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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
The idea of socialism has given normative grounding and orientation to the outrage over capitalism for more than 150 years, and yet today it seems to have lost much of its appeal. Despite growing discontent, many would hesitate to invoke socialism when it comes to envisioning life beyond capitalism. How can we explain the rapid decline of this once powerful idea? And what must we do to renew it for the twenty-first century? In this lucid, political-philosophical essay, Axel Honneth argues that the idea of socialism has lost its luster because its theoretical assumptions stem from the industrial era and are no longer convincing in our contemporary post-industrial societies. Only if we manage to replace these assumptions with a concept of history and society that corresponds to our current experiences will we be able to restore confidence in a project whose fundamental idea remains as relevant today as it was a century ago the idea of an economy that realizes freedom in solidarity. The Idea of Socialism was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book of 2015.
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Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
Introduction
Notes
I. The Original Idea: The Consummation of the Revolution in Social Freedom
Notes
II. An Antiquated Intellectual Structure: The Spirit and Culture of Industrialism
Notes
III. Paths of Renewal (1): Socialism as Historical Experimentalism
Notes
IV. Paths of Renewal (2): The Idea of a Democratic Form of Life
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
To my sons Johannes and Robert, who have made everything easier from the very beginning
Axel Honneth
The Idea of Socialism Towards a Renewal
Translated by Joseph Ganahl
polity
First published in German as Die Idee des Sozialismus. Versuch einer Aktualisierung © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1215-7
The Idea of SocialismLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2016044974
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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“COURAGE yet, my brother and sister!
Keep on – Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs; That is nothing that is quell’d by one or two failures, or by any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any Unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.
What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,
Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, knows no discouragement,
Waiting patiently, waiting its time.”
Walt Whitman, “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” [1856], Leaves of Grass
Preface
As recently as a century ago, socialism was such a powerful movement that there was hardly any great social theorist who did not see the need to address it in detail – sometimes critically, sometimes sympathetically, but always with great respect. John Stuart Mill was the first to do so in the nineteenth century, followed by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter, to name only the most important. Despite significant differences in their personal convictions and theoretical orientations, these thinkers agreed that the intellectual challenge socialism represented would have to permanently accompany capitalism. Today things look much different. If socialism finds any mention at all in social theory, it is taken for granted that it has outlived its day. It is considered unthinkable that socialism could ever again move the masses or be a viable alternative to contemporary capitalism. Virtually overnight – Max Weber would not believe his eyes – the two great nineteenth-century rivals have switched roles: Religion is perceived as the ethical force of the future, whereas socialism is regarded as a creature of the past. My belief that this is an overly hasty reversal and thus cannot be the whole truth is one of the two motives of this book. I will attempt to show that socialism still contains a vital spark, if only we can manage to extract its core idea from the intellectual context of early industrialism and place it in a new socio-theoretical framework.
My second motive for writing this book is the reception of my most recent, comprehensive study Freedom’s Right.1 Over the course of the numerous discussions about the book, I have been told that my methodological point of departure in the normative horizon of modernity betrays just how little my critique aims to transform the current social order.2 Whenever necessary and possible, I have already responded to these objections in print, arguing that they are based on a misunderstanding of the methodological restrictions I have consciously imposed upon myself.3 Yet I still felt the need to demonstrate that we only need to slightly adjust the perspective of Freedom’s Right in order to open it up to an entirely different social order. Contrary to my original intention, therefore, I saw the need to follow up my larger study with a smaller one, which would more clearly define the vision entailed by the lines of progress already reconstructed from a strictly internal perspective.
