Moral feelings as forms of expression of the social conflict: a reading from Axel Honneth

Abstract

In this paper, we want to rescue the academicals dialogue that encouraged sociologist and philosopher Axel Honneth about the structures of social recognition as key to understanding the collective complaints. The author takes a critical theory of society made by the Frankfurt School and the Hegelian heritage on the intersubjective recognition to mark the thesis in which are forms of contempt and feelings of injustice the ones who drive the resistance and struggle largely social conflicts. In this formulation the author distances himself from the Marxist idea that the motivations of socioeconomic are what drive struggles also departs from Habermas’s theory, which postulates faced with the problem of understanding the struggles of interest from the exclusive field of communicative rationality. From the theory of social recognition from Honneth, this paper proposes to stop in the reflection on the importance feelings of injustice acquired in collective complaints and conflicts.