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Critical Theory and/as Political Philosophy

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DOI: 10.4324/9781315105857-15

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THIS IS THE LAST AUTHOR DRAFT BEFORE FINAL REVISIONS, PROOFS AND
COPY-EDITING.
PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION, IN:
Paul Giladi (ed.) Hegel and the Frankfurt School. Traditions in Dialogue. Routledge,
2021, chapter 9.

Critical Theory and / as Political Philosophy

Jean-Philippe Deranty

In this chapter, I would like to consider the complicated relationship between Critical Theory (which is
taken here in the restricted sense of the Frankfurt School tradition) and Political Philosophy. I will
capitalise these two intellectual endeavours for the sake of clarity, so their names appear distinctly in
the discussions that follow. The purpose of my chapter is to problematise the long-standing suspicions
of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy by Critical Theorists, so that one may question the
boundaries that are often erected within Critical Theory in relation to Political Philosophy, and thereby
encourage Critical Theorists to engage more substantially with the latter.
The chapter proceeds in five steps. In the first section, I briefly summarise the defining features of the
research programme that the name of Critical Theory designates. Despite all the fluctuations in the
understanding of it, and the immense variations in the theoretical tools mobilised to attempt to fulfil it,
if we restrict the focus to the most eminent representatives of the tradition, a consistent project can be
identified from the moment of its inception until today. I summarise the key features of the Critical
Theory project to then highlight, in the second section, the different ways in which political dimensions
are entailed in it. I distinguish a number of senses of politics that Critical Theory takes an interest in, as
a direct result of its project. In the third section, I briefly recall the methodological, conceptual and
political reasons explaining why, throughout the generations, Critical Theorists have been suspicious
of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy.
In order to justify these claims and the call for greater cooperation between the traditions, I
highlight, in the fourth section of this chapter, a number of areas in which work in Critical Theory has
shown itself to be relatively under-determined on political issues. In the final section, I provide some
suggestions for how contemporary Critical Theory might address some of its deficits in the treatment
of political questions, by engaging with authors situated outside the tradition.

I
The Critical Theory project

1
In order to identify the many political dimensions that are inherent in the Critical Theory
project, we first need to briefly recall what are the main features of it. If it is formulated in
sufficiently formal terms, that project arguably remains consistent across its generations,
beyond the many different methodological apparatuses that have been developed to realise it.
Critical Theory can be defined as an original intellectual endeavour that seeks to perform two
tasks: (1) a theoretical task of description, comprehension and explanation of social
phenomena, that is guided by (2) a practical interest in emancipation, that is the realisation of
freedom for all. Because the social phenomena described do not as yet allow every human
individual to be free, the endeavour as a whole is a critical one.
The phenomena to comprehend and explain theoretically are those particular social
processes and structures from which people need emancipated, because those particular social
processes and structures are ‘negative’, i.e. regressive ones: they are structures of social
domination that translate into forms of oppression and injustice, and that also produce
pathological forms of life. The double task of theoretical and practical study is to be pursued
on two levels: at the objective level of collective organisation (which includes, for example, the
economic, cultural, legal sectors of society,), and at the subjective level of the individual agents,
inasmuch as social processes are reflected in, supported by, and in turn affect, the psychic
structures and embodied lives of individual persons.
Crucially, the theoretical and the practical reciprocally determine each other. The
theoretical inquiries are guided by a double impetus: a critical one highlighting all that is
‘negative’ in current social organisation, and a programmatic one indicating the possible
correction of these pathological and unjust social phenomena through a transformation of the
social organisation. Conversely, a defining feature of Critical Theory is that it makes the
practical parts of its inquiries methodologically dependent on the descriptive. This is where the
Hegelian and Marxian heritage of Critical Theory remains active throughout, even if Hegel and
Marx are no longer the most important references for a number of authors in the tradition, as
has been the case for instance for Habermas from the late 1960s onwards. Marx inherited from
Hegel the rejection of decontextualised normative analysis, that is, any kind of criticism on the
moral, legal and political planes that is detached from a historical context. Critical theorists
follow their lead in seeking to ground their reflections on possible forms of emancipation in
the analysis of the present structures of domination, injustice and social pathology. The
potentialities for emancipation, and the very meaning of emancipation, are to be found, not in
abstracto, through an asocial, ahistorical detachment from existing social reality. Rather, the
notion of, and directive for, emancipation here necessarily involves the realist consideration of

2
the historical context. Crucially, embedding the transformative and emancipatory project in the
non-ideal sensitivity to dynamical historical contexts proceeds negatively via the overcoming
of the structures of injustice and domination, and proceeds positively via the leveraging of
progressive forces that can already be identified in existing social institutions and
contemporary social spheres.
One last defining feature should be noted, namely the idea, also inherited from Hegel
and Marx, that the success of the critical project relies on the theory’s ability to develop a
unified account of a historical period, such that the links between different sectors of society
and their subjective counterparts can be shown. This attempt at describing the social system as
a totality has several dimensions. It explains firstly why Critical Theorists rely on
interdisciplinary collaboration with empirical social sciences for the realisation of their
programme. This is because conceptual work alone is not able to exhaust the account of the
historical period, given the latter’s factual specificity. Indeed, the reliance on empirical research
goes very deep because of the historicist, anti-apriorist assumptions already highlighted. Since
the functional and the normative aspects of the analysis depend in their very content on the
particular features of the historical period, they cannot be articulated a priori; they have emerge
from a description of social reality. At the same time though, Critical Theory aims to be more
than just a loose alliance of social theorists with overlapping normative insights. Particular
social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, political economy and legal studies, can
provide the material that is necessary for the understanding of the historical context, but some
meta-level theorising, some social theory loaded with normative insights is also necessary to
show the links between the different orders of reality, how they are integrated in an overall
social system, and the forms of injustice and social pathology that arise from it. Typically for
the first generation of Critical Theorists that framework was provided by historical
materialism.1 For Habermas, it was rationalisation theory informed by the classics of
sociology.2 A large part of the debates in Critical Theory consist in arguments about the most
relevant theoretical frameworks that can do justice to the complexity of the social system whilst
integrating advances in social theory and the social sciences.3 This attempt at ‘totality’ in
explanation can sound hubristic, not least if it is referred back to Hegel’s encyclopaedic system,
but for Critical Theorists it simply means taking seriously and doing justice to the double-task
defining the project. For, if one thinks that existing injustices and pathologies result from the

1
Cf. Horkheimer (1993c).
2
Cf. Habermas (1987).
3
Cf. Deranty (2011) on Axel Honneth’s integrated approach in this regard.

3
social organisation as a whole, in all of its levels of complexity, and if one is committed to
helping overcome these injustices and pathologies, then as a critical theorist, one has to try to
show how the different levels of social organisation are related, and how they affect subjective
lives, to produce those very injustices and pathologies.
One could show in detail how each generation, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas,
Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst, and Rahel Jaeggi, has continued to maintain
together these different features. For reasons of space, I will leave it at this very formal account.
The point of retracing the different features of the project in such broad strokes is that its
political dimensions appear clearly from them. In the next section, I will highlight these
different political dimensions of the Critical Theory project, that arise directly from the tasks
it aims to fulfil and the key methodological premises to which it is committed.

