nancy fraser - identity, exclusion and critique (inglés)

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European Journal of Political

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DOI: 10.1177/1474885107077319

2007 6: 305European Journal of Political TheoryNancy Fraser

Identity, Exclusion, and Critique : A Response to Four Critics

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Identity, Exclusion, and CritiqueA Response to Four Critics

Nancy Fraser New School for Social Research, USA

abstract: In this article I reply to four critics. Responding to Linda Alcoff, Icontend that my original two-dimensional framework discloses the entwinement ofeconomic and cultural strands of subordination, while also illuminating the dangers ofidentity politics. Responding to James Bohman, I maintain that, with the addition ofthe third dimension of representation, my approach illuminates the structuralexclusion of the global poor, the relation between justice and democracy, and thestatus of comprehensive theorizing. Responding to Nikolas Kompridis, I defend aview of recognition that prioritizes the critique of institutionalized injustice.Responding to Rainer Forst, I argue that such a critique is better formulated inparticipation-theoretic than justification-theoretic terms.

key words: critique, global poverty, justice, participation, recognition, redistribution, representation, structural exclusion

My contribution to Redistribution or Recognition? was Janus-faced, pointing simul-taneously in two directions, one theoretical, the other political. On the one hand,I proposed a new conceptual framework for critical theory, which linked a social-theoretical analysis of subordination to a moral-philosophical account of injustice.On the other hand, I offered a Zeitdiagnose of the present historical conjunctureand sought to intervene in it politically. These two faces were internally related.My theoretical framework encompassed both a distributive dimension, orientedto class inequalities, and a recognition dimension, oriented to status hierarchies.Thus, it made a political point. By insisting on two-dimensional conceptions ofsubordination and injustice, I sought to encourage a shift away from a one-sidedpolitics of recognition, which ignored political economy, toward an integratedpolitics of redistribution and recognition.

Each of the articles collected here concerns one face of this Janus construction.Linda Alcoff and James Bohman respond primarily to the political face: whereasAlcoff questions my critique of identity politics, Bohman claims that I neglect thestructural exclusion of the global poor. In contrast, Rainer Forst and Nikolas

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article

Contact address: Nancy Fraser, Department of Political Science, The New School forSocial Research, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA.Email: [email protected]

EJPTEuropean Journalof Political Theory

© SAGE Publications Ltd,Los Angeles, London, New Delhi

and Singaporeissn 1474-8851, 6(3) 305–338

[DOI: 10.1177/1474885107077319]



Kompridis respond primarily to the theoretical face: whereas Forst questions myparticipation-theoretic conception of justice, Kompridis objects more generallyto its discourse-theoretical underpinnings. Each article raises an important set ofchallenges to my approach. While I cannot provide an extended response to everypoint, I shall clarify the principal stakes, both theoretical and political.

2. Identity or Status? A Rejoinder to AlcoffLet me begin with the political face of my Janus construction, which is the primary focus of Alcoff and Bohman. At first sight, my differences with bothauthors seem great. Upon closer inspection, however, some apparent disagree-ments dissolve into semantic confusions; others turn on misapprehensions of myposition; and still others stem from reliance on early formulations that have sincebeen revised. Only by dispelling these misunderstandings can we get a handle onwhat remains in the way of real disagreements.

In the case of Alcoff, misunderstandings loom large. Her article is premisedupon the assumption that I want to separate redistribution and recognition. Yetexactly the opposite is true. Readers of Redistribution or Recognition? will recall thatI diagnosed the decoupling of those two indispensable dimensions of justice as adeeply disturbing feature of the ‘postsocialist’ era. Arguing that the dissociation of difference-affirming recognition struggles from egalitarian redistributivestruggles is conceptually inadequate and politically disabling, I sought to fostertheir integration. Given that this was the central political aim of my intervention,why does Alcoff reverse my meaning?

The key, I think, lies in her insistence on treating analytical distinctions as ifthey were substantive. Thus, Alcoff maps my distinction between redistributionand recognition directly onto real-world instances of subordination. Claimingthat I align the domination of labor, the poor, and welfare claimants exclusivelywith maldistribution, she herself equates the oppression of women, minorities,and homosexuals exclusively with misrecognition. The result is a seeminglyunbridgeable divide, as struggles against class injustices now appear to have noproper recognition dimension, while struggles against sexism, racism, and hetero-sexism now seem to have nothing to do with political economy. In Redistributionor Recognition?, however, I explicitly rejected those alignments. Arguing for a ‘per-spectivalist’ understanding of redistribution and recognition, I proposed insteadto analyze all real-world instances of subordination as involving both dimensionsof (in)justice. Far from separating class inequalities from status hierarchies, Ideveloped a set of analytical distinctions for theorizing their mutual entwinement.At the same time, these distinctions supplied the conceptual basis for criticizingpresent-day political culture, which tends to decouple struggles for recognitionfrom struggles for redistribution. Hardly originating with me, then, the separa-tion of which Alcoff complains is of her own making.

Another source of misunderstanding is terminological. In Alcoff’s article,

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semantic slippages connected with the term ‘identity’ sow the seeds of conceptualconfusion. An example is her repeated use of the expression ‘identity-based struggles or movements’ in place of the more common ‘identity politics’. This terminology conceals a major equivocation, which subtends her entire argument.Throughout her article, she presents herself as a defender and me as a critic of‘identity-based struggles’. But what she intends by that expression is not at allwhat I meant to criticize.

In Alcoff’s usage, the phrase ‘identity-based struggles’ seems to denote a wideberth of campaigns. Among the examples she cites are struggles aimed at over-coming discrimination, such as those waged by the National Gay and LesbianTask Force and the major US civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s;campaigns for social rights, pay equity, and access to welfare provision, such asthose conducted by the National Welfare Rights Organization, the NationalCouncil of La Raza, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and theNational Organization of Women; and struggles for greater political participa-tion and representation, such as those waged by the Puerto Rican Political ActionCommittee. What is striking about this list, however, despite its apparent breadth,is the absence of any examples of ‘identity politics’ in the usual sense. There areno instances of cultural feminism, Black nationalism, or gay identity politics, letalone instances of ethnonationalism, sectarian religious communitarianism, orpatriarchal neo-traditionalism. Altogether missing, in other words, are strugglesaimed at valorizing allegedly group-specific attributes or identities. Far fromclaiming that sort of affirmative recognition, Alcoff’s ‘identity-based struggles’ seekuniversalist recognition. Contesting institutionalized inferiorization, they seek tounburden subordinated groups of excessive ascribed and essentialized difference,often as a means to securing redistribution and/or representation.

With this terminological slippage from ‘identity politics’ to ‘identity-basedstruggles’, Alcoff misstates our differences. Skewing her account to struggles foruniversalist recognition, she casts me as an opponent of movements that I nevercriticized. Conversely, by omitting cases of identity politics proper, she fails tointerrogate struggles for affirmative recognition, whose drawbacks I really didanalyze. The result is a missed encounter. Failing to confront the hard cases,Alcoff never directly engages my two central arguments: first, that claims forrecognition that are cast in identitarian terms are liable to devolve into repressivecommunitarianism; and, second, that insofar as they presuppose a false, cultural-ist view of society, such claims tend to occlude political economy and to displacestruggles for redistribution. A fortiori, she never provides any grounds for reject-ing those arguments.

To compound the difficulties, Alcoff also uses the expression ‘identity-basedmovements’ in two additional senses. Invoking a first, restricted sense, she refersspecifically to movements of women, oppressed minorities, and gays and lesbians.In a second, unrestricted sense, she refers to virtually any movement that drawson or performatively constructs a shared identity. Above and beyond the equivo-

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cation, each of these uses of ‘identity-based movements’ is problematic in and ofitself.

The restricted use is conceptually inadequate and politically disabling. Toreserve this expression for movements of women, oppressed minorities, and gaysand lesbians is to imply that these movements have an exclusive or privileged relation to the politics of recognition, that they are categorically different fromclass struggles. From this it would follow that racism, sexism, and heterosexismare at bottom identity-based forms of subordination, rooted in relations of(mis)recognition, as opposed to relations of production. These implications arefalse. If we apply my perspectivalist conception, we will see that racism and sexism are two-dimensional axes of subordination, rooted simultaneously in thestatus order and political economy of capitalist society, while heterosexism hassignificant distributive consequences. To ‘culturalize’ these axes of subordinationis to truncate the injustices at issue, playing into the hands of those who wouldminimize them. A better approach is to treat maldistribution and misrecognitionas analytically distinct power asymmetries, which cut across social movements. Inthat way, as I have noted, one can apply both perspectives of (in)justice to all socialstruggles.

Meanwhile, Alcoff’s unrestricted use of ‘identity-based movements’ is equallyproblematic. Encompassing any movement that draws on or performatively con-structs a shared identity, this usage is too broad to do any real analytical work.Every social movement mobilizes or creates an identity of some sort or another.This is so even in cases in which the movement’s identity is not an explicit stakeof struggle, but remains, so to speak, in the background, while the express focus issomething else, such as overcoming maldistribution or misrepresentation. Thus,to call a movement ‘identity based’ in the unrestricted sense is effectively to statea tautology. Because this sense encompasses every conceivable social movement,it does not succeed in meaningfully distinguishing some movements from others.

In whichever sense we understand it, moreover, Alcoff’s terminology obfus-cates normative differences among recognition claims. Writing indiscriminatelyof ‘identity-based movements’, she collapses the differences between universalistclaims, aimed at securing equal respect for common humanity; affirmative claims,aimed at valorizing presumptive group specificity; and deconstructive claims,aimed at destabilizing symbolic oppositions that underlie existing group differen-tiations. The result is a loss of moral-philosophical insight. What is overlookedhere is that each such claim represents an appropriate response to a differentgenre of misrecognition. Universalist claims respond appropriately to injusticesarising from the institutionalized denial of common humanity – as, for example,when the African National Congress opposed apartheid in the name of ‘non-racial’ democratic citizenship. Affirmative claims represent appropriate responsesto harms resulting from the institutionalized neglect of relevant differences – as,for example, when feminists contested androcentric legal understandings of self-defense that did not accommodate typical forms of women’s resistance to


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domestic assault. Finally, deconstructive claims are in order when an injusticeresults from the imposition of simple systems of binary classification on complexexperiences and lived realities – as, for example, when ‘mixed-race’ people contestcensus categories that force them to choose a single line of ancestry and to denyall others.

