Taking Care Seriously: Gendering Honneth’s The Working Sovereign – A Normative Theory of work

Axel Honneth’s latest work The Working Sovereign. A Normative Theory of Work states that the democratization of work and employees’ experience of democracy at work are important prerequisites for creating and promoting democracy as well as social and political participation. According to Honneth, various aspects of ‘good work’ are essential for such a democratization of work. Undoubtedly working conditions must be improved and it is an inestimable merit of Axel Honneth’s book to demand this so clearly. Beyond this fundamental agreement, I would, however, take a broader view of some details and draw some conclusions differently. First, it is difficult to derive the improvements needed in the world of work from a theory of democracy alone as its limited scope hides other urgent problems. Second, any approach might prove short-sighted if the democratization of work thesis only refers to wage labour or, at best, to paid care work. Rather, a comprehensive concept of care/work must be the starting point. On a surface level, Honneth’s conception of work is broad and gender-sensitive. However, Honneth does not follow this to its logical conclusion and fails to provide a systematic role to his conception of work when deriving his claims in the final chapters of his book. Rather, this broad conception of work is lost more or less inconspicuously behind a latent androcentrism. This has far-reaching consequences: from a comprehensive, gender-theoretical perspective, it would have been necessary to demand the ‘democratization of care/work’ such that gender and specifically women, who are the main care providers and perform this work largely unpaid and invisibly, finally are also included. What is more, in Honneth’s analysis the same elision applies to other intersectional categories, as race, migration, citizenship and ability are all lost from view in Honneth’s nation-state-based, homogeneous and harmonious concept of democratization. In sum, in my critical engagement with Honneth’s new text I will show that while he very clearly points out the indispensable need for better working conditions, he is blind to gender and care work.