Recognition and Power
Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory

This 2007 volume offers a critical evaluation of the research program for Critical Theory developed by Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition.

Bert van den Brink (Author), David Owen (Author)

9780521864459, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 April 2007

416 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.78 kg

The topic of recognition has come to occupy a central place in debates in social and political theory. Developed by George Herbert Mead and Charles Taylor, it has been given expression in the program for Critical Theory developed by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. Honneth's research program offers an empirically insightful way of reflecting on emancipatory struggles for greater justice and a powerful theoretical tool for generating a conception of justice and the good that enables the normative evaluation of such struggles. This 2007 volume offers a critical clarification and evaluation of this research program, particularly its relationship to the other major development in critical social and political theory; namely, the focus on power as formative of practical identities (or forms of subjectivity) proposed by Michel Foucault and developed by theorists such as Judith Butler, James Tully, and Iris Marion Young.

1. Introduction Bert van den Brink and David Owen
Part I. Philosophical Approaches to Recognition: 2. Analyzing recognition: identification, acknowledgment and recognitive attitudes towards persons Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto Laitinen
3. Recognition and reconciliation: actualized agency in Hegel's jena phenomenology Robert Pippin
4. Damaged life: power and recognition in Adorno's ethics Bert van den Brink
5. The potential and the actual: Mead, Honneth, and the 'I' Patchen Markell
Part II. Recognition and Power in Social Theory: 6. Work, recognition, emancipation Beate Roessler
7. '… that all members should be loved in the same way…' Lior Barshack
8. Recognition of love's labor: considering Axel Honneth's feminism Iris Marion Young
Part III. Recognition and Power in Political Theory: 9. 'To tolerate means to insult': toleration, recognition, and emancipation
10. Misrecognition, power, and democracy Veit Bader
11. Reasonable deliberation, constructive power, and the struggle for recognition Anthony Simon Laden
12. Self-government and 'democracy as reflexive co-operation': reflection on Honneth's social and political ideal David Owen
Part IV. Axel Honneth on Recognition and Power: 13. Recognition as ideology Axel Honneth
14. Rejoinder Axel Honneth.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Philosophy [HP]