To browse Academia. The essays in Recognition, Work, Politics indicate the diversity and continuity of contemporary French critical theory concerning both the question of politics and its philosophical articulation.
These themes are approached and addressed from directions that include post-structuralism, the paradigm of the gift, and post-marxism. Recognition, Work, Politics also highlights critical theories developed in France today that concentrate on the central issues of recognition and work. These themes highlight the renewed reception of German Critical Theory in contemporary French thought particularly around the project of recognition developed by Axel Honneth.
Interest in recognition is motivated both by a complex intellectual tradition stretching back to German idealism and by the increasing prevalence of various types of emancipatory struggles and social movements not easily characterized in terms of class conflict.
In an important sense, 'recognition' has charged the imaginations of theorists and activists alike, promising a new set of analytic lenses on the struggles and wishes of the age. While there are surely many contending approaches to recognition in the theoretical literature, it is just as sure that no one has done more to develop a comprehensive, integrated, and systematic theory on the basis of that concept than Axel Honneth has over the last twenty years. In particular, he has sought to develop a critical theory of society -an interdisciplinary social theory with emancipatory intent -that promises to be able to analyze most if not all of the central social struggles evinced in modern, complex societies by demonstrating their internal link to individual, morally imbued experiences of misrecognition and disrespect.
The volume is capped by a substantial "Rejoinder" essay by Honneth responding in some detail to each of the contributors, and, along the way, bringing a greater degree of clarity and specificity to many of his central claims and arguments. In dialogue with his interlocutor, Axel Honneth summarizes the way his work on recognition has unfolded over the past two decades. While he has retained his principal insights, some important parts of his theory have changed.
