Multivalent recognition: The place of Hegel

in the Fraser–Honneth debate

Christopher Lauer
Department of Philosophy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705-1046, USA.

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.
Contemporary Political Theory (2012) 11, 23–40. doi:10.1057/cpt.2010.44;
published online 19 July 2011
Keywords: Axel Honneth; Nancy Fraser; recognition; Hegel; justice; redistribution

In the past decade’s renewed attention to the Hegelian motif of recognition,

Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth’s 2003 discussion in Redistribution or
Recognition? has emerged as something of a station of the cross (Zurn, 2003;
McCarthy, 2005; Tobias, 2006–2007; Lovell, 2007; McNay, 2007, 2008). In a
field concerned with the varying ways that reciprocity and mutual acknowl-
edgment shape the self, it should not be too surprising that one of the
touchstones of this discussion has been an exchange, and the Fraser–Honneth
debate is exemplary not just for the undeniable talent of its interlocutors,
but for the depth of the confrontation. Although the two thinkers start
from very different assumptions about the goals of political theory and
are unsparing in their criticisms of each other’s approaches, their mutual
commitment to uncovering the origin of their disagreement makes their

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encounter invaluable for theorists working on the politics of recognition.

Yet while commentators on the exchange generally note the Hegelian origin
of the exchange and some have even advanced Hegelian criticisms of
Honneth’s position (Tobias, 2006–2007; cf. Williams, 1997, p. 15), I contend
that Hegel deserves an even greater voice in the debate. Indeed, what is
perhaps most remarkable about the exchange is how Hegelian each thinker’s
criticisms are. When Honneth alleges that Fraser’s principle of participatory
parity fails to appreciate the role of self-respect in social justice, he is recalling
the Phenomenology of Spirit’s dialectic of legal personhood, and when Fraser
contends that Honneth psychologizes justice, she recalls the same book’s
dialectic of culture (Bildung). Both criticisms, I intend to show in this essay,
are ultimately correct, and they succeed because recognition must be
something more than either author claims. Far from being limited to the
submission that the slave gives the master, recognition is above all for Hegel
something manifold, and any attempt to lay out the conditions for a single
type of recognition is bound to be incomplete. Indeed, Hegel’s assertion in the
Philosophy of Right that history will continue to develop in ways that
philosophy cannot anticipate implies that there can be no such thing as a
transhistorical definition of recognition, as reason can grasp the importance
of a form of recognition only after it has been integrated into a spiritual
community (Hegel, 1967, pp. 12–13; see also Hegel, 1980, p. 433, y808).
Nevertheless, Hegel’s commitment to preserving suspended moments of the
dialectic means that what we have learned about recognition must be grasped
along multiple axes. As recognition is the means by which spirit comes to
know itself through the cognition of others, it must be able to take on multiple
forms irreducible to any single goal. This is not to say that more limited
accounts of recognition are illegitimate or useless, because Hegel believes
that even unfulfilling and partial forms of recognition have their place. But
I do believe it shows why neither Fraser’s nor Honneth’s account of recogni-
tion can be a complete one. Ultimately, I will argue, this incompleteness
points to a progressivism in the politics of recognition that both Fraser and
Honneth endorse, but which neither can conceptualize within the confines of
the debate.

Fraser’s ‘Participatory Parity’

Fraser, of course, makes no pretentions to be developing a Hegelian line

of thinking. From the beginning of her portion of the book, she takes pains
to distance herself from what she regards as a Hegelian overemphasis on
the role of recognition in self-constitution. For Fraser, a disregard for the
role of recognition in building a healthy and happy life ought not to be seen as
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a disadvantage for a theory of recognition. Rather, a theory that app-

