Struggles Over Recognition and Distribution: James Tully

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Struggles over Recognition and Distribution
James Tully
Introduction
In March 1999 Seyla Benhabib held a conference at the Minda De Gunzburg
Center for European Studies at Harvard University entitled “Multiculturalism and
Struggles for Recognition in Comparative Perspective.” She posed the following
question to one of the panels: “Is there a Transition from Distribution to Recog-
nition?” I would like to present a response to this question in two parts – a
response that has benefited from the discussion at the conference and further
discussion and reflection stimulated by the conference over the following year.
The first part proposes that issues of distribution and recognition should be seen
as aspects of political struggles, rather than distinct types of struggle, and thus a
form of analysis is required that has the capacity to study political struggles under
both aspects. The second part suggests that struggles over multicultural and multi-
national recognition are undergoing an important change in practice which
requires a corresponding change in the prevailing forms of analysis.
These two recommendations rest on and follow from an underlying orientation.
Rather than concentrating primarily on the goals of these struggles (specific forms
of distribution or recognition) and the theories of justice which could adjudicate
their claims fairly, as has been the dominant orientation among political theorists,
one should look on the struggles themselves as the primary thing. The primary but
not exclusive orientation then would be practices of freedom rather than theories
of justice. The aim of such an aspectival political philosophy and corresponding
democratic political practice would not be to discover and constitutionalize the
just and definitive form of recognition and distribution, but to ensure that inelim-
inable, agonic democratic games over recognition and distribution, with their rival
theories of distribution and recognition, can be played freely, with a minimum of
domination.1
I. Distribution and Recognition

Whether one addresses Seyla Benhabib’s question as she presents it or, impressed
by the recent return of social democracy in Europe, one takes it up as a question
about a movement from recognition towards a renewed interest in distributive
issues, it is clearly a question of central importance in the present. In one sense it
is an empirical question and I will have nothing to say about that. However, in
another sense it is a question about how one is to interpret and reflect critically on
Constellations Volume 7, No 4, 2000. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
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470 Constellations Volume 7, Number 4, 2000
a cluster of political struggles which appear to be present in and across most

North Atlantic constitutional democracies. This is the question I wish to address.
The answer to this question is NO, there is not a transition from distribution to
recognition or vice versa because the two are internally related. Citizens engaged
in political struggles may place more emphasis on one aspect than another at
specific times and political scientists and theorists may do the same, but both
aspects are present.
Schematically, a struggle for recognition is standardly both a challenge to a
prevailing rule or norm of intersubjective recognition and a demand for another
rule or norm of recognition by a group (or groups) of citizens against those who
oppose the proposed change and defend the status-quo or advance a change (or
changes) of their own. First, any such struggle to alter the identity-related norms
under which citizens are led to recognize themselves and others will have effects
in the distribution or redistribution of the relations of power among them. Of
course, the new rule of mutual recognition will itself constitute a redistribution of
“recognition capital” (status, respect, and esteem). A demeaning or degrading
form of misrecognition tends to undermine the basic self-respect and self-esteem
that are necessary to empower a person to develop the degree of autonomy and
sense of self-worth that is required to participate equally in the public and private
life of her society, often leading to well-known psychological and sociological
pathologies. A successful struggle for recognition gains for her the recognition
and respect from the dominant society that furnishes the basis of self-respect and
self-esteem, enabling her to participate on a par with the others. So, straight off,
the achievement of recognition itself redistributes the opportunity of citizens to
gain economic and political power.2 Next, the alteration in reciprocal recognition
will also alter in complex ways the more traditional objects of distribution: that is,
the prevailing (unjust) relations of political, economic, and social power that the
rule of recognition legitimates.
For example, struggles over equity policies for women, visible minorities,
persons with disabilities, Aboriginal people, and immigrants in the public and
private sectors over the last thirty years, where successful, not only gave these
citizens a form of public recognition. By challenging deeply sedimented racist,
sexist, and xenophobic social norms of recognition, they also redistribute access
to universities, jobs, promotions, and the corresponding relations of economic
power. Struggles for electoral reforms which render elected offices more repre-
sentative of the multicultural diversity of the electorate, where successful, give
misrecognized and non-recognized minorities public recognition and redistribute
access to and exercise of political power. Struggles for the legal recognition of
linguistic and cultural minorities often distribute political and economic power,
access to media and schools, and so on. Finally, the constitutional recognition of
non-recognized nations and indigenous peoples within larger constitutional
democracies by means of legal and political pluralism, land redistribution, and
complex federalism entail the redistribution of political and economic power.3
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

