Domination, social norms, and the idea of an emancipatory interest

Yet surprisingly, in spite of its indisputable foundational importance to critical theory, critical theorists have rarely sought to defend the idea that their work answers to such an emancipatory interest. We first encounter the contours of such a defense in the work of the young Max Horkheimer, in which, however, it remains associated with Marx's philosophy of history to an extent that subsequent generations of critical theorists have found wanting. In the mid-1960s, this led Jürgen Habermas, in his first systematic work of social philosophy, to attempt a novel account in the form of a theory of knowledge as social theory, which seeks to disclose three human cognitive interests—including an emancipatory interest—in the objective structures of our species’ history. However, this account was ultimately undermined by his reliance on psychoanalysis as a model of human emancipation, suggesting the questionable view of humanity as a collective species subject freeing itself from internal constraints.

These failures have recently led Honneth to undertake a renewed attempt to “answer critical theory's most fundamental question” (Honneth, 2017). Honneth proposes, first, a social–ontological view of the plasticity of social norms as the source of recurrent social conflict, and second, a claim that human beings have an emancipatory interest in knowledge that reveals the interests served by their one-sided interpretation and which enables transformative reinterpretation of those norms. In this article, I argue that Honneth's argument, too, is unsuccessful. Or rather, it is at best only partially successful. Honneth's argument remains incomplete, not only because its scope of application is narrower than Honneth seems to think, but also because it neglects the most important object of emancipatory knowledge—and that which I will argue  is the central task of a critical theory to provide—namely, a systematic account of the power relations within which dominated groups find themselves. In response to these problems, I develop the outlines of an alternative defense of the idea of an emancipatory interest, which locates the root of emancipatory struggles in the interplay between dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power and the availability of the requisite epistemic and normative resources for discursively articulating these reactive attitudes as shared experiences of moral injury—resources that a critical theory of society must strive to provide.

In the article's first section, I expound the history and conceptual content of the idea of an emancipatory interest and the claim that human beings have an interest in knowledge that enables a truly free life. I trace the concept of emancipation back to early Roman law and discuss its subsequent instantiations both in the abolitionism of Frederick Douglass and in Marx's thought. I then discuss the unsuccessful attempts to defend the idea of an emancipatory interest that we find in Horkheimer's and Habermas's work, before I expound Honneth's more recent argument and take issue with it on two counts: First, I argue that Honneth's claim that the plasticity of shared social norms is the social–ontological root of emancipatory struggles is too restrictive, excluding significant emancipatory struggles outside the bourgeois constitutional republics that characterize the narrower historical context of Western modernity. Second, I argue that Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest neglects knowledge of that which human beings require emancipation from: namely, the nature of the dominating power relations to which they are subject.

What Honneth identifies, I argue, is but one way that the social order may be receptive to emancipatory struggles, but not the social–ontological root of such struggles. I thus propose that a plausible account of the emancipatory interest must focus not only on conflicts over shared social norms but also, and more fundamentally, on dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power. Finally, I unpack this claim with reference to further discussion of Horkheimer's work and Honneth's earlier work, before concluding.

The concept of emancipation refers to a specific kind of social transformation. The subject of emancipation may be an individual or a social group, but the object of emancipation is always a transformation of the status or relationships that the relevant individual or group is positioned in. More specifically, the conceptual structure of emancipation involves both a social relationship of domination and a course of action that simultaneously abolishes this relationship and inaugurates a new one: namely, a condition of freedom. Accordingly, for us—as children of the Enlightenment—any invocation of the concept of emancipation has an inescapably normative pull: it entails, prima facie, a denial of freedom duly owed to someone, a demand for the abolishment of unjustified power that someone wields over another, and a call to arms to meet this demand for liberation in practice.

What is involved in claiming that human beings have an interest in emancipation? In a word, it involves the claim that any agent subject to domination has an overriding reason to be freed from domination, no matter their particular wants or desires (Roberts, 2017). Indeed, it involves claiming that even agents, who have formed affective attachments to their dominator and in some sense desire to maintain the dominating relationship, nevertheless have a reason to see that domination gone—that is, whether or not they are actually responsive to that reason (Pettit, 2013). Members of a social group, who are dominated by virtue of belonging to that social group, thus have a shared interest in emancipation; an interest in a transformation of the societal structure that abolishes the dominating power to which they, as a group, are subject. And this may be true even if members of that group have formed attachments to and derive significant benefits from life in their subordinate social position.

