This paper provides a conceptual account of Pierre Bourdieu's operational concept of habitus through the lens of social recognition. More precisely, a 'habitus of recognition', or 'recognitive habitus', is defined as a set of perceptive patterns and expectations whose main function is to actualize social behaviour that allows reciprocal recognition among social agents. In this respect, this paper explains why, thanks to the recognition paradigm, we can better grasp how habitus works as a pre-reflective common sense capable of producing coordinated collective actions and social reproduction.

The main aim of this paper is to illustrate the distinctive features of the Finnish school of critical theory, focusing especially on its reception of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition and his ideas regarding the concept of social pathology. In this respect, the article will provide a concise description of the philosophical work of some of its members: Onni Hirvonen, Heikki Ikäheimo, Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä. The paper consists of seven parts. First, the paper will sketch a very general account of Honneth's theory of recognition and social life, and, secondly, it will describe the ways the Finnish scholars have reinterpreted Honneth's paradigm of recognition. The third part will discuss two conceptions of social pathology that Honneth has explicitly endorsed in his intellectual career: Christopher Zurn's idea of pathology as a second-order disorder, and the organicist conception of social pathology, which Honneth himself has put forward in his essay The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept. Part four and five will then look at how the Finnish theoreticians have discussed and criticized these two conceptions of social pathology that are central in Honneth's work. In part six, the paper will briefly introduce some of the more fundamental criticisms that scholars have aimed at Honneth and, more or less directly, at the Finnish scholars. Finally, the article will explain why the new perspectives of Laitinen, Ikäheimo, Hirvonen, and Särkelä are, in any case, consistent with Honneth's philosophical perspective. 1 Axel Honneth's perspective on reciprocal recognition and social life: a brief sketchAxel Honneth states that to recognize somebody means, essentially, to be able to assume the perspective of our partners of interaction and consider ourselves in the role of our social addressee:«we should think of the act of recognition on the model of reciprocal action, in which two subjects ascribe to each other a certain normative status allowing them to treat each other in accordance with norms of respect and consideration». (Honneth 2011, p. 402)

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