Work and Recognition

In his article, Honneth attempts to develop an entirely new understanding of labour for his theory of recognition as a general critical theory. He argues that all attempts to orient the notion of labour towards intrinsic values within the act itself had failed. He proposes a new strategy to recall the conditions of market-mediated exchange in order to develop new criteria for criticism from them. By doing this – clearly in breach with the initial assumptions of Habermas’ Critical Theory - he implicitly rejects the assumption that alternatives of capitalist society do exist. Instead, he tries to locate the criteria for a normative social critic within the capitalist labour relations itself.