Human rights, reciprocal recognition and the state. A durkheimian contribution

Introduction

Discussions about the relation between recognition and human rights usually revolve around the compatibility of the individual rights of social minorities or underprivileged groups and the universal framework attributed to human rights. From Charles Taylor’s (1994) Hegelian analysis of French-Canadian identities to Cillian McBride’s (2013) Kantian discussion of the paradoxes of esteem recognition, one gains the impression that the main problem is how to guarantee that the social integration of difference does not harm universally accepted norms and principles, among which human dignity is paramount. Thus, Taylor makes the point that identities, as components of a successfully developed personality, are elements of justice and should be included in any broad framework of recognition. McBride, in turn, warns that although the search for social esteem has the potential to correct historically unjust relations, it brings with it the possibility of a search for social distinction (as understood by Pierre Bourdieu). In both these cases—arguments which are, of course, considerably more complex than I can do justice to here—there seems to exist an assumed incompatibility between minority rights and universal principles.

In this sense, Taylor tries to show that minority rights are unavoidable, and although in his essay the label “human rights” is never used, he qualifies demands for recognition as “a vital human need” (Taylor, 1994, p. 26). This need is developed not only through a monological ideal of self-discovery, but also—and mainly—through a dialogical discovery of the self which occurs through contact with significant others. That is, others can simultaneously confirm one’s expectations about oneself and demonstrate public respect by ensuring one is as equally valuable as all other citizens (Taylor, 1994, p. 34). Given the dual character of recognition as a force behind intimate relations that shape one’s identity and as a normative ideal of equal treatment, the problem underlying the politics of recognition is the accommodation of identity, or difference, and equality (Taylor, 1994, p. 36 ff.). The universal social structures upon which Western political culture is based should hence be expanded to become a “hospitable variant” (p. 62 ff.) of Liberalism; that is, they should allow different cultures to defend themselves within a universalistic framework.

McBride, on the other hand, also starts from the assumption that “Everyone cares about recognition” (2013, p. 1), but emphasizes that precisely because recognition is dialogical, “we must respond to the ways others recognize us” (McBride, 2013, p. 13). However, as he points out, because of that responsive character, recognition of one’s identity claims often becomes so entangled in discursive disputes, that the achievement of self-respect and self-esteem by one group may harm or threaten other groups’ feelings (McBride, 2013, p. 25). In order to safeguard what he calls an “ethics of recognition” (2013, p. 163), McBride suggests that recognition theories should be more attentive to social esteem in the form of rights, as in the modern universal framework of right, which is strong enough to protect minorities because it already includes human dignity as a fundamental right.

It seems, after all, that both Taylor and McBride deal with problems of compatibility. Accordingly, what unites them is the need to resolve tensions between recognition and vital or fundamental rights, which may or may not have to be evaluated as human rights. If this is correct, however, both of them discuss a framework of basic rights that should be granted to everyone, but neither of them actually discusses human rights as a political instrument or as a normative idea. As a special category of rights, human rights should be attributed a particular normative foundation, and that may have conceptual implications for recognition theories which acknowledge the importance of a sphere of positive right. Yet, the recognition theories of Taylor and McBride deal with the practical-political implications that arise with the need to accommodate difference within a vaguely conceived framework of universal rights, particularly based upon a general notion of the equal dignity of each person. Consequently, such theories are trapped in the dilemma of having to choose whether individual rights or the universal framework of the positive right is more valuable. Furthermore, being trapped in this accommodation dilemma, they do not take the further step of asking if mutual or reciprocal recognition can even be understood as a normative framework for rights, let alone human rights. That is, whether the conception of right that is included in recognition theories possibly fosters human rights as a principle of interaction in that sphere of right, on the one hand, and if the normative stakes of recognition could provide a normative foundation for that particular, special kind of rights which are human rights, on the other. This is a tension between two levels of recognition, right and esteem, but also a tension between the way two spheres of recognition relate to each other. This is a more complex problem than the one posed by Taylor and McBride. Indeed, this is what Georg Lohmann (2018) objects to in Axel Honneth’s (2011) distinction between a reflexive, or moral, and a social dimension of freedom.

