Arthur Bueno presented a paper on: 'The Psychic Life of Freedom: Social Pathology and its Symptoms'

This paper discusses the relationship between Honneth's intersubjective theory of recognition and his political theory of democratic ethical life by addressing the potentials and difficulties attached to the concept of social pathology. Taking into account the diverse uses of this concept throughout Honneth's oeuvre, it focuses initially on two of its formulations: first, the more recent discussions presented in “Die Krankheiten der Gesellschaft” (2014), some of which can be read in continuity with arguments presented in Das Recht der Freiheit (2011); second, an implicit conception of social pathology which can be found in Kampf um Anerkennung (1992). These formulations involve contrastingly different premises with regard to phenomenological, methodological, social ontological and etiological matters. I argue that such differences can be better grasped if one bears in mind two distinctive ways of understanding the fundamental intuition at the basis of the notion of social pathology: either as an analogy or as an homology. By explicating some of the actual or potential discrepancies between both conceptions, the intention is to outline the grounds on which they could be brought together within the framework of a comprehensive concept of social pathology. Having this in mind, I then examine a third conception of social pathology which was first presented in Leiden an Unbestimmtheit (2001) and later developed, with some restrictions, in Das Recht der Freiheit (2011).
This paper is part of a larger project which aims at exploring the social theoretical and normative foundations of the concept of social pathology. However, it was not written as the chapter of a future book or Habilitation dissertation, but rather as the first draft of an article. The text was originally presented in the workshop “Freiheit und Anerkennung – eine Verhältnisbestimmung”, dedicated to internal readings of Axel Honneth's works, with a special interest in the relations between his early theory of recognition and his recent political theory. Although the reconstruction of Honneth's concept of social pathology is not the primary aim of my research at the MWK, some of the topics discussed in the paper will likely be further developed in the project. Particularly relevant is the distinction between analogical and homological conceptions of social pathology and their different underlying assumptions regarding the phenomenology, methodology, social ontology and etiology of such phenomena.