Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 5, 2001
Latest Update: November 5, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Social Philosophy by Axel Honneth

This essay is based on the description that Gijs van Oenen offers of his Fall 2001 course. We couldn't be there. But we do have the benefit of his course outline. And we have some of Alex Honneth's work in our text, Contemporary Social Theory.The struggle for recognition Fall 2001 course at Erasmus University in Rotterdaam, by Gijs van Oenen. Reading list for the course.

I'm going to start this essay off with a very brief summary of Axel Honneth's "Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy," in David Rasmussen's The Handbook of Critical Theory, Blackwell, 1999. pp. 369-396.

"Even if Thomas Hobbes gave the discipline its name in the middle of the seventeenth century, social philosophy came to life in a real sense one hundred years later with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Under the title "social philosophy," Hobbes had searched for the legal conditions under which the absolutist state could win the measure of stability and authority necessary for the pacification of the religious wars. In the Leviathan his proposed solution of the formation of the contract laid out at as a guidepost the question of how, under the social conditions of ever present conflict of interests, the clear survival of civil order could be guaranteed. But when Rousseau worked on his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in the middle of the eighteenth century, this viewpoint had almost no interest for him. He was interested less in the presuppositions under which civil society was able to maintain itself than in the factors that led to its degeneration. In the hundred years that transpired between Hobbes and Rousseau, the process of capitalistic modernization had progressed to such an extent that a civil sphere of private autonomy was able to form in the shadow of the absolute state. Within the early bourgeois public sphere, which at that time still had no political influence in France, ways of interacting developed that later would provide the lifeworld framework for democratic institutions and capitalistic exchange. A form of social life emerged which would have been unrecognizable for Hobbes. Under the growing pressure of economic and social competition, ways of acting and of orienting one's life arose that were grounded upon deception, feigning, and jealousy. With the acute perception of the isolated loner, Rousseau fixed his gaze on the form of life that developed with this way of acting. Above all he was interested in whether or not it still contained all of the practical presuppositions under which men could lead a good and successful life. With Rousseau's change of attitude, modernity's project of social philosophy was put into effect. Unlike political philosophy, social philosophy no longer tried to determine the conditions of a correct or just social order, but set forth the conditions imposed by the new lifeform on human self-realization."

Yes, that's one paragraph, at pp. 370-371 in Rasmussen.

I'll add links to Hobbes and Rousseau later, but meanwhile, I think graduate students need a clear idea of what the different subdisciplines in and around sociology are about. This is primarily because without such knowledge we lose whole portions of our own discipline. Sociologists need to stay informed on social philosophy because without their involvement social philosophy itself will lack an important perspective, and sociology will lose the input of those who work within the new boundaries.

I have a copy of the Rasmussen Readings in Critical Theory. We'll discuss it in class and I'll add more later.

Discussion Topics

1. What are the two different perspectives chosen by Hobbes and Rousseau, as described by Axel Honneth?

   Consider both the preservation of civilization as we know it, and the preservation of individual freedom, as we know it.

2. Between Hobbes and Rousseau, which perspective is more appropriate today?

   Consider the the dire potential consequences of a world war. And consider the problems with achieving consensus. How does such consensus threaten individual freedoms? Consider dominant discourse and the demand for normative expectations to be met.