From Love to Recognition: Towards an Immanent Critique of Hegel’s Conception of Marriage

This article offers an immanent critique of Hegel's conception of marriage, on the one hand by showing the importance of love between the sexes in Hegel's development of his theory of recognition, and on the other hand by discussing Axel Honneth's update of this theory in Freedom's Right. The aim is to emphasize that Hegel's perspective allows us to understand the issues related to gender relations in the question of recognition, but that if we want to update this idea today, it is not enough to say that contemporary struggles are simply pursuing the modern ideal of love (as Honneth does).