Recognition,democracy and social liberty: A reply

The ethical precedence of individual freedom

Alessandro Ferrara’s paper is an extremely rich paper and I am sure I can’t sufficiently answer all the questions it poses. I would like before anything to make a remark on his first observation. I think it is right to say that the situation for Hegelianism is better today than 50 years ago. It is true that there are several Hegelian elements in a lot of very central philosophical approaches within the 20th century. It is not only the Wittgensteinian approach, I agree to that. And it is not only the theory of speech acts, which has a sort of Hegelian spirit, or Brandom’s account, the pragmatist movement and so on. But what I would deny is that there have been many serious attempts to transform the Hegelian spirit into a theory of justice. I think, for example, that Michael Walzer is not doing this, nor Charles Taylor, although it is more questionable how to describe his approach.

I have to confess that probably, as Alessandro says, the theory of justice which comes closest to a sort of Hegelian understanding of a theory of justice is John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness. I see that. There is a huge transition in Rawls’ development. He moved from his early theory of justice to the late concept of justice as fairness, and here he started with a Hegelian movement, when he’s talking about the tasks of political philosophy. He starts from a reconstruction of the implication of the normative self-understanding of the citizens, when they understand themselves as cooperative actors. That is surely a Hegelian move. But what is missing here is one point: namely that Hegel was specific in two respects, and I think that this is not yet adequately seen today.

Hegel not only historicized the language of justice, believing that there are different horizons of justice depending on the stages of world history. He also sociologized (the word is not an English word, but you know what I mean) the question of justice. Hegel was a sociologist before sociology existed and he was one of the strongest sociologists before the birth of sociology, because he saw that we shouldn’t talk about justice by ignoring what one could call an associational ethic, the ethics implied in certain associational forms of life in modern society. So that is really important to see. And I see here a difference not only to Michael Walzer, to Charles Taylor and to Alisdair Macintyre but also to Rawls. There is a difference already from the beginning.

Rawls accepts something like the basic structure that includes all the institutions necessary for social reproduction. But he doesn’t really believe that the basic structure serves as a normative structure. Here, there is in my view a huge difference.

I can now mention the three selectivities that Alessandro discusses with regard to Freedom’s Right. I do not exactly know with which selectivity I have the biggest problem.

The first selectivity is about the choice of normative references when we speak about justice. The question is whether it is justifiable to select, from out of a plurality of modern values, only one value, making it the reference point of the normative reconstruction. How to justify this selectivity? There are two steps to be mentioned. The first step consists in trying to reconstruct the normative implications of the foundations of the different institutions we have in view when talking about modern societies. If we try to reconstruct the normative promises inbuilt in the foundational writings on the different spheres established during the birth of modern societies, I think we always come to see that these new institutions are justified with reference to individual freedom. That is undoubtedly the case with respect to the market; I think of Adam Smith, who justified the market not only in terms of utility but clearly also in normative terms, by making the point that this new form of organization of economy increases individual freedom for all. The same is true for marriage or for families. The new forms of marriage and family are justified by referring to the increase of equal freedom: marriage is no longer arranged by parents, or by the social structures or by certain social groups, because this would prevent all participants from enjoying individual freedom. So marriage has to get in the new institutional form, namely romantic love, which is since then the core of marriage and of family. I think that Hegel simply describes what is going on in social reality and not only in social reality but in – Luhmann would say – the semantic reflection on these institutions or the philosophical justifications of these new institutions. The same is definitively true for the political sphere. I might only mention the social contract: the justification for popular sovereignty is always in terms of the protection of individual freedom, individual self-determination.

