Perspectives and Ideologies - a Pragmatic Use for Recognition Theory

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DOI: 10.1177/0191453711427260 2012 38: 215 originally published online 16 December 2011Philosophy Social Criticism

Kevin S. DeckerPerspectives and ideologies: A pragmatic use for recognition theory

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Article

Perspectives and ideologies:A pragmatic use forrecognition theory

Kevin S. DeckerEastern Washington University, USA

Abstract‘Recognition’ is a normative concept denoting the ascription of positive status to a group or anindividual by (an) other(s). In its larger meaning, it carries the implication that when a group oran individual can justifiably expect such a positive status-ascription, its denial (misrecognition) isunjustified and unethical. I discuss the role that the concept of recognition can play at the intersec-tion of two philosophies, pragmatism and contemporary critical theory. My perspective is one thatembraces the ‘pragmatic turn’ in critical theory and sees the possibility of reciprocal benefit forpragmatism in how critical theory handles issues of material culture, alienation and networks ofpower. I argue that a critical social theory incorporating pragmatist presuppositions ought to bringthe concept of recognition to bear in how it isolates and treats the ‘real interests’ of groups andindividuals who have suffered and continue to suffer from broad social ascriptions of negative status,or who, through lack of voice and access to the public sphere, remain paralysed to participation in athriving liberal democracy. In doing so, I do not construe recognition primarily as ‘positive tolerance’or understanding of cultural, ethnic, or gender identity, but as a minimally substantive tool for under-standing, and potentially correcting, how misrecognition impacts the collective and individual agencyof the historically oppressed.

Keywordscritical theory, G. W. F. Hegel, Axel Honneth, ideology, pragmatism, recognition, social theory

The philosopher sets up himself (that is, one who is himself an abstract form

of estranged man) as the measuring rod of the estranged world. (Karl Marx,

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)1

This article is about the robust philosophical notion of ‘recognition’ and its function in

social situations, or what I call the ‘recognition dynamic’. Briefly put, ‘recognition’ is a

Corresponding author:

Kevin S. Decker, Philosophy Program, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington 99004, USA

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism38(2) 215–226

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normative concept denoting the ascription of positive status to a group or an individual

by (an) other(s). In its larger meaning, it carries the implication that when a group or an

individual can justifiably expect such a positive status-ascription, its denial (misrecogni-

tion) is unjustified and unethical. The most familiar contemporary contexts for discus-

sion of recognition are multiculturalism and the conversation on ‘the politics of

identity’ in social and political philosophy, a discourse centered on culture, historical

injustice and inter-group difference. Although this conversation has been fundamentally

altered by globalization and the resurgence of terrorism, it is clear that recognition, as

well as its opposites, disrespect and degradation, continues and should continue to play

an important role in social philosophies that have a critical and liberative thrust to them.

In what is to come, I discuss one such role that the recognition dynamic can play at the

intersection of two such philosophies, namely pragmatism – the legacy of Peirce, James

and Dewey – and contemporary critical theory. My perspective is one that embraces the

‘pragmatic turn’ in critical theory and sees the possibility of reciprocal benefit for prag-

matism in how critical theory handles issues of material culture, alienation and networks

of power.3 From this perspective, I argue that a critical social theory incorporating prag-

matist presuppositions ought to bring the concept of recognition to bear in how it isolates

and treats the ‘real interests’ of groups and individuals who have suffered and continue to

suffer from broad social ascriptions of negative status, or who, through lack of voice and

access to the public sphere, remain paralysed to participation in a thriving liberal democ-

racy. To do this, I first provide a brief summary of the development and meaning of ‘rec-

ognition’ from its origins in German Idealism to the present day. Second, I sketch a

model of a ‘pragmatic’ critical social theory, noting both where the inclusion of prag-

matic inquiry strengthens, and where it weakens, the theory’s potential for constituting

or framing social problems and for interpreting the ‘real interests’ of groups in the

service of collective, remedial action. Third, I offer a modification of this model that

