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Grounding Recognition:A Rejoinder to CriticalQuestionsAxel HonnethPublished online: 06 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Axel Honneth (2002) Grounding Recognition: ARejoinder to Critical Questions, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal ofPhilosophy, 45:4, 499-519, DOI: 10.1080/002017402320947577

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Symposium on Axel Honneth and Recognition

Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder toCritical Questions*

Axel HonnethJohann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit at, Frankfurt am Main

It is always great good fortune for an author to have his writings meet with areceptive circle of readers who take them up in their own work and clarifythem further. Indeed, it may even be the secret of all theoretical productivitythat one reaches an opportune point in one’s own creative process whenothers’ queries, suggestions, and criticisms give one no peace, until one hasbeen forced to come up with new answers and solutions. The four essayscollected here, in any event, jointly represent an ideal form of such achallenge: I am now compelled to make further theoretical developments andclari� cations that lead me to a whole new stage of my own endeavours, wellbeyond what I initially had in mind in The Struggle for Recognition. For thisreason, I will not concentrate here on interpretative issues regarding myearlier work but will instead take up the problems and challenges that haveoccasioned several revisions on my part. For this reason, it makes sense tobegin (in section I) with the points that Carl-Goran Heidegren makes, in termsof a history of social theory, regarding my proposed theory of recognition.The issues that still motivate me today can best be expressed via anengagement with the conscientious interpretations he offers. The core of thisrejoinder is based on Heikki Ikaheimo’s and Arto Laitinen’s suggestions andcorrections, which they have used to develop my initial approach further, tothe point where the theoretical outlines of a precise and general concept ofrecognition come into view. It is primarily these two contributions that helpedme develop a productive elaboration of my originally vague intuitions(section II). By way of conclusion (in section III), I take up the penetratingquestions raised by Antti Kauppinen regarding the use of the concept ofrecognition in the broader context of social criticism; he has compelled me totake on several extremely helpful clari� cations, and they give me theopportunity, in conclusion, to summarize my overarching intentions.

* Translated by Joel Anderson.

Inquiry, 45, 499–520

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I

In his attempt to reconstruct the emergence of my model of recognition out ofthe interplay of ‘philosophical anthropology, social theory, and politics’,Carl-Goran Heidegren is right to attribute a certain priority to philosophicalanthropology. My thinking was indeed shaped from the outset by themethodological attitude of the tradition founded in the � rst third of thetwentieth century by Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen;despite all the conservative tendencies that could be identi� ed in the contentof this tradition, I still consider it to be an enormous contribution that, in theirre� exive analysis of the structures of our lifeworld, they (unlike Heidegger)took an empirical approach and thereby systematically integrated results fromvarious disciplines within the human sciences.1 The special insight to whichsuch a philosophical anthropology leads can, I believe, now sensibly bereformulated in John McDowell’s terminology: in the ongoing course ofhistory, which itself must not be conceived in purely scientistic terms, thehuman lifeworld can be understood as the result of the emergence of a‘second nature’, in which we habitually orient ourselves in a changing ‘spaceof reasons’. I am convinced that philosophical anthropology could be broughteven further up to date if one were to consider the additional convergences ofthese two approaches regarding their concept of value, their admission ofbiological constraints, and their concept of perception;2 but these initialsuggestions are enough, for present purposes, to make clear that, in the wakeof the excesses of linguistic analysis and historicism, philosophicalanthropology is still exceedingly relevant. When we also take into accountthe work of Charles Taylor and Harry Frankfurt over the past few decades, wecan perhaps say that the existential structures of human beings’ second natureare now being studied from the perspective of a linguistically informedphenomenology for which scienti� c results are not without systematicsigni� cance.

The above attempt to update my theoretical work should not misleadanyone about the fact that initially, without really having thought through themethodology, I had set out to employ the young Hegel’s model of recognitionas the key to specifying the universal conditions under which human beingscan form an identity; the underlying intention was basically to conceptualizethe structures of mutual recognition analysed by Hegel not merely aspreconditions for self-consciousness but as practical conditions for thedevelopment of a positive relation-to-self. This led me, in the form of an‘empirically informed phenomenology’, to differentiate the three forms ofrecognition to which Heidegren’s essay refers, in their original characteriza-tion; in the second part of this rejoinder, I shall address the question of how Inow view this differentiation, in light of the aforementioned methodology. Inany case, Heidegren is right that, already at that time, my core idea was to

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distinguish these modes of mutual recognition according to the constitutivecontribution that each makes to enabling a distinct form of relation-to-self; inthis connection, I was aided by the fact that it was rather easy to see how ErnstTugendhat’s related discussion3 could be developed in a way thatsupplemented the familiar aspect of self-respect with a consideration of theother two dimensions of basic self-con� dence and self-esteem. Thusemerged, out of a somewhat forced reinterpretation of the young Hegel(in� uenced, in particular, by the results of my work on the concept of theperson), the distinction between the three modes of recognition – love, rights,and solidarity – with which I am still working today, albeit in a modi� ed form.

In The Struggle for Recognition, I had not really worked out whether thesethree modes were to be conceived of as constants of human nature or as theresult of historical processes. The whole tone and argumentation did clearlysuggest that the various forms of recognition could only have been intendedas universal conditions for positive human relation-to-self; at the same time, Ihad given the distinction between legal respect and social esteem a historicalfoundation, at least in so far as I had interpreted it as the result of thetraditional concept of honour splitting into a universalistic moral element anda meritocratic element.4 I now distinguish much more sharply than in myoriginal approach between ‘anthropological’ starting conditions and histori-cal contingency: although the human form of life as a whole is marked by thefact that individuals can gain social membership and thus a positive relation-to-self only via mutual recognition, its form and content change during thedifferentiation of normatively regulated spheres of action.5 In this way, it alsobecomes clearer how to view the internal link to the second theoreticaldomain mentioned in Heidegren’s title. I currently see the connectionbetween philosophical anthropology and social theory as lying in thenormative conditions for social integration: individuals can become membersof society only by developing, via the experience of mutual recognition, anawareness of how rights and duties are reciprocally distributed in the contextof particular tasks. In this way, the use of the concept of recognition allowsthe normative implications that are necessarily inherent in every social theoryto emerge from both directions: from one direction, individual opportunitiesfor a positive relation-to-self depend on conditions that are social in character,since they comprise normatively regulated forms of mutual recognition; fromthe other direction, a given society’s chance of meeting with the uncoercedsupport of its members depends on its ability to organize the relations ofrecognition in a way that enables the individual development of those positiveforms of relation-to-self. I am thus more strongly convinced than ever beforethat an account of society will end up on the wrong theoretical track unless itis developed, from the outset, in terms of normative concepts.