For these two reasons I accepted an invitation to give the Leibniz lectures in Hanover in 2014, which I used as an opportunity to renew the basic ideas of socialism. I am very grateful to my colleagues at the Institute of Philosophy in Hanover, especially Paul Hoynigen-Huene, for allowing me to use their yearly lecture series to deal with what was most certainly an unfamiliar topic for them. I profited greatly from the discussions following the three lectures and gained a clear sense of the changes and additions I would need to make in order to present a second version of my lectures which would offer a much richer set of perspectives on a revised socialism. A cordial invitation by Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály to accept the Distinguished Fellowship of the Friedrich Nietzsche Kolleg in Weimar in June 2015 gave me the opportunity to present the revised version of my text to a larger audience. A parallel seminar with students from the “Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes” at the Wielandgut Ossmannstedt near Weimar enabled me to engage in several extremely fruitful discussions and to gather a number of suggestions for final corrections. I am very thankful to the participants in this seminar as well as to the director and the staff at the Kolleg for the interest they showed in my work.
I owe my gratitude to all the friends and colleagues for their advice during the production of the manuscript. Above all I would like to thank Fred Neuhouser, a close friend and trusted colleague in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, who gave me strong encouragement and a number of helpful suggestions from the very beginning of my work on the text. I have also profited greatly from the critical comments on the first version of my lectures made by Eva Gilmer, Philipp Hölzing, Christine Pries-Honneth and Titus Stahl. I am very grateful to them all for their years of help and attentiveness. Hannah Bayer and Frauke Köhler supported me as always by gathering literature and aiding in the production of the manuscript. To them I am grateful as well. Finally, for this English edition I would like to especially thank Joseph Ganahl, who has worked with perfect timing and again done a wonderful job translating the book; additionally I am grateful to Kristina Lepold who came up with good solutions for translating some difficult German formulations into English.
Axel Honneth, June 2015
Notes
1.
Axel Honneth,
Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014).
2.
See the various contributions in the Special Issue on Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right,
Critical Horizons
, vol. 16, no. 2 (2015).
3.
Axel Honneth, “Rejoinder”, ibid., pp. 204–26.
Introduction
Our contemporary societies are characterized by a puzzling divide. On the one hand, discontent with the current socio-economic state of affairs, with contemporary economic and working conditions, has increased enormously in recent years. More than ever in the postwar era, people are outraged at the social and political consequences unleashed by the global liberalization of the capitalist market economy. On the other hand, this widespread outrage seems to lack any sense of direction, any historical sense of its ultimate aim. As a result this widespread discontent has remained oddly mute and introverted, giving the impression that it simply lacks the capacity to think beyond the present and imagine a society beyond capitalism. The disconnect between this outrage and any notion about the future, between protest and a vision of a better world, is a novel phenomenon in the history of modern societies. Ever since the French Revolution, major social movements have been motivated by utopian visions of a future society. Here we might think of the Luddites, Robert Owen’s cooperatives, council communism and other communist ideals of a classless society. But today, these currents of utopian thinking, as Ernst Bloch would have put it, seem to have been interrupted. Although the outraged have a clear sense of what they do not want and what outrages them about current social conditions, they have no halfway clear conception of the goal to which the change they desire should ultimately lead.
Finding an explanation for such a sudden decline in utopian energy is more difficult than might appear at first sight. This can hardly be due to the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, to which intellectual observers like to refer when they proclaim the end of all hopes for a society beyond capitalism. Those who are outraged at the growing divide between private wealth and public poverty, though without having a concrete idea of a better society, certainly do not need the fall of the Berlin Wall to be convinced that the social welfare provided by Soviet state socialism came at the cost of a lack of freedom. Moreover, the fact that a real alternative to capitalism did not exist until the Russian Revolution did not prevent people in the nineteenth century from dreaming of peaceful coexistence in justice and solidarity. So why should the bankruptcy of the communist bloc have caused this apparently deep-seated capacity for utopian transcendence to wither? Another oft cited cause for this peculiar lack of vision is the abrupt shift of our collective sense of time. According to this claim, our entry into “postmodernism” – starting in the world of art and architecture and spreading into the broader culture – has devalued characteristically modern conceptions of teleological progress and paved the way to a consciousness of eternal recurrence. This new, postmodern conception of history supposedly hinders visions of a better life, since we have lost the notion that the inherent potential of the present necessarily strives to expand beyond itself and point the way towards an open future of continuous progress. Instead, the future is seen as having nothing to offer but reprises of past life-forms and social models. However, the very fact that we have become accustomed to advances in medicine or the enforcement of human rights casts doubts on this presumption. Why should transcendental imagination be alive and well in these fields, and yet impossible when it comes to the question of whether society can be reformed? The claim that we now have a fundamentally altered sense of history assumes that we can no longer anticipate a new and different kind of society, thus ignoring the strong, though certainly exaggerated hopes in the global implementation of human rights.1 A third explanation could thus refer to the difference between these two fields, i.e. between a structurally neutral establishment of internally sanctioned rights and a reorganization of basic social institutions, in order to draw the conclusion that it is only in the latter sphere that utopian forces have slackened. My impression is that this comes closest to the truth, though without capturing it completely, for we still need to explain why the current socio-political material should be unsuitable to utopian expectations.
