Jean-Philippe Deranty - Doing Justice To The Past

Article
Philosophy and Social Criticism

2017, Vol. 43(8) 812836
Doing justice to the past: The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permission:
Critical theory and the sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0191453716685757
journals.sagepub.com/home/psc
problems of historicism
Jean-Philippe Deranty and Andrew Dunstall

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
In this article, we argue that the usual restriction of critical theory to modern norms is subject to
problems of coherence, historical accuracy and moral obligation. First, we illustrate how critical
theory opposes itself to societies designated as pre-modern, through a summary of Honneths
recognition theory. We then show how an over-emphasis on modernitys normative novelty
obscures counter-currents in ethical life that threaten the unity of the modern era. Those two
steps prepare the main analysis: that the exceptionalist modernism of critical theory distorts our
view of history and ignores normative dimensions of the past. We show how medieval and early-
modern societies in Europe experienced many conflicts and possessed institutions that create
illuminating configurations with modern norms. As a result, we articulate several kinds of moral
and political link to the past that should lead critical theorists to expand the historical reach of
their analyses.
Keywords
Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Axel Honneth, medieval society, modernity
One would be forgiven for thinking that some of the most influential work done in
contemporary critical theory today appears from other perspectives to be provincial and
untimely. Debates about modernity, modernization and the accuracy and methodological
usefulness of these terms have been going on within social and critical theory for some
time.1 In other fields, postcolonial perspectives, historiography, anthropology and
sociology have all heaped suspicions and arguments against reifying oppositions
between the modern and the pre-modern, the modern and the traditional.2 However,
despite these challenges, and the substantial scholarship problematizing modernity,
much contemporary critical theory continues to employ a classical view of world history.
Corresponding author:
Andrew Dunstall, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia.
Email: a.dunstall@gmail.com
Deranty and Dunstall 813
That model appears as a Weberian unfolding through developmental stages towards a

normative telos embodied in a modern society. The paradigm of the modern society
remains western society. In this article, we focus on one specific problem associated with
this uncritical embrace of a now highly problematic reference to modernity as a tele-
ological stage in human development: namely, the normative relation between the pres-
ent and the past that is at stake in a critical theory project. We will argue that a partial yet
crucial source for the standards needed for valid social criticism is to be found in our
reference to past injustices and past suffering and the struggles that were waged in
relation to them.3
Social criticism aims to be historically sensitive, and so tends to be historicist, in the
sense that social conditions must be referred to their surrounding historical context. In
doing so, sharp boundaries between specific historical periods are often demarcated. The
historicist requirement is often interpreted in the following way: a given period would be
unified by particular norms, or indeed by the particular understanding of norms also
nominally present in other periods.4 But these norms or their particular understandings
hold only for a limited time. Then there would be a change and a new period would
emerge, defined and underpinned by a new understanding of key societal norms. Norms
from one period therefore could not be used to critically describe another, for to do so is
to apply norms that have no purchase within the context. In particular, the norms at play
in a modern society would be irreducible to the norms of a pre-modern period of the
same society. But is such a discontinuist view of isolated historical domains really
coherent, especially when it comes to the most important and deep-seated elements of
human societies? We think there are in fact serious problems entailed in this way of
understanding the need for a historicist stance in contemporary critical theory. We will
therefore focus our attention on problems of continuity and discontinuity in the concept
of modernity.
To explore these problems, and to make some initial suggestions to deal with the
tensions between historical specificities and inter-historical normative standards, we will
discuss the way a historicist method is developed by Axel Honneth. In his latest book in
particular, Freedoms Right,5 Honneth has explicitly connected the norms to use in social
criticism to the modern historical achievements. Consequently, he embraces modernitys
disconnection from its past. For Honneth, therefore, whatever precedes modernity
remains largely irrelevant from a normative point of view. Modernity conceived in this
way is considered historically exceptional in a clear and trenchant manner a unique
period of history, set off from all others.
We take the problems entailed in his modernist stance to have a much broader
relevance. So while we speak directly to Axel Honneths theory, we argue that his
modernist assumption is exemplary of an exceptionalist take on modernity that is still
largely prevalent within contemporary critical theory broadly conceived. The prevalence
of this exceptionalist assumption that modern society is so significantly different from
previous periods that it needs to be studied separately remains even though, as noted,
the classical notion of modernity inherited from Weber and the great social theorists
working in his wake (for instance, Habermas and Giddens) has been subjected to sig-
nificant challenge. We will compound this challenge through a historiographical lens by
collecting relevant scholarship of the medieval and early-modern periods. We seek to
814 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(8)
demonstrate across some key themes of social theory that supposedly modern norms,
practices and institutions have a far wider and longer history than is usually granted.6
We will not detail the many variations of the exceptionalist, modernist assumption
that can be identified across numerous writers within the broad field of critical theory.
Nevertheless, our aim in launching our study with a critical review of Honneth is to alert
researchers to the problems entailed in the widespread assumption of modernitys nor-
mative exceptionalism. This is why, to Honneths view, we contrast the work of another
prototypical figure, namely Michel Foucault. This allows us to open up a vista onto the
field in all of its extension, and to offer a glimpse of the import and reach of the issue we
have isolated. In Foucaults important, late text What is Enlightenment?, we find a
provocative reference to the modern. Across Foucaults work, and in this text in
particular, the modernist exceptionalism is explicitly articulated.7 As we will show in
our first and second sections, neither Foucault nor Honneth is entirely consistent on this
front. Both thinkers also provide examples and arguments that suggest a different kind of
relation to the past than the one that dominates their work.
Our aim is to show that despite real historiographic challenges, critical theory needs to
heed demonstrated, concrete, normative connections between past and present, beyond
the alleged borders of modernity. In our final section we explore 4 consequences of
doing critical theory without (exceptionalist) modernism. We show how a historically
expanded social theory realizes its own standards more clearly. The acknowledgement of
the rich history of protest against suffering strengthens present-day criticism and answers
a demand for recognition from the past. We also learn from what has gone before,
enriching our understanding of positive social possibilities. More specifically, critiques
of capitalism in its various forms must recognize the protracted violence of what Marx
called primitive accumulation in Europe. And that helps us better appreciate not only
the unique conditions, but also the anonymous labor that went into the positive ele-
ments that we appreciate and wish to promote in our present. These consequences show
how critical theory could, and in our view should, expand its historical vision. In doing
so, a strict demarcation of the modern is both counter-productive and historically wrong.
I Historicism as the positing of modernity

In order to study the issues raised by the exceptionalist take on the modernist assumption
in critical theory, the work of Axel Honneth recommends itself. His theory of recognition
is a sweeping, multi-layered theoretical proposition that was developed with the explicit
aim of pursuing, correcting and completing the grand tradition of a critical social theory,
whose ultimate foundation lies in a philosophical theory of modernity. Recognition
theory emerges notably from the critical reception of this tradition, from rereadings of
the tradition stretching from Rousseau, Hegel and Marx to Habermas and Foucault.8 The
rich conceptual apparatus offered by the theory of recognition provides answers to many
specific questions of social and political theory. But underlying those specific concerns
is the more fundamental one of giving an account of who we moderns are, what we can
achieve morally, socially and politically, and what holds us back still in each of these
areas. Of all the current models of critical theory, Honneths theory of recognition is
arguably one in which the modernist moment is the most pronounced and the most
explicitly assumed. This is why we focus on it more particularly here, to problematize

