Reconciliation and Reification: Freedom's Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory [Hardcover]

This book defends Hegel's concept of reconciliation as the best understanding of human beings' emancipatory interest and presents reification as a systematic blockage to its realization. Drawing upon psychoanalysis and legal theory, it explores the extent to which recent theories (Rawls, Honneth, Habermas) succeed in spelling out how society could be organized in such a way that reconciliation between individual and society could be realized on something approaching a universal basis.The critical theory tradition has, since its inception, sought to distinguish its perspective on society by maintaining that persons have a deep-seated interest in the free development of their personality--an interest that can only be realized in andthroughthe rational organization of society, but which is systematically stymied by existing society. And yet tradition has struggled to specify this emancipatory interest in a way that is neither excessively utopian nor accommodating to existing society. Despite the fact that Hegel's concept of reconciliation is normally thought to run aground on the latter horn of this dilemma, this book argues that reconciliation is the best available conceptualization of emancipatory interest. Todd Hedrick presents Hegel's idea of freedom as something actualized in individuals' lives through their reconciliation with how society shapes their roles, prospects, and sense of self; it presents reconciliation as less a matter of philosophical cognition, and more of inclusion in a responsive, transparent political process. Hedrick further introduces the concept of reification, which--through its development in Marx and Luk?cs, through Horkheimer and Adorno--substantiates an increasingly cogent critique of reconciliation as something unachievable within the framework of modern society, as social forces that shape our identities and life prospects come to appear natural, as part of the way things just are.Giving equal weight to psychoanalysis and llóÓ