Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory

critical horizons, vol. 14, issue 1, 2013, 93-119

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 doi 10.1179/15685160X13A.0000000005

Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical TheoryRocio zambranaPhilosophy Department, University of [email protected]

Abstract: Critical theory must add to its agenda “disrupt[ing] the easy passage from critique [to] its neoliberal double”, Nancy Fraser recently argued. Emancipatory movements have not only been transformed by neoliberalism. They have, “unwittingly”, provided powerful “ingre-dients” for the transition to neoliberalism. This essay examines Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser’s assessment of and normative proposal for addressing the paradoxes of neoliberalism. The constraints of neoliberal-ism, I argue, bring into focus the structural challenge of immanent cri-tique as understood within second and third generation Critical Theory. Normative ambivalence within neoliberalism, I maintain, calls for a shift in the way that critical and justificatory practices are understood within the Frankfurt School.

Keywords: critique; Frankfurt School; Fraser; Honneth; neoliberalism.

When in his 1937 “Traditional and Critical Theory” Max Horkheimer articulated the epistemological and methodological strictures of a critical theory of society, he added a metatheoretical task to the straightforwardly political Marxist understanding of critique. Critical theory aims to clarify the struggles of the present with the aim of contributing to dismantling sys-tematic forms of domination.1 Critical theory, however, must also pursue self-clarification. Theory is critical, Horkheimer famously argued, only if it is “self-aware”. Theory must clarify its entanglement with the “world of capital”.2 Critical theory must accordingly seek to thematize the reciprocal

1. For this particular gloss on critique, see Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender”, in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

2. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Stan-ley Aronowitz (Intro.), Matthew J. O’Connell (trans.) (New York: Continuum, 1995), 206.

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determination of subject and object, critic and society, in an ever shift-ing and resignifying capitalist context. Critique thus requires reflection not only on knowledge production but also on the philosophical assumptions underlying critical-theoretical practices.3

Axel Honneth’s longstanding commitment to specifying the intellec-tual legacy of the Frankfurt School can be read as an attempt to meet this metatheoretical task of critique.4 Honneth maintains that the main meth-odological concern of the Frankfurt School has been “describing and justi-fying a standpoint from which society and its institutional practices can be meaningfully theoretically criticized”.5 Throughout its three generations, he argues, the Frankfurt School has addressed this concern squarely within the left-Hegelian legacy of immanent critique.6 The left-Hegelian legacy is based on Hegel’s critique of Kant, which unmasked the false universality, impotence, and potentially ideological features of procedures for justifying norms that neither thematize nor address the challenges posed by situated rationality. Immanent critique, in contrast, makes explicit the normative infrastructure of a given society, and delivers these norms for a diagno-sis and transformation of the present.7 The legacy of the Frankfurt School thus challenges assumptions pervasive within a straightforwardly liberal

3. For Horkheimer, the ideal of value neutrality distinctive of traditional theory is not only institutionally bankrupt, but also philosophically suspect, given its positivist reduction of nature and society to mathematical, logical, and conceptual determination and to the Baco-nian ideal of manipulation. See Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, 194, 198, 232.

4. My discussion in what follows will be mainly focused on Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Rec-ognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-philosophical Exchange, Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (trans.)(London: Verso, 2003); Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (London: Polity Press, 2007); and Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory James Ingram (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

5. Honneth, “Reconstructive Critique With a Genealogical Proviso”, in Axel Honneth, Pathol-ogies of Reason, 44.

6. For Honneth’s reconstruction of the three generations of the Frankfurt School, see especially “Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today”, reprinted in Honneth, Disrespect.

7. Habermas famously accused Adorno and Horkheimer and the first generation thinkers of pursuing a merely negative critique that culminated in depoliticizing pessimism. For this reason, he pursued a reconstructive strategy aimed at addressing the problem of norma-tive foundations for critique. Although the distinction between negative and positive cri-tique is crucial, it is clear that thinkers of all three generations are committed to the norm of non-domination. See esp. Jürgen Habermas, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional-ist Reason, vol. 2 of Theory of Communicative Action, Thomas McCarthy (trans.) (London: Beacon Press, 1987).

ParadoxeS of neoliberaliSm and The TaSkS of criTical Theory 95

understanding of the normativity of critique while (especially with and after Habermas) maintaining a commitment to normative critique.8

Although Honneth’s reconstruction of the legacy of the Frankfurt School seeks to address philosophical assumptions implicit in normative critique, he forgoes reflection on the reciprocal determination of critique and the world of capital crucial to Horkheimer’s original idea. Honneth relegates reflection on the strictures of the contemporary Gestalt of capitalism to sociological writings that leave untouched his understanding of critique. Honneth’s oversight is symptomatic of the reduction of a critique of politi-cal economy and the accompanying cultural critique distinctive of the first generation to normative critique, a reduction accomplished by Habermas’ theory of communicative action and its accompanying discourse ethics. Horkheimer’s original idea, however, stressed the need to rethink not only critical-intellectual practices, but also the very idea of critique in light of the reciprocal determination of theory and the world of capital. The pro-gramme of the Frankfurt School articulated in the 1930s accordingly called for rethinking critique itself, given the strictures of distinct Gestalten of capitalism. Inheriting the legacy of the Frankfurt School today would thus require rethinking critique on the basis of the strictures of neoliberalism.

This task is particularly pressing in view of what Nancy Fraser has recently called the “crisis of critique”. Honneth’s sociological essays on paradoxes of neoliberal modernization and Fraser’s current work on paradoxes of eman-cipation in neoliberal capitalism articulate the ways in which neoliberalism resignifies norms of social justice in an “uncanny” way. The resignification is “uncanny”, since purportedly unambiguously emancipatory norms are not only co-opted by, but deeply implicated in neoliberal ideology. For Honneth, the problem lies in the neoliberal distortion of the ideal of indi-vidual freedom. This central normative achievement of modernity has been transformed in ways that compromise the very possibility of autonomy, turning an unprecedented opportunity for self-creation into new forms of domination. Fraser, in contrast, analyzes the inadvertent and “disturbing” implication of emancipatory movements in the development and expan-sion of the neoliberal agenda. In the US and the UK, for example, the second-wave feminist critique of the stigmatization of poor relief was used to attempt to dismantle welfare tout court, in many cases compromising economic and status equality for women.9

8. Rawls’ original position and the veil of ignorance and Habermas’ decontextualized discourse ethics are exemplary of liberal assumptions called into question by the left-Hegelian legacy. See, e.g., Honneth, “Reconstructive Critique”.

9. Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, New Left Review 56 (2009). I will examine the details of her treatment of second-wave feminism below.

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Honneth and Fraser offer valuable accounts of the crisis of critique. However, they do not fully draw the implications of their own analyses of the paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism. Holding on to roughly Haberma-sian assumptions about normative foundations for critique, they suggest responding to this crisis by appealing to norms in principle insulated from the effects of neoliberal resignification. For Honneth, critique requires recovering the original emancipatory meaning of recognition principles like individual freedom. This recovery makes possible distinguishing the context of application that may distort the ideal from the ideal itself. For Fraser, cri-tique requires awareness of the marketized terrain that makes the principle of participatory parity liable to ideological use. I will argue, in contrast, that neoliberal resignification presses us to rethink critique in light of its norma-tive ambivalence. This, however, requires thinking beyond the normative paradigm of the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School.

