Decency and the Struggle for Recognition

[Review Essay: Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The

Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press,
1996), xxii + 215 pp.; Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), xi -i- 304 pp.]

These two books, very different in both style and substance, are
nevertheless linked by their character as theories of social criticism.
I do not mean by tiiis that they are works of substantive social
critique in the way that Dialectic of Enlightenment or Discipline and
Punish are, but rather that they outline normative frameworks and
furnish conceptual tools for the formulation of critical judgments on
society and politics. Moreover, both texts represent a search for a
"realistic" normative stance in moral and political theory.' "Realism"
is of course a highly ambiguous and often dubious notion, but I use
it here simply as a convenient label for the following two features
of The Struggle for Recognition (hereafter "SR") and The Decent
Society (hereafter "DS"): (1) they both seek to anchor normative
theory to ethical concepts in everyday use; (2) they apply a kind of
"negative moral psychology" to social and political theory by
reflecting on the normative significance of experiences of injury,
humiliation, and misrecognitibn. In my view, these two aspects of
Axel Honneth's and Avishai Margalit's approaches suggest ways of
achieving a hard-headed awareness of the moral significance of injury
and forms of evil without thereby swamping normative commitment
and reflection in a despairing cynicism, or alternatively, averting the
theoretical gaze from suffering and cruelty in favor of a high-minded
evocation of moral ideals in its way equally stifling of moral
reflection. These two strategies—cynical non-normative realism and
blinkered moral sentimentalism—seem to constitute standing temp-
tations for social criticism, and The Decent Society and The Struggle
for Recognition are important precisely because they suggest ways
of resisting these temptations.
Another reason for calling attention to these works is that they
are representative of a turn in theories of social criticism away from
Copyright 1998 by Social Theory and Practice. Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 1998)

449
450 Jonathan Allen

an exclusive concern with material exploitation and domination,

unjust distributions of goods, and physical injury, to injuries to
people's sense of honor, self-respect, and dignity. This concern leads
Honneth and Margalit to formulate conceptions of human identity
that account for both the vulnerability to humiliation and refusals to
grant recognition, and the moral significance and nature of these
types of threats.
I have therefore chosen to review three aspects of these texts. I
begin by discussing the issues relating to the intersubjective character
of human selves and the consequent moral importance of recognition.
In the second section of the essay, I turn firstly to the accounts of
the moral significance of forms of injury, humiliation, and misrec-
ognition and then conclude by assessing the social ideals constructed
from the raw materials of people's sense of injury and humiliation.

1. Intersubjectivity and Recognition

Both Margalit and Honneth focus their theories of social criticism
on non-material forms of injury—on damage to people's sense of
basic integrity, to their social honor or self-esteem, and to their sense
of self-respect. Margalit tends to concentrate on the third type of
injury, which he terms "humiliation," while Honneth distinguishes
these three forms of injury and attempts to establish the human need
for the corresponding positive forms of recognition. Both agree that
human beings can be justifiably said to suffer injury from refusals
to grant them certain kinds of recognition. But how is this claim to
be justified against a skeptical challenge—against, for example, Marie
de Sevigne's claim that "[t]here is no real ill in life except severe
bodily pain; everything else is the child of imagination" (D5, p.
87)? On this view, only physical cruelty or perhaps the infliction of
some obvious material harm could count as legitimate objects of
social criticism. The suspicion may be, as it is in de Sevigne's case,
that the notion of psychological or emotional injury is an improper
analogy drawn from the case of physical suffering, and invariably
functions to prevent people from confronting their own self-indul-
gence and lack of control. Alternatively, as in Judith Shklar's case,
the suspicion can be prompted by fears that attempts to portray the
main concern of (liberal) politics as a commitment to the reduction
of humiliation or moral cruelty may detract from its central task,
which is the reduction of the summum malum, physical cruelty.
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 451

An initial response to this issue is suggested by Margalit. Arguing

against Shklar, Margalit insists that while it may be true that in the
short run people generally prefer being humiliated over being
assaulted or tortured, this hardly means that it is their "clear prefer-
ence" in the long run. Moreover, humiliation is often accompanied
by the infliction of physical pain, and "scars of humiliation" may
heal more slowly and with greater difficulty than physical scars.
Humiliation, he suggests, is part of the meaning of cruelty for human
beings—it is the distinctively human form of cruelty.
But why is this the case? Margalit suggests some answers at a
later stage of his argument. Before turning to these, I want to examine
Honneth's response, which essentially elaborates the causes of
human vulnerability to forms of misrecognition. Although he does
not respond directly to this question, I think that his theory of the
intersubjectivity of the human self may be interpreted as an implicit
attempt to deal with the kind of skeptical challenge sketched above.
Very roughly, in Honneth's work, the notion of intersubjectivity
is intended to signal the human need for relations with other human
beings, not merely for purposes of physical survival or material
cooperation, but also for achieving a distinctively human sense of
self. This seems to mean two things for Honneth. Most obviously,
it means that human beings need the validation or approval of others
in order to have a sense of self-trust or self-worth. Second, this
should not be thought to mean that we go about seeking approval
of our pre-social identities, but rather that it is only th-ough the
experience of interaction with others and the gradual process of
learning to adopt or represent their views of ourselves and our
conduct that we are able to have any sense of self at all. As George
Herbert Mead claims, prior to the act of importing the sense of the
"me"—the self which I reveal to others in a particular interaction—
into my inner life, that inner life is simply chaotic, and I cannot be
said to be conscious of myself at all. As my circle of communicative
partners grows, so my sense of individuation becomes more refined
and complex. By the same token, my sense of self becomes
increasingly dependent on the presence of these social interactions,
or conditions of recognition.
According to Honneth, we are entitled to talk about three forms
of social interaction relevant to the issue of recognition. First, there
are relations of intimacy or love (familial or non-familial), in which
needs and emotions are accorded the recognition of emotional support,
which in turn gives rise to a relation to self of basic self-trust.
452 Jonathan Allen