Struggles over Recognition and Distribution: James Tully 471
Second and conversely, a struggle for distribution usually involves an amend-

ment to the prevailing norms of recognition. For example, the struggles of citizens
to have a democratic voice in national and transnational corporations (over the
conditions of work and reinvestment, the type of product, the effects on the envi-
ronment, and so on) is eo ipso a challenge to the prevailing norms of recognition
of citizens (and corporations). It is a demand of citizens to be recognized as the
bearers of democratic rights (or social and economic rights) in a sphere where this
aspect of citizen identity has not been recognized in liberal democracies. Further,
if a demand for distribution also includes the impartial norm of recognition that
the demand should apply to all citizens in exactly the same way, this is often seen
as the misrecognition of the identity-related differences of citizens (or the
disguised imposition of the norms of the dominant group) and challenged on these
grounds, while others may oppose it on the grounds of distribution alone.4 More-
over, as Habermas adds, even a negotiated struggle over distribution which begins
within established rules of intersubjective recognition of the actors involved often
and unpredictably spills over into a struggle over the background rules:
Practical discourses cannot be relieved of the burden of social conflicts to the

degree that theoretical and explicative discourses can. They are less free of the
burdens of action because contested norms tend to upset the balance of relations of
intersubjective recognition. Even if it is conducted with discursive means, a dispute
about norms is still rooted in the struggle for recognition.5
Consequently, the various types of political struggle typical of our time exhibit
both recognition and distribution aspects. A challenge to a prevailing norm of
intersubjective recognition to which citizens are subject also challenges in some
way the prevailing relations of political, economic, and social power that the norm
of recognition legitimates, and vice versa. What is required, therefore, is a bifocal
form of critical analysis that clarifies empirically and normatively the recognition
and distribution aspects of contemporary struggles and their interaction without
reducing one to the other. Indeed, the complex interaction between distribution
and recognition appears to be characteristic of political struggles today.6
II. Recognition and Freedom

The interaction between recognition and distribution sets the stage for my second
thesis. In seeking to develop an enlightening form of critical reflection on demo-
cratic practice that is as unbiased as possible, one does not seek to solve struggles
over distribution by presenting and defending the definitive and preemptory form
of distribution for any democracy. Rather, one aims to provide a critical philoso-
phy of democracy that enables liberal democrats, social democrats, socialist
democrats, ecological democrats, feminist democrats, pluralist democrats, and so
on to engage in democratic struggles over rival views of distribution freely, with

the minimum of arbitrary and unnecessary constraints. Of course, theorists

present theories of their preferred forms of democracy and distribution (liberal,
social, conservative, and so on), and they often present their theories as if they
were the definitive or comprehensive theory of democracy per se (the “whole
truth” as Rawls nicely puts it). However, it has been relatively easy over the last
three millennia in western societies to show that the proposed theories have been
less than definitive and to distinguish them from less partial philosophies of
democracy which seek to take disagreements over distribution as an enduring
feature of democracy. This is true even though these less partial philosophies of
democracy themselves always harbor limitations of their own, as long as there is
a second-order form of reflection in the philosophy that acknowledges its own
limitations and thus its defeasibility.7
Now, it is the suggestion of this section that we should take the same critical
attitude to democratic struggles over recognition. One should not look for the just
and definitive theory of recognition on which all citizens could reach agreement
once and for all. As I will argue, in an open democracy this is as unlikely as
consensus on a theory of distribution. Rather, the aim should be an account of
democracy in which the freedom to question and challenge, as well as to reply to
and defend, the prevailing norms of recognition is taken as one enduring aspect
of democratic activity among many. Of course theorists will defend this or that
form of recognition (as in the examples in the previous section), but these theo-
ries will be seen as an extension of the same practical reason that the citizens
engaged in the struggles employ, not as a form of theoretical reason that stands
above the fray and provides a definitive account of the pre-conditions of democ-
racy. To paraphrase Rawls’ recent formulation, there will be an irreducible and
changing “family” of reasonable conceptions of recognition (and distribution)
held by members of any free and democratic society.8
Why are struggles over the rules of recognition of democratic members not
susceptible to a just and definitive resolution beyond further democratic disagree-
ment? That is, why is democratic activity not only agreement and disagreement
within a set of rules of recognition and distribution, but also agreement and
disagreement over any of these rules from time to time? To see why this is so let
me sketch four dimensions of the constitutional and legal context in which strug-
gles over recognition arise in constitutional democracies, using a complex rather
than a simplified sketch so limitations are avoided as much as possible in the
initial construction.
First, a constitution recognizes the members of a democracy under their respec-
tive identities and enumerates their rights, duties, and powers. For example, a
democratic constitution recognizes as members – or will be enjoined by some of
its members struggling for recognition to so recognize – some or all of the follow-
ing: individual citizens with their rights, freedoms, and duties; various minorities
(linguistic and cultural minorities, as well as individuals and groups disadvan-
taged because of race, ethnic origin, color, religion, sex, age, immigration, and

