Introduction

Agnes Heller: Critical

theory, value reflexivity
and horizons of
modernity

Thesis Eleven
117
The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513616654789
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John Rundell
The School of Social and Political Science The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Australia

The works in this online special issue of Thesis Eleven by Agnes Heller (sometimes with
Ferenc Feher) have been published in the journal over a period of some 35 years in the
context of migrations from Budapest to Melbourne, then New York, and later a semipermanent return to post-Soviet Hungary. Like migrations generally, these contain a
story. The most immediate part of the story is one of dissidence, exclusion, expulsion and
homecoming. For Heller and Feher, as well as George and Maria Markus, migration is
framed by the experience of the two totalitarianisms of the 20th century as children,
Nazism; as adults, Russian or Soviet communism and its Hungarian variant, where they,
along with other members of the Budapest School, became ardent critics of the regime. It
is also framed by another experience, sometimes called capitalism or the West. In the
hands of Heller and Feher these two terms of totalitarianism and capitalism are reconstructed and analysed in terms of a paradigm of modernity that results in a theory not so
much of multiple modernities but ones that are formed through very different and
competing logics, and thus take very different directions. Intellectually, and from a less
immediate perspective, their migration is also a narrative about an intellectual journey
from humanist Marxism to post-Marxism in a way that does not result in a break, but
contours, reflections, departures, arrivals, and continuing commitments to values and a
way of life.1
The title of this article alerts us to three themes around which these works, as well as
Agnes Hellers extensive and complex body of work overall, can be organized. These
themes are modernity, especially political modernity and politics, the human condition

Corresponding author:
John Rundell, The School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010,
Australia.
Email: johnfr@unimelb.edu.au

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Thesis Eleven

and its philosophical anthropology, and the question of homeliness, especially with
reference to the issue of politics and culture. The following remarks aim to give not so
much an introduction to Hellers work but an elucidation of its coherence that can be
organized around three dominant themes that course throughout her work as a whole.
In this way, these remarks are not a discussion of these papers overall, but an invitation
to read a rich and enduring body of work that is still as relevant today as it was when
many of these papers were written. As such, this discussion also brings these papers
into dialogue not only with Hellers more recent work but also with more recent
receptions of it.2

Modernity and its logics

For Heller, modernity is conceptualized neither as a problem to be solved nor one to be
managed or negated. It is not a system, although as we shall see it can be described
or reconstructed by her in terms of logics. Nor is it an unfinished project that has the
teleological push of history behind it. Rather, modernity is conceptualized by her as a
historical period that is co-constituted along three different axes: cultural imagination,
logics or imperatives that give it a certain systematicity, and values. In the case of the
first aspect, modernity is typified by the technical and historical imaginations or
cultures. In the case of the second, Heller organizes the systematicity of modernity
around three logics of: technology; the functional allocation of social positions; and
political power, which includes the institutions of freedom and institutions of government, authority and coercion. In the case of the third aspect or axis, Heller points to
the significance of particularly modern values, and for her there are two freedom and
life where the value of freedom is given priority and pre-eminence (Heller, 1999;
Heller in Rundell, 2011a).3
Hellers interpretation of freedom is the centrepiece of her work. The way that Heller
interprets freedoms modernity releases it from reliance on metaphysics, philosophies of
history and grand narratives to ground it. In her terms, the primary constitutive value of
modern freedom is paradoxical. From her value perspective of freedom, modernity is
conceptualized as an un-resolvable paradox or double bind. The paradox of modern
freedom stems from its founding principle: it is a foundation that provides no foundations. It is experienced and interpreted in a variety of ways. In other words, if moderns
are thrown into this condition of freedom, then this condition is experienced as one
without anchors and points of orientation. It is, and is experienced as, a condition of
contingency, in which even a sense of home, in both existential and cultural terms, can
no longer be taken for granted (Heller, 1987, 1999; Heller in Rundell, 2011a).
It is this sense of the loss of taken-for-grantedness, this sense of contingency, of
homelessness, that, for Heller, marks the essential difference between pre-modern and
modern societies and the women and men who constitute and participate in them. On one
level this difference is carried by the division of social positions, functions and wealth, as
there is no continuity in life expectations or experiences from the cradle to the grave. It is
here that the gap between life as a modern and its promissory note of freedom is most
immediately experienced. The experience between the empirical reality and the promissory note can be articulated as conflict with all its dramas and passions.

