In an era of heightened concern about injustice in relations of identity and difference, political theorists often prescribe equal recognition as a remedy for the ills of subordination. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, they envision a system of reciprocal knowledge and esteem, in which the affirming glance of others lets everyone be who they really are. This book challenges the equation of recognition with justice. Patchen Markell mines neglected strands of the concept's genealogy and reconstructs an unorthodox interpretation of (...) Hegel, who, in the unexpected company of Sophocles, Aristotle, Arendt, and others, reveals why recognition's promised satisfactions are bound to disappoint, and even to stifle.Written with exceptional clarity, the book develops an alternative account of the nature and sources of identity-based injustice in which the pursuit of recognition is part of the problem rather than the solution. And it articulates an alternative conception of justice rooted not in the recognition of identity of the other but in the acknowledgment of our own finitude in the face of a future thick with surprise. Moving deftly among contemporary political philosophers, the close interpretation of ancient and modern texts, and the exploration of rich case studies drawn from literature, history, and modern politics, Bound by Recognition is at once a sustained treatment of the problem of recognition and a sequence of virtuoso studies. (shrink)

This essay argues that the neo-Roman republican principle of "non-domination," as developed in the recent work of Philip Pettit, cannot serve as a single overarching political ideal, because it responds to only one of two important dimensions of concern about human agency. Through critical engagements with several aspects of Pettit's work, ranging from his philosophical account of freedom as "discursive control" to his appropriation of the distinction between dominium and imperium, the essay argues that the idea of domination, which responds (...) to concerns about "control," needs to be supplemented by the idea of usurpation, which responds to questions about "involvement"; and it shows how attention to both domination and usurpation (and to the interaction between them) can shed light on such phenomena as imperialism, slavery, and democracy. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s political theory is often understood to rest on a celebration of action, the memorable words and deeds of named individuals, over against the anonymous processes constitutive of ‘labor’ and ‘society’. Yet at key moments in _The Human Condition_ and _The Origins of Totalitarianism_, Arendt seems to signal a different relationship between political action and anonymity; and she does so in part via citations of the novels of William Faulkner. Using the apparently contradictory notion of ‘anonymous glory’ as a (...) heuristic, this essay reconsiders Arendt’s political thought through readings of the novels she cites, _A Fable_ and _Intruder in the Dust_. The essay argues that, for Arendt, a conception of action adequate to the scale of modern social power must somehow be both indelibly tied to individual deeds and immersed in a processual field that is indifferent to the needs for meaning or purpose or satisfaction that individuals bring to what they do; and that Arendt’s engagement with this problem both complicates the relation of action to its supposed opposites, and makes it more difficult to conceive of action’s recovery as a reliable source of theoretical or political redemption. (shrink)

The concept of "recognition" lies at the intersection between contemporary identity politics and the philosophy of Hegel. While Hegel's philosophy is often invoked to provide normative grounding for political projects devoted to overcoming misrecognition, Hegel's analysis of recognition actually supports an immanent critique of such politics. It provides us with diagnostic tools that show how the pursuit of recognition, especially in the context of modern, state-centered politics, works both for and against the values of agency and plurality it is supposed (...) to serve. I develop this argument through readings of Hegel's Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right; Sophocles' Antigone; the history Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia; and contemporary theorists of multiculturalism, including Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka. ;In chapter one, establishing connections between Taylor's work on Herder and language and his work on multiculturalism, I show that demands for recognition have a self-obscuring character: recognition constructs identities by seeming only to cognize them. To understand the temptations and risks of political strategies that constitutively involve misunderstanding our own activity in this way, chapters two and three turn to important recognition scenes in Sophocles' Antigone and Hegel's Phenomenology. Read through the lens of tragedy, Hegel illuminates how the pursuit of recognition, blind to its own participation in the workings of power through which identities are constructed, enacts new forms of subjection in the name of an attractive yet impossible vision of masterful agency. Chapters four and five show that, pace the later Hegel, the mediating institution of the modern state cannot salvage the ideal of recognition, because the state itself participates in struggles for recognition, demanding confirmation of its sovereignty. I trace the consequences of the state's involvement in the politics of recognition through the case of Jewish emancipation, and by analyzing contemporary debates over the supposedly divisive effects of multiculturalism as struggles for recognition in which the sovereign imperatives of multicultural states help generate essentialist articulations of identity, foreclosing democratic agency. The conclusion suggests modes of political practice and institution that might enable us to loosen our tenacious attachment to recognition, thereby negotiating its double binds more gracefully. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the question of whether there is a way to engage the question of democratic citizenship while refusing the invitation to subordinate political activity to the disposing power of expert thought. It explores this possibility with the help of Arendt's On Revolution, and in particular by attending to some of her characterizations of the American revolutionaries' experiences of, and in, political action. These characterizations throw a distinctive light both on the question of what threatens, and what might help (...) sustain, the activity of democratic citizenship, and on the question of the relations among political activity, thinking, and theory. They do so not only in virtue of what they say about the American revolutionaries, but also by exemplifying the generatively idiosyncratic way Arendt uses the fraught idea of “experience.” It begins with some general words about On Revolution and its context. (shrink)