore exerts an objective form of compulsion upon individ-

uals in capitalist society, and the social relations of labor take an alienated, self-

obscuring form. Commodities in circulation appear to be mere ‘things’ or objects of

need, but in fact as commodities their movement follows the independent logic of

exchange-value.

While Marx’s analysis of fetishism in Capital reveals the way in which the dynamic

of the capitalist social form becomes autonomous and apparently self-perpetuating, he

does not focus on the specific question of how individuals relate to commodities and

to their own labor, nor does he address the ways in which the individual’s subjective

stance itself becomes a crucial feature of the capitalist mode of production.5 Lukacs’

essay on reification addresses this lacuna. If Marx’s point was to show that commodity

fetishism entails the obfuscation of human activity from the dynamic of capitalism, then

Lukacs’ contribution is to emphasize that Marx’s analysis presupposes a subject who

regards the dynamic of capitalism as naturalized and immutable. Lukacs extends Marx’s

analysis by examining reification as a specific form of consciousness that accepts the fet-

ish forms of capital as naturalized and independent of human agency. The production of

this disengaged, spectatorial form of subjectivity, he contends, is as crucial to the repro-

duction of capitalism as the production of commodities. Indeed, this spectatorial stance

itself becomes a commodity.6 Illustrating this point, Lukacs makes repeated use of the

jarring metaphor of spectatorship, of a subject that can only ‘look on’ passively at its own

mechanistic activity: ‘ . . . the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while

its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system.’7 Lukacs

thus makes explicit the link between the institutions of modern capitalism and a

deformed and self-limiting form of rationality, which legitimates rather than critiques the

unfreedom of capitalist social life.

By formulating the problem this way, Lukacs reveals the specifically political dimen-

sion of reification, or rather the way in which reification promotes an apolitical orienta-

tion toward the capitalist social form. From the activity of philosophy to industrial labor,

Lukacs shows that the defining feature of reification, the pervasive aspect of capitalist

subjectivity, is the misrecognition of the practical basis of human activity. In capitalist

society, reification perpetuates contemplation and passivity in relation to a seemingly

inert and unchangeable social world. Humans do not recognize themselves or their own

practice reflected in commodities or in society, nor do they recognize the fetishized pro-

cesses of capitalism as an impediment to human self-determination. The result is that

individuals come to relate to structures of domination as beyond the realm of their

own practice, failing to see the ways in which human activity produces and reproduces

this structure. Instead, society confronts individuals as an abstract, immutable

structure, which appears to reproduce itself independently of human agency or reason.

Consequently, Lukacs observes, human beings under the spell of reification continue

to obstruct potential sites of social transformation.


590



Honneth’s critique of Lukacs: reification as misrecognition

Although History and Class Consciousness is a foundational text for the Frankfurt

School of critical theory, the theory of reification has tended to be neglected in contem-

porary discussions. An important exception to this rule is a recent work by Axel

Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, which reinterprets the critique of rei-

fication within the terms of his theory of recognition to render it usable for contempo-

rary social philosophy.8 Honneth responds to what has been perceived as a normative

deficit stemming from the Marxist orientation of Lukacs’ work and the consequent

neglect of the intersubjective dimensions of reification. To rise to the challenge of for-

mulating the concept anew, Honneth translates the concept of reification into the terms

of a theory of recognition, which emphasizes the phenomena of reification at the level

of intersubjectivity. In Honneth’s framework, reification consists in the forgetting of the

antecedent stance of recognition which is presupposed by our knowledge of and

engagement with other persons and objects in the social world. I take issue with Hon-

neth’s reconstruction of the critique of reification on two points. First, I argue that Hon-

neth’s separation of the critique of reification from an analysis of the social form of

capitalism results in an ahistorical concept of reification that is inadequate for theoriz-

ing contemporary political possibilities. Secondly, I contend that by separating the nor-

mative aspects of reification from an analysis of their socio-economic basis, Honneth

evacuates much of the critical potential of the concept of reification for political theory,

reducing reification to a phenomenon of ‘intersubjectivity’, whereby intersubjectivity is

conceived too narrowly to ground a critique of social domination in capitalism. Rather

than pose Honneth’s theory against Lukacs’, I argue that Honneth’s work is more use-

fully seen as an effort to render explicit the implicit normative basis of Lukacs’

analysis.

A full presentation of the architecture of Honneth’s theory of recognition goes

beyond the scope of this article. I will only briefly gloss the basic points relevant to

the discussion of reification, focusing particularly on Honneth’s restatement of his the-

ory of recognition in his recent debate with Nancy Fraser, which sought to clarify the

extent to which a theory of recognition could take over the theoretical role filled by the

critique of capitalism – in the more modest terms of that exchange, by claims for

redistribution.9

Honneth’s theory of recognition seeks to reveal the moral constraints underlying

social interaction and is based on the presupposition that the inclusion of members of

society will always proceed through the mechanism of mutual recognition, whereby indi-

viduals are normatively incorporated into society by learning to view themselves as

socially recognized in light of certain characteristics.10 Honneth argues that social theory

requires concepts that can grasp social injustice in terms of subjects’ normative expec-

tations of how society conditions their personal integrity. Therefore, he writes, ‘the expe-

rience of a withdrawal of social recognition – of degradation and disrespect – must be at

the center of a meaningful concept of socially caused suffering and injustice’.11 For

Honneth, the importance of social misrecognition as a motivation for social struggle

is an empirical finding of social theoretic relevance, but it also indicates a normative

principle of recognition that transcends these empirical instances. It therefore indicates a

Chari 591

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much-needed point of contact between social theory and the everyday expressions of

injustice and disrespect, which has long been a blind spot in critical theory. Honneth

writes:

This difficulty – a legacy of the sociological anti-normativism that also prevailed in the

older Frankfurt School – must now stand at the beginning of any renewal of critical social

theory. For without a categorical opening to the normative standpoint from which subjects

themselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completely cut off from a dimension of

social discontent that it should always be able to call upon. . . . What is needed is a basic

conceptual shift to the normative premises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of

all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of

humiliation and disrespect.12

Honneth’s reformulation of Lukacs’ concept of reification takes its lead from the

phenomenology of misrecognition, which stands at the center of Honneth’s theory.