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Heller approaches her image of the contestatory dimension of modernity from the
vantage point of two modern political projects or paradigms through which this contestation has been mobilized: (1) a redemptive paradigm with its totalitarian versions
that, once in power, want to eliminate conflict; and (2) a democratic paradigm, especially
its republican version, that accepts conflict, and can live with it as part of the contingent
condition of modernity. Here conflict is transposed into politics. Modern societies, whilst
dysfunctional or which have a degree of dysfunction built into them, can cope with this
from a democratic-pragmatic perspective.
The redemptive paradigm views conflicts and dysfunction in pathological terms only
and wants to rescue society from these in a single, grand gesture. In modernity this
gesture attempts to dissolve the paradox of freedom by integrating the competing logics
or imaginaries of modernity under a hyper-logic of a nation-state to create a different
modernity, a totalitarian one. In outline its main features are: an over-reduction of
modernity that nullifies, de-legitimates and illegalizes its inevitable conflicts; the creation of a self-appointed elite of interpreters of history and its texts who take the mantle
of authenticity; a homogenization of the plurality of groups, classes and organizations of
civil society under a single entity, usually the Party; the absence of stable and predictable
institutions as they are reduced to the personality of the redeemer qua individual or Party.
The exemplary models for this type of modernity were Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union (Feher et al., 1983; Heller and Feher, 1986: 24359; Feher, 1991; Arendt, 1973).
In more recent political history the redemptive paradigm and its totalitarian option
have been given a renewed life in unexpected places. As Heller has pointed out in many
of her more recent writings, new forms of the redemptive paradigm can emerge from a
negative, one-dimensionalizing critique of modernity coupled with an imputed group
that needs to be saved a culture or religion, a civilization, animals, or the planet. But the
contemporary version of the redemptive paradigm in the form of the new terrorisms
carries the same logic of homogenization and can be coupled with a new aesthetics of
radical evil in the Kantian sense. The new version of the redemptive paradigm qua
fundamentalism is stylized, ritualized, symbolic yet cruel, and in a way that homogenizes
and disregards the complexity of the target group that has been constructed as the enemy
(Feher and Heller, 1994; Heller, 2002a, 2002b, 2011b). In this sense, it belongs to the
historical-interpretative imaginary of modernity, which gives shape and credence to its
anti-political actions from a redemptive perspective.
In contrast to the redemptive paradigm Heller constructs an ideal-type of the democratic paradigm. This paradigm is also contrasted to the liberal model with its split
between the economic-public and private spheres, and its philosophical anthropology of
singular private interest. Like Habermas, Heller acknowledges the complexity of the
modern world and works with a differentiated model, as her version of the three logics
attests. Hellers concept of the political is the nadir point where, for her, the double bind
or the paradox of freedom comes to rest. Put slightly differently, for Heller the paradox
of freedom is most fully articulated politically in the logic of political power (Heller,
1990c: 122). Whilst the paradox of freedom between expectations and realities is keenly
felt in everyday life, its constant political topicalization entails that politics expands
beyond formal bounds and procedures (liberalism), or Arendts own version of the
demos that acts politically only on political issues (1990: 11927). According to Heller,

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each position is based on a principle of exclusion; for liberalism, the excluded are those
who are outside the process, whilst for Arendt, social concerns are excluded from
political discourse and action.
In contrast to both, Heller argues that democracy the nub of her logic of political
power must be an inclusive one derived from politically effective values, of which
freedom is the most universalizable, rather than a concept derived from empirical
sources such as equality. Here the double bind is experienced as a dynamic conflict
between interpretations of freedom (and hence its extensions) and concrete experiences of its lack or partiality in any sphere of life. Thus, the experience of dissatisfaction and the conflicts that this engenders are brought to life politically in the
public domain where the universal value of freedom is thematized and made concrete.
In Hellers view, the concretisation of the universal value of freedom in the public
domain is the modern concept of the political (Heller, 1990c: 123). In this context,
for her, the substantive aspect of modern politics does not revolve around the issue or
the topic, but the fact that people are reflectively and hence dynamically part of the
double bind itself.
Hellers argument is that when people articulate the universal value of freedom they
invoke a strong and weak claim. The stronger claim is that no-one and no topic can be
excluded from the public domain. The weak claim is that the public domain and the
activity of the actors qua political actors participate in an ethos of the, to be sure, historically interpretable universality of freedom. The nature of the contest and its limit
revolves around whether one accepts the notion of freedom, and the symmetrical reciprocity of the other that this presupposes, as part of the terms of the dispute. If one does,
otherness flourishes. In her view, otherness and difference are already built into the
dynamics of modernity and its paradox; it is already really and potentially contestatory.
Under these conditions all participants in the public domain implicitly or explicitly share
an agreement in freedom, as well as a critique and distance from the principles of
unfreedom, for example paternalism, racism, or genocide. In this sense, Hellers work is
not only a response to the Jacobin-Leninist heritage of radical philosophy, but also the
new fundamentalisms or anti-movements (Wieviorka) with their aesthetics of terror
(Heller, 2002a; Wieviorka, 2003).
Furthermore, actors in the social sphere could aspire to become actors of selfmanagement. By this, Feher and Heller mean that the social sphere is still the world
of work and the market the functional division of labour and capitalism but these
could become subject to the self-management of those who work in them. Where
Habermas now places normative constitutionalism at the centre of his model, at least in
Between Facts and Norms, which is the result of his theory of communicative rationality,
Feher and Heller include the social sphere, which can also be subject to democratization.
As Heller points out in her essay The Great Republic:
persons as members of self-managing institutions do not address political, but rather socioeconomic matters. They set the rules for their operations. What they decide in common is
the operation of such particular institutions. Self-managing bodies are concerned with
purposive-rational decisions, on the one hand, and with engendering value standards to
guide purposive rational decisions, on the other. (Heller, 1987: 197)

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For Heller, then, democratization is not synonymous with an increase in argumentation

(Habermas), but with an increase in the expression of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not
folded into a theory of language or argumentation, rather it is both a formal and
expressive category, and has the following characteristics. For her, persons are the
repositories of all human and political rights, and elect representatives to representative
political bodies. Beyond the formal and legally unrestrained rights of voting, persons
should, in a similar position to Habermas, have unfettered access to public spheres and be
able to use their own political judgement without guidance from others the Kantian
imperative that she shares with him. People are political actors in the sense that they also
participate as members of political and social institutions that they make and change.
Conflicts between the social, public and the political spheres are viewed as normal rather
than dysfunctional, and in this sense there is no post-conflict society, or a society of
total integration at either the social or political levels.
In summary, then, Hellers version of the democratic paradigm in the context of the
logic of political power accepts the differentiated complexity of modernity, which, in her
version, is co-constituted by the two other logics that are paradigmatic to modernity the
logic of the functional allocation of social positions and the logic of technology. Modernity, then, is heterodox in both spatial and temporal terms. Spatially, these logics of
technology, the functional allocation of social positions, and political power appear
simultaneously, reacting to, reinforcing, complementing and checking each other
(Heller and Feher, 1986: 201; Heller in Rundell, 2011a). In historical or temporal terms
modernity is both dynamic and contingent. It is, thus, unstable, and this instability gives
it the air of dysfunction. As we have seen, the redemptive paradigm attempts to impose
stasis, determination and homogeneity under a hyper-logic of the state to create a different modernity, the organizing principles of which are a functionalism that does not
function, an industrialization that does not innovate, an identity that is over-managed and
a political centre that nobody believes in. The exemplary model for this other type of
modernity is the Soviet one (Feher et al., 1983).
For Heller, the instability of modernity and its three logics of technology, the functional allocation of social positions and political power mean that it is not only unstable
and dynamic but also voracious, or in her terms omnivorous. Its voraciousness comes
about from two quarters the logics of the functional division of labour and the market,
and an ever increasing and expanding horizon of needs. The latter is the hallmark of the
culture of modernity. The main point of this part of her project is to imagine a different
type of social arrangement whereby the imperatives of the functional division of labour
and the market, and the instrumental and strategic rationalities that stem from them
respectively, are subordinated to the imperatives of practical reason to argumentation
and democratic forms of decision-making.

Needs and values

This puts Hellers project in the same arena as Habermass, and yet she is especially
critical of his project of communicative rationality. Why? As we have seen, and as Heller
argues in Habermas and Marxism and The Discourse Ethics of Habermas, Habermas
makes a counterfactual distinction between irrationality and rationality. According to

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Habermas, we do not decide to be rational beings we are rational beings. Habermas

attempts to re-claim the Enlightenments claim to reason by locating it within speech
acts, which by their very nature contain the validity claims of truth, legitimacy and
truthfulness which become exposed through argumentation. Habermas moves the
democratic imperative of modernity to an internal linguistic constitution of the species.
As such, we are not simply linguistic animals but argumentative ones, for it is through
argument that the rightness of a norm, for example, is questioned. Consensus, at this
level, means for Habermas that there is an implicit agreement to argue, not about the
agreement reached. Distorted communication occurs when argument does not occur and
is replaced, for example, with violence (Heller, 1991).
Whilst agreeing with the latter point, Heller maintains, though, that people do not
move to conflict, reflexive action and onto politics through argumentation. Rather, they
are motivated to contest and to argue from a prior condition, a need. Additionally, the
agreement to argue hangs on a concealed value which is not built-in, so to speak. Rather,
according to Heller, the right to argue is something that has to be argued for, or of which
others have to be convinced on the basis of a value perspective. It is worth examining
these aspects in turn the prior condition and value perspectives as these are not only
critical points against Habermass own project but, more significantly, are the two hinges
on which her own critical theory hangs.
According to Heller, human beings do not come into conflict and argumentation on
the basis of testing a prior validity claim of the right to argumentation. As she says,
readiness for rational argumentation . . . presupposes the involvement of the human
being as a whole, as a needing, wanting, feeling being (Heller, 1991: 463). To be sure,
argumentation is certainly about raising claims as an action; but as an action it is also an
activity that connects with and articulates needs, desires and feelings, which acting
subjects bring to the permanent context of intersubjectively constituted social life. Heller
identifies needs as the internal motivator the prior condition that propel people into
conflict and argumentation, and which build up people from the inside as socialized yet
individuated beings. Heller makes a crucial distinction between drives (for example
hunger) and needs, for which one can hunger. These needs are hierarchialized in terms of
clusters or systems of needs and, because of this, needs are also defined by a social
context, that is, by the norms and rules of the social unit that the human being is born
into. In this sense, needs are also social facts into which we are thrown in other words,
there is also a social system of needs. As such, for Heller, there is a point of tension
between needs formulated at the level of the individual and social needs created,
interpreted and institutionalized at the level of society (Heller, 1987).
In pre-modernity, so Heller argues, a homology was constructed between the two
versions of needs the personal and the social because of the context into which one
was born. As needs always carry an interpretative dimension, in pre-modernity the
context into which one is born is the constant position from which needs are interpreted
and understood. In modern societies this homology is widened, and the points of tension
become both less and more pronounced. For Heller, the contingent nature of modern
contexts entails that need structures and interpretations become open. In other words, the
culture of modernity also creates an open horizon of needs. This cultural openness is also
reproduced at the level of institutions and social contexts, and entails that one can move