Of course, none of these points touches the two issues that Heidegrenplaces in the centre of his reconstruction. He is quite right that I am not

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satis� ed simply to present the connection between social integration andmutual recognition, and that, drawing on Hegel, I speak instead of anagonistic relationship that requires a permanent ‘struggle’ for recognition;and, in an instructive comparison with the Gehlen’s anthropological ethics,6

he outlines the extent to which I move beyond the monistic framework of apure morality of respect, in that I speak, in parallel with the three forms ofrecognition, also of three distinct ‘sources’ of morality. I shall not discuss thissecond point further here, since it will play a larger role in connection with afurther clari� cation of the concept of recognition; the � rst point, however,will be taken up in what follows here, for it has to do with how the concept ofrecognition relates to the third theoretical domain that Heidegren mentions inhis title, namely, ‘politics’.

The problem Heidegren addresses stems in part from the Hegelianinheritance, at least in the sense that what Hegel was getting at in his earlywritings was the idea that every elementary form of mutual recognition iscontinually transcended via a struggle that leads to a ‘higher’ stage in theprocess of recognition. There has always seemed to me to be somethingparticularly attractive about the idea of an ongoing struggle for recognition,though I did not quite see how it could still be justi� ed today without theidealistic presupposition of a forward-driven process of Spirit’s completerealization. But drawing on G. H. Mead’s social psychology – which I thenthought I could use to develop the concept of recognition further, innaturalistic terms – did seem to provide me with the key to solving theproblem just posed: if we follow Mead in understanding the experience ofmutual recognition as the individual evolution of a ‘me’ that consists in theconsciousness of legitimate social expectations, then the ‘I’ could perhaps beconceptualized as the source of continual rebellion against established formsof recognition – the source that Hegel had wanted to explain in terms of thestructure of consciousness. I have since backed away from Mead’s socialpsychology, however, for I have come to doubt whether his views canactually be understood as contributions to a theory of recognition: in essence,what Mead calls ‘recognition’ reduces to the act of reciprocal perspective-taking, without the character of the other’s action being of any crucialsigni� cance; the psychological mechanism by which shared meanings andnorms emerge seems to Mead generally to develop independently of thereactive behaviour of the two participants, so that it also becomes impossibleto distinguish actions according to their respective normative character. Thisexplains why Mead never addresses the question as to what sort of behaviourmight be especially bene� cial, during the maturation process, for developinga positive relation-to-self; he simply thought that perspective-takingrepresented a psychological process that comes about regardless of theparticular manner of the reciprocal interaction. As a result, Mead’s socialpsychology turned out to be much less suitable than I originally thought for

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purposes of using the concept of ‘recognition’ to characterize a speci� c kindof attitude or action; in a certain sense, the naturalism of his approach is toostrong for it to be possible to view recognition as habituated behaviour thattakes place in a historically emergent space of moral reasons.

In departing from Mead in this way, I also closed off the possibility ofsimply locating the cause of the con� icts that are intrinsic to relations ofmutual recognition in the same source that Mead did. The ‘I’ – which, forMead, was the prere� ective locus of all spontaneous impulses – can no longerbe seen as the ‘origin’ of the rebellion against established patterns ofrecognition, given that these are to be viewed no longer as internalizedbehavioural expectations but rather as intersubjectively binding forms ofaction; it is still particularly tempting to attribute to persons an unconsciouswill to distinguish themselves [Besonderungswillen], but for Mead, it worksby means, again, of the inner negation of internalized norms, rather than bymeans of judgments regarding ‘objectively’ given standards of action.Regarding the question of whether there could be a uni� ed source of allimpulsive rebellion against established forms of recognition, we � nd ourselvesin the domain of wild speculation; this can easily be made clear in the case ofthe dif� culties that Judith Butler gets into when she re� ects on thepsychological causes of the rejection of regimes of recognition andnotoriously vacillates between a theory of drives and a theory ofconsciousness.7 At this point, the solution that suggests itself � rst would beto refrain altogether from generalizations about human nature and thus,instead of attributing to human beings any deep-seated tendency to negateintersubjectivity, merely postulate a sensibility to injustice that is mediated, ineach case, by experience and thus merely possible. Relativizing mattershistorically in this way would, however, come at the cost of giving up theHegelian claim that every relation of recognition should include an innerprogressive dynamic: as soon as the experience of not being recognized fullyin one’s distinctive identity no longer brings with it a virtually anthropologicalforce but rather becomes dependent on historical and cultural circumstances,one can no longer speak of the necessity of a ‘struggle’ for recognition.

In order to avoid losing entirely the suggestive power of this last thesis –and, indeed, to leave a bit of room to sharpen the point somewhatspeculatively – I have recently taken to substituting the recourse to Mead’s‘I’ with another hypothesis about human nature. In speaking, in a felicitousphrase, of an ‘anthropology of transcendence’, Heidegren has in mind the partof my more recent work just outlined, even though his presentation is notentirely accurate regarding the extent to which that account differs from theoriginal notion of individuals’ unconscious will to distinguish themselves. Ina rejoinder to the psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook,8 as well as in other essays onobject-relations theory,9 I have attempted to extend the view that I haddeveloped, drawing on Donald Winnicott, in The Struggle for Recognition.

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Taken together, these more recent essays lead to the thesis that the earlychildhood experiences of symbiosis have lifelong in� uences, in that theycompel the subject to rebel again and again against the experience of nothaving the other at our disposal. Accordingly, I now assume that the impulseto rebel against established forms of recognition can be traced to a deep-seated need to deny the independence of those with whom one interacts and tohave them, ‘omnipotently’, at one’s disposal. We would then have to say thatthe permanence of the ‘struggle’ for recognition stems not from anunsocializable ego’s drive for realization but rather from the anti-socialstriving for independence that leads each subject to deny, again and again, theother’s difference. Although I am convinced that I can put forward moreevidence for this speculative thesis than for the Meadean alternative, it tooraises an enormous problem regarding the connection with a theory ofrecognition; for it is entirely unclear how these antisocial impulses are to beconnected to the moral experiences we have in mind when speaking of feelinga lack of or a withholding of recognition.

