Università Roma Tre

The course takes as its focus the relationships between theories of human rights, concerned with guiding action, and theories about human rights, concerned with foundational questions. In particular the course examines the theory of autonomy, vulnerability, recognition and social justice by Axel Honneth. There is general agreement about the fact that liberal-democratic societies are based on normative principles, which require legal provisions to ensure that governments do not violate anyone’s fundamental rights. Yet, partially on account of the complexity of the ongoing overlapping global processes of integration, deregulation and reform, partially on account of the influence of anti-foundational critique (deconstruction; postmodernism; relativism), these widely accepted principles seem to have lost much of their original explanatory and prescriptive force. Against those who claimed that this problem consists in a mere temporal delay between philosophical investigation and practical application Honneth argued that more is needed than time, hope and persistence to transform theoretically developed principles of freedom and justice into guidelines for political action. In his view the normative principles at the hearth of the human rights discourse are formulated in a manner that prevents us from deriving guidelines for political action. The course will examine the ethical model provided by Honneth for the purpose of situating his theory of social justice as recognition in the analysis of the variety of historically determined institutional instances and practices that embody existentially significant claims to self-realization.

Honneth, A., Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (2011), translated by J. Ganahl, Polity Press, Cambridge 2014 .