II
Political Aspects of the Critical Theory Project
It goes without saying that Critical Theorists are interested in political issues. There is,
however, a difficulty at the heart of Critical Theory’s own self-understanding in relation to
political issues. Critical Theory has consistently portrayed itself as an alternative to Political
Philosophy. From the start, its project was identified with the discipline of ‘Social Philosophy’,
and4Social Philosophy is often presented as an alternative to Political Philosophy.5 But in what
precise sense is Critical Theory an alternative to Political Philosophy, if it studies similar
issues, i.e. political ones? Is Social Philosophy just another way of doing Political Philosophy?
If so, why reject Political Philosophy? To entangle those questions, we first need to see more
precisely what kind of political questions Critical Theory is interested in solving, based on its
intellectual project. We can use the critical description/interest in emancipation distinction as
a first entry point, to highlight the different political aspects of the Critical Theory project.
First, the critical goal of Critical Theory has several inherently political dimensions.
Critical Theory seeks to describe the social pathologies, injustices and forms of oppression and
domination prevalent in the current social situation in relation to both causes and effects and in
relation to both the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of, what one might call, ‘social
irrationality’. That is, in its most comprehensive form, Critical Theory first aims to unveil the
collective and the individual roots of social irrationality, typically, the specific contradictions

4
Cf. Horkheimer (1993).
5
Cf. Honneth (1996), Fischbach (2009), and Jaeggi & Celikates (2017).

4
of a stage of capitalism, and the psychological mechanisms whereby individuals not only are
impacted by these contradictions in their inner lives, but reproduce them and even amplify
them. This explanatory task is directly complemented by what might be called the aetiological
task, of describing the specific injustices and pathologies produced by these collective and
individual mechanisms. So, we have two levels of analysis, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, and
two perspectives: causes and effects. At each of those points, the political is directly implicated,
each time in a different way.
Let us focus first on the explanatory task and begin with the analysis of the causes of social
irrationality. The underlying contradictions of the social system, typically for most Critical
Theorists, the contradictions inherent in a particular mode of capitalistic production, produce
real effects only insofar as they are materialised in real social processes which involve different
kinds of social agents: public organisations, private corporations, social institutions,
individuals themselves. All of these bodies exert social force by relying on objective sources
of power and authority, notably the legal and regulatory frameworks that direct and constrain
social action. This points to the fact that the organisations and agents that manifest in reality
the contradictions of the social system rely upon an ordering of that system that is the outcome
of legislation, regulation and enforcement. Legislation is the product of decision-making
processes, and these decisions are applied, enforced and backed up by state power.
Famously, for the first generation of Critical Theory, the analysis of contemporary
capitalism required that one study how capitalist processes relied upon the authoritarian state,
to ensure the continuation of economic functions when competition was hollowed out, and for
the pacification of class conflict.6 Today, the transformations we are witnessing in neoliberal
capitalism, , cannot be analysed fully without considering the actions of the states that help to
create the legal frameworks, the financial environments, the political mechanisms and indeed
the ideological and cultural preconditions making possible and entrenching these
transformations. Already at the level of the structural contradictions of the social system, the
political is therefore inherently active. And as the writings of the 1940s cited above show, what
is true of the structural contradictions of the system is also true at the level of the relations
between groups and individuals. The structures of domination and injustice also owe their
reality and force to institutional powers that are intrinsically political, to the extent that these
structures are shaped by legislative and administrative processes anchored in state institutions,
and are put into practice and enforced through processes backed up by state power.

6
Cf. Marcuse (1988), Horkheimer (1973), and Genel, 2013: 237-49.

5
 On the subjective side, the individual psychic structures that help to explain how the
irrational rationality of present society can perpetuate itself are largely determined by social
processes that are also entrenched politically, to the extent namely that the “mediating
institutions” in which individuals are socialised and trained are ultimately under the control
and influence of the state”.7
If we move to the ‘effects’ side of the critical analysis, further political dimensions
emerge. Some of the pathologies of the ‘irrational’ organisation of society are political. These
pathologies again are collective and individual: pathologies of democracy and pathologies of
citizenship. Critical theory, throughout its history, has aimed to include a critical study of the
political aspects of modern pathologies, both from the point of view of the collectives and the
individuals involved. This was obviously at the heart of the initial project in the 1930s.
Habermas has written extensively on these aspects throughout his work, from the study of the
legitimation crisis of Fordist states (1973) to his more recent work on the undermining of the
nation-state state at the hand of deregulated, globalised capitalism (1998). Recently, Fraser and
Jaeggi ended their rich dialogue in which they sought to reconnect the Critical Theory project
to the critique of capitalism, precisely on those issues.8
Let us move now to the ‘emancipation’ side of the critical project. Here, the political is
obviously implicated, since emancipation designates the task of collectively changing the
social order for the benefit of the collective and of the individuals within it. Critical Theorists
tackle this dimension from two main perspectives: a descriptive, diagnostic one, and a
normative one. The analysis of the social system from a critical point of view provides
resources to describe the potentialities for emancipation in the present context. As Horkheimer
wrote in his famous 1937 programmatic description of the project: “the goal of critical thought,
namely the rational state of society, is forced upon it by present distress. The theory which
projects such a solution to the distress does not labour in the service of an existing reality but
only gives voice to the mystery of that reality”.9 This idea that the new, just society can be
anticipated in its outline as the reverse of present, unjust society was referred by first generation
Critical Theorists to Hegel and Marx: to Marx in terms of the real, material process of self-
overcoming capitalism, but also to Hegel inasmuch as his dialectic provided for them the

7
M. Horkheimer, 2002a: 54-59.
8
Cf. N. Fraser & R. Jaeggi, 2018: 193-215.
9
Horkheimer, 2002b: 217.

6
philosophical grammar to capture the flipping over of irrational reality into the rational reality
entailed in it.10
In turn, this dimension of the Critical Theory project entails two different moments.
The first is the general description of the social context from the point of view of the options
available to the different actors (individuals, groups, classes, institutions, the State itself),
within the constraints and possibilities of the situation.11 Within this kind of general overview,
a more particular outlook focuses on the real political forces that might be in a position to
embody and enforce the potentials for emancipation that the situation harbours.12
Finally, Critical Theory has always had an affinity with one political option amongst
others, namely socialism. Indeed, Carl Grünberg, the first director of the Institute for Social
Research, was a specialist of labour history and the founder of a journal and an archive “for the
history of socialism and the labour movement”.13 In turn, the socialist option entails different
aspects: a history of political actions and strategies that define the tradition within the history
of real politics, a history of internal controversies through which the movement defined itself,
which includes in particular a corpus of theoretical writings giving conceptual contours to the
tradition, in opposition to other political traditions, notably liberalism, republicanism and
anarchism. In seeking to provide political direction to their contemporaries on the basis of their
social diagnoses, Critical Theorists throughout the generations have engaged with the real
socialist movements of their time, in relation both to strategic and conceptual issues of self-
characterisation.14
As the table on the next page summarises, through a simple survey of the different tasks
involved in a Critical Theory project, we have found at a minimum twelve different moments
in it that entail political aspects. It would be easy to show that all the great authors of the Critical
Theory tradition have addressed, more or less extensively, these political aspects.

10
Cf. Adorno, 1993: 30; Horkheimer, 1993: 270-71; Marcuse, 1973: 148-49.
11
See Habermas (1990).
12
Cf. Marcuse (1969); Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 165-192)
13
Held, 1980: 29-31.
14
See Honneth (2016).

7
 Political Dimensions of the Critical Theory Project
Critique Emancipation
Causes Effects Praxis Theory
Political institution Pathologies of General political Socialism as option
of irrational social democratic field of modern politics
system processes
Political backing of Pathologies of Social movements Socialism as
social antagonisms public discourse, tradition in political
ideology thought
Cultural and Pathologies of Processes of Images of
educational politics citizenship individual and emancipated culture
collective and free education
enlightenment

Thus far, I have highlighted those aspects of the Critical Theory project that entail a political
dimension. Showing the many ways in which the Critical Theory project entails political
aspects, however, raises the puzzle at the heart of this chapter: some of those political aspects
that are of interest to Critical Theory would be typically issues that are also addressed in
Political Philosophy, in some of its guises. And yet Critical Theory often presents itself in
diametrical opposition to Political Philosophy, as a separate mode of inquiry, using different,
conflicting methods and assumptions. Before we can envisage how the opposition might be
softened, we must first establish on what grounds Critical Theory is suspicious of Political
Philosophy.

