Social Freedom and Self-Actualization: 'Normative Reconstruction' as a Theory of Justice.

In Freedom's Right Axel Honneth seeks to provide a theory of justice by appropriating Hegel's account of ethical substance in the Philosophy of Right, but he wants to do so without endorsing Hegel's more robust idealist commitments. I argue that this project can only succeed if Honneth can offer an alternative, comparatively robust demonstration of the rationality and normative coherence of existing social institutions. I contend that the grounds Honneth provides for this claim are insufficient for his purposes. In particular, I argue that Honneth's claim that 'justice and individual self-determination are mutually referential,' even were it to be accepted, would be insufficient to underwrite his more robust identification between the normative foundations of justice, autonomy and reciprocal self-realization. In the final section of the paper, I turn to Honneth's analysis of the 'social institution' of friendship, which he, following Hegel, holds up as a paradigmatic instantiation of social freedom understood as, in Hegel's words, 'being with oneself in another' ( Beisichselbstsein in einem Anderen). I argue that an analysis of the normative import of friendship wholly in terms of mutual recognition misses an important aspect of the kind of self-realization that friendship makes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]