Justiça como reconhecimento de Axel Honneth: os déficits sociológicos de uma teoria crítica renovada

Abstract

Deals the research to the defense of the thesis according to which Axel Honneth (Honneth) would have incurred on the sociological deficits that he accuses the critical theories of previous generations of Critical Theory. The position is based on the impacts of the theoretical changes and innovations undertaken from the aforementioned displacement, notably related to the use of fictitious empiricism in detriment of social research, the primacy of social institutions and the principle of freedom, as well the use of Normative Reconstruction as a methodological instrument. In order to substantiate the accusation against Honneth's theory, an analytical-critical study is developed comprising the exposition and description of the theoretical assumptions of Critical Theory, the accusation of sociological deficits and the way in which the author seeks to overcome them in his model of Theory of Justice as Recognition, having as its empirical and methodological basis the category of social conflicts. The positive reflexes and objections about the adoption of social conflicts are exposed, and these are faced by Honneth through the historicization of “recognition” and the subsequent loss of primacy of the category of social conflicts. The loss of primacy of social conflicts is interpreted in the research as a wrong path taken by the author, which consequences expresses in his questionable diagnosis of the social, in correspondence to the fictitious empirical work that comes to animate his theoretical proposal; his excessively one-dimensional critical theory, due to the centrality of the institutional dimension and the mediation of its criticism based on the principle of freedom; and about the reductionist of the role of subjects in the design of the social and of their potential for radical transformation of the social, because of the conditions established by Normative Reconstruction shaped as Honneth adopts, which impedes him the access to the interpretive operations of the subjects. In other words, inserted in the sociological deficits of previous generations, which corresponds to a contradiction to himself and to the critical sense of his theoretical model.