In this essay I will discuss Lohmann’s objection to Honneth as follows: First, I will present Lohmann’s criticism of Honneth’s theory of social freedom, showing how he correctly identifies not a practical-political tension between forms of recognition, but a normative tension between the “I” and the “We” of freedom (1); second, I will defend Honneth’s notion of social freedom, referring to the use he makes of the notion of cooperation in that sphere (2); that will finally show, however, that his theory could be supplemented by a more complex idea of the relation between individualities and cooperation, one that I hope to demonstrate is present in the later writings of Émile Durkheim, particularly in his theory of the State and democracy (3).

Human rights and the spheres of recognition

Contrary to both Taylor and McBride, Lohmann’s point of departure is not the theory of recognition, but the existence and importance of human rights both from a normative point of view and in their political application. In this sense, the complex of questions posed by him does not refer to a possible—or impossible, for that matter—compatibility between human rights and forms of recognition. Rather, to put it crudely, the problem here is to understand how recognition theories would cope with the given fact of the existence of human rights. Thus, I take as my own point of departure Lohmann’s objection that Honneth cannot properly account for the fact that, within modern societies, conceptions of individual self-realisation must, on the one hand, be conceived as independent of – and eventually protected from – collective relations with the community on which, on the other hand, they depend for their actual implementation, hence for the effective protection of individuals (Lohmann, 2018, p. 89). This is an especially sharp objection to Honneth, because in his recent model, as Lohmann points out, the former takes individual self-realisation to be a moment in a more ethically robust form of life: social freedom (Lohmann, 2018, p. 91). Human rights, together with all the elements of social life that are realised in the sphere of positive right, are deemed to be a “possibility of freedom”, in opposition to “freedom’s reality”, which is represented by that social form of freedom.

In his recent essay, “The brittle protection of legal freedoms” ^[1], Lohmann takes this objection one step further. He affirms that Honneth’s delimitation of this tension between spheres of recognition involves a definition of what exactly it is that legal freedoms protect: In the perspective of objective law, they seem to regard legal freedom, and in the perspective of subjective right, they may regard private autonomy. The result, according to Lohmann, is that Honneth’s standards for measuring and criticising law and rights are internally weak, since they relate to negative freedom only, but externally highly charged, since they relate to Honneth’s concept of social freedom. This concept, in turn, depends upon a reconstruction of its own legitimating conditions. Contrary to a reconstruction of the legitimating conditions for the emergence of binding norms and values underlying legal freedoms, Lohmann affirms that the moral and political justifiability of the law are intertwined with each other and are, thus, what assures its legitimacy.

The problem with Honneth’s account, according to Lohmann, is that human rights are a particular class of moral rights that is oriented by the positive conception of right. This means that neither their protection nor their core definition can rest upon a moral perspective, although this is their point of departure (Lohmann, 1998, p. 89 ff.). This rather complicated status echoes a problem that has been present from the very outset in the definition of human rights: if they are taken to be universal, egalitarian and categorical, it remains unclear whether those contents refer to a pre-State form of rights or to a political community regulated through positive right. Here, then, is the hidden question of how the Right should be understood—in a moral sense or in a juridical one? (Lohmann, 1998, p. 65). In Honneth, Lohmann contends, the two are intermingled, but only to allow for a trespassing on the positive structures of the right, thus allowing him to take elements like the Universal declaration of Human Rights as signs—signs of the History, as he puts it sometimes—of the modern learning processes of cultural resources that feed transnational ideals of solidarity (Lohmann, 2018, p. 94). Accordingly, as with “the brittle protection of legal freedoms”, the protection of human rights either does not take their special character as forms of positive right into account or it assumes that institutionalised norms and values will be morally legitimate enough to account for their fragile existence. Indeed, there are two further levels where the assumption of self-realisation as a form of emancipation able to replace every form of positive right seems to be missing something.