III
Critical Theory’s Critique of Political Philosophy

8
From its inception, Critical Theory has presented itself as an alternative to Political Philosophy.
Horkheimer’s work in the 1930s is particularly emblematic and influential in this respect.15 He
engaged in lengthy, critical reconstructions of the early founders of ‘bourgeois Political
Philosophy’ (namely, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Vico), precisely to define by contrast the
alternative, Social Philosophy approach the Institute would be taking. In each case, he aimed
to show how the key categories and arguments developed by the classical Political Philosophers
reflected each time a particular stage of economic development, basically a particular mode of
capitalistic exploitation, which required in turn a specific organisation of political power, to
ensure the pacification of class conflict in favour of the rising bourgeoisie. Horkheimer’s
judgement is ambivalent. On the one hand, as brilliant reflections of their times in thought, he
reads into the classical Political Philosophers genial anticipations of Hegel’s philosophy of
history and of historical materialism. But, precisely because of their Political Philosophy
approaches, which, each time in different ways, disconnects conceptual and normative analysis
from social conditions and the historical context, the great Political Philosophers also commit
serious methodological mistakes, generalising unduly from the particular constellation in
which they wrote. To give just one example, Macchiavelli’s famous justification of a good
ruler’s lack of morality can be read by the Social Philosopher both as an insightful analysis of
real historical phenomenon, but also criticised for the way in which it is presented by the
Political Philosopher:

when he demonstrates that the holiest expressions of loving kindness as well as the
darkest of crimes have one and all been means in the hands of rulers throughout history,
in so doing he has formulated a significant historical-philosophical doctrine. His mistake,
which the ensuing period committed even more egregiously in the doctrine of raison d’
état, was that his justification of means of domination that were essential for the rise of
the bourgeoisie in the Italy of his time was extended by him to cover the past and the
future as well. Such eternalising of the temporally bound is a characteristic deficiency of
modern philosophy of history.16

This criticism of Political Philosophy, objecting to the way in which it tackles issues in
decontextualised fashion, both in terms of the social conditions upon which political
phenomena are grounded, and in relation to the specific historical totality in which they are
placed, has remained a constant trait of Critical Theory throughout the generations. Given that
this criticism is at the heart of this chapter’s argument, it is worthwhile expanding slightly on
its different dimensions. Three problems can be distinguished.

15
Cf. J. Abromeit, 2011: 92-110.
16
Horkheimer, 1993a: 323.

9
 The first problematic aspect of Political Philosophy for Critical Theorists is its apparent
failure to adopt a truly historicist methodology, one that would reflexively connect the
reflection on political issues to the historical context. Political Philosophy tends to define its
concepts in a purely analytical manner, as if they existed in abstracta outside of time. But, the
norms that political actors refer to in their social struggles (like freedom or equality), the core
concepts that are used to study political institutions (like sovereignty, legitimacy, authority,
citizenship), the structure of constitutional regimes and their political institutions (democracy,
republic, parliament, elections), all of these terms are affected in their meaning, scope and
normative content, depending on the historical period in which they are embedded. This
criticism reprises Hegel’s historicist approach to a normative theory of institutions, according
to which (i) the meaning of freedom is the core norm, and the core concepts of collective life
are functions of the historical periods in which they are located. Marx, for all his criticism of
Hegel’s politics, took on this fundamental point, and rejected any reference to trans-historical
moral and political norms.17
This critique of Political Philosophy’s ahistorical approach is linked to the other
fundamental feature of Critical Theory self-identifying as Social Philosophy, namely the
attempt to ground specific inquiries in the overall social system. Explanation in Critical Theory,
as we saw, consists in showing how a particular collective or individual problem arises from
contradictions or crises or dysfunctions in the overall social system. This applies to political
thinking as well. From such historical-materialist perspective, there is a suspicion that Political
Philosophy, by claiming to analyse political concepts and political problems on their own,
independently of their roots in social processes and social problems, is unaware of the role that
these political concepts as a matter of fact play in the social tensions of the time, and indeed,
of the role that Political Philosophy itself plays in them .18 In short, it is oblivious to its own
potentially ideological character.
This criticism aims particularly at liberalism, as the mainstream branch of modern
Political Philosophy. Liberalism was read by first generation Critical Theorists as providing an
idealised account of the political institutions that belong to an intrinsically unjust and
pathological social system. A direct connection was established between liberalism as real
political system and as political theory).19 A similar suspicion continues to be at play in recent

17
Cf. Wood (1981).
18
See Abromeit , 2011: 174-175, on Horkheimer.
19
Cf. E. Hammer, 2006: 12, 112, for Adorno.

10
vindications of a Social Philosophy approach, questioning the self-understanding of liberalism
as being simply the reflexive discourse of modernity in its normative foundations.20
Thirdly, at the intersection of the theoretical and the practical, Critical Theorists object
to the way in which Political Philosophers construe the relationship between political
theorising and political reality. Critical Theory, as we saw, seeks to describe the political
options available to individuals and the collective, and seeks to do so on the basis of the analysis
of the contradictions and dysfunctions of the system in its current organisation. From this point
of view, the way in which Political Philosophers tend to bridge the gap between the analysis of
political norms, processes and institutions and real social situations is the wrong way around,
as their theories of justice seem to merely demand that the real be made equal to the normative,
without consideration of the forces preventing this to happen, or indeed those forces that could
make it possible. This suspicion is as old as Critical Theory, and is grounded in Hegel’s critique
of Kant’s “merely moral point of view”.21 This is typically what contemporary Critical
Theorists continue to object to about the mainstream Political Philosophy that developed after
Rawls.22
By presenting itself as an alternative to Political Philosophy on the basis of these
criticisms, we may assume that Critical Theory thinks of itself as a mode of inquiry that
interrogates the different political issues that were listed above in more consistent ways. Not
all the topics touched on by Political Philosophy would be objects of Critical Theory, simply
because their goals as intellectual inquiries are different. But Critical Theorists seem to assume
that those political objects that are of interest to Critical Theory are addressed by it more
appropriately than by Political Philosophy. As we will now see, however, there are a number
of areas of inquiry where Critical Theory remains relatively underdetermined.

IV
The Relative Indeterminacy of the Political in Critical Theory
As we saw in section 2, the project of Critical Theory has a many inherently political
dimensions attached to it. However, a number of those aspects have not been explored in a
significant amount of detail. For some of these aspects, the political indeterminacy is mostly
true across the generations; for others, there are important exceptions, which one might read as
confirming a general enough rule, once the entire corpus is taken into consideration.

20
Cf. Fischbach (2009) and Jaeggi (2018).
21
Cf. EPR: §163; Adorno, 1993: 8; Marcuse [Year],: [Page number(s)].
22
Cf. Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 120-127.