Elaborated in Redistribution or Recognition?, these distinctions enlarge our capacities of moral and political judgment. In conjunction with the principle ofparticipatory parity, they make it possible to assess the normative validity andpolitical warrantability of recognition claims. Enabling us to determine whetheran institutionalized norm denies some people the chance to participate on a parwith others, as full partners in social interaction, these distinctions help us decidewhether the associated recognition claim is justified.1 Likewise, by clarifyingwhether a proposed reform would reduce disparities in participation, they help usdetermine whether the proposal is warranted. But that is not all. These distinc-tions allow us to pose, and answer, a key political question of the present age.Given that misrecognition is a bona fide injustice that cannot be overcome indirectly, through difference-blind struggles for redistribution, which recogni-tion strategies are politically advisable? Which are least likely to reify groupdifferences and displace struggles for redistribution? And which, conversely, aremost susceptible to those temptations?

On the importance of this question, and on the need for distinctions to answerit, Manual Castells, whom Alcoff cites in support of her view, agrees in reality with me. He usefully distinguishes movements organized to defend embattledascriptive identities, such as negritude or femininity, from those that mobilize‘project identities’, such as environmentalism or feminism.2 Castells’s distinctionbears on the question I just raised: which types of movement can best resist thetendency to reify difference and displace political economy? And his answer dove-tails with my own: movements organized to valorize ascribed specificity are farmore susceptible to those pathologies than those whose identity-aspect derivesfrom a project of social transformation. The latter movements, which integrateredistribution, recognition, and representation, provide our best hope for over-coming injustice in the present constellation.

That said, it is not the case, as Alcoff suggests, that I am unrelievedly hostile toaffirmative recognition and unqualifiedly enamored of transformative recogni-tion. Here, she relies on the account proposed in a 1995 article, which I explicitlyrevised in the 2003 book. In the early account, I maintained that transformativestrategies were generally better than affirmative ones, as they are less likely to promote backlash against the beneficiaries, to reify group identities, and toencourage separatism.3 Later, however, I came to appreciate that the distinctionis not absolute, but contextual. Reforms that appear to be affirmative in theabstract can have transformative effects in some contexts – provided they are radically and consistently pursued. In Redistribution or Recognition?, therefore, Iproposed a via media between affirmation and transformation. Inspired by André


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Gorz’s idea of ‘nonreformist reforms’, this approach advocates policies that canengage people’s identities and satisfy some of their needs as interpreted withinexisting frameworks of recognition and distribution, while also setting in motiona trajectory of change in which more radical reforms become practicable overtime.4 Joining the practicability of affirmation with the radical thrust of trans-formation, this strategy effectively combines the best of both worlds.

Certainly, the foregoing suggests a continuing preference for transformativerecognition as a goal, while acknowledging the possible usefulness of affirmativerecognition as a means. But another argument I made in Redistribution or Recogni-tion? is expressly agnostic on this point. This second argument holds that we don’talways need to decide now whether existing group distinctions should be affirmedor deconstructed. In many cases, that decision is better left to future generations.What is crucial now is that we strive to bequeath them a society in which thechoice can be made freely, unconstrained by relations of domination. Thisrequires dismantling institutionalized status hierarchies, which currently under-pin existing group distinctions, thereby leaving the latter to stand or fall on theirown perceived merits.5 Thus, with respect to the choice between affirmative andtransformative recognition, my differences with Alcoff are not as great as shemakes out. Although I am more concerned than she is about the risks surround-ing difference-affirming identity claims, my reservations are neither categorialnor absolute.

Alcoff also overstates our disagreements on another issue of central importance:namely, the entwinement of misrecognition with maldistribution. In this case,too, her ‘identity’ language leads her astray, causing her to misunderstand myaccount of misrecognition as status subordination. That account is superior to thestandard identity model on at least three grounds. First, the status model of misrecognition can be harnessed to a deontological theory of justice, a point towhich I will return in replying to Kompridis. Second, it understands misrecogni-tion structurally, as grounded not in interpersonal failures of mutual regard, butrather in institutionalized patterns of cultural value, which regulate social inter-action in ways that impede parity of participation. Finally, by directing attentionto value patterns institutionalized in political economy, the status model graspsthe imbrication of maldistribution and misrecognition – and thus allows for anintegrated analysis of those two intertwined orders of subordination.

Properly understood, this view is supported, rather than refuted, by Alcoff’sexamples. A case in point is her account of labor market segmentation, whichrepresents racialized strata as ascriptive class segments that can be exploited morecheaply than majority segments. This account is useful, in my view, in partbecause it provides a structural explanation of the incentive for outsourcing, evenin the absence of attitudinal prejudice. But far from telling against my framework,the case of ascriptive class segments is well explained by it. Located at the inter-section of maldistribution and misrecognition, these formations arise when aracialized hierarchy of cultural value is institutionalized in the political economy,


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specifically in transnational markets in labor power. Compounds of status andclass, ascriptive class segments serve as textbook illustrations of my two-dimen-sional account of subordination.

Why, then, does Alcoff imagine that her example constitutes an argumentagainst me? The reason, I suspect, is that she persists in using the term ‘identity’,where ‘status’ would be much more clear. She writes:

Segmentation has occurred since the inception of capitalism through identity markers . . .there are no economic mechanisms operating with complete independence from identityhierarchies; identity hierarchies [are among the factors that] determine costs, profitability,and degree of organization among the workers. (p. 261)

Add the qualification I inserted in brackets and substitute the term ‘status’ for‘identity’, and I myself could have written these sentences. Here, accordingly, isanother case in which a terminological confusion magnifies or creates a disagree-ment.

It does not follow, however, that all forms of maldistribution are as directlyentwined with misrecognition as Alcoff claims. Recall the example I cited inRedistribution or Recognition? of a white male industrial worker who becomesunemployed due to a factory closing that results from a speculative corporatemerger. Insisting that the resulting maldistribution is ‘identity based’, Alcoffassumes that the owners must be outsourcing production to less expensive racial-ized workers in the developing world. But that is not the only possibility. Considerthe equally plausible scenario in which the owners shift their capital away fromproduction altogether, to financial speculation. In that case, the resulting mal-distribution is not directly tied to misrecognition. To clarify cases like this one, aswell as those Alcoff envisions, one needs a two-dimensional framework thataccommodates both the mutual irreducibility of status and class and the causalrelations between them.

In general, then, Alcoff’s central claim does not stand up. It is not the case thatmy approach leads away from an integrated analysis of class inequality and statushierarchy. On the contrary, by conceiving distribution and recognition as twointertwined orders of subordination, this framework provides the basis for such ananalysis.

So far, I have concentrated on dispelling Alcoff’s misunderstandings – somesemantic, some textual, some conceptual. Now I turn to the point of real dis-agreement between us, which concerns our respective diagnoses of the times. Myown Zeitdiagnose foregrounds the current grammar of social conflict. Noting therelative eclipse of movements for egalitarian redistribution by identity-centeredstruggles for recognition, I have posited a shift in the language of political claims-making ‘from redistribution to recognition’. At the same time, I have noted thatthe rise of identity politics coincides with a broader historical development, theemergence of an aggressively marketizing neoliberalism, which is vastly exacer-bating inequality on a global scale. Under these conditions, a progressive politics


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centered largely on recognition cannot succeed. To the extent that it neglectspolitical economy, such a politics cannot effectively challenge either the depreda-tions of free-market policies or the profusion of rightwing chauvinisms that arisein their wake. In the United States, certainly, two decades of preoccupation withidentitarian variants of the politics of recognition left progressive movementswoefully unprepared for the dramatic alteration of the political landscape follow-ing 9/11. In my view, accordingly, a new progressive strategy is sorely needed.

Alcoff rejects this Zeitdiagnose. In her view, the current left strategy is just fine as it is. That, at any rate, is how I read her intervention, which showcasesemancipatory struggles that successfully integrate redistribution and recognition,as if they typified the present era. Unfortunately, however, they do not. Air-brushed out of Alcoff’s picture are the rising tide of regressive chauvinisms, on the one hand, and presumptively progressive identitarian movements, on theother. Also absent is any hint of the worldwide co-opting of labor and social-democratic parties into the politics of the Third Way, which combines pro-gressive recognition policies with neoliberal economic policies, often using the former to mask the latter. Nor is there any clue as to why, if emancipatorymovements are already successfully integrating claims for redistribution andrecognition, conservatives consistently manage to divert attention from theirregressive distributive policies by playing the so-called values card. Alcoff’s readers would never guess, for example, that rightwing Republicans in the UnitedStates regularly succeed in convincing working class people that the threat to theirfamily life comes not from neoliberal economic policies, such as reduced taxes oncorporations and the wealthy, diminished social-welfare and consumer protec-tions, and very low wages and precarious employment, but rather from abortionrights and gay marriage.6

Here lies my real disagreement with Alcoff. Subscribing to a darker Zeitdiagnosethan she does, I take a broader view of the tasks of critical theory. For me, it is not enough to explain the forms of social subordination that permeate our world,necessary as that task surely is. In addition, one must interrogate political culture,asking whether the extant grammar of political claimsmaking provides an ade-quate basis for contesting injustice in the present conjuncture. This requires thatcritical theorists maintain their independence from the social movements withwhich they sympathize. Only if we are unafraid to criticize both progressive andregressive forces can we keep faith with the young Marx’s vision of critical theoryas ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’.7

2. On Political Exclusion: A Rejoinder to BohmanLet me turn now to James Bohman’s article, which also concerns the political faceof my framework. Here, too, my diagnosis of the times is central, but for differ-ent reasons. In replying to Alcoff, I could appeal with no qualifications to theZeitdiagnose that informed my contribution to Redistribution or Recognition? In


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replying to Bohman, in contrast, I need to extend that diagnosis, which I nolonger consider sufficiently radical. As I now understand it, the thesis of a shiftfrom redistribution to recognition captured one aspect of a deeper change in thecircumstances of justice. I must explain this deeper change, and the effect it hashad on my thinking, in order to engage the issues raised by Bohman.

Put simply, my redistribution–recognition model responded to the destabiliza-tion of the social-democratic paradigm, which had shunted political claims intothe redistributionist channels of the Keynesian welfare state in the decades following World War II. Writing in the 1990s, I could see that post-Fordism andpostcommunism had ruptured that paradigm, releasing political conflicts over status, which had previously been relegated to the margins, mere subtexts of distributive problems. Wishing to embrace what was emancipatory in the newstruggles for recognition, without minimizing the importance of distribution, Isought to integrate both dimensions in a broader theory of social justice. What Idid not fully understand was that these same developments were also problema-tizing the Westphalian political imaginary, which had framed struggles for justiceof every kind in the preceding period. As a result, I failed to grasp their full implications for the theory of justice.

