Axel Honneth and the Recognition Paradigm of Critical Theory

Abstract Chapter 7 reconstructs Axel Honneth’s recognition paradigm of critical theory. His defining concern with recognition is motivated by a critique of Habermas’s power-free account of the lifeworld and a concomitant aspiration to eschew systems theory and develop a monistic social theory that conceives of power relations as struggles for recognition within the lifeworld, where moral consciousness and individual identity are forged in the heat of social conflict. Honneth develops this idea into a theory of three spheres of recognition as a formal conception of the good life, which, in his later work, is explicitly construed as a communicative conception of freedom, or of the necessary social and psychological conditions of individual autonomy. Building on this theory, Honneth’s mature work undertakes a reformulation of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie as a ‘theory of justice as social analysis’, which reconstructs and criticizes the major institutions of social freedom in modern Western society across the domains of personal relationships, the market economy, and the democratic constitutional state. The chapter also offers a systematic account of three conceptions of power that we find in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory.