2 Three Orienting Questions
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How are we to make our way through this dense thicket? Rather than attempt
to spell out the idiosyncracies of each of these authors’ uses of ‘‘recognition,’’
IoVer a set of three orienting questions that can usefully be brought to the
reading of any of them. These questions mark out some of the important
dimensions of conceptual space within which diVerent approaches to recog-
nition can be located; or, in some cases, along which a single author’s work
may be tensely stretched or fractured.
First,is recognition a discrete good or a general medium of social life?Political
theorists often treat recognition as one among many diVerent objects of
human pursuit, possession, and distribution. Sometimes this is an artifact
of recognition’s rhetorical role as a counterweight to more familiar concepts
such as interest or class. At other times it is the result of eVorts to integrate the
idea of recognition into a theory of distributive justice, either by applying the
same liberal principles that govern the apportionment of ordinary tangible
goods (Patten 2001 ); or by insisting that recognition, like other social goods,
has its own appropriate sphere of inXuence and internal principle of distri-
bution (Walzer 1983 ). By contrast, theorists who approach the concept of
recognition as part of a philosophical treatment of intersubjectivity are
more likely to deny that recognition is a sharply bounded good, or even a
‘‘good’’ at all, in the sense of an object that can be possessed. Instead, they
often regard recognition as a ubiquitous mechanism by which meaningful
social relations are constituted, deliberately or otherwise. Such expansive uses
of the concept can be found in the tradition of French Hegelianism I have
described; among contemporary scholars of Hegel such as Robert Williams,
who treats ‘‘recognition’’ as a general structure expressed in an enormous
range of particular social practices and institutions (Williams 1992 , 1997 ); and
to some extent also in Honneth’s reconstruction of recognition as a ‘‘uniWed
framework’’ within which all sorts of moral issues can be encompassed
( 2003 b, 113 )—although, in what will turn out to be an important equivoca-
tion, Honneth also continues to treat ‘‘recognition’’ as something explicitly
claimed or demanded.
Second,how is the concept of recognition related, if at all, to the idea of
justice? Theorists often treat ‘‘recognition’’ as an intrinsically normative
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