The concept of “emancipation” derives from ancient Roman law, where it refers to the release of a son or daughter from the patria potestas of the pater familias—the legal power that a male head of a household wields over the members of his family, and which he alone has the power to renounce (Nicholas, 2015). Perhaps owing to its provenance in a slave society, emancipation is inextricably associated with the release of slaves from the legal ownership of their masters—as, most famously in modern times, in the case of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. For this reason, the concept of emancipation has also long been associated with the republican tradition, which, in Philip Pettit's recent influential restatement, takes its conception of freedom as nondomination precisely from the paradigmatic example of a slave, who is fundamentally unfree, even if he is allowed by his master to live without interference in his daily life, because he lives under the thumb of his master and remains subject to his arbitrary capacity to thus interfere (Pettit, 1997).

Of course, the concept of emancipation is by no means confined to legal and political emancipation from slavery but often encompasses freedom from domination in a more expansive sense. Frederick Douglass—who was born a slave in the antebellum American South but empowered himself through literacy and escaped his bondage to become the perhaps greatest abolitionist of the 19th century—saw the emancipation of the American slaves as grounded in the natural liberty of all human beings, including those living in that most violent and inhuman social condition of enslavement. However, Douglass often employed a more expansive definition of emancipation, which sometimes seems to mirror Kant's definition of enlightenment as “man's emergence from his self-imposed intellectual immaturity” (Kant, 2006). As he formulated this conviction late in his life: “Education … means emancipation. … To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being” (Douglass, 1894).

For Douglass, it is clear that an interest in emancipation also implies an interest in the kind of knowledge that enables a truly free life. To be sure, Douglass understood emancipation first and foremost as legal and political emancipation from bondage in the “slave system” of the antebellum South, and he has often been interpreted as a proud advocate of the doctrine of “self-made men,” urging white Americans to give black slaves their freedom, assure fairness in commercial life and otherwise “leave alone” their black compatriots to fight for their own destiny (Blight, 2020). However, he also insisted that without education and knowledge, and without the corresponding ability to demand equal respect in public life, a slave could be “nominally free” in that “he was not compelled to call any man his master, and no one could call him slave,” but he would still remain “in fact a slave, a slave to society” (Coffee, 2020; Douglass, 1894). In this sense, Douglass consistently stressed the need for both individual initiative and education as well as legal and political empowerment of Black Americans to ensure a “social uptake” of their legally emancipated and educationally edified wills (Krause, 2021).

Of course, the idea of emancipation also holds a prominent place within Marx's work, which is standardly interpreted as positing that the proletariat has a class interest in emancipation from bourgeois class domination. This is no coincidence, as the republican conceptual vocabulary that came to animate radical republicans and abolitionists such as Douglass in their struggle against American slavery also found its way into early radical-plebian and socialist thought and subsequently into Marx's thinking (Claeys, 1989; Leipold et al., 2020; Roberts, 2016). For Marx, the emancipation of the working class includes a legal and political dimension (from the legal and political institutions of bourgeois society), but it ultimately requires the abolishment of private ownership of the means of production and the whole economic structure of capitalist production relations.

The idea of emancipation that we find in Frankfurt School critical theory derives from the Marxian conception, but it is also closely associated with the more expansive definition of emancipation that we encounter in Douglass's speeches and writings, as it explicitly defines the interest in emancipation as including an epistemic or cognitive dimension: an interest in the requisite knowledge for achieving emancipation in practice. In the following section, I shall expound how critical theorists such as Horkheimer and Habermas have sought to account for the foundational assumption that human beings share an interest in emancipation from domination, before, in the subsequent section, I account for Honneth's more recent defense of this claim.