the modernist assumption that continues to hold within contemporary critical theory.
It is in the most recent formulation of Honneths theory of recognition, in Freedoms
Right, that the modernist assumption underlying it is the most explicit.9 The bulk of the
book is made up of what he calls normative reconstructions. These reconstructions are
lengthy historical narratives that retrace the transformations over two centuries of spe-
cific areas of social life. Those areas are selected by Honneth because he sees in them the
institutional realms that provide subjects with the necessary conditions for a full realiza-
tion of their individual freedom. They more or less correspond, in extensively improved,
differentiated presentations, to the spheres of recognition already sketched in The
Struggle for Recognition. Honneths fundamental Hegelian insight about the recognitive
logic at play in social reproduction remains in place that it is by being recognized in a
specific capacity by other members of society that individuals can fully acquire that
capacity and thereby have the conditions of their autonomy fulfilled. Examples of such
modes of recognition and their impact on freedom are those we can expect from the
previous book: to be free, we need to be recognized as being legally and morally
responsible, as having specific needs fulfilled on the basis of our vulnerability, as being
valid contributors to the division of labour, as being valid contributors to the processes
by which society governs itself. The bulk of Freedoms Right thus presents long histor-
ical reconstructions retracing the transformations in scope and content of key modes of
recognition that define the inclusion of individuals in modern society, through which
they can realize the different dimensions of their individual autonomy.
Honneths methodological intention with such a focus on the historical destinies of
the spheres of recognition chimes in with Hegels mature method. On the one hand, the
historical reconstructions define the specific meaning these norms and their institutional
instantiations have acquired throughout the development of modern society. Instead of
producing that content a priori, from the philosophers armchair, we can extract the
normative logic of key modes of socialization and self-relation, and follow the expansion
of those logics, from the shape they have actually taken throughout the history of modern
society, that is, for the last 200 years until our present.
However, since those norms and their institutional instantiations are conditions of
freedom, the historical narrative at the same time provides the proof for their ration-
ality. Hegels circular (dialectical) method is wholly embraced by Honneth; this is what
is meant by an immanent method as opposed to the a-priorist method Honneth sees
post-Kantian projects delving in.10 The history of normative developments at once
describes modern society in its rational core and justifies it as a form of moral progress,
thereby providing the very standards from which to establish its rationality. The funda-
mental norm of freedom is what makes this circularity a virtuous rather than a vicious
one. Since the concept of freedom requires that it be deployed as universally as possible
(in terms of the number of individuals enjoying it and the extent to which they enjoy it);
and since modern society corresponds to the time in human history when the norm of
freedom actually becomes universal in principle; since freedom therefore becomes social
fact through the institutions of modern society; therefore, as a consequence, to describe
those institutions is at the same time to draw out their rational content. On that basis then,
the moral superiority and thus the progressive character of a number of social
developments can be argued, in the positive, when these institutional realities actually
deliver on the promise contained in them. In a negative mode, when those institutional
realms fall short of the normative promise they contain, we have found a legitimate
ground from which to criticize aspects of modern society, and to understand and analyse
the emergence of social movements around those failures.
Such combination of thick historical description and strong normative justification
delivers a paradigmatic example of a philosophical theory of modernity. As we can see,
in such a model the philosophical and the historical are tightly interwoven. The philo-
sophers job is to articulate historical realities (institutions, ethical beliefs, forms of
social practice, particular events and movements if they signal important normative
shifts, and so on) in a philosophical way. But the project is wholly normative, it is not
about history for its own sake, for the sake of knowing about the people and
societies of previous or of recent times. It is about history only as the element in
which freedom can be realized and, just as equally, empirically fails to be realized.
Indeed it is about our freedom, since only in modern society has freedom become
a full social fact, made possible through its key institutions. From this point of view
what really matters about history is only our present, what promises it contains for
us and how it fails us in relation to those promises. This present-focused, normative
application of historical work is quite close to what Foucault called an analysis of
the limits inherent in our present.11
Honneths historicism then is of a very particular kind: it consists of a modernist
position, one we can call exceptionalist, which is typical of much contemporary social
theory. Its key underlying assumption is that the modern form of freedom is superior to
earlier forms, and not only more pervasive empirically. As a result this modern concept
is sufficiently distinctive in its constituent institutions and practices. A radical break with
any preceding social history is thus produced. This version of historicism asserts a
particular picture of moral progress for the modern world. It also follows from it that
once modernity is attained, there is a substantial unity within that epoch, for the modern
holds itself together in its self-recognition around its core normative principles.
The notion of progress we have just described, along with the narrative unity of
modernity, have been the focus of some criticism of Honneths social theory already.12
In the following sections, we develop new criticisms of these moderno-centrist, excep-
tionalist assumptions, focusing more specifically on the implicit philosophy of history
they entail.
The main issue is that the theory of moral progress entailed in the exceptionalist
stance unduly homogenizes the periods that are created by its underlying narrative
structure. Identifying a radically new normative achievement introduces a division
within human history between a clearly identifiable present and its past, which is defined
through the supposed absence of that achievement. However, there is an inherent risk in
such an approach both for the past and the present to be misrepresented, precisely as they
are constructed along a static and encompassing opposition.13 If the division is then
made into a principle for investigation, the opposition contradicts, precisely through its
positing of a break, the many links of varying kinds that might actually exist between the
periods thereby created.
In the next three sections, we highlight specific problems that arise from the homo-
genizing of historical periods and the severing of historical continuities. Our criticism of
a homogenizing approach to the past draws its inspiration from Walter Benjamins
famous critique of historicism, which we explicate in our final section and which inspires
the positive counter-proposals we delineate.14 From this Benjaminian perspective, his-
toricism as the projection of a homogenous time onto the past, is the epistemological
reflection of a practical failure to attend properly to history. Elsewhere, Honneth himself
expressed his sympathy for Benjamins argument. On this view, historicism performs a
moral injustice precisely because as an apparently rigorous and objective method it in
fact contributes to the making-invisible of past moral and political struggles. Such
blindness affects the way we view our supposed modern identity just as much as the
periods preceding it. In the next three sections, we critically examine the epistemic and
moral injustices involved in an exceptionalist take on modernity. We start by focusing
on the way in which the recent past, homogenized into our modern present, risks
being misrepresented.
II Homogenizing the present

An exceptionalist brand of modernism not only constructs a particular view of the past,
but in so doing creates the risk of flattening out the very present day the theory sets
itself the task to normatively and critically reconstruct.15 In erasing historical connec-
tions, a picture of the present emerges which tends to ignore the undercurrents and
shadows of numerous ongoing processes situated at different levels of social life. In
Honneths case, this homogenization occurs by portraying social formations that fol-
lowed the great revolutions of the late 18th century as forming a single normative
present, one continuous line leading to us today. This historical line is supposed to owe
its unity to the fact that it constitutes the gradual unfolding of the social conditions
necessary for the realization of freedom. Each subsequent generation, with the one
universalist concept of freedom as its normative baseline, is supposed to add its definite
contribution to this realization. From the perspective of history, however, such a view
risks performing an injustice by becoming blind to fractures that might affect this
present in its very normative structures.
This problem emerges at different levels of analysis. First, it plays out in empirical
terms, namely in the assessment of real historical episodes that appear to speak directly
against the normative rupture that modernity is supposed to represent. To continue to use
Honneths model as a paradigmatic case: if what we call our present is reconstructed
retrospectively from the perspective of the ideal telos of a full social completion of
individual freedom, then specific historical moments can become invisible as a conse-
quence. They are selected out of the modern narrative. Where the social-economic
situation was markedly antithetical to the telos that is to say, when large groups of
individuals were denied essential aspects of their freedom such moments risk being
passed over. The plight of the proletariat in 19th-century industrial England and France
could be one example here. Colonized people from the late 19th to the mid-20th century
are another. The telos of freedom reduces such extensive phenomena to mere deplorable
stages in the otherwise good developmental narrative of moral progress. At least
Hegels slaughterbench of history metaphor recognized the tragic dimensions of