The first of those levels still relates to the political dimension of both law and positive right. What is lost at this first level is precisely the critical character of projects of self-realisation, of which human rights are a particularly strong form. Not only are such human rights an answer to historical experiences of injustice or violence (whether felt or perceived), but they are also institutional arrangements and social constructions that assume other humans are bearers of rights. In this sense, human rights, on the one hand, immediately protect human beings from harms and fears, but on the other hand, they do that by means of a necessary reciprocal commitment. Moreover, that reciprocal commitment necessarily demands the existence of positive right, exactly because the protections assured by human rights are of that special kind which generally comes to the fore when individual life conducts are threatened. Accordingly, their critical potential is realised as the enabling of self-realisation in one’s life conduct and also when this implies that they are rights against the community (Lohmann, 2018, p. 98). That is, when they are against the norms and ideals that orient collective life if said norms and ideals are oppressive towards one’s life conduct. In the final analysis, human rights offer “a full arsenal of rights, through which the possibilities of individual self-realisations can be respected, protected and also ensured” (Lohmann, 2018, p. 98).

This problem, however, is a little more complex, for Lohmann also points out that it seems to be part of a larger change in the architecture of Honneth’s theory. That is, whereas in Struggle for recognition, self-realisation was still taken to be a final goal of social interaction, Freedom’s right normatively cuts out the “provocative spikes of modern schemes of self-realisation” (Lohmann 2018, p. 91). In the latter book, according to Lohmann’s argument, participation in democratic public life is mediated through the pursuit of shared goals. It is, then, not only that the formal structure of positive right is substituted as a binding force of ethical life in a political culture of solidarity (Lohmann, 2018, p. 93), but also that public life itself is no longer conceived as an arena for struggle. Thus, once it is rather modelled as a “community of the good willed”, it can only be a locus of self-realisation as long as self-realisation is already embedded in the community (Lohmann, 2018, p. 93).

What is lost at this second level is not only the experimental character of self-realisation which, as a particular case within moral rights, operates as a critique of oppression from the community; rather, it is the very possibility that political struggle, as those struggles which gave rise to human rights as positive rights, find a place within society—even though such things as human rights or positive rights may unfold within history. According to Lohmann in “The brittle protection...”, an approach such as Honneth’s leads him to ignore the fact that subjective rights are also the result of social struggle, as in T. H. Marshall’s description of the evolution of citizenship from civil to political to social rights. Furthermore, as Lohmann points out, Honneth strictly separates political rights to participation oriented by cooperation and exchange with other people, from rights to freedom and social rights directed to the building of a private self. Nevertheless, subjective rights should be understood in such a way that their political and moral claims are so intermingled that they are tasked with respecting, protecting and helping to fulfil individual aspirations all at once. This, according to Lohmann, also includes human rights.

However, this objection points to a deeper complex of problems within Honneth’s model: besides the already mentioned tension in the normative dimension of freedom, this second objection reveals that there is also a question concerning the ability of Honneth’s recent theory of recognition to address social conflict and, more importantly, its consequences. In other words, in moving away from a theory of the struggle for recognition towards a normative reconstruction of internal conditions for mutual recognition, Honneth loses sight of the critical dimension brought about by the mediating elements of social struggle, as well as from institutions such as positive right. According to Lohmann, this is due to a more profound cause within Honneth’s theory; namely, the tension between forms of positive and subjective rights which manifests as a tension between the spheres of reciprocal recognition that Honneth normatively reconstructs. In this sense, the objection also implies that Honneth’s strong emphasis on the conditions for social freedom also means that the formal, positive structures of institutional life in society are not given an accurate value as moments of critical self-realisation. This is a problem because political forms of self-realisation, of which human rights are a particularly acute case, on the one hand also represent a critical instance within modern societies. On the other hand, precisely because they have a critical potential, they ought to be evoked as elements of criticism rather than dismissed as incomplete forms of self-realisation. On a further level, however, this objection may be read as suggesting that Honneth does not place enough importance on all the elements present in the sphere of positive right, including positive law, but also the State, which both safeguards the application and implementation of the law and plays a mediating role in the formation of conditions for self-realisation ^[2].

