Evaluation of Fraser’s and Honneth’s Normative Approaches

Abstract

The normative approaches presented so far enable us to consider the relevance of justice and recognition as two powerful perspectives that must be included in social justice. We have seen that both Fraser and Honneth include in their theories the dimensions of justice and recognition as means to explain and ensure equal rights, equal citizenship, distribution of means and resources, and the recognition of different abilities and capacities. The fact that the claims for justice and recognition can be adequately answered by their normative perspectives turns their theories into first-rate actors when it comes to explaining the logic of the social struggles in contemporary societies. In addition, Fraser and Honneth give us something more than an attempt to harmonize the perspectives of recognition and justice under an egalitarian ideal; their approaches, as they explicitly say, can converge and contribute to the development of a critical theory of justice.¹ I will return to this later, but so far, suffice it to say that a critical theory of justice must postulate a critical point of view that meets two requirements: the first is to be embodied in social processes in such a way that this point of view explains the emergence of claims for justice, and the second is to be capable of identifying the feasible social transformation necessary to ensure that which equal dignity requires.