The Pathologies of Individual Freedom : : Hegel's Social Theory / / Axel Honneth.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Honneth, Axel,
• MitwirkendeR: Löb, Ladislaus,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2022]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Monographs in Philosophy ; 30
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (96 p.)

This is a penetrating reinterpretation and defense of Hegel's social theory as an alternative to reigning liberal notions of social justice. The eminent German philosopher Axel Honneth rereads Hegel's Philosophy of Right to show how it diagnoses the pathologies of the overcommitment to individual freedom that Honneth says underlies the ideas of Rawls and Habermas alike. Honneth argues that Hegel's theory contains an account of the psychological damage caused by placing too much emphasis on personal and moral freedom. Although these freedoms are crucial to the achievement of justice, they are insufficient and in themselves leave people vulnerable to loneliness, emptiness, and depression. Hegel argues that people must also find their freedom or "self-realization" through shared projects. Such projects involve the three institutions of ethical life--family, civil society, and the state--and provide the arena of a crucial third kind of freedom, which Honneth calls "communicative" freedom. A society is just only if it gives all of its members sufficient and equal opportunity to realize communicative freedom as well as personal and moral freedom.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- I Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a Theory of Justice -- II The Connection between the Theory of Justice and the Diagnosis of the Age -- III The Theory of Ethical Life as a Normative Theory of Modernity -- Index