Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO RECOGNITION
- 2 Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgement, and Recognitive Attitudes towards Persons
- 3 Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
- 4 Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno's Ethics
- 5 The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the “I”
- PART II RECOGNITION AND POWER IN SOCIAL THEORY
- PART III RECOGNITION AND POWER IN POLITICAL THEORY
- PART IV AXEL HONNETH ON RECOGNITION AND POWER
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
actualized agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO RECOGNITION
- 2 Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgement, and Recognitive Attitudes towards Persons
- 3 Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
- 4 Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno's Ethics
- 5 The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the “I”
- PART II RECOGNITION AND POWER IN SOCIAL THEORY
- PART III RECOGNITION AND POWER IN POLITICAL THEORY
- PART IV AXEL HONNETH ON RECOGNITION AND POWER
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
LIBERAL POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION
Most modern liberal versions of the state depend on a philosophically ambitious theory about the nature of human individuality and its normatively relevant implications. It is often assumed that contrasting theories about the ultimacy of inter-subjective relations and the derivative or secondary status of individuality are potentially if not actually illiberal, and Hegel's putative “organic” theory of the state is often cited as an example. A major arena for such disputes has been the claim by such neo-Hegelians as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth that the key liberal notion of the “free and rational individual” depends for its possibility on a social condition of great political relevance: “mutual recognition.” In the following, I return to the sources of this dispute (a dispute sometimes called postmodern “identity” politics) in Hegel's original arguments about “dependence” and “independence,” and investigate what according to Hegel is the exact nature of the human dependence at issue and what might count as the successful satisfaction of this condition of dependence. It is, I argue, much easier to see what Hegel's answer is to the former question than to the latter.
We need first a general, admittedly high-altitude survey of the landscape occupied by “liberal versions of the state.” This is not easy to do; versions of liberal political theory have become ever more various. There are autonomy liberals, value-neutral liberals, skeptical liberals, relativist liberals, libertarian liberals, welfarist liberals, and more recently liberal or value pluralists.
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- Recognition and PowerAxel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, pp. 57 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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