I’m interested in the concept of ‘recognition’ in the context of this developing work. Nancy Fraser’s work around the politics of justice – along with others – focuses on three principles of recognition, representation and redistribution. Recognition here refers to the demands for recognition of difference and the struggles of various groups or categories of people e.g. nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, to be legitimised.
Whilst this is relevant, the theories of Axel Honneth are more appropriate, focusing more on the individual in his emphasis on the importance of recognition in developing the confidence and self-esteem that enables social inter-action and empowerment:
Honneth situates his project within the tradition that emphasises not the struggle for self-preservation but rather the establishment of relations of mutual recognition as a precondition for self-realisation…..As Honneth understands it, self-respect has less to do with whether or not one has a good opinion of oneself than with one’s sense of possessing of the universal dignity of persons. There is a strong Kantian element here: what we owe to every person is the recognition of and respect for his or her status as an agent capable of acting on the basis of reasons, as the autonomous author of the political and moral laws to which he or she is subject……
see The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Polity Press, Cambridge