corrects for weaknesses by integrating the ‘recognition dynamic’. This move does not

construe recognition primarily as ‘positive tolerance’ or understanding of cultural,

ethnic, or gender identity, but as a minimally substantive tool for understanding, and

potentially correcting, how misrecognition impacts the collective and individual agency

of the historically oppressed. A theory of recognition can become a tool for what educa-

tor Paulo Freire called a ‘problem-posing education’, which is always an education for

social theorist and social agent alike.4

1 Philosophies of recognition

The concept of recognition, to which I have already alluded, is significant in Hegel’s

ethical theory, in the multicultural approach to the ‘politics of identity’, and also in

contemporary critical theory. In this (necessarily selective) examination of its career,

I want to make clear how these applications relate to each other, in order to prepare the

way for how recognition could function in a pragmatist-influenced critical social

theory.

Recognition first emerges from German Idealism as part of a substantive and social

theory of ethical life that contrasts sharply with Kant’s formal system of duties. Hegel

largely owes his ‘discovery’ of recognition to the work of the idealist J. G. Fichte.5 In

216 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(2)



Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, a work of ‘scientific philosophy in the Kantian

spirit’, reason is equated with the ‘I’, which has (corresponding to Kant’s distinction) both

a theoretical and a practical moment. It is the latter that concerns us, since the basis for

action according to Fichte is found in the encounter of the ‘I’ with the ‘Not-I’, an encounter

that produces resistance and leads to the effort of the ‘I’ to determine itself, minimizing the

‘Not-I’ as much as possible. Although Fichte is here primarily describing the process by

which sensation and, eventually, perception arises,6 Hegel is more interested in the impli-

cations of this theory for human self-assertion in a social context (itself part of a larger phe-

nomenology of consciousness), and so he ‘externalizes’ the struggle against the resistance

of another.6 This move is well known as the ‘struggle for recognition’.

However, there are two earlier sources in Hegel from before the 1807 appearance of

this famous struggle in the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ of the Phenomenology of

Spirit. One is Hegel’s early theological work from the last decade of the 18th century,

in which he attempts to analyse Judaism and early Christian communities through the

framework of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy. He there offers the motif of Christian

love as reconciliation of oppositions which leads, in slightly changed form, to the basic

and enduring idea of his social theory that participation in a community is not a restric-

tion on freedom, but rather a developmental enrichment of life.7 In Hegel’s Jena work the

System of Ethical Life (1805/6), we find the first conscious use of the concept ‘recogni-

tion’ (Anerkennung), particularly in his explanations of how possessions become prop-

erty and of linkages of crime, retribution and justice with mutual recognition.8 Hegel’s

concern here is ‘with the transition from the so-called ‘‘state of nature’’ to the formation

of the state or the social itself’, which necessarily involves alienation and struggle, or ‘the

problem of the intersubjective conflict of wills and its resolution’.9 This theme is further

developed in the section of Phenomenology of Spirit on ‘Self-consciousness’, in which

Hegel sets out to show how it can be the case that, as he writes, ‘self-consciousness exists

in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in

being acknowledged’.10 The resulting master–slave ‘dialectic of dependence and inde-

pendence’11 is Hegel’s attempt to clarify how the self-determination and freedom of an

individual develop by having his or her subjective point of view affirmed by another, with

conflict and servitude of another necessary preludes to such an affirmation. Hegel uses the

term ‘recognition’ for what the master demands of the slave, but since the master treats the

slave as an object and the master is wholly dependent upon the labor of the slave, ironically

the master does not benefit from this arrangement. In fact, it is the slave who, through

‘externalizing’ himself in his labor, understands himself as a productive agent, achieving

‘self-recognition’ while the master never does. ‘Through work,’ Hegel says, ‘the bonds-

man becomes conscious of what he truly is.’12 Although this kind of ‘recognition’ is

subjective, it is not yet an intersubjective ascription of positive status: that is, it is not

mutual recognition.13

It is no surprise that in the tradition of continental philosophy, themes of alienation,

struggle and recognition run through those thinkers significantly influenced by Hegel,

including Marx and the French Marxists, Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Gadamer,