In Horkheimer's famous essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” from 1937, in which he first coins the term “critical theory,” he defines traditional theory as a conception of scientific inquiry, which aims at producing a library of knowledge through value-free observation of any given object domain. Accordingly, traditional theory understands social inquiry as logically independent of the ends for which social–scientific knowledge is used in practice, which means that traditional theory blinds itself to the way in which social–scientific knowledge is used to maintain and reproduce an unjust societal structure. By contrast, critical theory is conscious of its social function—it is explicitly “aimed at … emancipation, and has the transformation of the whole as its end” (Horkheimer, 1988b).¹

This argument rests on two premises. The first is that, in modern bourgeois society, the established organization of society systematically produces suffering and privation; “Contemporary misery is tied to the societal structure” (Horkheimer, 1988a). This means that an understanding of the causes of experienced misery requires insight into the nature and modus operandi of the societal structure. The second premise is that the way in which misery is systematically produced by the basic structure of society is epistemically opaque to those subject to those injustices—that they lack the requisite knowledge for comprehending and efficaciously acting on their interest in a reorganization of the basic structure of society.

Accordingly, Horkheimer argues that the proletariat's experience of class domination is a necessary but by itself insufficient condition for grasping their collective interest in emancipation. It is the task of theory—a critical theory of society—to enlighten individuals about the nature and causes of structurally produced misery and allow individuals to grasp their interest in a reasonable society. Moreover, only if critical theory is able to produce knowledge of the societal structure that actually enables emancipation in practice is the theory validated: “For all its insight into individual steps of progress, and for all the agreement of its elements with state-of-the-art traditional theories, critical theory has no other authority on its side than the interest in freedom from class domination that it incorporates” (Horkheimer, 1988b).² Horkheimer thus conceives of critical theory as a form of reflection on emancipatory struggles, which seeks to inform and guide those subject to dominating power, and which “understands itself as the theoretical side of the struggle to rid the world of existing misery” (Horkheimer, 1988a).

Yet in Horkheimer's early work, this account of the claim that human beings have an interest in emancipation is often ambiguous. As we saw at the beginning of this section, he sometimes suggests that the interest in a reasonable organization of society is “innate in every human being,” and, at other times, he claims—echoing Marx—that it is “immanent in human labour.” In fact, Horkheimer may have simply assumed the existence of such an interest as part of his overall commitment to Marx's materialist philosophy of history. This has left subsequent generations of critical theorists, who have been less inclined than the young Horkheimer to wed their theories wholesale to historical materialism, without a systematic account of the emancipatory interest. It was precisely this perceived lacuna in critical theory that Habermas sought to fill with Knowledge and Human Interests, to which we now turn.

Habermas's project in that book is exceedingly ambitious. Its animating idea is an attempt to rethink epistemology or the “theory of knowledge as social theory”—to offer an account of the “cognitive interests” that ground and guide different domains of scientific inquiry with reference to certain basic or primordial ways that human beings relate to the world in the course of human history (Habermas, 1986). According to Habermas's argument, modern science has developed along three branches: the empirical–analytic sciences, the historical–hermeneutic sciences, and the critically oriented sciences. The empirical–analytical sciences comprise the natural sciences and the social sciences when concerned with drawing general inferences from observation of social reality. The historical–hermeneutic sciences comprise the human sciences, concerned with the interpretation of meaning. Finally, the critically oriented sciences include the social sciences and the human sciences when concerned with what Habermas calls “reflection.”

According to Habermas, each of these three scientific branches of knowledge expresses and incorporates a fundamental cognitive interest that human beings have in this specific domain of knowledge, and which correspond to three primordial human ways of relating to the world: the empirical–analytic sciences incorporate a technical interest in understanding and controlling the natural environment; the historical–hermeneutic sciences incorporate a practical interest in self- and mutual understanding; and the critical sciences incorporate an emancipatory interest in freedom from domination and ideological illusion. These cognitive interests are understood as knowledge-constitutive in the sense that they are conditions of possibility for knowledge in its three different branches and as rooted in the objective structures of humanity's species history through the corresponding social domains of labor, language, and domination (Herrschaft).

Without going deeper into Habermas's complex argument, what concerns us here is Habermas's apparent difficulty with justifying this last claim that the emancipatory interest is somehow grounded in a ‘definite means of social organization [Vergesellschaftung]’: namely, the practice of domination (Habermas, 1986). The problem is twofold: First, Habermas develops an argument with reference to Kant and Fichte that the emancipatory interest is inherent in reason as such—which, however, seems to run counter to his intention of grounding the cognitive interests in a domain of social practice. Second, Habermas chooses to liken the struggle against domination in the course of human history to the process of emancipation from internal constraints that an individual analysand experiences in psychoanalysis. As Honneth argues, this analogy has the unwelcome implication that human emancipation writ large is construed as a process of self-reflection by a collective “species subject” freeing itself from internal constraints, rather than as a struggle between social groups (Honneth, 2017).

