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An assessment of Axel Honneth’s reception and appropriation of Hegel’s theory of normative reconstruction as presented in his Freedom’s Right (Columbia University Press, 2014).

A comparative assessment of Honneth’s and Hegel’s approach to normative reconstruction focusing on three basic issues: general methodology, understandings of the logic and program of the Philosophy of Right, and analyses and assessments of modern market societies as detailed in Hegel’s account of civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft).

For Honneth, normative reconstruction consists in reworking modes of social rationality already realized in modern institutions. By contrast, Hegel is shown to advance an approach to reconstruction in which an account of social rationality is properly fashioned only in the reconstruction process itself. In this way Hegel is also shown to proffer an approach to normative reconstruction that is at once more robustly reconstructive and more robustly normative than is the case with Honneth.

The paper demonstrates the ongoing value of Hegel’s thought for social and political theory. It illuminates Hegel’s uniquely dialectical approach to immanent social critique, dedicated not only to explicating existing tensions and “bifurcations” (Entzweiungen) but – with the help of a distinctive account of Bildung (cultivation or formation) – to engaging those tensions and bifurcations in order to delineate the conditions for their constructive supersession. It also elucidates different ways in which critical social theorists, committed to notions of “immanent transcendence,” draw on the resources of market societies to mount normative challenges to the aporias of those societies.

Faculty members at public universities in different disciplines view civil society differently as they perform their function of creating partnerships with society. This chapter draws evidence from faculty members in public universities from one African country – Malawi. Drawing from Derrida’s (1978) concept of difference and West’s (1993) views of social theory, the chapter examines three approaches to community engagement (CE) with civil society. It concludes that the growing demands to attain difference in CE have resulted in oversupply of approaches that are often pitied against each other; hence, the hierarchies obscure the work CE is achieving.

Adam Smith, it is generally acknowledged, founded the modern discipline of political economy with the study entitled An Inquiry into The Wealth of Nations (1776) which he built upon the ethical system he presumed to exist in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Ricardo took Smith's observations somewhat further with his publication of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). When John Stuart Mill wrote his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, his considerations of economic processes were intimately connected with the political. By the time Marx published Das Kapital as a critique of political economy in 1867 the term was entrenched in both academic life and in common parlance and political circles. The study of economics was an integral part of the study of the state. Ironically, however, political economy was about to be upstaged by the development of economics as a separate and positivist discipline. William Stanley Jevons had published his “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy” in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in the previous year. This was much more widely read at the time than Das Kapital. By 1890, Alfred Marshall had published his Principles of Economics. The book began with these words: “Political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” The great tradition of seeing economics as an integral part of politics and vice versa was disappearing. However, though economists were anxious to convert that part of political economy known as economics and see it as a scientific discipline, the reality, that is the integrated nature of the state and the economy, remained. Simply because certain ideologues decided to separate politics from economics did not mean that the state in any sense disentangled itself from the economy or the economy from the state.

This very interesting chapter written by Delalieux and Kourula raises two important questions: (1) Why do the categories of civil society, so co-opted by neoliberal ideology, attract the aspiration of radical democracy and anticapitalist movements? (2) How can partnerships between nongovernmental organizations (civil society) and multinational corporations (market) mitigate the worst effects of economic liberalism? The authors argue that (a) the concept of civil society in Enlightenment thought is sometimes significantly different from its use in contemporary civil society theorizing – even though the latter speaks in the name of the former; (b) the results of civil society actions in correcting the market are limited in time, space, and resources; and that (c) the contemporary critics of the state are forming a powerful coalition that is demonizing the state in a way that is preventing public regulation from developing. Those powerful conclusions should make everyone rethink critically the importance of each sector as well as the relationship between sectors.

Salamon and Anheier have developed a theory about civil society regimes to explain differences between groups of countries based on data from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector project (Anheier & Salamon, 2006; Salamon & Anheier, 1998; Salamon, Sokolowski, & List, 2003). The purpose of the theory is to classify the countries into different groups in which different causal mechanisms are in operation. This echoes by and large Barrington Moore Jr.'s classification of countries according to their “routes to the modern world” (Moore, 1966) and Esping-Andersen's three welfare “regimes” (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Esping-Andersen, 1999). The assumption is that there is no single factor that can explain the size and composition of the nonprofit sector in different countries, in contrast to the economic theories of nonprofit organizations. Instead, complex relations exist between, on the one hand, social forces such as the working class, the landed and urban elites, the peasantry, and external powers, and on the other hand, social institutions like the state and the church. As a consequence, countries cluster into four types, social democratic, corporatist, statist, and liberal models, according to size of public welfare spending and scale of the nonprofit sector. The theory is used to explain current patterns in nonprofit sector size and composition when it comes to employment, revenue, expenditures, and volunteering. That means comparing only a few variables for a large number of countries.

Purpose – This chapter introduces the contents of the volume and provides an editorial overview of the origins of the concept of the Third Sector, methodologies employed by contributors, how contributions address different organizational forms, issues of critique within the volume, and the benefits of the contributions for researchers and practitioners within the Third Sector, and within Critical Management Studies.

Methodology/approach – Editorial overview and synthesis.

Research implications – The contents of the volume significantly advance critical perspectives upon the Third Sector.

Social implications – The contents of the volume enable improved critical reflection for those working within the Third Sector.

Originality/value of chapter – This editorial introduction presents the first broad-ranging synthesis of (a) contemporary issues within the Third Sector, Social Economy and Civil Society and (b) Critical Management Studies.