Accordingly, Honneth effects a theoretical shift from what he perceives as the econo-

mism of Lukacs’ concept of reification to the analysis of reification in terms of recog-

nition. Without such a reformulation, Honneth argues, the theory of reification is

divorced from an account of the normative criteria by which the phenomena of reifica-

tion can be criticized as well as an understanding of how reification can be experientially

grasped. These normative criteria, on Honneth’s account, elude a theory that seeks to

ground itself in an immanent critique of capitalism alone, since even the institutions

of the capitalist economy are to some degree dependent upon the normative expectations

placed upon them by members of a society. Honneth writes:

. . . even structural transformations in the economic sphere are not independent of the nor-

mative expectations of those affected, but depend at least on their tacit consent. Like the

integration of all other spheres, the development of the capitalist market can only occur

in the form of a process of symbolically mediated negotiation directed toward the interpre-

tation of underlying normative principles.13

Honneth therefore diverges sharply from Lukacs in his decisive decoupling of the pro-

blematic of reification from the critique of the social form of capitalism.

Honneth observes a fundamental problem in Lukacs’ argumentative strategy, which

relies on a social ontology of practice in order to explain precisely why reification is a

form of domination. Reification is meant to refer to a deformed, pathological structure

of practice, a passivity of the subject in relation to other human beings and the objective

world. On this reading, reification appears to be problematic, and thereby subject to cri-

tique, insofar as it violates certain ontological presuppositions of human activity. Hon-

neth claims that Lukacs measures pathological, reified practice against the standard of a

non-reified form of practice, a fundamental, originary, active form of interaction

between the human being and the world. Insofar as we relate to the world passively –

or as Lukacs called it, contemplatively – we deviate from the form of practice that is

proper to the rationality of our form of life. In this sense, Honneth argues that Lukacs’

critique of reification is insufficiently justified by his social ontological critique: reified


592



forms of practice merit critique not primarily because they contradict certain descriptive

elements of social ontology, but rather because they violate certain moral principles.14

The forgetfulness of recognition

Honneth sees a more fruitful social theory of reification in Lukacs’ analysis of the sub-

jective dimensions of reification, that is, the changes in the way subjects practically

relate to the social world, rather than in the analysis of commodity fetishism. The key

point that Honneth distills from Lukacs in this regard is the notion of Teilnahmslosigkeit,

or lack of participatory involvement. This term refers to a form of interaction whereby

subjects lose sight of their fundamentally active, engaged, and sympathetic engagement

with the world, and instead act as detached observers, contemplating the world passively,

without existential or emotional involvement.15

Honneth argues that in the critique of Teilnahmslosigkeit, lies an alternative, ‘unoffi-

cial’ version of the critique of reification, which is based not on an idealist, demiurgic

theory of human agency, but rather upon a normative standard of intersubjective praxis

that, far from fully eroded in the present by the generalization of commodity exchange,

forms an ineradicable kernel of human being in the world.16 In these moments, ‘Lukacs

doesn’t contrast reifying praxis with a collective subject’s production of an object, but

with another, intersubjective attitude on the part of the subject’.17 For Honneth, this

‘unofficial’ strand of Lukacs’ argument suggests a way of recuperating the critique of

reification from totalization: reification does not eliminate engaged, non-reified praxis

altogether, it has ‘merely concealed it from our awareness’.18

Armed with this insight, Honneth proposes to reinterpret reification in recognition-

theoretic terms, arguing that the disinterested, contemplative forms of practice referred

to as reified obscure but never fully eliminate the primary, interested, active stance of the

human being toward the world. Honneth proposes to think this stance as a primary recog-

nitional stance, which ‘enjoys a genetic and categorial priority over all other attitudes

toward the self and the world’.19 Honneth’s critique of reification is based upon the pri-

ority of a recognitive, empathetic, interested relation of the human being to the world

over a merely cognitive, passive attitude. Taking a suggestive line from Dialectic of

Enlightenment as his inspiration, Honneth proposes to think reification anew as ‘the for-

getfulness of recognition’, which indicates the process by which humans beings lose con-

sciousness of the antecedent stance of care and recognition that underlies knowledge of

other persons and of the world. This priority of recognition, according to Honneth, is

both ‘genetic’ and ‘categorial’. Using the insights of developmental psychology and

socialization research, Honneth locates the chronological priority of recognition over

mere cognition in the experience of affective relationships with significant others in

childhood to show how a critique of reification can be rooted in learning processes that

reveal the emotional conditions of thought processes.20 Honneth turns to Heidegger and

Dewey to show the conceptual priority of recognition to cognition, which he argues is

implicit in Lukacs’ theory as well.