human history, including the modern one.16 In Hegels philosophy of history, the
philosophical reconciliation with the rationality of Spirits realization could still be
coupled with a historiographical acknowledgement of all the suffering that had
been endured, as a kind of horrifying human sacrifice at the altar of freedom. In the
de-transcendentalized version on the other hand, there is a serious risk that the
sacrifices made in the present become invisible, that empirical struggles and real
suffering are moved behind the curtain of an homogenizing narrativization of modern
times. This is the first, empirical way in which justice might not be done to the past;
in this case, to the recent, modern past.
The problem of exceptions to the unified modernist narrative also plays out at the
normative level. For it is quite conceivable that a period covering more than 200 years
(on the most restricted definition of modernity), would have in fact created several
normative languages. The blindness in this case is not to empirical developments that
ran counter to the narrative of freedom, but to normative creations that are specific to
sub-periods within modernity. For instance, one can argue that there is a form of racism
specific to modernity.17 This modern variant of racism combines the deep-rooted dis-
criminatory logics inherent in the human psyche and in human societies, with elements
specific to the 19th-century scientific discourse and mindset, along with forms of 19th-
and 20th-century state institutions. Such a combination of elements built up a historically
unique formation, a modern form of racist thinking, that was obviously deeply influ-
ential in institutional practices in most western countries before the Second World War.
Arguably, this modern form of racism played a major part in the ideology and the
practices of National Socialism.18
This last example can be taken at the empirical level, as another, particularly
problematic, example of real historical development that dramatically set back the
universalistic principles that are supposed to characterize modernity. There is a sense
in which the pathos invoked by critical theorists when they use categories like cata-
strophe19 or breach in civilization20 for these events has a dual function. Categoriz-
ing such events as exceptions insulates us from them by distancing them from the
normal state of affairs at the same time as we acknowledge them. Designated excep-
tions therefore have a lesser effect on the analysis of the normative underpinnings of
19th- and 20th-century societies.
Modern racism21 is a thorny issue for a universalistic narrative like the one developed
by Honneth. For this particular form of racism could be upheld by people who also held
firmly to the universalistic ideals that are supposed to have been first asserted through the
political revolutions of the late 18th century. For many enlightened people in the West,
there simply was no contradiction between the universalism of status and rights on the
one hand, and racist views and their consequent policies on the other. The point of a race-
based view of humanity is precisely that not all humans are equal and therefore
universal principles need be applied only to those worthy of them. Versions of this
discourse should be differentiated in their structure and effect, from developmental
models to essentialist ones. It is an open question as to where a key thinker like Kant,
for instance, should be placed in this spectrum. Kant is exemplary as the most consistent
of philosophers who, according to recent influential readings at least, saw no
contradiction in being both radically universalist and holding exclusionary views.22 The
same issue can be raised in relation to gender or to the class racism displayed by
privileged classes towards proletarians in the 19th century, where once again Kant seems
to be a case in point.23 Critical theorists might wish to eliminate such modern normative
discourses from the core of their account of modernity. But to do so would leave the
ensuing account of modernity at odds with a full understanding of its history.
The examples we have just cited indicate that modernity is likely internally
splintered in relation to its normative foundations along several axes. To see how
complex these issues are, we can quickly show three simple ways to think about
modernitys internal conflict, captured in one famous text by Foucault. This also
serves to demonstrate that the argument just made, which was launched in reference
to Honneth at first, can just as well be taken up in relation to other paradigmatic
critical theorists.
First, there is the developmental, thresholds view of modernity. On this model, the
telos of a full realization of freedom goes through a series of steps. Apparent factual
setbacks in fact might point only to such thresholds, or indeed merely contingent set-
backs being encountered. This would be Honneths view, but would also chime in with at
least a possible reading of Foucaults What is Enlightenment?, since the latter posits
the value of freedom as the foundational principle of the modern ethos and encourages a
processual view of how that freedom is to be realized.24 The problem with this view is
that it risks underplaying the dark sides of contemporary society, as we have seen. It
might be crucial by contrast, for simple historiographical reasons but also for critical and
indeed for political reasons, to insist on negative phenomena (like modern racism, for
example) as sad achievements of modernity. These are not just a remnant or an aberra-
tion, but something made possible by modernity, something that defines modernity just
as much as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This might be what Foucault has
in mind when he defines Enlightenment as testing the limits of our self-understanding
as moderns, to uncover the dark side of modernity, either as it actually occurred or as it
could or might occur.25
Another classical view of modernity is that it is in fact split between a properly
modern and a new mode of organization, a postmodern one, pointing to a new way
of conceiving of our ways to know, our ways to exert power over each other, and our
ways to relate to ourselves.26 In this case, though, an epistemological Pandoras box
appears to have opened up. For what assures us that those periods now distinguished, a
modern and a postmodern one, are themselves homogeneous? Clearly, 19th-century
capitalism is not the same as pre-Second World War capitalism, and the latter is itself
different from post-Second World War, and indeed from post-1970s and post-2008,
capitalisms.27 But if that is true, then why should such diversity not concern also the
normative underpinnings of social formations? Once one begins to break apart period-
izations in this way and Foucaults methodological discussions of periodization insist
on this point as well28 where does one stop? On the other hand though, if one breaks
apart the present too much, what kind of homogeneous, general and systematic
conclusions will we be able to draw, as Foucault still requires of the critical theorist?
On the basis of what sufficiently general norms will we be able to launch any kind
of criticism?29
Modernity could also be harbouring contradictory currents, say, a movement of

universalization of deontic statuses, versus counter-movements harking back to older
exclusionary logics (based on class, citizenship, religious confession, and so on). Is this
what Foucault has in mind when he claims that modernity should actually not be under-
stood as a historically situated period but rather as an ethos, such that we would need to
distinguish between the contemporary (modernity as a historical period) and the modern
(modernity as an ethos), and the contemporary world would entail both modern and
counter-modern tendencies?30 Here the problem is that one can no longer rely on an
immanent historical method to justify the norms of social criticism, since the society
one critically approaches harbours contradictory normative logics within itself. If, as
Foucault claims, modernity harbours more than one ethos modern and counter-
modern how do we know that the counter-modern is not in fact the proper way to
define the modern as contemporary? Even if we just assume that freedom is the founda-
tional value of the time, how do we know what a modern conception of freedom
actually entails and how do we separate it from a conception that is in the present but
as a logic corresponding to a contradictory logic?
Whatever account of modernitys normative tendencies one adopts, the conclusion we
are interested in here is the following: the first way in which critical social theory might
not do justice to the past is if it fails to account for the alternative normative formations
of its recent past, that past that is close enough to form part of the history of our present.
But it seems as though any homogenizing talk of contemporary societies under one
banner (as modern societies) risks falling into that trap. So, the unity of a modern
period beyond the merely proximate in time remains problematic because the normative
underpinnings of modern ideals seem to be splintered on closer inspection.
Realizing that the modern period is normatively more complex than often portrayed
leads us to extend the sceptical interrogation and to question the nature of historical
continuity and discontinuity. In the next section, we will show how the pre-modern past
has a greater normative complexity than modern-exceptionalist accounts suppose, and
that there are numerous significant connections to be acknowledged between the pre-
modern past and the present.
III Homogenizing the pre-modern: Epistemic injustice

