Photo Credit: Jürgen Bauer/Suhrkamp Verlag
Axel Honneth is the Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University since 2011. He was the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main from 2001 to 2018, and C4-Professor of Social Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main from 1996 to 2016. Honneth studied Philosophy, Sociology, and German Literature at the universities of Bonn and Bochum from 1969 to 1974, earning his M.A. in Philosophy in 1974. His postgraduate studies were at Freie University Berlin from 1974 – 1976, before working as an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology, where he defended his dissertation with the title “Critique of Power. Foucault and Critical Theory” in 1982. After having worked for a year at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Sciences with Jürgen Habermas, he became Habermas’ research assistant at the Department of Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Honneth defended his habilitation with the title “Struggle for Recognition” at that Department in the year 1990. From 1991 to 1992 Honneth was C3-Professor of Philosophy at the University of Konstanz, from 1992 to 1996 he was C4-Professor of Political Philosophy at the Freie University of Berlin.
His areas of specialization include Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Social Theory. His publications include The Working Sovereign. Labour and Democartic Citizenship, 2024; The Poverty of our Freedom. Essays 2012 – 2019, 2023; Recognition. A Chapter in the History of European Ideas, 2020; The Idea of Socialism, 2016, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, 2014, The I in the We, Polity Press, 2012, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, 2009, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford University Press, 2008, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, 2007, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political– Philosophical Exchange, co-authored with Nancy Fraser, 2003, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, 1996, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, 1995, and The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, 1991.