3.1 Concerns about Recognition
While this move to theorize equality as entailing the recognition of diVerence
has been extremely inXuential in recent years, there are critics of this trend.
Two concerns have emerged as particularly pressing: theWrst focuses on the
degree to which the tendency to privilege groups leads to fragmentation of
the wider polity; the second focuses on the extent to which the preoccupation
with cultural recognition and political inclusion results in the marginaliza-
tion of issues of economic distribution. These concerns might be thought of
as the problems of reiWcation and displacement respectively (see Fraser 2000 ).
In relation to theWrst of these, many liberal egalitarians have argued that
the politics of recognition formalizes and freezes identities that are actually
subject to constant change and thereby undermines solidarity across groups.
As one critic notes, a ‘‘focus on aYrming identity produces debilitating
political fragmentation, diverts attention from widening material inequality,
and leads to a fetishism of identity groups, reinforcing the tendency of such
groups to become exclusionary to outsiders and coercive to insiders’’ (Kiss
1999 , 194 ). Others have argued that the ‘‘retribalization’’ inherent in group-
speciWc claims erodes a sense of public-spiritedness (Elshtain 1995 , 74 ) and
endangers national identity (Miller 1995 , 132 ). Given the controversial status
of groups, and group rights, within the equality/diVerence debates, it is worth
focusing on the place of groups in the various articulations of a politics of
recognition and diVerence, and noting that the move from making the
‘‘ontological’’ claim regarding the importance of recognition to the dialogical
self, to the ‘‘advocacy’’ claim regarding the importance of group rights to a
just society, is highly contested.
Benhabib, for instance, argues that it is ‘‘theoretically wrong and politically
dangerous’’ to assume that the individual’s search for authentic selfhood
should be subordinated to the struggles of groups ( 2002 , 53 ). This is an
interesting challenge, because unlike many of the critics of group rights,
Benhabib embraces certain aspects of a politics of diVerence. She challenges
the view of the moral self as a disembedded and disembodied being and
rejects universalistic moral theories that are restricted to the standpoint of the
‘‘generalized other’’ (Benhabib 1992 , 159 ). She also suggests that the abstrac-
tion inherent in this mode of theorizing leads to the denial of diVerence. Yet
she nonetheless claims that Taylor makes an ‘‘illicit move’’ from the right of
the individual to pursue an authentic form of life, to the claim that groups
pursuing a politics of diVerence would accommodate the realization of such
480 judith squires