The article is comprised of three sections. The first and second sections systematize Honneth and Fraser’s methodological commitments, and criti-cally assess these commitments in view of their work on the crises of neo-liberal capitalism. In section one, I assess Honneth’s recognition-based rewriting of immanent critique in light of his work (with Martin Hart-mann) on paradoxes of capitalist modernization. In the second section, I assess Fraser’s notion of participatory parity in light of her work on crises of emancipation. Fraser’s recent work on Karl Polanyi, I suggest, represents a promising route to rethinking critique. Nonetheless, she retains assump-tions about the normativity of critique that compromises the radicality of her proposal. Hence, in the third and final section I offer a friendly amend-ment to her understanding of critique as a matter of mediation between marketization, social protection, and emancipation. I argue that the metac-ritical emphasis on normative foundations distinctive of the second and third generations should give way to a metatheoretical assessment of the strictures that the normative ambivalence distinctive of neoliberal capital-ism imposes on critical and metacritical practices.

Paradoxical Contradiction and Recognition

We are faced with the “perplexing” predicament, Honneth argues, that in the context of neoliberalism the emancipatory meaning of individualism, equality, achievement, and intimacy revert to their opposite.10 In an era

10. Following Talcott Parsons, Honneth writes: “[I]ndividualism as the leading personal idea; an egalitarian conception of justice as a legal form of government; the idea of achievement as


of deregulation and privatization, trickle-down economics and personal responsibility, international financial flows and the power of global firms, these normative achievements have become legitimizing principles for capi-talist expansion.11 Especially individual freedom, the leading personal ideal of Western modernity, has served all-too-well to dismantle the material and social conditions for autonomy advanced within social-democratic states during the post-war years.12 Institutionalized individualism was transformed into “experimental self-realization” and, particularly, self-responsibility.13 The unprecedented flexibility of lifestyle choices proved salient for the transformation of labor in ways that undermine autonomy,

the basis for assigning status . . . and the romantic idea of love . . . [that] allowed members of society increasingly subject to economic pressures to preserve the vision of an emotional transcendence of day-to-day instrumentalism are the normative achievements of capitalists societies”. See Axel Honneth and Martin Hartmann, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, Constella-tions 13 no.1 (2006): 42.

11. This is Fraser’s gloss on neoliberalism. See her “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 107. In addition to Axel Honneth, “Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Self-Realization”, European Journal of Social Theory 7 no. 4 (2004) and “Of Markets and Morals: Alternative Analyses of Capitalism”, Divinatio 33 (2011), see and compare Albena Azmanova, “Capitalism Reorganized: Social Justice After Neo-Liberalism”, Constellations 17 no. 3 (2010) and Martin Hartmann, “Widersprüche, Ambivalenzen, Paradoxien: Begriffli-che Wandlungen in der neueren Gesellschaftstheorie”, in Axel Honneth (ed.), Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit: Paradoxien des gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002). Important elaborations of neoliberalism that also inform what follows include: Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gregory Elliot (trans.) (London: Verso, 2006); zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2000); and Ulrich Beck’s work, e.g., Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (Sage Publications, 1992), and “The Rein-vention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization”, in Reflexive Moderniza-tion: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens & Scott Lash (eds) (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Francesca Cadel and Guiseppina Mecchia (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

12. Honneth writes that he is interested in “the peculiar fact that today much normative pro-gress of the last decades has been turned into its opposite, a culture that decreases solidarity and independence, and, under the pressure of a neoliberal de-domestification of capitalism, has become a mechanism of social integration”, see Honneth and Hartmann, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 41. Cf. Azmanova, “Reorganized Capitalism”.

13. Work is transformed into a new set of “unreasonable demands” associated with flexibility and mobility, which include shifting location and its accompanying disruption of familial bonds; expectation of a “flat personality” malleable to fluctuating professional contexts; and the dis-solution of legal status guarantees (see Honneth and Hartmann, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 49–50). However, the most significant change is the emphasis on the “self-responsibility of abilities and emotional resources to bear in the service of individualized projects” (Honneth and Hartmann, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 45). All in all, individuals are forced to become “entreployees” (45). See also Honneth, “Organized Self-Realization”, 469.

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Honneth maintains. The resignification of the principle of achievement in view of marketized individual freedom, for example, promoted the dissolu-tion of legal status guarantees, biographical indeterminacy, and generalized psychological effects such as anxiety and depression. The mass phenom-enon of depression can be in part traced back to psychic fatigue caused by the demands of a marketized notion of individual freedom and its ideas of self-realization and authenticity.14 What is more, Honneth concludes, this undermining of autonomy dismantles solidarity, compromising conditions for civic and political participation.

This reversibility of individual freedom into social and psychological domination raises questions about the salience of the metacritical task that structures Honneth’s recognition-theoretic reworking of immanent critique. A critical theory of society pursues metacritique when it seeks to establish the source of the normativity of critique in order to establish the authority of concrete practices of contestation, justification, and vali-dation. The key to inheriting the left-Hegelian notion of immanent cri-tique, according to Honneth, is pursuing a metacritical reconstruction of the moral expectations implicit in institutions. Moral expectations are the metacritical clue, albeit in two ways in Honneth’s work. First, indi-vidual and social suffering express a moral failure, since they make explicit implicit normative expectations that have gone unmet. Generalized anxiety and depression related to demands of radicalized personal responsibility make explicit that individual freedom relies on material, intersubjective, and hence social conditions. Second, implicit in stable institutions like the modern nuclear family, market economy, and an egalitarian form of government are modes of relation-to-self and relation-to-others that make possible the authority of these institutions. Individual freedom, minimally understood as the possibility of entry and exit from contractual relations on the basis of personal choice, represents the normative expectation that makes possible the pervasiveness of market economy in the first place.15

Notice the tension in Honneth’s account of the source of the normativ-ity of critique. On the one hand, bodily and moral vulnerability tied to an account of subject development is understood as the source of norma-tivity. Honneth pursues this route most prominently in The Struggle for Recognition. On the other hand, the progressive development of normative commitments throughout history is also understood as the source of the

14. See Honneth, “Organized Self-Realization”, 467. 15. In “On Markets and Morals”, with Parsons, Durkheim, and Hegel, Honneth argues that

capitalism must be understood as a normative order and that norm-free capitalism is but a reified notion of individual freedom.


normativity. Honneth pursues this route in his exchange with Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? And in other writings. The tension is clear-est if one compares some of Honneth’s essays on the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School. In “Social Dynamics of Disrespect”, for example, Honneth argues that the “key to updating critical social theory [is] the task of categorially disclosing social reality in such a manner than an element of intramundane transcendence will again become visible”.16 The left-Hegelian legacy is on this view a commitment to the thought that while injustices are structural to society, immanent to the very society in ques-tion are sources that point beyond it.17 Metacritique accordingly involves locating “pretheoretical instances” (vorwissenschaftliche Instanzen) that in containing normative potential represent reference points for critique. The task, however, is not merely one of reconstruction. It is also one of justification. Critical theory seeks to establish that these instances are not “the result of contingent conflict situations, but rather express the unmet demands of humanity at large”.18

