This book offers a comprehensive rethinking of poverty through the lens of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. While poverty research traditionally distinguishes between material deprivation, social exclusion, and the structural causes of inequality, this book argues that these dimensions can be systematically integrated by understanding poverty as a specific form of misrecognition that is embedded in the institutional fabric of modern welfare states. Drawing on Honneth’s three forms of recognition – love, respect, and social esteem – the book then develops a social-theoretical framework that connects poverty’s material core to its social and symbolic consequences.

Poverty and Axel Honneth's Theory of Recognition is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of social philosophy especially those concerned with poverty. It is also ideal for scholars of moral philosophy and applied ethics.

Gottfried Schweiger is Senior Scientist at the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research of the University of Salzburg.