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RecognitionA Political-Philosophical Exchange

N N C Y F R S E R

and

XEL H O N N E T H

Translated by Joel Golb James Ingramand Christiane Wilke

\V E R S O

London • New York


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2

Redistributi on as Recognition

A Response to Nancy Fraser

xel onneth

In a series of articles and responses over recent years, NancyFraser has tried to outline a thesis that deserves our attentionnot only on account of its orienting power for a diagnosis of

the times. Rather if I understand her correctly, with herreflections she seeks to establish the conceptual underpinningsof an attempt to reconnect to critical social theory's old claim:both reflexively to conceptualize the emancipatory movementsof the age and prospectively to work towards realizing theirobjectives. l As the texts that emerged from the Institute ofSocial Research in its founding phase already indicate, the twotasks taken together not only call for a sociologically richinterpretation of the nonnative claims implicit in the socialconflicts of the present. Beyond this, they also require ajustification, however indirect, of the moral objectives thatsocial-theoretical analysis has shown to determine or character-ize the state of contemporary conflict. Now in contrast to herearlier essays, the particular challenge of Nancy Fraser's contri-bution to this volume is that both tasks are to be accomplishedin a single line of argument. In the course of an attempt toconceptually clarify the nonnative objectives now pursued ina rather diffuse and mostly implicit way by various socialmovements, a moral standard is to be fonnulated that can

REDISTRIBUTION AS R E C O G N I T I O N

demonstrate the goals' public justifiability, while moreoverimproving their political prospects.

The theoretical originality and sociological circumspectionwith which Nancy Fraser tries to renew the far-reaching claimsof Critical Theory are surely reason enough for deep engage-ment with the present essay. As well, in the course of herargument she also manages to clalify the importance of a seriesof contemporary political-theoretical approaches in the fi'ame-work of the social conflicts that mark at least the highlydeveloped countries of the West. But another and, for me,more essential reason for considering her reflections with greatcare arises from the specific thesis that establishes the guidingthread of her attempt to renew Clitical Theory: her conviction- indeed fear - that the shift away from key concepts of criticalsocial theory toward a theory of recognition w ll lead to neglectof the demands for economic redistlibution that once consti-tuted the normative heart of the theoretical tradition that goes

back to Marx. And, alongside the relevant essay by CharlesTaylor,2 she views my own theoretical efforts since I startedinvestigating the struggle for recog nitio n as typical of thisrecognition-theoretical turn. 3

The starting point of Fraser's argument is the now hardlydisputable observation that a great many contemporary socialmovements can only be properly understood from a normativepoint of view if their motivating demands are interpret ed alongthe lines of a politics of identi ty - a demand for the culturalrecognition of their collective identity. The more recent eman-cipatory movements - as represented by feminism, ethnicminorities, gay and lesbian subcultures - no longer strugglemainly for economic equality or material redistribution, but forrespect for the characteristics by which they see themselvesculturally bound together. But if the rise of a specific type ofsocial movement prompts a complete shift of critical socialtheory's key nonnative concepts toward demands for recog-nition, then, according to Fraser, something necessarily falls outof view that has lost none of its moral urgency in view of


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112 REDISTRIBUTION OR RECOGNITION?

growing immiseration and economic inequality: the persist-ence, beyond postmodem forms of identity politics, andespecially under conditions of unrestrained neoliberal capital-ism, of those social struggles and conflicts connected to theexperience of economic injustice. 4 If Critical Theory is still to

be able to understand itself as a theoretical reflection of theemancipatory movements of the age, it must not hastily giveitself over to the conceptual framework of recognition that hasarisen over recent years. Rather, it should develop a normativeframe of reference in which the two competing objectives ofrecognition and redistribution both receive their due. ForFraser, in the end this means that the standpoint of the justdistribution of material resources continues to deserve priorityon account of its moral urgency, while demands for culturalrecognition must be adjusted to the resulting limits. Throughthis reassessment of contemporary goals, she moreover hopes,finally, to contribute to a harmonization of two wings of the

emancipatory movement which threaten to fall ap art absent theintroduction of a reflective mediating instance.

Now, in view of the social situation even in the highlydeveloped capitalist countries, there can hardly be disagreementbetween Fraser and myself when it comes to this generalconclusion. The trend toward growing impoverishment oflarge parts of the population; the emergence of a new under-class lacking access to economic as well as socioculturalresources; the steady increase of the wealth of a small minority- all these scandalous manifestations of an almost totally unre-strained capitalism today make it appear self-evident that the

normative standpoint of the just distribution of essential goodsbe given the highest priority. The debate signaled by thejuxtaposition of the key terms recog nition and redistrib u-tion can therefore not reside at this level of weighing political-moral tasks. Rather, in my view the argument is located on, soto speak, a lowe r level, where what is at issue is the philosoph-ical question: which of the theoretical languages linked to therespective terms is better suited to consistently reconstructing

REDISTRIBUTION AS R E C O G N I T I O N 3

and normatively justifYing present-day political demands withinthe framework of a critical theory of society? Not the superficialranking o f normative goals, but rather their placement in acategorial framework shaped by the far-reaching claims ofCritical Theory thus constitutes the core of our discussion. And

it is in fact at precisely this point that I depart from Fraser in adecisive and far-reaching respect. ontra her proposal that thenonnative objectives of critical social theory now be conceivedas the product of a synthesis of material and culturalconsiderations of justice, I am convinced that the terms ofrecognition must represent the unified framework for such aproject. My thesis is that an attempt to renew the comprehen-sive claims of Critical Theory under present conditions doesbetter to orient itself by the categorial framework of a suffi-ciently differentiated theory of recogni tion, since this establishesa link between the social causes of widespread feelings ofinjustice and the normative objectives of emancipatory move-

ments. Moreover, such an approach does not run the riskFraser's does of introducing a theoretically unbridgeable chasmbetween symbolic and material aspects of social reality,since, on the assumptions of a theory of recognition, therelation between the two can be seen as the historically mutableresult of cultural processes of institutionalization.

However, fundamental questions of social theory, likethose raised by this last problem , play only a subordinate rolein the debate between Fraser and myself In the foreground isthe general question of which categorial tools are most prom-ising for reviving Critical Theory's claim to at once appropri-

ately articulate and morally justifY the nor mativ e claims of socialmovement s To be sure, the first step of my argument alreadyproblematizes a theoretical premise that this question seems toassume as self-evident: that in the interest of renewing CriticalTheory, it is advisable to be oriented by normative claims thathave already gained public notice as social movements. Weneed only recall the original intentions of the Frankfurt Institutefor Social Research, however, to realize that an abstractive


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fallacy is involved in such an attachment to goals that havealready been publicly articulated insofar as it neglects theeveryday, still unthematized, but no less pressing embryonicform of social misery and moral injustice. Simply recalling thiseveryday dimension of moral feelings of injustice makes it clearthat - in agreement with much recent research - what is calledinjustic e in theoretical language is experienced by those

affected as social injUly to well-founded claims to recognitionI) . Following these preliminary reflections - which might be

somewhat pretentiously termed a phenomenology of socialexperiences of injustice - in a second step the category ofrecognition will be differentiated in order to clarify differentaspects of socially caused injuries to recognition claims. In thisway, I hope to be able to offer evidence for the strong thesisthat even distributional injustices must be understood as theinstitutional expression of social disrespect - or, better said, ofunjustified relations of recognition II) . If this can be shown -

and Fraser's dichotomy of recognition and redistributionthus turns out to be questionable - then the question of thenormative justification of demands for recognition remains as afinal and decisive problem. And here, too, I will formulate acounter-thesis to Fraser's: I would like to demonstrate thatwithout anticipating a conception of the good life, it is imposs-ible to adequately criticize any of the contemporary injusticesshe tries to conceive in Marxist fashion, and I in terms of atheory of recognition (III).

