Social freedom and reasonable pluralism: Reflections on Freedom’s Right

Abstract

In this article, Honneth’s Freedom’s Right is discussed with the intent to assess its potential for offering a view of justice, grounded in social freedom, more adequate than the theories of justice of Kantian descent (Rawls, Habermas). Honneth’s claim that ‘social practices and institutions are “just” to the extent that they are capable of realizing generally acceptable values’ is argued to result in a limited ability to accommodate societal pluralism. Honneth’s freedom-based view of justice is argued to depend on positing one correct view of the relevant value affirmed by the institutions of a well-ordered modern society (i.e. social freedom), one correct view of which institutions concur in what way to the realization of social freedom, and one correct reconstruction of the actual contribution historically offered by said institutions to social freedom. No justification is offered for why just social freedom counts as the supreme value against which modern institutions are to be assessed; for why, in Hegel’s footsteps, the only institutions contributing to its affirmation are still the family (now expanded into the realm of ‘personal relationships’), civil society (now turned into the sphere of relations mediated by the market) and the State (now recast as the sphere of democratic will-formation); and for why the historical unfolding of these institutional spheres can only be interpreted in the ways suggested by Honneth. At a more general level, the question that remains unanswered, and even unaddressed, is how a social freedom–based approach to justice could allow for the oppression-free coexistence of people who endorse rival understandings (a) of the values to be institutionally affirmed, (b) of the relevant institutions and (c) of the significance of these institutions’ respective patterns of development.