Beauvoir and Sartre. Hegel also cast a long shadow toward America, particularly through

transcendentalist thinkers, the St Louis Hegelians and the development of a progressivist

‘social pragmatism’ at the University of Chicago around 1894.14 The two basic thrusts of

Decker 217



the Phenomenology’s recognition dynamic – (1) that self-consciousness emerges from

and is developed in a social context and (2) that this process involves conflict on a variety

of levels – are implicated in John Dewey’s theories of social intelligence and dramatur-

gical deliberation, in the social ethics of James Hayden Tufts, and in the social psychol-

ogy of George Herbert Mead. Unfortunately, I cannot here explore linkages between

these figures, continental and American, in a way to do justice to them. A synthetic his-

tory of the concept of recognition would be a worthy research project, and one that is

long overdue.

But for our purposes, we need to fast-forward our history of recognition to the last

decade of the 20th century and the conversation about ‘the politics of identity’ that

I alluded to in my introduction. In this context, problems of recognition have been

primarily dealt with on the ethical-political horizon of the tension between respect for

cultures or groups and the basic values of liberal democracy. Without a doubt, the fun-

damental significance in liberal democracies of political and legal individualism and the

principle of ‘equality under the law’ challenges, and is in turn challenged by, normative

claims for recognition of distinct cultural and group identities. Perhaps the most articu-

late and influential voice in this debate has been that of Charles Taylor, who linked

Hegel’s dialectic of recognition with Rousseau’s ideals of authenticity and integrity.

Taylor also imparted the gravity of a crisis to the debate, claiming: ‘[M]isrecognition

shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims

with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a

vital human need.’15 It is a vital need because it is the primary enabling condition for

humans to reach for an individualized identity, or in other words to live authentically.

In his confrontation with social problems that he admits will not be solved merely with

slogans or kind words, Taylor does advise us to adopt the presupposition that ‘all human

cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have

something important to say to all human beings’.16 Note that Taylor’s advice focuses on

identity and the past achievement of cultural groups, not on collective agency of the

group or individual agency of its members; this is significant to the use I want to put the

recognition dynamic to, and I will come back to this point later.

The question of recognition and its relationship to the normative justification of social

practices in pluralistic liberal democracies is still an open one. Exploring possible reso-

lutions to it, third-generation critical theorist Axel Honneth has shaped a ‘post-linguistic’

paradigm in critical social theory around the struggle for recognition. A model for under-

standing social conflict like Honneth’s, which integrates key ideas from Hegel and

George Herbert Mead with sociological, psychoanalytical and critical-theoretical

insights, is key to a robust ‘pragmatized’ critical social theory. Before I defend this con-

tention, however, I need to explain how the inclusion of themes from pragmatism would

impact such a theory.

2 A pragmatic turn for critical social theory

Pragmatism and critical theory have always had the potential to be closely aligned. This

fact was effectively obscured until fairly recently, given Dewey’s antipathy to Marxist

thought and Max Horkheimer’s charges of ‘opportunism’ against bourgeois pragmatists.




James Bohman has characterized critical theory as encompassing ‘any social theory that is

at the same time explanatory, normative, practical and self-reflexive’.17 On Bohman’s

definition, two of pragmatism’s central features – its intolerance for the infamous fact/

value gap in philosophy and its commitment to strengthening intelligent practice through

a method of critical inquiry – would qualify it, at first glance, as a form of critical theory

itself. I am not advocating, of course, that all pragmatists start calling themselves critical

theorists and begin to write dense and ponderous prose, but rather simply trying to point

out affinities between the two schools that should continue to inspire dialogue between

them.

