Axel Honneth

Axel Honneth (/ˈhɒnɪt, -ɛt/; [aksl̩ ˈhɔnɛt]; born 1949) is a German philosopher who is professor of philosophy at both the University of Frankfurt and Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.

Honneth was born in Essen, West Germany on 18 July 1949, studied in Bonn, Bochum, Berlin and Munich (under Jürgen Habermas), and taught at the Free University of Berlin and the New School before moving to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt in 1996. He also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 1999. Between 2001 and 2018 he was director of the Institute for Social Research, originally home to the so-called Frankfurt School, at the University of Frankfurt . Since 2011, he is also Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities at the department of philosophy at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Honneth's work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition.

His first main work The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory explores the affinities between the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault. In his second main work The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, the recognition concept is derived mainly from G. W. F. Hegel's early social philosophical works, but is supplemented by George Herbert Mead's social psychology, Jürgen Habermas' communicative ethics, and Donald Winnicott's object relations theory. Honneth's critical adaptation of these is the basis of his critical social theory, which attempts to remedy the deficits of previous approaches. In 2003, Honneth co-authored Recognition or Redistribution? with the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, who criticizes the priority of ethical categories such as recognition over structural social-political categories such as redistribution in Honneth's thought. His recent work Reification reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power. For Honneth, all forms of reification are due to intersubjectively based pathologies rather than the structural character of social systems such as capitalism as argued by Karl Marx and György Lukács.

• Social Action and Human Nature, co-authored with Hans Joas (Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1980]).
• The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (MIT Press, 1991 [1985]).
• The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1995 [1990]).
• The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Polity Press, 1995 [1992]).
• Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, co-authored with Nancy Fraser (Verso, 2003).
• Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Polity Press, 2007 [2000]).
• Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009).
• The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2010).
• The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (2012).
• Freedom's Right (2014).
• The Idea of Socialism (2016).