Conversely, misrecognition involves abuse and assault, but is not

confined to the physical dimension—it affects our capacity to identify
our needs as our own and to express them without fear. This type
of recognition is relatively static, according to Honneth; although
changes in relationships of intimacy do occur, it remains true across
time and cultures that the recognition of love and the capacity to
trust oneself are preconditions for self-realization in any community.
On the other hand, the remaining two forms of recognition—legal
recognition and the recognition of "solidarity" or social esteem—
have changed significantly over time. In legal recognition, our
universal dignity as persons is recognized, and this facilitates a sense
of self-respect, a sense of being "morally responsible" agents capable
of acting autonomously on the basis of reasons. Honneth claims that
this type of legal recognition has succeeded traditional, hierarchical
conceptions of legal relations in which status or social honor are
recognized. In the course of the last two centuries, the notion that
legal recognition must be directed toward all human subjects equally,
by virtue of the capacity for reasoned action shared equally by all,
has become the dominant conception of recognition expressed in
law. Honneth argues that legal recognition has undergone two further
developments since the nineteenth century. First, it has been extended
to an increasingly large number of people. Second, under pressure
from struggles for recognition, the "background assumptions"
concerning the preconditions for the exercise of the capacity to act
autonomously have changed and the features of moral personality
regarded as relevant to "rational will-formation" have become more
extensive, and consequently, the content of rights has expanded.
Drawing on the work of T.H. Marshall, Honneth points to the
historical shift from political rights to social rights, which, he
suggests, has resulted from an understanding that certain basic
conditions of social and economic welfare are required for human
agents to exercise their capacity for moral autonomy and self-reali-
zation. He concludes that "to recognize one another as legal persons
means more today than it possibly could have at the start of the
evolution of modem law" (SR, p. 117).
Finally, there is a third type of (post-traditional) recognition that
emerges in modem states. According to Honneth, while modern legal
recognition has succeeded traditional, hierarchical forms of social
esteem, in a sense this process has resulted in an ethical vacuum,
since modem legal recognition, by definition, cannot provide social
esteem for people's specific qualities and achievements. Instead,
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 453

individuals must stmggle to have the value of their particular qualities

and contributions to society accorded social esteem. This can be
acquired in "communities of value" (Honneth seems to be thinking
primarily of social movements here), and when successfully secured,
gives rise to a sense of self-esteem. Misrecognition here takes the
form of denigration of ways of life and insults. Honneth suggests
that in modem societies, there exists a variety of ways of life or
communities of value in which individuals can obtain the recognition
of social esteem and consequently a strong sense of their individual
value. A condition of " social solidarity" may be said to obtain when
"every member of a society is in a position to esteem himself or
herself (5/?, p. 129). Honneth regards such a pluralistic condition
of post-traditional, democratic "solidarity" as a necessary precondi-
tion of self-realization, and he seems to regard social commitment
to such a condition as more demanding than the liberal ideal of
toleration.
Honneth's account of the last type of recognition is particularly
controversial, and I want to offer an assessment of it in the final
section of this review. But I want to concentrate here on whether
his account of legal recognition and self-respect succeeds in defiecting
the skeptical objection concerning the validity of depicting non-physi-
cal injuries as injuries. Honneth does, I think, offer a more detailed
account than Margalit of how physical injury is closely linked to a
loss of self-tmst as a result of the close connection between our
sense of self-respect and our sense of bodily integrity. Moreover, his
claim that self-esteem can be damaged by insult or denigration of
one's way of life would seem to be obviously tme as an empirical
matter. Honneth devotes a great deal of energy to demonstrating,
through appeals to object-relations psychology and Mead's social
psychology that it is true as an empirical matter that insults can
adversely affect our sense of the value of our way of life or actions.
But the normative status of his claim that self-respect is adversely
affected by exclusion or denial of rights seems much less well
established.
It is presumably the case that as a matter of fact individuals often
experience a diminution of self-respect as a result of being denied
their rights or being excluded by others from the category of morally
responsible persons, just as it is surely tme that individuals' sense
of the value of their abilities and social contributions can be seriously
damaged if those abilities and contributions do not meet with approval
or recognition from the society of which they are members. But
454 Jonathan Allen