To summarise, from the viewpoint of the human rights doctrine, there are two difficulties in the Honnethian theory of recognition when it comes to dealing with human rights: first, there is no room for positive right and its critical forms; second, there is no room for social struggle and its effects, as is the case for that special kind of rights—human rights. Particularly regarding the problem of human rights, this could be traced to a tension between the reflexive and the social forms of freedom, or more broadly to the place and the role of societal institutions of positive right within Honneth’s model. This is why, in the next steps, I would like to address the question of whether a theoretical framework of recognition, in which freedom is based upon an implicit notion of reciprocity, can safeguard the necessary moment of individual self-realisation that is central to human rights. And, if so, which role, if any, the State should play in the realisation of individual forms of life and conduct.

The “I” and the “We” of freedom

Even if Lohmann’s objections did not refer only to the model of recognition, they would still open a wider range of problems that could be understood as a question regarding the role of a State within the architecture of Honneth’s recent recognition theory. First of all, it must be clear that this is not the same as the political deficit in Honneth’s theory spelled out by Werle and Melo, for example (Werle & Melo, 2007; 2013). Their criticism is that Honneth does not set out the principles of reciprocal justification necessary for mutual recognition, thus falling into a sort of political gap concerning political action. However, Lohmann’s point is that the justification of human rights is seen by Honneth as either less important than the social norms of reciprocal recognition or as resulting from a learning process that does not relate to social struggle, and, even more, from an understanding that learning processes would be better explained as the institutionalisation of claims made through social struggles. Accordingly, it is not that there is no room for political action, but that politics is deflated within Honneth’s normative reconstruction. Nevertheless, Honneth’s own procedure of a normative reconstruction of the conditions for ethical life in modernity must be observed rather as a contribution to the implicit values that are present in democratic social life. In order to better understand this idea, it is necessary to start by taking a step back and consider the unfolding of his theory.

First of all, it should be clear that, leaving his earlier interactionist assumptions aside, Honneth’s recent model of a theory of recognition relies upon a sociological enterprise in which he refers to a functionalist form of explanation of social life, particularly concerning the reproduction of society (Honneth, 2011, p. 19). This is indeed a sociological account of integration, only that instead of accounting for social conflict, as in his early work The struggle for recognition (2003[1994]), it rather focuses on social reproduction. In this account, social integration is as important as system integration. Individuals must actively legitimate the norms and values under which they live, as is exemplarily clear in Honneth’s attempt to give a new meaning to the relation between work and recognition (Honneth, 2008). By combining reproduction and interaction, Honneth then arrives at what he calls a “normative functionalism”. By this, he understands that institutional life, which is not heteronomous but results from functional differentiation, could be conceived as a necessary means for the realisation of freedom. Only if collective institutions result from implicit normative agreements, should the reality in which they find themselves be called social. These requirements are expressed through the institutional practices and routines that regulate the expression of one’s own goals as much as one’s perception of and the articulation of someone else’s goals. Through recognitional institutions, subjects learn to identify the complementarity of objective interests they share with other members of society, thus perceiving it as a collective enterprise at the level of its guiding values. However, and this is very clear in Honneth’s discussion of the labour market, he does not want to rely on institutional structures that could realise the implicit norms and values of production exchange. Because of that, he assumes that it is only norms and values that must be accounted for in the analysis of the normative content of markets, since they provide an ethical framework for the subjects’ orientations for action (Honneth, 2011, p. 333). This means, after all, that the pursuit of self-realisation depends on a previous set of unwritten rules asserting that economic exchange is understood by its participants as the only legitimate way of fulfilling their mutual dependence (Honneth, 2011, p. 348).

