Freedom's Right

Since The Struggle for Recognition, this is the first great monograph of one of today’s most significant social philosophers.

The theory of justice is one of the most intensively reflected fields in contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only reached their high level of argumentation at the cost of a large deficit: with their fixation on purely normative, abstract principles, they stray significantly from the sphere that is in fact their field of application – social reality.

Axel Honneth takes up a new route and extracts today’s significant criteria of social justice from the normative requirements that have evolved from within western, liberal-democratic societies. Together, these constitute what he calls »democratic morality«: a system that is not only anchored in the law but also in institutionally established norms of action that possess a moral legitimacy.

To account for this wide-ranging undertaking, Honneth first establishes that all crucial spheres of action in western societies share one characteristic: In each case, they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom.

In the spirit of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and under the auspices of recognition theory, the central chapter illustrates how in specific social areas – personal relationships, market-induced economic activity and in the public forum of politics – the principles of individual freedom are generated that form the guiding principles of justice. The aim of this book is highly ambitious: to re-establish the theory of justice as social analysis.

»Freedom's Right is a stunningly ambitious exploration of the ways in which major institutions of Western society promote freedom and at the same time present obstacles to its realization. Axel Honneth defends a compelling conception of social freedom grounded in mutual recognition, which he employs both to comprehend contemporary social reality and to reveal its deficiencies. Characterized by an extraordinary richness of detail, this book's aim is a provocative mix of reconciliation and critique. No social philosopher has attempted a project of this scope since Hegel composed the Philosophy of Right almost two hundred years ago.« Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College

»Breaking with the dominant style of contemporary political philosophy, Axel Honneth demonstrates how fruitful it can be to develop a theory of social justice not simply by appealing to common beliefs and intuitions but more fundamentally by understanding the characteristic institutions of modern society. Freedom's Right is a brilliant work by one of today's leading philosophers.« Charles Larmore, Brown University

»Honneth has provided us with a central reference point for future debates on the nature of modernity, freedom, justice, and the social world.« Arto Laitinen, Review of Politics

»[Axel Honneth’s] social critique is not content with pointing out that things are not as they should be. He is not out to provoke our indignation, but rather to make us more informed: show us what’s going wrong and why.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Honneth’s great merit lies not only the way he reminds us of the rational in the political. More than that, his book reminds us of a meaning of the word freedom that we are on the verge of losing.« Frankfurter Rundschau

»Honneth’s book is an impressive work that attempts to spell out what freedom has meant in the various areas of society, and on that basis what it should mean to us today. [...] At the very least, his differentiation of three types of freedom offers a highly provocative key to the normative reconstruction of the history of freedom in modernity.« Deutschlandradio

»In his new book Freedom's Right, Honneth bases his entire systematic framework on Hegel. […] In an impressively detailed reconstruction of the complete social history of the 19th and 20th century, Honneth attempts to demonstrate how the advances and retreats in the realisation of forms of freedom are clearly identifiable. […] And Honneth’s stunt, apparently taken from the Prussian political philosopher’s foundations of modern social criticism, is successfully pulled off.« Ludwig Siep, Die Zeit

»The Frankfurt professor of Philosophy and director of the legendary Institute for Social Research (and therefore the immediate heir to Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas) has just published his magnum opus […]. Honneth has not written a jaunty essay but rather a fundamental philosophical study that spells out the great terms once more: freedom and justice.« Falter