While Honneth develops a concept of reification that may be more analytically

nuanced than Lukacs’, demanding a higher level of empirical specificity in differentiat-

ing the phenomena of reification, it is hardly possible to overlook one crucial absence in

Chari 593

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Honneth’s theory of reification: it no longer views itself as a critique of socio-political

relations in capitalism, which in Lukacs’ account formed the basis of the critique of

social domination and of the elusiveness of self-determination. Why does Honneth distill

such a narrow concept of reification from Lukacs’ theory, one which remains confined to

such a small range of phenomena and which severs the tight link between the phenomena

of reification and the structure of capitalist society? I contend that this question can be

answered by viewing the critique of reification within the tradition of critical theory

more broadly, paying particular attention to the way in which the concept of intersubjec-

tivity has been theorized by Habermas and then Honneth as an attempt to reorient critical

theory away from the normative model of the philosophy of the subject.21 Honneth’s

reformulation of the critique of reification is an instance of a larger paradigm shift in crit-

ical theory towards communication and intersubjectivity and away from the structural

critique of capitalism. The concept of reification, however, is useful only insofar as it

calls into question this opposition. I will go on to argue that elements of Lukacs’ critique

of reification indicate a more expansive way of theorizing intersubjectivity that avoids

the stark distinction between intersubjectivity and materiality at the heart of Habermas’

and Honneth’s analyses.

The communicative turn of critical theory: beyond theproduction paradigm

For better or for worse, the contemporary reception of Lukacs is mediated largely

through the work of the first-generation theorists of the Frankfurt School, who were

greatly influenced by Lukacs’ critique of reification. The collapse of the Frankfurt

School into idle pessimism is widely believed to be a result of their adoption of the thesis

of total reification, in which the standpoint of critical theory is consumed by a thoroughly

administered society. Lukacs, writing from the perspective of a revolutionary situation,

addressed his analysis of reification to the practical questions that arose in the course of

political struggle and he was oriented toward theorizing the possibility of revolutionary

agency.22 By contrast, the early Frankfurt School theorists, discarding Lukacs’ positing

of a revolutionary subject of history, saw in the concept of reification the key to why

revolution had faltered. The critique of reification assumed a role in critical theory sim-

ilar to that of psychoanalytic theory – it was a tool to explain why the working class

failed to assume their historical role, persisting in their enslavement to the ruling ideol-

ogy. This was especially true of the works of Adorno and Horkheimer produced in the

1940s under the influence of Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, which diagnosed

a new phase of capitalism in which state intervention and the primacy of the political

over the economic had effectively absorbed the immanent contradictions that were pre-

viously present in the liberal phase of capitalism.23 In the hands of Horkheimer and

Adorno, in their classic work Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the critique of reifica-

tion is detached from its basis in the Marxian analysis of the historically specific com-

modity form, and instead is deployed in the service of a critique of reason as such, which

is now identified with instrumental rationality.24 Dialectic of Enlightenment, according

to this familiar history, posits reification as a feature of all human societies, from the ear-

liest shamanic rituals to the most recent manipulations of science, and thus capitulates to


594



the myth of a social form without contradictions, where society supposedly no longer

generates the standards for its own criticism. The reception of Lukacs’ own theory of

reification has been tarred by its association with the pessimism of the Frankfurt School

critique of reification. This tends to foreclose a real confrontation with the theory of rei-

fication at the conceptual level.

Habermas’ reorientation of critical theory away from the paradigm of instrumental

reason, which he argued was bound to an all-encompassing theory of reification,

attempts to redeem the project of immanent critique by recuperating the perspective

of communicative reason. The communicative turn of critical theory is an attempt to

counter the pessimism of early critical theory by revealing the concealed presuppositions

of its critique of modernity, which, according to Habermas, relies on a normative

standard of communicative reason that is immanent in everyday practice. Central to

Habermas’ project is the rejection of the paradigm of ‘production’, the normative model

of human agency underlying the left-Hegelian project of Marx and early critical theory.

The production paradigm of agency, according to Habermas, is at the core of what has

been referred to as the ‘philosophy of the subject’, a normative model in which history is

understood as the activity of a collective subject that exteriorizes itself through its pro-

ductive activity and then reappropriates that which it has exteriorized.25 The general

thrust of de-reifying critique, as theorized by Lukacs, which proceeds by revealing the

historically constituted nature of existing social forms in order to comprehend the pos-

sibility of their transformation, is regarded as part of this problematic tradition of the phi-

losophy of the subject. According to Habermas, this tradition restricts the concept of

practice in a way that is unable to account for the immanence of reason to communica-

tive relations themselves, which provides the practical standpoint of critique and

discloses the proper sphere of social transformation. Habermas writes:

. . . the emancipatory perspective proceeds precisely not from the production paradigm, but

from the paradigm of action oriented toward mutual understanding. It is the form of inter-

action processes that must be altered if one wants to discover practically what the members

of a society in any given situation might want and what they should do in their common

interest.26

Habermas thus reinterprets the critique of reification in the terms of communicative

action, which he argues could succeed in grounding the normative standpoint of critique

where the paradigm of production had failed. But insofar as Habermas’ critical project

throughout relies on a sharp opposition between his intersubjective concept of ‘interac-

tion’ and the Marxian concept of ‘work’ (Arbeit), which Habermas accuses of conflating

instrumental and social action, I contend that his concept of intersubjectivity becomes

abstracted from its material conditions of possibility.27 This will have implications for

the way in which Habermas, and later Honneth, theorize the critique of reification.