should their sense of their value be affected by the opinions or

actions of others, morally speaking? A distinction introduced by
Margalit is relevant here: people may be caused to feel humiliated
and have sound reasons for feeling this way, but they may also feel
humiliated without sound reasons (or indeed, have sound reasons for
feeling humiliated without actually feeling humiliation). The causal
or factual question can be established by historical studies or by
some or other branch of the social sciences, and Winnicott's
object-relations psychology and Mead's social psychology may indeed
be relevant to this task. But the issue of sound reasons is a distinct,
normative and philosophical question.
It is not hard, for example, to imagine a die-hard Nietzschean,
Sartrean individualist, or Stoic conceding that, as a matter of fact,
human beings need the approval of others and are riddled with
anxiety when they do not receive it, but then going on to condemn
this response as inauthentic or as a failure to see that human dignity
is intrinsic and that self-respect cannot properly be lost as a result
of the dispositions of others. This objection is not explicitly
addressed by Honneth. For Margalit, however, it is central, given
his concem with identifying sound reasons for feeling humiliated.
The "Stoic challenge," as he formulates it, involves (1) the thought
that self-respect is bestowed by virtue of the person's status as a
human being, and not as the result of the validation of others; (2)
the argument that self-respect, as implied by the term, is respect that
depends "upon the person's own self (DS, pp. 24-25). This is in
fact a stronger claim than the original skeptical objection to regarding
psychological injury as injury, since it suggests that an autarchic
individual ought not to be affected at all in her sense of self-respect
by the dispositions or actions of others. On this view, not even
physical cruelty could justifiably be said to diminish my dignity or
self-respect.
Honneth's discussion of legal recognition and self-respect often
seems torn, presumably as a result of some unarticulated sense of
this problem. On the one hand, he insists that self respect refers to
the sense of having the universal dignity of moral agency. This is
necessarily true of all human beings as moral agents. On the other
hand, he claims that a necessary precondition for self-respect is the
legal recognition accorded in rights. He attempts to reduce the tension
between these two claims by asserting that one can indeed have
self-respect without being recognized as the bearer of rights, but that
one's full sense of self-respect depends on being included in the
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 455

category of legal persons. However, he also wants to say that the

meaning and content of this recognition change over time and across
cultures, which suggests that the idea of a full sense of self-respect
is empty or Utopian, unless one is confident of being able to specify
the final meaning or end-point to which the development of legal
recognition is tending. Honneth does not offer a conception of human
dignity that would resolve this paradox and allow him to accommo-
date both the thought that people's sense of self-respect is justifiably
affected by the dispositions and actions of others, and the desire to
resist the idea that human dignity is simply dependent on the
willingness of others to include one in the category of those they
happen to regard as morally responsible persons.
Margalit, on the other hand, proposes several responses to the
Stoic challenge, at different stages of his argument. The first is to
call into question the Stoic's sharp distinction between the inner life
of the self and external experience. Drawing on Nietzsche, Margalit
points out that the attempt to ignore the importance of the "outside"
for determining one's attitudes is not a free act of self-affirmation,
but is rather a defense mechanism that stems from a lack of social
confidence, a form of resentment directed against others. If this view
is correct, the Stoic outlook does not free one from the need for
recognition by others, but is rather a response prompted by failure
to secure recognition and as such is a form of "slave" morality that
actually internalizes the attitude of the "master." I am thus driven
to act harshly towards myself, to control my impulses and actions
rigidly, just as the "master" seeks to do to me (DS, pp. 24-27). At
a later stage of his argument, Margalit identifies a number of
strategies that victims develop in order to discount or ignore the
attitudes of their victimizers—for example, dehumanizing the
tormentors (e.g., regarding them as mere "barking dogs") or tuming
what has functioned as a badge of shame into a badge of honor
(e.g., saying that "black is beautiful," or by appropriating the term
"fag," etc.). Margalit points out that these strategies cannot in fact
remove humiliation but at best mitigate it.
Part of Margalit's thought here seems to be the view sketched
above—viz., that responses that fall short of being active assertions
of dignity are in a sense parasitic on the attitude of the victimizer
and in fact intemalize that attitude. But there is a more radical and
disturbing thought at work here also. Unlike Honneth, Margalit is
wary of positive justifications of human dignity that appeal to a
characteristic or set of characteristics—for example, the capacity to
456 Jonathan Allen

act morally/autonomously on the basis of reasons. Such justifications

tend (a) to refer to capacities that can be ranked, and that therefore
justify according more respect to some than to others, and (b) to be
vulnerable to abuse—for example, the capacity for autonomous action
can be exercised for despicable ends. Although he does not dismiss
positive justifications for respect (and in fact frequently appeals to
the human capacity to reevaluate and change one's life at any
moment), Margalit does not wish to rely on them. Rather, he advances
in addition a skeptical and a negative justification of respect.
The skeptical justification suggests that "human beings have value
because others value them, and not because of any prior characteristic
that justifies such valuing" (DS, p. 77). It is this thought that makes
it possible for Margalit to show that a sense of injured self-respect
can be normatively justified. On this view, humiliation, understood
as rejection from the "human commonwealth," is not merely a
symbolic act, but "a signal of existential rejection that is not symbolic
at all" (D5, p. 122). What is so serious about such an attitude of
rejection is that, because respect is based on our attitude to human
beings as human, rejection of this sort "erodes the base on which
respect is founded" (DS, p. 124). As Margalit explains, "the attitude
of others, however base they may be, is required for determining
what defines the commonwealth of mankind—a commonwealth that
there is value in belonging to" (DS, p. 125). Moreover, "respect"
is itself a comparative concept. If I had no experience of what it
means to respect others, or be respected by them, it would be
meaningless and self-deceptive for me to claim to "respect" myself.
The specter that this raises is that of "attitude-racism"—the view
of a racist who justifies his racist disposition towards all non-members
of his group merely by reference to the fact that they are "outside,"
rather than to any supposedly inferior or negative characteristics.
The attitude-racist, in other words, justifies his racism simply by
invoking the fact of his group's attitude of respect for its members,
and lack of respect for non-members. While a skeptical account of
the grounds of respect for human beings that sees it as based on
human valuations can account for cases of justified humiliation, does
it have any resources for responding to the attitude-racist, or is it
forced to condone such a position? One response from within the
skeptical position, according to Margalit, is that respecting all human
beings regardless of the group they belong to is "the attitude that
best fits our moral judgments" (DS, p. 82). This attitude gives the
greatest degree of coherence to our moral judgments. But, in addition.
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 457