11
 a. Democratic Agnosticism
One trait that needs to be mentioned from the outset is what we might call Critical Theory’s
‘democratic agnosticism’. This consists in theorists refraining from engaging in substantive
analysis of political matters, whether they are located at the normative or empirical levels,
instead leaving to real democratic processes the task of specifying the content of the political
norms or institutional realities involved. A large part of the political philosophy of Critical
Theory consists in elaborating sophisticated accounts of democracy, to then refer to the
possible or anticipated outcomes of the processes of decision-making they would make
possible to settle important political issues. Honneth’s ending of The Struggle for Recognition
is typical in this respect:

whether these substantive values [deriving from demands of recognition]point in the

direction of a political republicanism, an ecologically based asceticism, or a collective
existentialism, whether they presuppose changes in socio-economic circumstances or are
compatible with the conditions of a capitalist society – this is no longer a matter for theory
but rather for the future of social struggles.23

This democratic agnosticism is not just a way to avoid taking a stand on first-order political
issues. It often operates at the core of the theoretical models themselves. For instance, the
fundamental norm in Fraser’s work has remained throughout her writings, the meta-norm of
participatory parity. This is a ‘meta-’norm, to the extent that it is specifically designed to avoid
giving content to any substantial principle that would ground political claims (for instance some
idea of self-determination, or full capability), in the name of which justice could be demanded.
Justice, for Fraser, consists solely in the ability to participate fully in social life. Injustice
designates the obstacles to such participation.24
In this gesture of pushing the inquiry away from the substance of justice claims to the
question of participation in processes in which these kinds of claims are addressed, Fraser, of
course, repeats Habermas’s own proceduralist approach to political issues. As is well-known,
Habermas’ decisive intervention in Political Philosophy has consisted in rearticulating
substantive questions, for instance the definitions of sovereignty and legitimacy, the specific
structures and functions of the different arms of the constitutional government, and indeed the
ultimate principles upon which a political order is justified, through the second-order grammar

23
A. Honneth, 1995: 179.
24
Cf. N. Fraser, 2010: 145.

12
of the Discourse Principle. The distancing effect of such a method appears strikingly when
Habermas contrasts the discourse theory approach to political issues from the substantive
traditions of the historical political ‘-isms’: liberalism and republicanism.25 Discourse theory
is a method, whereas the ‘-isms”’ are defined by a whole set of substantive norms, notably core
definitions of freedom and equality, a particular way of understanding the relation between
these norms, theories of sovereignty and of the legitimate government, and so on.
Forst’s brand of critical theory follows this Habermassian model closely, since he is concerned
mainly with the question of specifying the second-order normative principle that grounds
demands of justice, as well as the critique of alternative models of justice (mostly liberal and
communitarian), rather than the description at the first level, in substantive terms, of what
injustice and social pathologies consist (2007).26
Even though she uses a different approach, Jaeggi’s model of Critical Theory also
performs a kind of proceduralist distancing. Despite her criticisms of Habermas, her pragmatist
approach to politics also favours what we might call a meta-answer to substantive issues,
leaving to the respective lifeforms the task of deciding by themselves, through the mobilising
of their own ethical resources, the shape they want to give to major social, economic and
political issues (2018).27
This democratic agnosticism of later generations of Frankfurt School theorists reprises
the caution of the first generation, who were themselves directly influenced by Marx’s famous
avoidance of substantive claims about the organisation of the future, emancipated society. The
case has been well made that Adorno was far from uninterested in political theoretical
questions.28 We noted earlier how much Horkheimer had interacted with classical Political
Philosophy, and commentators have shown the importance of these early studies in his
development. But, their respective approaches to political issues were also “twice removed”,
to use a Platonic reference, from contentful specifications. In their case, this did not occur via
proceduralist distancing, but rather, following the model of Marx, they focused solely on the
critique of existing politics, and the link between the current stage of capitalism and the
perverse forms of politics accompanying it. As with Marx, reference to future emancipation
mentioned a few basic features in some scattered passages, but never went beyond that.

25
Cf. Habermas (1996).
26
Cf. Forst (2007).
27
Cf. Jaeggi (2018).
28
See Hammer (2005); Mariotti (2016).

13
 b. Hegel and Rousseau
If we assess this democratic agnosticism in light of the defining features of the Critical Theory
project, it reveals a few surprising traits. One of them relates to the fact that, for all the
variations across the different authors who have taken up the project, the Hegelian reference
has remained a defining one throughout. Some contemporary Critical Theorists like Honneth
and Jaeggi are much more influenced by Hegel than others, notably students of Habermas like
Forst. And yet Hegel remains a key underlying reference to the extent that the historicist,
contextualist approach to normative issues, which is a characteristic of Critical Theory for all
authors. The odd point about this underlying Hegelianism of Critical Theory, however, is that
he of course did not hesitate to provide rich, detailed accounts of some of the political issues,
notably the shape of the institutions of freedom, that Critical Theorists refrain from answering,
by retreating behind democratic agnosticism.
The political writings of Habermas and Honneth seem to be exceptions to this. In
Between Facts and Norms, for example, Habermas provided genealogical and normative
accounts of the different institutions of the modern constitutional state, showing both the
reasons for their emergence and their optimal modes of operation for the realisation of
democracy. In his writings on ‘the post-national constellation’ and on European integration,
Habermas equally took up the ‘Hegelian challenge’, by proposing descriptions of what would
be from his perspective the ‘rational’ political core of the time, that is, institutional
potentialities entailed in the present that would be the optimal democratic options for dealing
with the crisis of the nation-state. Similarly, in the final sections of Freedom’s Right, Honneth
focuses on the institutional and cultural conditions underpinning the functioning of the modern
constitutional state. The book ends, in Habermassian fashion, with a diagnosis of the current
crisis of the democratic state, and the political resources that might be drawn upon to address
it.
However, even these eminent examples do not go as far as Hegel in their analyses of
the political institutions making ‘concrete freedom’ possible in modernity. Between Facts and
Norms does not go into nearly as much detail as Hegel in describing the structure of government
institutions, how they relate to social institutions, and the role each plays in the overall
realisation of ‘concrete freedom’. Habermas’s aims in his book only commit him to showing
how the arms of government (in particular the legislature and the judiciary) fulfil different
dimensions in the institutional process transforming communicative power into administrative
power.

14
 Honneth’s latest magnum opus is formally organised along the architecture of the
Philosophy of Right, and Honneth is explicit about the Hegelian inspiration of his new model
of freedom as “social freedom”.29 But he does not attempt to ‘actualise’ the most significant
section of Hegel’s book, maintaining a wariness even in his later writings towards the latter’s
‘strong institutionalism’.30 Honneth does not delve into concrete aspects of institutional design,
but rather uses the Hegelian institutional carve-up to analyse different spheres of
institutionalisation of freedom. In relation to the constitutional state, only the organs enabling
the formation and expression of collective decision-making are of interest to him, as this is the
central role that Honneth attaches to the state. But, Hegel’s interests in describing the modern
state were more diverse: in particular, a major feature of his analysis was the relation between
social and political spheres, notably between economic processes and collective management.
Hegel also spent a considerable amount of attention on the links between political
representation and the social identity of represented and representatives. Honneth’s
reconstruction does mention the problem of the narrowness of political representation in
modern states, as the privileged classes have for long periods monopolised the decision-making
processes to further their own interests. However, he does not offer a precise account of how
that might be averted in the actual functioning of the state and the relation of representation to
pre-political institutions.
Indeed, what is striking in the case of both Habermas and Honneth, in contrast with
Hegel, is the extent to which, they remain oriented to the past in their analysis of political
institutions. The possible shape of new institutional arrangements that would allow
communities to meet new challenges, for instance, in Habermas’s case, the integration of
European nation-states into a broader European framework and political culture, is read off
from genealogical reconstructions that make sense of the present in light of the recent past.
The value of these new institutional constellations is gauged by the extent to which they might
or might not fulfil normative requirements that were precisely those that inspired the historical
developments just reconstructed. In other words, little room is made for institutional
innovation. One might object that Hegel himself claimed only a retrospective role for
philosophy, the reconstruction ex ante of “its own time comprehended in thought”.31 But, Hegel
clearly had a different understanding of what a reconstruction of the rationality of the present