At the moment, I am not sure where to go from here. On the one hand liesthe speculative insight (in� uenced by object-relations theory) that one mightbe able to trace the fact that relations of recognition are permanently markedby the possibility of con� ict, ultimately, back to the need to rebel against allforms of ‘recognized’ independence of the other, in order to recreate theoriginal situation of guaranteed, secure symbiosis; this type of approach couldhelp explain not only the tendency to compulsively deny the distinctivenessof one’s romantic partners10 but also the historically recurring willingness, inthe face of social threats, to seek refuge in a homogeneous community that isfree from all the dissonances intrinsic to relations of mutual recognition.11

This insight stands in contrast, however, with the decidedly more robust basicconviction that the ‘struggle’ for recognition is provoked by a particular kindof moral experience: the tendency to challenge established forms of mutualrecognition stems from the historically fuelled feeling that others unjustly failto recognize certain aspects of who one is. Whereas the � rst thesispresupposes a need, anchored in human nature, that generates the agonisticcharacter of relations of recognition, the second thesis appeals, by contrast, tothe moral vulnerability of humans, who turn to protest and rebellion onlywhen faced with certain experiences. It seems that the only way to bridgethese mutually exclusive ideas would be to explain the emergence of thismoral vulnerability in terms of the early childhood loss of the symbioticexperience of security; on that assumption, the individual tendency to denythat others are not at one’s disposal would be merely the � ip-side of thehuman interest in having essential components of who one is be sociallyrecognized. Before taking up that line of thought in the � nal section, I wouldlike to address the question of what exactly it makes sense to understandunder the concept of an act of ‘recognition’.

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II

Although it was enough, in replying to Heidegren, to look back to variousinitial motives for my project, the essays by Heikki Ikaheimo and ArtoLaitinen confront me with substantial systematic challenges. For howevermuch recent shifts in political ethics have expanded the research literature onquestions of social recognition, the core conceptual content of what we todaycall ‘recognition’ has hardly been addressed further; instead, the concept isemployed vaguely, usually with passing reference to Hegel, for attitudes andpractices by which individuals or social groups are af� rmed in certain of theirqualities. What remains unclear is not merely the relation to the Kantianconcept of ‘respect’; more than ever before, it has also become clear that theconcept of recognition incorporates various semantic components that differin English, French, and German usage, and that the relationship between themis not really transparent. Thus, in German, the concept appears to denoteessentially only that normative situation associated with awarding a socialstatus, whereas in English and French it encompasses the additional epistemicsense of ‘identifying’ or ‘knowing again’ [Wiedererkennung ]; adding to thisdif� culty is the fact that, in all three languages, the concept can be used inspeech acts in which one admits something or acknowledges a point, in whichcase ‘recognition’ acquires a primarily self-referential sense.12 Finally, incompetition with the Hegelian usage, there is also now a Wittgensteinianinterpretative perspective, according to which ‘recognition’ stands for aperformative reaction to how people express themselves; especially owing tothe writings of Stanley Cavell,13 who makes do without any recourse toHegel, the category of ‘acknowledgment’ has made its way to the inner circleof analytic philosophy.

Ikaheimo’s and Laitinen’s contributions to this symposium have clearedsome very helpful paths into this thicket of conceptual confusions andunanswered questions. Both authors address my original proposals withanalytic rigour, in attempts to reformulate them with suf� cient independenceof Hegel for the tripartite distinction of love, rights, and esteem to acquiresystematic meaning; at the same time, the two proposed interpretativestrategies depart from one another enough to force me to make a choicebetween them, a choice with signi� cant implications. As far as I can see, thereare four premises that both authors share and that form the underpinnings fortheir differing attempts at reconstruction. First, they are of the belief that theoriginal mode of ‘recognition’ consists in what the German meaning of theword foregrounds: in the � rst instance, it should be understood as a matter ofaf� rming the positive qualities of human individuals or groups, althoughneither author rules out the possibility of establishing a systematic link toother senses of the term. Second, Ikaheimo and Laitinen agree inunderscoring recognition’s character as an action: an act of recognition is

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never exhausted by mere words or symbolic expressions, since it is only thecorresponding behaviour that establishes the credibility that mattersnormatively to the recognized subject. This is why both authors speakexplicitly of recognition as a certain ‘attitude’. In addition, they share a thirdbelief, that acts of recognition represent a distinctive phenomenon in thesocial world that is accordingly not to be understood as a side-effect of another-directed action but rather as the expression of a free-standing intention;whether we are talking of gestures, speech acts, or institutional measures,these expressions and procedures are cases of ‘recognition’ only if theirprimary purpose is directed in some positive manner towards the existence ofanother person or group. This conceptual precommitment rules out, forexample, counting as ‘recognition’ those positive attitudes that unavoidablyaccompany the pursuit of a series of cooperative interests: if I have a strongdesire, for instance, to play chess regularly with someone, I am probablythereby expressing a special esteem for her intellectual capacities, but theprimary aim of my intentional action is directed at playing chess together. Afourth premise shared by Ikaheimo and Laitinen is the above-mentionedbelief that ‘recognition’ represents a conceptual species comprising three sub-species. What comes into view in the ‘attitudes’ of love, legal respect, andesteem is the one basic attitude (albeit with differing emphases) that can beconceptualized generically as ‘recognition’. This agreement with my ownproposal is not particularly surprising, since despite their preoccupation withanalytical clarity, they too are ultimately guided by Hegel; but theirreconstructions make clear that there is more theoretical plausibility toHegel’s tripartite distinction than we would ever guess from merehermeneutic appeals to heritage.