I On the Phenomenology o f xperiencesof Social njustice

In the last twenty-five years or so, it has become almost self-evident that when critical social theory reconsiders the norma-tive goals of the present, it should be oriented toward a socialphenomenon whose name already signals a break with the past.Empirical indicators of the spark-point of moral discontent in

115EDISTRIBUTION AS R E C O G N I T I O N

developed SOCletIes are no longer expected from the labormovement or similar protest currents, but rather from thediffuse complex of newer activist groups and protest move-ments brought under the umbrella concept of the new socialmovements. t is true that from the start there was a certainlack of clarity about what the commonality in the new ofthese movements consisted in. Thus, with the initial selectiveorientation toward the peace and ecology movements, the ideapredominated that we were facing the result of a cultural turnaway from materi al values and a growing interest in questionsabout the quality of our way of life;5 while today, with thefocus on the phenomenon of multiculturalism, the idea of a

politics of identity is dominant, according to which culturalminorities increasingly struggle for recognition of their collec-tive value convictions. 6 But in any case, the theoretical motivehidden behind these different versions of an orientation to the

new social movements remains the same insofar as the

traditional problems of capitalist societies are no longer held tobe the key to present moral discontent. Rather, it is suggestedthat only such newly emerging movements can inform us ofthe moral objectives toward which a critical social theoryshould be oriented in the long term.

It is with this indirect demand for a link between criticalsocial theory and present-day social movements that I aminterested in this first round of our debate. The danger I see insuch an affiliation is an unintended reduction of social sufferingand moral discontent to just that part of it that has already beenmade visible in the political public sphere by publicity-savvyorganizations. A critical social theory that supports only nor-mative goals that are already publicly articulated by socialmovements risks precipitously affirming the prevailing level ofpolitical-moral conflict in a given society: only experiences ofsuffering that have already crossed the threshold of mass mediaattention are confirmed as morally relevant, and we are unableto advocatoriaUy thematize and make claims a bout sociallyunjust states of affairs that have so far been deprived of public


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attention. O f course, it h s long since become clear in theMarxist tradition that endowing the working cl ss with aprivileged status in the articulation of moral discontent incapitalist society, prior to any empirical scrutiny, is merely anunaddressed residue of metaphysical historical speculation. Anda great merit of the thinkers brought together in the earlyInstitute for Social Research was to have opened the way forshaking off this philosophical-historical dogma by progranunat-ically subjecting the task of scouting out system-transcendingconflict potentials to the check of empirical social research. 7

But the now widespread acceptance of a merely opposedperspective, whereby only moral discontent articulated by the

new social movements is valid s a theory-guiding objective,holds no less danger for the project of a critical social theory. Itis ll too easy to abstract from social suffering and injustice that,owing to the filtering effects of the bourgeois public sphere,has not yet reached the level of political thematization and

organization.Now, Nancy Fraser seems to be completely clear about this

risk, s her contributions over recent years show. Indeed, thewhole drift of the present essay pursues precisely this aim bywarnin g against hastily adjusting our nonnative terminology topolitical objectives that owe their prominence to selectiveattention to only one type of social movement. Nevertheless, Iwould like to suggest that in the dramaturgy of Fraser's line ofthinking, her choice of examples and positioning of arguments,a conviction comes to dominate that is not so far from today'swidespread idealization of the new social movem ents. For inher case, too, the legitimacy of a critical social theory's norma-tive framework is primarily to be measured by whether it is ina position to express the political objectives of social move-ments. This is why she is so concerned to point out again andagain the exten t to which, ev en today, demands for materialredistribution are among the objectives of organized politicalmovements. The point at which I depart from the conceptualmodel underlying this argumentative strategy is best anticipated

REDISTRIBUTION AS RECOGNITION 7

by a rhetorical question: what would be the implications forthe categorial framework of a critical social theory if, at aparticular time and for contingent reasons, problems of distri-bution no longer played a role in the political public sphere?Would the consequence of the doctrine that basic nonnativeconcepts must essentially mirror the objectives of social move-ments then be that demands for redistribution would com-pletely disappear from the theory's moral vocabulary? Theobvious answer makes it clear that the introduction of centralnonnative concepts into a critical social theory should notfollow directly from an or ientation toward social movements.Rather, an independent terminology is required, since thefonns of institutionally caused suffering and misery to beidentified also include those that exist prior to and indepen-dently of political articulation by social movements. Beforetrying to show how carrying out this task raises a certain typeof moral-psychological question that has long been neglected

within the tradition of Critical Theory (2), I would first like tobriefly explain why Nancy Fraser is not altogether free fromunreflective ties to the contingent successes of social move-ments (1).

1. On the demystificationo identity struggles

The picture that Nancy Fraser develops of the post-socialistconditions of contemporary politics at the beginning of herreflections is wholly determined by the central place of acertain type of social movement . What we face first and fore-most in the framework of a critical social theory is a multitudeof politically organized efforts by cultural groups to find socialrecognition for their own value convictions and lifestyles. It isobvious which empirical phenomena Fraser has in mind withthis diagnosis: in the highly deVeloped countries of the West,the women 's movement and ethnic and sexual minoritiesincreasingly resist disrespect and marginalization rooted in aninstitutionalized value structure constitutively tailored to the


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idealized characteristics of the white, male, heterosexual citi-zen. The struggle thus aims to change a country's majorityculture by overcoming stereotypes and ascriptions in a waythat can also in the end win social recognition for one's owntraditions and way of life. It is true that in view of thetendency to elevate precisely this type of social movementinto the embodiment of a post-socialist conflict scenario, cer-tain doubts may arise about whether Fraser's initial diagnosisalready involves an overgeneralization of American experience.For in countries like France, Great Britain, and Germany,social struggles of the identity politi cs type have so farplayed only a subordinate role, whereas the tradit ional prob-lems of labor policies, social welfare, and ecology morestrongly shape debate in the political public sphere. But whatinterests me in this suggestive picture of a new, post-socialistera is a different question altogether, which has less to do withtendencies to empirical overgeneralization than with a certain

reductionism: which morally relevant forms of social depriva-tion and suffering do we have to abstract away from in orderto arrive at the diagnosis that today we are essentially facingstruggles for cultural recognition? I see three such reductiveabstractions at work, which had to be carried out sequentiallyfor the identity politics of certain social movements toemerge as the central conflict of our time.

a Anyone seeking a rough overview of typical forms ofsocially caused suffering in the highly developed capitalistcountries would not be ll advised to consult the impressivestudy The Weight o the World by Pierre Bourdieu and hisassociates. Here we find a multitude of reports and interviewsthat make it clear that the overwhelming share of cases ofeveryday misery are still to be found beyond the perceptualthreshold of the political public sphere. 8 A few remarks sufficeto sketch in broad outline the characteristics of these phenom-ena of social deprivation: they include the consequences of the

feminization of poverty, which primarily affects single


mothers with limited job qualifications; long-term unemploy-ment, which goes a.long with social isolation and privatedisorganization; the depressing experience of the rapid disqual-ification of job skills that had enjoyed high esteem at the startof a career and now have been made useless by acceleratedtechnological development; the immiseration of the rural econ-omy, where, despite deprivation and back-breaking work,yields on small farms never seem to be sufficient; and finally,the everyday privations oflarge families, where low pay renderseven the efforts o f both parents insufficient to support thechildren. Each of these social crisis situations - and the listcould easily be expanded - goes along with a series o f exhaust-ing, embittered activities for which the concept of socialstruggle would be entirely appropriate. Such tendenciestoward immiseration are constantly fought by the afflicted withforms o f opposition extending from confrontations with theauthorities, to desperate efforts to maintain the integrity of both

family and psyche, to the mobilization of aid by relatives orfriends. But, as Bourdieu insists in his Postscript, none o f thesesocial efforts is recognized by the political public sphere as arelevant form o f social conflict. Instead, a sort of perceptualfilter ensures that only those problems that have already attainedthe organizational level of a political movement are takenseriously in moral terms:

With only the old-fashioned category of social at theirdisposal to think about these unexpressed and often inex-pressible malaises, political organizations cannot perceivethem and, still less, take them on. They could do so only by

expanding the narrow vision of politics they haveinherited from the past and by encompassing not only all theclaims brought into the public arena by ecological, antiracistor feminist movements (among others), but also all thediffuse expectations and hopes which, because they oftentouch on the ideas that people have ab out their own identityand self-respect, seem to be a private affair and thereforelegitimately excluded from political debate.