roaches recognition from the standpoint of justice ought to ignore the role
that recognition plays in the constitution of the self, for otherwise the theory
risks letting questionable and culturally contingent conceptions of the
good into the properly deontological consideration of the right. Against
theorists like Honneth and Charles Taylor who argue that certain minimal
(and historically variable) levels of recognition ought to be seen as rights
because a lack of respect can be just as harmful to the individual as material
deprivation, Fraser contends that theorists should treat recognition not as
a universal good to be shared among all of a community’s inhabitants,
but instead as a sociological relation1 that everyone ought to have an equal
opportunity in pursuing. Conversely, to be disrespected or misrecognized
‘is not to suffer distorted identity or impaired subjectivity as a result of being
depreciated by others. It is rather to be constituted by institutionalized
patterns of cultural value in ways that prevent one from participating as a peer
in social life’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 29). Her definition of justice,
accordingly, is not equal recognition for all – which, she notes, is self-
contradictory, as recognition is always comparative (Fraser and Honneth,
2003, p. 32) – but rather a ‘parity of participation’ (Fraser and Honneth,
2003, p. 36), the equal opportunity for everyone to pursue recognition,
economic goods, or other forms of social participation that might come to be
seen as important.2
This principle, she maintains, has several advantages over one that values
recognition for its use in constituting subjectivity and ameliorating the psychic
damage of disrespect.3 First, it allows us to condemn certain institutionalized
patterns of misrecognition without valuing any particular conceptions of the
good over others. By emphasizing the role that recognition plays in self-esteem
and self-actualization, theories like Honneth’s cannot help but prefer some
conceptions of the good over others. Second, by arguing that the injustice of
misrecognition can be explained in terms of the impairment of subjectivity,
Taylor and Honneth make judgments of which forms of misrecognition
deserve remedies dependent upon the psychology of those affected. If system-
atically demeaning the social contributions of a class of people is wrong
because it prevents these people from developing healthy and sustainable self-
conceptions, then it is all too easy to ignore the institutional conditions of this
misrecognition and blame the victim (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 31). If the
wrong in racism, for instance, consists in its psychic damage to a racial
minority, then the problem lies not in social relations, but in the consciousness
of members of the despised race. But if the injustice of racism is psychological,
then presumably the remedy must be as well, which implies that those who
suffer a systematic lack of recognition need simply to ‘get over it’, whether
through psychotherapy or other means.4
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In contrast, Fraser believes that while there will always be hard cases,
particularly when the demands of two different minority groups intersect, the
parity of participation model can distinguish between legitimate and
illegitimate claims for group recognition without appealing to any psycholo-
gical damage or benefit that might be incurred by individuals in the group. It
might be argued, for instance, that the racist ideologies of some Europeans
and European Americans help them cope with senses of self-worth that have
been damaged by poverty or individual biographical vagaries, and thus that
these identities ought to be recognized through distinct legal status, special
privileges, or other means (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 32).5 The principle of
parity of participation, however, would reject these claims regardless of any
psychic benefit to the racial majority, as it would unfairly deny non-Europeans
access to the same avenues of pursuing recognition. For Fraser, this is not a
utilitarian calculus based upon a comparison of benefits to the majority and
harms to the minority, but an affirmation of each group’s right to pursue
recognition on a level playing field.

Hegel on ‘Legal Status’

It is this attempt to bracket questions of the good in determining who is to be

recognized that Hegel calls into question in ‘Legal Status’, the third moment of
the 1807 Phenomenology’s dialectic of ethical life. But first, I should note that
in saying that Fraser’s principle of parity of participation falls prey to the
dialectic of legal personhood, I do not mean to imply that Fraser is concerned
primarily with legal relations. While she does advocate reforms such as state-
sanctioned gay marriage that would offer greater equality of legal recognition,
she also attacks sexism, racism, heterosexism and other sources of status
inequality that transcend the legal sphere. Nor do I believe (for what such
judgments are worth) that Hegel foresaw the specific dilemmas with which
Fraser is grappling and incorporated them into the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Instead, I maintain that the movement described in the dialectic of personhood
is constructed broadly enough that it shows an inherent limitation in the form
of recognition Fraser describes. Just as Hegel can use an abstract narrative
loosely based on ancient Rome to describe pressures faced by nineteenth
century Central and Western Europe, we can use this same narrative to reflect
upon the limitations of twenty-first century standards of justice.
The dialectic of legal status begins as an ethical community suspends the
disputes that inevitably arise from irreconcilable claims of divine justice and
learns to value its members purely as persons with no attention to individual
conceptions of the good (Hegel, 1980, p. 262, y480).6 As a flight from the
confusion of conflicting value judgments, this form of ethical community takes
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refuge in the certainty that everyone is equal. Just as Fraser wishes to bracket
beliefs about what constitutes the good life in the demand that everyone be
given an equal opportunity to participate in the society, the community fixated
on legal status brackets every deviance among its members’ religious and
ethical values. It is a community that recognizes nothing about its members but
their equal right to pursue their own ends.
If we choose to call this relation to the community ‘recognition’, then it is a
recognition of the person’s rights, not of her as a moral, talented, useful,
desirable and sinful member of the community. It is a pre-approval, a
recognition without conditions of merit, but eo ipso it is a recognition that
teaches the individual nothing about herself. Or as Hegel puts it, the legal order
makes recognition the substantiality of the person, but the form of this
recognition is too abstract for the person to appreciate (Hegel, 1980, p. 262,
y478). By recognizing the person only as equal with all other persons, the legal
order obscures the individuality for which a fully developed subject needs to be
recognized. Without this more robust form of recognition, the person is left
with an indeterminate relation to the community that oscillates between
holding herself in infinite esteem and locating all reality in the state.

