Reflexive cooperation between fraternity and social involvement

1. Solidarity and democracy

The theme of solidarity has been at the heart of Axel Honneth’s social and political philosophy for more than two decades. What is at stake in this philosophical question is the fate of the third principle of the French Revolution, initially named fraternity, then rephrased as solidarity and later, in a somehow colder way, as social cooperation. In is, in more explicitly political terms, the question whether the third principle of the revolutionary triad should be considered as an irreducible and primitive ingredient of the concept of democracy, or whether the normative core of democracy is exhausted by one of its more successful twins, freedom or equality, or by a combination of both. Honneth’s later theory of social freedom would seem to opt for the second solution. In this article, I want to explore at some length this question and the viability of this answer. I will do this by reconstructing the three models of solidarity which can be found in Honneth’s work. Slightly modifying Honneth’s own wording, I suggest to call them (1) abstract solidarity, (2) fraternal coexistence and (3) reflexive cooperation. Each of these models can be traced back to a philosophical tradition that has played a major role in shaping Honneth’s social and political philosophy: GW Hegel and Emile Durkheim for abstract solidarity, socialism for fraternal coexistence, and John Dewey and American pragmatism for reflexive cooperation.

I begin my inquiry from a historical premise. At the beginning of the 20th century, we find a sort of transatlantic consensus among a vast array of thinkers trying to steer a middle ground between liberal democracy and state socialism. ¹ Common to these otherwise diverse traditions is the attempts to reconcile the basic values of democratic legitimacy with a view of man as a socialized being. In the United States, pragmatists as well as progressivists militate in support of a social conception of politics and of democracy. In Europe, British pluralists, French solidarists, as well as Italian thinkers such as Carlo Rosselli and Piero Gobetti elaborate a political vision alternately called ‘social liberalism’ or ‘liberal socialism’. In Germany, the reformed socialism of Eduard Bernstein expresses similar positions. Common to all these positions is the awareness that the social cooperation that a political community needs to function appropriately is incompatible with the liberal understanding of human individuals. In other terms, a collection of free and equal individuals is not yet a society.

For the defenders of this view, freedom and equality were necessary but by no means sufficient ingredient to account for democracy, and they generally contended that solidarity would have to be added to them if we wished to understand how a democratic society can exist and thrive. This conception of democracy has to a large extent been lost in subsequent decades, mostly due to the historical split between the two rival political projects of liberal democracy and state socialism. Partially as a consequence of this split, ideas of solidarity and fraternity have de facto disappeared from Anglo-American political theory, whereas their fate in Europe, while less dramatic, has been mostly dependent upon their reception in the social sciences. ² Twentieth-century German political theory has, perhaps, been the only notable exception to this situation, and the Frankfurt school is possibly the tradition that more than any other has continued to reclaim the central relevance of this concept for theorizing democracy. Indeed, the concept of solidarity is clearly at the heart of Jürgen Habermas’ political theory, and plays a major role in other central figures of this tradition, such as Hauke Brunkhorst, Claus Offe, and, as this article will show, of Honneth. ³ Honneth’s long-lasting engagement with the concepts of cooperation, solidarity and fraternity should, therefore, be inscribed in a larger theoretical and historical attempt to develop a distinctive, European, political philosophy, one that refuses to reduce the normative core of political legitimacy either to liberty or equality, or to a combination of both, and which tries instead to recover the distinctive contribution of the third revolutionary pillar in the constitution of the normative core of the concept of democracy. Indeed, once freed from the unhappy marriage with liberalism, and once differentiated from state socialism, a conception of democracy based on the successful integration of the three normative principles of freedom, equality and solidarity defines the genuine normative core of the social and political project which has defined Europe for the last two centuries.

I have said above that we can find in Honneth’s work three different ways of conceptualizing the third revolutionary principle, each of them connected to three different theoretical traditions that have marked his philosophical thought: Hegelianism, socialism and American pragmatism. While bearing close resemblances, the three versions of solidarity present also some major differences, the most important concerning their respective justificatory ground. In the case of abstract solidarity, the justificatory ground is social or sociological. In the case of fraternity, it is based on sympathy, whereas in the case of reflexive cooperation it is epistemic. Correspondingly, each of these conceptions refers to a distinctive mode of social integration: functional differentiation in the case of solidarity, identification in the case of fraternity and problem-solving in the case of reflexive cooperation.