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Referring Bourdieu's vehement objections back to Fraser'sinitial image of a post-socialist conflict scenario, the full extentof the retouching this construction required becomes visible: inunintended agreement with the exclusionary mechanisms thatdirect the attention of the political public sphere, out of themultitude of everyday struggles only the relatively insignificantnumber that have already found official recognition as newsocial movements are picked out, as if by artificial light. Thisgives rise, first of all, to the misleading notion that developedcapitalist societies are marked primarily by social conflictsdriven by demands for cultural recognition. And to counteractthe normative consequences of considering only these object-ives within the framework of a critical social theory, themarginalized social movements (still) demanding distributivejustice must then be remembered in a second step. The errorhere lies in the tacit initial premise that social movementscan serve critical social theory as a kind of empirically visibleguiding thread for diagnosing nonnatively relevant problemareas. What such a procedure completely overlooks is the factthat official designation as a social movement is itself theresult of an underground struggle for recognition conducted bygroups or individuals affiicted by social suffering to make thepublic perceive and register their problems. But this co-enact-ment of an exclusion already contained in the designationsocial movement is not the only retouching Nancy Fraser

had to carry out to arrive at her initial diagnosis.

b) For all its one-sidedness, it is of course not entirely wrongto locate a new focus of conflict within the highly developedsocieties in the growing tendency of cultural groups to demandrecognition of their collective identities. Albert Hirschman alsobasically assumes that we are facing a shift from divisible to

indivisible conflicts, whose peculiarity consists in the fact thatthe contested good - precisely this collective identity - cannotbe parceled out from the standpoint of distributive justice. On

REDISTRIBUTION AS RECOGNITION

his premises, the danger is therefore growing of social conflictswhose resolution can no longer rely on the normative agreementof the members of a political conununity.1O But those whobelieve they can in fact discern in this tendency the centralconflict scenario of the highly developed societies must also takethe next step and consider in their empirical diagnosis that manysuch cultural groups try to assert their collective identity byaggressively excluding all outsiders. The social movementstoday demanding recognition of their value convictions includenot only peaceful groups like femi.nists or marginalized minor-ities, but also racist and nationalist groups such as Farrakhan'sNation of Islam and German skinheads. In this respect, thesecond retouch Fraser had to carry out to her initial picture ofa new post-socialist conflict scenario consists in leaving outa not inconsiderable portion of the identity politics enter-prise. The different movements, that is can only be tied tothe common aim of non-exclusive, democratically-oriented

demands for cultural recognition when we abstract away fromthose that militantly try to assert their particula rity with thethreat of violence by tacitly applying a normative criterion. Inan essay that grapples with contemporary theoretical approachesto the new social movements, Craig Calhoun leaves no doubtabout such a tendency toward normative idealism in the con-ception of identity politics :

The new social movements idea is however, problematicand obscures the greater significance of identity politics.Without much theoretical rationale, it groups together whatseem to the researchers relatively attracti ve movemen ts,vaguely on the left, but leaves out such other contemporarymovements as the new religious right and fundamentalism,the resistance of white ethnic communities against people ofcolor, various versions of nationalism, and so forth. Yet theseare equally manifestations of identity politics and there isno principle that clearly explains their exclusion from thelists drawn up by NSM theorists.


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To this extent, the current privileging of the social move-ments with which Fraser opens her analysis not only resultsfrom leaving out many of the social struggles that occur in theshadows of the political public sphere. Moreover, it mustabstract away fi-om those identi ty politics projects that pur-sue their goals by means of social exclusion in order to aniveat the idea that today feminism, antiracist movements, andsexual minorities are at the center of social conflict. However,these two bits of retouching do not yet complete the initialpicture. Before it can take its final fonn, in a third step allhistorical precursors that might reveal similarities with themovements in question are excised. For only thus can thesuggestive impression emerge that with today's struggles for

cultural recognition we face an entirely novel historicalphenomenon.

c n the famous essay that revealed the polit ics of recog-

nition to a broad public as a contemporary problem, CharlesTaylor in a way already supposes a highly misleading chrono-logy. According to his central historical thesis, while the historyof liberal-capitalist societies has hitherto been marked by strug-gles for legal equality, today their place has largely been takenby the struggles of social groups demanding recognition of theirculturally defined difference. 2 What interests me at this pointis not that, by assuming a much too narrow notion of legalrecognition, Taylor schematically shrinks it into a kind ofhomogenizing equal treatment; I will have to return to thislater in the context of conceptual clarification, since the sametendency seems to be at work with Fraser as well. For themoment, however, what is of interest are the historical styliza-tions and one-sidedness that give Taylor's thesis its linearchronology. Just as all legal components of contemporarystruggles for recognition must be suppressed in advance, so,conversely, must all the cultural, i dentity-polit ical elementsbe removed from the legal conflicts of the past in order toarrive at the idea of a historical sequence of two distinguishable


types of social movement . The thesis that today we face aboveall struggles for the recognition of cultural difference thus tacitlyassumes a specific picture of traditional social movements - asif, despite all the focus on legal equality, an objective likedemanding social recognition for one's values and ways of lifehad been completely alien to these movements . It does notrequire much detailed historical knowledge to see how mislead-ing - indeed false - this characterization is.

The notion that identity politics is a new phenomenon is, insum, clearly false . The women's movement has roots at leasttwo hundred years old. The founding of communes was asimportant in the early 1800s as in the 1960s. Weren't theEuropean nationalisms of the ni neteenth century instances ofidentity politics? What of the struggles of Mrican-Americansin the wake of slavery? What of anticolonial resistance?Neither is identity politics limited to the relatively affluent(the postmaterialists as Inglehart calls them), as thoughthere were some clear hierarchy of needs in which clearlydefined material interests precede culture and struggles overthe constitution of the nature of interests - both materialand spiritual. 13

Today's identity-political movements can no more bereduced to their cultural objectives than the traditional resist-ance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies can be pinned down to material and legal goals. Inthe end , even the efforts of the labor movement - to nameanother important example Calhoun leaves off his list - aimedin essential part at finding recognition for its traditions andforms of life within a capitalist value horizon. 4 The wholesequential schema on which Taylor bases his historical diagnosisis therefore misleading: it suggests two phases in the history ofmodern social movements, where it is to a large extent merelya matter of differences of nuance and emphasis. And insofar asFraser lets her initial picture be influenced by this suggestiveperiodization, she necessarily takes on the false premises of ahistorical opposition of interest-based or legal politics on the


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one side, and identit y politics on the other. s a result, shetoo, in a third and final retouch, must leave out all the culturalelements of the traditional social movements in order to arriveat the idea that the struggle for cultural recognition is ahistorically new phenomenon.

Bringing together these three abstractions, it becomes clear thatFraser's initial diagnosis is a sociological artifact: first, from themultitude of current social conflicts, only those are picked outthat have attracted the attention of the political public sphereas social movements (in the USA) under the official title ofidentity politics ; then, tacitly applying a normative criterion,

from these identity-political movements precisely those areexcluded that pursue aims by the illegitimate means of socialexclusion and oppression; and finally, by leaving out historicalforerunners, the small group of social movements that remainare stylized into the new key phenomenon of the post- socialist

era, to which the normative conceptualization of critical socialtheory must feel partially bound. What chiefly concerns meabout such an approach in this first round of the debate is whathappens in the first of the sequential exclusions. On the dubiouspremise that a critical social theory should be nom1ativelyoriented toward social movements, the whole spectrum ofsocial discontent and suffering is reduced to that small part of itthat wins official recognition in the political public sphere. Thejustification for this thematic one-sidedness is for the most partimplicitly supplied by the fatal mistake Marxist theory madeover and over again, from its beginnings up to the recent past.While Marx and his successors had a historical-philosophicaltendency to see the proletariat alone as the stand-in for all socialdiscontent, in a countermove, all dogmatic definitions are nowto be avoided by interpreting social movements as the empiricalindicators of such discontent. 15 This gives rise to the question-able tendency of merely taking on board all the prior thematicdecisions by which, on the basis of selection processes, certainforms. of social suffering move to the center of the political

REDISTRIBUTION AS R E C O G N I T 1 0 N 125

public sphere. Today, such a - surely unintended - complic itywith political domination can only be undone by introducing anormative terminology for identifying social discontent inde-pendently of public recognition. O f course, this requires pre-cisely the kind of moral-psychological considerations Fraserseeks to avoid.

