This article explores Axel Honneth’s attempts to reconnect the struggles of workers with the normative content of modernity through Hegel’s intersubjective account of recognition. The importance of Honneth’s writings lies in his attempt to extend Habermas’ account of normative self-constitution to labor via the morally motivated struggles of workers to correct the modern maldistribution of social worth. To this extent, the expansion of ethical life is predicated on the struggles of excluded participants to gain inclusion within the normative content of (...) modernity. From this perspective Habermas’ attempt to legitimate the exclusion of labor (by the system) from the normative content of modernity appears unjust and unjustified. Unfortunately, Honneth shares with Habermas a tendency to locate the economic system beyond the (culturally defined) limits of ethical life. He thereby fails to acknowledge the extent to which workers play a major role in re-moralizing the former via the de-reification of the latter. (shrink)

Identifying self-empowerment as the normative core of the liberal democratic project, Habermas proceeds to dilute the revolutionary character of that project. After describing Habermas' views about legitimation problems in the West, the author examines critically Habermas' claim that democratic practices of self-empowerment must be self-limiting, arguing that under some circumstances (which cannot be specified in advance), more radical forms of self-empowerment may be justified. The author also argues that Habermas' own acknowledgement of the revolutionary character of liberal democracy, along with (...) his criticisms of the manifestly unconstitutional circulation of power which characterizes existing liberal democratic states, may themselves provide the basis for a more radical conception of self-empowerment than Habermas will currently allow. (shrink)