This chapter shows that in the British intellectual tradition, the Scottish moralists, followed by Hume and Smith, saw reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French tradition. Instead of being viewed as something intrinsically negative and self-destructive, such reliance is described – sometimes with the same words – as something positive, contributing to epistemic and moral self-control. The central notions used in the British tradition to describe these positive effects of being dependent on others are “sympathy”, “inner spectator” and “impartial observer”. The chapter also shows that John Stuart Mill adopted the same line of thought by reserving a very positive role for the judgment of others. The chapter also attempts to identify sociopolitical reasons that may explain why such a positive understanding might have prevailed in British culture.

This final chapter not only compares the different approaches in terms of conceptual strategies and theoretical premises but also evaluates their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, it shows that the German tradition provides the most general account of recognition but also lacks the critical observations made by the two other accounts. In the French tradition the emphasis on the potential for domination helps to overcome the “power-blindness” of the German notion of "recognition”; in the British tradition the emphasis on the importance of education and socialization helps to overcome the “educational blindness” of the German tradition. In this spirit the final chapter offers a systematic integration of all three notions of “recognition” that were reconstructed in the earlier chapters.

This chapter shows that in French culture, starting with La Rochefoucauld and powerfully carried forward by Rousseau, the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) was considered to be a fundamental threat to a sort of virtuous self-reliance on individual conscience. The chapter seeks to demonstrate that this “negative” meaning of recognition is still present in subsequent figures, including twentieth-century authors such as Sartre. On the key issue of whether recognition is primarily a threat to authority or an opportunity for mutual affirmation, it is often insufficiently appreciated that Sartre was closer to Rousseau than to Hegel. The chapter also attempts to identify some sociopolitical reasons that may explain why such a negative understanding might have been dominant in French culture.

This introductory chapter clarifies the methodological approach that will be applied in the intellectual history that follows. It differentiates between conceptual history and history of ideas and explains why the method adopted lies between them. On the one hand, a conceptual history is impossible, because the word “recognition” is rarely used in the different cultures under investigation, which employ different words to describe the same relation between two subjects, for instance “amour propre” in French and “sympathy” in English. On the other hand, this book is more than a simple history of ideas, because it compares the different cultures in order to reconstruct one and the same concern, namely how to understand the relations between subjects after the decline of the feudal order, in which these relations were taken as stable and unchangeable.

This chapter shows that in the German intellectual tradition, Kant, followed by Fichte and Hegel, saw the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French and British traditions. Specifically, in Germany recognition was seen as a condition not only for self-control, but also for individual self-determination. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of how this shift in orientation became possible, its connection with the “idealistic” presuppositions of German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, and the broader political claims of this new interpretation of “recognition”.

The ‘sociology of critique’ and ‘critical theory’ offer different perspectives on the phenomenon of critique. The former approach has been developed by Luc Boltanski, as well as by other members of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (GSPM), with the aim of providing an alternative to Pierre Bourdieu's ‘critical sociology’. The latter approach has been developed further by Axel Honneth, who proposes a ‘theory of recognition’, and whose work descends from the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Is critique, first and foremost, an achievement of ‘ordinary’ actors or a task of theory? What is the relationship between theory and practice? How can theory be critical and, at the same time, draw upon actors’ experiences and interpretations? These questions, as well as the – partly complementary and partly conflicting – answers given by the aforementioned approaches, both of which are crucial to contemporary debates in social philosophy, play a pivotal role in the following conversation.

I

Robin Celikates: Let us begin by reflecting upon the genesis of the two approaches. How have the sociology of critique and the theory of recognition developed as distinct paradigms? What role have diverging currents of thought, empirical issues, and specific intellectual constellations played in this respect? On the one hand, we have the tradition of critical theory and particularly its recent reorientation, proposed by Jürgen Habermas, as well as a certain dissatisfaction with the formal-pragmatic strategy, which suffers from a significant degree of ‘de-substantialization’ and ‘de-sociologization’. On the other hand, we find Pierre Bourdieu's critical sociology and the confrontation with empirical problems, which have led to the development of a new theoretical vocabulary aimed at making the description of certain social phenomena possible in the first place.

Luc Boltanski: I struggle with grand theoretical lines of development, especially at the moment, because – to borrow an expression used by Albert Hirschman – I am immersed in a phase characterized by a ‘propensity to self-subversion’.

Hardly any other of Hegel's works has attracted so much attention as the “Self-Consciousness” chapter in the Phenomenology. As difficult and inaccessible as the book may be on the whole, this chapter, in which consciousness exits “the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present” (109, ¶177) finally seems to give our understanding something to hold on to. All of a sudden, Hegel's account of the mind's self-experience takes on more striking colors, the lonely self-consciousness unsuspectingly meets with other subjects, and what was previously a merely cognitive happening is transformed into a social drama consisting of a “struggle for life and death.” In short, this chapter brings together all the elements capable of supplying post-idealistic philosophy's hunger for reality with material for concretion and elaboration. Hegel's first students took the opportunity offered by this chapter in order to take his speculative philosophy out of the ethereal sphere of ideas and notions and pull it back down to the earth of social reality. And ever since, authors ranging from Lukács and Brecht to Kojève have unceasingly sought to uncover in the succession of desire, recognition, and struggle the outlines of a historically situatable, political course of events.