Reification as the colonization of the lifeworld

Habermas describes his Theory of Communicative Action as a ‘reformulation of the rei-

fication problematic in terms of systematically induced lifeworld pathologies’.28 By

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reinterpreting reification from the perspective of communicative action, or, in other

words, as a phenomenon of a lifeworld that is invaded by autonomous, norm-free sys-

temic institutions, Habermas places the dimension of intersubjectivity at the center of the

theory of reification. In effect, he argues that reification is comprehensible only as what

he calls ‘the colonization of the lifeworld’ by systemic rationalization – the analysis of

fetish forms is absent. Habermas’ reinterpretation of reification along these lines, I argue,

has the problematic effect of sharply demarcating the intersubjective realm of the reified

lifeworld from the denormativized sphere of systemic rationalization, without theorizing

the ways in which the two are fundamentally intertwined – without recognizing, in

effect, both that the system is far from denormativized, and that the normativity of the

lifeworld is materially constituted. Furthermore, I will show that Honneth’s attempt to

address the shortcomings of Habermas’ theory, to set the theory ‘back on its feet’ as

Honneth puts it,29 nevertheless inherits from Habermas a constrained concept of inter-

subjectivity, implicitly generated by some (repressed) version of the opposition between

system and lifeworld, which is ultimately responsible for Honneth’s narrow understand-

ing of reification.

What Habermas finds insightful in Lukacs is his analysis of reification as a systemic

problem. As long as the production of goods is organized as the production of exchange-

values, which is accompanied by the commodification of labor power itself, ‘economi-

cally relevant action orientations are detached from lifeworld contexts and linked with

the medium of exchange value (or money)’.30 Interaction in such societies is coordinated

through an external mechanism, rather than through the values and norms which prop-

erly characterize the sphere of interaction itself. On Habermas’ reading, Lukacs’ insight

is to illuminate the connection between the sphere of the capitalist economy, mediated

through the principle of (exchange-) value, and the deformation of what Habermas calls

the lifeworld, that is, the horizon of communicative, social action.31 In Habermas’ terms,

this connection, which is the core of the phenomenon of reification, can be stated as fol-

lows: ‘The form of objectivity that predominates in capitalist society prejudices the

world-relations, the way in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the

objective, the social, and their own subjective worlds.’32 Habermas proposes to under-

stand these quasi-objective mechanisms for coordinating action, such as the dimensions

of the economy and the state, with the concept of ‘system’. Systemic integration is coor-

dinated not through norms and values, but rather through the denormativized and auton-

omous ‘steering media’ of money and power. In the system,

The mechanism for coordinating action is itself encountered as something external. Trans-

actions that proceed through the medium of exchange value fall outside of the intersubjec-

tivity of reaching understanding through language; they become something that takes place

in the objective world – a pseudonature.33

Apparently independent of human intersubjective constitution, the system takes on a

self-grounding, thingly character.

While Habermas credits Lukacs for challenging Max Weber’s pessimistic diagnosis

of modernity, thereby implying an alternative theory of rationalization, which is not sim-

ply identified with reification, Habermas’ central critical point is that Lukacs relies on a


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too undifferentiated notion of rationalization. In effect, Habermas claims, Lukacs

analyzes all processes of societal rationalization in light of the generalization of the com-

modity form and the abstraction of exchange. He writes:

As Lukacs takes only one medium into consideration, viz. exchange value, and traces rei-

fication to the ‘abstraction of exchange’ alone, he interprets all manifestations of Occidental

rationalism as symptoms of a process in which the whole of society is rationalized through

and through.34

To give an account of its own normative foundations, Habermas contends, the critique of

reification must appeal to the notion of communicative action in order to comprehend the

standard of communicative rationality as itself inherent to the social lifeworld, even

under conditions of reification.

The main point of Habermas’ reformulation of Lukacs’ theory of reification is to dis-

tinguish between systemic components that remain within boundaries, and those sys-

temic mechanisms which force their way into the domains of cultural reproduction,

social integration, and socialization – the sphere of the lifeworld.35 This overstepping

of boundaries constitutes a ‘colonization of the lifeworld’, which, according to

Habermas, refers to a more specific and differentiated notion of reification than the one

Lukacs presents. Systemic integration, which Habermas posits as a functional require-

ment of complex societies, is not in itself problematic, nor does it constitute a form of

reification. It is only when the steering media of the system overstep their boundaries

and penetrate the communicative realm of the lifeworld that the problem of reification

occurs. Habermas’ concept of society as system and lifeworld therefore aims to under-

stand reification as the colonization of the lifeworld, without resulting in a totalizing

critique of rationalization as such. He can thereby claim that some form of systemic inte-

gration – that is, of ‘economy’ and ‘state’ – will be necessary to all complex societies, as

long as systemic structures do not penetrate the symbolically mediated lifeworld.

His criticisms of Lukacs notwithstanding, Habermas explicitly says that his attempt to

reinterpret the problematic of reification is fundamentally influenced by the Marxian cri-

tique of capitalism. However, it should be clear that his approach diverges in significant

ways from that of Lukacs, particularly with regard to the way in which communicative

action is conceived as immanent to the structures of linguistically mediated interaction:

the critique of reification in capitalist society is rooted in the structures of communica-

tion itself, which contain an ineradicable potential for resistance to the lifeworld-

colonizing systemic structures.

Two concepts of intersubjectivity

Habermas’ reorientation of critical theory within the terms of a theory of communicative

action forms the horizon of Honneth’s own reworking of critical theory along the lines of

a theory of recognition. In The Critique of Power, Honneth takes issue with Habermas’

conception of the system as a denormativized form of integration, arguing that this posi-

tion obfuscates the ways in which normative structures of interaction are always

embedded in social and political institutions.36 Honneth’s turn to recognition seeks to

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avoid the dualism inherent in Habermas’ theory, which concedes too much to

systems-theoretic analysis. However, contrary to his own intention, Honneth’s theory

tends to address the problem by reducing the field of phenomena referred to by

Habermas with the concept of ‘system’ to the ‘lifeworld’, that is, the sphere of social inte-

gration, which, rather than solving the conceptual problem, merely displaces it to a higher

level. This helps to illuminate the curious way in which Honneth theorizes reification with

reference to lifeworld concepts alone, as the forgetfulness of recognition, without account-

ing for the commodity dynamic. Honneth’s reinterpretation of reification confines the cri-

tique of reification to the plane of a purified intersubjectivity. He therefore does not grasp

the critical core of the concept, whose original intent was precisely to explain the peculiar-

ity of capitalism as a system in which intersubjective relations appear as relations between

non-human objects and thereby exert an abstract form of compulsion upon human action.

