Honneth's new critical theory of recognition

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 220, 1996, Pages 126-132

  Alexander, Jeffrey C ^a   Lara, Maria Pia ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 0030492938     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson Polity Press, Cambridge 1995, ISBN 07456 18383, £39.50 HB,£12.95 PB.
2. More than any other major theorist, Alain Touraine's theorizing from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s embodied the effort to engage New Left social movements on their own terms. Touraine developed a genuinely new theory of how fundamental contradictions in post-industrial society would create revolutionary movements coalescing in a new, universalizing class struggle against capitalism. This entire theoretical project collapsed a decade ago with the decline of progressive social movements. By emphasizing concepts like democracy and legality, Touraine's new writings - Critique de la Modernité (1972) and Qu'est-ce que la Démocratie? (1994) - effectively refute his earlier work. For an extended discussion of Touraine in this regard, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, 'Collective Action, Culture and Civil Society: Secularizing, Updating, Inverting, Revising, and Displacing the Classical Model of Social Movements', in Jon Clark and Marco Diani, eds, Alain Touraine, London 1996, pp. 205-33.
3. This appropriation of Parsons by a left theorist may still seem surprising despite the pioneering labours of Habermas and others in the 1980s. Yet the manner in which the early Parsons provided a model that critiqued reification and affirmed solidarity and moral responsibility has also fundamentally informed David Lockwood's recent work Solidarity and Schism: The Problem of Disorder in Durkheim and Marxist Sociology, New York 1992.
4. In terms of this Bourdieuian concept of symbolic capital and Bourdieu's theoretical framework more generally, Honneth has written one of the single best critical pieces. See 'The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture', Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 3, 1986, pp. 55-66.
5. For an extended justification of his proposal to replace Habermas's emphasis on communication with the concept of recognition, see Honneth, 'The Social Dynamics of Disrespect,' Constellations, vol. 1, no. 2 (1994), pp. 255-69.
6. This discussion of illocutionary force, while indebted to Habermas's moral appropriation of the concept, implies at the same time a fundamental modification of it. As we have employed the concept here, drawing on Lara's forthcoming work, it points to the importance in successful illocutionary utterances of creating effective aesthetic symbols - in sociological terms, collective representations - a process that entails interpenetrating the moral 'validity sphere' with the aesthetic. It is precisely this necessity that Lara has emphasized in her interpretation of Albrecht Wellmer's important recent work. See Maria Pia Lara, 'Albrecht Wellmer: Between Validity Spheres', Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 21, no. 2 (1995), pp. 1-22.