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EX JlMJ.N:tNG THE :P 0 LIT 1 C S

OF.RECOGNIT ION

CHARLES TAYLOR

:K. ANTHONY ApPIAH

JURGEN HABERMAS

cSTEVEN.C. ROCKEFELLER

.-M.lCHA-ELWALZER

SUSAN WOLF.

Editedand1ntroducedby AMY GUTMANN

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P·RINCETON.·UNIVERSI,TY

PRESS

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NEW JERSEY

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lUPERJ B'BUOTE~

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AMY GUTMANN

to deliberate about our respectable differences is also part of

the democratic political ideal. Multicultural societies and

communities that stand for the freedom and equality of all

people rest upon mutual respect for reasonable intellectual,

political, and cultural differences. Mutual respect requires a

widespread willingness and ability to articulate our disagree-

ments, to defend them before people with whom we dis-

agree, to discern the difference between respectable and

disrespectable disagreement, and to be open to changing

our own minds when faced with well-reasoned criticism.

The moral promise of multiculturalism depends on the exer-

cise of these deliberative virtues.

The Politics of Recognition

CHARLES TAYLOR

A NUMBER of strands in contemporary politics turn on

the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. The need,

it can be argued, is one of the driving forces behind national-

ist movements in politics. And the demand comes to the fore

in a number of ways in today's politics, on behalf of minority

or "subaltern" groups, in some forms of feminism and in

what is today called the politics of "multiculturalism."

The demand for recognition in these latter cases is given

urgency by the supposed links between recognition and

icientity, where this latter term designates something like a

:person's understanding of who they are, of their fundamen-

tal defining characteristics as a human being~J The thesis is

that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its ab-

sence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person

or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if

the people or society around th~m mirror back to them a con-

fining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselv.es.

Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a

form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, dis-

torted, and reduced mode of being. -<

Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriar-

chal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory

image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of

their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objec-

tive obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be

incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And

')"

CHARLES

T A nOR

THE POLITICS

OF RECOGNITION

beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain of low

self-esteem. An analogous point has been made in relation to

blacks: that white society has for generations projected a de-

meaning image of them, which some of them have been un-

able to resist adopting. Their own self-depreciation, on this

view, becomes one of the most potent instruments of their

own oppression. Their first task ought to be to purge them-

selves of this imposed and destructive identity. Recently, a

similar point has been made in relation to indigenous and

colonized people in general. It is held that since 1492 Euro-

peans have projected an image of such people as somehow

inferior, "uncivilized," and through the force of conquest

have often been able to impose this image on the conquered.

The figure of Caliban has been held to epitomize this crush-

ing portrait of contempt of New World aboriginals.

Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just

a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, sad-

dling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition

is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human

need.

In order to examine some of the issues that have arisen

here, I'd like to take a step back, achieve a little distance, and

look first at how this discourse of recognition and identity

came to seem familiar, or at least readily understandable, to

us. For it was not always so, and our ancestors of more than

a couple of centuries ago would have stared at us uncompre-

hendingly if we had used these terms {n their current sense.

How did we get started on this?

Hegel comes to mind right off, with his famous dialectic of

the master and the slave. This is an important stage, but we

need to go a little farther back to see how this passage came

to have the sense it did. What changed to make this kind of

talk have sense for us?

We can distinguish two changes that together have made

the modern preoccupation with identity and recognition in-

evitable. The first is the collapse of social hierarchies, which

used to be the basis for honor. I am using honor in the ancien

regime sense in which it is intrinsically linked to inequalities.

For some to have honor in this sense, it is essential that not

everyone have it. This is the sense in which Montesquieu

uses it in his description of monarchy. Honor is intrinsically

a matter of "preferences."1 It is also the sense in which we

use the term when we speak of honoring someone by giving

her some public award, for example, the Order of Canada.

Clearly, this award would be without worth if tomorrow we

decided to give it to every adult Canadian.

