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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts
- Sprache: Englisch
A tension between the desire to be respected as an equal and the desire to distinguish oneself as a unique person lies at the heart of the modern social order. Everyone cares about recognition: no one wants to be treated with disrespect, insulted, humiliated, or simply ignored. This basic motivation drives the ‘politics of recognition’ which we see in those struggles for inclusion and equality in relation to gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality and which seek to affirm the public value of these particular identities.
In this compelling new book Cillian McBride argues that the notion of recognition is not merely confined to these struggles, but has a long history, from ancient ethical ideals centred on the achievement of honour and glory, to Enlightenment ideals of human dignity and equality. He explores the politics of cultural rights and recognition, the conflict between dignity and esteem, the role of shame and stigma in systems of social control and punishment, the prospects for a just society in which everyone receives the recognition they deserve, and the way in which we come to be independent, self-determining persons through negotiating the networks of social recognition we inhabit.
Recognition will be essential reading for students in philosophy and political theory, and any general readers interested in trying to understand and evaluate the role of recognition in the modern world.
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Seitenzahl: 334
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Key Concepts series
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: The Politics of Recognition
Two models of the self: Choice and dialogue
Feudalism, dignity, and authenticity
Is universal respect oppressive?
The ‘politics of difference’ reconsidered
Symbolism and recognition
Towards a more inclusive politics?
Responding to diversity: Recognition or toleration?
Three problems with the ‘politics of recognition’
Beyond cultural recognition
2: Respect
Honneth on respect, esteem, and personhood
Respect, equality, and difference
Respect and honour disentangled
The morality of respect
Respect and rights
Can one's dignity be extinguished by others?
The importance of virtual recognition
The importance of being counted
3: Esteem and Social Distinction
Why esteem poses ethical problems
Responsibility for self-esteem
Pride: A sin or a virtue?
Conflicts between social and self-esteem
Social distinction as social inequality
Social class and social status
Recognition as a resource
The threat of reductionism
The desire for esteem as a threat to social equality
4: Justice and Recognition
The relationship between goodness and justice
Injustice and social conflict
Recognition, redistribution, and resources
How should we distribute recognition?
Welfare and recognition
Recognition as a basic need
Deserving recognition?
What is the relationship between equality and recognition?
Can we shape the distribution of social esteem?
5: The Struggle for Recognition
Why do we care so much about recognition?
Recognition-sensitivity as social radar
What is ‘social’ about social norms?
Roles, claims, and the social actor
Normative authority and the struggle for recognition
Two responses to the struggle for recognition
An ethics of recognition?
References
Index
Key Concepts series
Copyright © Cillian McBride 2013
The right of Cillian McBride to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4847-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4848-4 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7086-7 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7087-4 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
For my parents
Acknowledgements
This short book has been a long time in preparation and I have incurred many intellectual debts along the way. I should particularly like to thank Jonathan Seglow, Jurgen De Wispelaere, John Garry, Simon Thompson, Patrick Leonard, Arto Laitinen, Peter Jones, John Horton, Maeve Cooke and Christopher Cowley, Rowan Cruft and the Northern Political Theory Association, Iseult Honohan, Andy Shorten and the Political Theory Network, Ireland; the participants in the Political Theory Doctoral Workshop here at Queen's, especially Paddy McQueen, Fabian Schuppert, Philip O'Hanlon, Gavin Kerr, and Onni Hirvonen. Also, Andrea Baumeister, Monica Mookherjee, and Mike Kenny who, along with Jonathan Seglow and Simon Thompson, organized seminars in the ESRC seminar series on The Politics of Recognition and the Dynamics of Social Conflict, and Shane O'Neill, with whom I coordinated the series. Paddy McQueen was kind enough to read and comment on the manuscript, as did Keith Breen, who was of great help in prompting me to straighten out many of the arguments. I am tremendously grateful to Alan Montefiore for introducing me to many of the themes discussed here. Emma Hutchinson at Polity has been a wonderfully patient editor. Living in Northern Ireland (and north Belfast in particular), it would be hard not to think about the ways in which struggles for respect and esteem play out in the world beyond the seminar room. Thanks to my friends in the Families in the Waterworks Fishing Club, David Murphy, David Nixon, and everyone at the Duncairn Community Centre, for taking the time to talk to me about some of these ideas. Lisa Smyth has discussed every detail of the argument with me: I could not have worked out my thoughts on these issues without her. Ruadhán deserves a special mention for putting up with all this recognition talk.
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 responses meet with a mixed reception, earning us the esteem of some, while losing us the esteem of others. We may find, too, that our self-respect can prompt us to reject some expressions of social esteem (Appiah 2010). While we are social animals, then, we are also individual agents who must try to make sense of the demands the various social, moral, and legal norms make upon us and who have considerable freedom to judge which of these claims to endorse and which to reject. To say that we are sensitive to social recognition is not to imply that we are simply slaves to it. Instead, we should see our recognition-sensitivity as an essential feature of our individual agency; that is, as part of the machinery of recognizing and assessing the normative demands made upon us by the social world.