Habermas has pretty much conceded this last point in later work (Habermas, 2009), and he long ago abandoned the project of recasting epistemology as social theory and the corresponding language of “cognitive interests” in favor of a universal pragmatics of communicative rationality and a theory of social evolution that focuses on the “rationalisation of the lifeworld” (Ibsen, 2023). Much like the account of the emancipatory interest offered by the young Horkheimer, Habermas's account in Knowledge and Human Interests must thus ultimately be considered unsuccessful. However, these unsuccessful attempts to defend the idea of an emancipatory interest have seemingly left critical theory without its defining reference point in social reality, motivating Honneth's more recent attempt to “answer critical theory's most fundamental question.”

Honneth's defense of the assumption that all human beings share an interest in emancipation proceeds in two steps: First, he offers a social–ontological argument for the claim that social conflict or struggle is inevitable and bound to arise in any human society. Second, he argues that this social–ontological argument at the same time discloses the kind of knowledge necessary for human emancipation. In support of the first step in this argument, Honneth distinguishes four positions, each with a distinctive take on the inevitability of social conflict.

The first position is the Rousseau–Kant view that social conflict is rooted in the natural human predisposition for “unsocial sociability”—or the drive to satisfy one's “amour propre,” in Rousseau's terms—i.e., the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency connected, however, with a constant resistance that continually threatens to break up this society,” which is driven by a deep-seated drive to distinguish oneself from others (Kant, 2006). The second position is the Freudian view, which sees social conflict as anchored in the infant child's conflictual psychological relationship with their parents. The third is the Marxian position, which, Honneth argues, sees the root of social conflict in the class structure of society. Fourth, and finally, the view that Honneth calls the Hegel–Dewey position holds that “social conflict is inevitable in all societies simply because the norms accepted by their members will again and again give rise to new moral claims that cannot be satisfied under existing conditions and whose frustration will therefore result in social conflicts” (Honneth, 2017).

Honneth quickly dismisses the Rousseau–Kant and the Freudian positions, since both ultimately refer to predispositions that further individual conflict rather than struggle between social groups. Perhaps more surprisingly, Honneth also rejects the Marxian position, in part, he argues, because Marx does not offer a genuine social–ontological thesis but rather a historicist view that sees class conflict as an ineliminable feature of society only up to the point of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society. According to Honneth, however, the most serious grounds for rejecting the Marxian position are its reductive economism: “The Marxian doctrine of class struggle fails above all because it views all conflict among groups or classes as economically motivated, whereas historical reality suggests that experiences of injustice and of frustrated hopes have had far greater motivating power” (Honneth, 2017).

By contrast, Honneth sees much greater potential in the Hegel–Dewey position. According to this fourth view, “the source of recurrent social struggles is thought to lie in the fact that any disadvantaged social group will attempt to appeal to norms that are already institutionalized but that are being interpreted or applied in hegemonic ways, and to turn those norms against the dominant groups by relying on them for a moral justification of their own marginalized needs and interests” (Honneth, 2017). That is to say, the Hegel–Dewey position—which Honneth endorses and elaborates—locates the root and inevitability of social conflict in the hermeneutic plasticity and openness of shared social norms, which can always be turned against the ruling interpretations and the social interests that they serve at any given point in time. Furthermore, Honneth argues, since this view refers to norms that are necessary conditions of possibility for social integration, and “the norms enabling social integration result from a reciprocal empowerment on the part of all individuals to be liable to others’ criticism for misapplications of these norms,” the Hegel–Dewey position represents a genuine thesis of social ontology (Honneth, 2017).

According to Honneth, the emancipatory interest—and a critical theory of society, which answers to this interest—can thus be understood as anchored deep within the ontology of any social order, since emancipatory social struggles are ultimately driven by the ineliminable hermeneutic openness of shared social norms and the concomitant possibility of contesting narrow or one-sided ruling interpretations that exclude the interests of oppressed social groups and serve only those of the few.

