Recognition

In plain terms

Hegel's claim is that you cannot be a self on your own. Self-consciousness requires being acknowledged as a self by another self-consciousness - and if you are not, something is missing that no amount of internal effort supplies.

That turns a political demand into a claim about persons. When a group demands recognition, they are not asking for good manners. On this account they are asking for a condition of being a full participant that others are withholding, and the withholding is a harm rather than a discourtesy.

And misrecognition is worse than absence. Being seen as something you are not - as less capable, as a type, as a problem - is a picture you then have to live inside, and it becomes part of how you see yourself whether or not you accept it.

As a philosopher would put it

Hegel's dialectic of recognition has two self-consciousnesses each requiring acknowledgement from the other; the master-slave outcome is unstable precisely because recognition from someone you have reduced to an object is worthless.

Honneth develops three spheres: love, giving basic self-confidence; law, giving self-respect through rights; and solidarity, giving self-esteem through the valuing of one's contribution. Denial in each produces a corresponding damage, and social conflicts are read as struggles for recognition rather than only for resources.

Taylor's version connects it to identity and multiculturalism: identity is dialogically formed, so misrecognition can inflict real damage, and the politics of difference asks for acknowledgement of particularity rather than only of equal status.

Fraser's objection is that recognition has displaced redistribution, and that cultural acknowledgement without economic change leaves the material structure untouched. Her proposal of a two-dimensional theory - and Honneth's reply that recognition already encompasses distribution - is the central exchange in the field.

What is actually disputed

Whether recognition can substitute for redistribution.

Fraser's charge is that the turn to recognition coincided with rising inequality, and that acknowledging identities while leaving the economic structure intact is a politics that costs nothing. Honneth replies that material claims are themselves recognition claims - a demand for fair pay is a demand that one's contribution be valued - and that separating the two misdescribes what people are actually fighting for.

A second objection concerns what recognition affirms. If identity is dialogically formed, then demanding recognition of an identity can freeze it, and the group's own dissenters are placed under pressure to conform to the version being recognised.

Markell's argument goes further: the desire for recognition may rest on a mistaken picture of the self as something fixed that others could correctly perceive, in which case the politics rests on a metaphysics it has not defended.