Is there a struggle for recognition? In comparing Hegel and Honneth

Abstract

The present analysis tries to cast serious doubt about Honneth’s connection between struggle and recognition and his pretension of finding its early essential and determinant theorization in some texts contained in Jena writings of young Hegel. Beyond Honneth’s thesis results paradoxical in many respects and theoretically almost inconsistent, a mere baseless overlapping of what should means both the more obvious notion and real existence of society as well as those of individual, his reference to Hegel’s recognition idea, substantially linked to a ‘pre-social’, ‘pre-political’, as well as naturally primitive and eventual atmosphere and scenario, seems extremely inappropriate and variously arbitrary, although this operation shows an emphatical exigence of objective foundation of what is variously insidious and bids one of most inaccessible theoretic challenge.