I believe there is much to be said for Honneth's argument. Indeed, I want to argue that his account of the social–ontological anchor of social struggles succeeds in showing, at least, why any social order integrated through shared norms is always vulnerable and potentially receptive to contestations of established interpretations of those norms, and that dominated groups in those contexts indeed have an interest in knowledge that enables such transformative interpretations. However, I also want to argue that his argument is ultimately unsuccessful, since it suffers from two basic problems.

First, I will argue that Honneth offers an overly restrictive account of the basis of emancipatory struggles—one that is perhaps too wedded to Western modernity and insufficiently sensitive to emancipatory struggles that do not take place in the context of established bourgeois constitutional republics.³ In this sense, his argument too remains a historicist thesis, rather than a social–ontological one. Second, I will argue that he ultimately provides an inadequate account, not only of the object of “emancipatory knowledge”—i.e., the epistemic content of what dominated social groups must know in order to emancipate themselves—but also of the dynamics that drive dominated social groups to engage in emancipatory social struggle in the first place. In this section, I first offer three counterexamples that cast doubt on whether, in the Hegel-Dewey position, Honneth has truly identified a universal social–ontological anchor of social conflict, and, second, I develop an alternative account of both the object of emancipatory knowledge and the dynamics of emancipatory struggle.

As a historical observation about some of the paradigmatic social struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, this is surely an intuitively plausible claim. However, it may also, to some extent, be restricted to the paradigmatic emancipatory struggles of Western modernity, as we can quite easily identify significant historical cases in which ruling social norms are so narrow and exclusive not only in their established interpretations but also in their fundamental semantic scope that the only available option for dominated social groups is to engage in radical normative innovation or overthrow ruling social norms altogether.

One such example is surely the ruling racist norms of strict racial segregation and discrimination that governed Apartheid South Africa—which were not, as in the case of the post-Reconstruction American South, a kind of parallel universe of locally institutionalized racism within a federal constitutional republic founded on ideals of liberty and equality, but rather inscribed into the legal architecture of the South African state—and which thus left the oppressed majority population of Black Africans little alternative but a wholesale repudiation of those norms (Harrell, 2009; Marx, 1992). A second example is the subaltern politics in colonial India described by Ranajit Guha, in which, as Guha famously argues, the Indian colonial bourgeoisie achieved dominance but never hegemony, and where peasant insurrections and other forms of resistance to colonial rule were precisely not undertaken as a form of transformative reinterpretation of norms shared with colonial elites and their British masters but rather through a distinctive and parallel subaltern normative register based on kinship, ethnicity, rituals, and rites (Guha, 1997, 1999).⁴

Finally, the Haitian Revolution has often been interpreted—most famously by C. L. R. James—as a revolt by the slave population against their French colonial masters with reference to the ideals of the French Revolution that had rocked the imperial metropole (James, 1989). However, in Adom Getachew's more recent interpretation, the Haitian Revolution is seen as a site of radical normative innovation that inaugurated “an alternative universal premised on the ideal of autonomy and emerging out the specific sites of colonial domination,” rather than as the instantiation of the universal normative ideal of the “rights of man” already articulated in the metropole (Getachew, 2016). It is beyond the bounds of this article to settle this interpretative dispute, but if Getachew is on the right track, we may perhaps also point to the Haitian Revolution as a historical example of an emancipatory struggle that produced its own normative horizon, rather than a conflict over the interpretation of shared norms.⁵

Such examples would seem to cast doubt on whether the Hegel–Dewey position is in fact sufficiently sensitive to emancipatory struggles other than the paradigmatic cases of Western modernity—i.e., “the slave revolts in both the Americas, the civil rights movement in the United States, the European workers’ movement, and the British suffragette movement,” as Honneth lists them (Honneth, 2017)—which were all fought out within established bourgeois constitutional republics integrated through putatively universal but practically restricted social norms of liberty and equality. In other words, examples such as Apartheid South Africa, colonial India, and perhaps the Haitian Revolution seem to call into question whether, in the Hegel–Dewey position, Honneth has truly located “a normative potential that reemerges in every new social reality because it is so tightly fused to the structure of human interests,” or whether it presupposes the more specific historical context of an established constitutional republic characteristic of Western modernity.

