Andy Blunden November 2004

Recognition
Recognition is one of the most important concepts of ethics, one which is
specifically identified with the series of post-World War Two struggles from
the National Liberation Movements, to the US Civil Rights Movement, the
Womens Liberation Movement and the multiplicity of identity struggles which
followed. Robert Williamss 1992 Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the other,
and Charles Taylor, in his 1992 essay Multiculturalism and the Politics of
Recognition brought the term into the centre of the debate about identity
politics and multiculturalism. Axel Honneth is a writer who is seeking to
expand the concept of recognition to encompass the ethical aspect of all social
conflict: resistance to an established social order is always driven by the moral
experience of in some respect not receiving what is taken to be justified
recognition. Ethical concepts do not simply sit side by side, without
interconnection, and theorists need concepts which articulate across all
specific ethical conceptions, but I question whether Recognition is suitable for
such a role.
On what basis can such a judgment be made? Which concepts are important
and which are secondary? A scientific approach to this question must be
guided by the forms of objectification of ethics which are found, or are in the
course of development in modern society, which actually perform the task of
making ethical judgments in society and moderating social conflicts.
While the classification and description of such institutions and social
movements is subject to ideological preference, and is a step removed from
moral philosophy, the actual performance of institutions does provide
objective criteria for resolving theoretical differences and testing hypotheses.
Not all ethical activity is objectified in public institutions, and self-reporting by
social actors of their motivations has a place, but institutions, social
movements and customs must surely provide the foundation for the concepts
to be brought to bear in political-ethical analysis. Reflection on the historical
development of the institutions we find in the present world, can give us
guidance on the typical mode of their genesis from pre-political activity and
consciousness.
If a writer uses an ethical concept for which they can point to no institution
or practice, no social movement which is regulated by that concept, other than

academic literature, then the burden lies with that writer to bring such a social
movement into being and demonstrate its validity by agitation.
And the same applies to theoretical generalisation. Axel Honneth is one
among very many writers who see the sense of Justice at the root of all social
conflicts. But the substantiation of such a view is not just an exercise in
transcendental argument: the theoretical subsumption of social conflicts under
a given generalisation such as Justice requires empirical substantiation by
institutions or social movements which perform such a generalisation.
Nevertheless, let us confine ourselves to the domain of Justice for the
moment and ask ourselves what institutions and social movements exist which
provide an empirical and material basis for concepts of Justice at a level of
generality like that of Recognition.
Recognition: as mentioned above, this concept entered the language, for
all intents and purposes, with the National Liberation Movements, which
provided an icon (in Peircean terms) of the Subject struggling for Recognition.
Kojve used the notion of Recognition drawn from Hegels Phenomenology to
give it a symbolic form (again using Peirces term), and the post-world war
two decades saw a multiplicity of subjects come forward and indexes, and
specifically identified their situation with that of the slave struggling for
emancipation according to the icon of the National Liberation Movements and
theorised by Kojve. It was above all, though not exclusively, the Womens
Movement which gave developed symbolic form to the concept of Recognition.
Subsequently, the Recognition conception of Justice has been objectified in
various kinds of non-discrimination laws and multicultural practices and
policies by institutions, over and above the countless social movements which
identify themselves under the notion of Recognition or its derivatives.
As I see it, it is these kinds of facts which substantiate Recognition as a real
concept of Justice. Honneth has cited research to the effect that workers
struggling for wage increases see the injustice of their situation, and always
have, in terms of misrecognition, of the failure of society to give recognition to
their personality and life-style through appropriate payment for their labour. I
find this assertion convincing. On reflection, it coincides with experience and is
a legitimate reading of the historical record. The late-medieval companies and
guilds which represented the interests of the various trades would be today
immediately recognisable as of the same genealogy as self-help groups, ethnic
community groups and so on, which are identified as embryonic recognition
claims.