Today, in contrast, I maintain that an adequate theory of justice must be three-dimensional. The reason for this has to do with a further shift in the grammar ofpolitical claimsmaking, beyond that from redistribution to recognition. Pre-viously, the Westphalian framing of political space tended to go without saying,as arguments about justice were assumed to concern relations among fellow citizens, to be subject to debate within national publics, and to contemplateredress by territorial states. Focused largely on the ‘what’ of justice (redistributionor recognition?), they took for granted that the ‘who’ was the national citizenry.Today, however, the Westphalian frame is intensely contested. Whether the issueis immigration or indigenous land claims, global warming or the ‘war on terror’,Muslim headscarves or the terms of trade, disputes about what is owed as a matter of justice to community members now turn quickly into disputes about whoshould count as a member and which is the relevant community. Problematizingthe Westphalian constitution of political space, such disputes raise the suggestionthat justice may require decision-making in a different frame.

Under these conditions, neither distribution nor recognition can be properlyunderstood without explicit reference to the problem of the frame. Both thosedimensions of justice must be resituated in relation to a third aspect of social normativity, which was neglected in my previous work. Henceforth, redistribu-tion and recognition must be related to representation, which allows us toproblematize both the division of political space into bounded polities and thedecision rules operating within them. Understood in this way, representation furnishes the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition areplayed out. Establishing criteria of political membership, it tells us who is included, and who excluded, from the circle of those entitled to a just distribution


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and reciprocal recognition. Specifying the reach of those other dimensions, representation enables us to pose the question of the frame. Thematizing bound-ary-making as a vehicle of exclusion, it points to yet another class of obstacles tojustice: neither economic nor cultural, but political. Representation, accordingly,constitutes a third, political dimension of justice, alongside the (economic) dimen-sion of redistribution and the (cultural) dimension of recognition.

Such, at any rate, is the thinking that has led me to revise my framework sincethe publication of Redistribution or Recognition?8 By incorporating the dimension ofrepresentation, I have sought to clarify forms and levels of injustice that were not adequately comprehended by my original theory. Aiming to illuminate the present conjuncture, I have drawn on the political dimension in order to conceptualize a type of meta-injustice that I call ‘misframing’. A species of mis-representation, misframing arises when first-order disputes about justice areframed in a way that wrongly excludes some from consideration – as when thenational framing of distributive conflicts forecloses the claims of the global poor.Institutionalized in the Westphalian constitution of political space, this form ofpolitical injustice is now being challenged by globalization activists. Under therubric of representation, then, my revised framework analyzes contemporarystruggles over globalization as struggles against misframing.9

The incorporation of representation into my framework bears directly on twoof the issues raised by Bohman: the value of comprehensive theorizing about justice and the structural exclusion of the global poor. Deeming the formerincompatible with pluralism and pragmatism, Bohman rejects the very idea ofcomprehensive theorizing. Thus he contends that I betray my own democraticcommitments by seeking an all-embracing account of injustice. Yet even as herejects the aspiration, Bohman faults me for failing to achieve it. So he also arguesthat my framework fails to grasp a core inequity of the present order, the struc-tural exclusion of the global poor. The difficulty, he contends, stems from myprinciple of participatory parity, which is inferior to his own notion of the demo-cratic minimum for dealing with questions of political injustice.

Understandably, Bohman directs his criticisms to the two-dimensional frame-work of Redistribution or Recognition? But my recent work shows that the concep-tion of justice as participatory parity can be expanded to deal satisfactorily with theissues he raises. To respond, therefore, I shall draw on my revised theory to defendfour theses: first, that the conception of justice as parity of participation affords anilluminating account of structural exclusion; second, that the three-dimensionalframework of redistribution, recognition, and representation clarifies the situationof today’s global poor; third, that the principle of participatory parity serves as wellto clarify the relation between justice and democracy; and, fourth, that a criticaltheory can (and should) aspire to comprehensiveness without sacrificing its commitments to plurality and democracy.

I begin with the question of structural exclusion. Alleging that this injusticeeludes my framework, Bohman cites it as proof that the conception of justice as


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participatory parity is incomplete. In fact, however, structural exclusion is wellcomprehended by my approach, in both its original and revised forms.

To see why, one need only unfold the conceptual logic of the principle of participatory parity as I presented it in Redistribution or Recognition? As we saw, thisprinciple entails that social arrangements that institutionalize obstacles to parityof participation are unjust. But anyone who is structurally excluded from partici-pation in social interaction is eo ipso denied the possibility of participating as apeer. On my account, therefore, structural exclusion is an injustice because it represents a denial of participatory parity. As denials of parity go, moreover, it isvery severe. Being excluded, after all, is considerably worse than being includedbut marginalized or being included in a subordinate way. Those who are margin-alized or subordinated can still participate with others in social interaction,although they cannot do so as peers. Those who are excluded, by contrast, are noteven in the game.

On the view of justice as participatory parity, therefore, structural exclusion isa grave moral wrong. But what exactly are the excluded excluded from? In myframework, the norm of parity of participation applies broadly, across all majorarenas of social interaction, including family and personal life, employment andmarkets, formal and informal politics, and voluntary associations in civil society.10

In principle, one can be excluded from some of these arenas and not from others.Thus, structural exclusion can take a plurality of different forms, depending onwhich arenas are affected. Historically, many women have lacked the standing and resources to participate in official politics, while enjoying the cultural andmaterial prerequisites for participating meaningfully (if not fully equally) in family life. Homosexuals, in contrast, have until very recently lacked the standingto participate openly in sexual relations and family life, even in contexts wheresome of them have had access to decently remunerated work. In such cases, exclu-sion remains contained within a given sphere or subset of spheres and does notspill over into others. In other cases, however, exclusion is highly convertible,spreading freely from sphere to sphere. We need only recall the Nazi treatmentof Jews to appreciate the possibility of total and radical exclusion. In such cases, aclass of persons is systematically stripped of participation rights in sphere aftersphere until they are denied the right to have any rights at all, including the rightto exist. Such cases attest to the possibility of extreme and wholesale exclusion, apossibility that contrasts sharply with more ‘ordinary’ sphere-specific exclusions,whose convertibility is far more limited.11

If exclusion can take a variety of forms, it can also be effected by a variety ofmeans. My original framework envisioned three possibilities. In one scenario,exclusion is grounded in political economy, as when economic structures denysome categories of social actors even the minimal economic resources that areneeded for marginalized or subordinated interaction. This, I take it, is what Hegelhad in mind when he wrote of ‘the rabble’. In a second scenario, exclusion is rooted in the status order, as when the institutionalization of a hierarchical


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pattern of cultural value denies some the chance even for second-class participa-tion in some arenas. This is how Max Weber understood the situation ofethnically constituted pariah groups.12 In a third scenario, exclusion arises fromthe combined operation of culture and political economy, as when status hierar-chies map onto class differentials to prevent some actors from participating at allin mainstream arenas of social interaction. This, I submit, is the situation of someindigenous peoples in settler societies, as well as of Romany people in East/Central Europe.

To my mind, this account remains insightful as far as it goes. With the incor-poration of representation, however, it can be extended to encompass two morepossibilities. In one additional scenario, exclusion is grounded in the political con-stitution of society, as when the architecture of political space denies some peoplethe chance to have even a marginal say in disputes about justice. This is the situation of undocumented immigrants in many countries. In a second additionalscenario, exclusion is rooted jointly in all three dimensions of social ordering, aswhen economic, cultural, and political structures work together to obstruct par-ticipation. This, I shall argue shortly, is the situation of today’s global poor.

First, however, I want to consider what it would take to overcome structuralexclusion. In my framework, the general formula for remedying injustice isremoving institutionalized obstacles to participation. This formula applies asmuch to exclusion as to subordination. Granted, dismantling obstacles that prevent participation altogether is not the same thing as assuring full parity of par-ticipation. On the contrary, it is conceivable that in overcoming structuralexclusion, one could end up with social subordination, which remains a violationof justice. Nevertheless, on my analysis, that would be a step in the right direction.As already noted, moreover, my framework distinguishes affirmative from trans-formative remedies for injustice. This distinction applies here as well. Whereverexclusion is grounded deeply, in basic societal structures, only deep restructuringwill suffice to overcome it. In cases of economically rooted exclusion, what isneeded is transformative redistribution, which alters the basic structures of thepolitical economy. In culturally rooted cases, what is required is transformativerecognition, which restructures the status order. In cases of politically rootedexclusion, what is needed is transformative representation, which reframes theconstitution of political space. In mixed cases, finally, what is needed is sometransformative combination of redistribution, recognition, and representation.

Contra Bohman, then, the view of justice as participatory parity does afford anaccount of structural exclusion. Comprehending multiple arenas and sources ofexclusion, my framework provides a broad but differentiated view of this injustice,while also accommodating transformative strategies for overcoming it.

But does this approach clarify the situation of the global poor? My second thesis is that the three-dimensional framework of redistribution, recognition, andrepresentation affords what is needed for this purpose: a differentiated view of themany types and levels of exclusion that afflict diverse populations in contexts of


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accelerated globalization. Central here are exclusions that arise transnationally,when processes that operate at different scales intersect – as, for example, whenglobal economic forces converge with local status hierarchies, on the one hand,and with national political structures, on the other. With its sensitivity to framesand to questions of scale, my framework illuminates such exclusions. One exam-ple is the sexual enslavement of girls sold by impoverished parents to Thaibrothels, a case in which gender status hierarchies intersect with the collapse ofrural farming economies in the wake of a regional banking crisis sparked by aglobal speculative currency run, as well as with a shift in transnational sex tourismtoward child prostitution in the wake of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.13

Another example, documented in the film Darwin’s Nightmare, is the devastationof Tanzanian shore communities as a result of the introduction of large-scale,transnational-corporate perch fishing in Lake Victoria, a case in which post-ColdWar structural adjustment policies, forcing developmental states to open theireconomies to foreign direct investment on terms dictated by transnational capital, intersect with ethno-racial stigmatization and political voicelessness.14

The result, in both cases, is a vicious circle of transnationally rooted exclusions,which spread unhindered from one arena of social interaction to another. In stillother cases, by contrast, those suffering from global poverty retain capacities for (subordinated) participation in some arenas – witness the situation of formercopper miners in Zambia who, despite having been disconnected involuntarilyfrom the official production circuits of the global economy, still manage to exercise political voice at the national level.15

What none of the excluded can do, however, is make efficacious claims againstthe offshore architects of their dispossession. As I noted, that option is foreclosedby the Westphalian gerrymandering of political space, which channels the claimsof the global poor into the domestic political arenas of relatively powerless, if notwholly failed, states. The effect is to misframe disputes about justice, as well as to insulate transnational malefactors from critique and control. Among thoseshielded from the reach of justice are more powerful predator states and trans-national private powers, including foreign investors and creditors, internationalcurrency speculators, and transnational corporations. Also protected are the governance structures of the global economy, which set exploitative terms ofinteraction and then exempt them from democratic control. Finally, the West-phalian frame is self-insulating, as the architecture of the interstate systemexcludes democratic decision-making on framing questions.

