Heller, Agnes

Agnes Heller was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929 and is a member of the Budapest School, a loosely connected group of intellectuals whose identity revolves around the association with their former teacher Georg Lukàcs and the experience of “really existing socialism” under the domain of the former Soviet Union. The experience of really existing socialism, analysed by Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and Görgy Márkus (1983) in Dictatorship over Needs, contributed to an understanding and critique of the totalitarian version of modernity, which has been [Page 361]subsequently accompanied by the experience and critique of the liberal-democratic one. This double experience culminated in Heller's A Theory of Modernity (1999).

Heller's critical theory of modernity is also accompanied by a philosophical anthropology grounded in needs and feelings, of which A Theory of Feelings (1979) is central. Heller's philosophical anthropology also opens onto a paradigm of social action articulated in terms of ethics, morals, and the self-responsibility of the reflexive and self-authoring subject. Each aspect of her work is underscored by her project of value rationality, which is spelt out in “Towards a Marxist Theory of Value” (1972), Radical Philosophy (1984), and The Power of Shame (1985). Heller's critical theory and its main concerns can be illuminated through her theory of modernity and, for her, its central value category of freedom.

In Heller's view, modernity is not a problem to be solved, managed, or negated. Nor is it an unfinished project. Rather, it is an unresolvable paradox or double bind. For her, the paradox of modernity stems from its founding principle of the value of freedom—it is a foundation that can provide no foundations (Heller 1999:4, 54).

In a similar position to post-Marxian and post-Parsonian interpretations of modernity, Heller's version is multisdimensional and loosely configured. It does not “fit” together. This entails that the paradox of freedom—or the double bind of modernity—is infused in all of the loosely configured, yet nonetheless constituting, dimensions that are conceptualized by her in terms of the logics of technology, the division of positions, functions, and wealth, and political power and domination. Accompanying these logics are the technical and historical cultural imaginaries and the constituents of contingency and critique. These logics, imaginaries, and constituents interact and compete and resist overall coordination and integration.

What makes modernity especially dynamic, according to Heller, is the way that freedom is mobilized as a project for both contingency and critique. For Heller, one of the principles of modern freedom is the principle of contingency. Drawing on the work of the neosystems theorist Niklas Luhmann, Heller argues that there is no fixed, predetermined telos to a modern person's life and its social location. It is not only that modern social arrangements replace premodern status hierarchies with ones that are determined by functions, but more so that this process is open-ended. Modernity is also the only period in history where all traditions and established norms, rules, and beliefs have been called into question and delegitimated. This critical deconstruction concerns, especially, those rules, norms, and beliefs referring to truth, goodness, and justice, which, by being increasingly subject to immanent and substantive criticism, lose their static character and become dynamic.

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