How To Critique Work Objectively?

In The Working Sovereign, Axel Honneth sets himself three tasks: to clarify how modern working conditions can be criticised in a way that is theoretically consistent; to unveil the lived reality of work over two hundred years of capitalism; and to demonstrate the centrality of work for a healthy democracy. The book makes major contributions to the philosophy of work, democratic theory and contemporary political theory more broadly. However, the instrumentalist approach Honneth adopts to critique the organisation of work is beset with problems. This article identifies three principal difficulties with this instrumentalist strategy: it produces a narrowing of critical theory's scope, which is puzzling given Honneth’s earlier model; the historical narrative underpinning the argument is problematic; and the reconstruction of the history of labour critiques distorts real political movements and intellectual traditions by mapping them onto single-themed paradigms. The article concludes by arguing that an “objective”, “intrinsic” approach, which connects features of working activities and working relations to key normative demands, such as well-being, freedom, moral and political rights, is possible and better suited.