mental and physical disabilities); corporations, territories, indigenous peoples,

and their rights and duties of self-government and land title; provinces with their
legislative powers; courts; the federation and its institutions; and the democratic
society as a whole. Second, a constitution stipulates the relations of governance
among the members: the totality of laws and procedures that guide their conduct
as members engaged in a fair system of social cooperation over time. Third, a
constitution lays out a set of procedures and institutions of democratic discus-
sion and amendment of the identities of members and relations of governance
among them. These typically include rights of public discussion, debate, assem-
bly, voting, strike and civil disobedience, courts, legislatures, procedures of
federal-provincial negotiations and federal-provincial-indigenous people negoti-
ations, and procedures for amending the constitution. Struggles over recognition
occur in and over these procedures and institutions. Fourth, a constitution and its
traditions of interpretation include principles, values, and goods that are brought
to bear on the identification of members, the relations of governance among
them, and the discussion and amendment of their identities and relations over
time. These principles, values, and goods do not form a determinate and closed
set on which all members agree. Rather, they are many, none is trump, different
ones are brought to bear in different cases, and there is reasonable disagreement
and contestation about which ones are relevant and how they should be inter-
preted and applied in any struggle over recognition (or distribution). Part of what
makes a society free and democratic is reasonable disagreement among the
members and their political traditions of liberalism, conservatism, socialism,
republicanism, feminism, and so on. These principles, values, and goods
comprise the public normative warrants members appeal to in exchanging public
reasons over the justice and stability of their conflicting demands for and against
recognition. Typically, they include such principles, values, goods, and their rival
traditions of interpretation as freedom (political and private), equality (formal
and substantive), mutual respect for difference, federalism, democracy (popular
sovereignty and representation), the rule of law and constitutionalism, and the
protection of minority rights.
Any demand for recognition of an identity-related similarity that some or all
citizens are claimed to bear is the exercise of the democratic right to discuss and
seek to amend (dimension three) the existing rules of recognition of the
members of the political association (dimension one) and, consequently, to
amend the relations of governance among them (dimension two), by presenting
reasons against the existing rule of recognition (as an injustice of misrecogni-
tion or non-recognition) and reasons for the amendment which are grounded in
the principles, values, and goods available in the democratic culture of the soci-
ety, or, more rarely, in an argument which seeks to introduce a new principle,
value, or good (or a new interpretation of an existing principle, such as the
recent neo-republican interpretation of freedom as non-domination) by, say, an
appeal to reflective equilibrium (dimension four).9