Stephen White has suggested that a recovery of what critical theory’s original Frank-

furt School founders intended, that is, critical social theory as a research program, might

be effected by adapting some of pragmatism’s lessons.18 These derive generally from the

suspicion, shared by pragmatists and critical theorists alike, that theory and practice are

not neatly separated; they derive specifically from the centrality of problems or ‘ruptures

in the continuity of experience’ in the pragmatist tradition. Dewey most clearly thema-

tized the problematic in terms of social and political questions in The Public and Its

Problems, where social inquiry is based on the principle (from The Quest for Certainty)

that ‘experimental knowledge is a mode of doing, and like all doing takes place at a time,

in a place, and under specifiable conditions in connection with a definite problem’.19

From within this focus that a critical social theory ought to center on concrete problems

rather than critique of rival theories or the refinement of method, Stephen White suggests

that three social facts ought to guide the analysis of how problems themselves are con-

stituted: ‘[1] the inescapability of a plurality of perspectives; [2] the social character of

the self and scientific inquiry; and [3] the ultimate entanglement of a scientific public or

community of inquirers with the broader public of society as a whole’.20 Critical theory

adds a reminder in each of these cases about the distorting effect of structures of power

on what we take to be authoritative perspectives, authentic selves and the interwoven

network of scientific inquiry, the state, the public and the market.

The persistence of power in its diverse forms is enough to justify a critical attitude,

White tells us, toward institutions and social practices that embody or perpetuate

inequality; this is the attitude that Paul Ricoeur called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.

If this were the case, then it would seem that the critical social theorist is justified in

working with hegemonically oppressed groups to frame problems in terms of that group’s

real interests in redressing inequality and injustice. Take, for example, the case of the dis-

posal of hazardous waste. Surely no community wants to be the ‘target’ of projects for

burying or storing hazardous materials, no matter what the safety protocols for the project.

So the social theorist carrying out a research program on the harms imposed by technology

might seem justified in equating the high degree of correlation, geographically speaking,

between minority communities and such projects with the ‘targeting’ of minorities and

environmental racism. She might interpret the ‘real interests’ of these communities in

terms of protection from the exploitation that this represents and in many cases where the

voices of such communities support this analysis, she would likely be right.21

But what about when voices in the community decry accusations of ‘environmental

racism’ and repudiate the theorist’s analysis of their ‘real interests’? In short, what if they

fundamentally disagree with our construction of the problem facing them? White

Decker 219



believes that not just critical social theory, but also feminist and black political thought,

have been guilty of making one further, illegitimate move in the service of the ‘real inter-

ests’ analysis – they employ the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to accuse the community

itself of ‘false consciousness’, that is, of being ignorant of what their real interests are

because of the distorting effects of hegemonic centers of power on available information

and alternative courses of action. But we should in turn be suspicious of this employment

of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

The point White makes about real interests runs roughly along the same lines as a

notable argument by Joseph Heath about ideology critique.22 Heath attacks the idea that

since ideologies are forms of ‘false consciousness’, those who think through ideology

also hold false beliefs and therefore act irrationally. Obviously, when social critics

accuse citizens who seem to be acting against their own best interests of irrationality and

error, the critics run the risk of insulting the intelligence of the people they are trying to

help, and of further alienating those people. Heath follows Davidson’s interpretation of

the principle of charity in interpreting others, a view that advises that ‘the best interpre-

tation is one that ascribes the most reasonable set of beliefs to [a] person, which is to say,

the one that maximizes the number of true beliefs the person is thought to hold’.23 With-

out going into the details of the rest of Heath’s argument, he persuasively suggests that,

instead of ‘ideology critique’, we focus on problems of collective action that explain how

individuals could be rational and act against their own best interests at the same time.24

Heath’s solution is empirical – if there is a simpler, more elegant solution than resort-

ing to claims of opposing real interests or ideology, go with the former. Just as much as