At first glance, this is why a normative account of cooperation is so important: If recognitional institutions are better understood as practices and routines, as forms of action, then they can only sustain the normative goals of reciprocal recognition if they operate as cooperative spheres. Furthermore, if reciprocal recognition is the normative core of freedom in modernity, then the spheres of action where it is realised should be cooperative. This, finally, leads to a further assumption by Honneth: within social freedom there is no reconciliation between subjects, but between only subjective freedom and objective reality (Honneth, 2011, p. 91). This is actually an idea Honneth has already been pursuing for some time; for instance, it appears in his attempt to approach John Dewey’s concept of reflexive cooperation (Honneth, 2000). There, the division of labour is taken to be a learning process of cooperation occurring in the public sphere and through which individuals develop a communicative instance towards solving public problems (Honneth, 2000, p. 299) which possess an epistemic rather than a political character. However, Dewey himself was aware that within public opinion and the public sphere, individualistic tendencies should be considered as more than a social pathology or a false development. As Franciele Petry (2018, p. 622 ff.) affirms, contrary to the way Honneth appropriated Dewey’s political concerns regarding democracy, the latter considered that internal dispositions and social practices should be constructed through a positive instance, which for Dewey would be education. Honneth, on the other hand, relies heavily on the idea that false developments come from outside the system of recognitional norms (2011, p. 231; cf. also, Kuch, 2018) and, accordingly, the creation of internal dispositions and social practices do not need space within those institutional practices and routines mentioned above.

However, it is in that extension of the intersubjective character of freedom towards the realm of institutions that one could identify the expansion of the I into the We of social conditions for the realisation of freedom (Honneth, 2011, pp. 69-70). Admittedly, however, this is also where one could recall the case where a critical element of reflexive freedom is transformed into social freedom. So, on the one hand, the cooperative character of interaction put forward through the combination of interaction and reproduction shows that it is not that there is no room for conflict, but that this room is rather occupied by recognitional institutions which have the function of coping with social struggle from a historical reconstructive perspective. If it is correct that this is a socio-theoretical approach that focuses on the reproduction of the social order and consequently on the establishment of its legitimacy, it must also be assumed that Honneth’s perspective is able to show that social freedom indeed achieves a higher level of legitimacy, since it is based on cooperative practices that span from the sharing of values to their institutionalisation. Yet, on the other hand, it is also clear that the “provocative spikes” of positive right are effectively lost, since the intended conciliation is between subjective freedom and objective reality. This means that the criterion used by Honneth to discuss the reality of freedom is not whether freedom is realised and protected, as in the positive right, or whether it is fostered, as in education, but is whether that kind of freedom corresponds to the cooperative norms which, as conditions for their possibility, underlie recognitional institutions.

The problem is, to summarize this second part, that in the change from conflict to cooperation, Honneth moves from his three original spheres of struggle for recognition (love, rights, and public esteem) to three spheres of cooperative action (personal relations, cooperative functions, and democratic ethical life). Therefore, besides the change from conflict to cooperation and consequently from action to institutions, there is another shift in the focus of his theory: Whereas in the former division of spheres of recognition the State had a central role as the mediator of a particular form of recognition, in the latter division of spheres it does not have a proper place, although it can clearly relate to any one of them. It is worth remembering here that it is “practices and routines” and “norms and values” that account for the orientation of action, so that the elements associated with the reflexive form of freedom contribute to the realisation of social freedom, but do not contain its distinctive elements. So again, what is the role of positive right as fostered by the State in this theory? Or, more specifically, how do we guarantee that the moment of individuality is not a mere possibility of freedom, a lesser stage compared to the reality of social freedom?

