Abstract
Beginning with Margaret Somers and Christopher Roberts’ review of the sociology of human rights and Bryan Turner and Malcolm Waters’ debate therein, the author presents some of the questions which have been so far been the focus of this sociological sub-discipline. This review raises the question of ‘rights’ as a subject of study, and the normative consequences therein. From here, the author introduces recognition theory as a potential participant in these discussions around human rights. The author traces recognition theory from its Hegelian origins to the work of Axel Honneth, and the critiques of Nancy Fraser, Frantz Fanon, and Glen Sean Coulthard. Despite Fanon and Coulthard’s critical accounts, they reinforce the value of recognition within any sociology of human rights. Lastly, the author briefly engages with Alasdair MacIntyre as both a dialogical participant, and a means towards dialogue in the first place between recognition theory and human rights. Concluding, the author argues that the normative and descriptive nature of recognition theory offers a useful tool to aid in sociological theorizations of human nature and rights, while addressing some of the problems raised by early theorists of the sub-discipline and preventing siloing of the sub-discipline within a universalist or particularist vein.
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Notes
While a normative synthesis between recognition theory and MacIntyre’s work is possible, for the sake of space, this must be the subject of future work — MacIntyre will primarily be an epistemological tool here.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2009: 206-12). Rajagopal confirms Douzinas’ claim as to this oppositional trend within human rights discourse, with more of an eye to the practicalities of social movements, international law, and the Third World, noting that both the universalist tendencies within human rights discourse and the relativist focus of culture discourses “need each other, even as they attempt to transcend each other.”
Alasdair MacIntyre (2018b: 388). This divisive cosmopolitanism is also critiqued by MacIntyre when he warms of the “rootless cosmopolitanism” which risks making us all “citizens of nowhere.”
George Herbert Mead (2015: 300). Despite his large engagement with themes of recognition, the development of self-consciousness, etc – as well as work he has written specifically addressing Hegel – there is only one off-hand mention of Hegel in the entirety of Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society.
Herbert Bloomer, Erving Goffman, Alfred Schutz, Charles Cooley, and Jürgen Habermas all engage with the concept in various ways.
See also, Alasdair MacIntyre (2014), for parallel questions of human dependence, vulnerability, and the role these necessarily play in human flourishing. Questions of dependence and vulnerability offer an interesting connection with the precarity noted by Turner’s conception of a sociology of human rights.
The interconnection between rights and duties for Hegel in the realm of the state help to moderate the negative potential of civil society. Civil society being the space in which the acquisitiveness of capital is given free reign. Without being motivated by love on the side of the family for your immediate peers and close ones, and duty to your fellow citizens on the side of the state, civil society becomes – in frank terms – a capitalist hell-hole.
See also, Kruger (2018: 110-25). MacIntyre offers a useful means to formulate such a socially defined value-horizon in a manner I argue is more flexible than that of lifeworld in his concept of ‘prereflective background.’ This is especially useful given the pluralist concern for values which Honneth puts forward when considering the relatively static nature of many conceptions of lifeworld. See also endnote 12.
Steffan Herrmann (2021). Herrmann argues that Honneth does not sufficiently engage with the idea of misrecognition, leading to a theory of recognition which is ‘ambivalence-free.’ While a useful critique, Herrmann realizes that such a critical theory of recognition need not reinvent the wheel – it remains an internal critique of recognition theory, not an attempt to dismantle it. As such, Honneth remains a useful theoretical participant in developing and laying out recognition theory, even if imperfect.
A critique which might also be levied against some types of reflexivity theory.
This critical engagement with recognition as a wider tradition of theory allows for what Herrmann refers to as an antecedent form of recognition, represented in conceptions of lifeworld, and tacit or ‘background’ conceptions of knowledge, such as that elaborated on by Husserl, Schutz, Habermas, Bourdieu, Stehr, Ryle, Polanyi, MacIntyre, and others.
Habermas’ critique of the philosophy of consciousness is one example of this. Despite this critique, recognition theory – while influenced by a philosophy of consciousness originating in Hegel - is also an attempt to extricate consciousness from some mysterious place inside the mind. In a manner, recognition theory was already critical of the phenomenon which many have come to critique it for.
While much of MacIntyre’s influences are non- and anti-Hegelian, there remain many parallels between a Hegelian dialectic and MacIntyre’s account of the development of traditions of inquiry over time, and insofar as I am drawing on MacIntyre as an epistemological tool the differences that do exist (which are primarily normative) are, I argue, of a secondary and not entirely relevant nature for the current topic.
MacIntyre’s Marxist influences make him well aware of the role action must take following theory. The action inherent in the directedness of peoples lives is also a subject of his interest.
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Kruger, R. ‘Recognizing’ Human Rights: an Argument for the Applicability of Recognition Theory Within the Sociology of Human Rights. Hum Rights Rev 22, 501–519 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-021-00638-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-021-00638-w