Abstract

Since the groundbreaking work by Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth in the early 1990s, there has undeniably been greater interest in the concept of recognition in critical social theory, social philosophy, and the politics of identity. Perhaps this is because ‘everyone cares about recognition’ . At least, this is what Cillian McBride claims in his book, Recognition, which is one of the more recent publications in Polity’s Key Concepts series.While everyone might care about recognition, it is not entirely clear what it is that they care about. The usage of the term in the current literature varies from Taylor’s cultural recognition, where the emphasis is on valuing particular identities and traditions, to Honneth’s anthropological recognition that is more centered on personhood and the development of healthy self-relations through our relations to others. From these two strands, McBride takes there to be a shared underlying Hegelian intuition that humans are social beings whose self-un ..