A State that, as a social representation, is individualistic

It is at this point that it is possible to appeal to Émile Durkheim’s political economy and moral philosophy. As is well known, Durkheim theorised that the division of labour creates societies which can only achieve stability and reproduce themselves through a set of values specific to every single one of them, and that such values must be created through the division of labour. That is why every single society has to generate a specific bond between its members, a feeling that can only result from that very division of labour: the feeling of solidarity. Solidarity, as resulting from the division of labour, should not be taken to mean anything like empathy; it means rather the force that bonds highly specialised and differentiated parts of those societies as a unity, a trait that is particularly necessary within modern societies. Accordingly, the moral function of the division of labour is precisely to guarantee cohesion within society (Durkheim, 2010, p. 30). But there is a second characteristic of such solidarity that is even more relevant. Solidarity not only reinforces social bonds between atomised individuals; the division of labour also presupposes that two or more human beings are mutually dependent (Durkheim, 2010, pp. 27-8). Hence, a second-level moral value of the division of labour alone can provide the means for the reciprocal satisfaction of mutual dependence—and consequently it can generate cohesive effects upon society. Once the very cause of the division of labour is understood as human incompleteness, the core of the social solidarity resulting from it is dual: on the one hand, in what could be called the practical dimension of social interaction, one person acknowledges her own dependence on others, but on the other hand, in what could be envisaged as a normative counterpart to that practical dimension, one person must also see as her task as working towards the satisfaction of others’ necessities. Hence, the exchange that comes about through the division of labour is a practical effect that relies upon a mediated satisfaction of individuals’ mutual dependence. One’s productive activity, according to this, is developed as a form of reciprocity for others’ productive activity. Therefore, it is not only the implicit recognition of others’ necessities, but also of a mediated horizon of experiences that is a result of the division of labour. Based on such an assumption, one can start to describe Durkheim’s theory of society as a model of reciprocal recognition.

Exemplary of Durkheim’s concerns about the implicit recognition of others as addressees of one’s action is his treatment of the anomic forms of division of labour. According to him, among the greatest threats to the division of labour are its excessive development or a lack of coordination between specialised activities, both of which result in social disintegration. Taking scientific specialisation as one case for the first threat, he affirms that once the scientist limits herself to the deep details of her field, science becomes so fragmentary, that it loses sight of the cooperative activities that constitute it from the ground up ^[3]. Consequently, it loses sight of the partners who work in the same (general) enterprise and even of the enterprise itself (Durkheim, 2010, p. 372). Thus, instead of complementary functions, the excessive division of labour ends up undermining the effects of the very solidarity it had created. Likewise, commercial and industrial crises that led to a wave of crackdowns in the mid-XIX century France provided evidence that the actions of the entrepreneurs would sometimes overlap and concur, so that the expected harmony of actions would give room to unregulated profiteering (Durkheim, 2010, p. 368). In this last case, the extent to which Durkheim brings the idea of a complementarity of interest embedded in the division of labour is so great that he supposes that employers’ and employees’ understanding of social roles is part of the experience of mutual satisfaction of needs (Durkheim, 2010, p. 383). In any case, apart from the anomic developments encountered in the unfolding of the division of labour, in its normal course it has to fulfil the function of providing human beings with a satisfactory way of overcoming their incompleteness through the mutual satisfaction of necessities.

So, once the division of labour extends, a kind of solidarity proper to the social order of specialisation emerges, where functional differentiations are directly tied to individuals’ personal ability to perform such functions. This results initially in an increase in individual functional autonomy (Durkheim, 2010, p. 109). However, in the course of the historical process, it also results in the acknowledgement of the individual personality as a central element of social life. In Durkheim’s vocabulary, a cult for human dignity as the individual person emerges (Durkheim, 2010, p. 155; and mainly 2016b). The institutionalisation and ruling of that cult for the individual personality demands a special organ, which must be able to coordinate the emerging particular activities, that is, to make them into a unitary whole: the State. Now, Durkheim makes it very clear that the State is neither to be taken as a collective consciousness, nor as an incarnation of one. The State is rather an administrative organ within which representations are elaborated that somehow involve the collectivity. So, amidst the heteronomy of social representations that will inevitably contradict each other at some point, the State is the moment of reflexive institutionalisation of collective representations that has the force of binding values for that given society. Moreover, the authority of the collective is itself moral. It has as its source the fact that any immaterial good human civilisation can enjoy is a debt to the existence of that sui generis psychic reality called society. Without society, reason, science or art would never have developed to a point that humans could even differentiate themselves from nature through culture (Durkheim, 1967, p. 130). This implies that the collective has an intrinsic moral character. It is not only a form of interaction that demands humans collectively build value horizons to orient themselves—what is usually understood as culture, as opposed to nature—but is also represented in the reflexive interests the State organises and coordinates through its particular status—what is usually understood as civil administration and civic morals. The psychic organ of the State is also the reflexive consciousness of the collective, which, for its part, is entitled to moral authority over society’s shared values and ideals. Finally, this moral entitlement can emerge only if exactly those values and ideals that emerge from the State’s elaboration of representations that inhabit society are seen as legitimate by the members of that society. In this complex balance of the relation between individual and collective, the outputs of the historical process of division of labour come again to the fore.