Understanding immanent critique as a matter of justification follows the Habermasian metacritical strategy of clarifying the normative founda-tions of critique. Habermas famously argued that communicative action is the source of the normativity of critique. The pragmatics of speech allows Habermas to argue that communicative action is presupposed in all inter-action, including strategic action.19 Communicative action is normatively

16. Honneth, “Social Dynamics of Disrespect”, 66. 17. The left-Hegelian legacy follows a dialectic of immanence and transcendence, see Fraser and

Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 238–47. See J. M. Bernstein’s discussion of the left-Hegelian legacy in “Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 no.3 (2005); Jean-Philip Deranty’s discussion of the charge of circularity in “Reflective Critical Theory: A Systematic Reconstruction of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy”, in Danielle Petherbridge (ed.), The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and Fraser’s charge that, instead of circularity, Honneth falls prey to the Myth of the Given in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 204 (for Honneth’s response see 245). For systematic albeit diverging reconstructions of the problem of immanent critique, see Maeve Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). For an understanding of immanent critique as a matter of the utopian impulse of critical theory, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Intro-duction (London: Routledge, 1998); Albrecht Wellmer, “The Critique of Critical Theory: Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Praxis International 2 (1983).

18. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 244. 19. See Habermas, Lifeworld and System; and “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philo-

sophical Justification”, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Christian Lenhardt and Shierry W. Nicholsen (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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salient, however, given that it understanding is the telos of speech. Because communicative action must be free from domination if understanding is to be reached, it functions as the norm for assessing practices of validation and justification.20 For Honneth, however, Habermas reduces normativity to idealized linguistic conditions, thereby missing that subjects “do not expe-rience moral harm as a restriction of intuitively mastered rules of language but as a violation of identity claims acquired in socialization”.21 A justifica-tion of the normativity of critique, for Honneth, must therefore proceed through a reconstruction of unmet expectations. Honneth thus pursues a moral-psychological justification of recognition.

In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth argues that a phenomenology of moral injury establishes the normative potential of mutual recognition, since it specifies constitutive psychological and material dependence as the normative core of recognition. He specifies three forms of disrespect, which compromise the positive relation-to-self necessary for individual free-dom.22 Crimes such as rape and torture violate physical integrity; system-atic denial of civil rights violates social integrity; a denigration of life-style violates dignity.23 These forms of disrespect compromise self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem.24 On this basis, Honneth offers a modern egali-tarian reworking of Hegelian Sittlichkeit, which he glosses as the “entirety of the intersubjective conditions that can be shown to serve as the neces-sary preconditions for individual self-realization”.25 Modern ethical life is comprised of three spheres of action within which subjects develop the three relations-to-self: intimate relations of care promote self-confidence; legal recognition promotes respect; and social appreciation promotes self-esteem. Intimacy, equality, and achievement have normative significance, given that they represent “stable expectations that we can understand as the subjective expression of the imperative of social integration”.26 They are also politically salient, since the expansion of recognition spheres is

20. Honneth, “Social Dynamics of Disrespect”, 69. 21. Honneth, “Social Dynamics of Disrespect”, 70. 22. “Disrespect”, Honneth writes, “refers to the specific vulnerability of humans resulting from

the internal interdependence of individualization and recognition” (Struggle for Recogni-tion, 131). Honneth not only addresses cognitive articulations of disrespect; the affective responses to these forms of injury, such as feelings of shame, are also crucial for his analysis. See Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, chap. 6.

23. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 138. 24. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 169; see also chap. 5, esp. 129. See also Honneth, Suffer-

ing from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Jack Ben–Levi (trans.) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000), 33.

25. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 173. 26. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 174.


progressive when these institutions become more inclusive in light of the recognition-expectations.27

In “Reconstructive Critique with a Genealogical Proviso”, in contrast, Honneth reworks immanent critique according to the historical develop-ment of normative commitments. Reconstructive critique makes explicit the norms implicit in institutions, practices, and moral expectations that structure a society at a specific time.28 The metacritical task here is estab-lishing that the normative validity of historically specific commitments exceed their context, thus serving as criteria for the diagnosis and transfor-mation of the present. This second route for inheriting the left-Hegelian legacy grows out of criticism of formulations in The Struggle for Recognition, which led commentators to argue that Honneth linked the recognition principles too tightly to specific institutions – the modern nuclear family, capitalist market, and the liberal state.29 In order to avoid this misunder-standing, Honneth underscored that the recognition principles are “social forms of moral knowledge”.30 Although recognition is “tightly fused to the

27. My intention here is not to assess whether the sociological aspect of Honneth’s account is accurate. This is a question that should be pursued empirically, not philosophically. Further, I do not here intend to assess whether Honneth’s account contains assumptions that should be questioned. Important work by Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young suggests that it does. Young has argued that Honneth’s recourse to the bourgeois institution of marriage to articu-late relations of intimacy is problematic because he does not account for the ethnocentrism, nor the sexism, nor the dynamics of exploitation that they have sustained. See her “Recogni-tion of Love’s Labor: Considering Axel Honneth’s Feminism”, in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Bert van den Brink & David Owen (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also her Justice and the Politics of Dif-ference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) for her critique of the principle of merit. Similarly, Fraser argues that the principle of care or intimacy does not have normative authority over marriage, since legal rights and duties tied to economic interests also regulate it. See chap. 3 of Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? esp. 219.

28. In his debate with Fraser, Honneth argues that “social reality must be described in a way that shows how norms and principles considered justified could already have become socially valid”, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 257. The notion of moral grammar of social conflicts developed in Struggle for Recognition is crucial here as well. Hon-neth interprets social struggle from the perspective of moral experiences. Social struggles are motivated by the violation of expectations regarding recognition, whether the form of injus-tice is material or symbolic, of distributive nature or concerning political and social rights (Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 163).

29. For an instructive discussion of these criticisms, see Lois McNay, Against Recognition (Cam-bridge: Polity Press, 2008), chap. 4. See also Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Rec-ognition? chap. 3; Jeffrey Alexander and María Pía Lara, “Honneth’s New Critical Theory of Recognition”, New Left Review 20 (1996); and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

30. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 42. Fraser calls into question this proposed solu-tion, arguing that the notion of ethical life betrays the lack of genuine historical thinking

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structure of human interests”, he argues, it represents a normative commit-ment rather than an anthropological constant.31 Recognition-principles are accordingly historical achievements that express the moral infrastruc-ture of modern societies. In the course of social-historical development, others could gain normative salience.32 The ideal of individual freedom, for example, is a normative commitment made possible by market rela-tions, since it is based on contractual relations that agents can enter and exit by choice.33

Honneth adds a genealogical proviso to reconstructive critique crucial to understanding his analysis of paradoxes of neoliberal modernization. He argues that the proviso should be added in light of the lesson of National Socialism formative for Adorno and Horkheimer and first generation of the Frankfurt School. Under the social validity of an ideal, a social practice could also develop “as far from its original moral meaning as imaginable”.34 Now, in response to this predicament, Adorno and Horkheimer pursued a negative critique of the dialectic of enlightenment, making the ambivalence of enlightenment rationality the centerpiece of their notion of critique. In contrast, Honneth argues that the reversibility of norms means that a moral norm “does not as such prescribe out of itself how it should be applied. Rather, its meaning can be transformed as a result of imperceptible shifts of meaning so that, in the end, it loses the normative kernel that origi-nally justified its development”. Critique must also study the real context of application of moral norms in order to test whether the original meaning of the norm is retained.35

The way Honneth understands “original” here should make us pause. He does not mean “original” in quite the same sense that Nietzsche did when in the Genealogy he pointed to the “blood and cruelty at the bottom of all ‘good things’”.36 Honneth means the socio-historical achievement that

in Honneth’s work. She is correct to point out that historical development could “never generate new moral categories that are not variants of recognition” (Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 207). For Fraser, this reduces all social phenomena to moral psychology.

31. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 244; see also 257. 32. See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 138; see also Honneth, “Paradoxes of

Capitalism”, 42. In Redistribution or Recognition?, Honneth speaks of community and soli-darity as a potential fourth recognition principle; in “Paradoxes of Capitalism” he speaks of individualism as a recognition principle.

33. Honneth, “Of Markets and Morals”, 44. 34. Honneth, “Reconstructive Critique”, 52. 35. Honneth, “Reconstructive Critique”, 53. 36. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo Walter

Kaufmann (trans.) (Vintage Books, 1989), 4.


norms represent.37 A social practice is considered a ‘rational’ achievement if it represents a form of moral learning. Rationality can be said to take on a more highly developed form, and history can be said to be a progressive realization of reason, when practices and institutions are structured by nor-mative expectations that sustain ever-greater forms of freedom. The genea-logical proviso accordingly raises awareness of distortions or “pathologies” of socially embodied reason. For Honneth, however, the norm itself is not distorted but rather misapplied. The implication is that the normative core of rational norms remains unscathed even when its social embodiment, its context of application, distorts rather than realizes the commitment. The appropriate response to this predicament is thus recovering the “original” meaning of the norm.

In his analysis of the paradoxes of modernization within neoliberal capitalism, Honneth employs reconstructive critique with its genealogical proviso. Specifically in “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, Honneth develops the notion of paradoxical contradiction as an “instrument of general explana-tion” for analyzing the reversals of individual freedom. Neoliberalism is paradoxical, not just contradictory, because rather than furthering indi-vidualism – its core normative commitment – it dismantles the very con-ditions of possibility of individual freedom. Neoliberal resignification of norms is distinguished by the fact that positive and negative moments are mixed, “that in complex ways improvements of a situation go along with deteriorations”.38 Neoliberalism is thus an “‘ethicized’ capitalism”.39 It does not simply “undo” the normative achievements of the social-democratic era.40 It “transforms” the meaning and effect of these achievements.41 Indi-vidual freedom is effective in justifying policies that dismantle forms of public assistance (health care and education), compromising material and social conditions for autonomy. At the same time, it is salient for detra-ditionalization in ways that make possible alternative ways of conceiving gender, family, and so on.42

37. This understanding of “original” signals Honneth’s commitment to an updated version of the Hegelian thesis of the progressive development of reason in history and the vindication of enlightenment modernity associated with this thesis.

38. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 47. 39. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 48. 40. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism” 41. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 47. 42. Lois McNay points out that women’s increased autonomy has partly been the result of an

intrusion of economic forces into the cultural sphere. He has accordingly argued that Hon-neth’s critique of the paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism is a conservative defense of tradi-tional institutions, given his overstated claims about the perilous effects of economic forces on intimate relations. See McNay, Against Recognition, 146.

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Paradoxes of individual freedom, however, can be described only in reference to normative vocabulary that encodes “original emancipatory content”.43 Indeed, it is in reference to recognition that these paradoxes are even “decipherable”. To specify the relationship between paradoxical con-tradiction and recognition, it is necessary to recall the analytic distinction that is implicitly drawn in The Struggle for Recognition between the nor-mative vocabulary of specific social struggles (the recognition-principle to which they appeal) and the moral demand (the claim for reciprocal recog-nition) that justifies their normative validity. Honneth’s notion of “surplus validity” (Geltungsüberhang) is key here. What the recognition principles denote always exceeds their facticity in social reality. They contain norma-tive potential because “the idea that underlies them always contains more legitimizable claims and obligations than are realized in the facticity of social reality”.44 As principles, care, equality, achievement, and individu-alism encode the normative expectation of reciprocity, which establishes their surplus validity.

In Redistribution or Recognition? Honneth glosses the notion of sur-plus validity in a way that stresses the historical development of norms. Surplus validity captures the “semantic extensions” of critical concepts “according to the criteria of the respective spheres”.45 Under the pres-sure of social struggles, norms acquire new “hard to reject” contents.46 However, these “hard to reject” contents cannot be specified without the normative core of recognition.47 Recognition principles can serve as

43. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 47. Also: “In order to be able to confirm such paradoxi-cal effects … we must draw on normative vocabulary by means of which these effects can be referred to ‘original’ intentions. In the context of our reflections, this function is fulfilled by the four normative spheres … which must of course be interpreted as the open-ended results of social struggles within whose framework subjects seek the recognition or appreciation of their personal characteristics, rights, achievements, and emotional needs” (Honneth, “Para-doxes of Capitalism”, 47).

44. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”, 42. 45. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 263. 46. The recognition-principles “possess a semantic surplus, which is gradually revealed by inno-

vative interpretations without ever being completely or clearly determinable”, Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 263.

47. Indeed, Honneth argues that ‘[a]ll struggles for recognition … progress through a playing out of the moral dialectic of the universal and the particular: one can always appeal for a particular relative difference by applying a general principle of mutual recognition, which normatively compels an expansion of the existing relations of recognition’, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 152. In this way, recognition principles retain criti-cal force (‘avoid being oriented to the status quo’, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 258.


“indicators of moral progress” because their revisions can be assessed in light of the expectation of reciprocity. On both versions, then, Honneth’s reworking of immanent critique leans on the theory of recognition laid out in The Struggle for Recognition. This understanding of immanent cri-tique, however, involves a notion of normativity whereby norms have critical potential if they remain insulated from capitalist resignification. The ambivalences of individual freedom in neoliberal capitalism are mere ideological uses of norms, rather than a resignification of the norm itself. Individual freedom is compromised by a context of application, which distorts the original emancipatory meaning of the norm. Recovery and further specification of the norm in a way responsive to material and social dependence of individual freedom is the critical response to the paradoxes of individualism.

