Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, by Axel Honneth

Abstract

Axel Honneth has done more than any other philosopher to develop and explore the significance of recognition to our social relations. On the broadly Hegelian approach he favours, political injustices largely involve institutional failures to recognize members of marginalized or oppressed groups, and emancipatory social transformation is animated by a concern to overcome these recognitional failures. Presupposed by this important approach to social relations is the basic idea that we are each dependent on the attitudes that other individuals take toward us—on their ‘recognition’ of us, as we might put it, as individuals whose interests matter. In his rewarding new book, based on Seely Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, Honneth takes this generic idea of dependence on the recognition of others as his quarry. His aim is to explore the different ways of thinking about this mutual dependence in the modern philosophical traditions of France, Great Britain, and...