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from context to context in order to satisfy them. In this sense, the gap and the experience
between needs and their possible fulfilment is lessened, at least in principle. However,
modern societies and their institutions cannot satisfy all needs, neither individual nor
social ones. This means that, for Heller, modernity is a dissatisfied society because the
gaps and experiences between needs and their possible fulfilment are heightened (Heller,
1985: 30015; Heller and Feher, 1988: 1443). This dissatisfaction can be articulated as
social conflict. As the remarks on the redemptive paradigm above show, conflict can be
de-legitimated and needs imputed to social actors by a redeeming central agent or agency
that organizes their satisfaction to create a different modernity. In this context modernity
is created as a dictatorship over needs (Heller and Feher, 1988).
However, as needs are experienced in a range between possible satisfaction and
possible dissatisfaction, an evaluative dimension always accompanies them, either
implicitly or explicitly. This evaluative dimension opens onto the second hinge of
Hellers critical theory. For, whilst we bring needs and the conflicts that they
invariably engender into argumentation, argumentation entails an evaluation of these
needs and the evaluation is not a matter concerning the procedural rationality of the
argument but rather the values that one places on the needs themselves. Values provide
the bridge between the inner world of desires, interests and hopes, and the social
world, including the socially located activity of critique evaluation and judgement.
Values provide the public meaningful frames into which . . . private [need interpretation] and matter[s] of desire can be placed, rendered intersubjectively intelligible
and justified (Murphy, 1984; Heller, 1972, 1985). They provide the focus around
which clusters of needs crystallize.
Hellers critical theory is a critical theory of values against a backdrop of individually
and socially produced and articulated needs. It is not a critical theory of communicative
rationality. More correctly, it is a critical theory of value rationality, and to draw this out
we can distinguish it from Webers use of the term. In Webers ideal-type description
value rational action is that type of rational action determined by a conscious belief in
the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behaviour,
independently of its prospects of success (Weber, 1978: 25). Often, it is recognized
under names such as vocation, duty or cause. It is a conscious, rational type of action, the
rationality of which is derived from the value horizon itself, and not from its likely or
unlikely success or its planfulness. Weber interprets value rationality as an end-in-itself,
and in its most acute form it takes shape as an ultimate end.
Heller does not follow the path laid down by Weber. For her, it is too restrictive. As
indicated above, values connect inner and outer life, and they do so in specific ways. In
the first instance they are our natural home. We are thrown into values, and they are our
social a priori. Moreover, they do not emit an odour of irrationality that is derived from
Webers interpretation of them as referring to an ultimate end. Rather, they are rational.
For her, though, this rationality does not refer to standards of cognition or normativity. It
refers to the competence to observe the norms and rules of everyday life, and it as three
constituents: everyday language; human-made objects with their rules for use, including
the use to which natural environments are put; and customs. Observing norms and rules
of everyday life in this instance is not separate from knowing and practising them. They
are the social a priori and provide the orientative categories with which the world is

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navigated, and as such provide human life with meaning in both positive and negative
terms. Moreover, this is the world of first competency we are adept at moving around
the specific everyday life into which we are thrown. In this sense, everyday life is
Dasein, our ontological condition. However, for Heller, unlike Heidegger, it is not
inauthentic at all, it is orientative (Heller, 1972, 1984c, 1985).
The ontological condition of the social a priori, which itself is a historical one, is
matched by another a priori that Heller argues is part of our human inheritance what
she terms, somewhat loosely, the genetic a priori, which is ahistorical. These two a
prioris stand in tension with one another. At the deepest anthropological level, without
this tension no society and no sociability is possible. Hellers aim in positing this double
human constituting condition is, on the one hand, to resist the reduction of the human
being entirely to natural or biological conditions and thus argue for the plasticity of the
human animal whilst, on the other, to also resist the reduction of the human being
entirely to social conditions or to socialization. In terms of the latter, her position contests the view of the over-socialization of the human being and, as such, is a postfunctional social theory (Heller, 1990).
In so positing this double-sided constitution of the human being, Heller can claim that
each of us is flawed and unfinished. In addition, and in so positing the human condition
in this way, she can side-step a psychoanalytic formulation. Rather, for her each human
being is born with a set of endowments, and it is an open question in the context of the
pre-existing social arrangements into which the human being is thrown whether these
endowments can be transformed into talents. This is not only a question of the history of
social constraints it is more a question of a tension that goes to the heart of the flawed
and unfinished character of any human life. This double-sided tension pushes her
argument towards the priority of practical reasoning and the question inherited from
classical philosophy of a life that is worth living, that is, what is a good life, and
moreover what is good thinking and good conduct (Heller, 1984a, 1985; Heller and
Feher, 1988; Heller in Rundell, 2011a: 10730).
From the side of the social, then, everyday life provides our initial context that we
learn to navigate in terms of its norms and rules, both with and against our endowments.
This pragmatic navigation entails that we learn three types of thinking in this context
repetitive thinking, inventive thinking, and intuitive thinking. In other words, our first
home of everyday life is not a world of in-action or non-thought. Or rather, specific
actions and specific patterns of thinking occur. In addition, everyday life provides value
categories with which we ethically navigate and make first distinctions between good/
bad, right/wrong, and so forth. These values provide life with meaning in a threefold
manner; firstly, they are meaningful in and of themselves; secondly, they represent the
positive side of one secondary category of value orientation; and thirdly, they take shape
as world pictures and are carried as stories and narratives, which give legitimacy to the
taken-for-granted nature of everyday life (Heller, 1984c, 1985).
Heller terms our capacity to learn to pragmatically and ethically navigate our first
world of everyday life the rationality of reason. Rationality of reason refers to the
competence to observe the norms and rules of our everyday life. It is also the competence
to observe the norms and rules of other contexts in the same way that we observe and
deploy everyday norms and rules. It is rational in the sense that rationality of reason is