The suggestion that the critical power of recognition is based on an originary normative kernel insulated from capitalist resignification is pre-cisely the suggestion that I seek to problematize. I am not arguing that recognition is not a salient category for critique. Instead, I am calling into question the assumptions tied to the metacritical task of justification for critique. Metacritique assumes that norms insulated from capitalist resig-nification are necessary for critique. Honneth’s own analysis of paradoxes of neoliberal modernization, however, establishes that normative integrity cannot be maintained in this context, and that the assumption of norma-tive integrity is precisely what makes norms liable to ideological use. Neo-liberal resignification destabilizes the normative valence of recognition internally, not merely externally. Rather than establishing the normativity of recognition a priori, critical practices have the task of establishing the authority of recognition on a case-by-case basis, given the normative unde-cidability generated by neoliberal resignification. However, this requires abandoning the central assumption of metacritique, namely, that critique requires moral-philosophical justification. In the context of an ethicized capitalism, critical practices require political articulation.

Fraser’s recent work heads in this direction. Her recent Polanyian pro-posal to understand struggles for emancipation as mediated by and medi-ating marketization and social protection represents a great advance. It provides the basis for rethinking critique in a way that shifts the task of justification to the political ground. However, holding on to the metacriti-cal commitment of justification for critique, she maintains that political practices are properly emancipatory when they appeal to the principle of participatory parity, which resists neoliberal resignification by encoding an overarching egalitarian interest.

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Paradoxes of Emancipation and Parity of Participation

In a recent set of lectures, Fraser argues that today we are in the midst of fighting an epic battle for the soul of emancipation.48 The current pre-dicament is a curious one. Emancipatory movements like feminism, anti-imperialism, and multiculturalism have been radically transformed by neoliberalism. While these movements successfully identified the gendered subtext of the welfare state, unmasked the false universality of majority reli-gious or ethnic self-understandings, and called attention to the gerryman-dering of political spaces whereby colonial people are excluded or made invisible, they find themselves in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. “Unwittingly”, these movements have provided some of the most power-ful “ingredients” for the transition to neoliberalism. Critical theory must therefore add to its agenda “disrupt[ing] the easy passage from critique [to] its neoliberal double”.49

In her 2003 debate with Honneth, Fraser explains that the moral-philosophical aspect of a critical theory develops a conception of justice, the social-theoretical aspect develops an understanding of capitalism, and the political aspect devises a practical orientation with the aim of eman-cipation.50 Specifically for Fraser, the moral-philosophical aspect clarifies that the single commitment presupposed by social movements and political actors is “participating on par with one another in social life”.51 Accordingly, Fraser develops the principle of parity of participation as the central norm of her conception of justice. The social-theoretical aspect clarifies the relation between class structure and the status order. Fraser has worked out the rela-tion between class and status, for example, via Habermas’ system-lifeworld distinction, and recently, Polanyi’s marketization-social protection distinc-tion. Finally, for Fraser, the political aspect of critique clarifies institutional arrangements that respond to objective and intersubjective conditions for participatory parity – namely, material resources and equal respect.52 It also

48. Nancy Fraser, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis” and “Predatory Protections and Dangerous Liaisons”, Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School, available at: http://www.law.yale.edu/news/10133.htm) and Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, available at: http://www.normativeorders.net/en/events/documentation/415-frankfurt-lecture-ii-nancy-fraser.

49. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 115. 50. Quoted in Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 113. 51. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 29. See also Fraser, “Abnormal Justice”,

Critical Inquiry 34 no.3 (2008). 52. Fraser argues that there are two conditions for participatory parity. First, an objective con-

dition: distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participant’s independ-ence and voice; second, an intersubjective condition: institutional patterns of cultural value


examines the strictures of democratic deliberation as a question of spaces of contestation and practices of justification.53

The moral-philosophical, social-theoretical, and political aspects of cri-tique, I want to suggest, are normative in two respects. First, they are norma-tive in a non-moral sense, since they are distinctions involved in understanding and assessing capitalist societies. In her engagement with Habermas and Polanyi, Fraser suggests understanding the relation between class and status as unstable. The economic logic of the markets interacts in complex ways with cultural logics “sometimes instrumentalizing existing status distinc-tions, sometimes dissolving or circumventing them, and sometimes creating new ones”.54 Fraser also suggests that this relation is multidirectional. Class differentiations are often times inflected by status differentiations, and vice versa. Instability and multidirectionality suggest that in many if not all cases social distinctions are multidimensional, rooted in both the economic struc-ture and the status order of society.

Second, the moral-philosophical, social-theoretical, and political aspects of critique are normative in a moral-political sense. These distinctions make possible assessment in view of emancipation.55 Emancipation, for Fraser, entails dismantling institutional conditions that systematically block agents from participating in social life as peers. Struggles against maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation implicitly or explicitly aim toward participatory parity.56 The emancipatory intent of these grammars of social contestation is not only at work in contestation and deliberation, but also in the diagnosis of the present. Maldistribution, misrecognition, and mis-representation are “discursive formations” that “mediate moral disagree-ment and social contestation”, but they also allow the critical theorist to “connect critique with its social context”, since they are “moral grammar[s]

express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 36.

53. Social movements that have both diagnosed forms of domination and worked towards dis-mantling domination on the basis of parity of participation are thus considered properly emancipatory movements , see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recogniton?, 70.

54. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 214. 55. The task of a critical theory, Fraser argues, is accordingly to evaluate the claims launched by

social movements and the fate of their struggles from a social-theoretic and moral-political perspective, Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 208. Not all social move-ments are emancipatory, however, and not all claims for injustice reveal a need for redressing institutional conditions. At the level of praxis, Fraser suggests cross redressing where meas-ures associated with one dimension of justice are employed to remedy the other; see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 83.

56. They are today’s “hegemonic grammars of contestation and deliberation”, Fraser and Hon-neth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 207.

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that social actors can (and do) draw on in any sphere to evaluate social arrangements”.57 Social movements thus make explicit that certain social arrangements impede parity of participation. In so doing, they can sustain or debunk the moral-political value of social-theoretical distinctions.58

The non-moral sense of critique, I mentioned above, is inherently unsta-ble. In so being, distinctions like system and lifeworld or marketization and social protection are normatively ambivalent. The class structure and status order sustain forms of freedom and unfreedom coextensively. In contrast, the moral-political sense of critique, if elaborated in terms of parity of par-ticipation, retains its stability within a neoliberal context. The battle for the soul of emancipation can be won, Fraser accordingly maintains, if we are self-aware of the “terrain” on which claims for parity of participation are currently raised. The claim that the non-moral sense of critique is ambiv-alent while the moral-political sense of critique retains its emancipatory salience, in my view, assumes that the norm of participatory parity is insu-lated from the ambivalences of neoliberal capitalism. This assumption runs counter to Fraser’s rich and powerful notion of critique. It is an assumption that follows from the metacritical commitment to a moral-philosophical account of the source of the normativity of critique.