Representation and the Dialectic of Legal Status

Here we should be careful to note that Fraser’s norm of participatory parity

does not demand that everyone be granted equal recognition. As we have
already seen, such a demand would be impossible to fulfill, as recognition is
always directed to the comparative worth of the recognized (Fraser and
Honneth, 2003, p. 32). Instead of an undifferentiated community in which
everyone is recognized solely for being a person, Fraser calls merely for a social
space in which everyone can pursue individual recognition on a level playing
field. But as Honneth argues (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 253), this risks
either leaving the question of who deserves recognition entirely unanswered or
sneaking some value judgments back into our account of the good. To grant a
subset of a community the right to pursue individual recognition is to give that
group a kind of recognition that does not take into account the worth and
achievements of its individuals. It is, in short, already a kind of recognition.7
Fraser contends that this inference is a distortion of the very concept of
recognition. In her words, to call the right to pursue recognition itself
recognition is to ‘stretch the concept of recognition to the breaking point’
(Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 204). If ‘recognition’ means anything in the
context of contemporary social movements, it must mean a kind of social
acceptance from a society or some important subset of it. There are many
injustices, such as stark maldistributions of wealth, that may have little to do
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with cultural acceptance and whose remedy demands not a formal recognition
but concrete redistribution of wealth. To focus on the abstract right to such
redistribution is to miss the point: justice calls not for any formal recognition
of a group or individual’s plight, but for material change. Honneth’s mistake,
according to Fraser, is assuming that societies are integrated solely on the order
of recognition. Honneth thus ignores such impersonal forces as supply chain
inefficiencies and the law of supply and demand, which can give rise to
systematic injustices regardless of how the disenfranchised may be conceived,
discussed, or addressed (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 214).
However, the very rigidity of this distinction throws Fraser back into
Honneth’s dilemma. In order to advance any concrete account of which claims
for recognition are legitimate, Fraser must at least offer a weak account of
the good. Fraser’s claim that everyone deserves the right to pursue recognition
on an equitable level implicitly assumes that this right itself is a universal
good, even if it remains neutral on whether any particular instance of esteem
or respect is universally desirable. Thus, for Honneth, the judgment that an
individual or group of individuals deserves rights of any kind is always a
(limited) form of recognition, and ignoring the plight of these individuals
is always an instance of misrecognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003,
pp. 251–252).8 It feels perfectly natural, of course, to assume that anyone
would want the right to participate equally in pursuing either goods or esteem
with other members of society, provided there was also the option of
abstaining from these pursuits. But both Hegel and Honneth argue that the
reason why this feels so natural is that the struggle for formal recognition
of equality before the law has been built into contemporary institutions. The
seemingly ahistorical demand that all people be treated equally before the law
presupposes a society whose members expect to be recognized by the law,
which, like all complex forms of recognition, can only develop through long
processes of struggle and negotiation. Fraser is always careful to note that
particular conceptions of the good and even systems for judging these
conceptions are historically contingent (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 48), but
she overlooks the fact that the demand for equality of access to further forms
of recognition is also historically contingent. As Hegel shows in the transition
to the dialectic of culture, to treat participation in a struggle for recognition as
something that can be granted indifferently to all is to ignore the very
foundation of this struggle.
This is a problem to which Fraser herself alludes in the encounter with
Honneth (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 53) and which she considers more fully
in later essays.9 Increasingly, she notes, as calls for social justice have come
from farther corners of the globe, conflicts are arising over not just how to
distribute resources or whom to recognize, but over how these disputes
are decided. With the rise of multinational corporations and anti-statist
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movements, the ‘Keynesian-Westphalian’ assumption that disagreements over

