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The Struggle for Recognition – The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts by Axel Honneth – Translated by Joel Anderson

THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION

Introduction

In the present volume, I attempt to develop, on the basis of Hegel’s model of a ‘struggle for recognition, the foundations for a social theory with normative content.

The intention to undertake this project arose in connection with the conclusions I reached in The Critique of Power: any attempt to integrate the social-theoretical insights of Foucault’s historical work within the framework of a theory of communicative action has to rely on a concept of morally motivated struggle.

And there is no better source of inspiration for developing such a concept than Hegel’s early, ‘Jena’ writings, with their notion of a comprehen­sive ‘struggle for recognition’}

The systematic reconstruction of the Hegelian line of argumenta­tion, which constitutes the first third of the book, leads to a distinction between three forms of recognition, each of which contains a potential motivation for social conflict.

This review of the young Hegel’s theo­retical model also makes clear, however, that the validity of his thoughts hinges, in part, on Idealist assumptions about the reason that can no longer be maintained under conditions of post-metaphysical thinking.

The second, theoretical part of the book thus starts from the attempt to develop an empirical version of the Hegelian idea by drawing on the social psychology of G. H. Mead. In this way, an intersubjective concept of the person emerges, in which the possibility of an un­distorted relation to oneself proves to be dependent on three forms of recognition:

love, rights, and esteem. In order to remove the merely historical character of this hypothesis, I attempt to justify, in the em­pirically supported reconstruction found in the subsequent two RH,1plt’rs, the distinction between the various forms of relations of recog­nition on the basis of the relevant phenomena. As the result of this