ations for historical injustice (Kutz 2004 ), homelessness (Feldman 2004 ), and
the toleration of dissent (Galeotti 2002 ), among many others.
Each of these topics has given rise to lively literatures of its own; but they
have also had an eVect in the aggregate. If the explosion of interest in issues of
identity and diVerence among political theorists in the 1980 s and 1990 s repre-
sented a reaction against theWeld’s preoccupation with distributive justice, as
well as against the economism of some kinds of Marxist theory (Young 1990 ;
Laclau and MouVe 1985 ), by the mid- 1990 s some scholars began to worry that
the pendulum would swing too far in the other direction, obscuring the
persistent and intensifying problem of ‘‘material inequality’’ (Fraser 1995 a,
68 ). One aim of this chapter is to introduce the rich debate that has grown up
since then over the relationship between ‘‘recognition’’ and ‘‘redistribution,’’
or, more broadly, between the problem of identity-based injustice and the
problem of economic injustice. Another aim of the chapter, however—and the
one I shall pursueWrst—is to chart the surprisingly diverse range of uses of the
term ‘‘recognition’’ in recent political thought. For all its familiarity, and
notwithstanding the general deWnition with which I began, the concept re-
mains deeply, although not always explicitly, contested; and attention to crucial
but often neglected diVerences among approaches to recognition can open new
avenues for thinking about its vexed relationship with redistribution.
1 The Uses of ‘‘Recognition’’
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The range of discourses that make use of the concept of recognition is
soberingly wide. Even to focus on the two documents usually credited with
provoking the recent surge of interest in the idea—Charles Taylor’s ( 1994 )
‘‘The Politics of Recognition’’ and Axel Honneth’s ( 1996 )The Struggle for
Recognition, bothWrst published in 1992 —is already to confront two quite
diVerent works. Taylor’s essay was partly an eVort to make sense of the
political landscape of the time, and partly a transposition of the ‘‘liberal-
communitarian’’ debates of the 1980 s onto fresh terrain. Taylor proposed that
such phenomena as the canon wars in higher education and the Canadian
constitutional crisis could be understood as examples of the ‘‘politics of
recognition,’’ in which people seek to transform the ways in which they are
seen and esteemed by others, and so to satisfy the deeply rooted human need
recognition and redistribution 451