As early as 1805, Hegel had written of the maser-slave relation which

emerged as the result of growing inequality of wealth, so this relation had even
been identified in the symbolic register. Nevertheless, it was not until very
recently that the struggle against economic inequality was seen as subsumable
under the notion of Recognition. Why is this? Because in the way the struggle
for recognition historically emerged in the post-World War Two period it arose
specifically in contradiction to the struggle of the organised industrial working
class for wage justice, in protest against the Post-War compromise between
imperialism and capitalism on one side, and the USSR and the workers
movement on the other. That is to say, it was in that historical period, by
definition not the struggle for wage justice and workers rights.
Once the various subjects identifying themselves in a struggle for recognition
had created such a powerful and impressive archetype and achieved such
substantial objectification in various forms of multiculturalism, antidiscrimination legislation and ingrained social practices and norms, it is no
wonder that other subjects can so readily be seen and see themselves as
embodiments of the same archetypal subject.
Redistribution: at first sight, redistribution might seem to be a thin and
unconvincing concept to capture the 150-year struggle of the working class for
justice, given that from its outset in the 1830s, the workers movement has
identified itself with radical theories of socialist utopia, incorporating farreaching visions of a cooperative human life and social progress, especially in
the political domain. A fair days wage for a fair days work is a slogan with a
long history, but is far from being archetypal or hegemonic. It is impossible to
imagine the workers movement separately from its identification with socialist
political transformation.
Nevertheless, ideals are one thing, forms of objectification and the actual
practice and achievements of social movements are something else. The most
compelling evidence for the fact that Redistribution is a real concept of social
justice are the redistributive taxation systems found in every country in the
world, the various legislated minimum wages and industrial award systems,
and the welfare systems found in almost every country, institutions dating back
into the nineteenth century, and all resulting directly from the struggles of the
organised working class. The objectification of a concept is not the same thing
as the subjective form of the concept; the Subject was a struggle for socialism,
the Object was a capitalist social system, and the resulting Idea was
Redistributive Justice (here using Hegelian terminology).
Democracy: Another outcome of the struggle for Justice which dates from

the beginning of the bourgeois epoch is the struggle for political justice, whose
most substantial objectification is Universal Suffrage. The idea that every
individual should have an equal voice in the affairs of the community is
thoroughly objectified in modern society. No institution could give a clearer
embodiment of the notion of individual rights than this one, as the vote is
given not to collectives but only to individuals, even though there is no
inherent barrier to collegiate voting. Whatever may be the faults of the various
systems of universal suffrage, and there are many, the ubiquity of the idea of
universal suffrage is proof that this individualist idea of political justice is very
real.
The notion of political justice is objectified in two basic principles: that of
majority rule (which was the dominant principle up until the post-World War
Two period) and the principle of inclusion, that is, that every voice must be
heard, even if it is a minority voice, embodied in the practice of consensus
decision-making, and given particular force by the recognition struggles, which
specifically represented those excluded from the dominant compromise. The
principle of inclusion is not, however, exhausted by the principle of
recognition. It seems to me that the two principles of political justice represent
interactions of a single principle of political justice with two different
principles of justice originating elsewhere. (The same can be said of the distinct
principles of redistribution objectified in regressive taxation, on the one hand,
and the welfare system on the other hand. Each of these institutions is the
objectification, not of a separate principle of justice, but of a multiplicity of
principles, subsumed within a single Notion of distributive justice. That is in
the nature of objectification.)
Autonomy and Community: Reflection on the multiplicity of forms of
injustice objectified in legal systems leads to the thought that the remaining
conceptions of justice are better understood in terms of right and wrong, that
is, conceptions of the rights of the person and derivatively, what constitutes
wrongs against these rights. It seems to me that these wrongs point to two
kinds of right: the right of individuals or Autonomy, and the rights of the
Community. Individuals can be deemed to have committed a crime if they
break a law reflecting the will of the community and/or if they violate the
autonomy and personality of another person.
In this sense then, the notion of Justice can be seen to subsume notions of
Autonomy and Community, as violations of the rights of either constitute an
injustice and are punished as such through a civil court and police system.
What do we make then of claims for the social conditions for self-realisation,