29
Honneth 2011: 42-62.
30
Cf. Honneth (2000).
31
EPR: §21.

15
means, since the rich detail of his institutional outline was nowhere to be found in the societies
of his time.
If we think about some of the most significant issues of contemporary politics, the
relative failure of contemporary Critical Theory to take up the Hegelian challenge is striking.
We can mention for instance the modes of democratic participation, the relationship between
state power and autonomous economic processes, and the global environmental crisis. In the
first case, the old style of representative politics, based on formal parliamentary elections, party
organisations and informal mediations in the public sphere is taken as the only possible model.
Habermas and Honneth analyse well the crisis of this model, but show comparatively little
interest in alternative modes of democratic decision-making. Aside from the pathologies of
democratic participation, are there no other potentialities inscribed in the present? Hasthe
model of representative, party politics not clearly demonstrated its conceptual exhaustion? In
the case of the tension between national state sovereignty and global capitalistic forces, again,
the critical diagnoses are detailed and profound, but little is offered by way of countering the
corrosive power of capitalistic mechanisms upon political institutions. Both Habermas and
Honneth limit their recommendations to extending the normative force built into modern
institutions of the recent past, but they are the first to admit that this will not be anywhere near
sufficient to address the magnitude of the problems encountered. What would a social and
political ’reembedding’ of globalised capital require? Relatedly, in relation to the
environmental crisis, their Eurocentric perspectives, particularly Honneth’s, contains no
indication of what a global institutional response would need to look like. And it must be
emphasised that Habermas and Honneth are taken to task here only because they are the Critical
Theorists who offer the most detailed analyses of state institutions.
We can make remarks of a similar kind by turning to another one of Critical Theory’s
key influences, namely Rousseau. He is acknowledged as the first thinker to have developed a
mode of inquiry into social and cultural phenomena that contrasted with classical political and
moral arguments, thereby demonstrating for the time a clear and well-defined Social
Philosophy perspective.32 Yet Rousseau should be a problematic reference for Critical
Theorists. His approach in The Social Contract could be taken as the epitome of a
’freestanding’ normative analysis of just institutions. For that matter, Hegel criticizsd it every
time he referenced Rousseau,33 arguing that the very principle to be deduced through it

32
Cf. Honneth (1996); R. Jaeggi & R. Celikates, 2017: 14).
33
Viz. EPR: §277.

16
(individual freedom made possible by participation in collective self-determination) was
already, implicitly presupposed in the thought experiment. Such criticism of social contract
theory is one of the most obvious foils for the type of grounded analysis Critical Theory aims
to perform.34 For Rousseau himself, however, The Social Contract was unproblematically
related, through deep thematic and conceptual links, to the Discourses.35 How can Critical
Theory do justice to these links given its strong methodological assumptions that seem to
favour one aspect of Rousseau’s work and reject the other?

c. Political Indeterminacy in Relation to Critique

A relative political indeterminacy can also be identified in many Critical Theory writings in
relation to the critical wing of the project. These indeterminacies appear in relation to at least
two aspects of the critical programme: the analysis of injustice, and the diagnosis of social
crisis.
Many Critical Theorists are resistant to the analysis of injustice, at the normative and
even at the empirical level. Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life, which articulates a sophisticated
account of how critique ought to be engaged in, contains no reference to injustice. Nor does
Habermas’s voluminous treatise of Political Philosophy. A recent compendium of Critical
Theory featuring its most illustrious current proponents barely mentions it.36 This suspicion
towards the notion of injustice might be grounded in the belief that the need for critique to
remain ‘immanent’ to the social world it describes implies refraining from engaging in
substantive theories of justice. Reference to feelings of injustice might be countenanced as a
first, phenomenological approach to particular problems,37 but this does not translate into
independent analyses of the very notions of justice and injustice. The main source of this is
famously to be found in Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as a critique of Kant’s moral theory,38and in a
prevalent interpretation of Marx which argues that he rejected a critique of capitalism in the
name of justice.39
From post-war writings in Critical Theory, it seems that only second-order injustices
are appropriate objects of study for critical philosophers, typically for Habermas, the obstacles
preventing some individuals or groups from participating in discussions on first-order issues.

34
See a recent reprise in Honneth, 2011: 55.
35
Cf. Neuhouser (2014).
36
See Deutscher & Lafont (2017).
37
See for instance Jaeggi (2017) on pathologies of work.
38
See a recent reprise in Honneth, 2014: 2.
39
See Wood (1991); Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 124-126.

17
Fraser’s norm of participatory parity is particularly interesting in this respect. At first glance,
her writings seem to focus on many forms of injustice: gender and racial discrimination as well
as systemic economic inequality. But, the norm of participatory parity in fact also performs a
distancing effect. From its perspective, it is not these injustices per se that are problematic, but
their consequences, namely their preventing subjects from fully participating in social life.
Even though amongst contemporary Critical Theorists, she emphasises most consistently the
different facets of injustice, even for her injustice is not an intrinsic, but only a mediated
concern.
For those theorists explicitly endorsing a Social Philosophy approach, such as Jaeggi,
the analysis of injustice is largely replaced by the analysis of social pathologies. The most
famous displacing of injustice through social theorization and second-level focus is in the final
part of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, in which the critical diagnosis of
contemporary society lists the pathologies and dysfunctions arising from the colonisation of
different spheres of the lifeworld by system logics, and ends with a survey of social movements
resisting these trends. Some of those movements, like the feminist movement, or the
movements for the recognition of equal rights for minorities, would easily deserve an analysis
in terms of injustice, but this is not how they are described, as a result of the social-theory
angle. Instead, their main impetus for the Social Philosopher is “resistance to the colonisation
of lifeworlds”.40
There is one major exception to this abstinence of post-war Critical Theory from
substantive analysis of injustice, namely Honneth’s theory of recognition. His first model,
presented in The Struggle for Recognition, aimed to make of injustice, conceptualised through
the range of denials or misshaped forms of recognition, a central concern of the Critical Theory
programme. The ‘grammar of recognition’ could provide a ‘formal’ model of justice that would
be substantive enough to identify different breaches of it at the first-order level, but formal
enough that it would abide by the methodological desiderata of historicism and contextualism.
Because it was grounded in a theory of modernity and a thick model of subjectivity, it was also
meant to avoid the “impotence of the ought”, to use Habermas’ expression.41 In principle, the
analysis of the norms of recognition at play in real struggles against injustice could claim to
have both feet in social reality. It is not by chance that the most serious recent attempt to

40
TCA II: 394.
41
BFN: 57.

18
develop a critical theory based on the experience of injustice, namely Renault (2017, 2019)
was heavily influenced by Honneth’s model.
The criticisms of Honneth’s first model have come from all quarters in the academic
field, but the ones coming from Critical Theory have typically rehearsed the reasons why other
Critical Theorists avoid defining a substantive concept of justice or indeed refrain from talking
about injustice at a first-order level. For instance, an important part of the criticism raised by
Fraser (2003) concerned precisely the thick, ‘realist’ aspects of Honneth’s model, linking
normative demands to substantive theses of social psychology, that helped to articulate
concrete, first-level meanings of injustice in connection with real experiences of social
suffering. Faced with a barrage of criticism from within his own camp, it is no surprise that in
his second model, Honneth abandoned his initial approach of directly connecting social theory
and normative analysis to the experience of injustice.
These reservations of contemporary Critical Theorists towards the analysis of injustice
has a direct political cost: conceptually, it leads to a lack of acuity in distinguishing precisely
between different kinds of injustice; this lack of precision in turn makes itself felt when
analyzing real situations of injustice and real movements against injustice. 42 This lack of
precision leaves a negative impression when connected to democratic agnosticism, as though
the intrinsically political character of Critical Theory had been left behind, and “the
presentation of societal contradictions [was now] “merely an expression of the concrete social
situation[, and not also] a force within it to stimulate change”.43
We might note also that the reluctance of contemporary Critical Theory to thematise
injustice is surprising in view of its own tradition. Horkheimer explicitly defined the ‘business’
of Critical Theory as “hastening developments which will lead to a society without injustice”.44
Adorno did not have any issue either with calling modern society, the criticism and overcoming
of which Critical Theory is dedicated to, as the “unjust state” (ungerechter Zustand).45
In relation to the analysis of the crises of modern social systems, there are only brief
moments in the history of Critical Theory when the political moment has been a central focus
of study. By this, I mean taking into account the specific role played by political institutions
and political mechanisms, notably those of the State, in the emergence of crises of the overall

42
See for instance the confusing statements about whether injustice matters or not in the critique of
capitalism in Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 125.
43
Horkheimer, 2002b: 215.
44
Ibid., p. 221.
See also the many references to injustice in Abromeit (2011).
45
[Reference]?