If attention is focused primarily on the activity of democratic struggle over

recognition in context one can see why no resolution in either theory or practice
is definitive. Any purported resolution will harbor elements of non-consensus and
injustice, and thus must be open to further democratic dissent and renegotiation.
As the Supreme Court of Canada puts it, a free and democratic society rests not
on a set of rules immune from criticism but on a “continuous process of discus-
sion” involving the right of dissent, the duty to acknowledge dissenting voices,
and the corresponding amendments of the rules of the democracy over time.10
The first considerations that weigh against a definitive resolution are the sheer
complexity and unpredictability of a struggle over recognition. The form of
recognition a member demands affects in complex ways the existing identities of
the other members and the relations of governance and cooperation among them
(dimensions one and two). As a result it affects the existing distribution of power,
as we have seen. When a group demands recognition, it affects the other identi-
ties of its own members as well (the recognition of, say, linguistic rights of a
minority will affect the individual rights of its own members in complex ways).
Thus, a struggle for recognition is almost never a relation between two actors (self
and other), as traditional theories of recognition from Hegel to the present presup-
pose, but a complex, multilateral web of relations and their affects among actors
of different types.11
Next, a demand for recognition provokes other demands which must be
acknowledged and responded to in turn. Some or all of the other members of the
political association will either refuse to acknowledge a demand or acknowledge
it and reply in one of three ways: by defending the status-quo, by signaling the
willingness to enter into negotiations of some kind or another (parliamentary
debate, litigation, referenda, constitutional amendment, or ad-hoc, case-specific
dispute resolution procedures), or by presenting counter-demands of their own.
The proliferation of counter-demands will be legitimate on the same grounds as
the initial demand: mutual recognition or reciprocity. Since a demand is based on
an argument that the member has been misrecognized or non-recognized, then the
demand cannot itself involve the misrecognition or non-recognition of others
without committing a performative contradiction. Such unilateral demands are
unreasonable and should be ignored by the other members of the society. That is,
legitimate recognition is always mutual.12
Consequently, applying the principle of reciprocity or mutual recognition, a
demand will be legitimate and activate a democratic duty on the part of other
members to acknowledge and respond in some way only if the following three
conditions are met. First, the citizens for whom the demand is made by citizens
claiming to be their spokespeople or representatives must themselves accept the
proposed identity and support it from a first-person perspective. This requires
democratic negotiation and agreement which ensures that minorities within the
group have the opportunity to have a say in the formulation of the demand so it
accommodates the other aspects of their identity that matter to them and also can

be defended by appeals to shared principles, values, and goods (for example,

linguistic and religious minorities within a region seeking recognition as a nation
within a larger multinational association). Second, the demand must respond to
and take into account the reasonable counter-proposals of other members of the
society who argue that they will be adversely affected (misrecognized or non-
recognized) if the demand goes through without amendments. This requires the
complex reciprocal elucidation of democratic negotiations among the group
demanding the change and the other members of society or their representatives.
Third, the demand (and its reciprocal amendments) must be made good to others
in terms of the principles, values, and goods that they all share to some degree
(dimension four). Consequently, the very conditions of legitimacy of the demand
ensure that other, unpredictable yet legitimate demands will arise in the course of
the struggle which must be taken into account by revising and resubmitting the
initial demand. Notice finally that these democratic discussions are not the simple
“dialogues” of traditional theories of deliberation and recognition but complex
“multilogues.”
The democratization of struggles over recognition is required not only by the
reciprocal or mutual character of recognition, but also by the principle of democ-
racy itself. As far as possible, the rules in accordance with which citizens recog-
nize one another and govern themselves should be based on the agreement of the
governed or their representatives. Therefore, any amendment to these rules, from
an equity policy in the workplace to the recognition of a nation within the larger
association, should rest as much as possible on the discussion and agreement of
those affected by it. If it is not, then their action is coordinated non-democrati-
cally, behind their backs, and they are to that extent unfree.13 Moreover, on prag-
matic grounds, the most reliable way to determine how a proposed amendment to
the existing rules of mutual recognition will affect those whose interaction is
coordinated by the rule, especially in identity-diverse societies of today, is to ask
them: that is, to ensure that they have a say in the deliberations. Hence the intro-
duction of the principle of audi alteram partem (always listen to the other side)
into democratic deliberation in theory and practice. Finally, the democratization
of struggles over recognition brings about stability for the right reasons. Both the
members who bear the proposed identity and those members whose identities are
affected by it support the amendment because they have had a say in its recipro-
cal formulation, their mutual recognition has been accommodated in an agreeable
way, and the resolution is grounded in the principles, values, and goods they share
as democratic citizens of the larger society.
However, reciprocity, reaching agreement, listening to the voices of all
affected, and stability by means of broad support are never achieved. First, there
are always asymmetries in recognition and the distribution of power among those
engaged in the negotiations. Such asymmetries can scarcely be bracketed in the
negotiations and their procedures of argumentation, for the negotiations are about
changing a rule of recognition so the asymmetry will be overcome after its imple-