So this is a first step towards justifying taking individual freedom as the central value. The second step is more independent from any kind of historical justification. It would be a kind of Wittgensteinian analysis that demonstrates that participation in certain institutions means feeling confident enough that these institutions could enable individual freedom. That would probably be an independent, second form of justification for why freedom can serve as the reference point for my normative reconstruction. The third form of justification would consist in demonstrating that all the other values existing within modernity and also standing in rivalry can’t stand independently from individual freedom. All the other values are expressed and justified with reference to individual freedom. That is a very strong thesis; I think I would defend it, but I should move in detail with the other values and I have to show how this is possible. Here only a short remark on equality. I have to confess that I didn’t spend sufficient time making the relationship between freedom and equality clear; there is only a small footnote in the book. That is too short. However, the basic idea there was that to qualify what equality means and implies as a value, we have to ask ourselves clearly ‘equality for what’? Only then we have to come up with a convincing answer, namely how to think about equality. And the only convincing answer would be equality with regard to individual freedom. Then we have to explain what individual freedom means when it is meant to be the ‘what’ of equality, the object of equality, and I would tend here to go in the direction that was first outlined by Elizabeth Anderson in her article on the implications of equality, when she proposed understanding the ‘what’ of equality as relational equality. Then we would almost already have the solution: equality is about relational freedom. This is one explanation of how to understand equality, but then it becomes immediately obvious that equality is not freestanding; it is depending on a more basic idea, namely individual freedom of a certain kind. So that is selectivity one.

With regard to selectivity two, I partly agree with Alessandro, and I partly disagree. One of the big mistakes of the book, I have to confess, is to leave out public education. Hegel made this big mistake and my big mistake was to follow Hegel. I think Hegel is completely unaware of the enormous importance of public education, in contrast to Kant who was aware of it.

This has a little to do with his overall idea of education. Hegel sees formation as something that takes place everywhere: you have education within the family, within the market and within the State. There, Hegel believes, permanent processes of individual formation take place – in short, he sees them always already to be happening. He therefore doesn’t take sufficient care of the requirement to have education or formation publically organized; he has no idea of the need for public education. Hegel is living in a time when the school didn’t play a big role, but Kant was wise enough to already envision the high importance of public education. So the question has to be put somehow differently: is education an independent sphere? Or is it the precondition for the flourishing of one of the other spheres? The huge dispute we have on the functional role of public education is about the question of whether schools are meant to prepare for the labour market or for civic participation. My answer would clearly be that we should understand public education as the institutional precondition for participation in the democratic process. School is not the institutional precondition for the second sphere, but for the third sphere in terms of my own differentiation. Its central task is preparing children to truly become competent citizens. But I wouldn’t describe the school as a separate sphere. So if I were to rewrite or could rewrite the book, I would give public education a very important role within the third sphere, but not as an independent sphere. The same is true, in my view, for churches. I wouldn’t privilege churches over other forms of private associations. I think churches are associations that play a constitutive role within civic society, in the meaning of the society surrounding the civil world of public institutions. So I don’t really see a need to change the third part of the book, but I can clearly see that education is missing, forgotten, left out in the architectonic of the book. When I saw this, I wrote an article about education and public reformation, where I tried to overcome this deficiency.

Now the third selectivity is related to the most difficult question to answer. This is the question of whether in normative reconstruction the selectivity I made can be justified with reference to the normative premises I had: to what degree certain innovations or conflicts within the specific spheres are relevant for seeing the fulfilment of the promise of social freedom more clearly. I should mention one short point here, because it could play a role in a certain discussion with regard to Freedom’s Right. I think I was relatively weak in not distinguishing sufficiently between what I would call normative revolution and institutional revolution. A normative revolution would be something I clearly exclude: I am excluding the possibility that in the future we would change our normative vocabulary to such a degree that we would justify the specific social institutions most important for us with reference to another value, different to individual freedom. I exclude a normative revolution: for example that in the future marriage could be based on values other than the free consent of loving subjects. I am aware that excluding normative revolutions in such a way comes relatively close to Hegel’s idea of an end of history. It depends on how you describe this Hegelian notion of the end of history: if you mean by the end of history the exclusion of any further normative revolutions, then I would be tempted to subscribe to it. But all of this is independent from the possibility of an institutional revolution. It is possible to describe with the same normative vocabulary certain changes within institutions. I don’t want to exclude, for example, the possibility that the nuclear family under the pressure of the same normative value – namely allowing the self-realization of all its members – can in the future take other forms than the form of the nuclear family that we have today. Although maybe it is not clear enough in the book, I don’t want to exclude experiments going in other directions or other institutional solutions.

The regress to ideologies of individualistic freedom

I think Giorgio Fazio raised a very deep problem and I am not sure whether I have here a sufficient answer to it. I want to start by formulating the problem somewhat differently than he did.