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coherent, and we are competent in the use of this coherence. In this sense, we are active,
discriminating, intuiting, inventing and judging, but always from the perspective of this
everyday life. In this sense, rationality of reason is particularistic, as our point of
orientation for this type of rationality is everyday life (Heller, 1985).
However, there is another sense of rationality that Heller constructs, and which, she
argues, is deployed as critical discrimination. This form of rationality is not derived or
located in everyday life but in the cultural sphere. For Heller, culture or the cultural
sphere provides human life with meaning over and above the meaning derived from
everyday life, and this type of meaning orients life towards homogeneous, rather than
heterogeneous, patterns of action and thinking such as religious devotion, art, writing a
novel, or philosophical practice. In this sense, norms and rules are established in this
particular sphere that are distinct from the ones deployed in everyday life. As importantly, for Heller, culture can also legitimate everyday life, or it can critique it. The type
of thinking it encompasses is creativity, imagination and good judgement, and these are
gathered or deployed by her under the umbrella concept of the rationality of intellect
(Heller, 1985).
In summary, then, value rationality occurs in two ways. We are thrown into values in
the first order of our natural home of everyday life. However, we also have a second
home, or point of orientation. This cultural sphere provides the capacity for second
order reflexivity in which everyday values are thrown into relief by other values derived
from the cultural sphere.
The activity of value critique in the sphere of culture that deploys rationality of
intellect is either static or dynamic. In Hellers view, pre-modern societies are static in
the sense that the ultimate values through which both everyday life and culture cohere
and are given meaning are no less taken for granted than the norms and rules of everyday
life perhaps even more so. The modern rationality of intellect is dynamic in the sense
that not only can everyday life be evaluated but also the values themselves they are no
longer ultimate. However, this does not mean that they become relative. Rather, different
values emerge that have become universalizable and embedded in modern culture as
empirical or historically narrativized universals. As mentioned above, these universalized values are freedom and life (Heller, 1985).
For Heller, our rationality of intellect, when combined with needs and their
interpretations, indicates something about what we are as human beings. For her, we
are not simply the linguistic animal we are the valuing or evaluating one, and it is
this capacity for evaluation and judgement of needs that gives depth and breadth to the
human animal.
In addition, and as importantly, the problem of social action its sociable as well as
unsocial sociability informs her philosophical anthropology and her theory and critique
of modernity. We not only have a relation to values, but also to others and to ourselves.
There is a connection between values and social action qua interpersonal and intrapersonal relations. Social action is carried out in practices which she still prefers to as
virtues, though they are better termed concrete orientative practices. Under the condition of contingent modernity, Hellers recommendation is that the classical triad of
matterpaideiaform should be replaced by a triad of determinationsconductlearning
processes. Conduct is the most important for her because whereas as form suggests

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perfection, fulfilment, completeness . . . conduct is open-ended, something which goes

