So Honneth claims that Marx has an economic reductionist theory of society, but the dimensions of work and the economy are rather missing in his own theory of recognition. His book from 1996 does not make evident how his distinction between emotions/rights/esteem relates to the realm of the production and control of use-values that satisfy human needs, i.e. the realm of work, which renders his approach prone to the accusation that it is a form of philosophical idealism that disregards society’s materiality.
5.3.3. Honneth and Habermas’ Distinction between System and Lifeworld
Although Honneth (1996) does not make it explicitly evident in The Struggle for Recognition, his approach seems to presuppose Habermas’ distinction between system integration and social integration. Habermas bases his categories of the system and the lifeworld on this diferentiation.
I have proposed that we distinguish between social integration and system integration: the former attaches to action orientations, while the latter reaches right through them. In one case the action system is integrated through consensus, whether normatively guaranteed or communicatively achieved; in the other case it is integrated through the nonnormative steering of individual decisions not subjectively coordinated (Habermas 1987, 150).
Although Habermas can account for the reification of communication as the colonisation of the lifeworld, he separates the systems of the economy and politics from the realm of communication, arguing that communication is pure, noninstrumental, and emancipatory. Communication is however part of systems of accumulation and domination. There is a whole field of studies termed ‘strategic communication’ – defined as the ‘purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission’ (Hallahan et al. 2007, 3), which includes the four clusters of corporate communication, marketing/advertising/public relations, business communication skills, and organisational communication. Strategic communication focuses on how to use communication in order to accumulate monetary capital, which shows that communication is also a tool and instrument for system integration, rendering the distinction between social and system integration meaningless. For Habermas, colonisation is a process, in which money and power substitute and replace communicative action. But in reality, communication often mediates the accumulation of money and power and thereby has itself an instrumental character.
The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory
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