distribution and recognition are to be settled within states among fellow
citizens is becoming increasingly questionable (Fraser, 2007, p. 19). Thus, in
addition to redistribution, there must be a third axis on which individuals
deserve parity of participation: that of representation. Just as justice demands
that everyone be granted roughly equal opportunities to acquire material
wealth and social esteem, it also demands that everyone be allowed to pursue
representation in political disputes on a level playing field.
Yet because it concerns not just parity of participation in economic and
cultural matters, but the ability to make justice claims about these matters,
Fraser calls this investigation of ‘the political’ a ‘second-order’ approach to
justice that asks ‘meta-level questions: What is the proper frame within which
to consider first-order questions of justice? Who are the relevant subjects
entitled to a just distribution or reciprocal recognition in the given case?’
(Fraser, 2007, p. 19). Here it becomes clear that Fraser’s project is no longer
solely the formalist’s one of securing equal access to public goods, but instead
involves procedural issues beyond the scope of Hegelian legal status. But at
this time (at least in her published work) her treatment of this third, political
axis of justice remains mostly undeveloped. As she remains committed to the
position that recognition occupies a distinct axis of justice, she lacks Honneth’s
resources for grounding claims for political power in the modern struggle for
recognition. We are thus left wondering what kind of answers to expect from
these meta-level questions of representation that would give criteria for
equitable participation in political disputes without relying on the potentially
sectarian demands of human subjectivity. As Fraser believes that these higher-
order political questions need to be settled not just in academic debate but
among the principal agents of social movements, it is no fatal criticism to say
that she has not laid out how the norm of participatory parity would resolve
these disputes. But such questions do point to the need for a schema for
integrating the sectarian needs of disenfranchised groups into an account of
social justice, which Honneth purports to offer in his response to Fraser.

Honneth on Recognition and the Good Life

Unlike Fraser, Honneth has no scruples about building a collective striving

for the good into his endorsement of recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003,
p. 180). For Honneth, the positing of a right is in its very structure a
recognition of an individual’s neediness, legal status, or value to society
(Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 181). To assert, ‘I have rights’, is to demand that
society or a part of it recognize some aspect of my personhood. In this
declaration I express not only my formal equality with others, but a particular
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relation to society that I need for my personal integrity. I may be asserting

my right not to be incarcerated without charges, to participate in governing my
community, or to protect my property, but in each case I am making a
generalizable claim rooted in my own needs. Although Fraser is wary of
relating justice claims to individual need, such need is not irrelevant even to
formal processes of justice, as evidenced by the legal requirement of standing
in order to bring a lawsuit. According to Honneth it thus makes no sense to
speak of rights in the absence of a historical struggle to attain them. Rights are
products of historical interactions among groups or classes of people and carry
these struggles in their very structures.
Relying on Hegel’s 1802–1803 System der Sittlichkeit, Honneth identifies
three spheres of recognition as playing the most important roles in constituting
modern subjectivity. At the most basic level, people need love from parents,
friends and perhaps others in order to have a conception of who they are
and how their needs are distinct from others’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003,
p. 139). Drawing both on Hegel’s account of the family and on more recent
experiments in developmental psychology, Honneth contends that a basic sense
of security and being cared for is so essential to the development of selfhood
that a meaningful and fulfilling life is impossible without it. At the legal level,
in turn, individuals need formal recognition of their equality with others in
order to grasp the range of opportunities open to them. Without the assurance
that one (to borrow Hegel’s language) in some way counts (gilt), one lacks
the resources to choose and pursue one’s own ends. And at the highest level,
members of a community need to be recognized for their achievements (Fraser
and Honneth, 2003, p. 142). Without at least the promise that citizens
can recognize each other’s diverse achievements in a spirit of social solidarity,
it is difficult to take pride in one’s own work or to grasp how one’s activity
could come to matter.
For Honneth, these dimensions do not set universal requirements for
justice but are the ‘normative grounds’ for critique of prevailing social
patterns (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 187). Social movements come to
demand particular forms of recognition because individuals in these groups
need this recognition. These normative grounds need not entail the sorts
of shared standards of value that Taylor endorses,10 but they do appeal to
common and historically contingent needs, such as the need in late capitalist
society for a person to be perceived as contributing something valuable to
the economy. For Honneth, the ‘idea of a human psyche structurally
directed against the unreasonable demands of society’ is the only ground for
speaking meaningfully about the necessity of transgressing unjust social
practices (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 243).11 Movements for social justice
gain both their impetus and their validity from concrete experiences of
feeling disrespected. Honneth thus operates under the assumption that the
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drive for individual happiness and the effort to improve society are mutually
conditioning.12
For Fraser, this amounts to an assumption that justice claims are to be based
on a pre-political suffering that is identifiable independently of the subjective
aims of the parties involved (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 203). Yet Honneth
rejects Fraser’s claim that he presupposes some sectarian understanding of
the good in seeking to minimize affronts to stable self-relations. At most, he
contends, he offers what Rawls would call a weak idea of the good (Rawls,
2005, p. 174). He does not support institutional intervention to ensure that
people feel good about themselves, but simply argues that the conditions under
which individuals and groups demand and achieve justice are the same by
which they recognize and are recognized by others (Fraser and Honneth,
2003, p. 259). This does indeed assume something about the conditions for
human happiness, but only as much as these engagements already assume.
Recognition is not something to be valued only according to some sectarian
understanding of the good, but is built into the various ways we talk about
(and demand access to) the good. Like Fraser, he believes that ‘the goal of
social justice must be understood as the creation of social relations in which
subjects are included as full members in the sense that they can publicly
uphold and practice their lifestyles without shame or humiliation’ (Fraser and
Honneth, 2003, p. 259), but he contends that this goal is inconceivable without
at least some reference to the self-conceptions of those affected.

