The Working Sovereign and the Democratic Significance of Labour: Editor’s Introduction

This introduction frames the symposium on Axel Honneth’s The Working Sovereign by situating the book within current debates on labour, democracy, and critical social theory. Honneth argues that labour relations are a constitutive condition of democratic life, since the capacity to participate in collective will formation depends on social conditions largely shaped within the sphere of work. The introduction reconstructs this central claim and presents the three contributions to the symposium by Jean-Philippe Deranty, Timo Jütten, and Nicholas H. Smith. While engaging Honneth’s proposal from different perspectives, the contributors converge on a common concern: whether a critique of labour grounded primarily in democratic citizenship can adequately capture the normative complexity of work. The symposium thus examines the relation between work and democracy, while also asking how far Honneth’s framework can account for questions of well-being, autonomy, recognition, domination, and social freedom.