2 Injustice as humili tion and disrespect

So far, I have demonstrated nothing more against Fraser thanthat normatively orienting a critical social theory toward thepublicly perceptible demands of social movements has theunintended consequence of reproducing political exclusions.This does not, however , seem to show all that much in viewof her further arguments, since in a second step she proceedsto insist on the normative relevance of questions of distribu-tion against the hegemony of identity-political goals. How-

ever, if we recall the argumentative roll of her initial diagnosis,then a not insignificant - in the end, even decisive - differ-ence already becomes visible: while Fraser can only considerthe introduction of vocabulary of recognition into the cate-gorial framework of a critical social theory justified to theextent that it expresses the normative demands of a new post-socialist conflict scenario, for me, following what has been saidso far, there ca n be no such historical restriction. Quite apartfrom the fact that the whole idea of a politics of identityseems to me a sociological artifact, I instead have to justify theconceptual framework of recognition apart from any referenceto social movements. In contrast to Fraser, I assume that it isnot the rise of identity-political demands - let alone the goalsof multiculturalism - that justifies recasting the basic conceptsof critical social theory in terms of a theory of recognition,but rather an improved insight into the motivational sourcesof social discontent and resistance. For me, in other words,the recognition-theoretical tum represents an attempt toanswer a theory-immanent problem, not a response to present


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social-developmental trends. Because of this systematic differ-ence, in the further course of my argument I will also have toshow that even questions of distributive justice are betterunderstood in terms of normative categories that come from asufficiently differentiated theory of recognition. And, in theend, even the problem of the normative justification of criticaltheory of society as a whole cannot remain unaffected by thisdistinction.

First of all, however, an explanation is required of the set ofproblems that introduc ing a conception of recognition is meantto solve. For this I need only continue the line o f argumentalready laid out in my remarks on the precarious role of the

new social movements within the framework of critical socialtheory. s should already have become clear there, a normativeorientation toward the social movements that happen to bedominant represents precisely the wrong response to a questionthat has become increasingly urgent since the collapse of the

historical-philosophical premises of Marxism: if the proletariatcan no longer represent the pretheoretical instance whichtheory can self-evidently call upon , how then is a form of socialdiscontent to be determined as constituting the necessary ref-erence point for empirically justifying critique? t is probablybetter, however, to free this question from its hermeneuticcontext and first formulate it independently of its specific rolewithin Critical Theory in order to be as clear as possible aboutits substantive core. With what conceptual tools, then , can asocial theory determ ine what in social reality is experienced bysubjects as socially unjust?

It is clear that no defmitive answer to this question offeelings of injustice is possible without first establishing theactual reactions of those affected with the tools of empiricalsocial research. Since, however, all investigations of this kindare informed, via categories and criteria of relevance, by atheoretical pre-understanding, it is necessary to treat this prob-lem on a conceptual level. What is at issue here are the basicconcepts to be used to inform us beforehand about the respects


in which subject's expectations can be disappointed by society.Thus, it is a matter of a conceptual pre-understanding of thosenormative expectations we must assume for the members of asociety if forms of social discontent and suffering are to beinvestigated at all. \Vith respect to this problem, it may behelpful first to recall somewhat more precisely two figures ofthought already at work in our opposed positions. This willmake clear that the level in quest ion - that of the categorialdetermination of moral vulnerabilities - need not be entered atall, since, according to prior decisions on matters of principle,they pass either above or below it.

This is not difficult to show for the tradition of criticalsocial theolY that remained largely confined to the premises ofthe Marxist history of philosophy. Where the proletariat wasnot, following Lukacs, endowed with the traits of AbsoluteSpirit from the start, this was argued on the basis of thesociological figure of ascribable interest, which so to speak

gave it a historical-materialist twist. A unified interest was tobe ascribed to the working class as a collective subject accord-ing to instrument-rational considerations - which, it couldthen be shown in a second step, would be forever disap-pointed by capitalist relations. Even if the content of any

ascribable interest could vary depending on the underlyingposition and could even include normative goals, the theoret-ical research could for good reason be broken off before thelevel that concerns us here. There was no need for a separateexplanation o f subjects' moral expectations of society, sincethe place of such expectations was taken by completely instru-ment-rational interests. Hence, the nOlmative dimension ofsocial discontent was never able to come into view at all inMarxism because of the implicit assumptions of a more or lessutilitarian anthropology: socialized subjects were basicallyregarded not as moral actors, marked in advance by a numberof nOlmative claims and corresponding vulnerabilities, but as

rational-purposive actors, whose particular interests could beascribed accordingly. 16


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Now, in my view, the second of the posltlOns discussedabove, which is normatively oriented by the empirical indicatorof the new social movements, relates to this failed intellectualtradition by simply making the opposite mistake. Whereasearlier too much was presumed about subjects' predeterminedinterests, here there is too little prior orientation to be able toperceive any stratum of normative expectations whatsoever.What predominates in these newer versions of critical socialtheory is the conviction that further clarification of this kind isnot required, since the objectives articulated by social move-ments already tell us enough about existing forms of socialinjustice. Any additional experiences of suffering that we maysuspect lie beyond such publicly articulated discontent belonginstead to the field of theoretical speculation, where sociologicalascription prevails over empirical indicators. The consequenceof this kind of short-circuit between social movements andsocial discontent as a whole is not simply the already criticized

tendency merely to theoretically confirm a society's politicallyestablished level of conflict. Graver still, in my view, is the factthat all conceptual efforts to make sense of possible forms ofsocial suffering are nipped in the bud. While within Marxism acertain tendency toward utilitarian anthropology always pre-dominated, allowing a unified interest to be collectivelyascribed to a social class, the second position lacks any concep-tual tools for hypothesizing about the potential causes offeelings of social injustice. Subjects remain, as it were,unknown, faceless beings until precisely such time as they unitein social movem ents w hose political goals publicly disclose theirnormative orientations.

With these historical-theoretical reflections we begin to seein outline why the attempt has never really been undertakenwithin the tradition of critical social theory to come to apreliminary conceptual understanding of the normative sourcesof social discontent. With the great exception ofJiirgen Haber-mas - alongside whom Antonio Gramsci should perhaps beplaced - for various reasons a certain tendency to anti-norma-


tivism has prevailed, which essentially prohibited subjects frombeing endowed with normative expectations vis-a-vis society.For this reason, what must be considered a kind of social-theoretical premise for categorial reflection on possible formsof social discontent could neve r even come into view: namely,that every society requires justification from the perspective ofits members to the extent that it has to fulfill a number ofnormative criteria that arise from deep-seated claims in thecontext of social interaction. If the adjective social is to meananythi ng more than typically found in society, social sufferingand discontent possess a norm tive core. It is a matter of thedisappointment or violation of nonnative expectations ofsociety considered justified by those concerned. Thus, suchfeelings of discontent and suffering, insofar as they are desig-na.ted as social, coincide with the experience that society isdoing som ething unjust, something unjustifiable.