It might help to recall that current economic and social events appear far too complex and thus opaque to public consciousness to be capable of intentional transformation. This is particularly true when it comes to processes of economic globalization in which transactions are carried out too quickly to be understood; here a kind of second-order pathology seems to make institutional conditions appear as mere givens, as being “reified” and thus immune to any efforts to change them.2 On this view, Marx’s famous analysis of fetishism in the first volume of Capital is only applicable today, as the general sense that social relations essentially consist in “the form of a social relation between things”3 did not exist as long as the workers’ movement still regarded society as capable of change – as is demonstrated in their dreams and visions.4 Reification, therefore, only applies to the present state of capitalism. If this were true, as everyday observations and empirical analyses indeed seem to suggest,5 we are unable to anticipate social improvements in the basic structure of contemporary societies because we regard the substance of this structure as being impervious to change, just like things. On this account, the inability to translate widespread outrage at the scandalous distribution of wealth and power into attainable goals is due neither to the disappearance of an actually existing alternative to capitalism, nor to a fundamental shift in our understanding of history, but rather to the predominance of a fetishistic conception of social relations.
This third explanation, however, still does not explain why traditional utopian conceptions no longer have the power to dissolve or at least make a breach in reified everyday consciousness. For more than a century, socialist and communist utopias electrified their addressees with visions of a better form of life, making them immune to feelings of resignation. The extent of what people view as “inevitable” and thus necessary about their social order depends largely on cultural factors, particularly on political patterns of interpretation which show that what appears inevitable is in fact any-thing but. In his historical study Injustice, Barrington Moore gives a convincing account of how German workers’ sense of hopelessness began to disappear once powerful re-interpretations of contemporary conditions demonstrated that institutional givens were in fact subject to arrangements and negotiations.6 This makes the question as to why classic and influential ideals have lost their power to unmask and destroy the phenomenon of reification all the more urgent. To pose the question more concretely, why do visions of socialism no longer have the power to convince the outraged that collective efforts can in fact improve what appears “inevitable”? This brings me to the main topic of the following four chapters of this brief study. Two related issues appear to me to be of particular intellectual relevance today: first, the internal or external reasons for the seemingly irrevocable loss of the power of socialist ideas to inspire; second, the conceptual changes needed to restore the vitality these ideas have lost. To do so, however, I will need to reconstruct the original idea of socialism as clearly as possible (section I). Only then can I turn to the reasons why these ideas have become so antiquated (section II). In the two concluding chapters I put these antiquated ideas back on their feet by making a number of conceptual renovations (sections III and IV). It should also be noted that the following considerations have a metapolitical character, since I make no attempt to draw connections to current political constellations and possibilities for action. I will not be dealing with the strategic question of how socialism could influence current political events, but solely how the original intention of socialism could be reformulated so as to make it once again a source of political-ethical orientations.
Notes
1.
Samuel Moyn,
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
2.