In order to recuperate the concept of reification for contemporary political theory,

Honneth is certainly correct that the intersubjective dimensions of reification, which

reveal the normative logic of reification, must be theorized in a more explicit way than

in Lukacs’ text. However, it becomes clear in the exchange between Lukacs and

Honneth, that two competing notions of intersubjectivity must be differentiated. On the

one hand, Honneth theorizes intersubjectivity on the model of interaction between

individuals: in his theory, recognition is essentially extra-institutional in character.

Institutions (in the most general sense of the word) are not themselves the place of

recognition; recognition takes place in the field of interaction between individuals.

Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault refer to this as an ‘expressive’ concept

of recognition, whereby institutions are conceived as an external, rather than internal,

condition of recognition and, indeed, of subjectivation itself.37 Institutions can ‘express’

or deny recognition, but this very way of figuring the problem tends to render the insti-

tutional contexts of recognition supplementary to, rather than constitutive of, individual

demands for recognition. While Honneth’s expressive theory of recognition captures the

normative content of demands for recognition, its reliance upon an interactionist concept

of intersubjectivity is less able to grasp the material conditions of social struggles. On the

other hand, the notion of intersubjectivity that can be distilled from Lukacs’ theory is one

in which institutions, the institution of capital, for example, can be understood as veiled

forms of social relations which are in some sense constituted by intersubjective agency.

Therefore, institutions do not merely express or deny recognition in some way that is

external to their constitution, nor can this concept of intersubjectivity be understood

within the model of interaction that is presupposed by Honneth’s theory. Lukacs pushes

beyond the terms of the purely interhuman intersubjectivity present in Honneth’s model,

instead understanding interaction in a thicker sense, which can begin to theorize the

material mediations of intersubjective interaction. Furthermore, the stark dichotomy

between system and lifeworld is explicitly ruled out by the Lukacsian position, insofar

as the critique proceeds by revealing supposedly denormativized systemic structures

to be self-obscuring forms of social relations, which can be criticized insofar as they are,

in some sense, a product of human agency, and thus not merely given, necessary, or

objective.

It will perhaps be objected that my attempt to reactualize the critique of reification by

recourse to the Lukacsian model of intersubjectivity harkens back to untenable


598



productivist normative presuppositions, which reinstate the long-ago discredited per-

spective of ‘transsubjectivity’. My objective, however, is to begin to unsettle the very

assumptions of the communicative turn of critical theory, which have expelled the ‘pro-

ductivist’ model of intersubjectivity outlined by Lukacs from contemporary debates, as

well as the dimension of materiality along with it. One need not reduce this model of

agency to a pseudo-Hegelian caricature – whereby de-reified practice is conceived as

nothing less than mind and world coinciding – to take the insight that de-reified practice

will have something to do with making social institutions more reflective of human self-

determination by making individuals conscious of the non-conscious forms of determi-

nation inherent in capitalist institutions. If the critique of reification is to have any

relevance for theorizing political practice oriented toward overcoming social domination

in capitalism, I argue that it must be based on a re-examination of the relation between

intersubjectivity and social institutions.

The materiality of reification

The essence of the fetishism of the commodity, Marx observed, is that a relation between

human beings takes on the form of a relation between things – commodities – and

thereby assumes an autonomous form that conceals its fundamental basis – the social

relations themselves. What is crucial to note in this formulation is that while fetishism

surely involves a certain kind of misrecognition – that is, the misrecognition of the social

relation masked by the relation between things – it is not limited to this misrecognition.

Moreover, what is rendered thing-like is not only other persons – although through the

commodification and mechanization of labor power this is also true. More fundamen-

tally, it is the social relation itself that is rendered thing-like, objective and apparently

immutable. To develop this point further, fetishism, as Marx theorized it, takes place

at the level of social reality itself – that is, in the social activity of commodity exchange.

Although the fetish is an abstraction, it has an objective existence.38 We could under-

stand this point in terms of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s remark: ‘What the commodity owners

do in the exchange relation is practical solipsism – regardless of what they think and say

about it.’39 Or as Slavoj Zizek humorously puts it, in capitalist society, individuals are

‘fetishists in practice, not in theory’.40 This is to underscore the crucial point of the mate-

riality of reified social practice. Lukacs analyzes the phenomena of reification in terms

of the mutually constitutive dimensions of subjectivity and objectivity.41 Reification is a

form of practice that stands in a relation of mutual constitution to the fetish forms of cap-

ital. Lukacs connects an analysis of the rationalization of the labor process and the

abstraction and commodification of labor with a theory of the ways in which human con-

sciousness becomes progressively contemplative, passive, and unable to comprehend the

dimension of human agency inherent in the dynamic of capitalism, which would provide

the only means by which the autonomous form of capitalist domination could be over-

come. I contrast this to Honneth’s way of addressing the status of macro-social settings,

which contends that economic processes, for example, are ‘not only normatively but also

factually ‘‘embedded’’ in the normatively structured social order’.42 With his theory of

recognition, Honneth grasps crucial dimensions of the normative order of capitalist

social relations, but he does so at the cost of neglecting the material constitution of those

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relations. This has implications for the relevance of his critique of reification to

contemporary political theory.

