4 Dualism, Anti-dualism, and Beyond
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A closer look at one disputed feature of Fraser’s account—her insistence on
an analytic separation between recognition and redistribution, rooted in an
understanding of modern political economy as a diVerentiated system of
social integration—will provide an occasion to return to the three orienting
questions about recognition that I posed earlier. As we have seen, Fraser’s
interlocutors have criticized her distinctions between redistribution and
recognition, class and status, culture and political economy—but they have
done so in quite diVerent ways. One version of the critique draws attention to
thecausalinterconnections between culture and identity on the one hand and
political economy on the other. The terms in which people are recognized
often have important distributive consequences: the denigration of non-
normative sexualities, for example, helps to sustain the maldistribution of
resources ranging from health care to police protection (Young 1997 , 157 ).
Conversely, access to material resources can help to ‘‘sustain’’ cultural identity
(Phillips 1997 , 149 ); and the institutions through which resources are distrib-
uted—for instance, bureaucratic welfare states—also shape the identities of
those under their jurisdiction (Benhabib 2002 ). 6 These are vitally important
insights, but they do not cut especially deeply against Fraser: as she has
pointed out, the analysis of such causal relations does not challenge—indeed,
it requires—the underlying analytic distinction between recognition and
redistribution (Fraser 2003 b, 63 ; Phillips 1997 ).
A second, more radical critique asserts that the relationship between
recognition and redistribution is not only causal but also constitutive—that
redistributive claims themselves, for example, cannot be grasped without
some reference to the notion of recognition, since, as claims of justice, they
depend upon ‘‘some understanding of the worth of persons’’ (Yar 2001 , 295 ;
Sayer 1999 ; O’Neill 1999 ). Thus Majid Yar casts the politics of redistribution as
a subspecies of the politics of recognition, because the economic goods with
which it is concerned are actually the material embodiments of ‘‘shared
human evaluations:’’ we struggle to possess objects that ‘‘concretize’’ others’
respect for us, or to distribute objects in ways that conWrm our membership
in a community of meaning (Yar 2001 , 298 ). Likewise, Honneth argues that
the politics of redistribution is at bottom recognitive because it involves
6 For empirical studies that highlight these interactions see the essays collected in Ray and Sayer
( 1999 ); Hobson ( 2003 ); and Rao and Walton ( 2004 ).
recognition and redistribution 459