(p.111) Over the past decade Jean-Philippe Deranty, along with Nicholas Smith, Emmanuel Renault, Christophe Dejours and others, has proposed that the foundations of a more robust, critical conception of work already exist within Honneth’s corpus. Deranty proposes that the Marxian critique of alienation that Honneth sketched in his 1977–1985 writings, if supplemented with the results of recent empirical studies by Christophe Dejours in the psychodynamics of work, contains a kind of recognition specific to working activity that could be incorporated into Honneth’s mature system. This would compensate for what Deranty sees as the greatest deficiency in Honneth’s system, allowing Honneth to...

(p.112) Of Axel Honneth’s many debts to the tradition of critical theory, the most significant is the idea that social critique must proceed from a standpoint immanent to, rather than transcendent of, its object. That is, rather than developing the concept of a just society and then evaluating existing institutions based on this external standard – as do Rawls and other political philosophers in the Kantian tradition – an immanent critique aims to conceptualise existing social institutions in such a way that they already appear as suboptimal, irrational or unstable forms of what they, on the basis of their own presuppositions,...

(p.115) In 1980, Honneth proposed restoring the normative significance of working activity by reconstructing Marx’s critique of capitalist production as an alienated form of work.27 For Honneth, the critical thrust of Marx’s concept of alienation is the role that a worker’s relation to the objective products of her or his work is supposed to play in her or his formation [Bildung] as a self-conscious, autonomous or fully human subject.

(p.116) Deranty draws on 40 years of empirical studies by Christophe Dejours, which have shown across multiple workplaces that regardless how detailed and precise the instructions given by management, or how insignificant the task involved, a worker is continually obliged to overcome abnormalities, breakdowns, glitches and other contingencies of the work process.This, for Dejours, suggests that in every work situation there is an “irreducible and inescapable gap” between the instructions given to a working subject and the actual activity that she or he will need to carry out in order to complete the assigned task. Dejours defines work as the overcoming...

(p.119) Deranty’s writings make a compelling case that a critical conception of work must criticise working activity and not just the institutional framework in which work occurs. Moreover, his analysis points to a sense in which the full development of a human subject’s unique capacities depends not just on intersubjective relations, but on a relation to the world of objects that a human subject establishes in and through working.

(p.99) Deranty and Smith provide another avenue of critique. They emphasize that what happens at work, what one does at work, not just what one is paid, are relevant for a critical conception of work. In other words, both the identity of the worker and the activity of working are at issue (Deranty and Smith, 2012: 55). This locution distances them from Honneth’s current concern with how work is implicated in the social recognition of achievement. In a number of papers Deranty argues that it is important to separately recognize the epistemic achievement of work: the capacity to accomplish a task,...

(p.104) Like Honneth, feminist political economy understands that economic transformation is subject to normative constraints. Patterns of female labour force participation reveal that normative models of work are simultaneously constituted by capital and the state. Additionally, however, the organization of care labour is both presumed and configured through these arrangements. Gender functions at both levels, with deep-seated expectations about the appropriate division of labour within and without the workforce taking normative effect. This analysis extends the concerns articulated by Honneth’s interlocutors: further to Borman’s concern about the structures which produce economic exclusion, for feminist political economy the gendered division of labour...