Heath’s approach is built upon the Davidsonian principle of charity in interpretation,

however, White takes seriously John Rawls’ ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ – that there

are always deep and irreconcilable differences in the worldviews or ‘comprehensive doc-

trines’ of citizens in a liberal democracy.25 On this basis, White concludes: ‘Any social

theory today that builds in from the start a specific substantive conception of the real

interests of any large category of actors is simply going to be too restrictive in terms

of both what those actors might constitute as problems and what they might choose as

legitimate resolutions of those problems’.26 And rather than contest this conclusion, the

three elements of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in social theory that were discussed earlier seem to

confirm this. If a plurality of perspectives is ‘inescapable’, then the theorist’s choice of

any particular perspective to represent a group’s real interests will reflect more about the

theorist and less about a falsely homogeneous group;27 if the self and social scientific

inquiry are channeled and formed by social currents and if the social scientific

community of inquiry is deeply connected with the broader public, then the theorist’s

third-person perspective, despite its usefulness, is no more authoritative than the first-

person perspectives of the members of the group or community in question.28 Yet, as

White points out, only the postulate that individuals and their groups have some real

interests justifies a hermeneutics of suspicion in the first place. We are caught between

the dominating impression that a substantive conception of real interests relies on a con-

cept of human nature or flourishing that is canalized or controlled by networks of power

on the one hand, and a toothless critical social theory that second-guesses every claim in

the service of real interests on the other. White’s own solution to the problem of real

interests is unsatisfying – he suggests that suspicions of ‘false consensus’ replace




accusations of ‘false consciousness’, and follows Habermas in equating real interests,

whatever else they may be, ‘with a presumed interest in individual or political autonomy

or self-rule’.29 While he is right to say that second-guessing the critical analysis of real

interests has the positive effect of reminding us that in our complex, highly articulated

western society, it is more difficult to isolate those who are responsible for the effects

of power, each of these moves is more likely to blunt, not sharpen, the instruments in

the critical social theorist’s toolbox of ideas. Even the Habermasian appeal to autonomy

(which, as a concept employed by pragmatists, looks very different from Habermas’ neo-

Kantian version), if it is not simply to be used as a slogan, has to derive its empirical

content from actual cases in which collective action in the service of a concept of real

interests worked to the advantage of group members’ power of self-rule. Our analysis

of these cases, however, is subject to the same problems as White has already pointed

out. So a different solution is required.

3 Pragmatic recognition?

In this final section, I would like to explore what I see as a link between recognition and

the critical social theorist’s need to isolate the collective, real interests of group members

who suffer the effects of inequality and injustice simply because they belong to certain

groups. By focusing on the struggle for recognition as having normative weight for the

critique of social practices and institutions, Axel Honneth has not only proposed a viable

and persuasive alternative to Habermas’ communicative paradigm or the traditional

economic-material concerns of Marx and the Frankfurt School. He has also incorporated

into his broadly Hegelian model certain insights from George Herbert Mead’s pragmatic

social psychology. Honneth harnesses Hegel’s enduring, central insight into intersubjec-

tive relations between human beings – that there is ‘a sequence of recognition relations,

in the context of which individuals reciprocally confirm each other to an increasing

degree as autonomous and individuated persons’ – but tempers this with the admission

that we must disentangle this insight from many of Hegel’s highly speculative claims,

the goals of his absolute Idealism, and his belief in the superiority of a certain historical

set of institutional and political circumstances (the Prussian state and its rising bourgeois

class).30 To do this, Honneth turns to the work of Mead as a ‘postmetaphysical’ inquiry

into the nature of inter-subjectivity. Not only does Mead naturalize Hegelian recognition

by grounding a theory of intersubjectivity on the results of empirical psychology; further,

the development of the self and its ‘generalized other’ in Mead follows the pragmatic

notion that moral and cognitive growth occurs only in the midst of problematic

situations.31

Beyond Hegel and Mead, Honneth’s own original contribution to the understanding

of recognition relations has been to adapt the idea, common to both his predecessors, that

there are different forms of social integration that are affected by the granting or with-

holding of recognition in a community. The three forms Honneth settles on are relation-

ships founded on emotional support, those based on the granting of rights, and those

anchored in a shared orientation to common norms or values. Recognition, then, can

be granted in the form of (1) love, (2) rights, and (3) what Honneth variously calls sol-

idarity, esteem, or achievement.32 These forms correspond, of course, to experiences of

