Interest, Recognition, and Victimhood in Social Struggles. A Critical Remark to Axel Honneth's Theory

Axel Honneth is known worldwide for his conception of social conflicts as moral struggles for recognition. However, his model relies on a distinction between struggles for interest and struggles for recognition which is not as clear as he assumes. In this paper, I argue that the problematic nature of this distinction implies that the logic of recognition claimed by this author is vulnerable not only to domination strategies (something for which he has been often criticized), but also to attitudes of false victimhood, either conscious or unconscious. This analysis of Honneth's theory leads to the conclusion that, in order to achieve the critical potential to which it aspires, it must develop a sufficiently robust, empirical criterion for defining in practice the social status of "victim" -one that cannot be provided by psychoanalysis alone. Otherwise, this proposal may be useful as a purely descriptive model, but not as a critical tool.