These reflections seem to suggest that Honneth's defense of the emancipatory interest with reference to the plasticity of shared social norms does not go deep enough, as it were. Or, in other words, they may seem to question whether his argument concerning the inevitability of social conflict is truly a social–ontological, rather than a historicist thesis. In a similar vein to my argument here, Titus Stahl has recently argued that, notwithstanding Honneth's efforts, “there is no answer to be found in a conceptual analysis of normativity” to the question whether someone who challenges a norm will be treated by others as a subject with a legitimate claim to contestability or as a “nonsubject who has left the game of subjectivity” altogether, as this is ultimately a “political decision” (Stahl, 2021). In the same way, I argue, it ultimately remains a political decision, whether dominated groups choose to contest power relations with reference to shared norms or with reference to alternative normative resources.

In order to account not only for the paradigmatic emancipatory struggles of Western modernity but also for those, as described above, which involve more radical forms of normative innovation than transformative reinterpretation of already-shared norms, I believe we must return once again to the Marxian position that Honneth—in my view—dismisses far too hastily. More precisely, we must return to an interpretation of the Marxian position that is inspired to a greater extent by György Lukács's work on class consciousness, which locates the basis of the emancipatory interest not in Marx's account of the class structure of bourgeois society as such, but rather in the proletarian experience of subjection to class domination (Lukács, 1971).

In fact, at a phenomenological level—to which Honneth is usually otherwise keenly attuned—it seems to me simply implausible to say that dominated social groups react to and struggle against one-sided interpretations of ruling social norms. Rather, what they struggle against is the experience of being subject to dominating power that such one-sided interpretations serve to socially legitimize. Indeed, what is curiously missing in Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest is precisely an interest in knowledge about that which human beings seek emancipation from: namely, relationships of domination—the condition and experience of being subject to the arbitrary or unjustified power of others (Forst, 2021; Pettit, 1997).

The crucial point argued by Gädeke here is that any account of socially robust dominating power requires an account of the “wider system of social norms and practices” and the structures of empowerment and disempowerment that those norms and practices maintain (see also Ibsen, 2022; Ibsen, 2023). From this claim, it follows that dominated social groups have an emancipatory interest first and foremost in gaining insight into the structure of the dominating power relations that they find themselves subject to, and how these relations might be transformed through struggle. As Rainer Forst has argued, the “first question” for any critical theory is “the question of power,” and its principal task is to illuminate the ruling power relations within a society, which represent the unjust context of action for dominated groups, through which they must be guided in their struggles for emancipation (Forst, 2014).⁷

I thus propose the outlines of an alternative account of the emancipatory interest, which sees this interest rooted ultimately in group experiences of subjection to dominating power, and which leaves open whether contestation of ruling power relations appeals to shared norms or more group-specific norms. In contrast to Honneth's account, this alternative is able to account for emancipatory struggles not only within established bourgeois constitutional republics but also in cases such as Apartheid South Africa, colonial India, and (on Getachew's interpretation) the Haitian Revolution, in which dominated social groups were unwilling or simply unable to appeal to social norms shared with their oppressors and mobilized instead in complete rejection of ruling social norms or with reference to a distinctive, subaltern normative register or novel social norms that they generated in the course of their struggle.

Moreover, Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest also fails to illuminate the dynamics by which dominated social groups come to question their social order, become responsive to their interest in freedom from domination, and practically engage in emancipatory struggle. These dynamics play out at a deeper level than interpretive conflicts over shared norms: namely, in the human experience of subjection to domination that leads dominated social groups to question and demand justifications for the relations of dominating power within which they find themselves, and which may or may not proceed through constatations of shared norms. The central dynamic of this dialectic, I want to argue, is that between dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power and the epistemic and normative means at their disposal for discursively articulating these reactive attitudes as shared experiences of moral injury. In the following and final section, I unpack these two arguments with reference to Horkheimer's and Honneth's early work.⁸

For all their faults, Horkheimer's and Habermas's respective accounts of the emancipatory interest both seek to locate the social–ontological anchor of the emancipatory interest in the human experience of subjection to domination. For Horkheimer, as we have seen, this account refers to the proletariat's subjection to bourgeois class domination, and in Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests, it refers, at least in outline, to the practice of domination as a primordial human way of relating to others. By abandoning Horkheimer's reliance on historical materialism and Habermas's questionable psychoanalytic construal of human emancipation as a collective species subject freeing itself from internal constraints, and focusing instead on intergroup interpretive conflicts over shared social norms, Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest in one respect pushes beyond the failures of his predecessors. However, as I have also argued, Honneth's account of the emancipatory interest simultaneously “falls behind” Horkheimer's and Habermas's accounts in a different sense, in that he effectively abandons the systematic intention pursued by both Horkheimer and Habermas of locating the root of the emancipatory interest in the human experience of subjection to dominating power.