While these three strands of normative theory tend to be well integrated in Honneth’s work, differences and tensions exist, and it is to them that I will turn my attention, so as to prompt an inquiry into their comparative advantages and disadvantages. In so doing, I will try to set aside Honneth’s own preferred solution, which consists in seeking to reconcile freedom and solidarity into the notion of social freedom, and try to look instead at what is conceptually distinctive and irreducible in the idea of social coordination, articulated in the three mentioned ways. I will subsequently offer some comparative conclusions, trying to assess the three models of collective action with the aim of drawing some general conclusions concerning the question of whether one or another idea of cooperation is needed as an independent principle to define the normative core of the democratic project.

2. Abstract solidarity

Particularly in Freedom’s Right, Honneth develops a conception of social coordination that, by significantly relying on Hegel, emphasizes the abstract dimensions of reciprocity, and this in two ways. On the one hand, by emphasizing what Hegel calls ‘mutual recognition’, and that Honneth defines in terms of ‘the reciprocal experience of seeing ourselves confirmed in the desires and aims of the other, because the other’s existence represents a condition for fulfilling our own desires and aims’ (Honneth 2014, 45). On the other hand, by emphasizing the kind of abstract cooperation that takes place in the sphere of civil society. At the basis of both models stands the idea of mutual dependence, according to which ‘it is only by recognizing their mutual dependency that individuals can achieve their respective aims’ (Honneth 2014, 46).

I suggest to call this model ‘abstract solidarity’ insofar as it is based upon a universalistic, and to a certain extent intellectualistic, understanding of the social bond as based on general relations of mutual interdependence that are the outcome of broad social and historical processes. Hegel has notably contended that the sphere of civil society is based on the mutual interdependence of producers and consumers, later respecified by Durkheim in terms of social division of labour. Here cooperation is understood as an abstract relation among social roles, rather than as concrete interactions among concrete actors. Honneth uses this idea to claim that markets’ legitimacy reposes on moral foundations, by which what he means is not, or not first of all, that markets must be fair to each participant, but that the very idea and existence of markets presupposes a society of mutually interdependent individuals, a society in which each can satisfy his own needs only through cooperation with others. The basic idea is that in order to enter economic transactions, social actors must recognize each other not only as parties to a contract, but also as members of a community of cooperation that is based on the abstract principle of a mutual interdependence determined by the social division of labour.

Solidarity is the name taken by this community of cooperation. Its constitutive principle is that of social integration through functional differentiation, and the theoretical framework against which such a principle is intelligible is that of a social theory of modernity in which mutual interdependence manifests itself as a sort of historical necessity. This is the reason why the ground of legitimacy of this conception is social: The necessity of cooperation is predicated upon laws of social evolution. Solidarity is an abstract bond also in the sense that its reality does not depend upon individual agents’ willingness to enter concrete relations of social cooperation, but upon their mere acceptance of the basic rules of associated living.

An important implication of this view concerns the mediating role that social and political institutions acquire. Indeed, insofar as solidarity appears as an abstract medium which neither requires nor presupposes the conscious involvement of individual agents, its achievement requires a sort of supplementary medium, which is provided by institutions. Institutions such as markets, labour contracts, occupational roles, and so on translate the abstract principle of mutual dependence into concrete social practices of cooperation. These institutions have an additional advantage, which is that of bringing the mutual strangers of which modern societies are composed into relations of mutual cooperation. Indeed, the degree of abstraction of this form of solidarity is so high that it cannot be provided by individual motivational resources such as sentiments or values.

3. Fraternal coexistence

In his latest book (Honneth 2015), Honneth explores an alternative view of social coordination, one that is more directly tied to the socialist tradition, and whose inspiring idea reflects more concrete and personal patterns of social cooperation. At the heart of this second model, we find the normative principle of fraternity. Whereas the idea of solidarity has a sociological basis, rooted as it is in the idea of functional differentiation, the idea of fraternity is based on an affective, rather than sociological, understanding of why human beings cooperate together. Whereas solidarity is defined as a kind of abstract relation among social roles, the idea of fraternity is inseparable from the experience of concrete patterns of interaction among interdependent agents. Here the basic normative idea is better described in terms of sympathy, of the strong bond aroused by a shared experience, rather than of institutionally mediated recognition, something that finds confirmation in the use of the notion of community instead of that of society (Honneth 2015, 13, 23). Mutual responsibility and sympathy among concrete selves is the cement which keeps society together. The dimension of mutuality is well captured by the following quotation: ‘if subjects practice mutual sympathy, they will necessarily treat each other as equals and thus refrain from exploiting or instrumentalizing each other in any way’ (Honneth 2015, 24). Honneth summarizes the normative ideal of fraternity as ‘taking part in the social life of a community whose members are so sympathetic to each other that they support the realization of each other’s justified needs for each other’s sake’ (Honneth 2017, 24). To be effective, the fraternal bond must be felt.

