Nancy Fraser's integrated theory of justice: a 'sociologically rich' model for a global capitalist era?

• Author: Lovell, Terry

Abstract

Focusing on Nancy Fraser's integrated theory of justice, the paper analyses the exchanges between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, both of whom draw upon Bourdieu in articulating their rival socio-normative theories of justice. Beginning with a brief description of Nancy Fraser's theory, the article analyses the same in relation to Honneth's monist 'thick, multilayered and historically developed recognition order' and his critique of Fraser's 'perspectival dualism' all the while referring back to Bourdieu as a point of reference. The paper develops this tension further by invoking Bourdieu's notion of habitus in relation to the 'subaltern speech of the dominated' revealing and illuminating points of congruence and of departure between and amongst the three scholars, particularly as concerns the voices that compete for hearing in the public discursive sphere. The paper highlights these scholars' approaches to the transnational effects of global capital and neoliberalism on full participation in the public sphere. It then suggests that Fraser's concept of participatory parity, which draws upon a rich legacy of feminist counterhegemonic practice, is a plausible principle of justice for addressing a broad range of social conflicts, disputes and injustice claims in restructuring global capitalist order.

Keywords:

Bourdieu, Feminism, Fraser, Global Capitalism, Habitus, Honneth, Participation, Recognition, Social Justice, Subaltern.

1. Introduction

   The aim of a series of exchanges between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth was to delineate, in the spirit of critical social theory, 'a sociologically rich interpretation of the normative claims implicit in the social conflicts of the present' (Honneth, A, in Fraser, N, and Honneth, A, 2003, p 110) that draws therefore on sociology as well as normative theory. Honneth's chief sociological recourse in this exchange is to the empirical study conducted by Pierre Bourdieu and a team of researchers on social suffering in contemporary society among marginalized working-class communities on the fringes of Paris and elsewhere (Bourdieu, P, et al. 1999), of the kind that witnessed the upsurge of angry, violent demonstrations across France in the autumn of 2005. Fraser had herself drawn upon aspects of Bourdieu's conceptual frame in the early stages of the development of her integrated theory of justice, the central concern of this paper, which suggests that this point of reference lends itself to further consideration in assessing the exchange.

   Although feminist issues are not at the centre of her exchange with Honneth, Fraser's feminism marks all that she writes, as is clear in many of the vivid examples with which her theory is furnished. One prominent resource for feminist theory in the 1970s was the Marxism that circulated in sociology and many other disciplines. The famous cultural or linguistic turn that subsequently affected so many of the disciplines on which feminist scholarship had drawn, gave greater prominence to philosophy and to textual studies, even to the point of reducing 'the social' to 'the textual'. The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a 'return to the social' (1), restoring attention to causal/structural sociological analysis, but this project is no simple turning back. The cultural turn was no cul-de-sac. 'The cultural' retains the place it has won in feminist theorising in which 'the social' had been temporarily eclipsed. (2)

   The history of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century has been one of development, contestation and transformation. Fraser's early contributions came from a socialist feminist perspective, and many who aligned themselves with this approach were hostile to 'the cultural turn' and to postmodernism. But Fraser holds together in critical synthesis the legacy of socialist feminism, aspects of postmodernism, and finally and perhaps most significantly, critical theory. Her approach is dialogical. Her characteristic strategy in response to those who would set these feminisms in opposition to one another has been 'the finesse'. She seeks out, through critique, defensible versions of each that may then be reconciled. (3) Her theory of justice is built in the context of 'the post-socialist condition' (Fraser, N, 1997), and it holds together another dichotomous opposition between 'the politics of equality' and 'the politics of difference'. In characteristic fashion she accords privilege to neither one against the imperatives of the other, arguing the case that justice requires, and can integrate, valid forms of both.

