Abstract
In their 2003 exchange Redistribution or Recognition? Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth present competing visions of the place of recognition in social justice. Whereas Fraser argues that justice entails a universal right to pursue recognition on a level playing field without appealing to any particular conception of the good, Honneth contends that questions of just recognition can only be settled by appealing to the needs and histories of the particular groups struggling for recognition. This essay argues that each position can be understood as a moment in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and that Hegel shows why each fails to conceive the full role of recognition in human life. Nevertheless, Fraser and Honneth both make important insights that Hegelian thought ought to preserve and defend a broadly Hegelian position against those who seek to downplay the importance of recognition in political life.
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Notes
For a discussion of Fraser's emphasis on recognition as a sociological rather than psychological or cultural category, see Zurn (2003, p. 522).
Fraser later clarifies that while redistribution and recognition are currently the most important avenues through which progressives are currently pursuing social justice, the principle of parity of participation does not rule out other forms of justice that might be pursued. In particular, she traces out a kind of political participation that might be regarded as separate from participation in the economies of wealth and recognition (Fraser, 2007). Her point in laying out this possibility is that participatory parity does not need to assume anything about the nature of the good in a given society, but is merely a formal principle for adjudicating calls for social justice.
Fraser gives a slightly different list of advantages in her 2001 Essay ‘Recognition without Ethics?’ that Zurn (2003) relies on for most of his criticisms. Although I agree with Zurn that it is unfair to fault Honneth's theory for essentializing group differences (as Honneth's theory assumes that the struggle for recognition is itself based on fluid identities), I do believe that at least the following two criticisms of Honneth (which are developed more fully in Redistribution or Recognition? than in the ‘Ethics’ essay) point to structural limitations in the latter's account of recognition.
Fraser goes on to discuss two more advantages of the status model of recognition. First, it avoids the self-contradictory conclusion that everyone has an equal right to social esteem because it only advocates parity of participation, not equal recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 32). Second, it allows her to analyze redistribution and recognition as two axes of the same drive toward parity of participation (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 33). Although she places special emphasis on this final advantage of the status model, for our purposes the first two suffice to differentiate her account from Honneth's.
Here I think it is unfair for Fraser to associate this position with Honneth's. Thus, for Honneth the struggle for recognition is always situated within a historical drive toward the integration of various group concerns, he, too, would criticize the irresponsible and ahistorical nature of such claims. Nevertheless, Fraser's emphasis on justice and Kantian Moralität in contradistinction to what she calls ethics carries a satisfying conclusiveness in denying such spurious claims for recognition.
Hyppolite argues that it is precisely the total enmeshment of political and ethical life in the ancient world that led to the emptying out of individuality that Hegel describes in ‘Legal Status’ (Hyppolite, 1974, p. 366). To translate this to Fraser's terminology, it is the fact that these communities had no scruples about being sectarian that led to the legal sphere's renunciation of concern for the good.
Thus Honneth argues that even when a community is struggling for legal rights or economic gains, it is, in effect, struggling for recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 171).
For this reason, Majid Yar, working with earlier texts from Fraser and Honneth, argues that Fraser is wrong to see recognition as merely one axis of social justice and that recognition is instead a ‘metatheoretical conspectus on social justice that contains both cultural and economic moments’ (Yar, 2001, p. 289).
See especially Fraser (2007), where she argues that the most trenchant questions of justice in contemporary politics are not to whom to distribute what, but who deserves political power in which institutions.
Taylor goes a bit farther than Honneth in his appeal to a common understanding of the good by arguing that recognition can only be granted through the establishment of ‘substantive agreement of value’ of various contributions to society (Taylor, 1991, p. 52). Honneth advocates a more confrontational approach to recognition, arguing that recognition is achieved not through stipulation of common values, but through the interaction of struggling social movements.
See Lovell (2007, p. 70) for a critique of this position.
Thus although I find much of value in Anderson's project of filling in the gaps in Honneth's theory of recognition by appealing to Hegel's Phenomenology and later works, I disagree with her contention that Honneth, like Taylor, offers no account of how society comes to recognize cultural differences (Anderson, 2009, p. 98).
See Williams (1997, p. 15) for criticism of this claim. Williams does a particularly good job of explaining why for Hegel recognition is not necessarily bound up with struggle.
Although Honneth contrasts his approach with Hegel's effort in the Philosophy of Right to delineate three different types of self-relation (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 144), he makes no mention of this passage in the Phenomenology. This is unfortunate because Hegel's aim in the Phenomenology is not, as it is in the Philosophy of Right, to lay out the objective conditions of a free human life, but to give a developmental account of human subjectivity – a project that resonates more closely with Honneth's.
Honneth expands on this claim in The Struggle for Recognition, where he argues that with the transformation of civil rights to political and social rights the legal understanding of personhood was greatly expanded. For instance, the advent of universal public education led children to be recognized not just for their rights to life, but for their rights to grow into contributing adults as well (Honneth, 1995, p. 117).
As Quentin Lauer explains, at this stage of culture ‘“finding self” has become a significant criterion of good and bad – far more significant than conformity to type’ (Q. Lauer, 1976, p. 195).
For more on the Sache Selbst, see Shapiro (1998) and C. Lauer (2006–2007).
This is also one of Susan Buck-Morss's (2009) central claims in ‘Hegel and Haiti’. Tobias, Fanon and Buck-Morss are right to emphasize the importance Hegel placed on a community learning to be self-determining and not merely receiving its constitution from external circumstances, but this emphasis on agency should not obscure the fact that spirit gains much of its self-knowledge through reconciliation and recognition of its dependence on others.
See, for instance, Hegel (1980, p. 365, §679), where Hegel argues that unlike the moments of religion, previous moments of spirit appear simultaneously, and Hegel (1980, p. 433, §808), where he argues that the various moments of spirit should be seen not as teleologically directed, but as discrete installations in a ‘gallery of images’.
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Lauer, C. Multivalent recognition: The place of Hegel in the Fraser–Honneth debate. Contemp Polit Theory 11, 23–40 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.44