But the absence of formal institutional channels of democratic transnationalpolitics does not mean the absence of all contestation. Rather, some segments ofthe global poor have organized resistance to transnationally rooted exclusions inways that are well illuminated by my framework. Consider the case of theZapatistas. Mobilizing impoverished peasants and indigenous people, their movement linked claims against despotic local elites and a corrupt, authoritarianfederal government to claims against transnational corporate predation, the US-


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dominated North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) pact, and the non-democratic governance structures of global capitalism. The result was a powerfulstrategy for contesting multiple sources and levels of exclusion. Thus, theZapatistas combined a redistribution struggle against dispossession from com-munal lands, a recognition struggle against a neocolonial ethnoracial hierarchy,and a representation struggle against exclusion from political decision-making atseveral different levels. At the local level, they sought to replace quasi-feudal subjection with communal self-government. At the national level, they contestedthe effective exclusion of indigenous peasant communities from Mexican citizen-ship. At the regional level, they protested popular exclusion from the design andcreation of NAFTA. At the global level, they contested meta-injustices of misframing and convened a transnational public conversation about how to framequestions of justice in a globalizing world – a discussion that has since been con-tinued in the meetings of the World Social Forum.16 With its several dimensionsand multiple levels, the Zapatista movement is well parsed by a tripartite concep-tion of justice that is sensitive to injustices of misframing.

Pace Bohman, then, my approach generates a powerful account of the variouslevels and layers of exclusion that afflict the global poor. Encompassing first-orderexclusions from domestic arenas of social interaction, it also conceptualizes meta-exclusions that result from the misframing of first-order harms. Clarifying as wellexclusions that are rooted transnationally, at the intersection of multi-scaledprocesses, my revised framework illuminates the moral stakes and political strategies of contemporary struggles over globalization.

But does this framework afford an adequate view of the relation between justiceand democracy? My third thesis is that the principle of participatory parity dis-closes the internal conceptual structure of this relation. In Redistribution orRecognition? I argued that this principle must be applied dialogically, throughdemocratic processes of public debate. In such debates, participants argue aboutwhether existing social arrangements impede parity of participation and aboutwhether proposed alternatives would foster it. For me, accordingly, participatoryparity serves as an idiom of public contestation and deliberation about questionsof justice. More strongly, it represents the principal idiom of public reason, the pre-ferred language for conducting democratic political argumentation on issues ofdistribution, recognition, and representation.

In general, then, I situate my approach within the family of theories of demo-cratic justice. For me, in other words, justice is not an externally imposedrequirement, determined over the heads of those whom it obligates. Rather, itbinds only insofar as its addressees can also regard themselves as its authors. Yetif justice implies democracy, the converse is equally true. Democratic deliberationyields legitimate outcomes if and only if the interlocutors can participate as peers– hence, only in the absence of structural injustice. Thus, the principle of partici-patory parity clarifies the dialectical character of the relation between justice anddemocracy. Disclosing that each presupposes the other, it reveals that these two


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fundamental concepts stand in an internal relation of reciprocal co-implication.It follows that Bohman is mistaken to present his notion of the democratic

minimum as an alternative to the principle of participatory parity. In actuality,these two ideas do not operate on the same level. Whereas participatory parity isa principle of justice, the democratic minimum is a transitional strategy forachieving justice under non-ideal conditions. To my knowledge, Bohman has notproposed a conception of justice comparable to mine. Yet he and I agree, I think,that a society that successfully achieves the democratic minimum may still be farfrom having achieved justice. At its best, the democratic minimum may get theexcluded sufficiently far into the political game as to assure them a voice in ongo-ing arguments about social justice, which is a very good thing, to be sure. But it does not assure that their voices count equally in political debates, as the principle of participatory parity requires. Thus, the two notions are not at all comparable. Far from regarding it as a rival, I understand Bohman’s idea as apromising example of a nonreformist reform, one that is perfectly compatiblewith the conception of justice as participatory parity.17

Bohman is also mistaken in treating my framework as antithetical to the capa-bility model of justice. Thanks to some recent exchanges with Ingrid Robeyns andKevin Olson, I have come to see that the principle of participatory parity operatesin ‘the evaluative space of capabilities’, as Amartya Sen would say, because itassesses social arrangements in terms of the degree to which they assure peoplethe capability to participate fully, as peers, in social life.18 Contra Bohman, then,my framework belongs to the family of capability approaches. Nevertheless, it differs importantly from some other members of that family. For one thing, myvariant is comparative, as it focuses on the relative capabilities for participation ofdifferent agents; thus, it belongs to the deontological tradition of ‘justice as fairness’, rather than to the Aristotelian teleological tradition. For another, myapproach focuses chiefly on capabilities for social interaction, rather than on capa-bilities for individual ‘functionings’; thus, it highlights the social character of sociallife. Next, my approach leaves open the question, participation in what? Assumingthat arenas of participation and types of interaction are historically variable andopen-ended, I do not seek to enumerate once and for all a list of basic capabilitiesor functionings. Finally, as already noted, my approach mandates that capabilitiesbe assessed dialogically, through fair and inclusive political debate; effectively,then, it marries the substantive orientation of the capability approach to the democratic proceduralism of discourse ethics.19

What I have said so far, in support of my first three theses, serves to buttress myfourth thesis too: comprehensive theorizing need not be at odds with plurality,democracy, and pragmatism. In revising my framework to incorporate a third,political dimension of justice, I have effectively upheld the spirit of Bohman’s commitment to plurality, without abandoning my own commitment to compre-hensive theorizing. As I see it, all theorizing worthy of the name aspires to com-prehensiveness in the sense of encompassing the whole range of phenomena within


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its domain. Thus, if and when the theorist discovers that something important isnot adequately dealt with, it becomes incumbent on her to revise her theory. Letme distinguish this sort of pluralism, which I shall call ‘responsible pluralism in theservice of comprehensiveness’, from another sort, which I shall call ‘gratuitous pluralism’. Pluralism is gratuitous, as opposed to responsible, when it violates therule of conceptual parsimony. That rule holds that we should prefer a frameworkthat can account for the phenomena in question with as few basic categories as possible. Assuming that pluralism should be responsible, as opposed to gratuitous,critical theorists should not renounce comprehensive theorizing. Rather, theyshould infuse it with the spirit of fallibilism and openness to new evidence.20

It was in this spirit of responsible pluralism in the service of comprehensivenessthat I argued in Redistribution or Recognition? that Axel Honneth’s recognitionmonism could not account for all the forms and mechanisms of injustice in con-temporary society, while a perspectival dualism of redistribution and recognitioncould. Although I still hold to the first part of this thesis (on the inadequacy ofrecognition monism), I have since changed my mind about the second (on theadequacy of redistribution–recognition dualism). I now maintain, in the same spirit of responsible pluralism, that a three-dimensional framework is both neces-sary and sufficient for critical theory. In principle, of course, this claim could turnout to be wrong, in which case I would need to revise my framework yet again. Butnothing that Bohman says here convinces me that I need to do so now.

This brings me to a final point, about the relation of theory to public-spherepolitical debate. Here I find myself in agreement with Bohman. I, too, endorse theDeweyan view of the critic as a ‘reflective participant’ and the pragmatic norm of‘practical verification’. And I, too, regard my theorizing as an effort to ‘articulatecommitments and enrich the pool of reasons available in public justification’ (p. 274). In my view, however, none of this requires me to drop the aspiration totheoretical comprehensiveness, even if the latter can never be fully realized. Onthe contrary, I maintain that critical theorists can best contribute to democraticprocesses of social emancipation by thinking as deeply, reflectively, and compre-hensively as they are able.

3. The Priority of Justice: A Rejoinder to KompridisSo far I have been focusing on the political face of my framework. Now, however,as I take up the articles of Nikolas Kompridis and Rainer Forst, I turn to the theoretical face. What are at stake here are the philosophical underpinnings ofcritical theory, especially its normative foundations and what Forst calls its ‘socialontology’. The issues divide into two streams. In one stream, which I’ll call ‘intra-paradigmatic’, the fundamental objectives of critical theory are taken as settled;and the primary question is: in what terms should the theory be formulated inorder best to fulfill those objectives? In the second stream, which I’ll call ‘extra-paradigmatic’, the very aims of critical theory are in dispute.


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In what follows, I begin with the second, extra-paradigmatic stream of ques-tioning, in which I locate Kompridis’s concerns. Reading him as challenging myunderstanding of critical theory, I compare the latter’s merits with those of someother possibilities, hinted at in Kompridis’s article. Here I consider the question:is there a defensible and desirable alternative to my view that critical theoryshould prioritize the critique of institutionalized injustice? Turning next to theintra-paradigmatic stream of questioning, I examine the principal issues betweenForst and myself. Premised on a shared understanding of critical theory, theseissues concern the best way to realize a project we jointly espouse. Here, accord-ingly, I weigh the relative merits of our respective answers to the followingquestion: with which social-theoretical and normative conceptions can one bestfashion a critical theory of institutionalized injustice for the present era?

Nikolas Kompridis contends that the central issue in Redistribution or Recogni-tion? is the meaning of recognition. Rejecting both Honneth’s identitarianaccount of that concept and my own status model, Kompridis maintains that neither of those interpretations captures the full meaning of recognition. In hisview, recognition belongs exclusively neither to the realm of justice nor to that ofself-realization. An essentially contested concept, its meaning cannot be reducedto a single normative idea. For Kompridis, accordingly, the alternatives debatedin Redistribution or Recognition? present a false antithesis. Far from wishing to con-tribute to that debate, he seeks to displace it in favor of a different set of questions.This larger, extra-paradigmatic agenda informs Kompridis’s more specific objec-tions to my approach – for example, his contention that I am so focused onjustifying recognition claims relative to existing protocols of public reason that Ineglect the disclosive role of language in articulating subjective suffering. Thiscriticism and others like it point not only to another understanding of recognitionbut also to a different conception of critical theory, not primarily focused on critiquing institutionalized injustice.

Yet the nature of Kompridis’s alternative remains unclear. At some points, hesuggests that recognition implicates both justice and self-realization, therebyinsinuating the need for a synthesis of Honneth and myself. At other points, how-ever, he contends that recognition is best understood as a matter of freedom in theFoucauldian sense, as it concerns ‘how we govern ourselves’. At still other points,though, he alleges that any attempt to reduce such a rich and contested conceptto a ‘normatively monistic’ interpretation is inherently misguided. Then again,finally, he maintains that recognition is the focus of aspirations that are so intrin-sically problematic that critical theorists would do better to question the conceptthan to accord it any normative validity.

