Justification, recognition and justice: Weaving bridges between Boltanski, Honneth and Walzer

Abstract

Together with Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski proposes that the assessment of social contributions occurs in a context where it is necessary that each participant claims, through justification, for the recognition of her/his place in the economies of worth, where a variety of evaluative criteria will be considered. The conception of this dispute around the justification has a reasonable proximity to the struggle for recognition of achievement (Leistung), that Axel Honneth defines as the third sphere in his theory of recognition; here, beyond the equality in the sphere of law, differences would be justifiably. Part of the discussion is if or how the horizons of values and purposes which enable for the assessment of the individual contribution are shared: in Boltanski they are clearly divergent and for Honneth apparently shared, while Michael Walzer assumes that values are shared, though emphasizing the need for a careful distinction of the spheres of justice to which values are referred to in each case. This distinction of spheres, apparently, can allow a bridge to the cities in the proposition of Boltanski and the spheres of recognition of Axel Honneth’s theory. In the text we propose to explore possible similarities and conceptional differences of these three propositions.