there is a last-ditch response suggested by the negative justification

for respecting human beings. The negative justification is simply
based on the idea that human beings are capable of suffering as a
result of acts with symbolic meaning. Cruelty is the ultimate evil,
and the core of morality is the prevention of cruelty. Thus, treating
people in a nonhumiliating way is at the heart of morality, and this
requires no additional justification. As Margalit observes, "The
requirement of eradicating all cruelty, including humiliation, does
not require any moral justification in its tum, since the paradigm
example of moral behaviour is behaviour that prevents cruelty. This
is where justification comes to an end" (D5, p. 88).
For Margalit, the sense of humiliation is justified when, through
physical or psychological means, one is treated as nonhuman,
excluded from the "human commonwealth," or deprived of one's
sense of control (these are three related senses of humiliation, rather
than three different meanings of the term). If I understand him
correctly, Margalit thinks that the key concept for understanding
humiliation is rejection from the human commonwealth. Depriving
people of a sense of control and treating them as nonhuman are
ways of achieving the goal of excluding them from humanity—they
make the task of rejection or exclusion easier to achieve. As William
Hazlitt once observed, when we have "taken away the character"
of a racial group or class, "there is no degree of turpitude or injustice
that we may not introduce into the measures and treatment which
we consider as most fit for them"
Margalit believes that although victimizers often talk of members
of the groups that they hate as "animals" or "beasts," it is not easy
to see people as nonhuman—indeed, in a sense, it is impossible.
The most that can be achieved is to see human beings as subhuman
(as children who will never grow up, for example); even where
references are made to a class of human beings as animals, one
usually finds other claims conceming the class that implicitly
recognize capacities distinct from characteristics of animals. For
example, even Heinrich Himmler, in his speech to SS commandants
at Poznan, recognizes that killing Jews is not the same as killing
animals, but requires a special kind of "heroism" and suppression
of natural feelings. Margalit proposes a kind of faith that "even
settings horrifying in their cruelty betray the fact that the people in
charge know very well that they are dealing with human beings"
{DS, p. 112).
458 Jonathan Allen

I take it that some will not be satisfied with this claim of faith.
I concede that it has to be complicated by a sense of the extent to
which victimizers can compartmentalize their lives and act in a kind
of routinized, instrumentalizing mode in which their victims appear
to them, if they appear at all, merely as background, or as material
to be worked upon.^ But I think that Margalit is essentially correct
in thinking that rejection is not completely realizable. I don't mean
to claim that much comfort or security is to be derived from that
thought. Terrible cruelty and humiliation are possible short of the
zero-point of complete rejection. In fact, they may be more inventive
short of that point, as victimizers hone in on what they recognize
as typically human vulnerabilities and foibles. In George Orwell's
1984, O'Brien is a more effective torturer precisely because he can
identify and understand Winston's all too human fears and weak-
nesses: recognition does not automatically result in sympathy. Still,
the view that even victimizers have a sense that they cannot fully
repress that they are dealing with human beings seems to me to be
correct. This sense, ambiguous though it may be, is the last line of
defense against humiliation. Unless its moral force can be recognized
by someone, it is hardly credible to suppose that philosophical
arguments identifying positive grounds for respect will succeed. The
common ground needed for the conversation to proceed would simply
be lacking in such a case.
Embodied in these claims is a modest, Humean sense of the role
of philosophy and its relations to sentiments and passions which I
find attractive. But this is not the place to argue that point.^ All that
I want to claim here, before addressing the second question raised
by Margalit's and Honneth's work, is that Margalit's account of why
human beings need some kinds of positive recognition by others
succeeds in doing two things that Honneth's theory of recognition
does not. First, he gives an unequivocal answer to the challenge
launched by the Stoic concerning the normative status of human
interdependence. Honneth is prevented from doing this by his
tendency to present his conception of intersubjectivity as an
"empirical" view. Although it might well be possible to develop this
conception normatively, Honneth does not do so. Second, Margalit's
account provides us with a set of reasons for respecting the dignity
of human beings, while at the same time reminding us of the sources
of human vulnerability to disrespect and the potentially devastating
effects of humiliation. As a result of his exclusive reliance on a
positive justification for respecting human beings—that is, an appeal
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 459

to universal human capacities which, in principle, cannot be

lost—Honneth has difficulty in bringing these two thoughts into
equilibrium with each other. Margalit's additional use of the skeptical
and negative justifications of respect, in my judgment, accounts for
the moral enormity of humiliation as exclusion from the human
community, while at the same time refusing to accept the fact of
humiliation as utterly destructive of the bases of the sentiment of
respect.