The most instructive way to begin assessing the senses of normativity in Fraser’s critical theory is to recall her engagement with Habermas during the 1980s. Recall that, in the concluding reflections to Theory of Com-municative Action, Habermas appropriates Weber’s analysis of paradoxes of rationalization for an analysis of the dynamics of welfare state capital-ism. Democratic welfare states were premised on “freedom guaranteeing juridification” through which the economic system could be “bridled”.59 Consequently, the role of the state became crisis management: Keynesian “market replacing” strategies and “market-compensating measures” that would address economic, political, and social crises effectively aligned the

57. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 207 58. They are “properly emancipatory”: invested in parity of participation rather than a particular

interest, say, maintenance of a cultural or religious perspective that systematically blocks the fair participation of all; see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 207

59. Juridification, for Habermas, is formal process whereby ethically neutralized spheres of action can legitimately regulate the increasing rationalization of the lifeworld. “[L]imitations placed on working hours, freedom to organize unions and bargain for wages, protection from layoffs, social security” are some “classic examples” that Habermas offers; see his Theory of Communicative Action, 361. Juridification thus requires not only a “higher degree of value generalization” but also an “extensive loosening of social action from normative contexts, a splitting up of concrete ethical life into morality and legality”, see Habermas, Theory of Com-municative Action, 317.


economy and the state.60 Pacification of social discomfort, however, fur-thers an increase of bureaucratic coordination of life.61 This alignment of economy and the state reduces the citizen to a consumer and client, thereby neutralizing political decision-making processes.62

Accordingly, Habermas argues, “from the start, the ambivalence of guar-anteeing freedom and taking it away has attached to the policies of the welfare state”.63 Although legal entitlements to monetary assistance rep-resent “something like historical progress”, juridification of, for example, health care, care of the elderly, and education restructures the lifeworld of those entitled.64 Not only the self-image of those entitled, but also the community that would provide assistance to these individuals is radically transformed: Bureaucratic management replaces relations of solidarity, be-speaking a colonization of the lifeworld by system.65 So on the one hand, limits on previously unrestrained power of capital represent a progressive change. On the other hand, these limits disempower agents who are now dependent on bureaucracies that interpret their needs, experiences, and life problems for them.66 For Habermas, these negative effects are not merely side effects. They are internal to juridification itself.67 The very means of guaranteeing freedom compromise freedom.

In her 1985 essay “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”68 Fraser famously argues that Habermas fails to thematize the gendered subtext of the welfare state. The new client role that results from welfare measures is not only gendered. It is feminized. It is overwhelmingly women – older women, poor women, single mothers – who are the clients of the wel-fare state. A thoroughly gendered view of the nuclear family structures social insurance programs vis-à-vis relief programs.69 Deeply androcentric

60. I am here following Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?” 61. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 351. 62. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 350. 63. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 359. 64. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action,, 362. 65. To recall, the thesis of internal colonization “states that the subsystem of the economy and

the state become more and more complex as a consequence of capitalist growth, and pen-etrate ever deeper into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld”; see Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 367. Accordingly, Habermas argues that “… [t]he individualiz-ing definition of, say, geriatric care has burdensome consequences for the self-image of the person concerned, and for the relations with spouse, friends, neighbors, and others; it also has consequences for the readiness of solidarity communities to provide subsidiary assis-tance”, see Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 362.

66. Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”, 130. 67. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 362. 68. Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”, 137. 69. See Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and Politics”, in Fraser, Unruly Practices, 150.

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assumptions then structure welfare programs. The needs and identities of social-welfare recipients are needs interpreted through the lens of patriar-chy.70 It is therefore false to assume that “the basic vector of motion in late capitalist society is from state-regulated economy to lifeworld and not vice versa”.71 The blind spot in Habermas’ critical theory – gender – does not allow him to see the multidirectionality of the relation between system and lifeworld.

This is symptomatic of deeper problems with Habermas’ system and lifeworld distinction. Although Habermas is clear that system is embedded in lifeworld, Habermas bases the lifeworld-system distinction on a falsely naturalized distinction between the material and symbolic reproduction of society.72 This distinction legitimizes the view that, for example, childrear-ing is a symbolic rather than material aspect of social reproduction – a thought that in turn often legitimizes the devaluation of unpaid domestic work.73 The crucial point is that, when naturalized, the distinction between material and symbolic, systemic and communicative unduly valorizes the symbolic. It fails to see that the institutions of the lifeworld have been and continue to be sites of female subordination, exploitation, and domination.

Fraser’s critique makes explicit the depths of the ambivalences that Habermas articulated. A woman’s freedom from dependence on the male head of the nuclear family at the same time makes her dependent on a patri-archal state bureaucracy. The crucial point is that both the male-headed nuclear family and state-regulated official economy are institutions that equally sustain female subordination. They both “appropriate our labor and short-circuit the normatively-secured need interpretations from political contestation”.74 Notice that feminism serves a moral-political function as well as a social-theoretical function. It prompts revision of social-theoretic assumptions crucial for pursuing the moral-political aims of critique.

70. In addition to making explicit that norms and expectations of the lifeworld carry over to system imperatives, the feminist critique of the welfare state allows us to see the uncritical valuation of lifeworld institutions over system. Thus, the feminist critique of the welfare state allows us to see not only that “in few if any action context are actions coordinated absolutely nonconsensually and absolutely nonnormatively”, see Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?” 117.

71. Gender identity “continue[s] to channel influence of the lifeworld into system” , see Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?” 117.

72. For Fraser, the system-lifeworld distinction is grounded in problematic assumptions con-cerning, on the one hand, symbolic and material reproduction and, on the other hand, socially integrated versus system-integrated action-contexts. See “What’s Critical About Crit-ical Theory?”, esp. 116–19, 138.

73. Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”, 119. 74. Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”, 138.


Notice as well that while social-theoretic distinctions are understood as ambivalent, the emancipatory aims of feminism retain their progressive meaning. The emancipatory telos of feminism allows assessment of the forms of domination anchored in both system and lifeworld.

Today’s world is no longer the world of state-protected capitalism, how-ever. Far from it. The era of Reagan and Thatcher ushered in privatiza-tion and deregulation. Neoliberalism replaced “public provision and social citizenship” with “‘trickle-down’ and ‘personal responsibility’”. It replaced “welfare and developmental states” with “the lean, mean ‘competition state’”.75 In so doing, it deepens the paradoxes of capitalism. In a perplex-ing and disconcerting turn of events, feminism finds itself converging with neoliberalism. It moreover finds itself legitimating policies that run coun-ter to its emancipatory aims.76 Neoliberalism resignifies feminist critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism, and Westphalianism. The second-wave feminist critique of economism called into question the exclusive focus on political economy inadvertently converging with the neoliberal turn away from redistributive justice.77 The critique of androcentrism con-verged with the “new spirit of capitalism”, in which corporate and transna-tional forms of exploitation are highly feminized.78 The feminist critique of the stigmatization of poor relief tied to the critique of étatism was used to begin dismantling welfare tout court.

In response, Fraser turns to The Great Transformation and develops a “Polanyian-feminist framework” for theorizing twenty-first century capi-talism. Polanyi famously argues that nineteenth-century British capital-ism developed by following a “double movement” comprised by a move towards “marketization” and a resistance to marketization aimed at “social protection”.79 This double movement articulates the relation between economy and society in terms of “embeddedness”. Embedded markets are subject to extra-economic norms, e.g., mores and laws, just price and fair wage. Disembedded markets are governed immanently by supply and demand. Self-regulating markets, however, undermine material (ecological)

75. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 107. 76. Second-wave feminism, Fraser argues, “served to legitimate a structural transformation of

capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society”, see “Femi-nism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 110. Cf. Özlem Aslan and zynep Gambetti, “Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited”, History of the Pre-sent 1 no. 1 (2011).

77. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, 101–102. 78. Cf. Saskia Sassen, “Countergeographies of Globalization: The Feminization of Survival”, in

Feminist Post-Development Thought, Kriemild Saunders (ed.) (London: zed, 2002). 79. Fraser, Yale Lectures.

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and social conditions of markets.80 By turning land, labor, and money into commodities, marketization despoils nature and disintegrates communities that sustain it in the first place.81 Because marketization is unsustainable, it leads to the self-protection of society in the form of measures like “protec-tion of the soil and its cultivators, social security for labor through union-ism and legislation, and central banking”.82

Like Habermas’ theory, Fraser argues, Polanyi’s theory of society con-tains a blind spot – gender. Polanyi speaks of social protection in terms of a “shield from exposure” to the threat of a cold economy, while he elaborates embedded markets as a question of social security. Polanyi does not realize that social institutions are “also loci of oppression”, thereby “romanticiz-ing” social protection. Conversely, Polanyi gives “too dark of a picture of disembedded markets, occluding the fact that disembedding also contains an emancipatory moment”. It is false to assume, Fraser maintains, the goodness of social protection versus the evil of marketization. Indeed, if we look at the feminist movement, we will see that it has “sometimes [fought] against embedding, at other times against disembedding”. Feminism itself has been consistently ambivalent: “never consistent with neither deregula-tion nor protection”. First-wave feminism fought for suffrage and equal access to the market, while second-wave feminism launched a critique of social welfare and fought to end gendered division of labor. Convergences therefore have been contingent on historically specific forms of domination.

Fraser locates the problem with Polanyi’s double movement in his fail-ure to theorize emancipation. Today, however, theorizing emancipation is paramount. The crises of capitalism are three-sided: they comprise mar-ketization, protectionism, and emancipation. Marketization, social protec-tion, and emancipation mediate each other; emancipation is accordingly entangled with both social protection and marketization. Polanyi’s double movement, then, ought to be transformed into a triple movement in which “any two sides mediate the third”. To neglect the mediating function and mediated character of emancipation is to misunderstand the other two. It makes impossible understanding the potential for domination in both mar-ketization and social protection, but it also makes impossible understand-ing the potential for freedom in both marketization and social protection.83

80. The removal of the restriction of buying and selling of land on the basis of mores dismantled their social “protective covering” from commodification. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Trans-formation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), and refer to Fraser’s Yale lectures.

81. Self-regulating markets “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society”.

82. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 211. 83. Fraser argues that such neglect leads to misunderstanding the very nature of capitalist


Consider again the feminist critique of androcentrism. While second-wave feminism helped “secure full access to employment and entitlement for women”, “this access tended to valorize wage labor and androcentric ideal of wage independence thereby devaluing care work, interdependence, and solidarity”. While this brand of feminism is “disembedding and functional for marketization”, Fraser argues, “in principle it could develop in a differ-ent way”. It could be aligned with social protection in a way that rejects an androcentric polarization of wage earner vs. care work. It could end over-valuation of wage work and re-envision care as a public contribution. It could endeavor to enable women and men access to both.

The task of critique is therefore to understand not only how emancipa-tion is mediated by social protection and deregulation, but also how mar-ketization and social protection are mediated by emancipation. “Critical theory”, Fraser accordingly argues, “should treat each term as conceptually irreducible, normatively ambivalent, and inextricably entangled with the other two”. Each term has a “telos of its own” but they are “ambivalent in their interaction with the other two”. Notice that as social-theoretical terms of assessment, these distinctions are irreducibly ambivalent. They respond to social institutions that are entangled in social reality. As moral-political terms, however, they retain their telos. The entanglement with marketiza-tion or social protection does not compromise the aim of emancipation, namely, participatory parity. Fraser thus suggests a move toward a post-neoliberal transformation guided by the interest in emancipation and giving pride of place to public spaces of contestation, which she dubs “civil soci-ety”. Civil society is a “seedbed” of emancipation, since it is a space where norms are made explicit, subjected to critique, and defended or debunked in light of participatory parity.84 Practices of deliberation must also meet the conditions of participatory parity, they ought to include metacritical deliberation, and be guided by pragmatist commitment revisability in light of irreducible fallibilism.85 Proposed remedies should accordingly be teth-ered to the harm at hand and work creatively across multiple dimensions.86

conflicts and the conditions for redress. It short-circuits pursuing emancipatory possibili-ties within social protection and marketization. Precisely because Polanyi does not thematize emancipation, Fraser argues, he does not see the forms of domination latent in social protec-tion. Fraser, Lectures.

84. Within these spaces of contestation, Fraser maintains in her lectures, actors ask “whether norms have been publically vetted or whether they exist as doxa, whether they serve the func-tion of parity of participation or whether they short-circuit participating as peers”.

85. See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 42–46. 86. See Fraser’s notion of “cross redressing” in Redistribution or Recognition? “For the pragma-

tist, everything depends on precisely what currently misrecognized people need in order to

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Emancipatory movements can put an end to their dangerous liaison with neoliberalism, then, if they become “aware [ ] that the space of contesta-tion is also populated by marketization”. Emancipatory movements should “think big”, she argues, but they should do so with historical self-awareness and guided by participatory parity.

Fraser offers a bold and promising programme for critical theory in a neoliberal age. The notion of the triple movement represents an advance over Honnethian immanent critique, since it makes explicit the reciprocal determination (mediation) of critique and capitalist resignification. While Fraser’s proposal is promising, it remains tied to the metacritical commit-ment of justification for critique, which short-circuits the radicality of her proposal. As we have seen, Fraser maintains that the non-moral sense of critique – the social-theoretical aspect of critical theory – yields norms that are inherently unstable. In encoding the complex relation between econ-omy and society, they are normatively unstable. They carve out an ambiva-lent space for critique. This ambivalence cannot be reduced to a form of capitalism. The distinction between class structure and the status order is unstable within state protected capitalism and within neoliberal capital-ism. The ambivalence is internal to non-moral distinctions that structure social reality. The moral-political sense of critique, in contrast, depends on a principle safe from normative ambivalence. If elaborated in terms of parity of participation, grammars of contestation like redistribution, recognition, and representation retain their critical capacity even when mediated by market and protectionists interests. In arguing that participatory parity can in principle retain its telos in a marketized terrain, Fraser holds on to the assumption that critique requires a principle insulated from an ambivalent social terrain. The crisis of critique in neoliberal capitalism thus appears as a matter of ideological manipulation of normative language.87

The assumption that moral-political norms can or should be so insulated runs counter to Fraser’s rethinking of critique as a matter of mediation, however. Abstractly, norms and principles can generate coextensive positive

be able to participate as peers in social life. And there is no reason to assume that all of them need the same thing in every context” (Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 47).