As against this notion of honor, we have the modern no-

tion of dignity, now used in a universalist and egalitarian

sense, where we talk of the inherent "dignity of human be-

ings," or of citizen dignity. The underlying premise here is

that everyone shares in it.2 It is obvious that this concept of

dignity is the only one compatible with a democratic society,

and that it was inevitable that the old concept of honor was

superseded. But this has also meant that the forms of equal

recognition have been essential to democratic culture. For in-

stance, that everyone be called "Mr.," "Mrs.," or "Miss,"

rather than some people being called "Lord" or "Lady" and

others simply by their surnames-or, even more demeaning,

by their first names-has been thought essential in some

democratic societies, such as the United States. More re-

cently, for similar reasons, "Mrs." and "Miss" have been col-

lapsed into "Ms." Democracy has ushered in a politics of

equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the

years, and has now returned in tl\e form of demands for the

equal status of cultures and of genders.

I "La nature de I'honneur est de demander des preferences et des dis-

tinctions .... " Montesquieu, De /'esprit des lois, Bk. 3, chap. 7.

2 The significance of this move from "honor" to "dignity" is interest-

ingly discussed by Peter Berger in his "On the Obsolescence of the Con-

cept of Honour," in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed.

Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, Ind.: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 172-81.

If'

CHARLES

TAYLOR

THE POLITICS

OF RECOGNITION

But the importance of recognition has been modified and

intensified by the new understanding of individual identity

thatemerges at the end ofthe eighteenth century. We might

speak of an individualized identity, one that is particular to

me, and that I discover in myself. This notion arises along

with an ideal, that of being true to myself and my own par-

ticular way of being. Following Lionel Trilling's usage in his

brilliant study, I will speak of this as the ideal of "authentic-

ity."3 It will help to describe in what it consists and how it

came about.

One way of describing its development is to see its starting

point in the eighteenth-century notion that human beings

are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for

what is right and wrong. The original point of this doctrine

was to combat a rival view, that knowing right and wrong

was a matter of calculating consequences, in particular,

those concerned with divine reward and punishment. The

idea was that understanding right and wrong was not a mat-

ter of dry calculation, but was anchored in our feelings.4 Mo-

rality has, in a sense, a voice within.

The notion of authenticity develops out of a displacement

of the moral accent in this idea. On the original view, the

inner voice was important because it tells us what the right

thing to do is. Being in touch with our moral feelings matters

here, as a means to the end of acting rightly. What I'mcall-

ing the displacement of the moral accent comes about when

being in touch with our feelings takes on independent and

crucial moral significance. It comes to be something we have

to attain if we are to be true and full human beings.

To see what is new here, we have to see the analogy to

earlier moral views, where being in touch with some

source-for

considered essential to full being. But now the source we

have to connect with is deep within us. This fact is part of the

massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of in-

wardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings

with inner depths. At first, this idea that the source is within

doesn't exclude our being related to God or the Ideas; it can

be considered our proper way of relating to them. In a sense,

it can be seen as just a continuation and intensification of

the development inaugurated by Saint Augustine, who saw

the road to God as passing through our own self-awareness.

The first variants of this new view were theistic, or at least

pantheistic.

The most important philosophical writer who helped to

bring about this change was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I think

Rousseau is important not because he inaugurated the

change; rather, I would argue that his great popularity

comes in part from his articulating something that was in a

sense already occurring in the culture. Rousseau frequently

presents the issue of morality as that of our following a voice

of nature within us. This voice is often drowned out by the

passions that are induced by our dependence on others, the

main one being amour propre, or pride. Our moral salvation

comes from recovering authentic moral contact with our-

selves. Rousseau even gives a name to the intimate contact

with oneself, more fundamental than any moral view, that

is a source of such joy and contentment: "Ie sentiment de

I'existence. "5

example, God, or the Idea of the Good-was

5 "Le sentiment de I'existence depouille de toute autre affection est par

lui-meme un sentiment pn~cieux de contentement et de paix qUi suffimit

seul pour rendre ceUe existence chere et douce a qui sauroit ecarter de soi

toutes les impressions sensuelles et terrestres qui viennent sans cesse

nous en distraire et en troubler ici bas la douceur. Mais la plus part des

hommes agitcs de passions continuelles connoissent peu cet etat et nc

I'ayant goutc qu'imparfaitement durant peu d'instans n'en conservent

qu'une idee obscureet confuse qui ne leur en fait pas sentir Ie charmc."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ll's Re-oeriesdu promeneur solitaire, "Cinquieme

Promenade," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:1047.

