Freedom's Right by Axel Honneth

Author:Axel Honneth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

6.2.2 The Sphere of Consumption

The rapid spread of the capitalist market economy throughout Western Europe in the twentieth century was for the most part explained by Max Weber, according to whom the motivational foundation for the necessary work ethic and self-discipline lay in a number of currents of Protestantism that linked God's mercy to the fulfilment of professional obligations.185 Over the last few decades, a number of sociological studies have shown that a new culture of consumerism emerging in eighteenth century England played an equally important role in the growing dynamism of the market.186 However we interpret the rapid growth of consumer needs on the threshold of social modernity, whether we trace it back to religious roots187 or to growing desires for personal authenticity,188 it is clear that both the rapid growth and the social legitimacy of the capitalist market were, already at an early stage, largely due to its apparent capacity to inform companies about the goods that are increasingly demanded by ‘private’ consumers. It is no accident that Hegel begins his account of the market economy with a chapter on the ‘system of needs’, a term that refers to the increasing satisfaction of ever more sophisticated individual needs, far beyond the bare necessities, through economic competition.189 Of course, the picture that Hegel draws of the sphere of private consumption is nearly idyllic compared to the developments that would soon follow. He often mentions that ‘opinion’ determines what counts as a need to be satisfied by produced goods, and he also mentions the tendency of the ‘English’ in their desire to be ‘comfortable’ to acquire a sheerly endless number of new desires,190 but for the most part, all these ‘multiplied’ ways and means remain tied to the natural basis of ‘food, drink, clothing, etc’.191

What Hegel's considerations on the ‘system of needs’ demonstrate is that he was more aware than any of his contemporaries that the gradually emerging market economy was accompanied by an additional dimension, a new form of individual freedom that, as a system of previously unknown practices, would have a significant influence on the culture of modern society. By means of the opportunities offered by the market, subjects would learn to see themselves as consumers who are free to determine their personal desires, and thus their identity, in the search for and acquisition of commodities. Hegel treats consumerism, to use a term that would later become increasingly pejorative, as an attitude [Einstellungssyndrom] that conveys a significant advance in the institutional establishment of individual freedom.192 More than any of his disciples, Hegel recognized that the entire sphere of consumption, despite all its ‘proliferation of arbitrariness’,193 represents an intersubjective ‘quality of being recognized’.194 Like Adam Smith, who was very insistent on this point,195 Hegel also emphasizes that the interests of consumers and producers harmonize with each other, because the satisfaction of each side's interest depends on that of the other.196 Hegel even goes so far as to speak of having to ‘fit in with other people’, because both sides

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