The four premises discussed up to now express, with all the clarity onecould hope for, what I too currently take as my point of departure: recognitionis to be conceived of as the genus comprised of three forms of practicalattitudes, each re� ecting the primary aim of a certain af� rmation of the other.The real challenge from these two contributions thus begins at the point wherethe agreement ends and the markedly differing emphases come to the fore;this point is indicated by the question as to whether we should understandrecognition more as a matter of attribution or of receptivity. Since I havenever before considered my conceptual approach from the vantage point ofthis pair of alternatives, I shall begin by presenting the two possibilities inabstraction, before then turning to the solutions proposed by Ikaheimo andLaitinen. With regard to the question of how to characterize appropriately thegeneric case of ‘recognition’, we do indeed appear to face two options as tothe cognitive relation to those with whom we interact: the af� rmation effectedby such an action can be understood either on the model of attributions as aresult of which the other subject acquires a new, positive property, or on themodel of perception, according to which an already-present property of a

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person is, as a secondary matter, merely strengthened or publicly manifested.In the � rst case, what we call ‘recognition’ would award or supplement theaffected subject with something she had not had before; in the second case, bycontrast, it would be a matter of a certain kind of perception of an alreadyindependently existing status.

This choice of alternatives marks the point at which the authors’argumentative paths diverge. If I understand them correctly, Ikaheimorecommends that I follow the attributive model, whereas Laitinen advises meto adopt the perceptual model. Of course, ‘perception’ is not quite the rightword here, since Laitinen prefers to speak, drawing on Joseph Raz, of a‘responsive attitude’, in order to emphasize the practical features of‘recognition’: in recognition we react correctly or appropriately to evaluativeproperties that human beings already possess in various ways. The modelpreferred by Ikaheimo, by contrast, is free of any tinge of such value realism;he leans unambiguously towards the notion of ‘attribution’ when he says thatwhat is distinctive of all forms of recognitional attitudes is that one acceptsanother person or group as having particular capacities; indeed, at severalpoints in the text, Ikaheimo himself even uses the phrase ‘attribute’, as if tounderscore the contrast with Laitinen. The disadvantage I see with this way ofviewing things lies in the same point that Laitinen considers the central defectof the attributive model: if the recognitional attitude were merely to attributepositive qualities to the other subject, we would no longer have an internalcriterion for judging the rightness or appropriateness of such ascriptions;instead, the variability of recognition would then have no boundaries, sinceanything could end up having to count as a capacity or status, as long as itcomes about through an act of attribution. One way out here could be found inthe thesis that the legitimacy of recognition depends on the normative qualityof the process by which it emerges; but then the concept of recognition wouldlose all the moral implications that distinguish it in the � rst place from asociological ‘labeling approach’.

At � rst sight, matters look no better for the opposing approach, the‘receptivity’ or ‘response’ model proposed by Laitinen. In order to be able toclaim that someone is responding ‘correctly’ to the evaluative qualities of aperson or group of persons, the objective existence of values must bepresupposed in a way that is incompatible with what we know about theconstitution of values. Laitinen will be aware of the dif� culties thataccompany this kind of value realism, but he makes no effort in his essayto point the way towards a solution. I think he is right to claim that we shouldlocate recognition in the ‘space of reasons’, so that it is not deprived of itscharacter as a moral action; for only if our recognition of other persons ismotivated by reasons, which we can also try to articulate as necessary, can weunderstand it as a matter of acting on the basis of insight and thus, in a broadsense, expand the domain of the moral. Laitinen’s further suggestion that we

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categorize these reasons as ‘evaluative’ also seems plausible, to the extentthat in recognizing persons (or groups) we always seem to be making theirvalue manifest; the moral constraints to which we know ourselves to besubject in recognizing others result from the valuable qualities to which, in acertain sense, we give public expression in recognizing them. The problemstarts at the point where we have to specify further the status of theseevaluative reasons. Here there seems to be no way out except to take recourseto a form of value realism that is incompatible with the rest of our backgroundontological beliefs. This unfortunate situation changes, however, once weadmit the possibility that these values represent lifeworld certitudes whosecharacter can undergo historical change; then the evaluative qualities that wewould have to be able to perceive in order to respond ‘correctly’ to them inrecognizing a person or group would no longer be immutable and objectivebut rather historically alterable. To be halfway plausible, however, the picturejust outlined would have to be supplemented with a further element: the sociallifeworld would have to be conceived of as a kind of ‘second nature’ intowhich subjects are socialized by gradually learning to experience theevaluative qualities of persons;14 this learning process would have to beconceptualized as a complex one, since in it we would be acquiring, alongwith the perception of evaluative qualities, also the corresponding ways ofbehaving whose distinctiveness would have to consist in the obvious restraintof our natural egocentrism; as a result, we could then view relations ofrecognition as a bundle of customs that, in the process of socialization, arelinked to revisable grounds for the value or worth of other persons.

Of course, this line of argument does not yet solve the problem thatgenerates the actual dif� culties with this type of moderate value realism. Theidea was that the valuable qualities for which we can appropriately recognizesomeone have reality only within the experiential horizon of a particularlifeworld; those who have been successfully socialized into the culture of thatlifeworld take these values to be objective ‘givens’ of the social world, in justthe way they initially experience other cultural particularities as self-evidently given facts. This gives rise, within this conception, to the danger ofa form of relativism that is fundamentally incompatible with the normativeaims of the concept of recognition; for the values in terms of which theappropriateness of acts of recognition would be assessed appear to havenormative validity only for a single culture. Consequently, the relativism thataccompanies the ‘response’ or ‘receptivity’ model would be indistinguishablefrom the ‘attribution’ model; in both cases the validity of the recognitionalattitude, whether it is described as an attribution or as an appropriate response,would depend exclusively on the normative givens of the form of life inquestion. With regard to the receptivity model defended by Laitinen, I believethat this dif� culty can be overcome only be equipping this moderate valuerealism with a more robust conception of progress. That would basically

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mean hypothesizing, with regard to the cultural transformations of valuablehuman qualities, a developmental path that would allow for justi� edjudgments regarding the transhistorical validity of a speci� c culture ofrecognition. I am fully aware of the burden of proof this hypothesis places onme in the present culture, which is so sceptical of claims to progress; but I donot see Laitinen having any alternative to a conception of progress, either, ifhe wants to avoid, for good reasons, the unfortunate choice betweencompletely ahistorical value realism and cultural value relativism.

