Two Attempts at Grounding Social Critique in„Ordinary“ Actors’ Perspectives: The Critical Theories of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth

Abstract

This paper analyzes two contemporary, „third-generation“ perspectives within critical theory – Nancy Fraser’s and Axel Honneth’s – with the aim of examining the degree to which the two authors succeed in grounding the normative criteria of social critique in the perspectives of ’ordinary’ social actors, as opposed to speculative social theory. To that end, the author focuses on the influential debate between Fraser and Honneth Redistribution or Re- cognition? which concerns the appropriate normative foundations of a „post- metaphysical“ critical theory, and attempts to reconstruct the fundamental 29 disagreements between Fraser and Honneth over the meaning and tasks of critical theory. The author concludes that both critical theorists ultimately secure the normative foundations of critique through substantive theorizations of the social, which frame the two authors’ „reconstructions“ of the normativity of everyday social action, but argues that post-metaphysical critical theory does not have to abandon comprehensive social theory in order to be epistmo- logically „non-authoritarian“.