A WORLD WHICH, INCIDENTALLY, IS NOT AS IT SHOULD BE: CRITICISM AND EXPLANATION BY AXEL HONNETH

Abstract

The article discusses the success of the critical moment of the normative reconstruction model as thought by Axel Honneth. It highlights the time diagnosis and conceptual elaborations dedicated to social pathologies in a broad sense in Honneth's work, including pathologies of individual freedom, reification, ideological recognition, paradoxes and misdevelopments. Relating the criticism of social pathologies to the normative functionalism to which Honneth adheres as well as to the background assumptions of normative reconstruction, the article attempts to show that in virtue of his narrow concept of the social Honneth needs to limit the critical moment of his model to the self-criticism of the self-understanding of a contextual lifeworld within wich the theory is inserted. The article attempts in particular to answer the question why Honneth leaves the concept of paradoxical development and shortly thereafter adopts the concept of misdevelopment. In this substitution, elements are found that reinforce the conclusion that Honneth cannot consistently have tools that would allow him to explain the very thing that is the object of criticism does however exist, and certainly in a sistematical manner, despite contradicting the supposed foundations of social integration. The critical power of the honnethian model is thus questioned in the light of its explanatory inability.