Honneth and the Theory of Recognition

Axel Honneth, born in 1949 and Habermas's successor as director of the Institute for Social Research from 2001 to 2018, represents what is often called the "third generation" of the Frankfurt School, and his major work Kampf um Anerkennung (The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, 1992) proposes recognition (Anerkennung), rather than either instrumental reason or communicative rationality, as the fundamental normative category through which critical theory should analyze social domination and emancipation. Honneth draws explicitly on the young Hegel's early Jena writings on ethical life (Sittlichkeit), particularly the unpublished System der Sittlichkeit (1802–03) and Jena Realphilosophie lecture manuscripts, which Honneth reads as containing an underdeveloped but philosophically rich theory of intersubjective recognition later overshadowed, in Hegel's own mature Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Philosophy of Right (1821), by more monological categories of self-consciousness and objective spirit.