The Fragmented World of the Social Essays in Social and Political Philosophy

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material production and culture, the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them. Axel Honneth is Professor of Political Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and is a leading figure in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. He is the author of a number of books, including The Critique of Power, The Struggle for Recognition, and (with Hans Joas) Social Action and Human Nature.