2. Accentuating the Negative: Putting Humiliation and

Disrespect First
A common feature of The Struggle for Recognition and The Decent
Society is what I referred to earlier as their attempt to formulate a
normative approach to politics that is nevertheless "realistic,"
sensitive to the presence of cruelty and suffering in human lives. A
distinctive element of this approach is the importance it attributes
to investigating the moral significance of suffering and humiliation
and the moral psychology of these experiences in the case of both
victim and victimizer. The question that I think arises concerning
this feature of these books is: how is this exploration or "mapping"
of negative moral experiences and phenomena related to the
formulation and articulation of positive moral ideals, if indeed it is
related at all?
This question has both psychological and conceptual components.
The psychological component concerns whether the dispositions
required to "gaze unflinchingly" at evil are compatible with any
kind of moral idealism. Close attention to evils may be thought to
encourage a kind of nihilistic skepticism, a moral nausea that makes
it increasingly difficult for the investigator to repose any confidence
in the activity of formulating ideals or in their presence and efficacy
in social life. I think that this is in fact often the case, but I also
think that, difficult though the task is, some observers do succeed
in holding these two projects together and that one should therefore
not conclude that there is an absolute disjunction between the
sensibilities required for them.
The question also involves a conceptual component concerning
the logical relations between negative and positive moral concepts.
It has been the habit of the greater number of moral philosophers
in this century to focus on positive concepts such as "good," "right,"
"duty," "obligation," "virtue," and so on. For the most part, phil-
460 Jonathan Allen

osophers have tended to ignore evils, wrongs, injuries, and vices,

and have rather assumed that these negative moral phenomena may
be regarded simply as the absence of the positive. By contrast, in
some forms of social criticism (Fanon, Sartre, Foucault), the graphic
depiction and denunciation of evils seems to take precedence over
the formulation and discussion of moral ideals, and strong claims
are sometimes made about the need to focus on and combat evils
rather than engage in normative discussion. It is one of the strengths
of The Struggle for Recognition and The Decent Society that they
seek to avoid both approaches, and do in fact succeed in staking
out a position between these two poles. Both Margalit and Honneth
agree that there is something to be gained by paying attention to
negative moral experiences and concepts—something that would
otherwise have been missed—and that this can contribute to our
understandings of notions of dignity, integrity, respect, and so on.
For Honneth, it is valuable to investigate phenomena of misrec-
ognition or disrespect for two reasons. First, this anchors our
normative discussions in the "everyday use of language," thereby
preventing our discussions from becoming too abstract or detached
from people's everyday experience, and sensitizing us to people's
frustrated sense of dignity or justice as a potential source of social
change. Second, by alerting us to human vulnerability to psycho-
logical evils such as disrespect and insult, it demonstrates the
importance of the three forms of recognition (intimate, legal, and
that of solidarity). In an article written in 1982, Honneth suggests
that, typically, the "suppressed classes" do not articulate systems of
consistent normative convictions, but nevertheless possess a strong
"unwritten morality" or "consciousness of injustice." Criticizing
Jiirgen Habermas's attempt to center his critical theory of society on
a procedural ethics of discourse for its tendency to concentrate only
on claims that have reached the level of "elaborated value
judgments," Honneth argues that a critical theory of society must
be sensitive to the emancipatory potential of people's fragmentary
consciousness of injustice (FWS, p. 206-8). In a more recent comment
on this article, he glosses it by claiming that the consciousness of
injustice and the experience of disregard for identity claims constitute
the prescientific instances of the theory of the struggle for recognition,
and point not only towards a diagnosis of society but also to a
"concept of the person that is capable of explaining how the claim
upon the recognition of one's own identity is anchored within the
particular subject" (FWS, p. xxiii). Honneth's claim is that his theory
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 461

of recognition allows us to find both of our moral feet, so to speak—it

permits us to place one foot in the experience of disrespect and the
struggles that result from this experience, while setting the other in
the ideals of respect and self-realization that form the positive aspect
of the theory of the struggle for recognition. The identification of
negative experiences implies the positive ideal, and we move naturally
from the former to the latter in our theoretical elaborations.
Honneth's theory of the struggle for recognition is valuable in
two respects. First, it avoids the tendency of theories of recognition
to concentrate either on the feature of struggle or on the aspect of
social recognition. Two examples of this tendency are furnished by
Alexandre Kojeve's emphasis on the life-and-death-struggle between
master and slave as the basic model of recognition on the one hand,
and Tzvetan Todorov's counter-proposal of the benign model of the
love-relation between "mother" and "chUd" on the other hand.^
While Kojeve clearly seems to exaggerate the violent character of
recognition, Todorov completely neglects the agonistic aspect of the
search for recognition. By contrast, Honneth is successful in drawing
attention both to the aspect of struggle and to the normative elements
associated with recognition. Second, this enables him to avoid the
disturbing tendency to valorize struggle, violence, and authentic
self-assertion that is often evident in the work of theorists of
recognition. Thinkers whose central aim is to offer a "neutral"
presentation of the conflictual and manipulative nature of human
relationships frequently slide from this into a celebration of struggle.^
Perhaps this is because it is inherently difficult to maintain a neutral
poise in the face of violence and human suffering. In any case,
whatever the reasons may be, the phenomenon is not unusual.
Once again, the advantage of Honneth's approach is that while
he calls attention to frustrated expectations of respect and honor as
a source of social confiicts and clearly thinks that struggles for
recognition are necessary and desirable, he never suggests that
struggle is valuable in itself, or a unique source of self-authentication.
On the contrary, he takes Georges Sorel to task for failing to
distinguish between the self-assertion of a group aimed at securing
honor, and the "violation of expectations associated with autonomy"
(SR, p. 155). The latter results in a struggle for legal recognition,
and this form of recognition has to constrain the assertion of
group-based values. Honneth makes a similar criticism of Jean-Paul
Sartre: Sartre, he claims, "failed to draw an analytically clear line
between law-based and law-transcending forms of mutual recognition
462 Jonathan Allen