The decisive question now, of course, is whether this core

of normative expectations amounts to more than what isalready contained in the formal criteria of the concept ofjustificatio n itself. On this minimal interpretation, the experi-ence of social injustice would always be measured by whetherthe procedural criteria built into established principles of publiclegitimation or justification are considered sufficient for insti-tutional regulation. What is ascribed to the participants here isthus a kind of conviction of legitimacy oriented by the moralimplications of the existing procedures for justifying politicaldecisions. Suggestions for such a procedural model are of courseto be found above all in the Habermasian idea that every formof political legitimation inust satisfy specific standards of discur-sive rationality; 7 bu t Joshua Cohen, too, following John Rawls,has more recently tried to show by examining historicalaccounts that the violation of institutionally expected justifica-tions leads to morally motivated protest. S From a sociologicalperspective, such reflections generally amount to the empiricalhypothesis that social feelings of injustice primarily arise whenindividually understandable reasons for particular institutional


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measures and rules are lacking. And it must further be assumedthat, by virtue o f moral socialization processes, these reasonsavailable to individuals make up the elements of public practicesof justification that are valid in a given society. In other words,social injustice is experienced the moment it can no longer berationally understood why an institutional rule should count onagreement in accordance with generally accepted reasons. It istrue that this line of thinking takes into account the fact thatthe individual evaluation of social processes possesses a formalstructure that cannot be completely independent of the struc-ture of public practices o f justification: what counts as a goodargument for general recognition will also sooner or laterachieve validity and shape subjective standards. But, on theother hand, this restriction to only a form o f justification seemsto entirely lose sight o f the normative perspectives from whichindividuals decide how far they can follow the establishedprinciples of public justification in the first place. It is as if the

generally accepted reasons need not correspond to the norma-tive expectations that the subjects bring - in a certain way ontheir own - to the social order. Sociologically applied proce-duralism thus lacks a counterpart to individual claims andvulnerabilities, which for those affected fonn the moral sub-stance through which the legitimacy o f institutional rules is

refracted. What counts as a good reason in the legitimationo f institutional rules, then, depends for individuals on whethertheir moral expectations of society as such find appropriateconsideration. Thus, when it comes to understanding theexperience o f social injustice categorially, the material horizonsof expectation that make up the material of all publicprocesses of justification must also be taken into account. Foran institutional rule or measure that, in light of generallyaccepted grounds, violates deep-seated claims on the socialorder, is experienced as social injustice. 19

With this turn against sociologically-oriented proceduralism,however, comes the not unreasonable demand that we be ableto say something theoretically convincing about the normative

REDISTRIBUTION AS RECOGNITION

expectations that subjects generally have of the social order.The most serious problem here, of course, turns out to bearriving at determinations that are abstract enough to grasp themultitude of different claims and, if possible, tie them to anormative core. Such an endeavor is not, however, completelyhopeless, since over the last two or three decades a number ofstudies in different disciplines have all pointed in one and thesame direction. And, in light o f what has been said so far, itshould not be surprising that this conunon goal consists in theidea that what subjects expect of society is above all recognitiono f their identity claims. This idea becomes clearer if we brieflyname the stages through which this research gradually reacheda breakthrough.

In the beginning it was historical research on the labormovement that first made clear the extent to which goalsof recognition had already marked the social protest o f thelower classes in emerging and gradually prevailing capitalism.

Taking aim at the tendency to consider only economicinterests, historians like E.P. Thompson and Barrington Moorewere able to show that, when it came to the motivationalsources of resistance and protest, the experience of the viola-tion of locally transmitted claims to honor was much moreimportant. o In surprising proximity to this line of research, abroad field o f investigation soon opened up in sociologywhich pursued the question o f what members o f the lowersocial classes saw as the core o f their experiences o f oppressionand injustice. And here too it emerged that motivationallywhat weighed much more heavily than their material plightwas that ways of life and achievements, which in their eyeswere worthy of respect, were not recognized by the rest o fsociety.21 But while this provided preliminary evidence thatsocial injury to one's integrity, honor, or dignity representsthe normative core of the experience o f injustice, these resultsremained limited for the time being to the lower classes ofcapitalist societies. Generalizing reflections could thus onlycome when these findings were placed in a broader context,


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where their convergence with completely different life-situ-ations and constellations of experience could come into view.Comparison with the social resistance of colonized groups orthe subterranean history of women's protest then showed thatthe proletarian struggle for respect for claims to honor was byno means a special case, but only a particularly striking exampleo f a widespread experiential pattern: subjects perceive institu-tional procedures s social injustice when they see aspects oftheir personality being disrespected which they believe have aright to recognition.

Even these empirical findings provided little more thanillustrative raw material requiring conceptualization to serve

s a tenable basis for a generalizable thesis. Refeni.ng back tothe problem under discussion here, the mutually reinforcingfindings said no more than that perceptions of social injusticedepend not only on established principles of legitimation, butalso on different expectations of social recognition. But how

a social order's standards of public justification were specifi-cally connected with these relatively stable claims - how themoral form of justification was to be thought together withideas of integrity and worth - largely evaded clarification inthis empirically and historically focused discussion. Fmtherprogress could only come when, under the impact o f researchthat had accumulated in the meantime, social theory and polit-ical philosophy began to open up to the theme. Alongsidework that further developed Hegel's theory of recognition,studies by Tzvetan Todorov, Michael Ignatieff, and AvishaiMargalit are especially noteworthy here. Despite their dif-ferent methods and aims, their efforts are nevertheless unitedby the initial premise that the experience o f a withdrawalof social recognition - of degradation and disrespect - mustbe at the center o f a meaningful concept o f socially causedsuffering and injustice. With this, what had previously onlyhad the status of generalized empirical findings was raised tothe level of a normatively substantive social theory: the basicconcepts through which social injustice comes to bear in a


theory o f society must be tailored to subjects' normativeexpectations regarding the social recognition of their personalintegrity.

O f course, this finding is still a far from satisfactory answerto the question of how such deep-seated claims to recognitionare influenced by the forms of justification that inform subjects'evaluative standards by way of social discourses of justification.Moreover, it is not yet entirely clear what is meant by thepersonal integrity which people generally expect their societyto recognize. But the research just described already providesthe initial outline o f a thesis that lends additional weight to theobjection I made against Fraser: the conceptual framework ofrecognition is of central importance today not because itexpresses the objectives of a new type of social movement, butbecause it has proven to be the appropriate tool for categoriallyunlocking social experiences of injustice s a whole. It is notthe particular, let alone new, central idea of oppressed collec-

tives - whether they are characterized in terms o f differenceor cultural recognition - that is now to provide the basis forthe normative framework of a theory o f recognition. Rather,what gives rise to - indeed compels - such a categorial revisionare the fmdings that have been compiled concerning the moralsources of the experience of social discontent. BarringtonMoore's path-breaking investigation of proletarian resistance;the scattered studies of the significance o f damaged self-respectamong colonized peoples; the growing literature on the centralrole of disrespect in women's experiences of oppression; Avis-hai Margalit's systematic treatise on the key place of dignityin our ideas o f justice - ll point in the same direction: to thenecessity o f adopting the terms of recognition. According tothe knowledge now available to us, what those affected regard

s unjust are institutional rules or measures they see s

necessarily violating what they consider to be well-foundedclaims to social recognition.

For the project o f a critical social theory Nancy Fraser and Iseek to renew, a consequence follows from this line of thinking


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that diverges significantly from her own strategy. More theo-retical innovation is needed today than Fraser has in mindwhen she tries to categorially expand theory's normative frameof reference so that both the older and the newer objectives ofemancipatory movements can find appropriate expression.Quite apart from the above-mentio ned risk of merely affirmingthe existing level of conflict, such an approach f ils even totouch on the problem of systematic lack of access to everydayexperiences of injustice. This difficulty - a legacy of thesociological anti-normativism that also prevailed in the olderFrankfilrt School - must now stand at the beginning of anyrenewal o f critical social theory. For without a categorialopening to the normative standpoint from which subjectsthemselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completelycut off from a dimension of social discontent that it shouldalways be able to call upon. Neither the idea of ascribableinterests, stemming from Marxism, nor an atheoretical attach-

ment to new social movements, is of any help here. Rather,in accordance with the research I have briefly summarized,what is needed is a basic conceptual shift to the normativepremises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of ll

experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition,in the phenomena of htimiliation and disrespect. In this way,the recognition-theoretical tum I am recommending forcritical social theory moves one level beneath Fraser's argu-ment. Such a categorial transfonnation would not serve toinclude emancipatory movements that have thus far beeninsufficiently thematized, but to solve problems having to dowith the thematization of social injustice s such. To be sure,pursuing this more comprehensive strategy also entails takingthe second step that arises from the basic recognition-theoreticalshift: even the material inequalities that most concern Frasermust be interpretable s expressing the violation of well-founded claims to recognition.