Decker 221



misrecognition: (1) abuse or rape as an emotional-physical violation, (2) the denial of

rights and political or legal exclusion, and (3) denigration or insult. For Honneth, all

social conflicts can be traced back to resistance in the face of experiences of disrespect

of these kinds.33 What is notable, and perhaps unique, about this approach is that, unlike

the views of Charles Taylor and virtually everyone else involved in the discourse on ‘the

politics of identity’, Honneth’s starting point is not to generalize the ideals of contempo-

rary struggles over cultural identity, often led by what have been called the ‘New Social

Movements’.34 Instead, the goal here has been to construct a formal model of human

flourishing (what Hegel and Honneth call ‘ethical life’) along the three forms of histori-

cally confirmed relations of recognition. Because this is a critical social theory, however,

its aim is to produce ‘an appropriate tool for categorially unlocking social experiences of

injustice as a whole’,35 of which experiences of identity- or culture-related injustice are

an important segment.

Unfortunately, there is insufficient time to discuss the merits and flaws of Honneth’s

three-pronged concept of recognition.36 I argue, however, that if Honneth’s model has

merit because it diagnoses genuine episodes of misrecognition as social injustices, then

it assists in solving one problem of White’s pragmatically influenced critical social the-

ory, namely the problem of real interests.

Put simply, the real interests of social actors are always to avoid misrecognition in the

forms of abuse, the denial of rights and irrelevant legal inequalities and the denigration of

personal or group qualities, and to demand redress when these occur. Even should certain

modifications in Honneth’s model of recognition be necessary, in its basic formulation, it

overcomes the most significant problem posed in the preceding consideration of real

interests: Rawls’ ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’. Rather than representing a substantive

‘comprehensive doctrine’ of its own, a theory of recognition bases itself upon the experi-

enced needs – emotional support, cognitive respect and social solidarity – that are all nec-

essary to the development of the self-understanding of social actors. As Honneth says,

‘Since the central institutions of even capitalist societies require rational legitimation

through generalizable principles of reciprocal recognition, their reproduction remains

dependent on a basis of moral consensus – which thus possesses real primacy vis-a-vis

other integration mechanisms, since it is the basis of the normative expectations of

members of society as well as their readiness for conflict’.37 In other words, any minimally

substantive ‘comprehensive doctrine’ for adjudicating social conflicts in a liberal democ-

racy would have to be based on just such a ‘morality of needs’ as has been proposed.

Critical social theory’s concern with the real interests of individuals, understood as

I have suggested in terms of recognition, can be framed in a variety of ways. I briefly

suggest two. (1) Through research programs centering on experiences of misrecognition,

theorists can foster a dialogue in the public sphere on the structural differences between

three classes of claims regarding social injustice: (a) those thematized in the relatively

well-known missions of ‘New Social Movements’, or liberation and lifestyle causes ris-

ing primarily in developed countries since the 1960s; (b) ‘cases of everyday misery . . .found beyond the perceptual threshold of the political public sphere’, such as the femin-

ization of poverty, long-term unemployment, and rapid shifts in international

employment patterns;38 and (c) those ‘cases’ that receive an explicitly ideological gloss

after appropriation by political or media forces. Far from totally abandoning the critique




of ideology, problem-centered theorists need to pay more attention to media and think-

tank hegemony that increasingly distorts public communication with the weight of dis-

information and propaganda.

