Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life

Abstract

One of the central aims of Axel Honneth's work has been to make Hegel's intuitions about the importance of recognition for individual self-realization fruitful for a contemporary critical social theory. Because Hegel based these intuitions on metaphysical ideas about history and nature that are hard to defend nowadays, Honneth has been trying to develop a theory of recognition that is based on a post-metaphysical, empirical foundation. In The Struggle for Recognition Here, Honneth still followed the Hegel-interpretation of Jrgen Habermas, who argued that Hegel only developed an intersubjective theory of recognition in his early Jena-period, which he then abandoned in The Phenomenology of Spirit for a monological theory about the self-development of Spirit.