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The authors explore what the contemporary discussion on the legal good and the harm principle can offer Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. Through Hegel and Durkheim, the reader is reminded how legal sanction – the experienced concept of positive law– powerfully actualizes the key notions of “justice” and “injustice” which are echoed in the earlier works of Honneth dealing with the negative experience of legal contempt. Somewhat regretfully, noting that Honneth’s latter works changed focus, the authors underline how his method of “normative reconstruction” could benefit from the integral character of the “legal good” as a concept possessing both an existential and an axiological dimension.