II The Capitalist Recognition Orderand Struggles over istribution

In the first round of my debate with Nancy Fraser, J wanted tocall into question two connected premises that tacitly underlieher determination of the relation between conflicts over rec-ognition and distribution. First, it seems highly implausible tome to interpret the history o f political conflict within capitalistsocieties according to a schema that asserts a transition frominterest-based to identity-oriented social movements, andhence a shift in nonnative semantics from interest to iden-tity, or from equality to difference. If we take intoaccount reports of moral discontent and social protest in earliertimes, it quickly emerges that a language is constantly used inwhich feelings o f damaged recognition, respect, or honor playa central semantic role. The moral vocabulary in which nine-

teenth-century workers, groups of emancipated women at thebeginning of the twentieth century, and African-Americans inbig US cities in the 1920s articulated their protests was tailoredto registering social humiliation and disrespect. True , this doesnot yet tell us anything about how they saw themselves s

disrespected or not recognized, but the evidence nonethelessshows unmistakably that injustice is regularly associated withwithheld recognition. To this extent, it seems to me inadvis-;lble simply on the descriptive level to divide experienceso f injustice into two diametrically opposed classes, the firstcomprising questions of distribution, the second questions ofcultural recognition. Not only is the spectrum of moral

discontent not exhausted by this simple opposition; it wouldalso suggest that experiences of materi al disadvantage can bedescribed independently of individuals' and groups' problemswith social recognition. It therefore seems more plausible tome that experiences of injustice be conceived along a contin-lmm of forms of withheld recognition - of disrespect - whosedifferences are determined by which qualities or capacities those


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affected take to be unjustifiably unrecognized or not respected.Such an approach lso allows us to consider that differences inthe expelience of injustice can be determined not only withregard to the object, but also by the form of the missingrecognition. Thus, when it comes to the sorts of identityconflic ts Fraser stresses, it makes a fundamental differencewhether the culturally defmed groups are demanding a kind ofsocial appreciation or the legal recognition of their collectiveidentity. In any case, simply mentioning these two alternativesgives rise to the suspicion that, because of the rigid distinctionbetween redistribution and cultural recognition, Frasersimply does not have the categorial tools to take adequateaccount of this legal form of recognition. Her argumentcreates the impression that social groups basically struggle formaterial resources or cultural recognition, while the strugglefor legal equality smprisingly finds no systematic expression atall. 23

These preliminary considerations, which I will explain fur-ther in the course of my response, give rise to the second ofFraser's conceptual premises I wish to call into question. Thosewho argue along the lines I have just indicated cannot histori-cally restrict the concept of recognition to a new phase of socialidentity conflicts. Rather, this framework should serve to

make visible a deep layer of morally motivated conflicts thatthe tradition of critical social theory has not infrequentlymisrecognized, owing to its fixation on the concept of interest.To be sure, such a recognition-theoretical reconceptualizationrequires more than opposing, as if from the outside, a series ofrecognition expectations which can potentially produce socialconflicts to an otherwise conceptually unaltered social reality.Those who proceed this way have not sufficiently appre ciatedthat forms of reciprocal recognition are always already institu-tionalized in every social reality, whose internal deficits orasymmetries are indeed what can first touch off a kind ofstruggle for recognition. What is therefore required first ofll is an attempt to explicate the moral order of society as a


fragile structure of graduated relations of recognition; only thencan it be shown in a second step that this recognit ion order cantouch off social confl.icts on various levels, which as a rule referto the mor l experience of what is taken to be unfoundeddisrespect. With such an approach it is moreover clear from thestart that the expectations of recognition attributed to subjectscannot be treated like a kind of anthropological yardstick, asFraser seems to reproach me for in some places. Rather, suchexpectations are the product of the social formation of a deep-seated claim-making potential in the sense that t hey always owetheir nonnative justification to principles institutionallyanchored in the historically established recognition order. Oncewe see this internal entwinement of expectations of recognition- or, put negatively, experiences of disrespect - and historicallyinstitutionalized principles of recognition, we also see the initialoutlines of how the so far unexplained connection betweensocial discourses of recognition and justification must be

construed.This short summary of the conclusions of the flf t part ofmy response theoretically anticipates the direction I will pmsuein continuing the argument. Before I can attempt to interpretdistribution conflicts according to the moral grammar o f astruggle for recognition, a short explanation is required of whatit can mean to speak of capitalist society as an institutionalizedrecognition order. To this end, in a first step I will explain howthe development of bourgeois-capitalist society can be under-stood as the result of the differentiation of three social sphereso f recognition (1). nly then can I set mys elf the task ofinterpreting distribution conflicts - contr Fraser's proposal - as

the expression of a struggle for recognition; this morally moti-vated struggle takes the specific fonn of a conflict over theinterpretation and evaluation of the recognition principle of

ac levement 2) .


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1. n the historical differentiation o hree spheres recognition:Love law achievement

In light of the merely preparatory aims o f the first part o f myremarks, in the following I will have to content myself withonly a rough sketch of the argument. I thus rely for the most

part on research that at least implicitly attempts to interpretbourgeois-capitalist society as an institutionalized recognitionorder. In this way, it should not only become clear in which ofthe particular spheres of recognition what are traditionally andin shorthand termed conflicts of distribu tion take place.Beyond this, I am also concerned to show that the distinctivelyhuman dependence on intersubjective recognition s alwaysshaped by the particular manner in which the mutual grantingof recognition is institutionalized within a society. From amethodological point of view, this consideration has the con-sequence that subjective expectations of recognition cannotsimply be derived from an anthropological theory of the person.To the contrary, it is the most highly differentiated recognitionspheres that provide the key for retrospective speculation onthe peculiarity of the intersubjective nature of human beings.Accordingly, the practical self-relation of human beings - thecapacity, made possible by recognition, to reflexively assurethemselves of their own competences and rights 24 - is notsomething given once and for all; like subjective recognitionexpectations, this ability expands 'with the number of spheresthat are differentiated in the course of social development forsocially recognizing specific components of the personality.

Following these preliminary reflections, it seems to make

sense to understand the breakthrough to bourgeois-capitalistsociety as the result of a differentiation of three spheres ofrecognition. In order to allow for the socialization of progeny,the estate-based order of premodern society must already haverudimentarily developed the attitudes of care and love - with-out which children's personalities cannot develop at all - as aseparate form of recognition. 25 But this practice of affective


recognitIOn, through which growing individuals acquire trustin the value of their own bodily needs, went on only implicitlyuntil childhood was institutionally marked off as a phase of thelife process requiring special protection. 26 Only then couldawareness develop within society of the special duties of carethat parents (historically, of course, at first only the mother)

have to assume with respect to the child in order to preparethe way from organic helplessness to the development of self-confidence. Parallel to this process, the recognition form oflove similarly became independent: the relations between thesexes were gradually liberated from economic and social press-ures and thus opened up to the feeling of mutual affection.Marriage was soon understood - a lbei t with class-specifiC delays- as the institutional expression of a special kind of intersubjec-tivity, whose peculiarity consists in the fact that husband andwife love one another as needy beings. 7 With these twoprocesses of institutionalization - the marking off of childhoodand the emergence of bourgeois love-marriage - a generalawareness gradually arose of a separate kind of social relation,which, in contrast to other forms of interaction, is distinguishedby the principles of affection and care. The recognition thatindividuals reciprocally bring to this kind of relationship isloving care for the other's well-being in light of his or herindividual needs.