as objectified for example in the provision of public education systems in most

developed capitalist countries, and pursuit of ones concept of the Good as
objectified in the proclamation of ceremonials holidays, legislation of dress
codes and moral norms, etc.? The observations that Honneth reports of how
the conception of right has broadened over the centuries to incorporate wider
and wider domains of social life, from economic justice to political justice to
social justice seem pertinent and convincing here. However, I doubt that they
point to new principles of justice over and above those that have already been
mentioned.
Honneth has remarked, and it seems hardly possible to contradict him on
this, that under the conditions of modern societies, every conception of justice
must have an egalitarian character from the start. In that sense then, any
conception of justice can be framed in terms of an answer to the question of
Equality of what? What is interesting here is that the archetypal
redistributive answer to the question equality of wealth or equality of
income is unconvincing. Neither wealth-egalitarianism nor incomeegalitarianism is either an effective demand in the sense that it will fail to
deliver what it promises, nor a demand which is intuitively compelling.
Redistributive justice is a concept which has been the subject of historical
and political critique from the standpoint of rival conceptions of justice. For
example, wages legislation always incorporates notions of desert into wage
differentials, as well as market ideas reflecting notions of employer autonomy.
The work of Amartya Sen is pertinent in this connection. Sen began in the
1950s as an advocate and theorist of distributive justice, and over a 50 year
period, he subjected the redistributive responses to the question equality of
what? to critique and arrived at the notion of equality of critical voice as the
essential idea of justice, the essence of the demand for distributive justice, in
fact.
Pierre Bourdieu took a different tack on the same problem, seeing that
wealth was an inadequate measure of someones position in the social order
and their capacity to subordinate others or resist subordination by others. He
conceived of wealth as a combination of economic wealth, cultural capital
and social capital with the clear implication that justice demanded an order
in which the combination of these assets was equalised, thus removing the
capacity of any person to subordinate another.
Nancy Fraser achieves the same coordination by a different route.
Recognising two distinct folk paradigms of justice, broadly associated with the

struggle against economic injustice on one side and cultural misrecognition on

the other, Nancy Fraser looks to the notion of parity of participation and a
measure of equality which appears to have intuitive traction across different
paradigms of justice. This implies that participation is the essential relation
which underlies ideas of economic and cultural equality, from which the latter
can be seen as derivative.
The historic shift from economic equality to political equality to social
equality also manifests a process of critique articulated on an historical scale.
There is a strong sense in which Recognition arose as a critique of the PostWW2 settlement performed by those who had been excluded. By critique I
mean theoretical and practical criticism which not only proves that the given
proposition is irrational, but brings forward an alternative principle which
maintains what was rational in the principle which is thereby not defeated
and discarded, but rather surpassed. This makes it possible to see how in
retrospect, struggles for redistribution can come to be seen as essentially
struggles for recognition, how struggles for economic equality give way to
struggles for political equality and thus to social equality, for it is only by such
a shift that the essential content of the original demand can be sustained.
In arguing in this way for a conception of justice as rooted in the real
struggles of social movements and objectified in institutions, rather than being
confined to logical relations between conceptions existing entirely in the realm
of ideas, I must rely on a methodology which is able to articulate between, on
the one hand, the symbolic order literally so constituted, in the form of ideas,
rules, laws, names, customs, languages, and so forth, normally the object of
philosophical or logical consideration, and on the other hand, social
movements, institutions, social practices, psychology and so on, which are
normally the objects of social and psychological science.
However, this is not the only gap to be bridged. None of the theoretical
concepts with which we might be concerned make any sense at all except
insofar as they can be performed by individual subjects, and this goes equally
as much for talk of political and social institutions as it does for theoretical
entities.
Attempts to accomplish this bridging by subsuming individuals under
specialised sciences like psychology, while other sciences like sociology or
political science are reserved for the study of social life can only demonstrate,
not solve, the problem. Concepts which hover over human life as tools of the
theorist, without roots in the activity of individuals themselves whether
engaged in ethical intuitions or in social practices, then they are of precious