The Dialectic of Culture in Hegel and Honneth

Although he rejects a number of Fraser’s characterizations of his position,

Honneth nevertheless concedes that it is his position that all justice claims
must be based on the good of self-relation: ‘I take it that the reason we should
be interested in establishing a just social order is that it is only under these
conditions that subjects can attain the most undamaged possible self-relation,
and thus individual autonomy’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, pp. 258–259). This
is also the presumption of Hegel’s dialectic of culture, which immediately
follows legal status in the Phenomenology. Whereas the dialectic of ethical life
(Sittlichkeit) had taken for granted that communities are structured so that
individuals may find the maximum possible fulfillment, the discussion of
culture problematizes the individual’s relation to the community and throws
spirit into a struggle to continually reform each in order to bring about a more
perfect union. For Hegel’s predecessors (especially Fichte and Schiller), culture
(Bildung) was both a process of personal development and the external
manifestation of this development in a society at large, and thus reached its
highest development in works of fine art. In the Phenomenology Hegel
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broadens the term to include all struggle for improvement enacted in the public
sphere, and it is the externality of this publicness that ultimately limits the
forms of recognition it can offer. Here I will not be able to answer all of
Honneth’s charges that a phenomenological account of recognition cannot
account for the development of the subject,13 but I hope at least to show that
the Phenomenology offers a plausible account of the limitations of a struggle
for recognition that, like Honneth’s, pins everything on the development of
individuality.
In his concluding reflection on the development of spirit, Hegel frames this
movement as an advance through increasingly satisfying forms of recognition.
In particular, he highlights three forms that the self has taken over the course
of the chapter.14 The first shape of spirit that could properly be called a ‘self’,
as opposed to a citizen whose identity is still bound up in her ethical
community, is the person of legal order. This self is defined by nothing but
the abstract recognition of a state, and thus it defines itself as inseparable from
the universal (Hegel, 1980, p. 341, y633). As we have seen, its recognition
is secure, but empty, as there is nothing about the self that is recognized. The
second self is the self of culture, in which recognition is not immediately
given, but must be fought for. It is primarily at this level that Honneth
conceives recognition. Unlike moral self-consciousness, which Hegel identifies
as spirit’s third form of self, this second self is not guaranteed recognition as a
member of a kingdom of ends or as a part of a universal community of sinners,
but builds up a conception of itself through multiple incomplete forms of
recognition. Whereas moral self-consciousness finds itself recognized for its
capacity to act autonomously and ultimately forgiven for its sins, the self-
consciousness of culture locates its recognition in the context of a never-ending
struggle. It finds meaning in this struggle, but not the sort that can guarantee
it a full and stable relationship to itself. The section on culture itself, of course,
is long and variegated, even by the Phenomenology’s standards, but throughout
the section this pattern remains constant. Spirit attempts to find its meaning
in external markers such as political power, wealth, nobility, council, gossip,
faith, wit, utility and universal humanity, and in every case its meaning is
something external that gives the individual self its significance. Though it
would without a doubt be profitable to work through the entire section,
showing in each case how spirit’s effort to secure its selfhood through external
measures fails, here I want to focus on the passages most relevant to Honneth’s
accounts of legal and social recognition.
In discussing the need for legal recognition in order to achieve self-respect,
Honneth describes not the abstract legal recognition that Hegel’s Roman
citizen can simply take for granted, but rather the more substantial recognition
that revolutions have attempted to wrest from the state since the seventeenth
century. In the modern world, Honneth claims, legal recognition serves not
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only to help one locate one’s place in society, but to develop a basic level of
self-respect (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 140). Although it is a recognition
accorded equally to all, it expands rather than contracts one’s sense for one’s
own possibilities. Far from offering a narrow and determinate vision of what
society expects of an individual, Honneth writes in The Struggle for
Recognition, ‘the essential indeterminacy as to what constitutes the status of
a responsible person leads to a structural openness on the part of modern law
to a gradual increase in inclusivity and precision’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 110). By
presupposing that all individuals in a society will work to accommodate each
other’s basic needs, modern legal recognition treats rights as malleable and
inclusive of individual considerations of the good.15
This commitment to accommodation is what in Hegel’s account sets the
freedom of the Enlightenment apart from earlier forms of legal recognition.