on and on; it is the identity of being and becoming (Heller, 1990: 67).
Furthermore, over and above the recognition of contingency Heller argues that
conduct encompasses the complexity of the networks of human interactions that are
concretized in institutions and repeated time and again in social interactions, and as
such are always societal endeavours (Heller, 1990: 66). This complex condition of
modern everyday life, one that is both contingent and pluralized, continues to constitute and address the patterns of interaction and forms of meaning which are required
for it to have depth.
This aspect of sociability and social action in Hellers work can be illustrated by
reference to her remarks on friendship. It is through a notion of friendship that she can
modernize the activity of social actions beyond seeing them as an agonistic transactions
or moral obligations based in shame. In Hellers more reflexively modern formulation
friendship, or what elsewhere she has termed symmetrical reciprocity, is constituted
through the recognition of the person qua person. In other words, men and women
recognise each others autonomy and have respect for each others personality (Heller,
1990: 67). In this way, the emotional economy of shame is loosened as the form of
sanction. An expectation of the reciprocation of a gift of friendship is mediated by the
recognition of anothers autonomy as a free man or woman. In Hellers terms, the
conditions of giving, receiving and reciprocating are constituted according to a value
horizon of freedom and autonomy. Whilst there continues to be a sanction involved in
symmetrical reciprocal interactions, the sanction is mediated by the heightened sense of
the values of personhood and autonomy that accompanies it. This means that an
increased distance and detachment between friends or gift-givers can occur, and in its
concrete form it can become more fluid and open-ended (Rundell, 1998).
For Heller, though, friendship is more than conviviality, more than simply a horizontal relation of symmetrical reciprocity. It requires depth. It requires an ethics of
personality. Friendship also belongs to the complex and unfinished condition of the
human being and thus the possibility that there are manifold and competing dimensions
to him or her. We are flawed creatures and friendship can stand alongside the flaws and
even outshine them. Yet modern friendship, in Hellers view, is quite different from the
pre-modern one based on shame culture; however, it is also quite different from the one
that we have inherited from part of our own progenitor culture, its Greek heritage. In
Platos version, which lays down the contours of one of the classical and received
versions of friendship, there is a conflict between two goods either the fidelity to truth
(justice), which is universalistic, and fidelity to friendship, which is unique and personal.
Here there are tragedies of abandonment either one abandons truth or ones best friend.
One cannot be loyal to both. In Platos view one can possess ones friend or desire the
truth, and the latter is better.
Aristotle contests this version and constructs a counter-paradigm that has also
endured. Friendship is a beauty that is the unity of possession and desire and also
involves freedom and reciprocity one freely chooses ones friends beyond the constraints of family and community, and this choice is freely reciprocated. In other words,
possession is founded on free reciprocity, and truth (or desire) is related to knowing the
other, that is, the truth of the inner world of the other, which is disclosed over time. In this

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sense, friends, especially close ones, are unique and they are loved, grieved and
remembered. Friends connect a sense of time above and beyond ones own life-time.
Friends are often the last and only witness to it. In the Aristotelian version, as Heller
puts it:
I abandon myself to a person whose friendship I possess, as he abandons himself to me,
whose friendship he possesses. There is no conflict between us, and none within us. Living
up to my responsibility to him, as he does to me, requires neither of us to make painful
sacrifices. (Heller, 1998: 11)

In Aristotles model there is the unity of harmony and symmetry, of reason and emotion,
yet it is a harmony of similarities.
In Hellers view, though, peoples lives in modernity exist in the context of many
contingencies that are dissimilar. Modernity is pluralistic, and this pluralism and dissimilarity changes rather than disables or dismantles the paradigm of friendship. In
Hellers view, it is no longer necessary to make a choice between truth or friendship in
Platos sense. Neither do we need to side with the Aristotelean version, even though there
is much to be said for it. The Aristotelean one, in her view, is outmoded and does not
speak to moderns. Modernity, because it is grounded on the ungroundable notion of
freedom, is equally grounded on difference rather than similarities, and this is nowhere
more so than in the friendships that moderns have and make. Taking Shakespeares
Hamlets as her own modern paradigm and locating the origins of the modern in the
Renaissance she argues that
the more modern life unfolds, the more likely it becomes that differences, sometimes grave
differences of opinion and judgement, will develop between even the best of friends.
Truthfulness requires us to speak such differences freely, and friendship requires the perseverance of absolute mutual trust. One need not choose between justice and friendship, for
friendship not only allows justice, but encourages it. (Heller, 1998: 18; see also 2002c,
2015: 15)

For Heller, friendship is combined with truth, differences, depth, appreciation, and
emotional attachment. For her friendship is beautiful. This places friendship in the arena
of beauty, not as an aesthetic category, but as a category of relationality and goodness
(Heller in Rundell, 2011a: 4966; Heller, 2012; Heller, 2015: 15).
Friendship establishes a framework for a common point of reference, as well as a
framework for sanctions, limits and reflective judgement. The field of friendship is both
serious and magnanimous, and thus provides a counter-model to cultures of both shame
and mean-spiritedness. Thus, those who pass through the relation of friendship are
opened by it, but in a way that enhances rather than reduces the social actors, especially
in terms of their freedom and autonomy on both sides of the relation. The result of this
detached form of modern friendship is a tension between mutual involvement and
indifference. Friendship under these conditions of autonomy and distancing, then,
relinquishes the presumption of similarity; rather, it requires a reflective judgement
through which the contingency of the intercourse, as well as its nuances, joys and disappointments, can be reflected on and learnt from. In this way, Heller can argue that even

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Thesis Eleven

in the condition of contingent modernity, social life and action have not been emptied of
relational content and depth, concrete orientative practices or meaning because friendships matter and continue across both time and space.
For Heller, then, the linguistic constitution of social action is not a primary concern
either at the level of the way in which human beings are constituted. Rather, in Hellers
view, concrete orientative practices such as friendship, together with values, provide the
bridge between needs and their articulation in terms that are socially identifiable.
According to her, all needs in all social contexts are constituted as concrete orientative
practices, and are subject to interpretation and evaluation through value categories.
Together, they indicate whether they are socially recognized, viewed and valued, for
example, as good or bad, or right or wrong, and whether we have friendly or unfriendly
relations in the context of fulfilling needs.

Where are we home?

