Having limited into the conscious philosophy,the early theory of social critique was short of social and normal base.Foucault,Habermas and Honneth,in their respective theoretical ways,criticize and analyze the social states,and attempt to offer the diagnose of the times.Foucault’s theory of power holds that,the social is construed as a domain of strategic interaction in which actors continuously confront one another in a perpetual battle,but it departs from moral consensus;Habermas emphasizes the connotation of freedom in the communicative understanding through the theory of communication,and interprets and grasps the human historic logic in the course of interaction among the groups who are communitively interdependent,however his theory is short of the moving paradigm of struggle.Honneth finds that neither Foucault nor Habermas can validly prescribe for the social crisis in the Western capitalist country.His theory of recognition,which intrinsically includes two aspects of communicative understanding and social struggle,strives to probe into the moral logic of the social conflicts,and succeeds in a critical social theory being transformed into the paradigm of recognition.