mentation. Only after citizens begin to think and act and recognize one another
under the new rule will the effects of the asymmetry in question be gradually
removed from their conduct and cooperation. Therefore, any resolution, even if
all agree, will be shaped by the effects of the old regime on the negotiators, and
its biases will come to light only from the vantage point of the new.14
Second, any negotiation and proposed resolution will, as we have seen, involve
complex reciprocal considerations of the concerns of the members affected and,
as a result, the proposed rule will be a compromise, not a consensus.15 Moreover,
given its complexity, there will be room for reasonable disagreement even over
the compromise. Third, negotiations take place in “real time.” All affected are not
heard and those that are heard do not always gain a response, let alone a satisfac-
tory one. At some point a decision must be taken and the process is often referred
to an arbitrator, such as a court, parliament, or referendum. Many cases of strug-
gles for recognition are advanced by minorities who are oppressed by majorities.
Although democratic discussion of their demands is necessary for the reasons
above, the force of the exchange of public reasons pro and con is scarcely suffi-
cient to free the majority from deeply sedimented norms of recognition (public or
covert) and the corresponding political, economic, and social structure of interests
that undergird them. The court or other arbitrator to whom the case is referred is
not free from the effects of the existing form of recognition and is also constrained
by the non-ideal form of argumentation in the courtroom. At some point, then, a
decision is taken in the face of disagreement and dissent, and the dissenters may
turn out to be correct in the long run.16
Fourth, reasonable disagreement will break out over the implementation of
the resolution as well as over acting in accordance with it on a day-to-day and
year-to-year basis. The resolution may have effects in practice that no one antic-
ipated in negotiation. For example, a right granted to a religious minority to
protect it from the majority may turn out, in the face of the best imaginable safe-
guards, to enable the minority to oppress its own members in some unantici-
pated way.
Fifth and most important, the identities of those seeking recognition, as well as
those to whom the demand is made, change in the course of the negotiations and
implementation of any resolution. An identity put forward for recognition is the
construction of two interacting processes of negotiation. It is constituted and
embraced (or rejected) by the members of a group, first, through their processes
of democratic discussion and reformulation over time. They (or a majority of
them) must be convinced that the present recognition they are accorded is unjust
in some sense and then convinced that the proposed form of recognition is just
and worth the struggle. These processes of identity criticism, formation, and
reformation shape their identity and thus the rule of recognition they propose.
Even an ascriptive identity, such as ethnicity or language, is not given, but the
construction of dialogue and negotiation. What the ascriptive identity is, who
possesses it and who does not, and how it is to be recognized, interpreted, and

implemented are questions that are answered in the course of the ongoing discus-
sions among the members of the group. Second, as we have seen, these discus-
sions are shaped at the same time by the processes of reciprocal discussion with
the other members of the society who do not share their identity, but whose reci-
procal identities come into question nonetheless. Nothing has changed more, for
example, than the identity of various majorities and minorities, men and women,
Christian and Muslim, Christian and secular, and English-speaking and Spanish-
speaking Americans as a result of the last forty years of these processes of discus-
sion and conflict over recognition in contemporary societies (to mention only
highly simplified dyadic examples). Therefore, any formal recognition at best will
be a codification of the state of processes of identity negotiation at a particular
time, a reification of a moment of the more primary activities. The processes of
discussion and contestation will continue to shape their identities in unpredictable
ways in the normal course of human events, and the new institutions of formal
recognition add another unpredictable element.
In summary, these reasons, derived from focusing on the activity, suggest that
struggles over recognition, like struggles over distribution, are not amenable to
definitive solutions beyond further democratic disagreement, dispute, negotiation,
amendment, implementation, review, and further disagreement. Recognition in
theory and practice should not be seen as a telos or end state, but as a partial,
provisional, mutual, and human-all-too-human part of continuous processes of
democratic activity in which citizens struggle to change their rules of mutual
recognition as they change themselves. If the study of struggles over recognition
is to be critical and enlightening, then it should be practical and “permanent”
rather than theoretical and end-state oriented: it should analyze and learn from the
recognition and distribution aspects of the entire circle of activity we have
canvassed, from the initial dissent through to implementation and the new round
of dissent it provokes.17 This should include the evaluation of the struggles under
the immanent ideals of reciprocity, reaching agreement, audi alteram partem, and
reason-based support. However, because there is reasonable disagreement over
the appropriate form of these ideals in any case and because they are never
achieved in practice, they should be taken as immanent or “critical” ideals rather
than transcendental or “regulative” ideals if they are not to obscure more than they
illuminate.18 Finally, if struggles over recognition, like struggles over distribution,
do not achieve the ideals immanent to their democratization and do not end in just
outcomes, then we must look elsewhere for the basic principle of legitimacy of
democracies that experience and accommodate them. The answer follows from
the orientation I have presented. A free and democratic society will be legitimate
even though its rules of recognition harbor elements of injustice and non-consen-
sus if the citizens are always free to enter into processes of contestation and nego-
tiation of the rules of recognition.19