The language of sympathy, feeling, altruism and fraternal dispositions replaces the colder, more abstract, institutional language of systemic integration, functional differentiation and role-taking, whereas the idea of partaking, of taking part, brings us closer to the third model I will discuss in a moment, that of reflexive cooperation. The formula ‘the self-fulfillment of each must depend on the self-fulfillment of the other’ (Honneth 2015, 13) should be understood literally in the sense of self-fulfilment of concrete agents taking part to concrete social interactions with fellow human being. To this extent, work cooperatives provide Honneth with the paradigmatic example of a form of social coordination prompted by fraternity, insofar as mutual dependence is experienced in concrete ways in the interaction with one’s equals engaged in the pursuit of a shared common good.

Honneth formulates two major criticisms to this way of conceiving social coordination. The first is that socialists failed to take functional differentiation into account, and that for this reason they failed to appreciate the emancipatory function of political institutions (Honneth 2015, 80). The second is that the normative model of fraternal coexistence remains too dependent upon the circumstances of work experience, so that its normative relevance for explaining cooperation within complex modern societies remains under-theorized. A sympathy-based conception of social coordination, while apt to enunciate normative requirements that are valid for a distinct sphere of social life, does not seem to be adequate to formulate normative expectations to be extended to the domain of politics. In terms that are relevant to my analysis, it provides a solid basis for theorizing democracy as a social idea, but not democracy as a political idea.

4. Reflexive cooperation

The third model of social coordination that can be found in Honneth’s work emerges from a more explicitly political context, as part of his attempt to find a third way between republicanism and liberalism, one aimed at reconciling political proceduralism with a thicker conception of politics. In this attempt, American pragmatism, and Dewey in particular, plays a major role. ⁴ As Honneth explains, there exists an opposition, or a tension between, on the one hand, the idea of ‘a solidary citizenry that is in a position to organize society itself through processes of communicative consultation and negotiation’ and, on the other hand, the idea that ‘state institutions have to form a legally bound but independent subsystem’ (Honneth 1998, 764). According to the republican view, formal political institutions are solidly rooted within an active citizenship, whereas according to the classical liberal model, the legitimacy of politics reposes entirely onto its institutional infrastructure. Honneth relies on Dewey’s theory of democracy to reconcile the two in the idea of democracy as a ‘reflexive form of community cooperation’. This definition brings us directly into the heart of our theme, which is indeed the question whether the normative core of the concept of democracy is exhausted by the two principles of freedom and equality or whether, instead, we miss something essential when we exclude the third pillar. By defining democracy as a ‘reflexive form of community cooperation’, Honneth seems to opt decidedly for the second solution.

It is important to note that this definition of social coordination as reflexive cooperation is immediately formulated in political terms, whereas in the previous two cases reference was either to society as large (solidarity) or to the subfield of economy (fraternity). On the one hand, reflexive cooperation shares with abstract solidarity the concern for institutional mediation, insofar as by reflexive cooperation Honneth means that ‘the procedures of democratic will formation are grasped as the rational means with which a cooperatively integrated society attempts to solve its own problems’ (Honneth 1998, 765). The basic idea is that formal political institutions provide the reflexive moment of social coordination, giving to cooperation its distinctive ‘reflexive’ quality. Formal political institutions are, in Dewey’s terms, a ‘phase’ of social life (Dewey 1927, 327), one that is consciously directed towards the identification and solution of collective problems. In Honneth’s words, it is ‘a “living expression” of the combined effort to help implement the cooperatively pursued ends more effectively, that is, by concentrating reflexive forces’ (Honneth 1998, 768). On the other hand, it shares with the notion of fraternity a deeper concern for the concrete, practical and direct involvement in socially situated practices. This model of social cooperation is not that of the linguistically mediated communication conceptualized by Habermas but, rather, that of the ‘communal employment of individual forces to cope with a problem’ (Honneth 1998, 766–67). These two dimensions of functional differentiation and of communal involvement are at the same time combined and distinguished. On the one hand, successful cooperation can be achieved only through the establishment of democratic institutions aimed at pooling distributed information and at coordinating decision-making. As Honneth notes, ‘Dewey developed an epistemological argument that proposed regarding democracy as a condition for increasing the rationality of solutions to social problems’ (Honneth 1998, 773). On the other hand, the idea of reflexive cooperation emphasizes individuals’ integration in a political community through concrete involvement in social practices. As Honneth clarifies this point, ‘society’s members expect of each other that they perfect their own capabilities precisely in the direction that serves the common good’ (Honneth 1998, 769–70).

