From Hegel to Foucault and back? On Axel Honneth's interpretation of neoliberalism

In this article, I would like to critically focus on the role that the question of neoliberalism put in Axel Honneth’s studies. As I will attempt to show, this aspect of Honneth's latest research is of particular interest, for several reasons. Firstly, the question of neoliberalism is at the center, in one way or another, of all the most recent works in which Honneth has developed a diagnosis of the time, combined with an empirically grounded social analysis. For another reason it worths to consider the way in which Honneth has in recent years interpreted what he himself called the “neoliberal revolution”. It seems in fact that when Honneth tries to conceptualize the very nature of the neoliberal transformations, he is forced to abandon some of the presumptions that underlie the systematic approach developed in his most important work - Freedom’s Right. Put blundly, I wonder if it is precisely Honneth’s discussion of the nature of neoliberal trasformations that forces us to question some fundamental socio-theoretical assumptions that underly the whole project developed in his book Freedom’s Right, and to redescover conceptual tools more in syntony with the first Frankfurt Critical Theory. What emerges from Honneth's studies on neoliberalism, is not only the difficult to analyze the capitalist market economy as a sphere of social liberty, as presupposed in Freedom’s Right. What emerge is also but also a much less consensual and teleological image of contemporary societies: an image in which norms and values are always intertwined with mechanisms of power; social integration is always also based on the exercise of domination, force and ideology; capitalist can also exists without a background of shared normative orientations.