Toward a political critique of reification

Habermas’, Honneth’s, and Lukacs’ critiques of reification imply different ways of

thinking the political through the lens of reification, and I will now delineate the

respective critical models to which they point. I argue that aspects of Honneth’s theory

of reification can be useful in thinking a political critique of reification when taken in

conjunction with, rather than against, Lukacs’ theory.

Habermas’ reorientation of reification through the concepts of system and lifeworld

theorizes reification as the effect of systemic mechanisms impinging upon intersubjec-

tive relations, which should rightfully be directed by communication oriented toward

reaching mutual understanding. For Habermas, then, reification is not simply a projec-

tion of the lifeworld. However, with the conceptual dichotomization of society into sys-

tem and lifeworld, the critical dialectical character of the Lukascian analysis is lost.

Habermas interprets the system as a denormativized structure, rather than as Lukacs had

theorized it, as an autonomized structure, whose normativity is veiled. Furthermore, with

his functionalist theory of society as a system, Habermas’ theory implicitly takes the

existing forms of economy and state as necessary, and therefore cannot put forth a trans-

formative politics. By collapsing the realms of the economy and state into the category of

the ‘system’, Habermas cedes the theoretical basis for grounding a conception of radical

participatory democracy, that is, a de-autonomized form of politics – for such a form of

true democracy would be unthinkable as a political ‘system’, in Habermas’ terms.43 As a

consequence, Habermas’ understanding of the political-theoretic significance of the con-

cept of reification is limited: he can only understand social movements that mobilize

against forms of reification as boundary-defending forms of politics, which guard against

the invasion of the lifeworld rather than transforming the systemic structures that reify

the lifeworld.

Honneth’s theory of reification is ambiguous in terms of its implications for a political

theory of reification. On one hand, I contend that Honneth’s move away from the anal-

ysis of ‘systemic’ rationalization that was central to Habermas’ analysis is a fruitful

direction for the political critique of reification. Honneth rejects the functionalist notion

of a de-normativized systemic structure at the core of Habermas’ account, thereby pro-

viding a pluralized account of reification that is not simply confined to the boundary-

defending reflexes of agents in the lifeworld. Instead, the specific causes and sites of

various instances of the ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ must be separately investigated,

in order to discover in each case how such forgetting is systematically enabled. Honneth

writes: ‘If the core of every form of reification consists in forgetfulness of recognition,

then its social causes must be sought in the practices or mechanisms that enable and sus-

tain this kind of forgetting.’44 In that case, Honneth’s theory would not seem to rule out

an analysis of the relation between the general structuring principles of society and the

corresponding and mutually constitutive intersubjective phenomena of reification – in

effect, a project similar to the one Lukacs’ attempted. Yet at many other points in the

text, the forgetfulness of recognition is viewed primarily as a cognitive process, and


600



so what is needed is an account ‘of how the cognitive process can cause our antecedent

recognition to be forgotten’.45 At such moments, Honneth seems to reduce the phenom-

enon of reification to the realm of affective intersubjective relations alone, ruling out an

account of the mediation of social relations with the structures that constitute them. Even

in terms of Honneth’s own theoretical trajectory, the focus on the affective identification

of humans with significant others as the basis for a norm of de-reified forms of social

practice lacks the political connotations of the earlier ‘struggle for recognition’. In Hon-

neth’s work on reification, the lack of participatory engagement delineated by the con-

cept of Teilnahmslosigkeit denotes that the primary, active, recognitive stance of the

human being has merely been forgotten, but it is far from clear how this forgetting could

be significant for social theory or political theory. When decoupled from the critique of

fetishism, one must ask whether the concept of reification retains the necessary concep-

tual force for illuminating contemporary democratic politics.46

A serious consideration of this question cannot ignore the strengths of Honneth’s

approach, which bring to the fore the crucial normative dimension of the critique of rei-

fication, admittedly undertheorized and only implicit in Lukacs’ account. Furthermore,

I would argue that foregrounding the concept of Teilnahmslosigkeit, as Honneth does,

should be central to the attempt to think the significance of de-reification as a normative

standard of political practice in political theory. Focusing on the lack of participatory

involvement characteristic of reification, this approach could point toward a critique that

searches for points of intervention in autonomized social processes, translating them into

the logic of the political – or in Honneth’s terms, into the normative logic of recognition

– by grasping social and economic structures in light of their potential transformation.47

However, this promising line of inquiry is not pursued by Honneth in his study. His anal-

ysis indicates the possibility of articulating the normative logic of reification, but a polit-

ical critique of reification would need to focus on the point of translation between the

normative level of the theory of recognition and the social-theoretic analysis of the struc-

ture of capitalism, without reducing capitalism to a ‘system’ in the Habermasian sense.

Insofar as Honneth speaks of the structure of capitalism at all, however, he tends to

operate with a rather problematic understanding of its processes, claiming, for example,

that even ‘seemingly ‘‘anonymous’’ economic processes are determined by normative

rules’.48 This has left Honneth vulnerable to the charge – for example, by Nancy Fraser

– that he reduces the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.49 Fraser’s cri-

tique raises the important question of whether Honneth grants any exteriority to the rec-

ognition order of capitalism, or rather whether capitalism is ultimately no more than its

recognition order.50 Honneth has described his project as guided by a kind of ‘moral

monism’, which argues that any normatively substantial social theory must discover

‘principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open

up the prospect of desirable improvements’.51 In other words, as Honneth argues in The

Struggle for Recognition, recognition is the ‘moral grammar’ of social conflict. There-

fore, even struggles that make claims for ‘redistribution’ in the terms of class struggle,

or in anti-capitalism terms, presuppose a moral logic of recognition as the basis of claims

to redistribution. Marxist theory, according to Honneth, tends to sacrifice the logic of

recognition to a metapolitical theory of the dynamics of capital to secure its scientific

claims. This is self-contradictory, he claims, insofar as it must simultaneously ‘conceive

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of the very same processes as strongly dependent on value-mediated communication’ in

order to ‘accommodate immanent moral demands for redistribution within them’.52 In

this sense, one might translate Honneth’s thesis to say that recognition denotes the struc-

ture of political emancipation as such, one which refuses the distinction made by the

young Marx between political and human emancipation.53 To that end, Honneth might

claim that contrary to the hesitations raised above about the relevance of a recognition-

theoretic concept of reification to theorizing politics today, only a theory of reification

retranslated in this way can provide an account of the immanent logic of politics.