Perhaps the greatest practical consequence of the division of social labour was not the emergence of social solidarity, but the notion that individual diversity can manifest freely, and, consequently, that personhood becomes the core of civil morals (Durkheim, 1999, p. 102). Assuming this, Durkheim goes on to say that from the moment the individual, along with his/her freedom, was established at the centre of society (and this, as mentioned above, only comes about within the shared horizon of expectations generated by the division of labour), the interests of the collective cannot be other than the defence of the interests of the individual, or, more precisely, the interests of the individuality. This is why the State’s main function is to free individual personalities (Durkheim, 1999, p. 92). Thus, in contrast to traditional political thought, Durkheim does not see a mere negative function for the State regarding freedom; he rather understands its role as providing individuals with the chance to exercise the kind of freedom they only have at their disposal because of their relations of mutuality. However, such a task is not the same as the defence of individual self-realisation since Durkheim is explicit that the individual personality should be freed because, as a social ideal, it is an outcome of subjects’ interdependence.

Now, this could already be seen as a morally embedded form of reflexivity, since it is based on the satisfaction of the economically mediated form of interdependence expressed in the historical tendency toward specialisation and complexification. This can be specified as follows: The State’s coordinating role amounts to no more—but also no less—than reflexively establishing rules of collective conduct based on a moral principle of respect and the protection of subjects’ individuality. Individuality, for its part, is only developed because subjects can legitimately pursue their own interests within an environment of organic solidarity; that is, an environment where they know their own activities will fulfil other people’s necessities and vice versa. Accordingly, the interactive character of an environment based on the specific form of solidarity which emerges from the division of labour is not solely based upon the implicit notion of interdependence, but also upon the fact that the horizon of shared values and legitimate expectations is constructed as an intersubjective compromise of mutual recognition among subjects regarding their reciprocal needs. The way Durkheim imagines that the coordinate organ of solidarity will be able to free individualities, therefore, is to reflexively make subjects aware of their mutual dependence as the central moral principle of collective life ^[4].

Of course, Durkheim does not employ the vocabulary of social recognition here, nor that of intersubjectivity. Yet, in attributing to the State the role of a reflexive organiser of the conditions of individual freedom—a context where real freedom can only be intersubjectively achieved— Durkheim belongs to a tradition of thought that, in Honneth’s understanding, does not limit itself to comprehending the conditions of freedom as related to their juridical, positive elements (Honneth, 2011, p.126). Once it is dedicated to the general development of morality within society, Durkheim’s account tries to comprehend how the process originating with the division of labour permeates other areas of sociability. Accordingly, he affirms that not only is modern political life gradually being shaped by the effects of that process (Durkheim, 1999, p. 147), but also that respect for the principle of mutual recognition, or the recognition of the moral status of the individual, in the Frenchman’s terms, is what generally organises all exchange between individuals within society. This is because those exchanges—economic, political, and civil—historically substitute ritualised forms of reciprocal contract (Durkheim, 1999, pp. 256-7). This last form of compromise is called the consensual contract, and it is the leading form of mutual compromise in modern societies. What is even more striking, though, is that Durkheim affirms that it substitutes the material tradition of the real contract for a “spiritual and psychic” tradition of exchange (Durkheim, 1999, p. 271, italics added). In other words, the specific morals that organise juridical, economic, political and every other form of exchange within society are based mainly on the principle of respect for the other, a principle that, as we have seen, is explained by Durkheim in a similar way to authors who use the vocabulary of intersubjective recognition.