As I see it, each of these four claims about recognition entails a different standard and model of critique. Yet all of them reject the premise, central to myapproach, that a critical theory should accord priority to the critique of institu-tionalized injustice. In what follows, therefore, I shall examine each of Kompridis’sclaims about recognition with a view to determining whether it affords a viable


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alternative to that justice-theoretic conception. For the sake of argument, I shallassume the following thin definition of critical theory, which I take to be non-controversial: a theory is ‘critical’, as opposed to ‘traditional’, only if it is guided by apractical, emancipatory interest in unmasking domination. Supposing this definition tobe sufficiently neutral to serve as a benchmark, I shall ask whether any of the alter-natives intimated by Kompridis better satisfies its provisions than the approach Ielaborated in Redistribution or Recognition? In this way, by comparing them withsome other possibilities, I shall attempt to defend both my status model of recog-nition and my focus on institutionalized injustice against Kompridis’s objections.

My strategy, I must add, will be dialectical. Borrowing a leaf from Hegel, I shalltreat each of Kompridis’s claims about recognition as a stage of thought, whichleads when probed to an impasse and so gives way to the next. Beginning with themost radical, rejectionist view and proceeding in order of increasing proximity to the status model, the sequence reveals the latter’s comparative strengths instep-by-step fashion. The end result will be to demonstrate the conceptual priorityof the justice-theoretic understanding of recognition and, by extension, of critical theory.Defending the thesis that justice is the first virtue of recognition, I shall argue that itis only by imagining the overcoming of misrecognition as a genre of institutional-ized injustice that we can conceive any positive form of recognition that can beconsidered a good beyond justice.

Let me begin, accordingly, with Kompridis’s most radical claim about recogni-tion and, by implication, about critical theory. The claim here is that the desirefor recognition is inherently unrealizable and self-defeating. In fact, so deeplyproblematic is this craving that critical theorists should treat it, not as an emanci-patory aspiration, but as a vehicle of normalization and thus as an object ofcritique. Forswearing any effort to distinguish good from bad forms of recogni-tion, they should abandon such mainstream ‘therapeutic’ concerns and questionthe yearning for recognition. Read this way, as a recognition sceptic, Kompridisinvites the thought that a genuinely critical theory would deconstruct, rather thanreconstruct, recognition.

Kompridis himself stops short of such a conclusion. Yet its implications areworth examining for heuristic purposes. As I see it, the argument just sketchedruns up against two objections, one conceptual, the other political. Conceptually,the claim that the craving for recognition is inherently self-defeating is questionbegging. It assumes what needs first to be shown: namely, that the desire forrecognition is best analyzed as a wish to be regarded and valued by others as onereally is, which means, in effect, as one regards and values oneself. Certainly, ifthis is what is meant by recognition, then recognition is neither possible nor desir-able and the most radical thesis would be right: we should jettison recognition asa normative category of critical theory. In fact, however, recognition need not beinterpreted in this way. Another (non-identitarian) possibility is the one I pro-posed in Redistribution or Recognition?: that we understand claims for recognitionas protests against status subordination – hence, as claims for justice. In that case,


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such claims would point to the need for institutional change, specifically to theneed to deinstitutionalize hierarchical patterns of cultural value and to replacethem with patterns that foster participatory parity. Understood in this way, claimsfor recognition are no more self-defeating than other types of justice claims,including claims for redistribution and representation. Granted, they will not leadto perfect justice, even in the best-case scenario; and they may well miscarry inpractice. But that is hardly a reason for critical theorists to eschew the category of recognition, which corresponds on this interpretation to a bona fide genre ofsubordination not reducible to distributive injustice. Absent a functional equiva-lent, able to expose such subordination, recognition remains indispensable to anycritical theory that seeks to unmask domination.

Politically, moreover, the proposal to jettison recognition presupposes a god’seye view from which the theorist presumes to invalidate whole social movementsin a single stroke. Premised on an authoritarian and elitist view of critical theory,it treats those who struggle for recognition as simple dupes. Thus, it fails to strikea proper balance between independence from and sympathy with struggling sub-jects. A better, more democratic approach would identify the emancipatory kernelof their aspirations and reconstruct their claims accordingly. Following this pathin Redistribution or Recognition?, I reconstructed recognition claims as aiming toovercome status hierarchy. The point was to discern the legitimate core of identitarian social protest in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Althoughit is disdained by Kompridis, this interest in distinguishing better from worserecognition claims is indispensable to any critical theory with a practical, emanci-patory intent. On both counts, then, political as well as conceptual, the proposalto equate recognition with normalization fails to yield a defensible view of criticaltheory as a practically motivated inquiry aimed at unmasking domination.

It is fortunate, therefore, that this proposal is not the one closest to Kompridis’sheart. A more likely candidate for that position is his second, less radical sugges-tion that recognition claims are unobjectionable in principle but so multifariousand contested that any ‘normatively monistic’ account of them is bound to bereductive and inadequate. On this view, misrecognition covers a multitude of sins,including violations of justice, impediments to self-realization, fetters on freedom,and so on. Thus, every attempt to associate recognition exclusively with one single normative category can at best capture only part of the story. Also doomedare efforts to subsume all of recognition’s many facets within a single compre-hensive account. For one thing, the various parts are at odds with one another; likeWeber’s polytheism of values, they cannot be harmoniously reconciled or lexi-cally ranked. For another, recognition’s meanings continue to unfold historicallyin novel and unpredictable ways; thus, they cannot be definitively enumeratedonce and for all. It follows that critical theorists should abandon efforts to con-ceptualize recognition along normatively monistic lines. Instead, they should treatit as an essentially contested concept, whose meaning will never be settled.

Although Kompridis may not subscribe to its full implications, this view, too,


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merits scrutiny. Reminiscent of James Bohman’s allegation that comprehensivetheorizing cannot do justice to the inherent plurality of modes of injustice, it issubject to related objections. First, the view that recognition cannot be compre-hensively theorized is objectionably aprioristic. Giving away the game at theoutset, it forecloses the chance to develop a viable theory of recognition by settling for a pluralism that could be gratuitous. Second, the view that recognitionis too inherently indeterminate to be theorized is hard to square with critical theory’s emancipatory intent. Counseling the theorist to throw up her hands inthe face of an unruly multiplicity of meanings, it positions her as an impotentobserver of an endless, irresolvable contest into which she can offer no insight.Implying, too, that any account of recognition is as good as any other, it replacesthe wholesale negativity of the previous view with an equally wholesale, and dis-abling, indifference. Finally, and most important, this view overlooks another,more promising strategy, aimed at elaborating an account of recognition as onedimension among others of a comprehensive theory of justice. Focused on thoseaspects that pertain to justice, such an account need not claim to encompass everyfacet of recognition. What it must do, however, is establish the conceptual priorityof the justice-related aspects over the others.

To pursue this possibility, consider another, less problematic interpretation ofthe thesis that recognition is essentially contested. Suppose this thesis is meant toendorse the democratic view that it is up to the participants themselves to deter-mine the meaning of recognition. In that case the critical theorist would have to concern herself with the fairness (or lack thereof) of the terms on which theircontest is waged. Do all concerned have equal chances to participate fully, aspeers, in the struggle to define what will count as recognition? Or are some ofthem excluded or marginalized as a consequence of unjust social arrangements?Clearly, this democratic view leaves open the precise content of the norms ofrecognition. But unless it interrogates the terms of the contestation that will settle that content, it does not deserve to be called a critical theory. To merit thattitle it must be prepared to do the hard social-theoretical work of exposing struc-tural obstacles to fair participation. In principle, however, these can includeinstitutionalized relations of recognition, which deprive some potential partici-pants of the status of peers. If the critical theorist is to identify these impedimentsto a fair contest over the meaning of recognition, she must already possess a gen-eral, justice-theoretic notion of misrecognition. And that notion, of misrecognitionas status subordination, must enjoy conceptual priority over the other, more specific meanings that emerge from the struggle, which may or may not be justice-related. Elaborated in Redistribution and Recognition?, this account offersthe only way I can see to connect Kompridis’s interest in valorizing contestationover recognition’s meaning with critical theory’s emancipatory aims. Without it,his second thesis about recognition fails to express the sort of practical interest inovercoming domination that distinguishes critical from traditional theory.

The same is true for the third claim I attributed to Kompridis: namely, that


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recognition is at bottom a matter of freedom. Contradicting both the view ofrecognition as normalization and the view of its meaning as essentially contested,this claim offers a positively valued, normatively monistic account of that concept.Yet the freedom-theoretic conception of recognition incorporates features ofthose previous views, especially a dislike of normalization and a fondness for con-testation. Associated by Kompridis with James Tully’s quasi-Foucauldianperspective, it values the struggle over recognition above the end to which thestruggle aspires. On this view, recognition achieved coerces and constrains, evenwhen it is reciprocal, while the struggle to achieve it is a practice of freedom.Thus, critical theorists should de-teleologize recognition, valorizing the freedom-incarnating process over the freedom-limiting result.

Despite its interest in promoting freedom, this view fails to generate a frame-work that is adequate for that purpose. The problem is that the only ideal offreedom that can be acceptable to a critical theory is an ideal of equal freedom.Social arrangements that enhance the freedom of some by restricting the freedomof others are unacceptable, as are arrangements that enable some to exercise their freedom at the expense of the freedom of others. Thus, a struggle overrecognition cannot be considered a bona fide expression of freedom unless theantagonists are equally empowered to exercise their freedom in and through it.Failing that, the contest is better described as an exercise in domination. Like theprevious view, therefore, this one must interrogate the terms on which strugglesover recognition proceed. Asking whether social arrangements enable all to par-ticipate as peers, it must expose structural impediments to equal freedom,including those inhering in institutionalized relations of recognition. Thus, thisview too must prioritize questions of justice in order to sustain its emancipatoryintent. What appeared at first to be an independent rival view turns out on closerinspection to be parasitic on the justice-theoretic view. In general, then, the viewof recognition as freedom maintains its critical-theoretical bona fides only insofaras it presupposes the view of recognition as a dimension of justice in the sense ofparticipatory parity.

Let me pause to recap my reasoning to this point. So far, in discussing three ofKompridis’s claims about recognition, I have returned again and again to a singlepoint: while the status model does not capture every meaning of recognition, it isthe interpretation critical theorists should prioritize so as to forward their eman-cipatory aims. Focused on status subordination as a genre of institutionalizeddomination, this model is justice-theoretic. As such, it is conceptually prior toother interpretations in the following sense: it is only by imagining the over-coming of misrecognition as a genre of institutionalized injustice that we canconceive any positive form of recognition that can be considered a good beyondjustice. It follows, to paraphrase John Rawls, that critical theorists should regardjustice as the first virtue of recognition – where ‘first’ means not necessarily the highest virtue but the one that secures the enabling conditions for all of theothers.21 Seen this way, as a justice-theoretic conception, the status model does


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not so much exclude other meanings of recognition as set constraints on how theymay be legitimately construed and pursued. Prioritizing justice, it rules out inter-pretations of recognition that require or promote institutionalized disparities ofparticipation.