Conclusion
To conclude, I wish to strengthen the argument for granting a certain priority to
praxis by explicating three further features of the activities of struggling over
recognition. As I have suggested, this dimension of human action can be inter-
preted as a multiplicity of democratic processes or practices of challenging and
negotiating the rules of mutual recognition under which citizens engage in politi-
cal, economic, and social cooperation as their identities change. These activities
have been relatively overlooked because theorists and practitioners have tended to
presume that there is an end state to which the activities are the means. Theories
of justice, usually universal in intent, applied to the form of recognition demanded,
were seen as the appropriate primary focus and response. The activity was seen as
something to be overcome or as a means to an end, even when one segment of the
activity – an idealized mode of argumentation aimed at reaching agreement – was
seen as the means to discover the just outcome and so end the struggle.
The last forty years of attempts to treat these struggles as if they were suscep-
tible to definitive resolutions and consensual agreements has tended to lead to
disagreements on what justice requires in theory and irresolution in practice.
Nevertheless, this period of struggles over recognition within North Atlantic
democracies, the European Union, and in global legal and regulatory regimes has
been an important learning experience. Theorists and dispute resolvers are begin-
ning to learn that there are many reasonable modes of argumentation over which
the participants will reasonably disagree and there are many considerations of
justice that can be brought to bear on any specific case over which the participants
will reasonably disagree on their ordering, interpretation, and application (as I
sketched in the last section).20 People engaged in the struggles as well as those
studying them are beginning to realize that ongoing provisional agreements open
to disagreement, review of the implementation, revision, and struggle all over
again are not failures, but part of a process of democratizing this type of struggle,
not unlike the way struggles over distribution have been democratized over the
last one hundred and fifty years, and are turning their attention to how practices
of disputation, resolution, and review can be played freely 21
This shift in orientation to the friction of the rough ground of practice and prac-
tical reason should not be viewed with resignation, for the ideal solution was
utopian in the first place. The practical activity of struggling for and against forms
of mutual recognition embodies some of the best features of democracy. It is a
form of democratic participation: the exercise of the political freedom to have a
say over the rules in accordance with which members of a society recognize one
another and act together. This is a freedom that always has been at the heart of
democracy. It will remain so as our societies become increasingly multicultural
and multinational and these struggles continue to expose the various biases of
gender, language, culture, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity that dominant
groups have structured into the norms of recognition over the last two centuries.

In addition, if this analysis is correct, the struggles are not so much over
“recognition” as what might be called “disclosure” and “acknowledgment.” The
traditional concept of recognition is closely related to the concept of a fixed,
authentic, or autonomous identity.22 Since the identities at issue in these strug-
gles are the ongoing, mutable, and multifaceted creations of the reciprocal eluci-
dation of democratic multilogues, the traditional concept of recognition lacks
application. Indeed, it is questionable whether the concept of identity has appli-
cation, for what is at issue is whether or not there are open processes or practices
of critical negotiation and modification of the identities under which we are led
to recognize ourselves and others as members of a fair system of social cooper-
ation, so we are not unnecessarily and arbitrarily subject to an imposed iden-
tity.23 Complicating things further, when an alliance of citizens seek to expose
and overthrow a demeaning form of recognition they suffer along one similar
aspect of their complex identities and to present a respect-worthy alternative,
they also do not wish to be recognized and stereotyped exclusively under this
alternative description, but to be regarded under other aspects of their identity in
appropriate circumstances.24
When a group puts forward a demand for recognition they seek to disclose the
misrecognition or non-recognition in the existing rule of mutual recognition of
themselves and others, to persuade others it is unjust and intolerable, and to
display publicly a preferred alternative. The implicated others, whose reciprocal
identities are called into question, acknowledge this illocutionary action by
responding and entering into agonic negotiations of the various kinds we have
discussed. These games of reciprocal disclosure and acknowledgment often fall
short of full recognition and affirmation, and, even when some kind of formal
recognition is achieved, struggles often break out over it and the process of
amendment begins again, for the reasons given above. If the activity of disclosure
and acknowledgment is examined on its own terms, rather than as a failure of
recognition, it can be seen to embody the following democratic features.25
The game of reciprocal disclosure and acknowledgment is a way of dispelling
ressentiment, generated by perceived misrecognition or non-recognition, which
would otherwise be discharged in more violent and anti-democratic forms of
protest. Penultimately and contrary to traditional theories of recognition, these
contests generate levels of self-respect and self-esteem among those advancing
the demand, independent of gaining formal recognition. By engaging in disclos-
ing an injustice and displaying an alternative, bringing it about that other
members of the society acknowledge this and respond, even if negatively,
responding in turn, and gaining less than one hoped for, members of an oppressed
minority generate levels of self-empowerment, self-worth, and pride that can
overcome the debilitating psychological and sociological effects of misrecogni-
tion. Suppressed nations and indigenous peoples within larger multinational
democracies who are not formally recognized as nations or as peoples under
international law, yet who publicly display the attributes of nationhood and