To summarize this third section then, one could say that moving forward from the evolutionary picture presented in The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim was confronted with the task of explaining how exactly the development of interdependence could also result in the establishment of individuality as the core value of modern societies. At the same time, he is compelled to explain such a development without opposing it with the emergence of the modern State, precisely because the latter also grew in importance throughout the historical process. Consequently, he intends to show that the institution of individual rights is actually due to the State (Durkheim, 2016a, p. 80). Although such a statement must seem oddly trivial at first sight, Durkheim’s usage of it hides the idea that the establishment of subjective rights can only occur because the very idea of individuality was lent a sacred status thanks to the effects of the division of labour ^[5]. Thus, the State does not attribute natural rights to its citizens because they are naturally entitled to them; it also does not attribute rights to its citizens because it is a moral task to do so or because they are rationally justifiable. Rather, the State elaborates and establishes rights that are already legitimated as an ideal within society. This is especially important, insofar as it shows that Durkheim evolved from a functionalist explanation based on the division of labour to one that highlights its normative value as a foundation of modern societies through the connection between a functionalist and an integrative approach. I think this is what Honneth intends to do, but without relying on a social mechanism like Durkheim does ^[6].

Conclusion

Although sharp in its content, Lohmann’s criticism of Honneth does not aim to challenge the latter’s system of recognition. Rather, it points to a tension in the relation between two dimensions of social action in Honneth’s theory. Paramount to that is the account of rights and, more generally, of the structures of legal and reflexive freedom like the State. Even though that tension must be acknowledged, Honneth’s recent model must be understood as a theory of society’s reproduction, so that the matter of legitimacy of institutional practices and routines does, indeed, have to come to the fore. If one consequence is that the positive right loses the critical character associated with projects of individual self-realisation, it also means that shared values and norms become elements of institutional, social reality. The problem now seems to be that there are not mediating stances between individual conducts and projects of self-realisation, on the one hand, and reciprocal projects of self-realisation, on the other. And that is the issue Durkheim can possibly help solve.

According to Durkheim’s lectures on civil morals, the State must be taken as an administrative organ within which representations are elaborated that later flow into society. However, this also means that the State must possess an openness to the heteronomy of social representations that correspond to the psychic life representations diffused within society. Furthermore, it must have an intrinsic capacity to self-consciously steer society through such heteronomy (Durkheim, 2016a, p. 70). In a sense, the state is an organ more capable of deciding what is best for society; on the other hand, during the establishment of the historical process of division of labour, society had already established as an ideal, a sacred cult, what matters most for it: individuality (Durkheim, 2016b). Thus, the State is actually the organ whose task is to provide a proper connection between individuals and the ends which allow them to be what they are, namely, a community of mutually-dependent and mutually-satisfying individual persons.

Since society generates the ideal of individuality (Durkheim, 2016b, p. 61), the fundamental task of its self-conscious steering organ is to liberate individual personalities (Durkheim, 2016a, p. 87). This is why Durkheim talks about a State that is at once individualistic, without being an institution devoted to negative freedom, and wide, without being mystically associated with transcendental Reason (Durkheim, 2016a, p. 89). Rather, the very existence of the State and the norms inhabiting it are results of an interplay of cultural, political and economic values that are legitimated from below ^[7]. Therefore, because it is the political form that more closely conforms to the social ideal of individuality, democracy appears to Durkheim as the social character of modern societies (Durkheim, 2016a, pp. 125-6). It is precisely because Durkheim sees democracy as a character that relates to the ideal of individuality as socially mediated interdependence that one could read his writings on civic morals as a more complex contribution to a political economy of reciprocal recognition. Instead of merely asserting functional interdependence, in those lectures the Frenchman assigns a normative trait to the division of labour that is at the same time functional and political. If this is correct, this could not only help solve the tension between forms of freedom within Honneth’s society, but it could also safeguard the space for self-realisation as individual life conduct, as defended by Lohmann.