The thesis that justice is the first virtue of recognition bears as well on thefourth alternative hinted at in Kompridis’s article – namely, that recognitionimplicates both justice and self-realization. The least radical of his various suggestions, this claim implies that critical theorists should seek to combineHonneth’s concern for self-realization with my concern for justice. Now, how-ever, we can discern the specific form such a combination must take: criticaltheory must prioritize the critique of institutionalized injustice in order to open aspace for legitimate forms of self-realization. Treating justice as the first virtue, itmust seek to equalize the conditions under which various interpretations ofhuman flourishing are formulated, debated, and pursued. Far from supplanting ordemoting self-realization, then, the status model of recognition aims to establishthe terrain on which it can be fairly pursued.

These considerations dovetail, I think, with the spirit of one of Kompridis’s criticisms of Axel Honneth. Claiming that Honneth reduces self-realization torecognition, Kompridis contends that he overburdens the latter concept andimpoverishes the former. The better course, I agree with Kompridis, is to dis-entangle self-realization from recognition so as to make room for a broader spectrum of perfectionist concerns. What Kompridis misses, however, is that the status model does just that. By prioritizing the critique of institutionalizedinjustice, which can be overcome by institutional change, this approach limitsitself to a political conception of recognition. Effectively downsizing recognition, asKompridis himself recommends, the status model clears a space in which socialagents can legitimately pursue diverse perfectionist aims, freed from the strait-jacket of identitarian recognition.

What I have said so far suffices, I trust, to defend my general conceptions ofrecognition and of critical theory. But by establishing the priority of the critiqueof institutionalized injustice, I hope also to have provided the basis for dispellingKompridis’s more specific objections. Let me conclude by responding to one such objection here, while leaving it to readers to work out the implications forthe others.

Kompridis claims that I neglect the importance of linguistic innovation aimedat giving expression to heretofore unnamed injustices. Yet nothing in myapproach entails that existing vocabularies of justification are adequate for dis-closing harms that have not yet been publicly articulated. On the contrary, thejustice-theoretic view is fully compatible with the claim, which I advanced morethan 20 years ago, that a society’s authorized ‘means of interpretation and com-munication’ (MIC) are often better suited to expressing the perspectives of itsadvantaged strata than those of the oppressed and subordinated.22 As a result ofthis typical bias in signifying systems, the dominated shoulder an extra, asym-


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metrical burden in political argument. Impeding their ability to participate aspeers, the bias built into the MIC is itself an institutionalized injustice. To unmaskit requires the sort of justice-theoretic critique I have elaborated here.

For this reason, virtually every epochal struggle against injustice has involvedthe creation of new vocabularies for articulating injustices that previously lackednames. Second-wave feminism, which invented such expressions as ‘date rape’,‘sexual harassment’, and ‘the double shift’, as well as the language game of consciousness-raising, is exemplary but by no means unique. What Kompridiscalls the struggle for voice is intimately linked to such linguistic innovation, asnew political subjects literally talk themselves into existence, often creating theirown subaltern counterpublics to amplify new need interpretations and situationdefinitions that cannot at first gain a hearing in mainstream public spheres.23

Moreover, when social movements succeed in expanding the range of publiclynameable injustices, the protocols of public reason change too. In broadening thespectrum of intelligible claims, these movements also enrich the pool of poten-tially persuasive justifications and change the understanding of impartiality.Contra Kompridis, no paradigm better comprehends the historicity of public reason than the version of discourse ethics that informs my approach. Far fromrelying on rigid, predefined notions as to what counts as an impartial reason, thatversion invites the reflexive critique of all institutionalized rationality regimes,whose injustice it already suspects. And far from neglecting the disclosive dimen-sion of signification, it valorizes the efforts of emancipatory social movements toinvent novel significations that expand the meaning of justice.

In general, then, the view of critique I have been advocating here is informedby a version of discourse ethics. Although Habermas’s version is sometimesthought to privilege justification at the expense of disclosure, mine accords dueimportance to both those linguistic practices, while clarifying the relationbetween them. What distinguishes this approach from all four alternatives inti-mated by Kompridis is its ability to link the disclosive use of language directly tothe project of unmasking domination. On this point, too, it better expresses thepractical, emancipatory intent of critical theory.

In replying to Kompridis I have pursued a quasi-Hegelian strategy. Examininga staged sequence of views about recognition – rejectionist, anti-monistic, free-dom-theoretic, and synthesizing – I have shown that each leads to an aporia whosesublation requires a shift to a justice-theoretic conception. The end result is to validate a specific answer to the extra-paradigmatic question about the socialontology of critical theory: such a theory best promotes its emancipatory aimswhen, construing misrecognition as status subordination, it prioritizes the critiqueof institutionalized injustice.


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4. Justification or Participation? A Rejoinder to ForstRainer Forst and I agree on the basic objectives of critical theory. For him, too,such a theory best fulfills its practical, emancipatory aims when it makes the critique of institutionalized injustice its priority. Unlike my dispute withKompridis, then, my disagreements with Forst are intra-paradigmatic. Premisedon a shared commitment to justice-theoretic critique, they concern the best wayto realize that project. The core issue is categorial: with what categories shouldone formulate a critical theory of (in)justice?

In order to specify that core disagreement, I must first note the points of agree-ment, of which there are many. In fact, notwithstanding his carefully cultivatedposture of evenhandedness, I read Forst as siding with me, and against AxelHonneth, on nearly all of the fundamental issues debated in Redistribution orRecognition? Aligning my position with the tradition of exploitation critique andHonneth’s with that of alienation critique, Forst himself comes down in favor ofthe former. Thus, he agrees with me that Honneth’s theory fails in two majorways to provide an adequate conceptual basis for critical theory. First, recognitionmonism is deficient as social theory, as it cannot identify the major genres ofstructural injustice in contemporary society. Because distributive injustices arenot always forms or effects of misrecognition, a critical theory needs a multi-dimensional explanatory framework. Second, recognition monism fails to supplyan adequate normative basis for critique. Because a teleological notion of recog-nition cannot justify binding obligations of justice in modern contexts of ethicalpluralism, a critical theory needs a deontological moral philosophy, which should,moreover, be normatively monist. Thus, instead of distinguishing three spheresof recognition, each governed by a different norm, critical theorists shouldespouse a single overarching principle of justice, which all injustices can be shownto violate.

In general, then, Forst and I agree that a critical theory of contemporary society should be social-theoretically multidimensional and normatively monist.24

Nevertheless, Forst does not endorse the theory I have proposed. On the plane of social theory, he appears to reject my account of three intertwined orders ofsubordination in favor of a ‘pluralism of evaluative notions’. On the plane of moralphilosophy, he proposes to replace my principle of parity of participation with anorm of justificatory fairness. The apparent result is to substitute a justification-theoretic conception of justice for my participation-theoretic conception.

Consequently, Forst’s article invites us to consider the question, which of thesetwo approaches should one prefer? Given the priority of (in)justice, should criti-cal theorists conceive that notion in terms of justification or participation? Butthat is not the only possible interpretation of our exchange. Instead of readingForst’s and my views as rivals, one can read his norm of justificatory fairness as aspecial case of my principle of participatory parity, applied to one specific arena ofsocial practice, namely, the practice of political argument. In what follows, I shall


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consider each of these interpretations. While devoting the bulk of my discussionto the relative merits of our respective views when construed as alternatives, I shallend by sketching a reading that incorporates elements of Forst’s approach intomine.

Let me begin, then, by assuming that we are confronted with a choice betweentwo competing conceptions of (in)justice, one justification-theoretic, the otherparticipation-theoretic. How should one weigh their relative merits? Forst him-self suggests an evaluative standard: does a given critical-theoretical frameworksucceed in putting ‘first things first’? Does it clarify the power asymmetries thatsimultaneously entrench injustices and hamper efforts to challenge them? Iwholeheartedly endorse this evaluative standard. Construing Forst’s theory andmine as rivals, I shall employ his standard to assess their respective strengths andweaknesses, asking: which does a better job of putting first things first in socialtheory and moral philosophy?

I can deal briefly with the social theory side of the question, as Forst himself sayslittle about that. In fact, I am not even sure whether his references to ‘evaluativepluralism’ are really meant to refer to social theory at all, i.e. to a multidimensionalexplanatory account of the genres, mechanisms, orders, and sources of injustice.Because he offers no account of his own of these matters, nor any substantivearguments against mine, it is not entirely clear whether he really does mean to rejectmy account of three intertwined orders of subordination (economic, cultural,political), corresponding to three intertwined genres of injustice (maldistribution,misrecognition, misrepresentation). In any case, this account satisfies Forst’s evaluative standard. Each of the three orders of subordination/genres of injusticenames a type of institutionalized power differential that deprives some socialactors of the chance to participate on a par with others in social life. Given Forst’sfailure to provide a comparable account of power asymmetries, one might con-clude that my approach is better equipped to put first things first in social theory.

I turn now to the moral-philosophical aspect of our exchange, which requiresmore extended discussion. Beginning with the points of agreement, I note thatboth of our views belong to the family of discourse-theoretic approaches. Each ofus holds that justice claims must be warranted discursively, via a deliberativeprocess in which all potentially affected can participate on fair terms in theexchange of arguments and counterarguments. For both of us, moreover, thatprocess is not conceived monologically, as an interior thought process, but ratherdialogically, as a real democratic political process, which must be socially institu-tionalized. For both of us, finally, the process will be fair, and the outcomelegitimate only if all who are potentially affected are able to participate fully, aspeers – which is to say, only in the absence of entrenched power asymmetries.

Nevertheless, our moral-philosophical views differ in four respects, which con-cern the object, modality, scope, and social ontology of normative critique. Let meconsider each of these issues in turn, beginning with the problem of object. Herethe question is: what does each theory take to be the principal focus of critical


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scrutiny? How does each construe the object to which its normative principleapplies? As I understand it, Forst’s justification-theoretic approach takes as itsprivileged object the formal syntax of the reasons the participants exchange. This, Itake it, is what he means to assess when he invokes the criteria of generality andreciprocity. Those criteria are treated by him as attributes of reasons, as opposedto social relations. For Forst, accordingly, justifications cannot be cogent unlesstheir syntax manifests formal properties of generality and reciprocity. The reasonsoffered must eschew special pleading and restricted, non-reciprocal codes andidioms.