I think we don’t yet have a sufficient understanding of what neo-liberal capitalism is – what Foucault said about it is definitely not sufficient. Although he differentiated ordo-liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism, he was not clear enough on this point. And I think we don’t yet have a sufficient understanding of this new neo-liberal constellation of capitalism, because neo-liberalism is not simply a laissez-faire capitalism; it is far from it, because the state is much more active than before in securing the conditions for unregulated markets: not only by certain, always necessary legal protections, but by the restructuring of all infrastructures of capitalist transactions, the state doesn’t play the relative minimal role that the laissez-faire ideologist want it to play; it is much more active, it is more heavily intervening than ever before. It’s enough to think of Trump: his government is the most proactive government, in the sense that it allows the capitalist accumulation to grow with tax reductions, trade wars and so on. I think we have to engage more in understanding in detail the new institutional preconditions of neo-liberal capitalism.

But the central point of Giorgio’s paper is how exactly to understand the sudden transition to neo-liberalism: how was it possible, for example, that a population in the United States, in Germany, in Italy – in France it was a little bit different – that was already used to a relatively developed welfare system and organized capitalism, within only 5 years, accepted a transformation of the economy of this importance. This transformation took only 5 years: in this time, Reagan deregulated almost all markets, the financial market, the industrial market and the trade system. It was a complete restructuring of the capitalistic economy in the United States, and then Blair took over, and then Schroeder took over: so how was it possible that the population accepted those huge transformations in such a short time?

Giorgio is using the Gramscian notion of hegemony. I am not sure whether this concept helps a lot in explaining what has to be explained. In any case, the question remains: how was it possible that such a huge change in the ideological justification of capitalism could happen in such a short time. I have to admit that this question is not fully in agreement with what I described in Freedom’s Right and here Giorgio has a good point.

In Freedom’s Right, I almost excluded the possibility that the language in which the market could be justified can ever be the language of negative freedom. I excluded it and I am saying that the market has to be always justified and legitimized in terms of social freedom and not of individualistic freedom or negative freedom. What clearly happened in those years was a new vocabulary for justifying the market: a transition from a social justification of the market to a completely individualistic justification of the market. That was the ideological role of Hayek in this transition, but Hayek’s doctrine is not sufficient to explain this transition because he excludes an interventionist role for the state, whereas the state was extremely proactive in this transition, in the name not of social freedom but of individualistic freedom.

So there are different alternatives that I can give as explanations. The first is not in agreement with my account in Freedom’s Right: this transition cannot be understood simply as a regress, it has to be described as a pathology of modernity, which is not the vocabulary I’m using in Freedom’s Right, because I excluded pathologies from the spheres of social freedom, preserving the notion of pathologies only for those spheres in which there is no presupposition of making use of social freedom. So one could describe the new ideological justification of the capitalist market as an ensemble of pathologies within the institutional structures of modernity, and then one could describe the different effects of these pathologies, also their ideological effects, in the stimulation of new forms of exploitation, alienation and so on. I am not sure whether the correct methodological strategy for describing such pathologies would be the genealogy; I am not sure about that, but we should continue to talk about it.

To put it shortly: I agree with the observation that there was inattention in Freedom’s Right regarding neo-liberalism and that I used two different models in order to analyse the emergence of neo-liberal capitalism. But I’m pretty sure that neither of these is the correct one. I think I don’t yet have a correct explanation of the sudden emergence of neo-liberalism, because I am not sure enough about how this sudden ideological transition could happen. A transition from one cultural hegemony to another normally would need a time period of some decades: so how is it possible that such a transition could happen in such a very short period? Either the cultural hegemony of the language of social freedom was not rooted enough before, which would go against what I am saying in Freedom’s Right…, or we should come up with a fresh new explanation. Maybe this new explanation should deal with economic facts, or with the fact of the extreme weakness of the unions in the moment of economic globalization: there was no resistance, no mobilization from below, because of the weakness of these organizations. We should accept as a possible explanation also the enormous role of the ideological constructions of the unavoidability of something, the huge ideological instrument to describe something as being inevitable. So, probably, the sum of different ideological instruments made this sudden ideological transition possible.