The picture of moderate value realism that I have presented thus far playsinto notions of progress in so far as I take as my point of departure theexpanding differentiation of evaluative qualities: the thesis would have to bethat, in the course of historical development, there is a growing number ofvalues that, owing to our socialization, we can perceive people as having andfor which we can, accordingly, recognize them. This development can beunderstood as progress in the normative sense, however, only if it can beshown that, taken as a whole, this development contributes to whatever it isabout relations of recognition that merits so much attention in the � rst place;there has to be an internal connection between the expansion of values and thepurpose behind relations of recognition, for it would otherwise be entirelyunclear what we ought to view as the intended endpoint for a purporteddirection of historical change. This theoretical demand raises the issue thatoccupies Ikaheimo and Laitinen extensively in their essays, namely, thequestion regarding the extent to which recognition represents a practice thatought to have normative signi� cance for human practical life. The answeralready suggested by Hegel (and subsequently proposed in ever-changingversions) reintroduces human autonomy as the goal of recognition: only theperson who knows that she is recognized by others can relate to herselfrationally in a way that can, in the full sense of the word, be called ‘free’. Inthe last section of his article, Laitinen makes clear that we must distinguishhere between two different strong readings of this thesis: we can speak of theconstitutive role of recognition for human personhood in a direct or anindirect sense, depending on whether recognition generates the relevantqualities for the � rst time or rather merely actualizes them. In both cases,recognition is a necessary condition for becoming a person capable ofautonomous self-determination; but only in the � rst case is recognition also asuf� cient condition, since the subject does not acquire the capacities inquestion prior to the act of recognition, whereas in the second case thesecapacities have to be already present as potentialities in order to then berealized, in a certain sense, as the result of recognition.

In light of this useful distinction, it is clear that only the attribution modelwill allow one to speak of recognition being constitutive in a direct sense: ifrecognitional attitudes are understood as attributions, then they represent thenecessary and suf� cient conditions for human beings becoming autonomous

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persons with the relevant properties. By contrast, the response model that Iwould defend (with Laitinen), allows at most for the possibility of speaking ofa constitutive meaning in an indirect sense: the evaluative qualities thatsubjects already have to ‘possess’, according to this model, would then beconceived of as potentialities that recognitional responses transform intoactual capacities. This rather ingenious thesis does, however, need anadditional assumption if it is to explain how, with the help of the concept ofrecognition, we are to imagine this transformation of potentiality intoactuality. It seems to me that an exceptionally apt explanation emerges froman understanding that combines the insight into the constitutive role ofrecognition with the response model: in our recognitional attitudes, werespond appropriately to evaluative qualities that, by the standards of ourlifeworld, human subjects already possess but are actually available to themonly once they can identify with them as a result of experiencing therecognition of these qualities. Although Laitinen himself gives no indicationof his theoretical sources, the in� uence behind the concept of ‘identi� cation’here seems to be Harry Frankfurt’s concept of the person: according to hisaccount, a person counts as ‘autonomous’ in the strong sense only if she is ableto identify ‘wholeheartedly’ with her own desires and capabilities.15 Goingbeyond Frankfurt, however, we would have to say that this identi� cationpresupposes recognition by others: with regard to the capabilities to which, invirtue of my culture’s normative presuppositions, I am entitled as a subject, Ican really af� rm only those capabilities that are reinforced as valuable throughthe recognitional behaviour of those with whom I interact. To this extent, anexplanatory model of this sort actually represents a middle position betweenpure constructivism and mere representationalism: although we makemanifest, in our acts of recognition, only those evaluative qualities that arealready present in the relevant individual, it is only as a result of our reactionsthat he comes to be in a position to be truly autonomous, because he is thenable to identify with his capabilities.

Having thus explained the purpose in terms of which acts of recognition gettheir normative signi� cance in human life, I can now return to the idea ofprogress that I saw myself having to defend in connection with moderatevalue realism. I do not think we can do without a conception of progress if weare to avoid the relativism that would ordinarily accompany claims to thealterability of evaluative human qualities; if we are to elude the implicationthat every evaluative predicate ever to have emerged in history has the samenormative validity, we must be able to derive, from the desired direction ofsuch changes, transhistorical standards for judging them. With regard to thedirectional index – that is, progress – that we are permitted to presupposehistorically, we can get some insight from the foregoing discussion into theunderlying purpose of mutual recognition in human life: every new evaluativequality whose con� rmation through recognition increases a human subject’s

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capacity for autonomy must be viewed as a progressive step in the historicalprocess of cultural transformation. This is not to say that a vague formulationof this sort already clears up the numerous problems connected with claimsregarding progress in evaluative perception; but the line of thought justsketched does still provide us with a criterion that we must attend to in tryingto ascertain a direction within cultural change. In my exchange with NancyFraser,16 I have actually tried to make these standards more precise, arguingthat it is the increases in individuality and social inclusion that jointly indicateprogress in social acts of recognition; with the help of these preliminaryre� ections, I have attempted to show that we ought to view the differentiationof various kinds of recognition not as an ahistorical given but rather as theresult of a directional process. This raises the further issue with whichIkaheimo and Laitinen confront me; for despite their differences, they bothclaim that the tripartite distinction of love, rights, and esteem represents anontological or anthropological (and, in any case, ahistorical) distinction.

Of course, the justi� cations each offers for this thesis are quite different,since they do, after all, defend different models of recognition. In theanalytical schema that Ikaheimo offers in the context of his attribution model,the distinctions between types of recognition appear to be made in terms ofthe logical possibilities formally available in the dimensions of humanpersonality; though he speaks of a ‘useful practice’, he is actually orientedtowards Hegel when he speaks of the three dimensions of singularity,autonomy, and particularity. By drawing a parallel between these aspects andthe three distinct qualities to which we can in principle – again, on logicalgrounds – attribute as a value to human subjects, Ikaheimo arrives at theambitious table with which he wants to elucidate the � eld of possible types ofrecognition: in ‘love’, the ‘singularity’ of one’s partner to interaction isrecognized by having attributed to him the status of a person whose well-being as such is valuable; in ‘rights’, the ‘autonomy’ of the other isrecognized by being granted the status of a person who is entitled to performcertain actions; and � nally, in ‘esteem’, the other is recognized in his‘particularity’ by being equipped with the status of a person who has value fora third party. I � nd especially helpful the ideas that Ikaheimo puts forward, onthe basis of his schema, when he crosses these different variables with oneanother. In this way, it becomes clear that the various categorical assignmentsare much looser that I envisioned in my original proposal: for example, wecan often demonstrate to children that we care by con� rming their autonomythrough the attribution of non-juridical rights, or we can grant persons formalrights that protect them exclusively with regard to their singularity. But evenif we consider such extensions to be sensible, the question remains as towhether to view the central categorizations as socio-ontological givens or asmatters of historical circumstance; the fact that love was not uncoupled fromexpectations of utility until the modern period and that legal rights were fused

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for a long time with social esteem seems to me to speak more in favour of thesecond answer. Like Ikaheimo, Laitinen also favours an ahistoricalintroduction of the basic types of recognition; in his case, however, thisstrategy is linked to his value realism, which unlike me, he apparently wantsto understand in ontological terms.

Although Laitinen leaves open at the start of his essay whether we shouldunderstand the evaluative qualities of persons in ontological terms, itbecomes clear in the course of his argument that this is precisely his view. Mysuggested way out, which involves speaking merely of these evaluativequalities’ social and experiential [lebensweltlich] ‘reality’, is not the route heseems to want to take; that is why he answers the question as to which types ofrecognition are to be distinguished, by referring to the various values that canbe seen as be� tting human essence. It is not surprising that Laitinen therebycomes to the tripartite distinction, since his conceptual orientation, likeIkaheimo’s, is Hegelian: human subjects can be recognized for good reasonsbecause they possess either the same dignity as all others or exceptionalcapacities or speci� c signi� cance for others. From what I said earlierregarding Laitinen’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, it is clearthat we are to understand these three values as objective, timeless potentialsof human essence: as a result of the corresponding recognitional responses oflegal respect, of love, and of esteem, subjects come to be able to identify withthe three evaluative qualities to which they always already potentially haveaccess, independently of all historical transformations. For the reasonsmentioned, I do not agree with such a strong value realism, whichpresupposes a � nite number of realizable human values; this type of viewignores, as a matter of principle, not only the social constitution of allevaluative qualities but also the possibility that new values could emerge.17 Inmy view, the ‘space of reasons’ is also a historically changing domain; theevaluative human qualities to which we can respond rationally in recognizingothers form ethical certitudes whose character changes unnoticeably with thecultural transformations of our lifeworld. If we assume, in addition, that thesechanges in our ethical knowledge have occurred in the direction of increasingindividuality and inclusion, then the three forms of recognition that Ikaheimoand Laitinen both presuppose can be understood as the result of a historicallearning process: in our lifeworld, we, the children of modernity, have learnedto perceive in other human subjects three potential evaluative qualities towhich we can respond appropriately with the relevant recognitionalbehaviour, according to the kind of relationship in question; what we thendo, in such acts of recognition, involves publicly making explicit theknowledge that we have acquired in the process of socialization.

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III

In my response to the systematic proposals of Ikaheimo and Laitinen, thecentral issue was the appropriate understanding of the concept of recognition.Faced with the choice between the attribution model and the response model,I took the path of a moderate value realism: we are to understand‘recognition’ as a behavioural reaction in which we respond rationally toevaluative qualities that we have learned to perceive, to the extent to whichwe are integrated into the second nature of our lifeworld. This formulationdoes not, however, make adequately clear why the concept of ‘recognition’,thus understood, refers to a moral action; we are, of course, dealing with anaction that is mediated by evaluative reasons, but that is far from enough toshow that this must also be a matter of acting morally. The intendedconnection � rst arises with Kant’s claim that ‘[r]espect is properly therepresentation of a worth [or ‘value’: Wert] that infringes upon my self-love’,18 that is, something’s (or someone’s) value can require us to constrainour actions in a non-egoistical manner. Joseph Raz seems to have somethingsimilar in mind when he writes that ‘the value of what is of value determineswhat action, if any, it is a reason to perform’.19 The implication of this line ofthinking is that the reason why acts of recognition must be moral acts is thatthey are determined by the value or worth of other persons; acts of recognitionare oriented not towards one’s own aims but rather towards the evaluativequalities of others. If this is so, then we would have to be able to distinguish asmany forms of moral action as there are values of human beings to berecognized; I have thus concluded, in several recent essays, that we shoulddistinguish three sources of morality, which are meant to correspond to thedifferentiated forms of recognition found in our lifeworld.20 My proposal thusoverlaps only super� cially with that of Arnold Gehlen, who also distinguishesthree sources of morality; contrary to Heidegren’s assertions, I take mystarting-point not from functional demands of human nature but rather fromaspects of the value of human persons, aspects that have becomedifferentiated as the result of a historical learning process.

With these remarks, I am already approaching the theme that is at the coreof Antti Kauppinen’s essay. In mentioning the implications that I wish todraw for moral philosophy from the historically justi� ed distinction betweenthree forms of recognition, I am once again underscoring the point of all myefforts here: basically, what I am concerned with is the attempt to use theconcept of recognition to develop the normative foundations on the basis ofwhich social criticism can be justi� ed. The astute comments that Kauppinendirects at this goal of my work are extremely well suited to helping me clarifymatters further. Even just the few pages he devotes to the opaque � eld ofsocial criticism make it possible to specify precisely my theoretical point ofdeparture: in contrast to approaches that try to criticize social relations

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‘externally’, with reference to universalistic principles, I favour an ‘internal’approach; this means that the standards for critical judgment are to be derivedfrom the normative convictions that are already shared by the addressees.Kauppinen rightly sees as the twofold advantage of such internal critique thatit safely avoids the danger of a merely supposed universalism and that it has,in addition, great motivating force: since the underlying norms in thecriticized society are already accepted in some way, those targeted by thecritique are more likely to be willing to follow them. But already in theinconspicuous quali� cation that the norms must be shared ‘in some way’, onecan see an indication that this model of critique must also be divided intosubspecies. Whenever the internal standards are explicit, that is, wheneverthey are publicly articulated in the society in question, Kauppinen speaks of‘simple internal critique’, since all that is needed is a confrontation betweenthose explicit norms and the practices that depart from them. By contrast,whenever the internal standards are assumed to be of only ‘implicit’signi� cance for the addressees, the situation becomes markedly morecomplicated and requires a form of critique that Kauppinen terms‘reconstructive’: before they can be considered implicit standards, the normsthat are to provide the underpinning for the critique must � rst be educedinterpretatively, in a ‘reconstruction’, from the semantic � eld of the existingsocial practices.

For Kauppinen, even this set of distinctions is not enough really to revealthe whole array of possible forms of social criticism. Not only does the‘simple’ form of social criticism get divided into two further subcategories,the ‘reconstructive’ form is also presented in two versions: if the critiquemakes ‘weak’ claims, then it treats the implicitly practised norms as havingonly a contingent, particular character, whereas if it appeals to ‘strong’aspirations, then the universal necessity of those implicit norms must bedemonstrated. Only after Kauppinen has introduced this last branching does itbecome clear why he had to go so far in drawing these distinctions; his view isthat both Habermas and I are engaged in a form of social criticism thatcorresponds to the stronger form of ‘reconstructive’ critique. Accordingly, hedevotes the main part of his essay to the question of whether my theory ofrecognition is actually able to ful� l the wide-ranging aspirations of this typeof critique. Since I agree with Kauppinen’s astute classi� cation, I must takeup the challenge posed by his questions; indeed, it is not clear to what extentthe concept of recognition sketched thus far could make possible a‘reconstructive’ form of critique that rests on the universalistic content of asociety’s implicit norms.

Kauppinen’s analysis of the critical intent behind my conception ofrecognition is just as wellfounded as his classi� catory proposal is convincing.The starting-point here is to be found in the same premises regarding humannature that already came up in my rejoinder to Heidegren: with Hegel, I take it

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for granted that human beings need the experience of recognition in order torelate to their capabilities and potentials in a way that permits a free,uncoerced realization of their personality. Taking a page from Laitinen, Ishould perhaps now say that social recognition represents the necessarycondition for subjects being able to identify with their valuable qualities and,accordingly, develop genuine autonomy. This premise remains a claim withinphilosophical anthropology, even though I now emphasize much more thanpreviously the historical alterability of forms of recognition; it is still a matterof the invariant dependence of humans on the experience of recognition, eventhough its forms and contours can become differentiated in the course ofhistorical transformations. For me, the decisive point that Kauppinen makesin connection with my anthropological starting assumptions is the proposalthat he makes in connection with the ‘implicit’ character of norms ofrecognition: he recommends that these be understood, following RobertBrandom, as generalized behavioural expectations that we follow, notexplicitly or consciously, but rather implicitly; accordingly, we becomeaware of the norms that regulate our behaviour in the form of ‘knowing how’only in those moments when our expectations are disrupted; the interruptionof our action forces us to make explicit the portion of our latent backgroundbeliefs that is ineluctable for making sense of the situation. I see no dif� cultyin incorporating this suggestion with the ideas I developed earlier, regardingthe basis for acts of recognition in our socially acquired backgroundknowledge: if we think of norms of recognition as patterns of response that wemaster in the course of acquiring evaluative knowledge, this must be a matterof ‘knowing how’ that we can never completely articulate in explicit rules.

This conceptual result actually only explains why the theory of recognitiontakes the form of social criticism that Kauppinen terms ‘reconstructive’: thecritique relies on norms of recognition that it must make explicit via a form ofreconstruction, because the validity of those norms has the character ofimplicit knowledge. This does not yet show that the concept of recognitioncan also accomplish the more ambitious tasks that Kauppinen associates withthe strong version of reconstructive critique; that would require demonstrat-ing that the norms of recognition that are reconstructed in each case are not ofa merely contingent character but have, rather, necessarily universalisticcontent. This is where we come to the most dif� cult questions that Kauppinendirects at my approach; he is not sure to what extent a society’s implicit normsof recognition can yield a universalistic basis for forms of critique thatattempt to connect up with the self-understanding of their addressees.

In my rebuttal, I will skip over the questions that Kauppinen treats underthe rubric of a ‘Priority Challenge’. I currently think it is possible, without toomany dif� culties, to use the historical, sociological, and psychologicalliterature to indicate the priority that normative questions of recognition musthave, from the perspective of those affected, ahead of other moral interests;

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moreover, I have recently attempted to work out, in several recent texts, theexplanatory proof for a prioritization of this sort.21 For me, the real challengebegins at the point where Kauppinen doubts these norms of recognition canyield an adequate basis for a universalistic justi� cation of my criticalaspirations. The � rst problem that arises in this context results once againfrom my repeated assertion that recognitional behaviour serves to enableautonomy or self-realization; this formulation leaves the impression thatrecognition is accorded the role of a merely instrumental value, whereasautonomy or self-realization occupies the truly decisive position as thehighest moral value. I shall � rst reply brie� y to the charge of ‘instrument-alism’ just voiced, before I then turn to the charge of cultural ‘particularism’.

The suspicion of instrumentalism arises from my starting assumption thatsocial recognition is a necessary condition for the individual autonomy ofpersons. The character of that claim changes markedly, however, as soon asone notes additionally that these acts of recognition also represent the morallyappropriate response to individuals’ evaluative qualities; for what wasinitially just a ‘condition’ loses its purely instrumental meaning in coming tobe also a matter of meeting a moral or ethical demand. Just as Kant locatesboth a precondition and an obligation in the concept of ‘respect’, one must seethe concept of ‘recognition’ as simultaneously representing both as well: it isin virtue of being in accordance with individuals’ potential evaluativequalities that recognition comes to be a condition for the development of theirautonomy. In this sense, it would be a mistake to follow Kauppinen inspeaking of ‘recognition’ as merely secondary to a primary goal of ‘self-realization’; on the contrary, the point is that individuals’ autonomy can reachits fullest development only via the relevant recognitional responses, and itwould thus be entirely inappropriate to draw a primary/secondary distinctionhere.