In contrast, my participation-theoretic approach takes as its primary object thesocial relations among the interlocutors. The parity standard applies, not to thesyntax of the propositions they utter, but to the social terms on which they con-verse. Are these terms such as to permit all to participate fully, as peers, in politicalargument? Or do institutionalized power asymmetries deprive some potentialinterlocutors of the resources, standing, and voice that are needed for full partici-pation? Thus, my approach applies its normative standard to the power relationsin force, which can institutionalize obstacles to participatory parity in delibera-tion.

This difference in object bears importantly on Forst’s suggestion that criticaltheorists put first things first. Unlike his, my approach provides a non-circuitousroute to the question of power. Whereas he broaches power indirectly, throughthe proxy of syntax, my approach confronts power directly, tackling head-on thestructural asymmetries that taint social practices of justification in unjust societies.As a result, it is better able to see through the ways in which dominant stratamanipulate arguments – for example, by using reasons whose formal syntax isfacially general and reciprocal to defend arrangements that injure the dominated,on the one hand, and by disqualifying the latter’s protests as particularistic andnon-reciprocal, on the other. By training scrutiny not on syntax but on social rela-tions, my approach unmasks such strategies. Interrogating the social-structuralcontext disregarded by Forst, it captures power asymmetries that are not reflectedin justificatory syntax and that elude an approach that takes the latter as a proxy forthe former. If the two theories are construed as rivals, then, mine has advantagesover Forst’s on the issue of object. Directly targeting differentials in power, it isbetter able to put first things first.

My second moral-philosophical difference with Forst concerns the modality ofnormative critique. What is at issue here is the mode in which our respective prin-ciples of justice operate. For each of us, does the principle function procedurallyor substantively? Does it evaluate the process of deliberation, or does it serve ratherto assess the outcome? As I understand it, Forst’s principle of justificatory fairnessis purely procedural. Applying exclusively to the input side of the dialogicalexchange, it serves to evaluate the latter’s procedural fairness – by scrutinizing thesyntax of the reasons exchanged within it.

For me, in contrast, the principle of participatory parity is at once procedural


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and substantive. Applied to both the input and the output of deliberation, thatprinciple serves to evaluate each of two major variables in the equation. First, itassesses the procedural fairness of dialogical processes – by interrogating the rela-tions of social power that underlie them. Second, it also serves to assess thesubstantive justice of deliberative outcomes – by examining their consequencesfor future social interaction. In the first case, the principle directs us to askwhether the interlocutors are really able to participate as peers in exchangingarguments about justice and injustice. In the second case, it directs us to askwhether the political decisions that ensue from their discussions will reallyenhance the fairness of future encounters by reducing disparities in participation.

Once again, faced with two alternatives that appear to be rivals, we should ask:which approach is better positioned to put first things first in the sense of expos-ing unjust asymmetries of power? To be genuinely critical, in my view, a theoryof power must keep open the possibility of a gap between procedural fairness andsubstantive justice. Allowing for the possibility that a procedurally fair process cangenerate a substantively unjust outcome, such a theory should be able to criticizesubstantive injustice as well as procedural unfairness. Granted, any specificaccount of substantive injustice must be dialogically warranted. But the discus-sion, like the theory itself, should be informed by empirical research, which canreveal the likely impact of a contemplated policy decision on extant power rela-tions in a given context. Thus, a critique of institutionalized injustice shouldencompass both consequentialist and procedural considerations. Sensitive to out-put as well as to input, such a theory best grasps the workings of power when itincorporates a normative principle that operates in both modalities, i.e. both pro-cedurally and substantively – while taking care neither to confuse them with oneanother nor to blur the distinction between them.

Forst correctly notes, however, that my double use of participatory parity toevaluate both the input and the output of political argument raises the question ofcircularity. On the one hand, what exactly is needed to achieve parity of partici-pation in a given case can only be determined dialogically, through fairdemocratic deliberation. On the other hand, fair democratic deliberation pre-supposes that participatory parity already exists. There is indeed a circularity here,but Forst’s own view is circular in just the same way: one needs a fair structure ofjustification in order to determine the requirements of justice; but one needs justdistribution and recognition in order to have a fair structure of justification. In no way specific to me, then, the circularity problem arises for any approach thatenvisions a transition to more just social arrangements via political processes thatoccur by definition in unjust circumstances. All such approaches must take stepsto prevent the circle from becoming vicious.

Forst proposes an ingenious solution to this problem. Echoing Bohman’s ideaof the democratic minimum, he distinguishes minimal from maximal justice.Whereas the first refers to the existence of an institutionalized structure of justi-fication, where participants can demand and receive justifications, the second


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denotes a fully justified basic structure of society. Although Forst suggests thatthis distinction redounds to the exclusive credit of his approach, I maintain that itsits equally well with mine. Elsewhere, in fact, I have proposed the analogous ideaof good enough deliberation. A paraphrase of D.W. Winnicott’s notion of ‘goodenough mothering’, this expression refers to deliberation that, while tainted bypower asymmetries and thus falling short of participatory parity, is ‘good enough’to generate outcomes that reduce disparities, so that the next round of politicalargument proceeds on terms that are somewhat more fair and can be expected tolead to still better outcomes, and so on.25 This idea, like those of Forst andBohman, aims to turn a vicious circle into a virtuous spiral. The differencebetween it and Forst’s minimal justice is not a difference that makes a difference.

As I see it, therefore, when our two approaches are construed as rivals, minecomes out better than Forst’s with respect to the issue of modality. No more liablethan his to the charge of circularity, the participation-theoretic model is morecritical of power asymmetries insofar as it interrogates both the input and outputof deliberation. Operating substantively as well as procedurally, it is better able toput first things first.

Let me turn, then, to my third moral-philosophical difference with Forst,which concerns the scope of normative critique. The issue here is the range ofsocial practices that each theory subjects to critical scrutiny. As I read him, Forstlimits his core principle’s scope of application to a single class of social practices –namely, practices of justification. It is to them alone (or to the reasons exchangedwithin them) that his criteria of generality and reciprocity apply. In contrast, myprinciple of participatory parity applies more broadly, to all major social practicesand arenas of social interaction. Included here are practices of justification, to besure, but also other major social arenas, such as employment and markets; familyand personal life; formal and informal politics; public goods and services; andassociations in civil society. It is thanks to this wide scope of application that theparity principle can serve as a substantive norm for evaluating the outcomes ofdeliberation as well as a procedural principle for evaluating deliberative processes.

Assuming here, too, that we are dealing with competing views, we should ask:which approach more thoroughly exposes the unjust asymmetries of power thatpervade contemporary societies? On its face, my approach is more critical,because it targets more types of power asymmetries in more arenas of social life.Yet Forst maintains that he is justified in limiting the scope of his principle to justificatory arenas for two reasons: first, because the political is the masterdimension of social (in)justice; and, second, because power is the hyper-goodwhose distribution determines that of all other goods. What should we make ofthese claims?

In my view, Forst mixes genuine insights with dubious conclusions. I agree that the political is a fundamental dimension of justice, as my revised three-dimensional framework makes clear. I also agree that power has a special status,that it is a hyper-good. But it is a mistake, in my view, to identify power exclusively


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with the political dimension of justice. Rather, each of the three dimensions (eco-nomic, cultural, and political) identifies a fundamental, irreducible dimension ofsocial power. Corresponding to a distinctive mode of subordination and genre ofinjustice, each picks out an order of power asymmetry that poses a distinctive typeof obstacle to parity of participation. So what is so special about the political?

Forst is right, I think, to insist that the political is always necessarily in play,even when it is not the explicit focus of dispute. But this does not entail that it isthe master dimension. For the same is true of the other two dimensions of justice.In fact, the three dimensions stand in relations of mutual entwinement and recip-rocal influence. Just as the ability to make claims for distribution and recognitiondepends on relations of representation, so the ability to exercise political voicedepends on the relations of class and status. Thus, maldistribution and misrecog-nition conspire to subvert the principle of equal political voice for every citizen,even in polities that are formally democratic. It follows that efforts to overcomeinjustice cannot, except in rare cases, address the relations of representation alone.On the contrary, struggles against misrepresentation cannot succeed unless theyare joined with struggles against maldistribution and misrecognition – and viceversa. Where one puts the emphasis, of course, is both a tactical and strategic decision. Given the current salience of injustices of misframing, my own prefer-ence is for the slogan, ‘No redistribution or recognition without representation’.But that priority is conjunctural, not conceptual. And even today the politics ofrepresentation appears as one among three interconnected fronts in the strugglefor social justice in a globalizing world.

The upshot is that the political cannot be designated the master dimension of(in)justice. I say this even while endorsing Forst’s view of power as a hyper-goodand stipulating that the political enjoys a special salience today – for conjunctural,not conceptual, reasons. This is a difference that makes a difference. By refusingto treat the political as the master dimension of justice, my approach avoids thepitfalls of what I shall call reductive ‘politicism’. Analogous to economism, on theone hand, and to culturalism, on the other, politicism is the view that the socialrelations of representation determine those of distribution and recognition.Ascribing a base–superstructure configuration to contemporary society, whileinstalling the political as the ‘base’, this view is no more adequate than vulgareconomism or reductive culturalism. Like those discredited approaches, whosearchitectonic it faithfully mimics, politicism fails to do justice to the complexity ofstructural causation in capitalist society. Consequently, its practical implication,that one can overcome all maldistribution and misrecognition simply by over-coming misrepresentation, is deeply misguided. Politicism appears to follow fromForst’s insistence that the political is the master dimension of justice. If so, it dis-ables his approach from grappling successfully with the three dialecticallyentwined sources of power asymmetry in contemporary society.

What follows for the issue of scope? If the political cannot be deemed the master dimension, there is no justification for limiting normative critique to


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justificatory practices. Rather, critical theory should track the effects of powerasymmetries across the entire range of social practices in contemporary society.On this count, too, then, the participation-theoretic approach puts first thingsfirst.

This brings me to my fourth moral-philosophical difference with Forst, whichconcerns the social ontology of normative critique. Here, too, it is necessary to separate out the points on which we differ from the views we share. Both of useschew as sectarian the strategy espoused by Honneth, which purports to groundcritical theory on a comprehensive (albeit ‘formal’) account of human being.Rather, each of us follows John Rawls in correlating her or his theory with a morelimited, ‘political’ conception of the person, which picks out only those featuresof personhood that a nonsectarian theory of justice must presuppose.26 On thisgeneral theoretical strategy we agree. Nevertheless, Forst and I hold differentpolitical conceptions of the person. His approach portrays persons as givers andreceivers of justifications, who participate with one another in the social practiceof exchanging public reasons. Mine, in contrast, depicts persons as co-participantsin an indeterminate multiplicity of social practices, which emerge and disappearin a historically open-ended process and, so, cannot be specified once and for all.In my approach, persons are socially situated but potentially autonomous fellowactors, whose (equal) autonomy depends on their ability to interact with oneanother as peers – not only in political reasoning, but in all the major arenas andpractices that comprise their form of life. For me, accordingly, the practices of justification that Forst makes central are but one of the many social practices inwhich individuals ought to be able to exercise their free and equal personhood byparticipating with one another as peers.