3 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authellticity (New York: Norton, 1969).

4 I have discussed the development of this doctrine at greater length, at

first in the work of Francis Hutcheson, drawing on the writings of the Earl

of Shaftesbury, and its adversarial relation to Locke's theory in Sources of

the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 15.

CHARlES

TA YLOR

THE POLITICS

OF RECOGNITION

The ideal of authenticity becomes crucial owing to a devel-

opment that occurs after Rousseau, which I associate with

the name of Herder-once again, as its major early articula-

tor, rather than its originator. Herder put forward the idea

that each of us has an original way of being human: each

person has his or her own "measure."6 This idea has bur-

rowed very deep into modern consciousness. It is a new

idea. Before the late eighteenth century, no one thought that

the differences between human beings had this kind of

moral significance. There is a certain way of being human

that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way,

and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion

gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not,

I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.

This is the powerful moral ideal that has come down to us.

It accords moral importance to a kind of contact with myself,

with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of

being lost, partly through the pressures toward outward

conformity, but also because in taking an instrumental

stance toward myself, I may have lost the capacity to listen to

this inner voice. It greatly increases the importance of this

self-contact by introducing the principle of originality: each

of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should

I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I

can't even find the model by which to live outside myself, 1

can only find it within.?

.. ~".,"~

articulating it, I am also (falling myself. I am realizing a po-

tentiality that is properly my own. This is the background

understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to

the goals of self-fulfillment and self-realization in which the

ideal is usually couched. I should note here that Herder ap-

plied his conception of originality at two levels, not only to

the individual person among other persons, but also to the

culture-bearing people among other peoples. Just like indi-

viduals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own cul-

ture. Germans shouldn't try to be derivative and (inevitably)

second-rate Frenchmen, as Frederick the Great's patronage

seemed to be encouraging them to do. The Slavic peoples

had to find their own path. And European colonialismought

to be rolled back to'give the peoples of what we now call the

Third World their chance to be themselves unimpeded. We

can recognize here the seminal idea of modern nationalism,

in both benign and malignant forms.

This new ideal of authenticity was, like the idea of dignity,

also in part an offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society.

In those earlier societies, what we would now call identity

was largely fixed by one's social position. That is, the back-

ground that explained what people recognized as important

to themselves was to a great extent determined by their place

in society, and whatever roles or activities attached to this

position. The birth of a democratic society doesn't by itself

do away with this phenomenon, Ijecause people can still de-

fine themselves by their social roles. What does decisively

undermine this socially derived identification, however, is

the ideal of authenticity itself. As this emerges, for instance,

-_._.~_.~,

,."--"--"-" .. '.-",

" "Jeder Mensch hat ein eigenes Maass, gleichsam eine eigne Stimmung

aller seiner sinnlichen Gefiihle zu cinander." Johann GOlllob Herder,

Idee1l, chap. 7, sec. 1, in Herders Siimlliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan (Ber-

lin; Weidmann, 1877-1913), 13:291.

7 John Stuart Mill was influenced by this Romantic current of thought

when he made something like the ideal of authenticity the basis for one of

his most powerful arguments in all Liberty. See especially chapter 3,

where he argues that we need something more than a capacity for "ape-

like imitation": "A person whose desires and impulses are his own-are

the expression of his own nature. as it has been developed and modified

by his own culture-is said to have a character." "If a person possesses

any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of

laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself. but

because it is his own mode." John Stuart Mill, Time Essays (Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press, 1975),pp, 73, 74, 83.

~g_t_ru_e_t_o_m_y_selmeans being true to my own original-

~ry,!_whichis something orily'r canarticulate -ariddiscove"J:'.Iil

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