The exceptionalist assumption in social theory can also bring about a homogenization of
the pre-modern past. We wish to emphasize the pre-modern era overall, for a larger
view of injustice, informed by a wider set of normative discourses, and the countless
expansion of social struggles, enriches our view of the present in important ways. The
exceptionalist stance towards modernity cuts us off from that breadth and depth. And
with such a stance come several kinds of injustices to that past.
The first injustice is simply epistemic. In contemporary social theory, the reference to
modernity often comes with an implicit contrast with a pre-modern past about which
assumptions are made, notably regarding the normative values held at different times in
that past, which simply do not correspond to the facts. In his recent dialogue with Jacques
Ranciere, Honneth, for instance, has made the following claim about the absence of a
universalistic notion of social equality in the Middle Ages. Again, rather than arguing
specifically against Honneth, we refer to this passage as a statement that makes explicit
an assumption that is prevalent in much contemporary critical theory:
Isnt the idea that we should treat one another as equals the result of a relatively late process
of moral learning in human history? My suspicion would be that people in a number of
earlier periods in history wouldnt have been able to make sense of such a demanding idea
of equality. They probably wouldnt have been able to interpret their own claims as claims
for equality, because they were living in a world that did not have social equality as part of
its normative vocabulary. And if this were true (of the ancient Greek world or the Middle
Ages), then it would be strange to presuppose an egalitarian desire. I would not even know
exactly how to spell it out.31
Stated in this way Honneths statement does not do justice to the complex reality of
medieval societies. For while it is true that the organization of society on hierarchically
ranked orders made any broadly encompassing appeal to equal status between individ-
uals mostly impossible, this, however, was also in direct contradiction with the univer-
salistic aspect of the Christian message,32 which provided the ultimate cultural
framework for western societies. And that contradiction was played out in a number
of ways in pre-modern times.
The tension between the hierarchical underpinning of societies in the Middle Ages
and the egalitarian potential of its Christian principles produces many of the social
struggles that punctuate this period. Thus came the tensions within monastic orders in
the 12th and 13th centuries, as they were caught between a strict hierarchical structure
based on social status and the attempt to follow the key Christian message according to
which the first will be last and the last will be first. Jacques Dalarun shows how the
resolution of this tension led to innovations in the administration of orders and the
elections of the leaders. Such developments already signalled proto-democratic values;
for example, the idea that leadership functions should be awarded on competence, and
that everyone therefore was equal in status, independent of class or gender.33 In another
area, many historians have emphasized the depth of autonomous self-government at the
communal level, whether in village life or in the corporations.34 In these cases, the strong
hierarchical framework organizing society as a whole harboured very large pockets of
social life in which collective decisions were made through majority vote of all. The
(usually, but not always) male representatives of the collective participated on a princi-
ple of political equality at these local levels. These communal organizations also har-
boured strong values of solidarity through the collective management of common
resources that were essential to each and every one. While Honneth might be correct
in a very broad sense about the absence of a fully universalist dimension in demands
regarding social and political equality of status, nonetheless the norm of equality was far
from being ignored. Rather, egalitarian practices were thoroughly institutionalized in
specific contexts through long periods of pre-modern times.
The contradiction between status hierarchy and the universalism of the Christian
dogma emerged regularly and became a focal point in the many social upheavals that
traversed the pre-modern times in Europe.35 These (very numerous) episodes of social
revolt are crucial because they make visible the normative framework that underpinned
those societies.36 As it turns out, in many cases the demands made by the insurgents and
the moral grammar that structured their actions already pointed to some of the norms that
only modern times are supposed to have entrenched. As Samuel Cohn has shown with
the famous example of the Ciompi of Florence, if one uses the taxonomy of social
movements developed by Charles Tilly, then the movement of 1378 has to be described
as modern to the extent that it used universal forms of conscription in a struggle waged
with the explicit purpose of gaining control of the central power in order to introduce
general economic, social and political change. The first revolt of the Ciompi made it
possible for all men, whatever their previous professional affiliation, to be represented in
communal elections, and indeed to be elected to the most important offices. Cruder
forms of these demands had provided precedents in many revolts in northern Italy, some
well antedating the late 14th century. Revolts were waged to the cry of The people!,
demanding significant extensions of status recognition (political or economic, depending
on circumstances).
The peasant rebellions of the 14th century in France and England arose out of a sense
of outrage as the superior classes did not hold up their parts in the social contract of the
time. While the labouring classes often seemed to broadly accept their lot consisting of
working for the benefit of the orders of those who pray and those who fight, it was on
the understanding that those in return would fulfil their own key functions, either of
maintaining the ultimate source of truth and justice (the Christian dogma), or of defend-
ing the whole of society, against external attacks and against internal dissent, through the
administration of earthly justice. In both cases, there were strong moral and indeed
political standards on what a right completion of those roles would consist of. Breaking
those standards was perceived as a breach of the social contract, and in many circum-
stances led to major revolts.37 This comes out very explicitly in Piers Plowman, the
literary companion to the uprising of the English peasants of 1381. In this amazing text,
the full contradiction of the ideological structure of the time comes to light, as on the one
hand the hierarchical status order is not challenged in a direct way,38 yet Piers Plowman,
the poor labourer, is portrayed as the only true Christian in a society in which the other
two orders have usurped their power.39 So no universal equality of social status exists in
fact, and full equality is only rarely demanded (although it is already imagined in several
passages), and yet at the very least something like a functional equality between the
orders is explicitly expected and expressed.40 Analysis of the French Jacquerie of
1358, and other peasant revolts, shows a comparable pattern.41 Historiographical anal-
ysis of the Middle Ages, then, can contribute to giving modern norms much greater
temporal relief and thereby added normative depth, precisely insofar as comparisons
and connections can be drawn that are not simply ones of exclusionary contrast.
Indeed, different forms of egalitarian and democratic practices leap out at us, not-
withstanding the presence of deep inequality and bitter social struggles, indeed pre-
cisely as the ultimate normative horizon of such struggles. These examples protrude
from the past for us precisely because of our recognition in them of something we can
ourselves identify; a common, or comparable, horizon that places them within our
constructive, imaginative reach.42
We can identify other significant episodes and structures relevant to other fundamen-
tal norms, like those around practices of intimate relationship. When Honneth dates the
beginnings of friendship as an institutionalized form of social freedom towards the very

end of the 18th century, and only for privileged men, he forgets the importance of the
values of solidarity and brotherhood that animated and made successful the institution of
corporations and fraternities in the Middle Ages.43 Gervase Rossers meticulous study of
the art of solidarity in the Middle Ages demonstrates the depth and importance of
feelings and institutions of friendship throughout the time. Companionship and broth-
erly love at the level of everyday life were explicit goals and ideals of the confrater-
nities.44 The individual and social importance of friendship in medieval society is
reflected in a rich body of theological and philosophical literature dedicated to it. Many
of the most influential theologians sought to direct the emotional, moral and social force
of friendship towards Christian goals. Rosser argues that the model of Christian friend-
ship inherited from Augustine, which, through mutual exposure transforms the individ-
ual and leads, through the action of love for other human beings, to God, would shape the
philosophy of the later medieval fraternities.45 The importance of this institution for
individuals in medieval society cannot be overstated and should not be downplayed by
retrospectively taking more recent ideals of friendship as the only true normative
standard.46 In any case, as the historians show us, it is simply wrong factually to state
that strong emotional feelings of attachment between people were socially institutionalized
and thereby became a possible condition of social freedom only at the end of the
18th century. This example shows once again that there is more to be said for the forms
of life evident in the Middle Ages as being in some way comparable with, or indeed
illuminating in their distance from, contemporary institutions.
Honneth himself presents the hermeneutic claim that we must make use of the past
to make sense of our own moral projects. A retrospective view establishes the conceptual
model of freedom.47 Freedom in this sense relies on a specific sort of memorial
relationship, to the extent that it requires an individual to identify imaginatively with
struggles for freedom that have already been.48 But from this it does not follow that
modern individuals are limited to recognizing only modern partners in freedom.
In the examples we gave, it was a matter of an epistemic justice to the past, of
representing the situation accurately by not making exaggerated claims on behalf of a
posited modernity. The epistemic injustice can lead us to overlook and therefore slight
our old partners in freedom, who have struggled for norms that possess a connection to
our own. This basic kind of epistemic injustice, one of factual error where the pre-
modern is overlooked in favour of more recent history, leads to a moral kind of injustice.
A moral injustice dealt to more distant times still has critical and political implications
for our stance towards our present. There are moral and political links, beyond merely
epistemic ones, to be recognized. In the final section, we try to delineate several links of
this kind.
IV Critical theory beyond narrow modernism

