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

Description

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.

Bert van den Brink is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is the author of The Tragedy of Liberalism, co-editor of Reasons of One's Own, and author of many articles and book chapters on liberalism, democratic conflict and civility, and critical social theory. David Owen is professor of social and political philosophy and deputy director of the Centre for Philosophy and Value at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Maturity and Modernity, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality. He has published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in moral, social, and political philosophy.