19
social system. Today, many critical thinkers outside of the Frankfurt School tradition highlight
the decisive role played by the reform of the State in the establishment of neoliberalism and
the central role of the neoliberal state in the current and looming crises, notably the rise in
inequality and the environmental crisis.46 There were some famous exceptions to this lack of
interest in the state as a central factor of social crisis. The first was in the late 1930s and 1940s
when the concept of state capitalism became a central explanatory element for Horkheimer and
Adorno, and the concept of authoritarian state became the central factor in the explanation of
contemporary structures of domination.47 The second moment was in the 1970s, when
Habermas centred his analyses of the crises of post-war developed economies around the
concept of ‘state-organised’ capitalism. Since then, however, Critical Theory has largely
abandoned reference to the state in its diagnostic descriptions of the crisis tendencies of the
most recent stages of capitalism.
Honneth dedicates a whole section of Freedom’s Right to “misdevelopments” of the
democratic state,48 but his perspective there focuses on forces that prevented the modern states
from fulfilling their democratic function, not the causal role of state institutions in injustices
and social pathologies.49 One might cite also as a recent counter-example the impressive
analysis deployed by Nancy Fraser in her conversation with Rahel Jaeggi (2018). But, as these
two eminent Critical Theorists explain, they contended the need to dedicate a whole book to
capitalism, and notably the political dimensions of capitalistic modes of domination and
exploitation, and the crises attendant to it, precisely because it had largely disappeared from
academic Critical Theory. Even in their rich discussion, the State features only as a background
figures to which no precise features are given. In Fraser’s analysis, it operates mostly in
negative fashion, as a self-limiting power that institutionally and ideologically absented itself
from the realm of social activity that was identified with the economy .50 If we compare these
two important books of recent Critical Theory with, for example, the account of the modern
state that Bourdieu provided in his 2012 lectures at the Collège de France, the contrast in the
level of detail is stark.

d. Political indeterminacy in relation to emancipation

46
Typically, Harvey (2005).
47
Cf. Horkheimer (1973).
48
Honneth, 2014: 334).
49
One might cite also as a recent counter-example, the impressive analysis deployed by Fraser in conversation
with Jaeggi (2018).
50
Cf. Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 37-39.

20
Critical Theory also suffers from a relative level of political indeterminacy in relation to its
discussion of emancipation.
We already noted two traits of Critical Theory in this respect, which seem to be
definitional for the tradition: the first is a commitment to socialism over against other modern
political traditions; the second is the acceptance of Marx’s prohibition on anticipating concrete
features of the future emancipated society. This absence in relation to the conception of
socialism is another version of democratic agnosticism. Emancipated individuals, Critical
Theory seems to imply, would demonstrate the extent of their new-found freedom precisely by
deciding amongst themselves how they would organize social cooperation. Yet again, Honneth
seems to present counter-evidence with his 2016 book on socialism. In it, he offers precisely a
conceptual definition of the tradition’s core ideal, namely the idea of social freedom, as well
as a series of suggestions as to what an implementation of socialism would entail, which would
require notably establishing an open archive of socialist thinking and practice, in particular in
relation to non-capitalistic economic organisation.51 Like the 2018 book of Fraser and Jaeggi
on capitalism, however, this can just as well be taken as an exception that confirms the rule.
Honneth’s book is precisely a response to what is a glaring absence in the recent Critical Theory
tradition. Indeed, it is Honneth himself that provided the most stunning evidence of democratic
agnosticism with the final words of The Struggle for Recognition. Even if his The Idea of
Socialism is an impressive response to the question of what Critical Theory’s favored political
option might entail, when placed within the entire corpus of that tradition, it highlights just as
much the absence of discussions of this kind.

V
Critical Theory and/as Political Philosophy
In this last section, we can make a few, tentative suggestions for how Critical Theory might
develop more substantive accounts of the political, by drawing on its own history, methods and
conceptual resources, and also by drawing on authors from other traditions, including Political
Philosophers.

a. Hegel

51
Cf. Honneth, 2016: 51-75.

21
First, contemporary Critical Theory might seek to respond more squarely to the challenge
posed by Hegel’s social and political theory.52 Very few of the institutional structures,
mechanisms and processes Hegel described in the last part of his Philosophy of Right existed
in that shape at the time. However, crucially, Hegel clearly thought there was no contradiction
between his rejection of the ‘merely moral point of view’ and its corresponding deontic
prescriptions, and his analysis of the kinds of institutions required for the realisation of
‘concrete freedom’. That there was no tension or contradiction for him came from the fact that
he thought a philosophical approach was in a position to extract the underlying ‘rational’
structure of the society of the time, even though the latter might not appear in its full developed
shape anywhere as such. Obviously, it would be preposterous to attempt to mimic Hegel’s
method of deriving the different institutions from different syllogisms, and thus to try to base
some substantive description of modern institutions on a comprehensive logical system that
would articulate the different dimensions of rationality. But this doesn’t mean that the Hegelian
challenge should not be acknowledged in its full scope and at least partially taken up, if the
project of a Critical Theory is to be realised on the political level. This would involve more
than just a critical study of the extent to which political mechanisms and institutions are
involved in contemporary forms of injustice, social pathology and systemic crisis. And it would
involve more than just a study of the “misdevelopments”53 of the democratic constitutional
state. It would also involve an appraisal of the possible ways in which political processes and
institutions might provide social reality to collective demands for justice and collective
attempts at addressing looming crises.
In particular, one area where contemporary Critical Theory might take its lead from
Hegel is the way in which he linked the political to social institutions. One powerful, original
lesson from the Philosophy of Right is that social theory and political theory should be
intimately connected. The relevant level here is that of the thick description of social and
political mechanisms and their interconnections, the kind of descriptions that borrowed the
functionalist language of systems-theory in Habermas, a turn from which that kind of Critical
Theory is still struggling to distance itself. Hegel’s detailed descriptions of the functions and
structures of state institutions in the third part of the Philosophy of Right are rooted in the
description of the social spheres in the previous parts. More specifically, state institutions, he
argues, are directly rooted in the institutions of work, and the political sphere cannot be

52
See along those lines de Boer (2013).
53
Honneth, 2011: 328.

22
articulated in its logic in separation from the organisation of society as a division of labour.
This is not just true for the different functions the state serves so that other social functions can
themselves unfold, typically economic ones. This is even true in terms of collective decision-
making. In other words, one lesson to be drawn from Hegel is the political centrality of work,
which means that political processes and political institutions are centrally impacted by the
institutions and processes of work and therefore, conversely, that care for progressive politics
should be centrally concerned with the organisation of work. This Hegelian lesson requires that
the great rupture with the socialist tradition performed by Habermas, which Honneth vindicates
in his 2016 book on socialism, of severing the links between political emancipation and the
emancipation of work, should be critically re-examined.
Such critical re-examination of the place of work in Critical Theory’s social theory, as
a key plank of its political theory, would be wholly consistent with its defining features as an
original intellectual project. For most Critical Theorists, there are deep conceptual threads
running through and connecting different perspectives of the ‘social’: between the definition
of freedom as ‘social freedom’, the historicist and contextualist method of grounding normative
claims in social theory, and the favouring of socialism as a viable political option. It is for that
reason that Critical Theory and Social Philosophy overlap so significantly. However, there are
many ways, some highly conservative, of emphasising the importance of the social for
individual and collective life. For most Critical Theorists, the emphasis on ‘the social’, more
specifically, entails two elements, which are tightly interconnected: (i) the element of
individual freedom and (ii) the element of reciprocity. This is captured in the normative vision
of the social as ideally a free cooperation amongst free social agents.
There are many ways human beings cooperate, through forms of care, through the
sharing of cultural activities, through collective decision-making, and they obviously all matter.
For Hegel, however, there is one type of cooperation that is functionally foundational, both for
the structures of social life and the development of the individuals, and that is cooperation
through productive activities. It would make sense for contemporary Critical Theory to focus
more intently on the experiences and institutions of work as ground conditions of contemporary
politics, both for critical, diagnostic purposes, say for the analysis of populism, as well as for
programmatic purposes, to establish how democracy might be saved and meet the immense
challenges looming on the horizons.