Assuming they constitute rival social ontologies, which of these conceptions isbetter situated to put first things first? As I see it, my approach has at least twoadvantages over Forst’s. First, by refusing to single out justification practices forspecial notice, it offers a more capacious, variegated, and historically open-endedview of social personhood. As a result, it is less vulnerable to the charge of excessive rationalism. Second, by affirming the ideal of participatory parity, myapproach posits a close relation between the liberal value of individual autonomyand social belonging. According the latter a non-communitarian interpretation, itconstrues institutionalized obstacles to participatory parity as impediments notonly to equal autonomy but also to full membership in society. As a result, thissocial ontology permits critical theory to address a major form of alienation,namely, alienation from one’s society and fellow actors, even while prioritizing justice.Thus, the participation-theoretic view manages to recoup within a deontologicaltheory of justice at least one important ethical concern that is usually deemed the exclusive province of teleological theories of self-realization.27 In this way, itsatisfies Forst’s desideratum that a critical theory avoid as far as possible sacrific-ing other ethical concerns, even as it rightly prioritizes the critique of institution-alized injustice.


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In general, then, there are good reasons for preferring my approach to Forst’swith respect to all four issues considered here: the object, modality, scope, andsocial ontology of normative critique. Thus, in moral philosophy, as in social theory, the participation-theoretic conception of justice appears to do a better jobof putting first things first, assuming the two views are construed as rivals.

Suppose, however, we reject that interpretation in favor of one that regardsForst’s view as a special case of mine. Read this way, his norm of justificatory fair-ness appears as an application of the principle of participatory parity within oneimportant but restricted type of social practice – namely, the practice of demand-ing and receiving political justifications. No longer the fundamental principle ofjustice, Forst’s norm now presents itself as one of several such applications, eachof which specifies the meaning of parity in relation to a given type of social prac-tice. Certainly, this interpretation assumes the validity of my approach, butperhaps it captures the spirit, if not the letter, of Forst’s as well. As I read him, hetoo envisions a maximally just society as one in which no one is disrespected as aresult of institutionalized power asymmetries in any social practice that is essen-tial to full membership. It follows, I think he would agree, that in such a societyno one would be structurally excluded from or marginalized in any social arena of real significance. And Forst would agree too, if I understand him, that a justsociety requires that no one be deprived of the resources, standing, and voiceneeded to avoid exclusion or marginalization in any major arena of social inter-action. If that is right, then the equal right to justification serves in effect for himas a kind of synecdoche for society-at-large; it not only promotes but also modelsthe sort of egalitarian social relations that justice requires more broadly, through-out the whole of social life.

Perhaps I read too much of myself into Forst. But the mere fact that I can imagine interpreting him in this way shows how close in spirit our views really are.Our disagreements, as I said at the outset, are intra-paradigmatic, premised on ashared understanding of the basic shape and point of critical theory. In defendingmy participation-theoretic view here, then, I have sought to forward objectives wehold in common.

5. ConclusionLet me conclude on a note of gratitude. It is a rare privilege to have the opportu-nity to respond to four such interesting and intelligent articles. Different as theyare, each symposiast’s article inspired me to think more deeply than I had beforeabout key aspects of the view I elaborated in Redistribution or Recognition? Whetherthe primary focus of a critic’s article was political or philosophical, the result wasthe same: each contributor pushed me to devise new formulations of my positionthat go beyond, and (I hope) improve upon, those that appear in that volume. Noauthor could ask for anything more.28


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Notes

1. On this point, Alcoff misunderstands my view. She claims that I distinguish one type ofrecognition claim, aimed at parity, from another, aimed at identity. In fact, however, Ihold that all recognition claims should be judged by the single standard of parity ofparticipation, which applies also to claims for redistribution. Thus, the parity standardapplies equally to claims for universalist, affirmative, and deconstructive recognition.What distinguishes these types from one another is neither the standard by which theyare judged nor the goal at which they aim. The difference lies, rather, as I noted above,in the type of obstacle to participatory parity that each confronts – hence in the type ofremedy each projects as the means to parity.

2. Manuel Castells (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2, ThePower of Identity, pp. 8–11, 356–8. London: Blackwell.

3. Nancy Fraser (1995) ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a“Postsocialist” Age’, New Left Review 212 (July/Aug.): 68–93. Repr. in Nancy Fraser(1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. London:Routledge.

4. André Gorz (1967) Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, tr. Martin A. Nicolaus andVictoria Ortiz. Boston: Beacon Press. For my use of Gorz and my later account, seeNancy Fraser (2003) ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics’ ch. 1 of Fraser andHonneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, at pp. 79–82. London and New York: Routledge.

5. Fraser (n. 4), pp. 81–82.6. Here, too, Alcoff misunderstands my position. Noting my worry that recognition is

displacing redistribution, she observes that I fail to express any parallel concern thatredistribution could displace recognition. Seeking to explain the asymmetry, sheconcludes that I must value redistribution over recognition. But here she decontextualizesmy argument, neglecting to see it as an intervention in a specific historical conjuncture:the rise of neoliberalism, the weakening of social egalitarian ideals, and the surge ofidentity politics. This is the context in which I have commended the slogan, ‘Norecognition without redistribution’, while noting that in an earlier era of reductive-economistic social democracy, one might well have preferred the converse slogan, ‘Noredistribution without recognition’.

7. Karl Marx (1975) ‘Letter to A. Ruge, September 1843’, in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed.L. Coletti, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, p. 209. New York: VintageBooks.

8. I first elaborated this revised, three-dimensional framework in Fraser (2005) ReframingJustice: The 2004 Spinoza Lectures. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. See also Fraser (2005)‘Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World’, New Left Review 36 (Nov.–Dec.): 69–88.Fraser (2006) ‘Democratic Justice in a Globalizing Age: Thematizing the Problem of theFrame’, in Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (eds) Varieties of World-Making:Beyond Globalization, pp. 193–215. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kate Nash andVikki Bell (forthcoming) ‘The Politics of Framing: An Interview with Nancy Fraser’,Theory, Culture and Society.

9. Fraser (2005, in n. 8).10. Because access to these arenas is so fundamental for people’s well-being, I construe all of

them as ‘spheres of justice’ in which the requirement of participatory parity applies. HereI break with the common view that focuses exclusively on political participation, oftenunderstood very narrowly in terms of voting. For me, in contrast, the requirement ofparticipatory parity applies broadly, in all the major arenas of social life.

11. Whether exclusion from one sphere converts into exclusion from others is in the end anempirical question, which depends on the character of the society in question.


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12. Max Weber (1958) ‘Class, Status, Party’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. HansH. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 188–190, 399. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

13. Katherine C. Bond, David D. Celentano, Sukanya Phonsophakul, and ChayanVaddhanaphuti (1997) ‘Mobility and Migration: Female Commercial Sex Work and theHIV Epidemic in Northern Thailand’, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Sexual Cultures andMigration in the Era of AIDS: Anthropological and Demographic Perspectives, pp. 185–215.New York: Oxford University Press.

14. (2004) Darwin’s Nightmare, film dir. Hubert Sauper. Celluloid Dreams/InternationalFilm Circuit.

15. James Ferguson (1999) ‘Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism’,in Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the ZambianCopperbelt, pp. 234–54. Berkeley: University of California Press.

16. Dan La Botz (1995) Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform.Cambridge, MA: South End Press. June Nash (2001) Mayan Visions: The Quest forAutonomy in an Age of Globalization. London: Routledge.

17. In fact, as I shall explain shortly, in my reply to Forst, I have my own analogue of thedemocratic minimum in the notion of ‘good enough deliberation’.

18. Kevin Olson (forthcoming) ‘Participatory Parity and Democratic Justice’, in NancyFraser, Adding Insult to Injury: Social Justice and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Kevin Olson.London: Verso. Ingrid Robeyns (2003) ‘Is Nancy Fraser’s Critique of Theories ofDistributive Justice Justified?’, Constellations 10(3): 538, repr. ibid.

19. I will return to this point in replying to Forst.20. I made a similar argument several years ago in response to Iris Marion Young, whom I

also regard as a proponent and practitioner of gratuitous pluralism. See her (1997)‘Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory’, New LeftReview 222(March/April): 147–60. Nancy Fraser (1997) ‘A Rejoinder to Iris Young’, NewLeft Review 223(May/June): 126–9.

21. John Rawls (1999) A Theory of Justice, rev. edn, pp. 3–4, 263–4, 266–7. Cambridge:Belknap Press.

22. Nancy Fraser (1986) ‘Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity’, Praxis International 5(4):425–9. (1989a) ‘Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts inWelfare-State Societies’, Ethics 99(2): 291–313. (1989b) ‘Struggle over Needs: Outline ofa Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture’, in NancyFraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Polity Press.

23. Nancy Fraser (1991) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique ofActually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 109–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; reprinted in Fraser (1997, in n. 3).

24. Forst suggests that my theory can be interpreted in two ways: as normatively monist or asnormatively dualist. The first interpretation is correct. Although I conceive distributionand recognition (and now representation) as two (now three) conceptually irreducibledimensions of justice, I subsume both (all) of them under the single overarching norm ofparticipatory parity. For me, accordingly, all injustices violate a single normativeprinciple. Thus, my view is social-ontologically two- (now three-)dimensional, butnormatively monist.

25. The phrase ‘good enough deliberation’ was suggested to me by Bert van den Brink(personal communication). I develop the idea in ‘Who Counts? Thematizing theQuestion of the Frame’, in Fraser (2005, in n. 8). Fraser (2006, in n. 8).

26. John Rawls (1996) Political Liberalism, pp. 29–35. New York: Columbia University Press.27. I owe this point to Cristina Lafont (oral intervention in discussion of this exchange at


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session on ‘Redistribution or Recognition?’, Central Division meetings of the AmericanPhilosophical Association, Chicago, April 2006).

28. Special thanks to Nikolas Kompridis. Not only did he organize and guest-edit thissymposium, but he also remained patient and gracious despite my slowness in preparingthis response. I am grateful, too, to Amy Allen, Maria Pia Lara, and Eli Zaretsky forhelpful comments on the present text.


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nancy fraser - identity, exclusion and critique (inglés)

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