. . . [and therefore] could not avoid confounding the pursuit of

self-realization and the pursuit of an expansion of rights . . ." (SR,
p. 158; FWS, p. 165).
While I think that Honneth's approach allows him to avoid the
disadvantages and dangers of concentrating either on the positive
goals of recognition or on an ethically evacuated notion of struggle,
I also believe that he misses out on some of the theoretical advantages
to be gained from analyzing negative moral concepts and experiences
by moving too quickly from the negative to the positive. It is striking,
for example, that the chapter on "Personal Identity and Disrespect,"
which sketches three forms of injury (violation of the body, denial
of rights, and denigration of ways of life) is just eight pages
long—which makes it the shortest chapter in The Struggle for
Recognition. In an article written shortly afterwards, Honneth cites
with approval Ernst Bloch's claim that natural law may be seen as
an attempt to eliminate human degradation, but criticizes what he
describes as Bloch's premise that "the essence of everything which,
in moral theory, is known as 'human dignity' can only be ascertained
indirectly, by determining the forms of personal degradation and
injury" (FWS, p. 248). According to Honneth, Bloch fails to see
that his claim that notions of dignity can be arrived at only by
paying attention to forms of disrespect actually implies that "the
constitution of human integrity is dependent on the experience of
intersubjective recognition" (FWS, p. 248). In other words, Bloch's
concern with forms of human degradation commits him to a theory
of recognition.
It should be clear by now that I agree that claims that human
beings can be injured by the dispositions (as distinct from the physical
actions) of others require some kind of justification—^which may
indeed take the form of an articulation of positive moral ideals
worked out by means of something like a "theory of recognition."
But I think that Honneth is nevertheless too quick to dismiss Bloch's
view that there are advantages attached to approaching the concept
of human dignity indirectly. For Honneth, the investigation of moral
negatives actually seems to be powered by his maximalist conception
of self-realization as the core ideal of politics. Although the study
of forms of disrespect shows that the quest for self-realization as a
moral-political goal takes a number of necessary detours through
types of recognition, it does not qualify the scope of the ideal itself,
nor does it suggest different moral priorities to us.
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 463

Honneth retains quite maximalist moral-political ideals. In the first

place, at various points in his text, he seems to articulate a strongly
progressivist conception of history and social transformations. He
seems quite confident that the "conditions for self-realization" will
be secured and will prove mutually compatible—that the demands
of love, rights, and solidarity will not conflict seriously. ^^ Second,
and more important, Honneth's social ideal seems extremely
ambitious. Although this aspect of his work is seriously underdevel-
oped, he affirms an ideal of society "in which the universalistic
achievements of equality and individualism would be so embedded
in patterns of interaction that all subjects would be recognized as
both autonomous and individuated, equal and particular persons"
(SR, p. 175). Roughly translated, this seems to mean that we would
have all the benefits of liberal rights as well as lots of mutually
£iffirming "communities of value" in which people's specific qualities
and contributions would receive recognition, and an overarching
society supportive of this "post-tradition^" communal plurality.
I agree (who could not?) that these are all good things. But do
all these good things go together? Will the goals of trade union
movements tum out to be compatible with an "ecologically based
asceticism" or with women's movements? Honneth's concluding
remark is that the socio-economic and political implications of the
values of these communal movements is not a matter for theory
"but rather for the future of social struggles" (SR, p. 179). In one
sense, I agree. Theory does not dictate political practice, although
at its best it may inform it. But in another sense, I am afraid that
Honneth makes this concluding move because he still possesses more
faith in historical progress than I can muster. And one reason why
I cannot muster it is because humiliation, disrespect, and sheer cruelty
continue to be such powerful forces in history. This is not a good
reason to relinquish moral ideals. But I think that it is a reason to
direct attention to the eradication or minimization of pressing moral
evils such as cruelty and humiliation and not to be too confident
that history will bring in all the sheaves.
This is part of the lesson of Margalit's work. For Margalit, there
are three reasons for putting the negative phenomenon of humiliation
at the start of a theory of social criticism. First, he suggests, the
central moral reason is that there is an asymmetry between combating
evil and promoting good: "It is much more urgent to remove painful
evils than to create enjoyable benefits" (DS, p. 4). Second, there is
a logical reason: while according people respect may be a by-product
464 Jonathan Allen

of general behavior and hence not a goal that can be achieved

directly, there are specific acts that are humiliating, and these can
be combated directly and deliberately. Third, there is a cognitive
reason for focusing on humiliation rather than on respect—it is easier
to identify humiliating than respectful conduct, just as it is easier to
identify "attack situations" (which involve a clear contrast between
attacked and attacker) than "defense situations" (where there may
be no identifiable attacker). These arguments do not imply that the
concept of humiliation and the social goal of eradicating institutional
humiliation C£in function without some notion of respect for human
dignity—merely that there are reasons for considering humiliation
to be an experience with distinctive features, and the goal of the
decent society (the nonhumiliating society) to be an ideal that is not
simply included in ideals of the just or good society.
Thus, while for Honneth, the function of studying phenomena of
disrespect seems to be mainly practical—it permits us to be sensitive
to emerging struggles for recognition and prevents our moral theories
from becoming too detached from everyday experience and vocabu-
laries—^Margalit suggests additional reasons for thinking that the
concept of humiliation has a distinctive significance that is not
reducible to terms such as respect, virtue, or justice, and assumes
different institutional and political forms. For example, he argues
that the idea of the decent society differs from the Rawlsian theory
of justice in three respects: (1) although the theory of justice is
concerned in spirit with the issue of humiliation, since self-respect
is considered the most basic primary good, it nevertheless does not
share the explicit concern with the humiliation of the nonmembers
of a society (or those considered to be nonmembers by a dominant
group) who nevertheless reside within it; (2) a concern with
institutional humiliation involves attending to social rituals of
membership or exclusion and to the costs of criticizing or exiting
from "encompassing groups"—a focus that seems absent in A Theory
of Justice, (3) whereas theories of distributive justice concentrate on
the just distribution of goods, the idea of the decent society also
examines the way in which distribution occurs—whether the officials
regulating distribution and the bureaucratic settings of distribution
humiliate recipients (DS, pp. 271-81). Moreover, Margalit suggests
that nonhumiliation has moral priority over justice as a social ideal,
and notes that he is more optimistic about the chances of realizing
the ideal of the decent society than about the chances of realizing
a just society.
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 465