The unavoidability of a weak teleology

The comments by Marco Solinas for which I’m very grateful require to tackle the question whether the idea of socialism is depending on a teleological account of historical progress. With respect to this, I don’t see the difference between Struggle for Recognition and Freedom’s Right as being as strong as Marco has described it. I think I am following the same intuition in both of the books: struggles for recognition are the moving force in moral progress and they can be sufficiently described with reference to the semantics they are using. I think struggles normally are forced to use the normative vocabulary prevailing at a certain time because they have to be justified not only towards the public, but also internally, towards the participants of the struggles. Therefore, I believe that struggles live in the normative vocabulary of the present, and that we, as observers, are somehow forced to permanently make a distinction between progressive and regressive struggles.

I assume that nobody here in this room would disagree with the following description: namely that what we experienced with the neo-liberal reorganization of the capitalist market should be described as a regression or somehow as historically leading back to periods that we thought we had overcome. I think that as long as you agree to this description of the new state of the capitalist market, then you have to give a historical explanation of why you should describe that as regression. But if you are willing to describe it as a regression, then you are already within the teleological horizon I am presupposing. So the very general question would be: can we avoid describing and experiencing the modern constellation of our societies without employing the teleological perspective of progress? I mean, even Habermas’ idea that modernity is an unfinished project cannot be maintained without presupposing some kind of deep teleology. And ‘unfinished’ is even stronger: it is referred to an organic understanding of a process that has an internal goal, and this process has to be finished: which means that we have to continue to struggle for the realization of modernity and we have to fight for the realization of the core of modernity. This was only a general invitation to take the question of teleology and the unavoidability of certain ideas of teleological process seriously.

But this was only a first general remark. Applied to a current question this means: if we don’t give up the possibility of describing the new populist movement as regressive, then we are already applying a distinction between regression and progression. The question is how can we justify this, what allows us to say that a populist movement like that of Le Pen or Lega Nord is regressive. And if you allow that, you are already sitting in the same ship I am sitting in, because you are forced to make this distinction. And the question is how to make this distinction without referring to some immanent promise within modernity, which can be realized step by step – so, in short, we can’t avoid the teleological schema of progressive realisation as long as we take it as almost unavoidable to describe certain social or historical developments as regression.

Alternatives in understanding socialism

Before answering this question, I would first like to make one preliminary remark about the use of the notions of fraternity and solidarity.

In my book The Idea of Socialism, I started by using the notion of fraternity, namely the notion used during the French Revolution, but in continuing the argument I slowly replaced the notion of fraternity with the notion of solidarity. This is not only because the notion of fraternity bears a deep male association – it refers only to men as brothers – but also because the notion of solidarity is placed on a slightly more abstract level.

My main problem in defining or trying to indicate what could be meant with ‘fraternity’ or ‘solidarity’ was to insist on a certain distinction between two kinds of cooperation or ‘acting for one another’. There is one form of acting for one another which is enabled, for example, by the market as presented by Adam Smith: the market in Smith’s perspective is an institution that by using the fantastic mechanism of the ‘invisible hand’ is caring for the complementary fulfilment of individual interests. But in the market, we don’t have intentionally to take care of the purpose of the others: in this sense, we could say that we are acting for each other unintentionally. In the market, we are following our own self-interest, but by following our self-interest at the same time, we are acting unintentionally for one other. In this sense, the market represents the exemplary model of an acting for each other without intention.

In opposition to that, my central task was to define acting for each other in a different way: in a way that excludes the normal understanding of the market. I tried to do this by adding one word, namely intentionally acting for each other. And ‘for each other’ is more appropriate than for the others, because here is always meant acting for all others. So the further question was how to understand this ‘intentionality’. Here I totally agree with Eleonora Piromalli’s observation that we should avoid the reference to positive affection as much as possible, because the more positive affections would be required, the less realistic the vision of socialist society will be. The task would be to rearticulate the idea of solidarity in such a way that it can function as a motor of social integration without requiring those positive affections, which are certainly necessary for bonds of fraternity. And I had hoped that when I spoke on acting intentionally for each other, this expression wouldn’t have required a lot of emotional attitudes or dispositions. I wanted to emphasize strongly that this form of solidarity can in principle be impersonal, so that it is not dependent on face-to-face interactions. If it is bound only to face-to-face interactions, then it would not be a recommendable pattern of social integration for big communities or big societies, because obviously we can’t presuppose that the complex societies of the present are composed only of face-to-face communities or face-to-face societies.

