Harris, Neal.Pdf

A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details i UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Beyond Recognition: A Critique of Contemporary Social Pathology Diagnosis Neal Harris Candidate Number: 160021 Qualification: PhD Sociology Supervised by Professor Gerard Delanty and Dr. James Hardie-Bick Number of Words: 79,995 Submitted 10th May 2019 ii I hereby submit that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted either in the same or different form to this or any other University for a degree. Signature: iii Acknowledgements: It has been a true privilege to have been supervised by Gerard Delanty. Through the entirety of my research he has been exceptional. His generosity with his time, both on this thesis, and other projects, has been phenomenal. James Hardie-Bick deserves thanks for his continual and enthusiastic support, ever-present coffee machine, kind words and provocative conversation. Beyond my immediate supervisors, Sussex has provided me with a cadre of formidable dialecticians to throw ideas at. Special thanks go to the SPT brigade, notably Onur Acaroglu, Red Meade, Ployjai Pintobtang, Angus Reoch and James Stockman. The latest vintage of Sussex collaborators: Ane Engelstad and Anna Wimbledon deserve a warm mention. Beyond Sussex, Steve Barden, Tula McFadden and Jonathan Lennon have offered proof reading, whisky, IKEA flat-pack assembly, and all shades of conversation to help me throughout. My parents have provided continued support, moving services and a first-rate university-airport taxi shuttle. But my most constant ally through all challenges PhD: intellectual, emotional, organisational and survival-related, has been Priya Raghavan. How on earth did she put up with this for three years? iv The first person who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse Upon the Origins of Inequality v Abstract This thesis argues that a crucial resource of Critical Theory, the diagnosis of social pathologies, is being rendered impotent through its troubling and unnecessary marriage with a restrictive, recognition-derived approach to social theory. There is a growing literature arguing that contemporary Critical Theory has become philosophically, politically and social-theoretically unsound, increasingly blind to the meritorious insights of earlier generations of Frankfurt School scholars. This thesis argues that exactly such a development can be traced within contemporary social pathology scholarship. As a means of rejuvenating the Critical Theoretical tradition, this project serves to outline the utility of the many framings of social pathology which have been needlessly, and problematically, displaced by the ascendant recognition-based approaches to diagnosing social pathologies. This thesis seeks to champion a ‘polycentric and multilateral’ approach to social pathology scholarship, pointing beyond the myopically recognitive nature of contemporary Critical Theory. Key Words: Axel Honneth, Critical Theory, Michael J. Thompson, neo-Idealism, Recognition, Social Pathology vi Contents Introduction: On the Importance and Relevance of Social Pathology Scholarship 1 Chapter One: Social Pathology Diagnosis and Recognition: Very Different Beasts 14 Chapter Two: Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition: A Critique 37 Chapter Three: Recognition Theory and Social Pathology: A Troubling Marriage 59 Chapter Four: Rousseau: The Social Pathologist par excellence 76 Chapter Five: Pathologies of Reason: Left-Hegelianism and Social Pathology 100 Chapter Six: Reconstructing Erich Fromm’s ‘pathology of normalcy’ 127 Chapter Seven: Rethinking Recognition 146 Conclusion: Social Pathology Diagnosis and the Future of Critical Theory 162 References 175 1 Introduction On the Importance and Relevance of Social Pathology Scholarship On the origins and import of this research Why Social Pathology? Long before I encountered the concept of social pathology I had been intuitively fascinated by ‘deeper’, more ‘foundational’ social critiques. In my teenage years, as a socialist from a working- class family, society simply seemed ‘crazy’ or ‘illogical’ to me. I would read about the grotesque inequalities of wealth, the self-indulgent fancies of billionaires, man-made global warming, the continued presence of racial and gender inequalities, neo-colonial wars, even the persistence of the House of Lords … to my unschooled mind, the best word to describe this was ‘bonkers’. So, as a precocious (at times insufferable) college student, I would puzzle over Rousseau and Nietzsche, not always understanding it, but feeling there was ‘something’ there which was ‘weightier’ than the prescribed liberal readings of my textbooks. During my undergraduate degree I became fascinated by Hegel and Adorno for similar reasons, and with comparable semi- comprehension. It was only during my Master’s, that these thoughts developed any clear form, and I slowly became aware that there was a rich theoretical literature on the explicit commonality across these authors: that of ‘social pathology’. This realisation largely came through reading Axel Honneth, who, at time of writing, is director of the Institute for Social Research, the symbolic home of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ of Critical Theory. Indeed, from one perspective, the reader might engage with this thesis as borne out of a ‘love-hate’ relationship with Honneth’s output, and his increasing divergence from earlier generations of Critical Theory (Honneth, 2000, 2004a, 2007a, 2010, 2014a). Two of Honneth’s lesser known texts were central to drawing me into the literature on social pathology diagnosis. Honneth’s (2004a) ‘A social pathology of reason: on the Intellectual legacy of Critical Theory’ and his (2014a) ‘The diseases of society: Approaching a nearly impossible concept’ seemed to articulate with superb clarity the importance of diagnosing social pathologies and expertly illuminated what this tradition has represented. Yet, simultaneously, Honneth’s own substantive scholarship seemed increasingly restrictive, even reactionary. The more I studied them, Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1995) and particularly his Freedom’s Right (2014) seemed entirely incommensurate with the theoretical insights and political urgency of earlier generations of Critical Theory. Honneth thus annoyed me, he seemed to ‘get it’, but not to ‘do it’ when it came to diagnosing social pathologies. 2 Mid-way through the first term of my doctoral research, Michael J. Thompson’s The Domestication of Critical Theory was published. I found myself in broad agreement with his argument: contemporary Critical Theory was a far cry from the political and philosophical radicalism of earlier generations. Thompson’s (2016) powerful argument, that Critical Theory has suffered a process of ‘domestication’, fitted perfectly with my own, protean thoughts on social pathology scholarship. Having read Thompson’s text repeatedly the central idea of this thesis became settled, to show how contemporary scholarship on social pathology has led to a domestication of this crucial area of Critical Theoretical research. From these foundations the ideas which developed into this project began to crystallise: diagnosing the central irrationalities of the social conjecture, the ‘social pathologies’, remains a crucial, if not the crucial task for Critical Theory, yet contemporary Critical Theorists were failing to do it adequately. Largely, this seemed to be due to the turn to a needlessly restrictive, and philosophically questionable, recognition-derived framework for conducting social theory and social research; an approach furthered largely by Honneth’s Critical Theory. Yet, while demonstrating the limitations and the domesticated nature of contemporary pathology diagnosis was an important goal, like Thompson, I was keen to go further. I wanted to point towards possibilities for renewal and to draw out the occluded potential for social theory and social research residing in the myriad framings of social pathology that have been lost in the recognition turn. My project was thus to have two objectives: to demonstrate the limitations of the dominant recognition-derived approaches to social pathology scholarship, and, perhaps more importantly, to articulate the potency of the multiple framings of social pathology once central to Critical Theoretical scholarship, which have been needlessly jettisoned in the recognition turn. This latter task helps to point towards resources that could be united as part of a broader, non-recognition-restrictive approach

Load more