The texts gathered here are a great example of how Hegel can be read from a sociological perspective.
With Hegel, Honneth offers normative criteria that allow for a scientific diagnosis of situations of social suffering arising from social pathologies or, more specifically, pathologies of freedom. He finds these criteria in the existence of social institutions. These are critical norms to the extent that Honneth is able to show the potential for the development of institutions to satisfy demands for recognition that have not yet been met. In this sense, Honneth understands The Philosophy of Right as the theory of the social conditions that make possible the realization of freedom, whether understood in Hegelian terms as free will or in Honnethian terms as autonomy.
For the philosophical task, the following pages represent a commendable effort to "deidealize" Hegel, and therefore to actualize the claim of the Young Hegelians and of Marx, who, at the various moments in which he undertook the writing of what he considered his work, faced this task.