b. Injustice, Inequality

23
For the reasons stated above, many Critical Theorists are wary of the language of injustice.
There is a temptation in Critical Theory to either replace the language of injustice with the
language of social pathologies, or to deem injustice as the critical focus only at the second-
order level, as an obstacle to democratic or even social participation. The reason for this
reticence is the Hegel-Marx inspired diffidence towards Kantian constructivist definitions of
justice, of the kind typically displayed in mainstream Anglo-American Political Philosophy.
However, not only is such reservation towards injustice unwarranted in view of the project’s
founders, it can in fact lead to serious blind spots in the delivery of the project.
If Critical Theory is to take injustices seriously as a first-order problem, it will need to
engage in some conceptual analysis of justice at some point in the exercise. For all their
suspicion of ahistorical conceptual analysis, Critical Theorists are forced to define in basic
formal terms the key operating concepts that they mobilise in normative or descriptive
analyses. A good example of this methodological difficulty can be witnessed in a recent article
by Jaeggi on pathologies of work (2017). In her writings, Jaeggi is particularly circumspect
when it comes to abiding by the tradition’s defining methodological strictures. However, in
order to be in a position to describe to what extent current pathologies of work are indeed
pathologies of work, she found there was no way around providing some formal definition of
it.54 Critical Theorists should not be worried to engage in this kind of analysis of core normative
notions. This simply repeats a gesture that Hegel and Marx themselves had no compunction in
doing, despite their historicist approaches. For example, Marx, who famously rejected
reference to ahistorical normative concepts, had no issue with defining his fundamental concept
of labour in formal terms in the Grundrisse55and in Capital ).56 As Critical Theory is forced to
define its central normative concepts, and in particular justice, since phenomena of injustice
should be one of its central concerns, it is bound to come across reflections that have been
engaged in about the very same topics in Political Philosophy.
The crux that this represents for Critical Theory appears particularly vividly around the
issue of material or, as the early socialists used to call it, real equality. Contemporary Critical
Theorists sometimes express their views on justice in terms of ‘social equality’, that is, equal
access to the conditions of participation or self-determination.57 But, economic equality tends
to be underplayed in their writings. Even when it is taken seriously, notably by Fraser when

54
Cf. Jaeggi, 2017: 66-73.
55
Marx, 1973: 104.
56
Marx, 1990: 283-90.
57
Typically, Honneth, 2003: 256-65.

24
she focuses on injustices of maldistribution, it is discussedas an obstacle to full participation in
social life. One could argue that this means that even in this case, inequality is not taken as an
injustice per se, but from a second-order perspective, A similar displacement is operated by
Honneth, since he argues that equality matters only as a dimension of autonomy.58 This implies
that inequality is not an injustice in and of itself, but only to the extent that it damages some
aspects of the more fundamental ideal of autonomy. The first generation of Critical Theorists
already had an ambivalent relationship to claims of equality. It was under the direct influence
of Marx’s famous rejections of equality as ideological illusion in Capital59 and as a misguided
concept in the ’Critique of Gotha Program’.60
Adorno gave these ideas an extreme formulation in a derogatory passage of Minima
Moralia,61 in which he sees the extreme levelling happing in the death camps as the ultimate
vindication of the ‘abstract’ demand for equality. In The Theory of Communicative Action, the
demand for material equality was listed as an issue belonging to ‘old politics’, which implied
that it had become obsolete and was superseded by other issues pursued by new social
struggles, tracking actual dysfunctions of the social system. In contemporary Critical Theory,
the concern for distributive equality suffers from the fact that it has been a central concern of
mainstream Political Philosophy in the last three decades. But, there have been many activists,
classical thinkers, and contemporary philosophers, including many who aimed to realise
socialism, that have defended the importance of economic equality. It would be a mistake to
abandon the concern for equality, including equality of distribution, just because that concern
is central in a method that Critical Theory wants to avoid. Given the rise in inequality in recent
decades, there has to be a way for Critical Theory to continue to talk about distributive
inequality, without thereby thinking this would mean renouncing the critique of freestanding
normative analysis.
The work of Forst is emblematic in this regard. Of all the leading Critical Theorists, he
is the one who engages most substantially with mainstream Political Philosophy, whilst
maintaining key methodological features of the tradition, such as the focus on social relations
and the historical nature of justice claims.62 Even Forst, however, despite his closeness to
mainstream Political Philosophy, rejects the focus on distribution. Like other Critical Theorists,
he does not deny the importance of distributive injustices. However, in a typical gesture, he

58
Cf. Honneth, 2014: 15-17.
59
Marx, 1990: 280.
60
61
MM: §6; Hammer, 2006: 160-161.
62
See Forst, 2007: 258-59.

25
pushes it back from being a topic deserving analysis at a first-order level, which would then
require conceptual analysis of further clarification, and instead makes it only one type in the
list of objects concerned by second-order demands for justification.
There is a way in which Critical Theory could interact meaningfully with Anglo-
American Political Philosophy, in a manner resembling the one that Forst has pursued, but
without pushing issues of justice to being merely a problem that is to be addressed at the
second-order level. This approach connects the concern with justice and equality with the
points raised in the previous section in relation to Rousseau and the definition of socialism.
In the last two decades, a powerful new paradigm has emerged in mainstream Political
Philosophy, challenging established liberal and utilitarian approaches, namely the republican
paradigm. Forst (2015) has recently started a dialogue with it. This paradigm, as it is presented
in contemporary scholarship, is divided between a ‘neo-Roman’ wing, with Quentin Skinner
and Philip Pettit as its main figures, and a ‘radical’ US one, represented in particular by
Elizabeth Anderson. An engagement with Anderson’s pragmatist version of republicanism
would benefit Critical Theory for a number of reasons.
Anderson’s version of republicanism overlaps with contemporary models of Critical
Theory in significant ways. Her relational definition of equality is specifically designed as a
critique of the distributivist approach.63 She emphasises the quality of social relations and
social cooperation as the foundational ideal of the just society. Strikingly she uses the same
formulation by Stephen Darwall, as did Honneth,64 to encapsulate this idea of justice, “to stand
up as an equal before others”.65 Her vision of democratic equality is similar to Forst’s definition
of justice as reciprocal and general right of justification: “democratic equality regards two
people as equal when each accepts the obligation to justify their actions by principles
acceptable to the other, and in which they take mutual consultation, reciprocation and
recognition for granted”.66 Her analyses are also anchored in social theory, notably when she
engages in critical studies of work organisations (2015a) or market outcomes (2008). Like
Honneth in his first model, she places much emphasis on social movements and on processes
of public ‘contestation’ for moral progress (2015b).67
Her reference for this is not Hegel and Marx, but classical American pragmatism. But,
many contemporary Critical Theorists also draw heavily on this tradition of thought. Like