Honneth concedes that his theory of the capitalist recognition order

. . . is, of course, not sufficient to explain the dynamics of developmental processes in

contemporary capitalism. But it is only meant to make clear the normative constraints

embedded in such processes because subjects face them with certain expectation of

recognition.54

The recognition-theoretic approach thus appears to be an assertion of ‘the autonomy of

politics’, posed in the terms of a normative social theory.55

Ultimately, I want to argue that by decoupling the critique of reification from the cri-

tique of fetishism, Honneth reinforces a problematic separation between the ‘economic’

and the ‘political’, which renders the theory unable to grasp the breadth of emancipatory

political struggles today, limiting politics to the logic of recognition without taking into

account the dimensions of political movements that struggle for transformation of the

existing structure of socio-economic relations. Nevertheless, I contend that Honneth’s

pluralized understanding of the social mechanisms of reification suggests a fruitful way

of comprehending a politics of de-reification, provided that it resists Honneth’s tendency

to absorb material structures of domination fully within a lifeworld concept and to oper-

ate with a purified concept of intersubjectivity. Honneth’s pluralized account of reifica-

tion, which begins with the diverse experiences of reification, can be used to expand the

Lukacsian account, which contends that the experience of reification is only comprehen-

sible as such from the perspective of an analysis of totality. A truly political critique of

reification would theorize more adequately the transition between these two moments to

delineate the structure of de-reified practice.

With the idea of a political critique of reification I seek to push beyond the terms of

Fraser’s and Honneth’s debate in Redistribution or Recognition?, which tended to grasp

anti-capitalist struggles as struggles over redistribution, thereby misrecognizing their

potentially transformative character by construing their claims as claims posed primarily

in the terms of distributive justice. Anti-capitalist struggles against neo-liberal globaliza-

tion, for example, make claims that go beyond the demand for social recognition within

existing institutions and institutionalized principles of legitimation and distribution, even

if they are indeed motivated by feelings of social disrespect.56 Take the example of the

landless workers’ movement (MST) in Brazil, which has organized massive occupations

of land for use by displaced rural populations, expropriating more than 50,000 square

kilometers of land for use by landless families. The logic of this movement cannot be

reduced to a claim for social recognition, although this is obviously an important dimen-

sion of the struggle. Beyond the claim for recognition, the landless workers struggle


602



against the institution of private property itself, setting up democratically organized rural

cooperatives of agricultural producers on occupied lands.57 The structure of politiciza-

tion in this movement invokes a translation from the analysis of capitalist domination

to the forms of intersubjective practice that could alter those structures into de-reified

political forms. Similarly, the ‘Water Wars’ against the privatization and commodifica-

tion of public water in Bolivia, in India, and in other parts of the world are yet another

example that suggests that many political struggles today cannot be comprehended

solely within the logic of recognition, nor can they be reduced to claims of redistribution.

These are struggles against reification and they highlight the importance of a critique of

reification that takes into account both the intersubjective and ‘material’ dimensions of

reification to theorizing democratic struggles in the present.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Patchen Markell, Axel Honneth, Moishe Postone, John McCormick, Jacinda

Swanson, and J. J. McFadden, for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this article, as well as

to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for fellowship support and the Institut fur

Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main for office space during the writing of this article.

Notes

1. On the ‘neo-liberal’ articulation of the economy and politics, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as

Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2006); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press,

2005); and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).

2. ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Georg Lukacs, History and Class Con-

sciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1971).

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage

Books, 1977).

4. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Crit-

ical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), part II, ch. 4, pp. 123–83.

5. Certainly Marx’s early writings focus on the question of the subjective stance of the worker in

relation to the object of labor; however, his analysis there is not posed in the terms of a critique

of commodity fetishism.

6. On this point see Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

(London: Routledge, 1991) and Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone

Books, 1994).

7. Luk�acs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 90.

8. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2008). On the term ‘social philosophy’, which is somewhat different than political

philosophy or social philosophy, in Honneth’s usage, see Axel Honneth, ‘Pathologies of the

Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy’, in The Handbook of Critical Theory (Cam-

bridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 369–98.

9. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical

Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).

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10. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

11. Axel Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, in Redistribution or Recognition? (New York:

Verso, 2003), p. 132.

12. ibid., p. 134.

13. Axel Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition’, in Redistribution or Recognition? (New York:

Verso, 2003), pp. 250–1.

14. For a discussion of ‘social-ontological’ critique, see Honneth, ‘Pathologies of the Social’.

15. Honneth, Reification, p. 24.

16. The Heideggerian inflection of Honneth’s reading of Lukacs is noteworthy, although I will not

deal with this theme in this article. In addition to Honneth’s chapter (ch. 2) on Heidegger and

Dewey in the original German version of the work, Axel Honneth, Verdinglichung: Eine aner-

kennungstheoretische Studie, 2nd edn (Suhrkamp, 2005), see Lucien Goldmann, Luk�acs and

Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).


18. ibid., p. 31.

19. ibid., p. 36.

20. ibid., pp. 41–6.

