Recognition

Introduction

Everyone cares about recognition. This claim may strike some as a little odd: does everyone really crave the praise and admiration of others? Surely only the shallow and insecure care deeply about such things? Such people, we might think, exhibit the worst features of our ‘celebrity culture’ in which, it is said, the desire for fame has crowded out a concern with real achievement. We might well prefer to see ourselves as standing aloof from all this shallowness and superficiality. We do not crave recognition, rather we are independent and self-contained. Or is it simply that we want to be recognized as independent and self-contained?1 It is impossible to understand our world and our place in it without a clearer understanding of the nature of recognition and the reasons for our sensitivity to it.

The desire for recognition takes many forms and the relations between them are complex. On the one hand, it is a long-standing feature of our ideas about recognition that we should not be seen to care too deeply for some forms of recognition – praise and esteem, for example. On the other hand, however, we can understand why some are willing to sacrifice their lives for other forms of recognition, such as that of basic human dignity. In this case, to surrender our claim to basic respect would be tantamount to surrendering our moral standing, the value of which may outweigh the value of continued existence. Sometimes these different modes of recognition may threaten to come into conflict with one another. Our desire to distinguish ourselves as special and unique may threaten to undermine our commitment to respecting others as equals. We may have to struggle to be recognized in the ways we think justified, but it can be difficult to determine what counts as appropriate recognition, especially when our own sense of self-respect and self-esteem is at odds with the degree of respect and esteem which others have for us.

There are two distinct currents in debates about social recognition, one concerned with the ‘politics of recognition’, and one offering a more philosophical account of the role that social recognition plays in helping us to become agents. The first of these strands connects the desire for social recognition to the politics of multiculturalism, taking its lead from Charles Taylor's (1994) account of the way that marginalized groups can be harmed by the misrecognition of the wider society. Cultural minorities, so the argument goes, are not only disadvantaged with respect to access to resources like wealth, income, and power, they also suffer from a lack of recognition of the value of their particular identities and traditions. The appropriate response to this symbolic violence is some form of ‘public’ recognition of particular identities, which goes beyond the recognition of the sort of equal rights insisted upon in traditional forms of liberal egalitarian politics (Galeotti 2002).

The second strand of the recognition literature has its origins in the Critical Theory tradition, and it is relatively unconcerned with the politics of multiculturalism. Indeed, the leading thinker in this tradition, Axel Honneth, is quite critical of Taylor's emphasis on cultural recognition (2003a: 163). Like Taylor, Honneth regards the lack of recognition as a serious ethical problem, but his approach follows two tracks. On the one hand, he ties recognition to a philosophical account of the conditions under which individuals develop their capacities for self-determination and self-realization, while on the other hand, he offers a social theory of modernity which interprets the modern world as the product of a series of struggles for recognition (Honneth 1995). Honneth argues that our relationship to ourselves is determined by our wider social relationships: our capacity to develop positive relations towards ourselves such as self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem is determined by the degree of love, respect, and esteem we receive from others (Honneth 1992; 1995). Honneth suggests that Habermas' theory of communicative action and discourse ethics is too abstract and formal: a critical social theory aimed at diagnosing society's ills should start instead with the concrete experiences of humiliation and disrespect which can undermine individuals' self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, and consequently, their capacity for freedom (2007b: 71–2). The desire to secure the appropriate recognition, whether in the form of equal rights, or in the form of social esteem for one's contribution to society, lies at the heart of many social conflicts in Honneth's view, in contrast to the old Marxist understanding of social conflict in terms of class interests (1995: 148).

Taylor (1994: 51) is sharply critical of the pre-eminence of recognition as respect for universal human dignity in rights-based theories, seeing it as a hindrance to the recognition of the value of cultural diversity, although he does not argue that we must abandon our concern with this form of recognition (1994: 52). Honneth, by contrast, offers a more harmonious picture of the relationship between universal ‘respect’ and particular ‘esteem’, seeing each of these modes, together with ‘love’, as necessary to the formation of a successful identity. Both Taylor and Honneth are inspired, however, by a shared commitment to Hegel's vision of human beings as essentially social creatures, whose capacity for freedom is inextricably linked to the norms and institutions of their particular communities. The multicultural and Critical Theory approaches to recognition are opposed to the sort of ‘atomist’ understanding of the relationship between individuals and society associated with certain forms of liberalism, or libertarianism. Taylor and Honneth share the view that a traditional liberal politics of equal rights is insufficient to maintain the sort of solidarity which a liberal society requires. To remedy this we must turn to richer forms of recognition. Taylor thinks this requires greater openness to the value of cultural diversity, while Honneth (1995: 171–7) stresses the need to supplement the rights embodied in legal norms with a form of social solidarity that includes recognition of the value of everyone's particular contribution to society. In different ways, then, each attributes to social recognition a key role in making possible the ideal of an ethical community in which everyone is, somehow, recognized appropriately (Taylor 1979; Honneth 1995: 2010).

I find the underlying vision here of human beings as social beings working out their understanding of themselves through dialogue with others compelling. Both Taylor and Honneth subscribe to an essentially social understanding of the conditions of human freedom, and this aspect of the Hegelian heritage remains attractive, even if other, central, planks of his philosophical system must be abandoned (Honneth 2010). Hegel is, however, famous for his critique of Kantian morality's overly abstract account of the moral agent, detached from any social context and guided by a hopelessly formal commitment to universal moral principles. I should lay my cards on the table now: I am not persuaded by this critique of the sort of Kantian moral outlook that informs many liberal egalitarian theories of social justice and democratic politics (Rawls 1999, 1993; Scanlon 1982; Barry 1995). An underlying assumption of this book is that it is possible, however, to combine this sort of moral outlook with the more Hegelian vision of ourselves as social actors central to the recognition literature.

There is not space to argue this in this short book, but in Chapter 2 I touch on the affinities between contractualism and the idea of respect recognition in particular. One consequence of this view is that I believe that the existing literature on recognition does not offer us an adequate account of what justice requires of us with respect to recognition claims. The relationship between recognition and social justice is explored in Chapter 4. A second consequence of this, I think, is that neither strand of the recognition literature gives sufficient weight to individual agency in the struggle for recognition; that is, our role in managing our desires for recognition, and in deliberating about the authority of the recognition claims made upon us. In the concluding chapter, then, I outline an ‘interactive’ account of recognition that puts the agent at the centre of the struggle for recognition, and I suggest, in the discussions of respect and esteem in Chapters 2 and 3, that we are always, to some extent, independent of particular manifestations of social recognition and misrecognition.

This ‘interactive’ account of recognition stresses the link between social norms, individual agency, and our sensitivity to recognition of others.2 This sensitivity is part of the mechanism which helps us to orient ourselves in the social world. Our lives, on this view, are guided by largely unwritten social norms which prescribe the sorts of behaviour appropriate in a given situation. We are guided not determined, however, for the norms themselves are always open to interpretation, and, in our modern world, often make conflicting claims upon us, pulling us in different directions. The social recognition we enjoy will be shaped by the way that we respond to the normative demands made upon us.

In practice we may find that our...