However, sharpening Hegel's considerations into concrete and tangible concepts has always meant running the risk of losing sight of this chapter's argumentative core in the face of all this conflictual interaction.

In the same measure that the concept of recognition has become the normative core of several different emancipation movements over the last several years, so have there also been increasing doubts as to its critical potential. This theoretical skepticism has doubtlessly been fostered by the experience that we live in a culture of affirmation in which publicly displayed recognition often bears the marks of mere rhetoric and has the character of being a mere substitute. The act of praising certain characteristics or abilities seems to have become a political instrument whose unspoken function consists in inserting individuals or social groups into existing structures of dominance by encouraging a positive self-image. Far from making a lasting contribution to the conditions of autonomy of the members of our society, social recognition appears merely to serve the creation of attitudes that conform to the dominant system. The reservations entertained with regard to this new critical approach thus amount to the thesis that practices of recognition don't empower persons, but subject them. We could summarize this objection by saying that through processes of reciprocal recognition, subjects are encouraged to adopt a particular self-conception that motivates them to voluntarily take on tasks or duties that serve society.

These fundamental reservations recall the considerations that moved the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser more than thirty years ago to find the practice of public recognition to be the common mechanism of all forms of ideology.

In recent years, the debate over the philosophical relevance and social-theoretical scope of the concept of recognition has been confronted with two problems, both of which constitute central elements of post-Marxist consciousness. First, there is the question of whether and to what extent the recognitional approach can make more than a merely accidental contribution to our understanding of the conflictual character of societies; second, there is a continuing suspicion that the granting of recognition can always also – or nearly exclusively – turn out to be a means for maintaining social domination. According to some interpretations, these questions are connected, as it is only by noting the character of power inherent in all forms of social recognition that we can account appropriately for the permanent conflictuality of the social.

In their Introduction to this volume, Bert van den Brink and David Owen have reconstructed my own approach with the greatest care and circumspection, up to the point at which these questions arise virtually automatically. They pose the question as to how a theory that conceives of the struggle for recognition essentially as a guarantee of moral progress can respond to the objection that relations of recognition often merely serve to conceal relations of power? With this provocatively posed question, they open up a collection of essays revolving around the connection between power and recognition, though from very different points of view.

One of liberalism's core commitments is to safeguarding individuals' autonomy. And a central aspect of liberal social justice is the commitment to protecting the vulnerable. Taken together, and combined with an understanding of autonomy as an acquired set of capacities to lead one's own life, these commitments suggest that liberal societies should be especially concerned to address vulnerabilities of individuals regarding the development and maintenance of their autonomy. In this chapter, we develop an account of what it would mean for a society to take seriously the obligation to reduce individuals' autonomy-related vulnerabilities to an acceptable minimum. In particular, we argue that standard liberal accounts underestimate the scope of this obligation because they fail to appreciate various threats to autonomy.

The reason these vulnerabilities have been underestimated, we believe, is because autonomy has generally been understood in an essentially individualistic fashion. The alternative account of autonomy we sketch here highlights the ways in which individuals' autonomy can be diminished or impaired through damage to the social relations that support autonomy. By articulating a conception of autonomy in terms of, more specifically, a theory of mutual recognition, we aim to pinpoint the individualistic bias in liberal accounts and the concomitant underestimation of our dependence on relationships of respect, care, and esteem. We conclude by anticipating some broader implications of this for how proceduralist accounts of social justice ought to be revised.

With the turn of the new century, Critical Theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact. This superficial dividing point alone seems to increase the intellectual gap separating us from the theoretical beginnings of the Frankfurt School. Just as the names of authors who were for its founders vividly present suddenly sound from afar, so too the theoretical challenges from which the members of the school had won their insights threaten to fall into oblivion. Today a younger generation carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of western Marxism. Indeed, already over thirty years have passed since the writings of Marcuse and Horkheimer were last read as contemporary works. There is an atmosphere of the outdated and antiquated, of the irretrievably lost, that surrounds the grand historical-philosophical ideas of Critical Theory, ideas for which there no longer seems to be any kind of resonance within the experience of the accelerating present. The deep chasm that separates us from our predecessors must be comparable to that which separated the first generation of the telephone and movie theatre from the last representatives of German idealism. The same vexed astonishment with which a Benjamin or a Kracauer may have observed a photo of the late Schelling must today come over a young student who, on her computer, stumbles across a photo of the young Horkheimer posing in a bourgeois Wilhelmian interior.