Identity or Status? Struggles over ‘Recognition’ in Fraser, Honneth, and Taylor

Abstract

recognition from the external perspective of an objective, social-scientific observer, who attends only to those distinctions between groups that are the result of institutionalized social relations of subordination, whether economic, political, or cultural.Calling this a "status" model of recognition politics, Fraser claims that it provides a better basis for a critical theory of struggles against denigration than competing "identity" models of recognition.Only by forswearing recourse to the prevailing identity model can theorists make normatively important distinctions between warranted and unwarranted claims for recognition.Furthermore, according to Fraser, only such a status model can be properly integrated with a theory of just economic distribution, so that one coherent framework of social justice can accommodate and reconcile claims for just social relations of distribution and recognition.Fraser's general model does indeed represent an important advance over competing models of identity politics.However, it is not entirely clear how many of its advantages are the result of the status model, and how many are attributable to other theoretical components.My underlying hypothesis is that no adequate critical theory of recognition can be so objectivistic that it ignores the internal connections between struggles for expanded social relations of recognition and the development of individual identity.I develop some arguments in support of this hypothesis in this paper by showing that most of the clear advantages contained in Fraser's critical social theory are not due to the adoption of a status-based model of recognition.In particular, after reconstructing the crucial changes that Fraser has made most recently in her theory of recognition (II), I turn to her specific claims for the advantages of a status-based model of recognition in comparison with the competing identity-based models put forward in the work of Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor (III).Throughout, I pay special attention to the ways in which Fraser attempts to depart from the problems she detects in identity politics, to whether these problems are actually evident in competing identity-based theories of recognition, and to the potential losses faced by a theory that forswears access to the connection between social struggles for expanded recognition and the structures of individual identity development.I conclude that, while Fraser is right to insist on a theory of recognition politics that can be integrated with a distinct theory of redistributive politics, she is wrong to claim that a critical theory of social justice requires a status model of recognition. II. Fraser's New Status Model of RecognitionIn two recent essays Fraser has reformulated her critical theory of recognition in order to respond to problems she perceives in both her own and in other theorists' accounts of the dynamics and prospects of identity politics, as evinced in the new social movements of the last 30 years or so. 4 Rather than recount her entire theory, I focus here on five crucial changes she makes in the theory in these two Cons10(4).