little use.
Every concept brought to bear in articulating between the principles which
motivate social movements and practices and the movements and practices
themselves must be itself conceived as a unity of concept, individual and social
relation, in itself. I rely on my reading of Hegel to accomplish this
coordination, and in particular the admittedly little-understood doctrine of the
Subjective Notion. However, the same task has been approached by other
writers, amongst whom I should mention, in semiology, Charles Sanders
Peirce with his icon, symbol and index, and in psychology, the Vygotsky
School, though there are others. As each of these three theoretical traditions
acknowledge, icon, symbol and index (individual, universal and particular)
each have a separate existence and trajectory, but the crucial moment in the
development of any notion (read social movement or person) is the
coincidence icon, symbol and index.
In my opinion, any social theorist who clings to some kind of nominalism in
epistemology and individualism in social theory must necessarily flounder in a
study of fundamental problems of political ethics.
For Honneth, for example, subject is a synonym for individual and
movements and institutions are conceived of as collectives, by which he
seems to understand either abstract general categories, that is to say, sets of
individuals sharing an attribute in common, or reified concepts which have an
unmediated duplicate existence, on the one hand in peoples minds and on the
other hand in a naturalised social life-world.
Honneth is right in seeking a social-psychology to underpin assertions about
moral philosophy. It is difficult to conceive of an applied theory of moral
philosophy which did not in some way rely on or take for granted some theory
of how people form ethical intuitions. Since for Honneth, collectives are either
individuals grouped together in a set, or objects which can be sensuously
perceived by individuals, he is all the more obliged to rely on some kind of
psychological theory to substantiate his ethics. However, the cognitive social
psychology cannot be one which transcends his own conceptual boundaries,
and he has gone only as far as American Pragmatism, a school of psychology
which was ground-breaking in its day, but individualistic and blind to culturalhistorical mediation.
If the decline of orthodox marxism is to teach us anything, it would surely
be that a social and political theory which left no place for the individual is no
longer tenable. And this is by no means a statement in support of liberal

individualism; popular support for a head of state elected by popular suffrage

rather than by the elite, and the focus of election campaigns on the personality
of the leader, hark back to Hegels defence of the hereditary head of state.
Political communication always needs a human face for the very good reason
that it is only to the extent that an idea can be given the form of a human
individual that it is really meaningful. This is one of the meanings of ethical
politics.
One of the conclusions of For Ethical Politics was that Recognition is a
paradigm characteristic of a certain period of the history of western bourgeois
society, and that this period has come to an end with the rise of alliance
politics, on the exhausted body of a multiplicity of recognition struggles. To say
this, no more implies that Recognition is obsolete, than to proclaim
Recognition as the dominant principle implies that Redistribution is obsolete.
It does however point to a crisis of some kind in recognition politics and the
need to transcend Recognition with a different paradigm of justice.
In my view, critical voice, parity of participation and democratic justice are
expressions, coming from different theoretical directions, of a shift to a
different paradigm which is sublating (i.e., surpassing and negating while
including) both recognition and redistribution paradigms of justice.

Hegels idea of Recognition

The master-slave dialectic upon which Kojve built the modern theory of
Recognition belongs to Hegels subjective logic, the stage in which the
theoretical attitude and practical attitude are differentiated from each other.
This separation, which is the precondition for modern society, arises from the
unmediated confrontation between two subjects, in which one subject
subjugates the other. It is an exceptional passage precisely because it deals
with unmediated opposition, whereas mediation is a ubiquitous theme in
Hegels work. In fact, however, this confrontation is mediated, because the
subjects confronting one another are duplicated as subjective and objective
subjects, and the subjectivity or objectivity of one subject mediates between the
objectivity and subjectivity of the other.
For example, the colonialist arrives on the shores of a foreign land; the
culture, language and religion of the colony (their subjectivity) are destroyed,
but the labour of the colonised (their objectivity) is subordinated by the
coloniser and transformed into an objectification of the colonialists needs and
appropriated. Conversely, the colonialists subjectivity directs the labour of the