What we are arguing for is an expanded and more significant reactivation of the histor-
ical elements that critical theory relies on in its attempt to articulate the principles
underpinning the practices and institutions of contemporary societies. Critical theory
should not homogenize the past, whether recent or further afield. We are not trying to
erase the real differences between, for instance, the Middle Ages, the 18th century and
the present. Rather, the methodological point is that normative continuity and disconti-
nuity are highly complex across history. At the same time, our claim should not be
confused with the claims made in the debate around multiple modernities. Our
approach is close to the multiple modernities one as we also insist on the diversity
of the present. But the notion of multiple modernities continues to take the modernist
break for granted. This break, however, should be considered as a problem to be
discussed.49 And this is because, or so we want to argue, continuity and discontinuity
exist simultaneously. There are several kinds of each that may coexist between histo-
rical phenomena. In any case, we must avoid the generalization that discontinuity has
priority. Sometimes, as we have seen with the example of racism, there are new
normative creations of the recent past, despite long histories of exclusion and oppression
of people groups. But for other phenomena, and despite the discontinuity in social
organizations, we have shown that important principles, like equality, have retained
their moral significance from long ago, and can be shown to have them for the future.
There are moral and political links with the past that do not rely on direct causal links
or temporal proximity. The general model that we follow, of an ethical injunction that
proceeds from the past, takes its cue from the conception that Walter Benjamin famously
developed in his Theses on history, which Honneth himself reconstructed in an early
text.50 Our criticism of a homogenizing of the past qua past of injustices and qua past of
struggles against injustice follows from Benjamins famous text.51 For Benjamin, the
criticism of progress and historicism is conducted on ethical and political grounds, and
not only on epistemological failings. The historians task includes a moral and political
dimension: she has the obligation of recognizing something about the past, redeeming
and protecting the dead from their enemies. That is the sense of the claim of the past,
and the weak messianic power of the present that Benjamin mentions.52 What sort of
recognition is this? This act reaches across times to join two disparate parts, constructing
a momentary identity, like the Jacobins with ancient Rome. Supposed distance in a
homogeneous time is cancelled here. Honneth describes this bridging of the past as
an interactive process, but how can one interact with the dead? The movement is never
simply retrospective according to Benjamin. Our coming was expected on earth he
writes.53 We have been appealed to from the past, Benjamin argues, left tasks to com-
plete that had been tragically left undone; a claim exists upon our abilities. By answering
to that claim, the historically minded critic of the present really does enact an effective
change on the past that had reached out to the future. And changing the past also means
changing the present.54 We can recognize retrospectively what was denied. Suddenly,
the issues of the present are testified to by a new host of witnesses. Their experience of
suffering is now addressed to us. Our response must address theirs. We therefore become
morally bound to a preceding group through historical work, and these groups become
witnesses to the present.
Alongside the historiographical oversights of modernity-centric historicism then,
there are normative reasons why we should not agree with the posit of an absolute
modernist break. The implications of the concept of a normative modernity would cut
us off from the moral and political witnesses of the past. However, having uncovered in
the preceding sections some substantial episodes that annul the idea of a normative
historicism, we can now use those events to identify several productive avenues of this
moral and political relationship with the past for critical theory. Two of these are of a
generic nature that should hold for all historical investigations; two are more specifically
tied to our present predicament and norms that are at stake today.
To begin with, we owe to past generations an acknowledgement of their suffering and
their struggles against injustice, for freedom and equality as such, despite the distance
that might separate us from them. For ignoring the struggles and demands of past
generations is to repeat their suffering and the injustice they suffered from a second
time over.55 This is a risk taken by an exceptionalist modernist stance.
A hard modernist account could still claim to be open in principle to the claims and
demands of pre-modern times. But the implications of a strict modernist boundary-
setting between historical times make such a claim problematic. First, an exceptionalist
position leads to the implication that we cannot know today for sure what it is the
French and English peasants of 1358 and 1381, or the Florentine artisans of 1378, were
really struggling against, and what they were demanding. This epistemic gap would
seem to make any identificatory moral projection with their fate and their struggle
problematic. Historical prudence commands that we avoid projecting our ideals into
theirs, and that in turn makes any sympathy for them appear nave at best. Second, if we
assume that it is only in modernity that universal claims can be made to equal social,
moral and legal standing, then, as Honneth stated in our quotation above, it is in fact
doubtful that those struggles were struggles against injustice in the sense that we give it
today, that is, as struggles driven by a need for emancipation in the general sense of the
term. Some historians, for instance, interpret lower-class movement, particularly of
peasants, as driven by a nostalgia to return to a more stable past, one in which they were
actually still dominated by their lords.56 And so it is not just that their sense of justice
and injustice was different from ours; in fact, it is even possible that they were not
driven by a sense of justice and a rejection of injustice at all, if by justice and injustice
we understand specifically the idea of full realization of the conditions of freedom
for everyone.
Against these objections, the examples taken above demonstrate that while granting
the historical prudence that needs to be maintained, serious historiographical information
and well-grounded historical hermeneutics actually require of us that we view many
forms of social struggles in past, pre-modern societies, as arising from a sense of
unjustifiable, socially caused suffering and the rupture of a moral contract. Even though
this sense of injustice is undeniably couched in terms different from ours, was founded
upon justifying languages that are no longer ours, it is nevertheless a language we can
still make sense of today. We are not sealed off from these worlds.57 Whether we look at
it teleologically as a precursor of some of our achievements or indeed of some of our
failings (as in the case of racism, for instance), or non-teleologically as just a kindred
struggle by fellow beings, for something that resembles at a formal level what we
ourselves demand when we demand equality or freedom or solidarity, or as a form of
exclusion and hatred that has features homologically comparable to ours, the facts and
their contemporary interpretation require acknowledgement.
We do need a lot of precise historical information to be able to read Piers Plowman, or
to understand the issues at stake in the revolt of the Ciompi in Florence, or the peasant
revolts of the 14th century. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose a relative similarity

that enables acknowledgement and a basic identification with their aggrieved state, even
if the exact content of their demands seems utterly distant. When Foucault turns to the
Nus-Pieds revolt of 1625 and reconstructs the origin and the form of their revolt, the
great historian of social formations has no problem identifying this revolt as the begin-
ning of a long historical line, the continuous history of the state-backed institutions of
legal punishment that stretches all the way to the very lecture at which he reawakens this
historical event for his contemporaries, to make sense of the present. No need to explain
why this example is relevant, he tells his audience in the midst of a Paris in upheaval, in
which police violence and state repression are his main concerns at the time.58 When he
famously describes his genealogical work as insurrection of dominated knowledges in
another set of lectures, it is quite possible that he has in mind the example of the
Nus-Pieds.59 This would mean that Foucault has no qualms in relating contemporary
struggles for freedom to very old ones, and in drawing lessons from the latter for the
former. In these lectures, to retrieve the oppressed knowledges of the past, to make a
history from below, is for Foucault to try to counter the modernist danger of doubling
past oppression with present indifference. Historical practice shows us then that there is
no absolute epistemic barrier to acknowledgement of pre-modern injustice.
The second general form of justice we owe to the past is not negative, but positive.
Through the construction of careful analogies and comparisons with prior historical
episodes, critical theory enriches its normative vision. For example, guilds and frater-
nities not only provided recognition, companionship and material support but were also
able, on the basis of the social force they represented, precisely as a result of the
provisions they offered, to challenge the institutions of power and gain greater political
influence. Indeed, in some exceptional cases such as in Florence, guilds were able to
achieve more egalitarian forms of direct political representation. Such an example
should not be romanticized. The many aspects of social exclusion and political manip-
ulation prevalent in these historical examples need not be overlooked. And yet they can
still provide a positive alternative example (in the strong sense of the term), notably as an
idealized model to contrast with the caricature of democracy that many modern liberal
democracies have become. For all their flaws, the history of corporations can serve at the
very least as a historical demonstration of the necessity of socially based support for
vulnerable individuals and how political participation can be founded upon such support.
To take another example, some reconstructed forms of direct participation in com-
munal life as occurred in long periods for the villages and communes of the Middle Ages
can also act as catalysts for political imagination. It is not certain that contemporary
political representation in the lands of the free actually fares so well on a democratic
scale by comparison. The past can therefore be studied as a reservoir of normative
experiences available to be drawn upon and learned from. This, as Honneth himself has
highlighted, is most strikingly the role Quentin Skinner sees in the retrieval of a sup-
pressed republican tradition.60 The same gesture that Skinner makes in relation to
Roman republicanism, as it is rearticulated at the time of the English civil war, can be
made in relation to other forms of political and social justice: for instance, once again,
communal self-government, as a model for a decentralized form of government; or craft-
based solidarity as a means to provide social support and political agency.
In the second set of relations the third and fourth forms we have specific,
substantial normative links that tie us to a particular past. As historians of the longue
duree would argue, modern Europe has a long gestation period. We moderns directly,
however distantly, benefit from structures, labours and achievements of previous ages
which made the achievements, and thus the prosperity and freedom, of the following
times possible.
Third, to focus again on the negative side first, the suffering and the struggles that
critical theory should not want to sever itself from are not just located in a general past.
Those struggles do not count simply as general cases of human suffering and of revolt
against it, but also as being directly related to our present predicament, through causal,
genealogical links, beyond the mere link of human belonging. This is a key lesson to be
drawn from Benjamin. The angel of history moves towards the future with his head
turned towards the past. This refers quite specifically to the primitive accumulation
Marx described so vividly at the end of volume 1 of Capital, that is, all the episodes of
large-scale violence that made possible the emergence of modern capitalism in Europe.
This protracted violence targeted populations in European societies, particularly the
peasant communities who were forcibly removed from the land and transformed into
a property-less workforce subject to incredibly harsh legal control, and of course also
non-western populations who provided the slave workforce, as well as the markets that
were brutally opened by colonial expansion.61 In these famous chapters on primitive
accumulation, Marx insists with a great degree of pathos and overwhelming graphic
details on the incredible levels of violence that made modern capitalist society possible.
Perhaps an unintended effect of his text is to present the rise of modern society not as a
history of moral progress after all, the conquest of freedom for all, but rather as a descent
into hell for the majority, a definite worsening of the situation for most. For all their
economic, moral and political limitations, the medieval corporations, villages and the
independent city-states62 in fact appear in this part of Capital as benign institutions by
comparison with what started to emerge from the 16th century onwards.63 And so, as
Benjamin describes, a composite montage from the industrialist and the medieval past
conjointly forms a constellation. We see that this is a two-way relation that not only
teaches us something about today, but redeems the past by recognizing the subjects of
that past as fellows in a process of living interaction.64 Honneth has reconstructed this
argument himself, showing how the fact that cries of suffering in the past were not
listened to means that people were denied recognition of their moral rights. Later gen-
erations for whom there is some direct historical, genealogical line with the victims of
history, are able to continue, or alternately symbolically and indeed materially atone
for, such ostracizations. From the perspective of the present, this means that an alterna-
tive image of the past, like those we have sought to gather here, should jolt us into acting
in the present in a new way.65 We can see here what meaning the Foucaldian term of
genealogy can have: no longer to open up ways to liberate ourselves from our past by
showing the contingencies we inherited from it; but to open up ways to atone for the
suffering stemming from our past, which in some sense makes us today. Failure to
atone for this past of suffering, failure to hear the oppressed insurrected knowledges of
that past, would not just be to commit a crime of epistemic and moral indifference, as
above, but in this case, to remain accomplices of a historical injustice. To maintain a
social organization based on historical violence and oppression is to commit a present