Titus Stahl,
Immanente Kritik: Elemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken
(Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2013).
3.
Karl Marx,
Capital, Volume I
(London: Penguin, 1990), p. 165.
4.
See Jacques Rancière,
Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France
(London: Verso, 2012).
5.
See Pierre Bourdieu et al.,
The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
6.
Barrington Moore,
Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt
(New York: Random House, 1979), esp. ch. 14.
IThe Original Idea: The Consummation of the Revolution in Social Freedom
The idea of socialism is an intellectual product of capitalist industrialization. It first saw the light of day after it had become apparent that the demands for freedom, equality and fraternity raised in the course of the French Revolution remained unfulfilled promises for large parts of the population. But in fact, the term “socialism” was introduced much earlier to philosophical discourse when, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Catholic theologians sought to expose the German theory of “natural law” as a dangerous misconception. At this time, the polemical expression “socialistae” (a neologism derived from the Latin “socialis”) referred to a tendency in the works of Grotius and Pufendorf, who were accused of claiming that the legal order of society should be founded on the human need for “sociality” rather than divine revelation.1 A direct line runs from this critical use of the term to the legal textbooks of the late eighteenth century, in which the term “socialist” is primarily used to refer to Pufendorf and his pupils. Yet by this time the term had already lost its polemical connotation and merely come to indicate the intention of giving natural law a secular foundation in the human need for sociality.2 Thirty years later, in the 1820s and 1830s, when the English terms “socialist” and “socialism” entered the European vocabulary, any relation to their original use in debates on natural law had been lost.3 Robert Owen in England and the Fourierists in France referred to themselves as socialists as if they had invented a new term, expressing no intention of engaging in philosophical debate over the justification of law. “Socialist” and “socialism” thus became “terms for a movement directed towards the future” (Wolfgang Schieder), an expression of the political aim to make the existing society more “social” by establishing collective organizations.
Of course, efforts to make society more “social” had been undertaken long before the first half of the nineteenth century. Here we might think of the Scottish moral philosophers who sought to derive the principles of a well-ordered society from sentiments of mutual sympathy. Even the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who in no way can be suspected of being a socialist, flirted with such notions when he wrote up plans to establish intellectual clubs he termed “Sozietäten”. Following the Platonic model of the rule of philosophers, these organizations – later deemed “academies” – were meant to serve the common good not only by performing certain educational and cultural functions, but also by embedding the economy in a social framework.4 In the brief manuscript “Society and Economy”, written in 1671, Leibniz assigned to these academies the task of providing financial support and a minimum wage to the poor, thus putting an end to the competitive economic struggle and ensuring “true love and trustfulness” among the members of society.5 Certain passages of Leibniz’s text give the impression that he virtually anticipated the radical aims pursued by Charles Fourier 150 years later, who intended to establish cooperatives called “phalanstères”.6
In making plans for a cooperative society, however, Fourier was faced with an entirely different set of prevailing social values from Leibniz’s feudal surroundings. After all, the French Revolution with its principles of freedom, equality and fraternity had given birth to moral demands for a just social order that could be invoked by anybody seeking to improve social conditions. Thinkers and activists in 1830s France and England who began to refer to themselves as “socialists” were fully aware of their debt to the values established by the revolution. Unlike Leibniz or other social reformers prior to the French Revolution, whose designs conflicted directly with the political reality of their day, these socialists could invoke already institutionalized and universally confirmed principles in order then to derive radical consequences from them. From the very beginning, however, it was unclear just how the demands of these “early socialist” groups related to the three norms established by the French Revolution. Although the intellectual exchange between the followers of Robert Owen in England, the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists in France went back as far as the 1830s,7 their respective conceptions of desirable social change were too distinct to count as a shared goal.
For all three of these groups, their rejection of the post-revolutionary social order derived from their outrage at how the expansion of the capitalist market prevented a large portion of the population from taking advantage of the principles of freedom and equality proclaimed by the French Revolution.8
