In the critical theory of Frankfurt School, emancipation has been the ultimate normative criterion against which both the reconstruction of social theory and the analysis of specific social realities were evaluated. As in Habermas'Theory of Communicative Action there was a certain restriction to the world of life, to the detriment of political-administrative and economic subsystems, in his Theory of Recognition, Axel Honneth proposed to take up again the project of a critical theory to analyze all dimensions of social life in the light of ethical immanent criteria and having emancipation as its teleological horizon. In his book The right of freedom: outline of a democratic ethics, released in June of 2011, he develops a theory of justice that, unlike the tradition in which the author adheres to, sets freedom as the ethical criterion in various spheres of life. This paper analyzes the roots of that work inquiring how the issue of emancipation has been related to the ends of a theory of justice. Its attention is less focused on the actual content of the diagnosis of time and more to the methodological proposal for normative reconstruction as a tool for the analysis of society.
Theory of recognition; Freedom and emancipation; Theory of Justice; Axel Honneth