injustice to the past victims of that violence in reaffirming an exclusion that it was in fact
our chance to reverse.
Finally, there are also more positive contributions to mention. Benjamin phrases it
in this way: cultural treasures, he writes, owe their existence not only to the efforts of the
great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries.66 The fact of anonymity here, for Benjamin, is itself a horror and a
barbarism that is in need of redemption. It is horrible and barbaric to the degree that
the official historical archive (and hence insufficiently problematized present judge-
ments that inherit this archive) inevitably associates such achievements with only
the victors of history. But when it comes to our own social and political inheritance,
the fact that this horror exists does not mean we want nothing to do with that
heritage. In this case the things we inherit are also good. It is a matter of changing
the relation to that heritage in a way that once again does not double an oppression
and instead retrieves the achievements of the anonymous. Benjamin therefore breaks
with a method of empathy and recommends a detachment towards official his-
toriography, so as not to inadvertently continue overlooking those who have been
rendered silent. It is a matter of problematizing and actively counter-acting the
prejudice of anonymity.67 In terms of our argument, we can define the idea of a
cultural treasure as follows: the institutions and norms of freedom that make a
positive contribution to social life today are indeed cultural treasures to be cau-
tiously maintained, refined and extended when possible.
This fourth kind of link is a specification of the second more general type we
described above. But the link here is more than acknowledging the facts of a longue
duree. For in this historically substantial instance, it leads us to the recognition that social
achievements we admire today are the product, however indirect the mediations, of a
specific, if ambiguous, cultural heritage. The critical theorist has the task to remedy the
silence, restoring an image of the medieval past, for instance, as something due to that
past, as the redemption of anonymity, but of also clarifying that it is this past, and not
another, and that this past is our past. Doing justice to the past is to bear witness to the
toils of our forebears, their struggles against injustice, their attempts at expressing their
grievances, their suffering and their hopes, all of which, in specific cases, paved the way
for some of the rights and freedoms we might enjoy today.
Critical theory today often stresses the ruptures between pre-modern and modern
historical periods, as it highlights the normative underpinnings of society as of relatively
recent invention. In doing so, however, such a project runs the risk of unfairly caricatur-
ing the past on either side of an exaggerated break. Positing the modern period as too
strongly normatively exceptional has consequences for the history that provides the very
standards for social criticism. If so-called modern social movements are the only con-
ceptual sources for a normative critique, then critical theory will blinker its potential for
critique. If the longer views of social struggles for norms such as freedom and equality
are overlooked (and so our present seems more positive), then the description of actual
progress is weaker to that extent. If critical theory is to do justice to its normative
resources, as a matter of historical accuracy and nuanced reconstruction, then it should
not be modernist in an exceptionalist sense.
More deeply, critical theory, in mispresenting or simplifying a part of the past, will
also fail to meet moral claims that the past delivers to us. Past struggles should be
acknowledged, as a normative, indeed as a direct political matter. Present-day wealth
and social structures and all that they enable have deep historical roots. The moral links
complex, subtle and easily overlooked deserve remembrance. Ignoring such claims
would risk cutting critical theory off from more nuanced and sympathetic historical-
theoretical images of the past, an action that has moral and political consequences.
Freedom, equality and solidarity are testified to clearly and substantially by historical
records and scholarship well beyond the bounds modernist accounts give to them. Once
we recognize that our predecessors, however distant, themselves struggled for freedom
in their own ways, then we cannot refuse them community with our own moral proj-
ects. Their past makes a demand on us: a demand to recognize what justice was for them;
and affects concretely what justice would be today. An injunction for us is placed against
meting out the same injustice that those in the past received.
Not only then are there epistemological and methodological problems with excep-
tionalist periodizations. There are multifaceted moral and political claims that the past
has on us too. We do the past an injustice when we unfairly represent it, or disconnect it
from the generation of our own social conditions. Most especially, we do the past an
injustice when we homogenize our view of the past into simple, reified oppositions
through simple breaks and periodizations. We can interpret the ongoing efforts of his-
torians to uncover that past and dispel false images of it often as indirect (and oftentimes
today, direct) responses to such a demand. Critical theory should fruitfully engage with
this scholarship. Critical theory, too, must be able to take account of it in the memorial
reconstruction it makes of the present in light of its past. Although we have used Axel
Honneths theory as exemplary of the kind of homogenizing modernist narrative that we
have criticized, Honneth has also articulated the very principle of our argument of a
moral demand for justice from the past. Every present is therefore connected anew to the
unatoned victims of history through a moral band which consists in the silent demand
that their personal integrity be restored retrospectively by admitting them into the moral
community of mankind.68 That is what we have sought to do here to connect once
more to the experience of suffering and rebellion against injustice from distant periods,
that we might do justice to the past.
Notes
1. See in particular Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), and Jeffrey
Alexander, Modern, Anti, Post and Neo: How Intellectuals Have Coded, Narrated, and
Explained the New World of Our Time, New Left Review, I/210 (MarchApril 1995):
63101. Most recently, taking seriously the scholarship of the last two decades that question
the Eurocentrism of the field is the starting point of Amy Allens End of Progress (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016). Our study chimes with Allens goals as we also question
linear, normative readings of history. We explicitly discuss the multiple modernities
approach later in our text; see in particular the beginning of section IV and note 49.
2. In historiography, Jacques Le Goffs interrogation of the ancient/modern couple in History
and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
the work of Jack Goody in contemporary anthropology, notably The Theft of History (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); in social theory, Bruno Latours We Have Never
Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); in literary
theory and postcolonial studies, Robert Youngs White Mythologies (London: Routledge,
1990). Dipesh Chakrabartys influential Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) does not deny the
validity of the modernity category, but his move to provincialize Europe as the implicit ideal
paradigm reference within contemporary social sciences has the effect of loosening the ties
between the contemporary and the pre-modern. For a clear delineation of the problems
entailed in any reified reference to modernity, see Anthony Woodiwiss, Against Moder-
nity: a Dissident Rant, Economy and Society 26(1) (1997): 121.
3. See Emmanuel Renault, LExperience de lInjustice [The Experience of Injustice] (Paris: La
Decouverte, 2004) for a systematic defence of a critical theory paradigm based on the notion
of the experience of injustice and a conception of emancipation as struggle against
injustice.
4. For a study of a variety of historicisms, see Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge,
1996).
5. Axel Honneth, Freedoms Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, trans. J. Ganahl
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Freedoms Right considerably develops the model already found
in Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, tr. J.
Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
6. For an argument along these lines that opposes the idea of work as being only a modern
invention, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, Historical Objections to the Centrality of Work, Con-
stellations 22(1) (2015): 10521, and esp. 11213.
7. The question running through the text is of working out through archaeological and genealo-
gical methods that which made us be what we came to be. What is Enlightenment?, in
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 46.
Note, for instance, the passage where Foucault speaks of western societies singular historical
destiny so particular and so different from the others in its trajectory and so universalizing,
so dominant with respect to others (ibid.: 47).
8. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy, in
David M. Rasmussen (ed.) The Handbook of Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp.
36998.
9. Honneth, Freedoms Right. The modernist assumption in the previous model of recognition is
particularly visible in the following passages: Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, pp. 10810
and 1228, and Axel Honneth, On the Historical Differentiation of the Three Spheres of
Recognition: Love, Law, Achievement, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or
Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke
(London and New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 13844.
10. Honneth, Freedoms Right, p. 15. See Titus Stahl, Immanente Kritik. Elemente einer Theorie
sozialer Praktiken [Immanent Critique: Elements of a Theory of Social Practices] (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus, 2013), pp. 15781.
11. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p. 47.
12. See Christopher F. Zurn, Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social (Cambridge: Polity,
2015), pp. 76 ff.; Danielle Petherbridge, The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth (Plymouth,
Devon: Lexington Books, 2013) and, as already cited, Allen, The End of Progress.
13. See the classical criticism along this line by Joseph R. Gusfield, Tradition and Modernity:
Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change, American Journal of Sociology 72(4)
(1967): 35162.
14. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999).
15. Charles Taylor has observed the same risk that accompanies what he calls an acultural
account of modernity: The march of modernity will end up making all cultures look the
same, in Two Theories of Modernity, The Hastings Centre Report 25(2) (1995): 2433 (28).
16. It is worth recalling the famous passage from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, to
show the depth of Hegels acknowledgement of the tragic nature of history:
[P]assions, private interests, and the satisfaction of selfish impulses are the most potent
force. What makes them powerful is that they do not heed any of the restraints which
justice and morality seek to impose upon them, and the elemental power of passion has
a more immediate hold over man than that artificial and laboriously acquired discipline
of order and moderation, justice and morality.
When we contemplate this display of passions, and consider the historical conse-
quences of their violence and of the irrationality which is associated with them (and
even more so with good intentions and worthy aims); when we see the evil, the
wickedness, and the downfall of the most flourishing empires the human spirit has
created; and when we are moved to profound pity for the untold miseries of individual
beings we can only end with a feeling of sadness at the transience of everything. And
since all this destruction is not the work of mere nature but of the will of man, our
sadness takes on a moral quality, for the good spirit in us (if we are at all susceptible to
it) eventually revolts at such a spectacle. Without rhetorical exaggeration, we need only
compile an accurate account of the misfortunes which have overtaken the finest man-
ifestations of national and political life, and of personal virtues or innocence, to see a
most terrifying picture take shape before our eyes. Its effect is to intensify our feelings
to an extreme pitch of hopeless sorrow with no redeeming circumstances to counter-
balance it. We can only harden ourselves against it or escape from it by telling ourselves
that it was ordained by fate and could not have been otherwise. (G. W. F. Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbett [London:
Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 68)
17. We are indebted with this point to conversations with Adam Hochman and reading his forth-
coming work on the modernity of the concept of race. On the modern specificity of the concept
of race and racism, see also Vanita Seth, The Tyranny of Race, Thesis Eleven 81 (May)
(2005): 91102: recent scholarship appears to have arrived at something of a consensus in
arguing that racial discourse is a product of the West and a product of the modern (ibid.: 91).
18. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989).
19. See Jurgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 164. Max Pensky, in On the Use and Abuse of Memory: Habermas,
Anamnestic Solidarity, and the Historikerstreit, Philosophy & Social Criticism 15(4)
(1989): 35180, shows the importance of anamnestic solidarity in Habermas, in connection
to Benjamin, but ultimately questions its consistency. Pensky argues that Habermas can
