Abstract

The »original idea« of socialism is, according to Axel Honneth, marked by the »normative intuition« to create a relationship between liberty, equality and fraternity »in which these principles would mutually enable each other« and in which »all obstructions to the even realization of all three principles of the French revolution« would be removed. My reflections on Honneth’s reconstruction of socialism starts with the assumption that the relationship between the three revolutionary principles is a normative paradox constitutive of modern politics. In the first part, I discuss Honneth’s idea of blocked communication between the three principles. The second part is dedicated to the structural correspondence between the three principles, the three spheres of Hegel’s conception of morality and, furthermore, to the three great modern political ideologies – liberalism, socialism and conservatism. The third part revolves around the concept of »communicative equalization« and explores the question of whether a normative de-hierarchization of the three moments is necessary in order to think the possibility of an »even realization of all three principles«. In the last part, these considerations are continued with the help of the concept of paradoxical communication, which is linked to the interpretation of negative dialectics as an exercise in critical self-cultivation.