So solidarity in my view should be understood as an intentional form of acting for each other, and the precondition for this acting is the recognition of reciprocal dependence and mutual interrelation. Also in Marx’s view, the difference between socialism and capitalist economy is that in the socialist economy, we contribute to the well-being of the other intentionally. In the model of Adam Smith, the people do not have to recognize their mutual dependency; they are mutually dependent on each other but they don’t have to have an awareness of it. Solidarity is defined by a recognition or by an awareness of mutually dependence, which means that I am also interested in the well-being of the other and that I am acting for the sake for the other in order to promote a joint goal or a joint purpose. And this has to be impersonally enough, because such an attitude of solidarity should be possible in complex societies, where face-to-face relations are no longer constitutive for all interactions.

That was my rough idea and for all these reasons I used the notion of Anteilnahme. This is a difficult German word, which is definitely less than empathy in the English sense and that could be probably best translated with the term ‘sympathy’. Empathy is a positive feeling towards the other, not necessarily love but something like love: a loving attitude towards the other. I wanted to avoid such a reference, because I was aware from the beginning that this would require such strong feelings among citizens that they can’t be realized in complex societies like ours. There is a deep misunderstanding that sometimes can be found in the socialist tradition or also in the anarchist tradition, like in the writings of Kropotkin, namely the idea that a complex society like ours can rest on such positive feelings among citizens or among the members of the community. I wanted to avoid that misunderstanding and for this reason I avoid the notion of fraternity, which is placed in familial relations, like those among brothers.

The further question is therefore whether the German word Anteilnahme is a good substitution for it. Anyway, I repeat, with this word I wanted to refer to an intentional acting for each other which also means the impersonal other over there: who is not personal known to me, but can work in a completely different place far away from me. Nevertheless, I have to be intentionally aware of the situation, in order to intentionally act for the others. I didn’t want to make solidarity closer to what is normally called friendship. And I never wanted to have a picture of the socialist society as a society of members who love each other or who have positive emotional relations to each other. A disposition like sympathy has to refer to the intentional awareness of mutual dependence. The question is whether I was conscious enough of this. If I wasn’t conscious enough you are right, because then I think it would be too exclusive and too demanding, for socialist purposes, requiring emotional attitudes like altruism, which I think are not necessary in order to think of the structure of a socialist society.

So to repeat: my main concern was to avoid the distinction between altruism and egoism and to avoid the reference to positive emotional attitudes like those in friendships and love relationships. I should also say that I would join Marx in his uneasiness with the common distinctions between altruism and egoism. The opposition between altruism and egoism is not exhaustive enough and it is not encompassing. There are other attitudes which I think are of higher importance, when trying to define the specific mode of acting together we are referring to with these notions of solidarity. Also for this reason I never used in my book the notion of altruism.

Maybe I was not strict enough there. But anyway there are other components that I think it is important to spell out, in order to explain what is meant with the idea of socialism. For example to share a common goal includes to a certain degree the involvement of sympathy for the fate of the others. When we are sharing a common goal, the fate of the others is not indifferent to me. I have to take care of the fate of the others far away, over there, but still contributing to the joint purpose. So these are the different components I wanted to put together in order to spell out the ruling idea of the socialist tradition and I know that in the beginning also Marx was not always very strict in that. In his early writings, he sometimes tends to have the idea that it should be relations of love and friendship that should prevail in the future society. That is a mistake and I agree that he is much more clear when he makes the remarks you are quoting from The German Ideology.

