The Struggle for Recognition

• Honneth argues that the self develops through experiencing recognition from others.
• Heavily influenced by Hegel – the self is intersubjective.
• calls this ‘Mutual self-realization’. This is a social process that we all experience. Not strictly individual.

• Recognition is a cultural phenomenon, but it is not ‘merely cultural’. To deny the self through a denial of recognition is a matter of civil rights.

• Therefore the symbolic denial of rights/self is an injustice on the same level as the loss of legal or political rights.

• Freedom’s Right (2014). A theory of rights based in the analysis of social life, not in universality, natural justice, subjective or objective epistemologies or ontologies.