The politics of mutual recognition: The philosophical roots of a theory of socialist civic democracy

This thesis articulates the Heglian and Marxist philosophical roots of a theory of socialist civic democracy. In the first chapter Marx's theory of labour is shown to presuppose what Hegel calls mutual recognition. This argument is based on an articulation of why desire must educate itself from the appetitive to the erotic . In the second chapter the theories of alienation of Marx and Hegel are outlined, generating a distinction between necessary and unnecessary alienation and an argument for the priority of common over private property. In the third chapter three forms of unnecessarily alienated society are described such as to show how each is characterized by a contradiction between its system of juridical-imaginative and concrete-lived recognition. On the basis of this analysis it is argued that fully free societies must be constituted by the first-order institutions of family, civil society and state. Civil society is itself divided into two spheres---individual and sectoral civil society . It is argued that the institutions of sectoral civil society must be structured in such a way as to educate desire from the appetitive to the erotic. In the fourth chapter it is argued that only a sectoral civil society founded on worker-managed cooperatives and a system of democratic representation in which sectors participate in the juridical state can educate desire such as to ensure a harmony of concrete-lived and juridical-imaginative recognition. This system of mutual recognition is called socialist civic democracy . This claim is made in such a way as to demonstrate that social criticism articulated in the name of socialist civic democracy is not utopian. Four examples of movements that foreshadow socialist civic democracy (Yugoslavian worker-managed socialism, the Israeli kibbutzim, the Basque Mondragon cooperative and the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers) are described.