That brings me to another point in Eleonora’s paper, namely how inclusive such a project of socialism can be. With regard to this question, I think we have to differentiate between two dimensions. The first is the practical and political question of which tradition or theoretical current to include in the socialist project. It would be a disaster for the political concerns of socialism to be too exclusive: to really believe that some theoretical groups should be excluded – for example, analytical Marxism – because they don’t have the right concept of solidarity. That was a mistake always present in the socialist tradition, which created a lot of further subdivisions, where each small sect insisted on their own principle. So it would be best to have an idea close to the idea of social freedom that permits everyone to join. So I agree with your recommendation that we have to include as many versions of socialism as possible. But this question is really independent from the conceptual question: the question namely of how the basic goals of socialism can be better justified and better articulated. And on this conceptual level, I have to say that some of your suggestions belong more to political liberalism than to the socialist tradition. I mean, the more extended versions of political liberalism we have, the better it is, and it is clear that we should include them, but I doubt that this is still coherent with the socialist vision. Roehmer’s version of socialism, for example, is in my view an extension of the vision of political liberalism Rawls has offered and therefore shouldn’t count as a true version of the idea of socialism.

The same is true for Vorländer, who was a Kantian socialist. If you try to spell out what Vorländer says in the passage, you are referring to, it is, I think, political liberalism at its best, namely the normative idea that every human being should be treated as an end in itself rather than as a means, against a capitalistic society based on exploitation and instrumentalization. This kind of political liberalism can be understood as being adversarial against capitalistic societies based on exploitation and instrumentalization – and the same line of political thought you can also find in the writings of Rawls. Obviously I would like to have Rawls on my side and I would invite him to become member of a growing movement for socialism, but the constitutive idea of socialism is going a little bit further than his idea of political liberalism.

Variations of solidarity

Roberto Frega proposes a differentiation between different models of solidarity and so poses very tricky conceptual questions; I am very grateful to you, Roberto, for having made things conceptually so hard for me.

Let me first make one remark on Durkheim, because Durkheim is a very helpful reference point for clarifying the point I had mentioned before, when I was saying that solidarity is based on the recognition of mutual dependence and includes therefore an awareness of the fate of the others or an awareness of the well-being of others. I think this is exactly the idea of solidarity Durkheim had in mind when proposing that such solidarity would be produced by fair conditions of the division of labour: the role of the occupational groups in the division of labour is to sustain a shared awareness of mutual dependency and an awareness of the fact that we have to intentionally act for each other – the task of the occupational groups is therefore to somehow sustain the awareness of mutual dependency and guarantee the complementarity of the individual actions.

Now, I found your distinctions, Roberto, extremely helpful and I would like to indicate only some slight differences, because this might help us to get a clearer picture of where I want to go to. First of all, I would repeat with regard to your middle rubric – namely fraternity – what I had said before, namely that such a form of solidarity, coined as fraternity, is based on positive sentiments, an association I want to avoid. With regard to your first rubric, the Hegel–Durkheim tradition, I would say the following: Hegel is not using the notion of solidarity, while Durkheim is, but you link them both by referring to their attempt to ground solidarity within the ‘social’. Let me slightly reformulate this helpful proposal: I would say that their notion of solidarity is based on practices that they believe are entailing sources of solidary attitudes. If these are accompanied by a respective awareness, so that we are getting an consciousness of the meaning of these practices, we realize that we are already cooperating – and this counts for Hegel and Durkheim as a root for a solidary ethic.

So to go through your list, I would say that whereas the Hegel–Durkheim tradition is based on practices, the fraternity tradition, which in my view is too demanding, is based on affections of positive relatedness.

Then we have thirdly the Dewey tradition, as formulated by the mature Dewey, that is based on epistemic grounds – and I have some problems with this last tradition: there is in my view a slight overemphasis on the concept of problem-solving, as if people intentionally acting together are mainly concerned with problem-solving.

Everything depends here obviously on how to define problem-solving. Either it means something like a reflective attitude or it refers to what is included in all cooperation: cooperation then would be identical with problem-solving, understood as that with what we are always dealing when cooperating. Whenever we are cooperating, the idea would be, we are concerned about how to solve the next problem in view. Such a problem-solving requires a commonly shared interest that defines the perspective under which we experience something as a ‘problem’ and under we searching for adequate solutions.

But if we redefine Dewey’s notion of solidarity in such a way, then it is almost identical with the notion developed by the Durkheim–Hegel tradition, because then problem-solving is an internal part of any form of cooperative practices, it is not something external to it, but it is what cooperation requires at any specific moment. When a problem comes up then we have to invest epistemic energies, as Dewey would describe it, then we have to stand back and we have to engage consciously in finding intelligent solutions for solving the problem in view – but then problem-solving is part of any cooperative practice that Hegel and Durkheim take as the source for solidarity.