My suggestion is that we should not consider reflexive cooperation as a mere attempt to reconcile the two models of abstract solidarity and of fraternity. The concept of reflexive cooperation adds something new to the scheme by providing a new and different understanding of collective action, one that finds its justificatory basis in an epistemic, rather than a social or moral argument. The fruits of this interpretation of social coordination developed by Honneth for the first time in (Honneth 1998), will become fully visible only later, in (Honneth 2014). At the heart of this interpretation of social coordination stands the idea that personal involvement in processes of collective problem-solving brings about beneficial outcomes for the individual as well as for the collectivity. We can distinguish two alternative interpretations of this idea of social coordination as social involvement. The first, that Honneth retraces to Dewey’s early writings, keeps the two benefits separate. On the one hand, communal involvement in social practices is praised for its function in promoting individual self-realization, according to a model that closely resembles that of fraternity. Here the focus is not on problem-solving, but on mere involvement, on affective integration into a small face-to-face community. The principle of integration is moral. On the other hand, the epistemic moment intervenes in providing a justification of political democracy conceived as the best method for solving collective problems, in a way that recalls abstract solidarity. As it can be seen, the moral and the epistemic benefits of social involvement are distinguished and then assigned to different social spheres, the first integrated through sympathy, the second through functional differentiation. This interpretation of the principle of social involvement has a major shortcoming, as it obscures what is most interesting and original in this conception of social coordination, which is precisely the constitutive soldering of self-realization with functional problem-solving into a single conception of social interaction that is valid for all domains of social life.

The second, integrative, interpretation, which can be distilled from Dewey’s later political works, ⁵ insists precisely on the idea that individual self-fulfilment derives from direct participation in practices of collective problem-solving, of which politics is but an instantiation among others. What distinguishes this view is precisely the fact that the personal dimension of self-realization and the political dimension of collective problem-solving in reality cannot be separated. To this extent, the social idea of communal involvement should be defined not in the moral terms of communitarianism but, rather, in the epistemic terms of concrete participation to those processes and practices which contribute to the well-being of a community. As a consequence, the political idea of democratic participation is extended beyond that of political participation to broader forms of involvement in social life. In that way, we achieve an all-encompassing, conjointly social and political, conception of democracy. It is, indeed, this integrative conception that will resurface again in Honneth’s later idea of a democratic ethos in (Honneth 2014).

The major advantage of this model is that we do not need external sources of constraint to explain why individuals cooperate: Through the notion of inquiry, what Dewey offers us is, indeed, a model of participation which is not exclusively political. It is the idea of individuals socially involved in practices that aim at producing collective goods, and that in so doing find also a personal satisfaction. Politics merely completes this model, adding a specialized form of agency that replicates this scheme of social coordination at a further abstract level. In that sense, as I have stated above, political democracy is ‘a phase’ of social democracy, not a separate sphere of social life. This view, rather than identifying diverse social spheres steered by different principles, relies on a single and all-encompassing model valid for social as well as for political coordination. Dewey’s much quoted sentence stating that political democracy is but a ‘phase’ of social democracy means precisely that the form of involvement citizens can experience in politics is but a specialized, perfected specimen of the broader kind of involvement that characterizes social life in its all breadth, that is to say intelligent participation to collective processes of problem-solving. This understanding of social cooperation as involvement cannot be reduced to Durkheim’s idea of social division of labour, as in so doing we lose much of its specificity and strength. In that sense, I am not convinced that, as Honneth writes,

Like Durkheim in his book on the social division of labor, Dewey also assumes that only a fair and just form of a division of labor can give each individual member of society a consciousness of cooperatively contributing with all others to the realization of common goals. (Honneth 1998, 776)

