El soberano trabajador: una discusión con la filosofía social y política del trabajo de Axel Honneth

Abstract

This paper engages into a critical dialogue with the normative proposal that Axel Honneth displays in his last book, The working sovereign, which means a groundbreaking contribution in the field of contemporary social theory. First, I address the main claims contained in the book, which draw to a reformulation of work and the intertwinement between workspace, the social and political division of labor and social furtherance of democracy. Second, I highlight some blind spots of Honneth’s enquiry, which mostly refer to a limited knowledge of classical sources about the political purview of work and of the state-of-art of current lines of philosophy of work developed in South Europe and Latin America. Third, I raise some demurs related to the material sources of social reciprocity, the disavowal of universal basic income and the narrow geographical and social patterns appearing in Honneth’s appraisal of the social value of work.