The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

373 Pages·1993·10.35 MB·English

by  Axel Honneth

The Critique of Power
Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory
Axel Honneth
translated by
Kenneth Baynes
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
First MIT Press paperback edition, 1993
First MIT Press edition, 1991.
Translation © 1991 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This work originally appeared in German under the title Kritik der Macht. Reflexions-
stufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie (© 1985 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
am Main).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Set in Baskerville
by DEKR Corporation.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Honneth, Axel, 1949-
[Kritik der Macht. English]
The critique of power : reflective stages in a critical social
theory / Alex Honneth ; translated by Kenneth Baynes. — 1st MIT
Press ed.
p. cm. — (Studies in contemporary German social thought)
Translation of: Kritik der Macht.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-08202-0 (HB), 0-262-581284) (PB)
1. Critical theory. 2. Horkheimer, Max, 1895-1973.
Philosophische Fragmente. 3. Habermas, Jurgen. 4. Foucault,
Michel. I. Title. ILSeries.
HM24.H582713 <199)^
301'.01—dc20 -- 91-6950
CIP
Contents
Translator's Preface vii
Author's Preface xi
Afterword to the Second German Edition (1988) xiii
I The Incapacity for Social Analysis: Aporias of
Critical Theory
Introduction 3
1 Horkheimer's Original Idea: The Sociological
Deficit of Critical Theory 5
2 The Turn to the Philosophy of History in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Critique of the
Domination of Nature 32
3 Adorno's Theory of Society: The Definitive
Repression of the Social 57
II The Rediscovery of the Social: Foucault and
Habermas
Introduction 99
4 Foucault's Historical Analysis of Discourse: The
Paradoxes of a Semiological Approach to the
History of Knowledge 105
Contents
5 From the Analysis of Discourse to the Theory of
Power: Struggle as the Paradigm of the Social 149
6 Foucault's Theory of Society: A Systems-
theoretic Dissolution of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment 176
7 Habermas' Anthropology of Knowledge: The
Theory of Knowledge-Constitutive Interests 203
8 Two Competing Models of the History of the
Species: Understanding as the Paradigm of the
Social 240
9 Habermas' Theory of Society: A Transformation
of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of the
Theory of Communication 278
Notes 305
Index 335
Translator's Preface
When it was first published in Germany in 1985, The Critique
of Power was immediately recognized as a significant and in
novative contribution to debates concerning the normative
foundations and emancipatory claims of a critical social theory.
Honneth's study not only presents a systematic interpretation
of the various attempts by the early Frankfurt School (notably
Horkheimer and Adorno) to clarify the theoretical status and
practical aims of their enterprise; it also brings to light the
deeper continuities between this school and the later critical
theories of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. Moreover,
by situating the latter two theorists within the context of the
earlier tradition of critical theory, Honneth provides a con
structive framework for a comparison between them that (at
least in the United States) has so far been conducted only at
an initial, highly polemical level.
At the center of Honneth's reconstruction of the early Frank
furt School is the thesis that both Horkheimer and Adorno
remained so tied to ideas derived from a comprehensive phi
losophy of history (e.g., social labor and the technical domi
nation of nature) that they were unable to find a place within
their theoretical analyses for a unique domain of the "social,"
that is, a domain in which individual and collective actors con
test competing interpretations of their collective needs and
normative orientations as well the distribution of scarce social
resources. Insofar as a conception of social action becomes
thematic for their theories, Foucault and Habermas are better
Translator's Preface
able to attend to the domain of the social, albeit in quite dif
ferent ways.
For Foucault, the socral is construed as a domain of strategic
interaction in which actors continuously confront one another
in a "perpetual battle." According to Honneth, however, this
analysis of the "microphysics of power" encounters difficulties
in its attempt to account for the formation and maintenance
of more complex structures of social domination. In the end,
Foucault is compelled to abandon a model of strategic inter
action in favor of a systems-theoretic analysis of power in which
power is construed as a self-expanding property of social sys
tems rather than as the product of struggle among strategic
actors. Honneth thus presents a novel and systematic interpre
tation that is sure to find a place within current discussions of
Foucault's work in the United States.
According to Honneth, Habermas' theory of communicative
action offers a more promising point of departure for an anal
ysis of the social, since it recognizes the role of consensual
agreement as well as strategic conflict in both legitimate and
illegitimate forms of power. However, two different and com
peting models of social change can be found in Habermas'
writings: one that is indebted to his earlier critique of the
"technocracy thesis" (a largely conservative thesis, hotly de
bated in the 1960s, that affirmed the spread of scientific reason
and technocratic rule into more and more aspects of social life)
and stresses the independence of "labor" and "interaction" and
one that is more indebted to his reading of Marx and is better
described as a moral "dialectic of class struggle" in which col
lective actors engage in conflict with one another about the
interpretation of norms and the asymmetrical distribution of
power. In The Theory of Communicative Action, with its two-tiered
model of society as "system" and "lifeworld," Habermas dis
plays a clear preference for the first model, with the result,
according to Honneth, that the domain of the social is divided
into a "norm-free" domain of strategic interaction and a
"power-free" lifeworld. By way of an immanent reconstruction,
Honneth thus offers a critique of Habermas' most recent for
mulation of critical social theory, which is still at the center of
Translator's Preface
discussion (see Communicative Action, ed. A. Honneth and H.
Joas [MIT Press, 1991]).
The result of Honneth's study is thus not merely a rich and
at times provocative interpretation of the history of critical
theory, but also a sketch of the contours of "the social" that
should furnish that theory with its normative and practical
orientation. Honneth pursues this latter task in greater detail
in Kampfum Anerkennung (Suhrkamp, 1991).
In the following translation I have cited existing translations
of both French and German texts whenever possible; any mod
ifications are indicated in the notes. Axel Honneth was unduly
patient in responding to my queries and offered many helpful
suggestions during the long course of the translation. I would
also like to thank Charles Wright for reading through the
manuscript #nd for assuming primary responsibility for the
translation of chapter 5. Shari Hartline assisted with the notes.

Author's Preface
In this study, I attempt to clarify the central problems of a
critical social theory. At the first level of a history of theory I have
been guided* by the conviction that the two most influential
new approaches to a critical social theory, that of Michel Fou
cault and that of Jiirgen Habermas, are to be understood as
competing developments of a set of questions opened by a
critical theory: Both the theory of power, which Foucault has
grounded in historical investigations, and the theory of society,
which Habermas has developed on the basis of a theory of
communicative action, can be viewed as attempts to interpret
in a new way the process of a dialectic of enlightenment ana
lyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno. If the history of critical
social theory is reconstructed from this point of view, then
Foucault's theory of power proves to be a systems-theoretic
and Habermas' social theory a communication-theoretic solu
tion to the aporias encountered by Adorno and Horkheimer
in their philosophical-historical analysis of the process of
civilization.
Insofar as the study traces historically the movement of
thought that leads from Horkheimer's early essays through
Adorno's philosophy of history and finally to the competing
theories of Foucault and Habermas, there arises from an in
quiry into the theoretical models a systematic viewpoint from
which the construction and maintenance of social power can
be apprehended. On the second level of a clarification of the central
problems of a critical social theory, I examine the approaches de-