Axel Honneth’s 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Dublin Lecture seeks briefly to reconstruct the history of conceptual disputes about the meaning of work from the beginning of capitalist industrialisation. Initially, the only kind of activity that counted as work in the proper sense was the industrialised manufacture of goods. Subsequently, this extremely narrow view of work was challenged by a succession of social actors who attempt to expand the definition by interpreting additional kinds of activity as work. At the present juncture, there is widespread acceptance of the view that caring and curative activities, be they in private households or in public facilities, should also count as work in the strict sense. However, this new, broader notion of work poses the problem of how to distinguish socially important work from activities performed for merely private ends. Honneth concludes with a proposal for resolving this conceptual difficulty.

Axel Honneth holds professorships at both Columbia University and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. He has been awarded the Ernst Bloch-Preis from the City of Ludwigshafen, the Bruno-Kreisky Prize from the Karl-Renner Stiftung in Vienna and the Ulysses Medal, University College Dublin’s highest honour.