   Bourdieu's is a complex sociology of domination. One of its principal lines of articulation distinguishes social structure from habitus, although these are intimately linked. (4) Habitus is a powerful yet elusive concept, and is significant in the sociological underpinnings sought for Fraser's and Honneth's rival socio-normative theories of justice. It makes of Bourdieu a tacit third party to their exchange. All three have positioned themselves in relationship to Habermas over the manner in which the sphere of public debate, within which injustice claims circulate and are assessed, systematically disadvantages dominated social and reference groups. (5) Honneth's critique and Bourdieu's sociology of domination provide two pressure points on Fraser's theory. But the third and most urgent challenge lies in the project of interpreting and adapting the theory to the exigencies of global capitalism, a challenge which Fraser has addressed in her recent work. I shall begin with a brief account of her theory of justice.

2. Fraser's integrated theory of justice

   Fraser's early framing of her theory is concerned primarily with inequality and injustice in the context of global capitalism and the increase in cultural diversity in modern society that it carries in its train. She argues for a 'dual perspectival' approach that distinguishes two types of injustice, those of misrecognition and maldistribution, rooted respectively in the cultural domination that is perpetuated through the status order and the economic system of modern capitalism. She identifies three types of socio-economic injustice:

   i) Exploitation (appropriation of fruits of labour).

   ii) Economic marginalization (restriction to undesirable or poorly paid work, or denial of access to incomes).

   iii) Denial of an adequate material standard of living.

   Her three types of 'cultural or symbolic' injustice rooted in 'social patterns of representation etc.' (Fraser 1997: 14) are:

   i) Cultural domination (subjection to alien standards of judgement).

   ii) Non-recognition (subjection to cultural invisibility).

   iii) Disrespect (routine subjection to malign stereotypes and disparagements).

   Fraser is interested in systematic injustices that affect those occupying particular positions within the social relations of the class and status orders. To be sure, socio-cultural groups and categories are not mutually exclusive. But Fraser argues that they may be classified according to their primary roots and their attendant vulnerability to one or another type of injustice. She places them along a continuum; at one extreme are those groups that are rooted primarily in the economic order, most vulnerable to maldistribution; at the other end are clustered those that are defined within the matrix of status distinction and who are particularly vulnerable to misrecognition. If the subaltern social class--the working (but not always employed) class--provides the paradigm case with regard to economic injustice, Fraser's examples of groups that suffer primarily from cultural injustice include those whose sexualities place them outside the hierarchies and values of the dominant culture, including homosexuals. At the centre point we find what Fraser terms 'bivalent' groups that are equally vulnerable to both types of injustice. The two examples she uses are those of gender and 'race', both identified as culturally rather than economically grounded, but she argues that these distinctions have become sufficiently deeply embedded in, and structuring of, the inequalities of the economic order to merit this bivalent status. Dalits in India would serve as a powerful example (Chigateri 2004). Their oppression is at one and the same time rooted in the (cultural) status order that defines caste (for Max Weber, castes were status groups) and deeply embedded in an economic order that perpetuates them.

   Bivalent groups are presented as special cases, but it is not always easy to distinguish them from groups grounded more fully in the economic or status orders. The dominated, or subaltern class was never homogeneous; but in a variety of contexts and forms, it developed distinctive social and cultural institutions and practices, and a habitus that was marked in terms of class. Wherever subaltern groups are culturally distinct, they may attract disparagement, cultural misrecognition. On the other hand, pace Judith Butler (Butler, J, 1998), homosexuals, insofar as they are culturally visible, may pay severe economic penalties, and suffer physical as well as what Bourdieu terms symbolic violence (Bourdieu, P, 2000). But whether injustices are principally generated in the economic system or the cultural/status order, or whether they are fully bivalent, Fraser's dual perspectival approach carries the imperative that analysis must always examine all cases and all proposed remedies in terms of both, and it is this that serves to protect against any given categories being seen as 'merely cultural' or exclusively 'economic'.

   Fraser is indeed concerned, alongside philosophical/political analysis, to offer guidelines for a more practical, pragmatic task: to identify modes of intervention that are, in a given conjuncture and a particular case, likely to have some success in remedying the injustice suffered, or at least reducing it, but above all, that will not exacerbate it (Fraser, N, 1997)...