It is this the strategy I would use in order to bring the Dewey tradition closer to the Hegel–Durkheim tradition: occupational groups, as understood by Durkheim, are agencies for problem-solving within the division of labour. The occupational groups then have two tasks simultaneously: they have to sustain joint awareness of our co-dependency and interdependency and they have to be agencies for problem-solving – whenever a problem is arising in a cooperative enterprise at a certain point, then the occupational groups have the task of mobilizing jointly epistemic energies directed at solving the problem. Understood in this way, I would guess that the Dewey tradition and the Durkheim–Hegel tradition are conceptually not so far apart, as you, Roberto, are presenting it in your enormously illuminating schema.

Let me close with two short remarks on two further problems, namely the idea of social differentiation and on how best to understand the whole project of socialism. The idea of functional differentiation is a core element in the way in which I attempt to re-actualize socialism. This step has a lot to do with the observation that Marx is unable to define what is at risk when the capitalist economy tends to colonize other spheres of social life, be it the family or the democratic process. I thought what is needed to explain the risk is an idea of the normative principles prevailing or dominating within the different fields or spheres invaded by capitalist principles; only then am I allowed to say that the colonization by capitalist principles is something damaging, because some other normative patterns of action, some other value systems are in the risk of being destroyed. Only be being able to identify the normative specificity of, for example, the family, am I justified to claim that by the invasion of capitalistic principles something valuable, something irreplaceable for our form of life is about to be extinguished.

So in order to express all that, we need an idea not only of the functional division of labour within a society but also of the different normative principles regulating the various social spheres. This was the reason for my recommendation to adopt within socialism a concept of functional differentiation. Functional differentiation means in my view to distinguish within a society between functions, each of which requires for its adequate handling specific normative attitudes based on singular ‘ethical’ principles.

Competition and cooperation

I spent some time on thinking how to best present a viable idea of socialism by avoiding the danger to let it been fixed on something like an end state, a unchangeable telos; I took this, the fixation on something fully describable in the present that has to be reached in the future, as being one of the gravest mistakes of all former concepts of socialism, a mistake because it doesn’t allow a permanent correction of what we have to fight for by the experiences we are making in the active process of attempting to change things to the better – or, to employ a formulation used by Dewey very often, to be open enough to revise within the process the aims of what we trying to achieve. In that sense, to use a phrase by my friend and colleague Michael Walzer, socialism has to be understood as being permanently ‘in the making’. I find the proposal by Stefano Petrucciani to employ for this constitutive thought – the understanding of the project of socialism as being permanent in the making – the concept of a regulative idea very helpful.

I also agree to the formulations Stefano is proposing for this idea with the help of some thoughts by Karl Otto Apel; one could say that the regulative idea of socialism has to be the vision to allow in the future as much solidary relationships as possible and as few social competition as necessary. This is in fact a very fine formulation for what I had in view when struggling with the question of how adequately to replace the idea of an end state or a fixed telos: because we can’t be sure how much economic competition will be necessary in the future in order to sustain that degree of economic productivity required for satisfying the basic needs of a growing population we should aim for reducing competition to the unavoidable minimum – and we don’t know beforehand where this minimum will lay.

The problem of Rawls is that he pretends to know that a certain degree of economic competition is irreplaceable – this is the idea justifying the second principle in A Theory of Justice. The justification of the difference principle is resulting from the belief that you can initiate certain economic activities only with the incentive of financial gains by unfettered competition. I think Apel is right in claiming that we do not know exactly how much of that kind of competition is necessary, so in that sense I would say that the formula you are offering is a nice way to rethink what I mean with economic experimentalism, experimentalism within the economic sphere. I believe we have to test in the future how much competition is necessary in order to sustain that degree of economical productivity necessary for a permanently growing number of the population. I therefore completely agree to Stefano’s proposal.

