Axel Honneth

Axel Honneth is a professor at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany (the so-called Frankfurt School).

Biography
He was born in Essen in 1949, and studied in Bonn, Bochum, Berlin and Munich (under Jürgen Habermas), and taught at the Free University of Berlin and the New School before moving to Frankfurt in 1996.

Research
Honneth's work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition.

His first main work The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory explores the affinities between the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault. In his second main work The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, the recognition concept is derived mainly from G.W.F. Hegel's early social philosophical works, but is supplemented by George Herbert Mead's social psychology, Habermas's communicative ethics, and Winnicott's object relation theory. Honneth's critical adaptation of these is the basis of his critical social theory, which attempts to remedy the deficits of previous approaches.

Honneth co-authored Recognition or Redistribution? with feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser in 2003, who criticizes the priority of ethical categories such as recognition over structural social-political categories such as redistribution in Honneth's thought.

His recent work Reification reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power. For Honneth, all forms of reification are due to intersubjectively based pathologies rather than the structural character of social systems such as capitalism as argued by Karl Marx and György Lukács.

Major works translated in English

 * Social Action and Human Nature, co-authored with Hans Joas (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 * The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (MIT Press, 1993).
 * The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1995).
 * The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Polity Press, 1996).
 * Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, co-authored with Nancy Fraser (Verso, 2003).
 * Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View (Oxford University Press, 2007).
 * Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Polity Press, 2007).

Secondary Sources

Bert van den Brink and David Owen, Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2007).