From Hegel to Foucault and back? On Axel Honneth’s interpretation of neoliberalism

The article is focused on the role that the question of neoliberalism plays in Axel Honneth’s work. The author aims to show that when Honneth tries to conceptualize the very nature of the neoliberal transformations, he is forced to abandon some of the presumptions that underlie the systematic approach developed in his most important work, Freedom’s Right. It seems to emerge from Honneth’s studies on neoliberalism, not only the difficulty of analysing the capitalist market economy as a sphere of social liberty, as presupposed in Freedom’s Right, but also a much less consensual and teleological image of contemporary societies – an image in which norms and values are always intertwined with mechanisms of power, social integration is always also based on the exercise of domination, force and ideology and the capitalist can also exist without a background of shared normative orientations. The author suggests finally that, in order to give a better account of the neoliberal transformations, one should rediscover the importance of the original Gramscian category of cultural and political hegemony