(2) The work of critical social theorists can itself serve as a source of positive recog-

nition for those who have suffered misrecognition in its various forms in the very act of

addressing individuals in the so-called ‘second-person’ perspective oriented toward the

achievement of mutual understanding. As Bohman claims: ‘In its context of inquiry,

critical social science treats social actors as knowledgeable social agents to which its

claims are publicly addressed. . . . [T]heir form of inquiry does not seek to achieve

specific ex ante ends, but rather to bring about those social conditions in which their

insights and proposals could be validated or falsified by agents themselves.’39 Social

inquiry becomes democratic, Bohman says, when its research and its results are struc-

tured in such a way as to become materials for public deliberation. Beyond the

obvious parallels between Dewey’s work on communication communities and the Haber-

masian concept of communicative action that the ‘second-person’ perspective presumes,

the orientation toward achieving mutual understanding between immiserated social

agents and social theorists has an ameliorative, pragmatist flavor to it: it does not call

for the potentially alienating, fragmenting social changes entailed by ‘transformative’

redistributive and recognitive solutions like institutional socialism and cultural

deconstruction.40

In conclusion, most of us are not going to be involved in reconstructing critical social

theory in response to demands for recognition, Rawls’ ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ and

the various perspectival-pragmatic social facts discussed earlier. Far from making my

central points irrelevant, this underscores the fact that our participant perspectives in the

fight for social justice be informed by the idea that recognition, in the sense in which

I have used it in this section, is a vital civic virtue in a liberal democracy. Mark Warren,

in his book Democracy and Association, points out that recognition cannot become a

civic virtue without a preceding, positive attitude toward cooperation based on recipro-

city. In a pluralistic democracy, this attitude is a condition for individual self-respect

within the larger public sphere, self-respect that activates, in turn, our recognition of oth-

ers. ‘[T]he experience of pluralism’, Warren argues, ‘is also valuable as a condition of

individual autonomy; recognition for one’s particular abilities makes individuals more

secure in their identity, which in turn makes it easier to investigate one’s own preferences

and beliefs without threat of destabilizing the core of one’s personality.’41 Warren’s anal-

ysis points out an important feedback mechanism in the public sphere: for civic virtues

such as the willingness to reciprocate cooperatively, a plural society must, as far as pos-

sible, keep to a minimum the ‘destabilizing’ threats to individuals; in terms of Honneth’s

model of recognition, it must, in short, be concerned with threats to love and bodily self-

respect, legal equality and rights, and self-esteem or achievement.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. M. Milli-

gan (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 175.

Decker 223



2. See the essays in William Rehg and James Bohman (eds) Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn:

The Transformation of Critical Theory – Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2001), particularly the essays by Bohman, Rehg, Fultner, Heath and Meehan.

3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Berman Ramos (New York: Continuum

Publishing, 1993), p. 86.

4. Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: SUNY Press,

1992), p. 83.

5. But even here there is influence on Hegel. One of the results of this Fichtean process is, in the words

of Gunter Zoller, that ‘the objects of cognition are to be the results of prior volition and action; what

seems given from the cognitive perspective of the theoretical I is to be the result of some willing

and doing on the part of the practical I’; see his ‘German Realism: the Self-limitation of Idealist

Thinking in Fichte, Schelling and Schopenhauer’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.) The Cambridge Compa-

nion to German Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 204.

6. For reasons of space, I have eliminated Fichte’s moral development of the idea that ‘Right’ is

based on mutual recognition; see his Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser,

trans. M. Baur (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), as well as Hegel’s criticisms

of Fichte in Faith and Knowledge (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977).

7. So, for example: ‘The lover who takes is not thereby made richer than the other; he is enriched

indeed, but only so much as the other is. So too the giver does not make himself poorer; by

giving to the other he has at the same time and to the same extent enhanced his own treasure’;

see G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Fragment on Love’, in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox and

R. Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 307.

8. See my ‘Right and Recognition: Criminal Action and Intersubjectivity in Hegel’s Early

Ethics’, History of Political Thought 22(2) (Summer 2001): 300–16.

9. Williams, Recognition, p. 84.

10. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977), §§ 178, 111.

11. The phrase is Terry Pinkard’s; see his Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’: The Sociality of Reason

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 54.

12. Hegel, Phenomenology, §§ 195, 118.

13. Again, for reasons of space and because of the difficult and complex framework required to

contextualize it, I have had to pass over the role that recognition plays in Hegel’s mature polit-

ical philosophy; see his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B.

Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as well as Dudley Knowles’ commen-

tary in Hegel and the ‘Philosophy of Right’ (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 91–106.

