to be recognized as the bearer of a distinctive identity. ‘‘DiVerence-blind’’
liberalism, he argued, cannot adequately respond to this need, for while it is
also an instantiation of the norm of equal recognition, it is an excessively
narrow one, which recognizes only those qualities that are taken to be
universally shared. 1 In turning to the language of recognition, Taylor echoed
other Anglophone political theorists who had employed the term, including
Michael Walzer ( 1983 ) and especially Isaiah Berlin ( 1969 ); yet he also and
more explicitly drew the idea of recognition from earlier thinkers, including
Herder, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, and post-Hegelian theorists of the
dialogical self such as M. M. Bakhtin and George Herbert Mead. 2
For Axel Honneth, ‘‘recognition’’ was not primarily a means to grasp such
phenomena as the rise of identity politics or new social movements: instead,
the concept of recognition served as the basis for a systematic reconstruction of
the tradition of critical theory, which would take the lesson of Habermas’s
linguistic turn—grounding critique in the norms implicit in communication,
rather than in the realm of production—while also giving these norms, and
thus critical theory’s emancipatory aspirations, a more reliable empirical
anchor in everyday reactions to injustice. On Honneth’s account, injustice is
felt in theWrst instance not as the transgression of an explicit linguistic norm,
but as a denial of intersubjective recognition that violently disrupts a subject’s
relationship to herself, whether through physical abuse (which corresponds to
the level of recognition Honneth calls ‘‘love’’), the refusal of basic moral
respect or legal protection (‘‘rights’’), or the ‘‘denigration of individual or
collective ways of life’’ (‘‘solidarity’’ or ‘‘esteem’’). 3 This approach to recogni-
tion shared some points of reference with Taylor’s—most obviously Hegel and
Mead, who form the cornerstones ofThe Struggle for Recognition. Unlike
Taylor, however, Honneth focused not on Hegel’sPhenomenologybut on his
pre- 1807 Jena manuscripts—a choice that reXected the inXuence of Habermas
( 1974 ), and which also signaled Honneth’s participation in an ongoing con-
versation among specialists in German idealism about the development of the
concept of recognition (Anerkennung) in the work of Fichte and the young
1 On Taylor’s essay see the critiques in Taylor ( 1994 ) as well as Dumm ( 1994 ); Rorty ( 1994 );
Connolly ( 1996 ); Nicholson ( 1996 ); Blum ( 1998 ); Gooding-Williams ( 1998 ); Sommer ( 1999 ); Hanssen
( 2000 ); White ( 2000 ); Oliver ( 2001 ); Benhabib ( 2002 ); Cornell and Murphy ( 2002 ); Markell ( 2003 );
Elshtain ( 2004 ); Orlie ( 2004 ).
2 For diVerent approaches to the theme of recognition via Rousseau and Montequieu see Todorov
( 2001 ) and Krause ( 2002 ), respectively.
3 Honneth ( 1996 , 134 ). For critical discussions of Honneth see Foster ( 1999 ); Van den Brink ( 2000 );
Zurn ( 2000 ); Whitebook ( 2001 ); Heidegren ( 2002 ); Ika ̈heimo ( 2002 ); Kaupinnen ( 2002 ); Laitinen
( 2002 ); Kompridis ( 2004 ); and Owen and Van den Brink (forthcoming).
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