Theodor W. Adorno's most well-known statement about ethics probably is “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”; “There is no way of living a false life correctly.” This is Adorno's answer to the old question in ethics and social philosophy as to whether good, just, well-ordered lives can be led in societies that are neither good nor just nor well-ordered. Adorno has important things to say about the fatal dynamics between the false – damaged, distorted – social and cultural conditions modern individuals live under, on the one hand, and these individuals' (in)ability to recognize themselves and others as moral and ethical agents, on the other. Since Adorno accounts for false life in terms of a theory of rationality according to which the control of inner nature, social relationships, and of the external physical world determines humans' chances at survival, there is not much room in Adorno's modern world for forms of recognition of self and others as beings with a non-instrumental, moral status. Here we find a link between Adorno's account of power understood as rational control (Herrschaft) and his account of recognition. We will see that insofar as Adorno has an account of recognition at all, it is an account of moments of intersubjective responsiveness towards genuine needs of self and other that escape false rationality. But recognition is always momentary, an escape from reification that cannot be stabilized and institutionalized, cannot be turned into a trustworthy disposition for action that would escape the way false life shapes us.

The topic of recognition now occupies a central place in contemporary debates in social and political theory. Rooted in Hegel's early Jena Writings and the famous discussion of the Master/Slave dialectic in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and developed in a variety of ways by George Herbert Mead, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser, recognition has been given renewed expression in the ambitious third-generation program for Critical Theory developed by Axel Honneth over the past twenty years, most prominently in his classic text The Struggle for Recognition.

Honneth's guiding thought has two aspects. First, modern ethical agency requires the formation of practical relations to self that are constituted in and through relations of recognition across three axes of self-formation: love, respect, and esteem. Second, the non-recognition or misrecognition of ethical subjects along any of these axes of self-formation is experienced as a harm or injustice that, under favourable social conditions, will motivate a struggle for recognition.

The research program that Honneth has developed is widely acknowledged as both an empirically insightful way of reflecting on emancipatory struggles for greater justice within such societies and a powerful way of generating a conception of justice and the good that permits the normative evaluation of such struggles. The aim of this volume is to offer a critical clarification and evaluation of this research program and particularly its relationship to the other major development in critical social and political theory over recent years – the focus on power as constitutive of practical identities (or forms of subjectivity) proposed by Michel Foucault and developed in a variety of ways by theorists such as Judith Butler, James Tully, and Iris Marion Young.

This chapter approaches the political significance of Honneth's theory of recognition by way of his articulation of an ideal of (radical) democracy as reflexive co-operation drawn, in large part, from the work of Dewey. The opening two sections of the chapter sketch the main features of this ideal and its apparent advantages with respect to competing proceduralist and republican ideals. It then proceeds to demonstrate the relationship between this ideal and the formal ethical account of the good that Honneth proposes in The Struggle for Recognition, before turning critically to evaluate the naturalistic moral psychology and theory of recognition that underpins Honneth's articulation of this ideal. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to a number of problems that this account identifies with Honneth's research project.

Honneth's argument for ‘democracy as reflexive co-operation’ is articulated by way of the claim that Dewey's mature democratic theory combines two elements: (1) a theory of human socialization that links self-realization to membership of a community of co-operation, and (2) an epistemological argument for democracy that emphasizes the rational value of democratic procedures for problem-solving. Let us address each in turn.

Honneth glosses Dewey's theory of human socialization thus:

In recent years, liberal political theory has been revolutionized in a number of ways. First, initiated by John Rawls, mainstream liberalism has dropped its self-understanding as a comprehensive moral in favor of a purely political self-understanding. Second, several authors have started criticizing this now widespread “political” self-understanding of liberalism in a number of ways. Some claim that liberalism is not a purely political doctrine at all. Others argue that, irrespective of the question whether it is or is not, it cannot claim to be based in the hypothetical agreement of all reasonable citizens. As Marilyn Friedman puts it: “ … political liberalism is simply one more political doctrine among many, freestanding or not, with no greater politically independent, consent-based claim to anyone's allegiance than many of its political rivals.”

Of course, it is not at all clear that this conclusion is warranted. But suppose it is. And further suppose that in a pluralistic social world, ongoing interpretative conflicts over the requirements of a just and well-ordered society, its constitutional essentials, and its principles of justice are more characteristic of political cooperation than fundamental agreements as to these requirements are. We then arrive at a starting point for normative political theory that is strikingly different from that of political liberalism. For our main question would no longer be: which substantive agreements among reasonable citizens would help warrant political legitimacy, and appropriate understandings of political autonomy and civic responsibility?