63
Cf. Anderson (1999).
64
Cf. Honneth, 1995: 112.
65
E. Anderson, 1999: 313.
66
Ibid.
67
See Anderson (2015b).

26
Honneth in his recent book on socialism, she grounds her account of relational, ‘republican’
equality in the history of political ideas and the history of political movements. The republican
tag is not just a theoretical ‘-ism’ made up to distinguish her position from others in the
contemporary academic field. With it, she wants to retrieve a long tradition of thinking
politically about justice, what she calls the ‘radical’ tradition, with Rousseau as one of its main
founders. This alliance of conceptual analysis and historical reconstruction is the same gesture
as the one performed by the ‘neo-Romans’: a political theory can justify itself not just through
the force of conceptual argument, but also if it can show that it has been a political demand
throughout history, in different kinds of social contexts, both in terms of its defining principles
and as an inspiration for real political practice, including in relation to particular institutions,
notably in relation to democratic processes.
Based on all these thematic and methodological overlaps but also as she consistently
and pointedly pits her republicanism against the socialist tradition, an engagement with
Anderson’s brand of republicanism would be particularly fruitful for contemporary Critical
Theory. It would represent a valuable challenge to take up.
Anderson contrasts her republican approach to a socialist one on a number of issues.
One particularly important issue is economic equality. In her debates with socialists, her main
target is G. A. Cohen, who along other luck egalitarians has explored in intricate details, both
in terms of normative principles and principles of application, how to implement a view of
justice according to which it would ensure a fair, equal distribution of “desirable conditions of
life” .68 As a result of all the overlaps noted above, notably the emphasis on equality in social
relations as the true measure of justice, Critical Theorists appear to be much closer to Anderson
than to Cohen. However, she presents her approach pointedly and self-consciously as a
republican one, and by that she means specifically, not a socialist one. It could be that the term
‘socialism’ means something different in the American and the German and European
academic fields, but that is unlikely. Anderson is unrepentant in her criticism and rejection of
Marxist arguments, whereas most Critical Theorists today, for all the criticisms and attempted
corrections of Marx’s ideas, continue to claim him as a founding figure. The challenge thrown
to Critical Theorists by Anderson is thus to be more precise on what they mean by ‘socialism’.
For as it stands, it could just as well be a version of radical republicanism.
To clarify the difference between Anderson’s brand of republicanism and their vision
of socialism, Critical Theorists need to engage in the same kind of work she has done in tying

68
Cf. Cohen (2008).

27
conceptual work and historical reconstruction, reciprocally linking the definition of
fundamental norms and of the ultimate social ideal, to real historical thinkers and historical
movements. Honneth did this in The Idea of Socialism, but further work would be required to
clarify precisely how the arguments presented in it demarcate his conception of socialism from
a radical republican one. At stake is the legacy of the French Revolution, what distinguishes a
republican from a socialist take on liberty, equality, solidarity, and their interconnections.
A particularly important theme to explore in order to establish this difference is
economic equality. Anderson embraces Rawls’s difference principle as being fully compatible
with republican, democratic equality, since the principle aims precisely to provide the
justification for some economic disparity. Cohen argues against the difference principle
because its purpose contradicts the assumption of equality it is premised upon, and its leads to
outcomes, economic inequality, which, on his understanding of justice, are a negation of it.69
Can Critical Theorists remain agnostic in relation to this these discussions, on the basis of their
incompatible modes of approaching political issues? Or should they take a stand? Everyone
agrees that some level of economic provision is necessary for every individual to be able to
participate fully in social life. The issue at stake is whether some economic inequalities are
justifiable, or justice demands some levelling so that everyone enjoys the same life chances. Is
that really a question Critical Theory should not be interested in answering? Does it not matter
to the evaluation of current social reality and of possible political options? Since he endorses
the Leistungsprinzip as one of the major normative principles arising with modern society,
Honneth would seem to side with Anderson against Cohen. Is it not a problem if, on the issue
of economic inequality, Honneth’s model calls itself socialist in Germany but would be
republican in America?
The issue is complicated by the fact that, in relation to the second fundamental principle
cited by Cohen to define socialism, the principle of community,70 Honneth is for that matter
much closer to him than Anderson. Anderson emphasises reciprocity, but only in relation to
the justification of claims, in the same manner as Forst: the claims I make on others, I should
reciprocally expect others to be able to make on me, and I should be prepared to provide good
reasons if in some respect I claim that the other should receive less than me. In the socialist
understanding, notably as Honneth has sought to conceptually clarify it, reciprocity goes a lot
deeper, it involves taking into account the well-being of others in my own plans. This is very

69
Cf. Cohen (2008).
70
Cf. Cohen (2009).

28
close to Cohen’s own argument. Is it just a difference of opinion that is to be expected if a
leading Political Philosopher and a leading Critical Theorist agree on one major principle of
socialism (reciprocity) and disagree on the other (equality)?
In citing Anderson and Cohen, my aim is not to underplay the major methodological
differences between mainstream Anglo-American Political Philosophy and Critical Theory,
and to argue for some kind of irenic synthesis. Rather, it is that thorny issues for Critical
Theory’s own self-understanding arise when, rather than rejecting mainstream Political
Philosophy out of hand, it is taken seriously, notably on issues on which there is disagreement
where agreement might be expected, and agreement where disagreement might be.

c. Contemporary Crises of Capitalism

Many Critical Theorists have reserved a place in their models for some of the institutional
dimensions of the pathologies, injustices and dysfunction of current social systems: the
systemic forces colonising lifeworlds in Habermas; economic and technological trends and the
ideological basis of modern states leading to misdevelopments in the spheres of social freedom
for Honneth; forces of power and domination for Forst; the dynamics of exploitation and
expropriation at play in capitalism for Jaeggi and Fraser. And yet, as the previous section has
signalled, however rich and enlightening each of these accounts might be, they remain
relatively under-determined when it comes to describing the precise institutional mechanisms
behind crises and social pathologies. This is true even of Habermas, as his system-theoretical
approach to social spheres makes it difficult to see the conflicted, ideologically charged, and
geographically fragmented nature of the institutions that have accompanied Fordist and post-
Fordist capitalism across different regions of the world.
In citing Bourdieu and Harvey earlier, the implicit suggestion has been that Critical
Theory can usefully refer to and indeed perhaps seek to emulate, to the extent that it falls within
its own brief, substantive accounts of the mechanisms of contemporary state institutions. In the
conclusion of this chapter, I would like to suggest one other area where Critical Theory might
usefully expand its current focus. If we consult the critical literature outside the Frankfurt
School tradition, we find accounts that share broadly similar theoretical concerns, even though
the authors’ methods are different, and that are also able to provide more concrete detail on
another crucial aspect of our present predicament. These are studies that are not strictly
speaking in the field of Political Philosophy but contain invaluable lessons for theorising
contemporary politics. They relate institutional aspects of domination and exploitation to
transformations in the attempt of the capitalist system to extract surplus-value as existing

29
sources of profit become blocked or extinguished. I am thinking of studies that don’t just open
the “black box” of political economy as Fraser and Jaeggi enjoin Critical Theory to do once
again,71 but actually examine what is going on inside the box. In other words, they don’t restrict
their focus to the effects of new modes of production on social spheres and on the life
experiences of individuals but seek to describe the workings of new capitalistic processes.
In doing so, these kinds of accounts shed light on contemporary transformations that
current Critical Theory has difficulties in discussing: notably, the rise of platform capitalism.72
In view of accounts such as these, it seems that if contemporary Critical Theory wants to be in
a position to fulfil its project in all of its scope, it needs to rediscover a mode of analysis it has
abandoned since Habermas embraced systems theory to describe the workings of the economy:
namely, a critique of political economy that focuses specifically on the mechanisms of value-
extraction. This kind of analysis seems indispensable not just for descriptive purposes, if one
is to keep track of the pathologies and injustice arising out of the new organisation of
capitalism, but also in terms of the political responses that would be required to offset the
damages it incurs. These political responses do not just involve discussion of institutional
design, notably of the trans-national policies that will have to be implemented if globalised
value-chains and capital flows are somehow to be regulated. They also involve reintroducing
some struggle in economic theory, since the latter is a key factor in the current political
paralysis affecting societies as they fail to formulate collective responses to the looming
environmental disaster.

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