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The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

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Although you'd hardly know it by looking at recent sales, Axel Honneth is one of the world's major intellectuals; and has perhaps the most advanced sensibility in social theory today, as evidenced by this book and his earlier *Critique of Power*. Both are crisp, lucid expositions of themes drawn both from classic sociology and German Idealism. Honneth has done much to "re-sociologize" the work of the *second* Frankfurt School workgroup. Here he follows the lead of Hans Joas and treats George Herbert Mead as a substantive social theorist rather than a "pragmatic" wish-fulfiller; and this according to the principles of *ego psychology*.

In the 80s and 90s ego psychologists were scorned as psychological "River Rouge workers", but worse things have existed -- and furthermore, the principles of ego psychology provide a firm grounding for discussing questions of desert and other "normativities" found in moral discourse. Which discourse perhaps ordinarily obeys a none-too-transparent logic, a question raised by the recent work of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen on "welfare economics" outside questions of political desert; and Honneth's none-too-opaque constructions provide a solid grounding for raising necessary question the legitimacy of socialist strategies still obsessed with unclear questions of "micropower".