Honneth, Hegel, and Global Justice

Abstract

Recent philosophical discussions of the concept of recognition are indebted to the work of Axel Honneth, who has sought to appropriate original Hegelian insights for contemporary social theory. For the most part, however, Honneth has made little effort to mine the resources of recognition theory for issues of global justice and globalism generally. It is telling that his Suffering from Indeterminacy (Honneth, 2000), which seeks to rejuvenate Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from the perspective of a reconstructed account of recognition, devotes virtually no attention to the concluding sections on international law and world history.