Sometimes we compete for the positive esteem of others, but there are circumstances in which negative social esteem assures us that we are on the right track. We may want to provoke unease or anger on the part of others because we reject their claims upon us and want them to recognize that we are rejecting their authority to make these demands on us. This sort of struggle for recognition, whether it involves teenagers upsetting their parents with their clothes, haircuts, and music, women seeking to upset engrained patriarchal social norms, or gay and lesbian citizens demanding the right to live their lives in the open, is a central feature of both personal, and social and political conflicts. The exercise of our freedom in a social world that makes all manner of normative demands upon us will give rise to complex, sometimes antagonistic, relations of recognition and misrecognition. This aspect of the struggle for recognition, the struggle for authority, is not, I think, as widely appreciated in the literature on the ethics and politics of recognition as it should be.
Our thinking about the ethics and politics of recognition has been decisively shaped by what we could call the ‘recognition deficit’ model. The basic picture which has both multicultural and Critical Theory discussions of recognition in its grip is that of a relationship between someone who lacks recognition, claiming it from another who has the power to remedy this recognition deficit by granting the recognition which is sought.3 The focus is, typically, on the harms done by the lack of recognition, and the solution is, consequently, thought to be more recognition. We should strive for a society in which recognition deficits are, if not entirely overcome, at least minimized. I don't want to say that this is wholly mistaken, only that this model does not do justice to the complexity of our struggles for recognition.
Firstly, it offers a seriously truncated snapshot of relations of recognition. In particular, it diverts our attention away from questions of power and authority. The assumption is that the most urgent problem is that recognition claims often, and wrongly, go unmet. As I suggest in Chapter 1, however, there is also a question about the way our desires for recognition from particular groups, individuals, and institutions are formed in the first place. In seeking recognition from a particular quarter, I am already recognizing their authority over me, and sometimes this is a greater problem than the lack of recognition. We should be more aware of the possibility that our desire for recognition can itself be a product of social domination. In some cases, then, particularly, I would suggest, those of cultural minorities, the pursuit of freedom and equality may be advanced rather by freeing ourselves altogether of the desire for the recognition of those to whom we are subordinate. To understand this, we need to think of recognition in terms of a struggle for normative authority (Pinkard 1994), rather than in terms of a psychological need.
Secondly, and closely related to this, the recognition-deficit model presents us primarily as passive recipients of social recognition. However, if we understand recognition in terms of a struggle for normative authority, it is clear that we are always agents who must endorse the authority claims of others before their recognition is of any value to us. While there are tremendous social pressures upon us to accept the authority of dominant norms, and those who represent them – parents, teachers, politicians, clerics, ‘business leaders’, and so on – it is, in principle, possible to resist these claims, and to value alternative sources of recognition. Indeed, when we are faced with competing claims, we may have no choice but to exercise our agency in deliberating about which claims we ought to endorse.
In focusing on the recognition claimant and their lack of recognition, there is a risk that our attention is diverted from those who claim the authority to dispense recognition: those who have the power to block our access to respect by denying legal equality, or whose social dominance positions them as the authorities whose esteem we must strive to earn. The deficit model's focus on the recognition supplicant can distract us from addressing the pressing problem that some simply enjoy too much recognition and use their social prestige as a resource to secure their dominance. Dazzled by ‘difference’, perhaps, there is a surprising failure in the recognition literature to come to terms with the connection between recognition and the processes of social distinction which sustain social inequalities. In Chapter 3 I try to correct this imbalance by drawing attention to the rich tradition of sociological thought concerned with status hierarchies and social distinction. An adequate moral and political theory of recognition cannot afford to overlook the dark side of recognition and the thorny problem of the way that the pursuit of distinction can work against the pursuit of social equality.
To sum up, then, I have reservations about the way that debates about recognition have been too closely associated with multiculturalism, and too insulated from questions about social distinction and social stratification. There is also, clearly, a substantive difference between the sort of weak perfectionist ethical outlook shared by Taylor and Honneth, which gives priority to ethical questions about the good life, and my own, more justice-focused, outlook. While Taylor and Honneth are typically concerned to ‘correct’ or supplement the undoubted narrowness of the focus on moral rights and wrongs which characterizes normative moral and political philosophy (Honneth 1995: 172), my worry is that this contributes to a tendency to skirt difficult questions about justice in relation to recognition, and to an overly conflict-free understanding of the role of recognition in our lives.
I share, however, their sense that we need to think about moral agency in more concrete, situated ways, and that an understanding of social recognition is essential to this, but I am more inclined to see our social situation as a source of competing claims and moral dilemmas. The struggle for recognition is, in any case, a central feature of our lives, from our personal relations, through to our interaction with social and political institutions. We cannot make sense of social conflicts, and the way our embeddedness in the social world gives rise to moral and ethical dilemmas, without understanding the way that our sensitivity to recognition orients us in the world.
Notes
1 ‘Those who sell men's clothing learn that the gruff show men maintain of being little concerned with how they look is sometimes merely a show and that strong, silent men will try on suit after suit, hat after hat, until they appear in the mirror exactly as they want to see themselves’ (Goffman 1990: 154).
2 The influence of Terry Pinkard's work should be clear here, although I do not expect that Pinkard (1994) or Robert Pippin (2008), the leading exponents of the ‘Kantian’ reading of Hegel, would endorse my commitment to contractualist morality.
3McNay (2008: 135) draws attention to the way Honneth's recognition theory is built around this ‘primary dyad’.
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