peoplehood, and who elicit various kinds of acknowledgment and negotiations

short of full recognition (such as misrecognition as “minorities”), are well-known
examples of this respect- and esteem-building phenomenon.
Finally and somewhat counter intuitively, participation in activities of disclo-
sure and acknowledgment generate a sense of belonging to and identification with
the larger political society. These practices are, among other things, processes of
citizenization in culturally diverse societies. Citizens appreciate that they possess
this unique democratic freedom to have a say over the rules of recognition. As
they exercise it in reciprocal discussions and negotiations, they gradually come to
see that others have reasonable concerns of recognition as well and that their orig-
inal demands need to be modified to accommodate the others’ reciprocal
demands. In the course of, and as a result of, these discussions (perhaps over a
lifetime), they may come to acquire, in addition to the specific identities they wish
to see acknowledged, a kind of second-order consciousness of the diverse and
mutable identities of other members of the association, of the place of theirs
within it, and of the reciprocal and interdependent character of their specific iden-
tity or identities. That is, they become aware of their membership in a democra-
tic society which provides the institutions for the free play of this democratic
activity of disclosure and acknowledgment over time.
This form of self-awareness and self-formation that comes into being in the
course of the struggles is their identity as citizens of a free and culturally
diverse democracy. It does not make their specific struggles for recognition any
the less important, but it situates them in the broader context of identification
with the democratic society which enables them to take place freely. When
insufficient acknowledgment is the result of a long and difficult struggle, the
identification with and attachment to the democratic institutions which enabled
them to try and are open for another round often counteract the disposition to
alienation, balkanization, and secession. The remarkable achievement of diver-
sity awareness and diversity attachment, as the unintended consequence of
struggles for recognition, marks the successful democratization of the recogni-
tion aspect of political struggles, complementary to the democratization of the
distribution aspect of political struggles.
NOTES
1. I first sketched out this approach in Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of
Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2000). I have developed it further in the
articles mentioned below.
2. This is the traditional account of the relation between recognition and self-respect and self-
esteem. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, tr. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1995). As many commentators have noted, the claim by Honneth and Habermas that self-
confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem fall into the three separate spheres of the family, politics,
and ethics is a particular and partial form of recognition, not a universal and impartial framework
for struggles over recognition. Its triumph as a meta-norm would mark the destruction of reasonable
cultural pluralism. (For this argument see Strange Multiplicity, 58–98 and Tully, “To Think and Act

Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas,” Foucault contra Habermas:

Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden and
David Owen (London: Sage, 1999) 90–142.) For further modifications to this traditional picture see
Conclusion below. I am indebted to David Owen, “Self-government and Democracy as Reflexive
Co-operation: Reflections on Honneth’s Social and Political Ideal” (forthcoming).
3. For example, see Will Kymlicka, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in
Canada (Don Mills & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). More generally, James Tully,
“Multicultural and Multinational Citizenship,” The Demands of Citizenship, ed. Catriona McKin-
non and Iain Hampsher-Monk (London: Continuum, 2000), 212–34.
4. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–75, 43.
5. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, tr. C. Lenhardt and
S.W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 106.
6. Broadly speaking, there are two traditions of critical philosophy with the capacity to study
both aspects of these struggles, a more universalistic approach associated with Simone Chambers,
Jürgen Habermas, David Held, and Axel Honneth, and a more contextual approach associated with
Seyla Benhabib, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, John Rawls, Charles Taylor, and Iris Marion
Young. For the strengths of the former see William E. Scheuerman, “Critical Theory and the Chal-
lenge of Ethical Pluralism,” Ethical Pluralism, Civil Society, and Political Culture, ed. Brian Barry
and Donald Moon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). For the strengths of the
latter see Tully, “To Think and Act Differently.”
7. I take this for example to be the spirit of both Rawls’ political liberalism and Foucault’s
Enlightenment attitude. See respectively, Anthony Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liber-
alism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming) and David Owen,
“Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy,” Foucault contra Haber-
mas, 21–45.
8. John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 573–615, 592.
9. This rough sketch is generalized from the account of Canadian constitutional democracy
presented by the Supreme Court of Canada in Reference re: the Secession of Quebec, reprinted in
David Schneidermann, ed., The Quebec Decision (Toronto: James Lorimer and Co., 1999), 14–71.
I argue that it is generalizable to other North Atlantic constitutional democracies in “Multinational
Democracies: An Introductory Sketch,’ in Multinational Democracy, ed. Alain-G. Gagnon and
James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). This Introduction is a more
extended presentation and defense of some of the arguments presented here.
10. Reference re: the Secession of Quebec, sections 68–69, in Schneidermann, The Quebec
Decision, 38–39.
11. For a more detailed analysis of this and several of the following points see Tully, “Multi-
cultural and Multinational Citizenship.”
12. For the importance of reciprocity and mutual recognition, see Habermas, Moral Conscious-
ness and Communicative Action, 88–94, and Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 7–17. In the terms of polit-
ical liberalism, all members are constrained to accept the “burdens of judgment.”
13. Both Rawls and Habermas accept a version of this democratic principle. See Jürgen
Habermas, “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason,” The Inclusion of the Other, ed.
Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 49–74, and John Rawls,
“Reply to Habermas,” Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
372–434.
14. This is often called Rousseau’s paradox. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract,
ed. Roger Masters, tr. Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), II.vii, 69.
15. Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (London:
Routledge, 1999), 91–140.
16. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 54–58, and, on the importance of these factors more generally,
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 1–9.

17. This is the general approach recommended by Michel Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’
Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998),
303–19.
18. See Tully, “To Think and Act Differently,” 109–39.
19. See Tully, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” Economy and Society 28, no. 2 (1999):
161–82.
20. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
38–75, and Douglas Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Arguments (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998) for the varieties of negotiation, and notes 9 and 15 for the plural-
ity of reasonable considerations of justice.
21. This is a conclusion I draw from the interdisciplinary study of struggles for recognition in
Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Canada (note 9 above). For a complementary analysis of
constitutionalism in the European Union, see Jo Shaw, “Constitutionalism in the European Union,”
Journal of European Public Policy, special edition, 6, no. 4 (1999): 579–97.
22. The tradition of authentic identity derives from Herder and the autonomous identity from
Kant. See Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.”
23. As William Connolly has always insisted. See The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Compare Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of
Democracy,” Political Theory in Transition, ed. Noel Sullivan (London: UCL Press, 1999).
24. For an important analysis of this form of misrecognition, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies
and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999).
25. For a more detailed analysis of disclosure and acknowledgment see Tully, “Multinational
Democracies.”

Struggles Over Recognition and Distribution: James Tully

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14678675, 2000, 4, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.00203 by Ku Leuven, Wiley Online Library on [02/12/2022].

I. Distribution and Recognition

a cluster of political struggles which appear to be present in and across most

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Second and conversely, a struggle for distribution usually involves an amend-

Practical discourses cannot be relieved of the burden of social conflicts to the

II. Recognition and Freedom

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the minimum of arbitrary and unnecessary constraints. Of course, theorists

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mental and physical disabilities); corporations, territories, indigenous peoples,

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If attention is focused primarily on the activity of democratic struggle over

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be defended by appeals to shared principles, values, and goods (for example,

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peoplehood, and who elicit various kinds of acknowledgment and negotiations

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas,” Foucault contra Habermas:

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

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