Confronting the neoliberal challenge: Recognition, social freedom and depth realism

Abstract This article explores how Axel Honneth's critical theory, when adapted to a materialist depth realism, can be utilised as a critique of Fredrick Hayek's ‘neoliberalism’, an antipolitics influenced by Karl Popper's neo‐positivism. In response to the neoliberal challenge, it is proposed that Axel Honneth's theories of recognition, when grounded in anthropological (‘critical’) materialism, provides a robust defence of an irreducible social agency. When interpreted through this lens, recognition is one aspect of the system of human needs based on subject–subject interactions, the other being a subject–object interaction of humans with non‐human objects. By contrast, Honneth's more recent theory of social freedom relies on a Hegelian process of historical reconstruction and so remains vulnerable to the same epistemic errors that inform neoliberal attempts to universalise homo economicus , that is, of reducing reality to various ways in which it is conceptualised. In this regard, anthropological materialism must presuppose depth realism . The importance of this can be seen when the implications for Honneth's move towards a more orthodox Hegelianism in his more recent works are considered.