In the model of social coordination as reflexive cooperation, what seems to be prominent is not functional integration per se, but the capacity an individual has to perceive the meaningfulness of his own actions in terms of their being conducive to some sort of collective goal. It is in this sense that I distinguish this form of integration from what I have called abstract solidarity. At the same time, its clearly political content differentiates it from the socialist model of integration through fraternity. Dewey’s reflections on democracy are driven by the question of how the experience of social involvement, that individuals make throughout their social life, can be replicated at political level, once a society oversteps the threshold of small communities. Therefore, whereas Honneth says that ‘Dewey sees the presupposition for a revitalization of democratic publics located in the prepolitical sphere of the social division of labor’ (Honneth 1998, 776), I would rather say that the reference of Dewey’s conception of social cooperation is that of a more general model of social involvement, one that can equally be applied to the social division of labour, and to the internal organization of face-to-face groups such as families, classrooms and neighbourhoods. What this conception stresses is not the division of labour as the turning point of modernity but, rather, the continuity in democratic patterns of social interaction which can be found at all levels of society. Only in this sense Dewey’s idea that democracy is a way of life can be correctly understood as meaning that the democratic norm should inform social life in all its dimensions.

5. Comparisons

If we now try to resume the main points of convergence and divergence of the three models, the following can be said. Social coordination seems to stem from at least three partially different sources: (1) institutionally mediated mutual interdependence among strangers in the case of abstract solidarity, (2) the sympathy aroused by the perception of needs among individuals who mutually recognize each other as members of a community in the case of fraternity and (3) the self-fulfilment produced by direct involvement in joint activity aimed at shared goals in a variety of social situations in the case of social involvement. All three conceptions start from a social rather than a political view of social coordination, hence they all try to explain the place and nature of politics through categories that are not purely political. This is an aspect that is worth stressing in the context of contemporary theories of democracy, dominated as they are by purely political concepts.

The three conceptions differ, however, in conceiving how politics is related to society. (1) In the abstract solidarity model, politics is conceived of as a separate sphere with its own distinctive logic. Given the level of abstraction, a theory of functional division of labour seems to be sufficient to explain the genesis of political institutions, and these institutions’ embodiment of the principle of solidarity is that which justifies them. (2) The model of fraternal coexistence is the most problematic, as the distinctive function of politics tends to be neglected, the primal experience of social coordination being not only pre-political but distinctively non-political. (3) Finally, in the model of solidarity as reflexive cooperation, politics is conceived of as a phase of social life, organized by the same integrative principle – cooperation mediated through intelligence – but qualified by its level of specification. Using a trope that is typical of pragmatism, we can say that political problem-solving stands to ordinary problem-solving as high art stands to aesthetic experience, or scientific thought to ordinary thought. Continuity, rather than separation of spheres, is the leading principle.

Finally, each of these three approaches emphasizes a different dimension of sociality. (1) The invention of new forms of cooperation as a consequence of the sociological transformations produced by modernization; (2) the importance of shared experience, affectedness and sympathy for creating stable communities of cooperation; and (3) the integrative function of cooperative patterns of interaction based on shared participation in problem-solving.

6. Conclusion

If we set aside the model of social cooperation based on the socialist interpretation of the idea of fraternity for the reasons Honneth has explained, two alternative models remain, and the best solution may well be, as Honneth himself seems to believe, to take the best from each in order to develop an integrated model of social coordination. Dewey’s democratic experimentalism and Honneth’s historical experimentalism, their shared endorsement of the concept of ‘democracy as a way of life’, the privilege both assign to a social conception of democracy over more standard purely political accounts of democracy as a political regime, are clear indications of the road such a project should likely pursue.

This solution brings us in full circle to the beginning of the argument, and also to the beginning of the 20th century, at this moment in time when theorizing democracy as a social category was considered a plausible and worthwhile undertaking, and when American and European political thought seemed to have so much in common. That was before the ideological and political confrontation between the capitalist and the socialist blocs forced political thinking into an artificial separation, whose outcome has been the steady and progressive devaluation of democracy as a desirable goal and as an independent normative ideal. Through the opposition between liberal democracy and socialist democracy, what has been lost from view has been, somehow ironically, democracy itself. Now the times seem to be ripe again for rediscovering the normative roots of this concept, and to do so, we need new ways to recover its original and irreducible threefold normative core, which in turn requires that the normative contribution of each of its three normative pillars be identified, distinguished from the others, and coherently integrated into a new conception of democracy. I read Honneth’s work as a precious contribution to such a project.