embrace the concept only by severing the link to the past and instead thinking the debt to
the past in the form of guilt and atonement. See also Martin Matustik, The Critical Theorist as
Witness: Habermas and the Holocaust, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.) Perspectives on Habermas
(Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2000), pp. 33966; Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).
20. Honneth, Freedoms Right, p. 2.
21. One might object here that we are helping ourselves to the very concept we criticize. The
example of a modern concept of race is not self-contradictory, however, for it is comparative,
acknowledging both continuities and discontinuities; we are not suggesting that exclusionary
violence did not occur in earlier periods. The critical point is to recognize that racism may in
the end be a rather specific type of prejudice, one that arguably relies on biological concepts
not available in earlier periods. For an argument for forms of racism prior to modernity, and
the accompanying debates, see in particular Geraldine Hengs two-part analysis, Invention of
Race in the Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity and the Middle Ages and Invention of
Race in the Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race Literature Compass 8(5) (2011):
31531 and 33250 respectively in the same issue. For the contrary viewpoint, see n. 24
below; Ania Loomba offers a nuanced view that combines elements of both sides of the
debate, Periodization, Race, and Global Contact, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 37(3) (2007): 595620.
22. See, for instance, Robert Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand up: The Challenge of
Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy, Radical Philosophy
117(January/February 2003): 1322; Robert Bernasconi, Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of
Racism, in J. K. Ward and T. L. Loft (eds) Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, The Color of Reason: The Idea of Race in
Kants Anthropology, in E. C. Eze (ed.) Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 10331; Michael Mignolo, The Darker Side of the
Enlightenment: A De-colonial Reading of Kants Geography, in Stuart Elden and Eduardo
Mendieta (eds) Reading Kants Geography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), pp. 31944.
23. Beyond the well-known passages on women in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beau-
tiful and the Sublime, see his exclusion of dependents from full citizenship in the Doctrine of
Right, which include: apprentices, servants, minors [naturaliter vel civiliter], all women and,
in general, anyone whose preservation in existence (his being fed and protected) depends not
on his management of his own business but on arrangements made by another (Immanuel
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals , ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996], 6:315).
24. In What is Enlightenment?, Foucault connects his characterization of the modern ethos
with the constant attempt to give new impetus, as far and as wide as possible, to the indefinite
work of freedom; ibid.: 46. Also see above, n. 8.
25. ibid.
26. ibid.: 39. Compare this with the brief summary concerning historiographical periods of the
care of the self in Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Colle`ge de
France 19812, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 4612.
27. See Foucaults specific study of a number of varieties of capitalism in The Birth of Biopolitics:
Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 197879, trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
28. Foucault often addresses periodization. In a 1967 interview titled On the Ways of Writing
History, he treats the question clearly; depending on the level one selects, one will have to
delimit different periodizations, and, depending on the periodization, one will reach different
levels, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954
84, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 280. Foucault insists on multiple
overlapping periodizations, because the period is determined by the thing being analysed
which may call for a longer or shorter period. This leaves open the question of what in fact
works to unify the social field overall and returns us to the possibility of contradictory
normative logics. The discussion of periodization (which is about the method of Les Mots
et les choses) is consistent with the one that appears in Foucaults The History of Sexuality,
vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).
29. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, pp. 489: the historical ontology of ourselves has to
answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may
be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions
systematized as follows: how are we constituted as subjects . . . (emphases added).
30. The idea of a modern ethos can be compared with Le Goffs approach to modernity as a
mentality. But Le Goff shows precisely that the modernist mentality recurs in vastly distant
periods that do not at all match the periods we have come to call modernity; Jacques Le Goff,
Ancient (Antique)/Modern, in his History and Memory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), pp. 2150.
31. Axel Honneth, in Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty (eds), Recognition or Disagreement:
A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality and Identity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015), p. 102.
32. The universalist aspect of the Christian announcement is expressed by Pauls egalitarian
sentiment in the Letter to the Galatians 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave
nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (NIV translation).
The political heritage of this is complex, however, especially with respect to Jewish commu-
nities. See our discussion of modern racism above.
33. Jacques Dalarun, Gouverner cest servir. Essai de democratie medievale [To Govern Is to
Serve: An Essay on Medieval Democracy] (Paris: Alma editeur, 2012).
34. Francis Dupuis-Deri, Democratie. Histoire politique dun mot aux Etats-Unis et en France
[Democracy: The Political History of a Word in the United States and France] (Montreal: Lux,
2013); Christopher Dyer, The English Medieval Village Community and Its Decline, The
Journal of British Studies 33(4) (1994): 40729; Anthony Black, Communal Democracy and
Its History, Political Studies 45 (1997): 520.
35. Note how the traditional periodization between early and late Middle Ages, the Renaissance
and the early-modern period is rejected by a leading historian such as Jacques Le Goff, who
shows how societal evolutions occur on the basis of normative lines that can cover extremely
long periods. See Jacques Le Goff, Un Long Moyen-Age [A Long Middle Age] (Paris:
Tallandier, 2004).
36. See Samuel K. Cohns enlightening anthology of sources covering the period 12451453,
Popular Protest in Late-Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2004).
37. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising
of 1381 (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003).
38. The radical implications of Christian equality are explicitly asserted by others, notably by
John Ball in his legendary sermon to the rebellious peasants:
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning
all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust
oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the begin-
ning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I
exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye
may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty. (R. B. Dobson, The
Peasants Revolt of 1381 [Bath: Pitman, 1970], pp. 3735)
A similar message is repeated 300 years later during the English Civil War and forms the
basis of the True Levellers movement. See in particular [Gerrard] Winstanley, The Law of
Freedom and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See Paul
Friedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
39. William Langland, Piers Plowman (New York: Norton, 2006). See in particular, passus VI, in
which the exchange of services between labourers and knights is made very explicit. The
Knight who agrees to the contract offered by the Plowman assures him: As long as I live I
shall look after you. Indeed, the Knight explicitly bows to the Peasant for the learning of true
Christian humility.
40. As Georges Duby comments, what justified the differentiation of each of the three categories
was their function [emphases added], in The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (London:
Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 93.
41. See Samuel K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe,
12001425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 3442; Hugues Neveux,
Les Revoltes paysannes en Europe: XIVeXVIIe sie`cles [The Peasant Revolts in Europe: 14th
17th Centuries] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).
42. For a nuanced exploration of the nature of imagination in historical work, see Marnie Hughes-
Warrington, How Good an Historian Shall I Be? R. G. Collingwood, The Historical Imag-
ination and Education (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), chs 4 and 5.
43. Honneth, Freedoms Right, pp. 1348.
44. Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages. Guilds in England 12501550
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), in particular ch. 3. See also an earlier study, Steven
Epstein, Wage Labour and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991), ch. 4.
45. Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, p. 92.
46. In fact, Rossers study of friendship is explicitly critical of the modern form of friendship;
ibid.: 901. On the general approach of a politicized historiography, see pp. 7 ff.
47. Axel Honneth, The Irreducibility of Progress: Kants Account of the Relationship between
Morality and History [trans. R. Sinnerbrink and J.-P. Deranty], Critical Horizons 8(1) (2007):
117.
48. Jacques Le Goff has shown that this kind of relationship can itself be investigated as a problem
of history. A part of the present memorial is the imaginative projection of its break with the
past (notably, this view does not take hold until well after the French Revolution), but such
narratives themselves must be dissected and laid out as specific representations that are
deliberately selective, and have their reasons explicated. See Le Goff, Ancient(Antique)/
Modern, p. 47.
49. Charles Taylor has notably raised the diversity of modern experiences, even though he himself
has focused only on the onset of western secular society. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 4, and the expanded discussion of
that chapter that is published as Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004). See also above, n. 21. For a criticism of the idea of multiple modernities, albeit
one that leaves the idea of modernity itself intact, see Volker H. Schmidt, Multiple Moder-
nities or Varieties of Modernity?, Current Sociology 54(1) (2006): 7797.
50. Axel Honneth, A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation between Anthro-
pology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin, New Formations 20 (1993): 8394.
Elements of Benjamins view of history are also adopted by Theodor Adorno, who develops
the principle of a critical memory of the invisible past, specifically combating the compul-
sory forgetting of suffering that our present imposes. See Max Pensky, Natural History: the
Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno, Critical Horizons 5(1) (2004): 22758.
51. See thesis XIV, History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty
time, but time filled by the presence of the now, in Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 252.
52. ibid.: 246; Honneth, Communicative Disclosure of the Past, p. 91.
53. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 246.
54. It is for this reason that Benjamin argues in theses XVI and XVII that the historical materialist
method is ranged against an eternal, that is, fixed, view of the past, and the correlated idea of
a universal history; ibid.: 255.
55. Honneth explicates this idea as follows. To be denied justice in ones own time is to be refused
admission to the moral community of mankind. Each new generation becomes a part of this
community. We, in the present, are therefore in a position to retrospectively restore the victims
of history through admitting precisely what was refused them in their own day. Honneth,
Communicative Disclosure of the Past, p. 92.
56. See the critical review of the main historical and sociological interpretations favouring this
line in Cohn, Lust for Liberty, notably ch. 5.
57. The question of how we bridge this gap raises again the idea of historical imagination
mentioned above (see n. 48). This classical hermeneutic question is here given a political
dimension and motivation that calls for further study.
58. Michel Foucault, Theories et institutions penales: Cours au Colle`ge de France 197172
[Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the College de France 197172] (Paris: Editions
EHESS, 2015), p. 3. See the editors commentary, pp. 24872, showing the continuous line
Foucault sought to establish between the state repression against leftist movements at the time
and the early -modern rebellion in Normandy. These specialists of Foucaults work do not
hesitate to claim that the view of society as being a form of civil war constitutes for him a
historical invariant (p. 268).
59. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19756,
trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 7: Subjugated knowledges are, then, blocks
of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but
which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously
enough, the tools of scholarship. From the point of view we are defending here, one of those
tools of scholarship ought to be serious historical scholarship, which, we think, always tends
to undermine overly sharp pronouncements about the normative exceptionalism of