O f course, another developmental process was incompara-bly more important for the emergence of the core institutionsof capitalist society, since it laid the foundation for their moralorder. Not only in the estate-based social constitution of feu-dalism but in all other premodern societies, the legal recog-

nition of the individual - his or her recognized status as amember of society protected by certain rights - was directlyconnected to the social esteem he or she enjoyed by reason oforigin, age, or function. The scope of the rights legitimatelyat a person's disposal arose in a sense directly from the

honor or status conferred on him or her by all other mem-bers of society within the framework of an established prestige


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order. This alloy of legal respect and social esteem - the moralfundament of all traditional societies - broke up with theemergence of bourgeois capitalism. For with the nonnativereorganization of legal relations that developed under thepressure of expanding market relations and the simultaneousrise of post-traditional ways of thinking, legal recognition splitoff from the hierarchical value order insofar as the individualwas in principle to enjoy legal equality vis-a-vis all others. 28

The nonnative structural transfonnation that went along withthis institutionalization of the idea of legal equality should notbe underestimated, since it led to the establishment of twocompletely different spheres of recognition, revolutionizingthe moral order of society: the individual could now - cer-tainly not in actual practice, but at least according to thenormative idea - know that he or she was respected as a legalperson with the same rights as all other members of society,while still owing his or her social esteem to a hierarchical scale

of values - which had, however,also

been set on a newfoundation.The transformation that occurred in the social status order

with the transition to bourgeois-capitalist society was no lesssubversive - indeed revolutionary - than what happened at thesame time within the autonomized sphere of legal respect.With the institutionalization of the normative idea of legalequality, individual achievem ent emerged as a leading cul-tural idea under the influence of the religious valorization ofpaid work. 29 With the gradual establishment of the new valuemodel asserted by the economically rising bourgeoisie againstthe nobility, the estate-based principle of honor conversely lostits validity, so that the ipdividual's social standing now becamenOlmatively independent of origin and possessions. The esteemthe individual legitimately deserved within society was nolonger decided by membership in an estate with correspondingcodes of honor, but rather by individual achievement withinthe structure of the industrially organized division of labor. 30

The entire process of transformation triggered by the nonnative


reorganization of legal status and the prestige order can thus bevividly described as a splitting of the premodern concept ofhonor into two opposed ideas: one part of the honor assuredby hierarchy was in a sense democratized by according allmembers o f society equal respect for their dignity and auton-omy as legal persons, while the other part was in a sense

meritocracized : each was to enjoy social esteem according tohis or her achievement as a productive citizen.

O f course, the latter kind of social relation - which repre-sented a third sphere of recognition alongside love and thenew legal principle in the developing capitalist society - washierarchically organized in an unambiguously ideological wayfrom the start. For the extent to which something counts as

achievement, as a cooperative contribution, is definedagainst a value standard whose nonnative reference point isthe economic activity of the independent, middle-class, malebourgeois. What is distinguished as work, with a specifiC,

quantifiable use for society, hence amounts to the result of agroup-specific determination of value - t o which whole sec-tors of other activities, themselves equally necessary for repro-duction (e.g. household work), fall victim. Moreover, thisaltered principle of social order at the same time represents amoment of material violence insofar as the one-sided, ideo-logical valuing of certain achievements can determine howmuch of which resources individuals legitimately have at theirdisposal. Between the new status hierarchy - the gradation ofsocial esteem according to the values of industrial capitalism -and the unequal distribution o f material resources there is, tot is extent, more than a merely external relation of super-

structure and basis, of ideology and objective reality.The hegemonic, thoroughly one-sided valuation of achieve-ment rather represents an institutional framework in which thecriteria or principles for distributing resources in bourgeois-capitalist society can meet with normative agreement. 31 Thisadditional consideration gives rise to what Richard Miinch hasrightly called the intenneshing of payment and respect in the

J


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capitalist economic sphere. 3 It would be wrong to speak, withLuhmann and Habermas, o f capitalism s a norm-free sys-tem of economic processes since material distribution takesplace according to certainly contested but nevertheless alwaystemporarily established value principles having to do withrespect, with the social esteem of members of society. It is nothard to see that these considerations will have far-reachingconsequences for defming what have been traditionally termed

distribution snuggles.Summing up these brief remarks on the social-moral devel-

opment o f bourgeois-capitalist society, it turns out that we canspeak of a differentiation of three spheres of recognition withsome plausibility. These violent transformative processes estab-lished three distinct forms of social relations in which membersof society can count, in different ways and according todifferent plinciples, on reciprocal recognition. In terms of thenew kind of individual self-relation made possible by the

revolution in the recognition order, this means that subjects inbourgeois-capitalist society learned - gradually, and with manyclass- and gender-specific delays - to refer to themselves inthree different attitudes: in intimate relationships, marked bypractices of mutual affection and concern, they are able tounderstand themselves s individuals with their own needs; inlegal relations, which unfold according to th e model of mutu-ally granted equal rights (and duties), they learn to understandthemselves s legal persons owed the same autonomy s llother members of society; and, finally, in loose-knit socialrelations - in which, dominated by a one-sided interpretationo f the achievement principle, there is competition for pro-fessional status - they in principle learn to understand them-selves s subjects possessing abilities and talents that are valuablefor society. O f course, this does not mean that the developingcapitalist social or der did not also produce other forms of socialrelations allowing individuals hitherto unknown types o f self-relation. Thus, for example, the increased anonymity of inter-action in rapidly growing cities led to a rise in individuals'


opportunities to test new patterns of behavior without sanction,experimentally broadening their horizons of experience. 33 Butunlike other newly developing patterns of communication,each of the three forms of relation I have outlined is distin-guished by internal normative principles that establish differentforms of mutual recognition. Love (the central idea ofintimate relationships), the equality principle (the norm oflegalrelations), and the achievement principle (the standard of socialhierarchy) represent normative perspectives with reference towhich subjects can reasonably argue that existing forms ofrecognition are inadequate or insufficient and need to beexpanded. To this extent, unlike other structurally producedsocial relations in the new society, the three spheres of recog-nition fOlm normatively substantive models of interaction inthe sense that they cannot be practiced if their underlyingprinciples are not somehow respected. Finally, a fi.lrther differ-ence concerns the fact that only social relations that require

an attitude of mutual recognition contribute to the develop-ment of a positive self-relation. For only by participating ininteractions whose normative preconditions include reciprocalorientation to specific plinciples of recognition can individualsexperience the enduring value o f their specific capacities forothers. Thus, with the institutional differentiation o f spheresof recognition, the opportunity for greater individuality alsorises - understood s the possibility of increasingly assuringthe singularity of one's own personality in a context of socialapproval: with each newly emerging sphere of mutual recog-nition, another aspect of human subjectivity is revealed whichindividuals can now positively ascribe to themselves inter-5U bjectively.

These additional points should make it clear how much theidea of a social differentiation of three spheres of recognitionowes to a kind of social-theoretical transf onnation of Hegel'sPhilosophy o Right Just s Hegel spoke with regard to theethical sittlich) order of modern society of three institutional

complexes (the family, civil society, and the state), whose


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internal constitution as spheres o f recognition allows the subjectto attain the highest degree of individual freedom throughactive palticipation, the same basic idea is to be found in myown reflections in the form o f a differentiation of threedifferendy constituted spheres o f reciprocal recognition. BeforeI pursue this line o f argument to reach another view ofdistribution struggles, however, I would like to indicate at

least two differences that fundamentally distinguish my projectfrom Hegel's.34

a It is true that in his hilosophy oj Right Hegel tends to asserta kind of built-in recognition conflict within each of the threecomplexes, but these essentially function only to motivate thetransition to the next level of ethically c onstituted institutions.In contrast, I have tried to introduce the three spheres ofrecognition that emerge with capitalism in such a way that it isclear from the start how each must be distinguished by an

internal conflict over the legitimate application o f its respectiveprinciple. With the three new forms of social relations that inmy view prepare the way for the moral order o f capitalistsociety, distinct principles o f recognition develop in whoselight the subject can assert specific experiences of undeserved,unjustifiable disrespect, and thus produce grounds for anexpanded kind of recognition. In intimate relationships thisinternal conflict typically takes the form o f bringing forth newlydeveloped or previously unconsidered needs by appeal to themutually attested love in order to demand a different orexpanded kind of care. 5 In the recognition sphere of modern

law, in contrast, it normally takes the form of showing howpreviously excluded groups deserve legal recognition or pre-viously neglected facts require a differentiation of legal prin-ciples by appeal to the basic idea of equality.36 And in the thirdrecognition sphere, individuals or social groups generally bringforth hitherto neglected or underappreciated activities andcapacities by appeal to the achievement principle in order to


demand greater social esteem and at the same time a redistri-bution o f (material) resources.

