CONTRIBUTI / 4 / Francesco Leone
Collective Memory in Europe as Promise of Freedom: Axel Honneth’s lesson
The aim of this paper is to highlight the role that collective memory plays in Honneth’s theory of justice exposed in Freedom’s Right. Honneth develops his theory on the basis on a «normative reconstruction» of the recognition’s forms institutionalized within the Western societies starting from the modern era. The author of the return to Hegel in Critical Theory recovers a Kantian teleological philosophy of history to ground his normative theory. Kantian «signs of history» becomes the subject of a collective memory. Honneth argues that only the recourse to a collective memory can motivate subjects and groups to expand the spaces of social freedom and drive history towards better. The memory of significant events and moral conquests can arouse enthusiasm to defend the Europeans spaces of social freedom and for their relaunch. A stronger European integration can only take place with the struggles of groups and individuals motivated by action through the memory of moral and normative achievements. Europe needs a broader concept of constitutional patriotism: a kind of patriotism of collective memory.