modernity.
60. See Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998); and Axel Honneth, Geschichtsschreibung als Befreiung [The Writing of History as
Emancipation], in Vivisektionen eines Zeitalters [Vivisection of an Age] (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
2014), pp. 26380.
61. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmonds-
worth, Mx: Penguin, 1990), pp. 873926; Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History
and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 1634.
From the point of view of the establishment of the colonial system in particular, these pages of
Capital offer a sobering correction to the narrative of modernity as conquest of universal
freedom and equality. It might be useful to let the pathos of Marxs denunciation ring again
here, with just one single quote:
W. Howitt, a man who specializes in being a Christian, says of the colonial system:
The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout
every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are
not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and,
however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. (Capital, p. 916)
62. Marx, Capital, p. 876.
63. See, for instance, the way in which Marx bemoans in Capital the demise of English yeomanry
and the disappearance of communal lands in England from the end of the 15th century,
Capital, pp. 87783.
64. A messianic power falls to us today to the extent that its losers again appear as interacting
partners in our present experiences and thereby become members of the moral community:
Honneth, Communicative Disclosure of the Past, p. 92. On history as process of interaction,
see also Axel Honneth, History and Interaction: On the Structuralist Interpretation of His-
torical Materialism, in Gregory Elliott (ed.) Althusser: A Critical Reader (n.p.: Blackwell,
1994), pp. 73103.
65. The oppressed class is not a priori the heir of the tradition of the vanquished: it becomes the
heir only inasmuch as it is the avenging class, that is, inasmuch as it fulfils hic et nunc a
promise incessantly betrayed and incessantly deferred [emphases added], Philippe Simay,
Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin and the Critique of Historicisms, in Andrew Benjamin
(ed.) Walter Benjamin and History (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 13755 (p. 154).
66. In thesis VII, in Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 248.
67. This is a key aspect of Jacques Rancieres method of equality. Equality extends back in time,
as a performative, hermeneutic imperative; the scholars task is to retrieve from the past not
only the anonymous voices of suffering and dissent, but also the anonymous voices who were
thinking and dreaming a different world. See in particular Proletarian Nights: The Workers
Dream in 19th Century France (London: Verso, 2012).
68. Honneth, Communicative Disclosure of the Past, p. 92.

Jean-Philippe Deranty - Doing Justice To The Past

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Jean-Philippe Deranty - Doing Justice To The Past

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Critical theory and the sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Jean-Philippe Deranty and Andrew Dunstall

That model appears as a Weberian unfolding through developmental stages towards a

I Historicism as the positing of modernity

explicitly assumed. This is why we focus on it more particularly here, to problematize

II Homogenizing the present

Hegels slaughterbench of history metaphor recognized the tragic dimensions of

Modernity could also be harbouring contradictory currents, say, a movement of

III Homogenizing the pre-modern: Epistemic injustice

beginnings of friendship as an institutionalized form of social freedom towards the very

IV Critical theory beyond narrow modernism

revolts of the 14th century. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose a relative similarity

social organization based on historical violence and oppression is to commit a present

to undermine overly sharp pronouncements about the normative exceptionalism of

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi