One of the more significant debates in contemporary social and political philosophy concerns the comparable merit of two opposing approaches to the normative analysis of modern social and political life. This is the debate concerning the paradigms of redistribution and recognition. Both approaches occupy a place, generally speaking, on the left side of the social and political spectrum, and yet they have decidedly different foci and orientations. The principle of redistribution is rooted in the traditions of liberal equality, social democracy, Marxism. It attends to broader notion of social justice and is dedicated to eliminating or mitigating forms of social and economic inequality. By contrast, recognition emerges most directly from recent debates about multiculturalism and the experience of new social movements. It focuses more on notions of personal and group self-realization, and is dedicated to eliminating or mitigating experiences of social and cultural forms of disrespect. This has found its most developed articulation in the writings of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, who jointly published a book — Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange — in which each presents his/her own position while advancing significant challenges to the other. As is commonly known know, Nancy Fraser is associated with the position of redistribution, while Axel Honneth is associated with that of recognition. The debate between these two thinkers is significant not least because each also claims to accommodate features of the other’s position in a complete account of his/her own. Thus, Honneth seeks to show how issues of social economic inequality are accommodated in his account of recognition, while Fraser claims that matters of recognition are accommodated in a broader account of material equality. Indeed, Fraser goes so far as to re-envision the concept of recognition as itself a general principle of social and economic justice.
Yet if both theorists have thus formulated impressively encompassing accounts to social theory, each remains rooted in their respective paradigms: social-economic equality on the one hand and individual dignity and respect on the other.In this paper I wish to consider Hegel’s contribution to this debate. Examining Hegel can be especially instructive since he was perhaps the first thinker both to thematize recognition as a wider category of social and political analysis and to do so in a way that related recognition to matters of social and economic injustice. Attention to Hegel is also valuable, however, because his so-called dialectical method of social and political analysis provides a means to challenge that the abstract dualities and dichotomies that arguably still beset this debate, the synthesizing efforts of Fraser and Honneth notwithstanding. My analysis is grouped around four different but related themes, all of which display, I believe, the features of a “dialectical” approach to the theme in question. First, I consider Hegel’s analysis of poverty, and recall how on his view modern forms of material deprivation societies are simultaneously, and above all, to be construed as matters of cultural misrecognition. Second, I note that while Hegel asserts that such forms of social disrespect must be redressed for structure of recognition that (re)affirms conditions for fostering integrated notions of identity, this does not entail, as is claimed both by proponents and opponents of a “politics of recognition,” a simple championing of unique forms of individual or group-specific modes of identity; instead, such affirmation, on a Hegelian account, goes hand in hand with forging the type of intersubjectively validated norms of transcultural justice invoked by opponents of recognition theory. Third, I argue even as forms of material inequality entail accounts of social and cultural recognition, the latter itself entails, in Hegel’s view, an account of socioeconomic justice. Finally, against the view that the paradigms of recognition and redistribution reflect an opposition between deontological and teleological modes of normative theory, I assert — focusing on Hegel’s dialectical account of the relationship of self-realization and justice or the right and the good — that these modes are mutually dependent and co-constitutive.Although my treatment calls into questions features of both sides in this debate, it is clearly closer to that Honneth, for whom the appeal to recognition is also a component of what his the highly commendable project of “reactualizing” Hegel’s practical philosophy. Yet, there are at least three ways in which the present approach differs from that of Honneth. These are not all explicitly addressed in this paper, but they do minimally operate as background assumptions. First, I question whether Hegel can be said to espouse a tripartite understanding of recognition, analytically divided among the separate structures of love, respect, and esteem. Second, I assert that for Hegel recognition is guided by efforts less at valorizing given forms of identity than fostering relations of reciprocal interaction, those that serve to transform and given notions of identity. And third in asserting the value of Hegel for this debate, I appeal not to a norm of intersubjectivity itself, but rather to an understanding of dialectic that draws on Hegel’s logical categories, categories that Honneth — not unlike many commentators today — reject as unserviceable.One final point is order. In exploring the issues of recognition and redistribution in Hegel, I will consider matters of social justice in a global as well as domestic context. I do so in part just because this in a central focal point of my current research. But I do so as well because many of the questions associated with this topic now cannot be fully explicated except in a global context. Thus, in addition to elucidating some general features of the redistribution and recognition debate, I hope as well to make some contribution to the theme of Hegel as a theoretician of global socio-economic justice.
