Hegel (Siep 1979 , 1996 ; Harris 1980 ; Williams 1992 , 1997 ; Jurist 2000 ; Pippin
2000 ). And Honneth’s use of Mead, who helped him explain how identity could
be socially constituted yet also open to perpetual innovation, paved the way for
his increasingly intensive engagement with other strands of psychology, espe-
cially the object-relations tradition, in his ongoing eVort to identify the sources
of human subjects’ creativity (Honneth 1996 , 1999 , 2002 ; Whitebook 2001 ).
InXuential though these approaches to recognition may be, they do not
exhaust theWeld. Political theorists interested in recognition are increasingly, if
belatedly, engaging with the long and distinguished history of Hegelianism in
twentieth-century French thought, where the idea of recognition has long
played a crucial role, thanks in part to the inXuence of Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures on thePhenomenologyin the 1930 s (Kojeve 1980 ; Butler 1987 ; Roth
1988 ). This is true not only of Sartre’s ( 1956 , 1992 ) account of the meaning of
being-with-others, but also of Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s
subordination inThe Second Sex( 1989 ); the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques
Lacan ( 2002 ); Frantz Fanon’s ( 1967 ) critical use of Hegel and Lacan to under-
stand the psychological dynamics of colonialism; Louis Althusser’s ( 1971 )
account of the production of subjects through the ‘‘interpellating’’ address of
authoritative institutions; Pierre Bourdieu’s ( 1977 , 2000 ) work on the oper-
ation of symbolic power; and—among American philosophers who draw upon
this tradition—Judith Butler’s ( 2003 ) rethinking of recognition in light of her
understanding of the subject as necessarily self-opaque. 4 Intersecting with this
history, but also extending beyond it, is a rich body of work that critically
engages Hegel’s account of the master–slave relationship as part of the analysis
of modern chattel slavery and racial domination (Fanon 1967 ; James 1989 ;
Genovese 1974 ; Davis 1975 ; Patterson 1982 ; Gilroy 1993 ; Willett 1995 ; Cassuto
1996 ; Buck-Morss 2000 ). Recognition is also a continuing theme in the history
of feminist interpretations of Hegel, from critiques and rewritings of his
philosophical appropriation of Sophocles’Antigoneto wider explorations of
the potential, or lack thereof, of Hegel’s thought for feminist politics (Irigaray
1985 ; Benjamin 1988 ; Mills 1996 ; Gauthier 1997 ; Butler 2000 ). And,Wnally, the
term ‘‘recognition’’ has also had an active life at a greater distance from Hegel:
as a term of art in poetics, for instance, it dates back as far as Aristotle (Cave
1990 )—although the idea of tragicanagnoˆrisisis also an important ancestor of
Hegel’s concept of recognition (Williams 1992 ; Jurist 2000 ; Markell 2003 ).
4 On Sartre and recognition, see Honneth ( 1995 , 1996 ); Williams ( 1997 ); on Beauvoir, Lundgren-
Gothlin ( 1996 ); on Fanon, Gordon ( 1995 ); Turner ( 1996 ); Hanssen ( 2000 ); Oliver ( 2001 ); and on all
three, Kruks ( 2001 ).
recognition and redistribution 453