In a brief passage just before his description of the ‘absolute freedom’ and
‘absolute terror’ of the French revolution, Hegel discusses the instability of a
form of culture that recognizes its members solely on the basis of their pursuit
of individualized conceptions of the good. If what is recognized is an
individual’s equal right to develop a self by positing her own ends, then what
matters is neither the individual nor the good as such, but the relation between
them (Hegel, 1980, p. 316, y582). An individual is recognized neither for simply
being who she is, nor for the nobility of her ends, but rather for her right to
come to know herself in those ends. But as this sort of recognition makes
no distinction between the ends an individual could choose, it is an empty
gesture that must be supplemented with recognition of one’s social utility.
Recognition, that is, must be split into the parallel forms of legal rights and
social esteem.
Relying on Hegel’s Jena work, Honneth suggests that this distinction
between recognition of one’s legal status and of one’s social value can be traced
back to the decline of pre-modern systems in which these measures were fused
into a single standard of social rank (Fraser and Honneth, 2003, p. 141; see
also Honneth, 1995, pp. 122–123). Once accepted and estimable actions were
no longer determined by one’s place in the social hierarchy, measures of
personal value became more fluid and greater emphasis was placed on
measures such as wealth that do not depend on complex judgments of heritage
or position. But as it can be all too obvious that wealth is a poor measure of
personal worth, other factors such as meaningful work appeared as measures
of individual value. Whereas in the pre-modern period status was won and
lost based upon relatively constant standards, the transformations of the
eighteenth century made measures of social worth themselves objects of
struggle, and ‘it is only from this point on that the subject entered the contested
field of social esteem as an entity individuated in terms of a particular
life-history’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 125). Social status was at this point no longer
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just a variable measure of one’s worth, but a realm in which one could define
and redefine oneself as a subject. As such, this transition established a
‘permanent struggle, in which different groups attempt, by means of symbolic
force and with reference to general goals, to raise the value of the abilities
associated with their way of life’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 127). For Honneth, in the
modern world social recognition is never something merely given, but is always
won, and even the most basic social actions are founded on this battle.
Similarly, Hegel traces the emergence of wealth and work as estimable
pursuits from the breakdown of pre-modern institutions of nobility. In the
absence of a single scale that would assign recognition simultaneously by legal
rank and social standing, culture treats both political power and wealth as
worthy pursuits and ultimately finds no reason to prefer one to the other
(Hegel, 1980, p. 272, y499). In a certain sense, Hegel grants, work on behalf
of the state may be seen as the ‘absolute heart of the matter [Sache selbst]’
(Hegel, 1980, p. 270, y494) in that it works to preserve the ability of all citizens
to pursue their ends, but to the extent that state employees are functionaries
like any others, all careers, whether public or private, come to be held in
roughly equal esteem; every pursuit is one Sache selbst among others.16 The
term Sache selbst, which Miller translates alternately as ‘matter in hand’ and
‘heart of the matter’, recalls a moment in the dialectic of reason in which
active reason becomes so caught up in its individual project that its recognition
of other projects is bland and insincere.17 Here in the dialectic of culture the
emphasis is on communal recognition of the individual rather than an
individual’s recognition of others, but the result is the same. With no universal
criterion for what constitutes noble human action, various factions, which
appear first as the state and wealth, then as the nobility and the bourgeoisie,
and finally as the absolute monarch and his subjects, are left with no recourse
but to fight over which spheres of life deserve recognition. Without an
underlying assumption for which of these claims has merit, however, the results
of these struggles are subject to the vagaries of history and yield no lasting
concept of just recognition. Thus, what is lacking in such an account that
attempts to ground recognition in historical struggles is precisely what Fraser
alleges: an independent standard of justice.
Paul Ricoeur reflects on this dilemma in The Course of Recognition, where he
notes that a recognition that, like Honneth’s, must be won or earned tends to
dissolve into a vortex of suspicion and counter-suspicion. For Ricoeur, the
only solution to this dilemma is an unexpected gift, which, by suspending
the hostility and suspicion of the struggle, creates a ‘state of peace’ in which
mutual recognition is at least temporarily possible (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 242). But
as such generous gestures could always be part of a larger nefarious strategy,
the possibility of suspicion remains, and the state of peace will always be
temporary. For Hegel, on the other hand, mutual recognition without struggle
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can actually be found in the moral self-consciousness. The unsatisfied and

divided self of culture finds its fulfillment when a community of self-
consciousnesses decides that despite the inevitability of their respective
trespasses – and indeed, precisely because of it – all members of the community
deserve to be recognized without condition. Hegel has much more to say
about the need to develop this commitment through religion and then to
‘sacrifice’ spirit’s dependence on another in order to define itself (Hegel, 1980,
p. 433, y807), but he never renounces the need for morality’s form of
recognition in addition to those of legal personhood and culture. Just as the
incompleteness of abstract legal recognition points to the need for a form
of recognition that values individual considerations of the good, the
incompleteness of a form of recognition based on struggle points to the need
for a recognition beyond the dialectic of culture.

Preserving Fraser’s and Honneth’s Insights

None of this should be taken to imply that Hegel ‘wins’ the debate with Fraser
and Honneth. Indeed, if the Phenomenology shows the limitation of each side’s
approach to recognition, it also shows its necessity. This can be seen both
abstractly, in Hegel’s contention that absolute knowing must preserve each
moment of spirit as essential to its image of itself (Hegel, 1980, p. 433, y808),
and concretely, in his endorsement of positions very similar to those of Fraser
and Honneth. On the one hand, Fraser is right to call for a way to adjudicate
competing claims for recognition. While the abstract assurance that one’s
group has the right to participate in society equally with other groups is not
likely to be sufficient to overcome a sense of alienation, standards like Fraser’s
principle of participatory parity are necessary to distinguish genuine from
opportunistic attempts by groups to gain recognition in the public sphere.
Honneth, on the other hand, is right that Fraser offers no way to explain
why people need recognition and thus to develop institutions that can help
build sovereign selves. By contextualizing demands for recognition within
historical struggles, Honneth offers a way to understand the multitude of needs
behind any call for recognition. Whereas Hegel offers a more complete account
of the various forms of recognition stable subjectivity demands, both Fraser
and Honneth take the additional step of exploring how to put this demand
into practice.
The theoretical import of Fraser and Honneth’s respective insights on
recognition can be seen perhaps most clearly by comparing them to an
alternative account that downplays the importance of recognition in the
development of spirit. In a provocative and cogent essay, Saul Tobias argues
that whenever recognition plays a role in the Phenomenology what matters
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most is not the recognition itself, but the self-determination that may or may
not follow from it (Tobias, 2006–2007, p. 103). In the dialectics of master and
slave, reason, ethical life and culture, recognition does indeed play a role in
spirit’s development, but mainly in pointing out spirit’s limitations. The real
work of spirit is the self-transformation it undertakes in response to these
limitations (Tobias, 2006–2007, p. 114). What is carried through in the master–
slave dialectic, for instance, is not the master’s obsession with being recognized,
but the slave’s realization that he can shape his world through his own activity
(Tobias, 2006–2007, p. 123).
But in his extensive work on Hegel and the politics of recognition Robert
Williams has shown that Hegel adopted the Fichtean position that free self-
determination is itself constituted by recognition (Williams, 1992, 1997). Like
Fichte and the early Schelling, the Hegel of the Phenomenology maintains that
spirit’s freedom can only be awakened by the ‘summons’ (Aufforderung) of the
other and is only fulfilled through mutual recognition. Although Tobias is right
that the laboring activity of the slave shows that not all self-determination
involves an explicit reference to another self-consciousness (Tobias, 2006–2007,
p. 113), one of the primary lessons of the Phenomenology is that self-
determination is impossible without multiple levels of recognition. We cannot
separate recognition as a mere initial step toward self-determination, because
what Hegel calls ‘authentic [eigentlichen] recognition’ is a concrete engagement
with the other as other (Hegel, 1980, p. 113, y191). Recognition cannot be
merely a spur to further self-knowledge because self-knowledge must take the
very form of recognition. To the extent that self-consciousness believes it can
conceive itself separately from its other, it fails to know itself at all.
If this were merely a terminological dispute, then Tobias’s distinction
between ‘recognition’ as the manifestation of intersubjective reciprocity and
‘self-determination’ as the driving force of spirit’s self-knowledge would be a
useful distinction that, if not entirely borne out by the text, at least accords
with the spirit of Hegel’s argument. But there are political implications of
Tobias’s position that run counter to what Hegel shows in the dialectic of
culture. Addressing the kinds of claims for group identity recognition that have
driven Fraser, Honneth and others to emphasize the importance of recognition
in Hegel’s thought, Tobias grants that racial minorities and women in the
United States have made significant progress toward cultural and political
recognition, but argues, ‘While the resulting strength, confidence, and sense of
identity enabled these communities to engage publicly with the wider
hegemonic discourses of racism and sexism, and to demand the recognition
they believed was guaranteed by the Constitution, this call for recognition
would have likely gone unanswered had these groups not, in a sense, “freed”
themselves by their own efforts’ (Tobias, 2006–2007, p. 122). The point that
recognition in the absence of struggle can ring hollow is an important one, and
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one that Hegel emphasized in his 1827–1828 version of the master–slave

