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.

The Poverty of Our Freedom