colonised, rather than their own needs and consciousness. The theory/practice
split thus introduces mediation in the relation between the two mutually
estranged subjects.
There is a lot more to this story which has been retold in countless versions.
My only point is that what appears initially as the unmediated contact between
two subjects, turns out to be a thoroughly mediated relation. In a culture of
rampant individualism however, this essentially mediated relation is
transformed into simple intersubectivity, a two-sided relation in which
mediation is made invisible. This gutting of Hegels concept of Recognition is
achieved by eradicating Hegels idea of the isolated subjects as duplicated
subjects, simultaneously objective (land, animals, tools, speaking, icons,
writings, etc) and subjective (thinking, feelings, beliefs, perceptions, will, etc);
for the isolated subject, living in the traditional way, there is no differentiation
between the objective and subjective forms. Consequently, for the isolated
subject, there can be no real differentiation between the universal (the entire
culture which is sustained by the life activity of a people), the particular (the
activities, relations and collectivities by means of which individuals sustain the
culture) and the finite individual (who acts out the universal in particular
activities). Only by means of this three-sided relation in which each pair is
mediated by the third, can modern consciousness be enacted, with the
theoretical and practical attitudes separated.
Once torn out of its context within the Hegelian system, the concept of
Recognition is therefore transformed into a simple relation of self and other,
dominant and dominated; simultaneously, the subjective and objective aspects
of subjectivity are separated from each other and placed into separate realms
in which the active role of a subject in constructing and acting-out the objectworld is obliterated, and the problem of perception becomes a mind-matter
problem. The concrete universal notions by means of which Hegel understood
social relations are therefore necessarily replaced by abstract general
collections of individuals, and Hegels essential insight has been obliterated.
That the concept of Recognition by means of which the post-World War Two
social movements theorised themselves is so remote from the Hegelian original
doesnt really matter, except to the extent that it acts as a barrier to
understanding Hegels insights, which appear as a kind of religious dogma,
once the underlying logic has been taken away. The concept of Recognition
functioned nonetheless as an effective symbol of the emancipatory struggles of
that period.
It is nevertheless worth restoring the Hegelian concept of the subject

because in Hegels hands this concept incorporated concepts of both

distributive justice and legal/cultural recognition; the subsequent discovery
that reward for labour was a form of recognition was already known to Hegel.
Hegels concept of subjectivity therefore supplies a theoretical framework in
which these two concepts of justice can be articulated. Political justice is also
incorporated within the Hegelian concept of subjectivity as outlined in the
Objective Logic (a.k.a. Philosophy of Right). On this basis, I think Hegels
concept of Subject has value as a theoretical framework for analysis of the
different dimensions of justice. Hegel died in 1831, before any independent
movement of workers or oppressed nationalities manifested itself, and Hegels
own use of these concepts could go no further than the conceptions of justice
known to early-19th century Europe. So what we can find in Hegel is only the
most abstract theoretical tools.

The Current Juncture

It could strike one as odd to be talking about justice today, because political
life in the western capitalist countries is so far removed from anything
resembling a rational pursuit of justice. Governments freely visit injustices
upon the poorest in their own countries and whole populations in other parts
of the world, with the consent of a majority of the population.
Universal suffrage and globalisation have made people participants in and
victims of injustices over domains which are beyond their ability to understand
or control. Nevertheless, few are indifferent to the demands of justice,
provided both the claimant and the citizen whose solidarity is demanded have
an effective voice in a relevant forum.
The problem is to formulate claims which are capable of constituting
communities of solidarity in which very diverse conceptions of the good, and
very diverse forms of fear and suffering, provide a basis for negotiating
common rules and boundaries. This is the task of justice today: the
constitution of subjects, within which individuals can develop autonomy in
their relations with others, and between which mutual respect and esteem can
be established.

See Analysis of Nancy Frasers Status model of Recognition and Subjectivity,

Recognition and Objectification, in which I further develop the notion of
Recognition in terms of subjectivity.

Works