14. See Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1993).

15. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of

Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 26.

16. ibid., p. 66.

17. James Bohman, ‘Critical theory’, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1st edn (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 170.

18. Stephen K. White, ‘The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science: the Pragmatist Turn’, in The

Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2004), pp. 310–35.




19. John Dewey, John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 2, The Quest for Certainty, ed.

Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 82.

20. ibid., p. 314; regarding these social facts, White is relying on Richard Bernstein, ‘Pragmatism,

Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds’, in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New

York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 383 ff.

21. See Shari Collins-Chobanian, ‘Environmental Racism, American Indians, and Monitored

Retrievable Storage Sites for Radioactive Waste’, in Applied Ethics, 3rd edn, ed. Larry May,

Shari Collins-Chobanian and Kai Wong (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002), pp.

167–76.

22. Joseph Heath, ‘Problems in the Theory of Ideology’, in William Rehg and James Bohman

(eds) Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory – Essays

in Honor of Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 163–90.

23. ibid., p. 165.

24. Three problems that Heath focuses on in the remainder of his essay are coordination problems,

trust (or the lack thereof), and adapted preferences, which deals with how certain social

constructions of preference reproduce inequality and the effects of discrimination; ibid., pp.

169–87.

25. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4.

26. White, ‘The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science’, pp. 317–18.

27. Horkheimer himself warned explicitly against this in his programmatic statement, ‘Traditional

and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).

28. See James Bohman, ‘How to make a Social Science Practical: Critical Theory, Pragmatism

and Multiperspectival Theory’, Millennium 21(3) (2003): 499–524.

29. White, ‘The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science’, p. 321.

30. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1996), pp. 69–70.

31. ibid., pp. 71–91. Also see Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His

Thought, trans. R. Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), particularly ch. five.

32. The interpretation of a third form of social integration in terms of ‘achievement’ first appears

in Honneth’s published debate with Nancy Fraser. ‘Achievement’ appears there more

frequently than ‘esteem’ or ‘solidarity’ in order to put Honneth’s argument against Fraser’s

privileging of justice as reflecting economic concerns on a more even footing. He maintains

that ‘achievement’ is the form of social esteem found in the modern development of bourgeois

values and capitalist accumulation, and that many contemporary cries for social justice from

certain social groups can be interpreted as demands for recognition of ‘achievements’ outside

this narrow, accumulation model; see Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or

Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Debate (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 145–50.

33. ibid., p. 157.

34. On NSM theory, see Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,

1995), pp. 215–16. In fact, Honneth is undecided about where precisely to locate identity-

based social conflicts: either as a demand for legal equality (recognition of rights) or perhaps

as a fourth form of recognition; see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, pp.

159 ff.

35. ibid., p. 133.

Decker 225



36. But those interested in doing so are referred to Jordy Rocheleau, ‘Communication, Recognition

and Politics: Reconciling the Critical Theories of Honneth and Habermas’, in Cheryl Hughes

(ed.) Social Philosophy Today, vol. 17 (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation

Center, 2003), pp. 253–63; Christopher Zurn, ‘Identity or Status? Struggles over ‘‘Recognition’’

in Fraser, Honneth, and Taylor’, Constellations 10(4) (December 2003): 519–37; Fraser and

Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?.

37. ibid., p. 157 (emphases added).

38. ibid., p. 118.

39. James Bohman, ‘Democracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science,

and the Cognitive Division of Labor’, American Journal of Political Science 43(2) (April

1999): 590–607 (605).

40. See Nancy Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition?’, in Justice Interruptus: Critical

Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 23 ff. I am not

saying that there is no merit whatsoever in these approaches, nor that they should be aban-

doned completely in favor of Fraser’s ‘affirmative’ approaches – economic liberalism and

multiculturalism. But Fraser vastly underestimates the fragmenting potential of transformative

solutions in this treatment, a price that pragmatism would balk at.

41. Mark Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),

pp. 74–5.




Perspectives and Ideologies - a Pragmatic Use for Recognition Theory

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