Interpretation and evaluation of needs, values, patterns of action and forms of life cannot
be achieved without some form of institutional or cultural context that provides support
and succour for a form of modern sociable sociability. In other words freedom, interpreted from this perspective, requires a home in which each person can be an end for him
or herself in the context of other selves. Being at home is an end in itself. And yet being
at home in modern everyday life is difficult. Its contingent fracturing and often temporary nature make it difficult to imagine a home across a life-time and in one place
(Heller, 1993; Rundell, 2009).
As Heller notes in Where Are We at Home?, there are two possible homes beyond
everyday life that moderns can make and inhabit that might provide homes that give a
sense of existential succour and value orientation in an age of contingency. These homes
are the North American model of democracy and the sphere of European high culture,
the modern sphere in which rationality of intellect reigns (Heller, 1992: 6984; 1995:
118; Markus, 2004).
For Heller, North American democracy is homely not because of its democratic
institutions but because of its democratic constitution. Echoing de Tocquevilles seminal
Democracy in America, and arguing against Habermass model of an internal relation
between law and democracy in Between Facts and Norms, for Heller, the home experience is the constitution itself for it provides the rooms, so to speak, for an expanding
household. This household or political community is orientated by an unfoundable but
still believed and interpretable narrative of freedom that the Constitution provides
(Heller, 2011a: 13142; Feher, 1995). The American polity is a household, a home
forever in the present that makes room for new arrivals, new topics and new conflicts.
The Constitution provides the broad identity that is both abstract and concrete, in which a
number of different dimensions come into play all at once apart from judicial specialism
civic courage, public opinion, the dramas, rather than tragedies, of prosecution,
defence, and verdict. Democracy can be tested and re-made or re-gained because of the
interpretative nature of the Constitution. In this sense, democracy is established every
day. As Heller states, since a democratic constitution must be established every
moment, one could say, without exaggeration, that one who lives in this home is at home

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in the absolute present. There is no other past than the past of the present, and no future,
just the future of the present (Heller, 1995: 13; Feher, 1995). It provides the ground for
an imaginary political community of citizens who feel jointly responsible for its continuity in the present.
For Heller, it both is and is not the empirical condition of American democracy that is
homely. On one level its home is a unique one. Constitution making belongs to the
specific historicity of a specific society and this activity of constitution making cannot be
copied. On another level the specific empirical historicity is outstripped. As a model, the
centrality of its constitutionality its interpretative, conflictual nature that can speak to
new conditions in the present can be viewed as a paradigm that can be emulated and
that can travel.
European high culture provides the model for a different type of home and homely
experience. It is conversational rather than argumentative and is derived from a lived
experience not because it necessarily comes from experiencing together, it is also
lived by recollecting together and exchanging memories (Markus, 2004; Heller, 1995).
European high culture, or its ethos, is important for Heller as a place of homeliness
because of its hermeneutic, non-dogmatic sensibilities that combine constant interpretation with creativity in the form of new works, interpretations and perspectives. It is
this combination of interpretation and creativity, and not necessarily its Europeanness,
that is important here, for as Heller notes, it has travelled and has done so without losing
its density. Its density is constituted by sensuous satisfaction and cognitive reward.
Works become open to interpretation, and in travelling they encounter equally dense
cultural resources from either their own tradition or other traditions which begin to join
in the conversation. In this sense, both because of and despite its European origins, a
cosmopolitan-cultural ethos develops as a new high culture of rationality of intellect. As
she says,
[this] home is a home like others, it must be shared . . . the visitors together re-enter this
home and, in reflection and discussion, they keep the vision of this home alive. What we
used to call high culture is not just the sum total of works that certain Europeans had
placed onto a pedestal, but it includes all human relations, be they emotive or discursive,
that happened to be mediated in and by the world of the absolute spirit. (Heller, 1995: 10)

To put it slightly differently and in the spirit of her work on aesthetics, our relation to
high culture and its works (literature, paintings, music, for example) should not be
mediated by an aesthetics of judgement or taste with its categories of the beautiful and
the sublime. Rather, it should be mediated by a practical reasoning (rationality of
intellect) determined by the values of dignity, friendship and autonomy that we establish
with our conversational partners, and these partners include the works of high culture
themselves. These works can become personal friends. This makes high culture not
only dense culturally, but also our experience of it is personal, unique and includes our
emotional involvements (Heller in Rundell, 2011a: 4966, 6780).
As Heller notes, however, there are many difficulties with each of these homes. In her
view, the empirical condition of American democracy attests that all is not well. The
American polity often divides itself into competing groups, communities and pressure