87. In addition to unmasking the power differentials involved in practices of justification, prac-tices of justification must grapple with the fact that the very meaning and normative valence of the norms in question are being settled and unsettled, configured and reconfigured, val-idated and debunked in practice. On this point, see Fraser’s debate with Rainer Forst in Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, Kevin Olson (ed.) (London: Verso, 2008). Forst, “First Things First: Redistribution, Recognition, Justification” and Fraser, “Prioritizing Justice as Participatory Parity: A Reply to Kompridis and Forst”.


and negative meanings and effects because they are ambivalent in the first place. The crucial point is that thinking of moral-political norms as ambiv-alent affects how we understand practices of contestation and deliberation. In an ethicized capitalism, emancipatory movements are faced with the added task of establishing concretely not only the meaning but also the normative value of the ideal of participatory parity. As Fraser’s discussion of the feminist movement shows, emancipation, marketization, and social protection serve all-too-well the purposes of each other. Marketization has challenged androcentric assumptions structuring labor; social protection has consolidated institutionalized gendered status hierarchies; feminist critiques of economism helped dismantle programs aimed at distributive justice for women. Instead of establishing the normative valence of eman-cipation, marketization, and social protection on the basis of an inherent telos, Fraser’s own analysis suggests that the normativity of critique is a matter of the normative authority of participatory parity in specific cases. The objective and intersubjective conditions for participatory parity are matters to be settled not only in the context of but in reference to a mar-ketized terrain.88 The distribution of material resources to ensure independ-ence and voice and the affirmation of patterns of cultural value that express equal respect are matters to be negotiated in light of the normative author-ity of participatory parity within a marketized and protectionist terrain, rather than measured against the normative core of participatory parity. The difference lies in grappling with the undecidability of the normativ-ity of critique, given neoliberal resignification of norms. The authority of normative language requires political rather than philosophical justifica-tion. To be sure, this is the very thought motivating Fraser’s transforma-tion of the Polanyian double movement into a triple movement, and it is consistent with Fraser’s longstanding pragmatist commitments. Yet Fraser’s equally significant commitment to the metacritical task of critique inflects her recent Polanyian proposal in ways that compromise its radicality.

Critique, Metacritique, Metatheoretical Critique

While Honneth and Fraser offer insightful analyses of the crisis of critique within neoliberal capitalism, they seek to address this crisis in light of the metacritical commitment of justification for critique. Honneth and Fraser’s own accounts of the paradoxes of neoliberalism, however, suggest that the

88. For a related critique, see Kevin Olson, “Participatory Parity and Democratic Justice”, in Olson (ed.), Adding Insult to Injury.

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current Gestalt of capitalism presses us to rethink critique in light of its logic of ambivalence. Although Fraser ultimately understands the metathe-oretical task of critique as a metacritical task of justification for critique, her recent Polanyian proposal is a promising route for rethinking critique in a neoliberal age. Fraser’s notion of the triple movement establishes media-tion between emancipation, marketization, and social protection as the key practical challenge for critique. Irreducible mediation (or reciprocal deter-mination), I want to suggest in closing, should also be thematized as the key theoretical challenge for rethinking critique.

Recall Horkheimer’s understanding of the methodological task of criti-cal theory. Critical theory remains critical if it is aware of its implication in the world of capital. Critical theory remains critical today if it thema-tizes the strictures imposed by the reciprocal determination of critique and neoliberal capitalism in light of the latter’s logic of normative ambiva-lence. Critical-theoretic practices must think through the mediation of the normativity of critique and its neoliberal double. I have argued that this requires calling into question the main assumption of the metacritical task of justification for critique, namely, the need for a norm in principle insu-lated from capitalist resignification.89 As we have seen, ideals like mutual recognition and participatory parity do not remain stable courts of appeal in an ethicized capitalism. They cannot ground the normativity of critique, given that neoliberal resignification disturbs the stability of the distinctions between forms of freedom and forms of domination that they make possi-ble. In response to this predicament, critical theory should move way from metacritique and towards metatheoretical critique.

Critique seeks to “disclose tensions and possibilities” immanent to the present social configuration and “develop a language of criticism” that can speak to social agents.90 Critique is metacritical when it seeks to establish the source of the norms for critique in order to establish the authority of norms at work in concrete practices of contestation, justification, and validation.91 Metatheoretical critique, in contrast, thematizes the challenges of assessing and justifying core normative commitments in practice. It is a reflexive practice that seeks to contribute to critical and metacritical practices by making explicit the strictures imposed by the reciprocal determination of

89. Critical responses to both Honneth and Fraser’s have also focused on metacritical rather than metatheoretical aspects. See esp. Forst, “First Things First” and Kompridis, “Struggling Over the Meaning of Recognition”, in Olson, (ed.), Adding Insult to Injury.

90. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 202. 91. Here I diverge from Luc Boltanski understanding of metacritique and justification in his

insightful On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (London: Verso, 2011).


critique and capitalism. It thus makes explicit the logic of ambivalence gen-erated and sustained by distinct Gestalten of capitalism. Metatheoretical critique accordingly also provides reflection on the challenges of carving out a normative perspective for critique, since it submits the present to scrutiny in light of normative commitments that are not only subject to radical resignification but whose normative valence is never given a priori. It thus clarifies the insurmountable risk internal to the commitment in question: that it can sustain precisely the opposite of what it takes itself to represent.

Understanding irreducible mediation and hence ambivalence as the key theoretical challenge, however, also clarifies the key practical challenge of critique in a neoliberal context. Metatheoretical critique shifts the task of justification from theory to practice, from a moral-philosophical task to a political task. It thereby theorizes the way in which critique entails contest-ing, revoking, defending, revising normative commitments central to the struggles of the age. In a marketized terrain, critical practices must estab-lish both meaning and valence of an ideal politically. Shifting the task of justifying the normativity of critique to the ground of contestation does not compromise emancipation but rather makes possible negotiating the undecidability of norms in practice. Metatheoretical critique would thus promote awareness not only of the context of application of a norm (Hon-neth) and the marketized terrain in which claims for participatory parity are launched (Fraser). It would also promote awareness of the ambivalence of norms themselves.

This sketch of metatheoretical critique, to be sure, does not deliver a solution. It is tied to a first attempt at articulating a methodological prob-lem implicit in what I take to be the most promising route to rethinking critique. I take the move from metacritique to metatheoretical critique to be compatible with Fraser’s notion of the triple movement, which proposes rethinking critique in light of mediation. My amendment, however, sug-gests moving away from assumptions tied to the problem of normative foundations articulated by Habermas. Given the crisis of critique, carrying the legacy of the Frankfurt School forward today requires a commitment to theorizing normative ambivalence. The crisis of critique within the current Gestalt of capitalism accordingly calls for a radical rethinking of critique in practice but also in theory.

Rocío Zambrana is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental Philosophy, with focus on German Idealism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

118 ROCIO zAMBRANA

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to J. M. Bernstein and Richard J. Bernstein for insightful com-ments on early drafts of this work; and to Amy Allen, Colin Koopman, and Anita Chari for stimulating conversations about these matters. I am thankful to Anita Chari for her engaging response at the University of Ore-gon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society’s Women of Color Project Works-in-Progress Series, and to Charise Cheney for organizing the event. In addition to CSWS, I presented versions of this essay at the 2011 meeting of the Critical Theory Roundtable and at the 2012 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I am grateful for the helpful feedback I received at the Roundtable and SPEP.

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