With these re� ections, I am already working within one of the two possiblesolutions that Kauppinen distinguishes, namely, the one he labels the‘foundationalist possibility’. I do indeed assume that we should understandautonomy or self-realization as the overarching telos of our human form oflife, in terms of which our internal critique can orient itself. In order tounderstand how a universalistic approach of this sort can be combined withthe idea of internal critique, however, two things need to be made moreprecise. I have spoken throughout of ‘autonomy’ or ‘self-realization’ in themost neutral sense possible, in which we attribute to every human being aninterest in being able to freely determine and realize his own desires andintentions; that is why, on my view, this way of specifying the goal does notentail any culturally speci� c commitments, or even the designation ofparticular conceptions of the good. On the contrary, a formal concept of‘autonomy’ or ‘self-realization’ should rather let differences come to the foreregarding the various cultural ways of realizing, within history, the telos of a

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relation-to-self that is free from domination or compulsion; this is the samemove I made vis-a-vis Laitinen, in claiming that the changing evaluativeproperties of human beings specify, in each case, what has to be seen as thedistinctive character of individual autonomy. Granted, this line of thought stilldoes not justify why social criticism that starts out from a society’s implicitrecognition norms must rely on a normative basis that is universal or evennecessary; this is because following those norms fosters only one form ofindividual autonomy, whose legitimacy [Geltung] is limited to just oneculture, leaving it without any transcendental validity [Gultigkeit]. AsKauppinen rightly surmises, at this delicate point in the argument, I have torely on a conception of progress; for in order to show that the currentlydominant norms of recognition are not just relatively but rather universallyvalid, it must be possible to assert their normative superiority over allprevious recognition regimes. I have already addressed, in the discussion ofIkaheimo and Laitinen, the conditions under which I consider such a model ofhistory defensible; here I would only add that, in my view, the hemeneuticalcounter-proposal that Kauppinnen defends, following McDowell, itselfcannot be carried out without a weak concept of progress.22

In this debate with Kauppinen, I have now reached the point where one canstart to see how the concept of recognition can serve as the basis for a strongversion of reconstructive internal critique. In describing the process by whichit would come to be used in this way, I could hardly do better than Kauppinenhimself does in the � nal section of his essay: social criticism reconstructs thenorms of recognition that are already implicit in the ways in which people inthat society respond to one another’s evaluative qualities, in order to makeclear, in the exchange with its addressees, the extent to which their de factopractices and social order contradict their implicitly practised ideals. I amunsure, however, whether Kauppinen’s formulation takes suf� ciently intoaccount that I presuppose, in the very structure of my approach, that norms ofrecognition are characterized by a ‘normative surplus’ [Geltungsuberhang];even when there is no apparent gap between de facto practices and implicitnorms, the ideals associated with the distinct forms of recognition alwayscall for greater degrees of morally appropriate behaviour, than is everpractised in that particular reality. Otherwise, I could hardly explain howthere could ever be the progress (regarding the historical transformations ofrecognitional attitudes) that I must presuppose in defending the strong modelof critique; here, my hunch is that norms of recognition – which are to beunderstood as patterns of response (acquired through socialization) vis-a-visevaluative properties that are perceived in lifeworld contexts – continuallydemand, from within themselves, the further perfection of our moral action,such that the historical process is characterized by a permanent pressure tolearn.

I know full well, of course, that I am getting myself into extremely

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speculative terrain here. As is true of Habermas and his approach, I too need aplausible concept of progress for the theory of recognition if I am to justify theuniversalistic content of my internalist approach to critique; and as in the caseof his writings – indeed, in a much more underdeveloped and confusing way –the building blocks for such a conception are lying around in my writings,without ever really � tting together. What is, above all, unclear to me is how tosquare the anthropological speculations about anti-social human tendencieswith the suggestions I have made in connection with the structural surplusregarding the validity of recognition norms. But the authors of the essayscollected here can take comfort in the fact that there may well be no greatercompliment to the signi� cance of their criticisms than the admission that I amconfronted here with problems that are dif� cult to solve.

NOTES

1 Cf. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. Raymond Meyer(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 2.

2 John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 167–97.

3 Self-Consciousnes s and Self-Determinatio n, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1986), Lecture 11.

4 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Con� icts,trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

5 Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribu-tion or Recognition? A Political-Philosophica l Exchange (London: Verso, forthcoming) .

6 Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: Eine pluralistisch e Ethik (Frankfurt a/M:Athenaum, 1969).

7 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1997).

8 Axel Honneth, ‘Facetten des vorsozialen Selbst. Eine Erwiderumg auf Joel Whitebook’,Psyche 55 (2001), pp. 790–802.

9 Axel Honneth, ‘Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory: On the SupposedObsolence of Psychoanalysis ’, Philosophica l Explorations 2 (1999), pp. 225–42; AxelHonneth, ‘Das Werk der Negativit at. Eine psychoanalytisch e Revision der Anerken-nungstheorie ’, in Bohleber and Sibylle Drews (eds), Die Gegenwart der Psychoanalyse –Die Psychoanalys e der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), pp. 238–45.

10 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis , Feminism, and the Problem ofDomination (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

11 Axel Honneth, ‘“Angst und Politik” – Starken und Schwachen der Pathologiediagnos e vonFranz Neumann’, in Mattias Iser and David Strecker (eds), Kritische Theorie der Politik:Franz Neumann – eine Bilanz (Baden-Baden : Nomos Verlag, forthcoming) .

12 Cf. the entry on ‘Recognition ’, in Michael J. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford:Blackwell, 1992).

13 Stanley Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging ’, in Must We Mean What We Say?(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 238–66.

14 John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, op. cit.; Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 1.

15 Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), chs. 7 and 12; and his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chs. 7, 11, and 14.

16 Axel Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, op. cit.

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17 Hans Joas, Die Entstehung der Werte (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1997); English translationforthcoming from Polity Press.

18 Immanuel Kant, ‘Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals’, in Mary J. Gregor (trans.and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 56,second footnote [Akademie edition 4: 401–2].

19 Joseph Raz, Value, Respect, and Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001), p. 166.

20 Axel Honneth, Das Andere der Gerechtigkei t (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2000), part II;English trans. forthcoming from Polity Press.

21 Axel Honneth, ‘Redistribution as Recognition’, op. cit.22 Axel Honneth, ‘Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the

Challenge of Moral Realism’, in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell (London:Routledge, 2002), pp. 246–66.

Received 21 September 2002

Axel Honneth, Institut fur Sozialforschung , Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit at Frankfurt/M.,Senckenberganlag e 26, DE-60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. E-mail: honneth@em.uni -frankfurt.de

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