Socialism and ‘political liberalism’

Let me finally come to the paper by David Rasmussen that was not presented at our workshop but was added to the list of published contributions later; I regret a lot that David did not take part at our lively discussions because this would have given me the chance to engage with his challenging arguments more directly and in person. The observation with which David begins his discussion of my attempt to re-actualize the idea of socialism is totally correct: I was in fact trying in my little book to argue that it was a huge mistake by Marx not to have taken more seriously Hegel’s proposal to distinguish between separate spheres of what they both believed to be the right concept of freedom, namely social freedom as opposed to individualistic liberty. Both thinkers agree upon the true meaning of freedom by supposing that it can be realized only by mutually complementing each other, by a specific form of being with the other; but Marx, differently than Hegel, assumed that it would suffice in the future to realize such communicative freedom only in the economic sphere in order to bring about a just, free and solidly united society. By this reductionism, Marx unintentionally produced all the flaws and mistakes from which traditional socialism suffered from its beginning and from which probably all the later ‘misadventures’ of socialism resulted. In this sense, it is completely correct to describe my own endeavour – as David is doing it – as an attempt to replace a socialism inspired by Marx with a kind of Hegelian socialism. So far I do not see any reason to complain about anything in David’s contribution.

The differences between us, however, start when it comes to the conclusions to drawn from these Hegelian lessons with regard to socialism. David seems to be convinced that there is only one obvious conclusion to draw as soon as one assumes with Hegel and against Marx that political liberties and individual rights deserve a place of their own within the design of a fair and free society: namely, that of giving up any allegiance to the idea of socialism and instead of siding with the camp of Rawlsian political liberalism. The justification for this recommendation is taken from the (modern) requirement of pluralism that forbids any ‘comprehensive doctrine’ to influence, inform or substantiate our visions of justice. Let me start my rejoinder to this well-intentioned advise by conceding that it is of highest importance today for any attempt to re-actualize the idea of socialism to define its relation to the Rawlsian alternative; this is the reason for the many efforts I make – mainly in footnotes and definitely not sufficient enough, as David rightly asserts – to differentiate my own approach from Rawls’ political liberalism. The differences begin where I believe that the idea of socialism is in need of an understanding of history that gives us reasons to trust our own powers to change things to the better, to be able to bring about the reforms required for a transition to a ‘socialist’ society; ‘socialism’ in my view would be only one normative concept of justice among many others if it were not rooted in a ‘progressive’ vision of history motivating people to believe in the changeableness of the existing social conditions and to fight for their improvement. There is another way of describing this difference between a ‘normal’ concept of justice and the socialist doctrine: whereas the first attempts either to justify some normative principles or to articulate an already existing normative self-understanding, the second over and beyond all this additionally also attempts to initiate the right kind of praxis – in former years, one would have said that the relation between theory and practice is very different in the two approaches. In order to be able to initiate such a political praxis, socialism is, as I said, in need of a specific understanding of history: not a teleological one, not a deterministic one, but one capable of indicating that ‘our’ activities and efforts are supported by a tendency within the historical process – hence my attempts to complement the doctrine of socialism by a Deweyan vision of history as entailing the potentials of an increase of communication or interaction. To put it in Kantian terms that are probably more accessible to an advocate of the Rawlsian legacy: a normative concept of justice remains fruitless and ignored by the people as long as it can’t explain why our respective moral efforts will make a difference and bear fruits in the future – something Kant tried to solve with his hypothetical account of moral progress within history.

What I just said was meant as a methodological point about the theoretical status of any socialist doctrine; it cannot take the form of an ordinary normative theory because it aims at providing its addressees with a faith in their power to change society for the better and therefore is in need of a vision of history capable of evoking such a faith. From this addendum follows, as David rightly remarks, that a socialist theory has necessarily to violate the normative requirement of abstaining from any comprehensive doctrine since the needed vision of history cannot be expected to be immediately accepted by every citizen. But this does not come as a surprise at all; nobody ever believed that socialism would be acceptable for every well-intended citizen right from the beginning since it never was meant as an articulation or expression of an already implicitly existing self-understanding but as the anticipation of a normative agreement to come. In summarizing these remarks, I would claim – as I do already at one point in the book – that socialism is a comprehensive doctrine that has sufficient evidence to suppose that it once will lose its partiality and become a universally acceptable principle. Let me conclude with the cautionary warning that this trust in its prospective acceptability does not allow any socialist doctrine to use illegitimate violence to enforce such universal approval – the only means today available to a democratic socialism for realizing its normative aims is the convincing power of the better arguments.