With the help o f this brief summary we can now also seemore clearly how the connection between subjective claims forrecognition and existing discourses o f justification must beconstrued. If deep-seated claims of this kind are always sociallyshaped - in the sense that the content of the expectation isalways influence d by institutionally anchored principles of rec-ognition - then these principles always give rise to practicalgrounds that make up the rational web of sphere-specificdiscourses of questioning and justification. Thus, the spheres o frecognition represent normatively substantive models o f inter-action in which the intersubjective nature of human beings isexpressed in a generalizable way. Owing to these underlyingprinciples, what is socially established here in forms of recipro-cal recognition has the character of publicly justified standardswhose social application can accordingly be subject to rational

objections and doubts. As his reflections on the rational contento f ethical life Sittlichkeit) shows, Hegel was not far from suchan insight; but seeking the harmonious closure of ethicaltotality, he shrank from seeing a transcending struggle structur-ally built into each of his spheres o f recognition.

b This tendency of the late Hegel to as it were bring hishilosophy oj Right to systematic closure, despite all the internal

tensions within ethical life,37 reappears in the second respectin which my proposal differs from the original. Hegel not onlytried to deny the built-in structural conflicts that always char-

acterize his three spheres of recognition; he also wanted toequate them with the institutional complexes typical of histime. He thus rashly identified the recognition sphere of lovewith the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family, that o fmodem law with the organizational structure of bourgeoissociety, and the sphere I have presented under the rubric ofsocial esteem with the institution of the state, in accordance


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with his idea of political standing or honor. The disadvantageof this institutionalist way of thinking is not only that insti-tutions are interpreted much too one-sidedly in terms of asingle recognition principle - as emerges, for instance, in thecurious absence of any reference to legal recognition in thefamily or state. Under the pressure of this concretism,

the borders between the institutional complexes on the oneside, and the spheres of recognition on the other, break downaltogether. But an even more serious problem is that Hegelis no longer free to systematically bring other institutionalembodiments of the recognition principles into his analysis.Thus, to name only the most striking example, his discussionof the ethical relation of love lacks any reference to the socialimportance of friendship, although this would seem tohave been strongly suggested by his orientation to classicalideals.

In order to avoid such inconsistencies, it seems much moreplausible to me to introduce the different spheres of recognitionabove the concrete level on which we speak of social or legalinstitutions: such spheres refer to the forms of socially estab-lished interaction that have a normative content insofar as theyare anchored in different principles of reciprocal recognition. Ifthe basic idea of the Philosophy o ight is taken up again todayin this altered form, it is clear from the start that the idea ofsocial . Sittlichkeit can designate only the most abstract possibleidea of an ensemble · of historically specific spheres of recog-nition. 38 And it is also self-evident that institutional complexesrepresent a single recognition principle only in the rarest ofcases as a rule, they rather result from an intenneshing of

several of them. Thus, to take another obvious example, themodem bourge ois nuclear family is an institution in whichthe recognition principle of love has been gradually comp-lemented by the legal regulation of intrafamilial interactions.The introduction of the legal principle of recognition - anexternal constraint of legal respect among family members -typically has the function of guarding against the dangers that


can result from the pure practice of only the principle ofreciprocal love and concern. 39

If we consider the possibilities of such institutional intercon-nections, we also see that the third sphere of recognition I haveintroduced - the achievement principle as a selectiveembodiment of social esteem - was already compleme nted

early in the history of capitalist society by references to legalrecognition. The development of social-welfare measures canbe understood such that individual members of society sh ouldbe guaranteed a minimum of social status and hence economicresources independently of the meritocratic recognition prin-ciple by transforming these claims into social rights. And withthis suggestion, I can pick up the thread of my argument whereI left it before this short excursus on the Hegelian Philosophy oRight we cannot adequately analyze the significance of distri-bution struggles within the framework of a theory of recog-nition without first briefly describing the social-welfare state'sincorporation of the sphere of social esteem.

The individualistic achievement principle, which emerged as anew criterion of social esteem after the dissolution of the estate-based status hierarchy, was from the beginn ing a double- edgedsource of legitimacy. On the one hand, as mentioned, itrepresented little more than part of an influential ideologyinsofar as it simply expressed the one-sided value hOlizon ofthose social groups which, because they possessed capital, hadthe means to reorganize economic reproduction. Thus , what

achievemen t means, and what guarantees a just distributionof resources, was measured right from the start against an

evaluative standard whose highest reference point was invest-ment in intellectual preparation for a specific activity. But thischaracterization is in a certain way already misleading, sincehardly any of the criteria used beneath the surface is fi·ee fromone-sided evaluation - as is shown , for example, by thedefInition of individual risk-taking by the investment lisk ofthe owner of capital. 40 Beyond this, the whole way of evaluat-


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ing achievement was also influenced from the start by encom-passing horizons of interpretation whose origins lie not in theevaluations of the capitalist elite, but in much older worldviewsthat nonetheless help detennine what counts as an expressionof individual effOlt. Naturalistic thinking, which attributesessentialist collective properties to social subgroups so that their

practical efforts are not viewed as achievement or work,but merely as the realization of an innate nature, plays anespecially big role here. Within the social-ontological horizonof this naturalism, the activities of the housewife or mother, forinstance, are never viewed as a prod uctive contribution tosocial reproduction that would justify any form of social esteem,while women's work in the formally organized sector is notbelieved to be as productive as that of men, since according towomen's nature it involves less physical or mental exertion. 41

Once we become cognizant of the many superimpositions anddistortions inherent in the capitalist achievement principle, it ishard to see any normative principle of mutual recognition in itat all Nevertheless, putting the new idea into social practiceindeed did away with the estate-based form of social esteem,and at least normatively sustains the demand that the contribu-tions of all members of society be esteemed according to theirachievements.

On the other hand, then, for the time being the individualistachievement principle is also the one normative resource bour-geois-capitalist society provides for morally justifying theextremely unequal distribution of life chances and goods. Ifsocial esteem as well as economic and legal privileges can nolonger be legitimately governed by membership in a certain

estate, then the ethico-religious valorization of work and theestablishment of a capitalist mark et suggest making social esteemdependent on individual achievement. To this extent, theachievement principle henceforth forms the backdrop of nor-mative legitimation which, in case of doubt, has to providerational grounds for publicly justifying the privileged appropri-ation of particular resources like money or credentials. And the


fact of social inequality can only meet with more or less rationalagreement because, beyond all actual distortions, its legitimatingprinciple contains the normative claim to consider the individ-ual achievements of all members of society fairly and appropri-ately in the form of mutual esteem. To be sure, the unequaldistribution of resources also found normative support from

another side, which would serve as the gateway for a far-reaching restructuring of the capitalist social order. For along-side the newly-created achievement principle, it was themodern legal order, with its inherent claim to equal treatment,that saw to it that the state-approved, and hence sanction-supported, appropriation of resources by structurally advantagedgroups could be considered legitimate. 42 But it was also pre-cisely this principle of equal legal treatment that could bemobilized in countless social struggles and debates, especiallyby the working class, to establish social rights. Thus, therecognition sphere of the achievement principle was in a certainway contained by the social-welfare state by making a mini-mum of social esteem and economic welfare independent ofactual achievement and transfonning them into individualrights claims. 4

The changes that take place in the capitalist recognitionorder with the emergence of the welfare state can perhaps bestbe understood as the penetration of the principle of equal legaltreatment into the previously autonomous sphere of socialesteem. For the normative argument which made social wel-fare guarantees in a certain sense rationa lly unavoidable is

essentially the hardly disputable assertion that members ofsociety can only make actual use of their legally guaranteed

autonomy if they are assured a minimum of economicresources, irrespective of income. 44 Here we have an especiallyvivid example of how historical changes can be brought aboutby innovations whose origins lie in nothing other than thepersuasive power - or better, the incontrovertibility - of moralreasons 45 ; thanks to their underlying principles, the socialspheres of recognition that together make up the socio-moral


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order of bourgeois-capitalist society possess a surplus of valid-ity, which those affected can rationally assert against actualrecognitio n relations. The s

Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth - Redistribution or Recognition Ch. 2-2

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