Axel Honneth and the moral grammar of conflict

Here we touch upon one of the most important theoretical junctions of the entire Honnethean framework. An experience of misrecognition does not generate conflict in itself. For this to happen, it must undergo a further transformation, that is, it must cease to be merely an individual experience and begin to be interpreted as a shared social condition. In other words, the transition from pain to struggle is not automatic. It is mediated by a process of collective interpretation and consciousness-raising. Only on this condition then does the feeling of offence lose the character of a simple private affection and take on the form of a publicly articulable claim.

It is here that conflict ceases to be a mere sociological phenomenon and becomes a problem of social philosophy. For Honneth, in fact, society is not only a system of distribution of functions and resources; it is also, and more profoundly, an order of recognition. This means that institutions, roles, practices and norms always incorporate an implicit promise about how subjects are to be treated, what dignity is accorded to them, what value is attributed to their contribution. When this promise is betrayed, not only a functional imbalance is produced. A normative contradiction within the social order itself is produced, and conflict is the form in which this contradiction emerges.

In this sense, then, conflict is not the opposite of social integration, but a critical mode of it. It signals, that is, that the existing order can no longer deliver what it had, at least implicitly, promised. This is why Honneth does not see it as a social pathology, but as a dynamic that can have a morally positive function. Conflicts make visible what normally remains invisible in society, namely the dependence of social integration on relations of recognition that cannot be violated indefinitely without producing resistance.

But if conflict arises from misrecognition, it is not only the means to correct an external situation. It is also an experience through which subjects reconstruct themselves. To struggle does not only mean to oppose. It means coming out of the paralysis of shame and mortification. It means removing the wound from passivity and transforming it into action. This is possible because, as Honneth notes, 'individuals constitute themselves as persons only by learning to relate to themselves from the perspective of another who approves or encourages them, as beings positively characterised by certain qualities and capacities' (p. 203). If the relationship with oneself is always mediated by the recognition of others, then its reconstruction also necessarily passes through active social relations. Struggle, in this sense, is therefore not just a reaction to a wrong, but a space in which subjects reactivate, in a still unfinished form, those conditions of recognition on which the very possibility of a positive relationship with oneself depends. Conflict is thus not only to be understood as a reaction to a wrong, but primarily as a practice of reappropriation of self. The misrecognised subject, at the moment he enters into the struggle, anticipates to some extent that recognition which is not yet given to him institutionally. He anticipates it in the solidarity of the group, in the shared language of protest, in the possibility of seeing himself confirmed by others as someone whose wound is not imaginary, not private, not an individual's fault. Conflict, then, takes on a performative dimension because it does not merely demand recognition, but already produces partial and provisional forms of it. This explains why Honneth sees in social struggles not simply a clash, but a moment of moral growth.

In last week's Mind the Economy we dwelt on the origin and taxonomies of 'misrecognition'. The next step is to analyse the political becoming of injury. It is no longer only of interest to classify the forms of injury. We are interested in understanding how an injury can be transformed into a historical force. Honneth is not only telling us that human beings suffer when they are not recognised. He is telling us that societies learn something about themselves through the conflicts that those injuries produce. Struggle is the moment when a society is forced to make its normative assumptions explicit, to measure the distance between what it claims to be worth and what it actually makes possible.

Of course, nothing guarantees that every experience of misrecognition will result in struggle. And this is where the theory becomes even more interesting, because it opens up to the opposite problem, analysing not only why conflicts arise, but also why they sometimes fail to come to light. The possibility of a failure to react to misrecognition is a real problem, which the literature on Honneth has highlighted well. Eleonora Piromalli formulates it clearly when she observes that "The possibility of a failure to react to misrecognition as a result of misrecognition itself (or of illusory, partial and dim forms of recognition), is indeed a relevant problem for a theory that finds one of its pivotal points in the idea that the experience of oppression is the prerequisite, through the normative conflict resulting from it, for the moral evolution of society, and that aims to foreground the experience of the participating subject." (Axel Honneth. Social Justice as Recognition. Mimesis, 2012, p. 145). This emphasis is crucial because it underlines that the transformation of wrong into protest is by no means an automatic process. Between the experience of the wound and its transformation into struggle there are social, cultural, linguistic and institutional mediations. And there are also forms of self-blame, internalisation of defeat, and passive acceptance of the existing order that paralyses and prevents the pain of misrecognition from becoming generative.

We experience this from the increasing individualisation of social wounds typical of our present. Misrecognition does not disappear, it changes form. It privatises. What originates in social arrangements is experienced as personal inadequacy. Precariousness as individual inability, subordination as lack of talent, lack of recognition as a defect of self. In this transition, the conflict weakens not because injustices are reduced, but because it becomes more difficult to name them as such. It is a point that Honneth, in more recent works such as The Sovereign Worker (2025) or The Right of Freedom (2015), takes up from another angle, showing how the world of work can produce not only subordination, but also an inability to think of oneself as a subject of the public sphere.

One can then understand why his theory of conflict based on recognition is so demanding. It asks not only to observe where protests are produced, but also where they are prevented, blocked, rendered unthinkable. It asks to look not only at visible conflicts, but also at the wounds that fail to speak out. And here the very concept of justice changes status. For it is not enough to reduce the number of conflicts to consider a society as just. It is also necessary for such a society to make possible the emergence of the experiences of misrecognition as publicly intelligible questions. A society that does not force subjects to experience wrongdoing as private guilt. A society that does not paralyses, but renders collective suffering publicly intelligible.

From this point of view, conflict should not be seen as a failure of coexistence. It is, if anything, the place where coexistence is put to the test of truth. Not all conflicts are just, but those that arise from misunderstanding show that society contains within itself promises that it is not yet able to keep. And this is precisely why it cannot only be understood from the point of view of order, but also from the point of view of its cracks. It is not enough to look at the rules. One must look at the points where the life lived resists the rules because it feels it deserves more. It is there that conflict can stop appearing as noise and instead turn out to be a sign that the social order has not yet lived up to its promises.