21. On this point see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of

Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

22. See John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition,

Revolutionary Studies series (London: Routledge, 1998); Michael Lowy, Georg Luk�acs:

From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: NLB, 1979).

23. Friedrich Pollock, ‘State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations’, in Critical Theory and

Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge,

1989), pp. 95–118.

24. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Frag-

ments, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

25. See Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Origins of Defetishizing Critique’, in Critique, Norm, and Utopia:

A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),

pp. 44–69.

26. Jurgen Habermas, ‘Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm’, in The Philo-

sophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 82.

27. On the distinction between labor and interaction, see Jurgen Habermas, ‘Labor and Interaction:

Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Phenomenology of Mind’, trans. J. Viertel (Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1973), pp. 267–8. Before Habermas, Hannah Arendt proposed this distinction explicitly

in contrast to the Marxian concept of labor. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition

of Western Political Thought’, in Social Research 69(2) (Summer 2002): 273–319.

28. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationaliza-

tion of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. xxxii.

29. Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition’, p. 242.

30. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 358.

31. On the concept of the lifeworld, see Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action,

vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1987), pt VI.


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32. ibid., p. 359.

33. ibid., p. 358.

34. ibid., p. 360.

35. ibid., p. 374.

36. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K.

Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

37. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, ‘Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recogni-

tion’, in Thesis Eleven 88 (February 2007): 99–100.

38. For a fascinating working-out of this thought, which shows the specific way in which Marx

sought to expose Hegel’s logical categories as categories of social existence, see Lucio

Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. L. Garner (London: NLB, 1973).

39. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige Und K~orperliche Arbeit: Zur Epistemologie Der Abendl~an-

dischen Geschichte (Weinheim: VCH, 1989), p. 37 [my translation].

40. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 31.

41. Luk~acs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 84.


43. On this point see Thomas McCarthy, ‘Complexity and Democracy: or the Seducements of

Systems Theory’, in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of

Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Whether my critique is applicable to Habermas’ later

works, in particular Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), which does not focus on reification, cannot be addressed

here.


45. ibid., p. 58.

46. On this point see Deranty and Renault, ‘Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition’. They

note that ‘Honneth makes a conscious effort to avoid referring to it [his theory] as a politics of

recognition’, and that while ‘His reluctance to discuss the political and his focus on the ethical

has good reasons within his theory’, his avoidance of the political ‘is symptomatic of a weak-

ness’ (p. 92).

47. One brilliant attempt at such an analysis is K�ojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

48. Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition’, p. 254 (emphasis added); one exception to this tendency

is an article delineating the new research program of the Institute for Social Research in Frank-

furt am Main, where Honneth and Martin Hartmann present a concrete theory of the ‘para-

doxes’ of capitalism, in which a certain kind of structural analysis plays a greater role. See

Martin Hartmann and Axel Honneth, ‘Paradoxes of Capitalism’, in Constellations 13(1)

(2006): 41–58.

49. See both of Nancy Fraser’s contributions to Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-

Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), for a discussion of this criticism. For a

thorough discussion of the way in which Honneth’s theory constitutes a response to the

shortcomings of ‘historical materialism’, which nevertheless tends to overcompensate for

these shortcomings and thereby to ‘repress the material mediations’ with which intersubjective

interactions are mediated, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Repressed Materiality: Retrieving the

Materialism in Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition’, in Critical Horizons 7(1) (2006):

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113–40. See also Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Les horizons marxistes de l’ethique de la reconnais-

sance’, in Actuel Marx 38 (2005): 159–78.

50. While I concur with Fraser’s critique, I disagree with her argument that a two-front strategy

that combines analysis of recognition and redistribution into one normative model suffices to

solve the problem. In my framework, reification undercuts the binary between redistribution

and recognition, which remains trapped within the framework of a liberal democratic politics.


52. ibid.

53. In this regard, Honneth’s theory of recognition looks surprisingly more like Jacques

Ranciere’s ‘autonomous’ conception of politics than is immediately apparent, although

Ranciere would reject the strong moral overtones of Honneth’s theory of social struggle as

well as Honneth’s Hegelian conception of moral progress. What is somewhat similar in both

theories is the focus on the experiential dimension of the political, as well as the delineation of

the structure of emancipation – demands for equality, although expressed in economic or

social terms, contain an immanent political/ethical logic that is not reducible to the economic

or sociological dimensions of the struggles. See Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and

Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For Ranciere’s

own discussion of the relation of his theory to the theory of recognition, see Max Blechman,

Anita Chari, and Rafeeq Hasan, ‘Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle:

an Exchange with Jacques Ranciere’, in Historical Materialism 13(4) (November 2005):

285–301. See also Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Jacques Ranciere’s Contribution to the Ethics of

Recognition’, in Political Theory 31(1) (2003): 136–56.


55. For a discussion of this point, see Etienne Balibar, ‘Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation,

Transformation, Civility’, in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. C. Jones, J. Swenson and C.

Turner (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 1–39.

56. Nancy Fraser has recently addressed this issue with her theory of ‘abnormal justice’, which

diagnoses the contemporary situation as one in which the very metapolitical conditions of

justice, that is, its subjects, institutional sites and norms of adjudication, are themselves

placed radically in question. See Nancy Fraser, ‘Abnormal Justice’, in Scales of Justice:

Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press,

2008), pp. 48–75.

57. For a discussion of this movement see David McNally, Another World is Possible: Globaliza-

tion & Anti-capitalism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006), especially ch. 6. See also

Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil

(London: Latin American Bureau, 2002), esp. part II and part IV; and George Meszaros,

‘Taking the Law into Their Hands: The Landless Workers’ Movement and the Brazilian

State’, in Journal of Law and Society 27(4) (2000): 517–41.


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