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Thesis Eleven

groups in which particularity of perspectives and interests takes precedence over consensus building. It attempts to renovate by sealing rooms rather than by opening them
out. Sectarian and particularistic opinion and policy-making often win out, and other
opinions are viewed as deviant. In this way, democracy becomes a vehicle for the politics
of exclusion, not inclusion, and good judgement gives way to dogmatism. This is the
case when politics and culture, especially identity-based cultural politics, combine to
become a resource for dogmatic assertion rather than discussion and possible consensus.
Yet, it is not only its empirical condition that is of concern. The paradox of freedom
entails that modern societies are politically dynamic not only in a contestatory sense, but
also that this more or less permanent and more or less open form is derived from the
propensity to permanently question not only social conditions but also the very presuppositions of freedom itself. The dynamic nature of the paradox of freedom could
entail that democracy questions itself out of existence.4
All is not well in the home provided by culture, either. The increasing pluralization
and expansion of culturally located and received points of orientation and interpretation
has resulted in not only a fragmentation of cultural conversations but also their specialization and insulation from one another. Cultural sensualists only speak to others who
share their particular specialist world, with neither spirit nor heart, to paraphrase Weber.
Cultural conversation, too, becomes cultural identity, which can become the basis for
exclusions. According to Heller, this type of identity politics bars the way to the access of
other differences and, because of this to, universally shared meanings and concerns. The
home of culture becomes stale and sour rather than alive and fresh. Works of high
culture that keep the doors open enable everyone who is passionately interested in the
human condition to converse. As Heller goes on to argue,
the alternative is not between difference and universality, between internal and external, but
between closure and openness, between fundamentalism and an invitation to a voyage
where we never know ahead whom we are going to meet during our journey, whether we
will recognize as once Iphigenia and Orestes did our brothers and sisters among the
strangers. (Heller in Rundell, 2011a: 191204)

In this sense, too, friendship is beyond the logics of technology or techne`, function and
political power and the polis. It is like an enduring open conversation between people
who are contingent strangers in which everything can be discussed and talked about,
nothing is banned. The home for friendship is highly personal, yet is not identified by her
with the private sphere. Nor do the public worlds of work and politics portray the sense
of where modern friendship might reside. Rather, in Hellers view modern friendship
resides as a value orientation within an emotional household that should be cultivated
irrespective of where we are. Moreover, because friends connect a sense of time they also
connect a sense of modern lives that have become fragmented. They not only endure the
differences of personality, judgement and opinion but also differences caused by diremption of time and space. Friendships, especially modern ones, provide a home
regardless, and not because of, modernitys complexity (Heller, 2015: 15).
For Agnes Heller there is no exit from these political or cultural conditions of
modernity. Nor are there exits from sociability unsociable or otherwise. Solutions that

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15

wish to resolve the tensions and paradoxes of the modern constellation and its equally
complex and variegated forms of sociability potentially can result in totalitarian or
terroristic options. However, this lack of resolution does not result, for Heller, in nostalgia, resignation, or withdrawal but in the creation of possible homes, constituted and
informed by the value of freedom and forms of sociable sociability, through which we
may be affirmed.
Yet, as the essays in the special issue attest, modernity is a time that is permanently
out of joint. It is not an historical form that attests exclusively to either affirmation or
destruction, but to a permanent tension between its competing gods and demons. This
tension, if it is to remain a tension, requires a sensibility of openness at both the political
and cultural levels. Openness discloses more than truth-telling, more than a duty to a
norm, and certainly more than self-authenticity. It discloses a capacity for sociable
sociability and a value of freedom that accompanies it, and this enables subjects to
remain open to otherness in whichever home we might dwell, including our most
immediate one.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Hellers work is contextualized by her relation to Georg Lukacs, the formation of the so-called
Budapest School, and the work of her late husband, Ferenc Feher. The essays published here
were written after the Budapests Schools informal dissolution, in part, due to migration
George and Maria Markus went to Sydney, Australia, where they both still live, and Agnes
Heller and Ferenc Feher went to Melbourne, Australia, where they lived until 1987, when they
moved to New York in order for Heller to take up the Hannah Arendt Chair in Philosophy and
Politics at The New School for Social Research, now The New School University. These essays
constitute a continuous arc that spans Budapest, Melbourne and New York.
2. See Fu Qilin (2008); Agnes Hellers Preface to Fu Qilin (2006); Heller (2010); Grumley
(2005); Terazakis (2009). There have also been three special issues of the journal Thesis Eleven
on Hellers work, Thesis Eleven 16 (1987) see articles by Richard Bernstein, Dick Howard,
David Cooper and Sandor Radnoti; Thesis Eleven 59 (1999) see articles by Peter Murphy,
Artemis Leontis, Angel Rivero, Marios Constantinou, John Grumley, Mihaly Vajda and David
Roberts; and Thesis Eleven 125 (2014) see articles by Lutz Niethammer, Katie Terazakis,
Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Marcia Morgan, Andrea Vestrucci, Jonathan Pickle, Fu Qilin, Ornella
Crotti, and John Grumley. See also Thesis Eleven 126 (2015) for Hellers essay on the work of
George Markus, and her beautiful homage to him. Parts of the following discussion draw on
Rundell (2004), Rundell and Petherbridge et al. (2004), and Rundell (2011b). I would like to
thank Danielle Petherbridge for her comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
3. I will leave to one side Hellers version or theory of history. The key aspect to Hellers view on
history is that it is a form of living and writing from the present, and this gives it a sense of

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contingency and responsibility that belongs to any present. History belongs to the reflexive
work of the rationality of intellect, and in modernity these sensibilities of contingency and
responsibility are heightened. It is the shifts within her version of history, from Renaissance
Man to A Theory of History to A Philosophy of History in Fragments and beyond that give the
impression of her later work being post-histoire or postmodern.
4. This is an implication of Hellers discussion of her concepts of dynamic justice and of an
incomplete ethico-political concept of justice in Beyond Justice (Heller, 1987).

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