as language, nationality, gender, culture, and race. Others, especially those who
approach recognition through Hegel, conceive of ‘‘identity’’ more broadly as
individual personhood, a constellation of valuable qualities in virtue of which
beings deserve respect from others, and whose forms of expression range from
the idiosyncratic to the universal. Thanks to the ambiguity of the word ‘‘rec-
ognition’’ itself, however, it often remains unclear whether identity in either of
these senses is to be conceived as recognition’s object, something given in
advance to which an act of recognition responds; or its product, a social
relation constituted through exchanges of recognition (Markell 2000 , forth-
coming; Garcı ́aDu ̈ttmann 2000 ; Laitinen 2002 ). In response to this ambiguity,
and to the deeper tensions in identity-based accounts of recognition that it
indicates, I have suggested that recognition can also be understood as directed
toward the conditions of one’s own action rather than toward an identity,
whether another’s or one’s own: this recasting of recognition as an ‘‘acknow-
ledgment’’ of one’s own practicalWnitude draws on uses of the term ‘‘recogni-
tion’’ in Greek tragedy and Aristotelian poetics as well as the work of the
American philosopher Stanley Cavell (Cavell 1976 ; Markell 2003 ).
3 Fraser on Recognition and
Redistribution
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Keeping in mind the diversity of approaches to recognition these three
questions reveal, we can now take up one of the most important responses
to the prominence of this theme in contemporary political thought. In 1995 ,
in response to what she saw as the ‘‘eclipse of a socialist imaginary’’ by the rise
of a politics focused on identity and culture, Nancy Fraser published two
essays investigating the conXicts that arise between the politics of recognition
and the politics of redistribution (Fraser 1995 a, 69 ; 1995 b, 166 ; both reprinted
in 1997 a). On Fraser’s account, the recognition–redistribution dilemma is
centered on the problem of ‘‘group diVerentiation.’’ In struggling against
cultural injustice, the politics of recognition tends to promote the speciWcity
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