The Concept of a Society of Social Freedom by Axel Honneth

Abstract

The article shows the logic of the theoretical development of Axel Honneth in the direction of comprehending the basic principles of a reasonable society, corresponding to the human dignity of everyone, understanding the key causes of the current state of injustice and the ways of transition from an unjust society to a reasonable one. An unjust society is a society filled with social pathologies and pathologies in the self-consciousness of its members, and the fight against injustice is the path to restoring personal and collective identity. A. Honneth understands the self-identity as a product of sociality, i.e., identity arises through the fact that each recognizes himself in the other (and the other does this in sync with me). Consequently, personal and collective identity can only be maintained jointly if developed relations of mutual recognition of individuals are formed at all three main levels: love (at the level of the individual as a bodily being), law (at the level of abstract individuality) and solidarity (at the level of a specific individual, capable of realizing their subjective abilities in activities). Violations of recognition (at the first level this is violence, at the second — deprivation of a person's social rights, at the third — refusal to recognize personal achievements) generate various forms of social conflicts and trigger the struggle for recognition, which acts as the main driving force behind the development of society. Exploring the phenomenology of recognition, A. Honneth shows that it is based on the ability of the participants in the interactions to mutually commit moral self-restraint. Moreover: recognition is primary and precedes the cognitive identification of the other, but the refusal to recognize the other is equivalent to consciously making some subject invisible, which ultimately gives rise to personality pathologies in all participants in the disturbed interactions. Further, A. Honneth showed that the formation of relations of mutual recognition is a process of gradual development of that reasonable potential, which is hidden in the institutional system of modernity and to which the oppressed appeal, proposing and seeking a more just social order. In another way, A. Honneth calls this process modernization and substantiates that its main principle is the realization of the universal value of freedom in its three main forms: negative, reflexive and social freedom. These forms of freedom must be present at the same time and complement each other in the three main spheres of society: family, civil society and the state. In the course of modernization, socialism gradually emerges as a society of developed social freedom, when each person feels support in his life, in the process of goal-setting and goal-setting of a reasonable institutional environment. At the same time, each subject, even when setting goals, considers others not just as allies, but as partners, the implementation of whose goals he should contribute, since the success of achieving my goals depends on the success of their achievement of their goals. Thus, A. Honneth shows that the natural result of modernization is the emergence of socialism as a society of developed social freedom.

Acknowledgments
The reported study was funded by RFBR and FRLC, project number 20-511-23002 “Migration of Ideas and Formation of National Philosophical Traditions: Dialogues Over Borders”