This article deals with the theory of social recognition from the perspective of the sociologist Axel Honneth, who belongs to the third generation of the Frankfurt School. The work seeks to relate this theory, which has a European matrix, with theories about poverty and social inequalities originated in Brazil, in order to test its theoretical validity, highlighting the interpretations of Jose de Souza Martins and Jesse Souza. It is possible to see suggestive points of contact considering the approaches about anomalous modernity, a term coined by Martins, and about peripheral modernity, an expression used by Jesse Souza, especially when thinking about poverty and inequality as phenomena beyond the materiality of life, that is, in its dimension of symbolic reproduction.