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On Axel Honneth's Cosmopolitanism: The 'Forgetting' of Global Poverty as a Form of Reification

Mookherjee

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Abstract

Amid now extensive debates about cosmopolitanism in political theory, this article explores the implications of Axel Honneth’s recognition theory for issues in international justice, not least the dire situation of poverty in the world. In contrast with a purely resource-distributive approach, the essay turns particularly to Honneth’s recent revival of the Lukácsian concept of reification as a process of self-distancing from the elementary humanity of others. Specifically, Honneth re-formulates reification as a failure of an elementary or ‘antecedent’ form of recognition. From the perspective of his theory, reification connotes the forgetfulness of others’ fundamental humanity. While Honneth takes such forgetfulness to become most readily apparent in dramatic violations such as the Holocaust, the article interprets his theory to explain, and eventually to challenge, the passive acceptance by many of dire material injustices. The paper develops the implications of this challenge by interpreting from Honneth’s framework a duty to question international policies which tend to reify and objectify the least well off in the world, whilst remaining cognizant of the limits of de-reification to the more extensive, meaningful alleviation of poverty globally.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 24, 2019
Publication Date Nov 5, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Social Theory and Practice
Print ISSN 0037-802X
Publisher Philosophy Documentation Center
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 46
Issue 4
DOI https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract20201029105
Keywords antecedent recognition, cosmopolitanism, global poverty, reification, Lukács, Honneth, material redistribution
Publisher URL https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_2020_0999_10_29_105?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=cf87bb184525a16d8b548f72736f608ce4917461-1605781415-0-AQdmcMReY1DXP6wRh_SDO95h9SnDLy56yygFx4E3FSZuCyGmiNN5nFnCey_nRlgMqY02hhZeS7QPrFc0avyXZlKNrpgB2Q_rOAK-Ja