But does this mean that the ideal of the decent society issues in
a conservative view of politics that seeks to restrict the scope and
role of moral ideals in politics? Is giving priority to the eradication
of nonhumiliation tantamount to substituting a less demanding
ideal—nonhumiliation—for the more demanding ideal of justice?
This objection seems to me to be based on several misunder-
standings. First, Margalit's approach is certainly not conservative in
the sense of aiming to place severe constraints on the application
of moral ideals to politics. On the contrary, as he points out, to be
more optimistic concerning the chances of realizing the social ideal
of nonhumiliation than the chances of realizing a just society is not
enough to discredit the ideal of justice—it is simply the view that
it may be very difficult to realize this ideal. Second, although
nonhumiliation is a negative ideal in the sense that it is concerned
with the eradication of an evil, it does present a situation better than
the existing one and is thus an optimistic ideal.
But does adopting the ideal of nonhumiliation amount to setting
one's sights lower than justice? This objection also seems wrong-
headed. In fact, a glance at his discussions of the implications of
nonhumiliation for matters such as exclusion, citizenship, treatment
of different cultures, snobbery, privacy, bureaucracy and the welfare
state, unemployment, and punishment is sufficient to demonstrate
that Margalit's ideal is at least as demanding, and ranges as widely,
as the ideal of distributive justice. To summarize crudely, Margalit
argues that a decent society is one which: does not reject any of
the morally legitimate encompassing groups or cultures that exist
within it; does not deny the full citizenship rights of those who are
citizens or withhold citizenship from those entitled to it, and does
not support through its institutions any symbols directed against some
of its citizens; does not institutionally support a hegemonic culture
that contains humiliating collective representations of subgroups; does
not institutionally support "liminal humiliation" (e.g., humiliating
initiation rituals imposed by subgroups in publicly funded schools);
does not encroach on personal privacy; does provide its members
with the opportunity to find a "reasonably meaningful" employment;
cares about the dignity of the inmates of its prisons. TTiis is an
extremely exacting picture of society. It is true that in many cases,
Margalit does not specify precise institutional requirements of
decency—on the view, which I take to be correct, that philosophers
have no right to try to dictate political policy and are ill-equipped
to do so, although they do have every right to enumerate what kinds
466 Jonathan Allen

of considerations ought to figure in policy-formation and political

decision-making. There is considerable room for disagreements
conceming the interpretation of the requirements of the social ideal
of nonhumiliation in specific cases. But even on a minimalist
interpretation, this ideal seems very rigorous, and stands as a criticism
of most existing social arrangements, even those that involve quite
well-developed welfare provisions.
Second, Margalit's account of the decent society as social ideal
is designed in part to show that it is not an approximation of justice
but an ideal in its own right that involves distinctive concerns. It
may be the case that a just society would not necessarily be a decent
society, although it seems plausible that a fully decent society might
have to be a just society (injustice could be justifiably perceived as
humiliating). This does not mean that we cannot work for the ideal
of justice at the same time that we seek to combat humiliation. The
thought here is that these are different but not incompatible goals
and that therefore the strategies for attaining them need not in
principle conflict. Nevertheless, Margalit does suggest that nonhu-
miliation has a moral priority over justice since eradicating a pressing
evil is more important than securing a good.
This leads me to a last question conceming Margalit's social ideal.
As I noted before, Judith Shklar worries, in Ordinary Vices, that
those who are prepared to talk of psychological injury or "moral
cruelty" frequently tum out to be insensitive to physical cruelty and
suffering. This may occur in two ways. You may, for example, be
so angered by the tormentors' acts of humiliation that you
countenance and encourage acts of cmelty directed against them.
Altematively, you may, like Nietzsche, be so disgusted at the
phenomenon of moral weakness among the victims of humiliation
that you propose an aristocratic, "toughening" politics that may
implement cruelty in order to elicit aristocratic virtue—to draw a
strong, self-respecting elite from the weak and inert masses. As David
Hume inimitably wams: "A delicate sense of morals, especially when
attended by a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of
the world, and to make him consider the course of human affairs
12
with too much indignation."
I think it must be conceded that Shklar's concem to avoid the
effects of "disgust" is fully justified, but it must also be said that
her account of the phenomenon does not show that nonhumiliation
is not, after all, a valid social ideal or that it must always conflict
with the goal of combating physical cruelty. What it clearly does
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 467

demonstrate is that concem about humiliation must be tempered by

a horror of cmelty. In some cases, the attempt to combat humiliation
must give way to the sense that physical cmelty is the summum
malum. Indeed, Margalit's account demonstrates that humiliation often
facilitates cmelty and that it is especially important to combat
humiliation where this occurs in a context of violence. Margalit
himself suggests that the ideal of a society that does not institutionally
support physical cmelty—he calls this "the bridled society"—^has
moral priority over those of the decent society and the just society.
These ideals must be lexicographically and cumulatively ordered.
Thus, the decent society should also be a bridled society.

