Since the 1960s 'New Left' emancipatory movements have claimed that women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other groups are oppressed. Some liberal theorists have treated their demands for equality as matters of toleration, of securing by law the equal treatment of cultures and conceptions of the good. However, much more is involved. Also at stake are conceptions of identity differences that inform social practices and perpetuate inequalities that are beyond the reach of legislation. This book outlines an alternative approach to a liberal politics of difference. Sybol Anderson begins by constructing a definition of oppression that illuminates, from a liberal perspective, its salient features. Exposing the limits of toleration as a response, Anderson reaches beyond it for a viable concept of recognition. Hegel's theory of recognition proves an indispensable resource in this endeavor. Anderson concludes, contrary to recent critics of Hegelian recognition, that Hegel's theory can successfully guide modern liberal states toward the achievement of social equality.

The theory of recognition is now a well-established and mature research paradigm in philosophy, and it is both influential in and influenced by developments in other fields of the humanities and social sciences. From debates in moral philosophy about the fundamental roots of obligation, to debates in political philosophy about the character of multicultural societies, to debates in legal theory about the structure and justification of rights, to debates in social theory about the prospects and proper objects of critical theory, to debates in ontology, philosophical anthropology and psychology about the structure of personal and group identities, theories based on the concept of intersubjective recognition have staked out central positions. At the same time, contemporary theories of recognition are strongly, perhaps indissociably, connected to themes in the history of philosophy, especially as treated in German idealism. This volume compromises a collection of original papers by eminent international scholars working at the forefront of recognition theory and provides an unparalleled view of the depth and diversity of philosophical research on the topic. Its particular strength is in exploring connections between the history of philosophy and contemporary research by combining in one volume full treatments of classical authors on recognition--Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Freud--with cutting edge work by leading contemporary philosophers of recognition, including Fraser, Honneth, and others.

In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition (Anerkennung). Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit (Geist) as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his Philosophy of Right, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age.

This unique collection focuses on the unexamined connections between two contemporary, intensively debated lines of inquiry: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition (Anerkennung) and analytical social ontology. These lines address the roots of human sociality from different conceptual perspectives and have complementary strengths, variously stressing the social constitution of persons in interpersonal relations and the emergence of social and institutional reality through collective intentionality. In this book leading theorists and younger scholars offer original analyses of the connections and suggest new ways in which theories of recognition and current approaches in analytical social ontology can enrich one another.

The legal regulations and formal rules of democracy alone are not enough to hold a society together and govern its processes. Yet the irreducible ethical pluralism that characterizes contemporary society seems to make it impossible to impose a single system of values as a source of social cohesion and identity reference. In this book, Lucio Cortella argues that Hegel's theory of ethical life can provide such a grounding and makes the case through an analysis of Hegel's central political work, the Philosophy of Right. Although Hegel did not support democratic political ends and wrote in a historical and cultural context far removed from the current liberal-democratic scene, Cortella maintains that the Hegelian theory of ethical life, with its emphasis on securing a framework conducive to human freedom, nevertheless offers a convincing response to the problem of the ethical uprootedness of contemporary democracy.

This book presents three generations of German, French, and Anglo-American thinking on the Hegelian narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation in life, labor, and language—a narrative that has been subject to extensive commentary in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. The texts focus on a central topos in Western thought, the story of self-consciousness awakened in nature and in history. John O'Neill argues that current postmodern rejections of the Hegelian-Marxist narrative demand an understanding of the texts included here. Without Hegel and Marx in our toolbox, he argues, we will flounder in a world marked by the split between postmodern indifference and premodern passion. The book makes a strong selection from the history of Hegelian-Marxist debate, hermeneutical and critical theory, and Freudian/Lacanian and feminist commentary on the dialectic of desire and recognition, on the levels of social psychology and political economy. Included are articles by Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sarte, Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Howard Adelman, Shlomo Avineri, Jessica Benjamin, Edward S. Casey and J. Melvin Woody, Henry S. Harris, George Armstrong Kelly, Ludwig Siep, Judith N. Shklar, and Henry Sussman. The texts and commentaries show how the Hegelian-Maxist narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation is a contested story, one in which class, race, and gender issues are drawn into a historical romance that is being rewritten in contemporary cultural politics.

The topic of recognition has come to occupy a central place in debates in social and political theory. Developed by George Herbert Mead and Charles Taylor, it has been given expression in the program for Critical Theory developed by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. Honneth's research program offers an empirically insightful way of reflecting on emancipatory struggles for greater justice and a powerful theoretical tool for generating a conception of justice and the good that enables the normative evaluation of such struggles. This 2007 volume offers a critical clarification and evaluation of this research program, particularly its relationship to the other major development in critical social and political theory; namely, the focus on power as formative of practical identities (or forms of subjectivity) proposed by Michel Foucault and developed by theorists such as Judith Butler, James Tully, and Iris Marion Young.