dialectic (Hegel, 1996, p. 173) and Fanon made central to his mobilization of
Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 1967, p. 217).18 But to treat the
struggle itself as the accomplishment is to miss one of Hegel’s central insights
regarding recognition. To the extent that it is merely a product of unilateral
striving, it lacks the reconciliatory structure of forgiveness found in moral self-
consciousness. Recognition is not just the greedy demand of the master
(Tobias, 2006–2007, p. 123), but is a ground of spirit’s very openness to self-
knowledge and intersubjective development. It is not just a prize to be won, but
a gift that grows each time it is offered.
In this regard, at least, Fraser and Honneth’s approaches to recognition are
both of a piece with Hegel’s. Both openly subscribe to the doctrine that
discourses on justice have ‘surplus validity’ – that as a given conception of just
recognition takes root in a community the number of people and practices it
recognizes will tend to expand. Although moments of Hegel’s system are often
portrayed as irreconcilable and invariably separated by revolutions,
Hegel argues repeatedly that these moments appear alongside one another in
history and develop in parallel rather than serially.19 It thus would be deeply
un-Hegelian to contend that the insufficiency of these two accounts of
recognition implies they should be eliminated. Rather, all three philosophers
are on the same ‘team’ in pushing for broader, more inclusive and more
forgiving conceptions of recognition. In the contemporary political context, the
least inadequate name for this team is probably ‘progressivism’, but given the
resistance we have seen in all three thinkers to an overly teleological conception
of history, we should be careful not to assume that such progressivism implies
an identifiable goal toward which society is progressing. A progressivism
interested in recognizing differences must be sensitive to multiple visions of
the future and cannot claim for itself any epistemological primacy on where the
future of recognition is headed. The kind of work that Fraser and Honneth
are engaged in is indispensible for such progressivism, because the more
determinately the grounds for a claim for recognition can be specified, the
more clearly we can understand the irreducible multiplicity of ways that
recognition contributes to human life.
But although Fraser and Honneth both make allowances for these multiple
roles that recognition plays – Fraser by tracing the variety of forms of status
subordination and Honneth by naming love, legality and solidarity as the
primary arenas in which recognition is pursued, each remains tied to a
particular conception of the place of recognition in political philosophy, and
thus closes off the kinds of questions that the other asks. Hegel’s
Phenomenology provides a model for asking both sorts of questions without
treating either as absolute. In this way, I contend, it helps expand the debate in
a direction that both Fraser and Honneth would want: an ever-increasing
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receptiveness to the freedom of the other that supersedes any particular

conception of what it means to be recognized.

Notes

1 For a discussion of Fraser’s emphasis on recognition as a sociological rather than psychological

or cultural category, see Zurn (2003, p. 522).
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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).
8 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).
9 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.

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10 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.
11 See Lovell (2007, p. 70) for a critique of this position.
12 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).
13 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.
14 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.
15 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).
16 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).
17 For more on the Sache Selbst, see Shapiro (1998) and C. Lauer (2006–2007).
18 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.
19 See, for instance, Hegel (1980, p. 365, y679), where Hegel argues that unlike the moments of
religion, previous moments of spirit appear simultaneously, and Hegel (1980, p. 433, y808),
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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