These claims may seem inconsistent with the account of Horkheimer's model of immanent critique that I gave earlier in this article—a model that operates precisely by turning the content of bourgeois moral ideas critically against the dismal reality of bourgeois society, and which may thus seem to centre conflicts over shared social norms, much like in Honneth's account. However, there is no inconsistency. Whereas Honneth offers the claim that the inevitability of social conflict is rooted in the plasticity of shared social norms as a thesis of social ontology, Horkheimer clearly saw immanent critique, which proceeds on the basis of shared social norms, as presupposing the specific historical context of bourgeois society that is distinguished historically precisely by issuing normative promises that it is unable to redeem in practice (Ibsen, 2023).

However, Horkheimer did in fact occasionally gesture toward a genuinely social–ontological thesis on the emancipatory interest, such as his distinctively Lukácsian claim that “the groups that bear knowledge of the roots of evil and the ends on which their emancipation depends are those that experience privation as a consequence of their position in the reproductive process of society” (Horkheimer, 1987). We can thus interpret the young Horkheimer as indicating a possible social–ontological thesis on the emancipatory interest that identifies the root of emancipatory struggle in the dynamic interplay between the proletariat's experience of class domination—and the suffering and privation that they experience as a result—and the epistemic and normative resources necessary for discursively articulating these experiences as injustices that may be remedied only through struggle.⁹ In this account, critical theory aims to provide those resources: the bridge that allows dominated groups to comprehend their group experiences of socially compelled misery as injustices, and which thus at the same time allows them to grasp their interest in the knowledge that enables emancipation.

As Honneth suggests here, the cognitive potential inherent in affective reactions to the experience of domination may never become articulated as a protest against injustice; this depends—as Horkheimer and Honneth both argue—on the epistemic and normative resources available in the subject's social environment. And the later Honneth is surely right to insist that, in many, if not most, contemporary cases, struggles for emancipation do take the form of a transformative reinterpretation of shared social norms, because those struggles are fought out within the social and political context of constitutional democracies founded on basic political norms of liberty and equality. However, in cases where no such “shared” norms exist, or where dominated social groups are so alienated and excluded from ruling norms that they must rely instead on their own epistemic and normative resources or more radical forms of normative innovation, such resources may still redeem the cognitive potential inherent in affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power.

To be sure, one might wonder whether this outline of a defense of the idea of an emancipatory interest is sufficiently robust. In the argument presented here, I have sought to replace (the later) Honneth's thesis, which is predicated on the Hegel–Dewey position as a view of social normativity, with a moral–psychological thesis that draws on Horkheimer's and Honneth's own, earlier work. But must we not also account for what drives dominated groups to react affectively to the experience of subjection to dominating power? I am not so sure that we must. Or rather, it may simply be the case that the historically observable fact that human beings will generally under certain circumstances (which I have tried to clarify above) react affectively against subjection to the power of another, in ways that may become articulated in critique and struggle, is ultimately the sine qua non of critical theory, which critical theory is itself unable to conclusively account for.¹⁰

In this article, I have argued that Axel Honneth's recent attempt to justify the idea of a universal human interest in emancipation is ultimately unsuccessful and that a successful account of critical theory's foundational aspiration to offer such emancipatory knowledge must ultimately be grounded at a deeper level than the plasticity of shared social norms, if it is to escape the failures of past attempts to answer this most fundamental question of critical theory. More specifically, I have advanced the claim that the social–ontological basis for the idea that human beings share a basic interest in emancipation must be sought in dominated groups’ affective reactions to the experience of subjection to dominating power, and that critical theory must seek to provide the emancipatory knowledge—the epistemic and normative resources—that allows for these affective reactions to become discursively articulated as injustices and political demands in emancipatory struggles.