Axel Honneth and Jurgen Habermas on Critical Social Theory: A Focus on Their Theories of Social Evolution

Abstract

This paper was inspired by a debate that I was first introduced to in Chris Latiolais's Continental Philosophy class. While reading Axel Honneth's Struggle for Recognition and Jiirgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, the debate over which critical theorist most effectively accounted for social problems arose. In this paper, I have trotted out each of their theories and retraced the steps they have taken to reach their conclusion; going back to the theories of Karl Marx, Friedreich Hegel, Donald Winnicott, George Herbert Mead, John Locke, and those that inspired them.