Per una critica interna dei paradossi del capitalismo. Capitalismo e riconoscimento di Axel Honneth

By analysing some recent essays of Axel Honneth - translated and collected in the Italian edition Capitalismo e riconoscimento -, the paper focuses the attention on the reciprocal influence between the modern spheres of social recognition and the last developments of capitalism. Through this comparison, the paper summarizes Honneth’s attempt to articulate a theory of justice centred on the concept of recognition. This theoretical choice allows to point out a diagnosis of today social pathologies and to face the paradoxical effects linked to the development’s tendencies of capitalism: effectively, the examination of social, cultural, economical and political processes of the last decades testifies the inversion of normative intentions originally connected to the institutional media of recognition. This theoretical perspective stimulates a critical approach to the concept of recognition itself, whose justified forms have to be distinguished from the illegitimate ones. In this way, the critical theory of society can again benefit from the classic topic of the critic of ideology, through which it is possible to develop an internal criticism of capitalism and to take back the social claims of a qualitatively satisfying work to the forms of its social organization.

Keywords: Capitalism, recognition, theory of justice, ideology, critical theory of society, paradox, social pathologies, internal criticism

Leonard Mazzone, Per una critica interna dei paradossi del capitalismo. Capitalismo e riconoscimento di Axel Honneth in "COSTRUZIONI PSICOANALITICHE" 21/2011, pp 163-175, DOI: 10.3280/COST2011-021010