3. Conclusion

The Struggle for Recognition and The Decent Society both offer
distinctive perspectives on politics, perspectives that are not well
represented in contemporary political theory. Both Honneth and
Margalit underscore the importance of recognition in politics as a
moral concept and a practical force. Their accounts of recognition
successfully avoid romanticizing all forms of stmggle for recognition,
while showing that recognition sometimes is cmcial not just to
people's sense of self-esteem, but to their dignity as human beings.
I have argued that Margalit is more successful than Honneth with
respect to this latter project, but both have more to offer than many
contemporary theorists who enthuse about "the politics of recogni-
tion" without noting its more disturbing aspects.
By placing phenomena and concepts of disrespect and humiliation
at the start of their theories, Honneth and Margalit both suggest, at
least by implication, that social criticism is an important part of
political theory. The great advantage of this approach, I believe, is
that it helps political theorists to avoid preaching and abstract
sentimentalism, while nevertheless retaining a strong normative
commitment. This is a difficult balancing act, but it seems to me to
be especially well executed in the case of The Decent Society.
There is another feature of Margalit's work that I want to draw
attention to in closing. I referred at one point to Honneth's retention
of "maximalist" positive moral ideals in his theory of recognition
and then went on to contrast this with Margalit's emphasis on the
importance of nonhumiliation. The relevant contrast here, however,
is not between moral maximalism and moral minimalism (understood
as scaled-down objectives), or between optimism and pessimism, but
468 Jonathan Allen

perhaps between lesser and greater degrees of skepticism concerning

moral-political objectives. On this view, while both Honneth and
Margalit pay more attention than most contemporary theorists to
negative moral experiences and concepts, Margalit in addition gives
greater scope to skepticism in forming and constraining moral goals.
What do I mean by "skepticism" here? I certainly do not mean
a kind of generalized skepticism about the possibility of making or
justifying meaningful moral judgments. Rather, I mean simply a kind
of uneasiness concerning the comprehensive validity and possible
unintended consequences of specific moral positions that one regards
as valuable.'^ This moderate skepticism accompanies rather than
substitutes for moral convictions. At its best, it prevents us from
becoming ideologues—^from reposing too much confidence in the
views and programs that we nevertheless care about deeply. Perhaps
especially in politics, morality calls for commitment, but to prevent
this from turning into blind faith, the moderate skepticism about
grand theories and convictions implied in giving a special priority
to experiences of physical suffering and humiliation is equally
necessary. The road to hell may indeed be paved with good intentions.
Perhaps putting cruelty and humiliation first in our moral theories
and sensibilities can help to avoid that particular infernal itinerary.

Notes
1. This is no doubt a potentially confusing term. I do not intend any reference
whatsoever to philosophical theories of "moral realism," but rather to a
disposition characterized by both moral commitment and a "realistic" outlook
capable of seeing and responding to suffering and cruelty.
2. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Bellknap Press of Harvard
University, 1984), pp. 35-44.
3. For a recent statement of this objection, see George Kateb, "Notes on Pluralism,"
Social Research 61 (1994): 8-13.
4. William Hazlitt, Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 464-66.
The essay first appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1821.
5. Tzvetan Todorov offers important insights into this issue in his recent study.
Facing the Extreme (New York: Holt & Co., 1996), pp. 141-78, 289-90. One
of the disturbing features of this work is Todorov's understanding that the
fragmentation of our lives and the depersonalization of others (in routine
transactions—e.g., dealing with bank-tellers or with bureaucratic officials) are
everyday, and to some extent, indispensable features of our experience. But, as
he says, these aspects of our contemporary world were also among the factors
that made the "immense evil" of the concentration camps and the gulags
possible.
 Decency and the Struggle for Recognition 469

6. See David Hume, "The Sceptic," in Philosophical Works of David Hume. vol.
3: Essays. Moral, Political and Literary (Edinburgh: Black & Tait, 1826), p.
192. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 16.
7. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political
Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) (hereafter
"FWS"). p. 209.
8. See Alexandre Kojfeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic
Books, 1969), and Tzvetan Todorov, "Living Alone Together," New Literary
History 27 (1996): 12-13.
9. For different examples of this tendency, see Georges Sorel, Reflections on
Violence (New York: Collier, 1961), Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 1968), and Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). Michel Foucault is a
particularly interesting case of a thinker who shifts from a detached depiction
of the social world as conflictual, a kind of "battlefield," to a strange kind of
joy in the phenomenon of collective violence. See Michel Foucault, "Iran: the
Spirit of a World without Spirit," in Politics. Philosophy. Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (London: Routledge, 1988).
10. Honneth seems to have moved away from this view in a more recent article
commenting on Margalit. Here, he admits that tensions between the claims of
the various types of recognition may arise, and notes that the moral point of
view cannot decide the proper outcome of these conflicts in advance, although
human rights retain priority. I am more sympathetic to this formulation. See
Axel Honneth, "Recognition and Moral Obligation," Social Research 64 (1997):
32-33.
11. For a recent example of this Burkean suspicion of rationalist moral ideals, see
Michael Oakeshott, "The Fortunes of Scepticism," Times Literary Supplement.
15 March 1996, pp. 14-15.
12. David Hume, "On Dignity and Meanness in Human Life," in Essays. Moral,
Political and Literary, p. 91.
13. For a similar view, see Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," in The Crooked
Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 14-19.
14. I would like to thank James Wood Bailey, Aurelian Craiutu, and Brenda Lyshaug
for encouragement and helpful comments concerning this article.

Jonathan Allen
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Jonallen@princeton.edu