Mainstream views of justice have typically concerned themselves with the distribution of goods such as money, power, opportunity, and liberty. In recent years, however, the traditionally neglected good of recognition has become a major focus of attention in contemporary politics and political theory. Stirred by a growing awareness of the pluralistic character of modern societies, many people now believe that recognition is something that is owed as a matter of justice. Just as poverty and a denial of liberty can have catastrophic implications for a person's well-being and self-development, misrecognition and nonrecognition can demean and insult an individual, leaving him or her with a crippling feeling of inferiority. In response to perceived failures of recognition, identity-related groups have called for significant changes in public policies and institutions: Political debates about everything from the college curriculum to laws regulating marriage, to language rights and race-conscious districting, to institutions of self-government for indigenous peoples and national minorities have been framed as “struggles for recognition.”

For many political theorists, this turn to recognition has been something of a disaster. Critics charge that the new politics of recognition distracts the public and theorists alike from more urgent questions of economic justice. Worse still, it is argued, some of the policies that are demanded in the name of recognition seem offensive from a liberal standpoint. They extend benefits and privileges to groups with illiberal outlooks, or they create special distinctions between citizens and thus go against an ideal of equal, and hence undifferentiated, citizenship that has been historically central to the liberal vision.

In addition, the politics of recognition is accused of reinstating a new form of “essentialism” that is ultimately just as insensitive to difference as the old universal politics. To recognize some particular identity is apparently to take a view of what that identity's essential features are and to attach public significance to those features. But this process of essentializing an identity risks imprisoning bearers of the identity into a “script” (as Anthony Appiah has called it) that heavy-handedly defines the “proper” way to be a bearer of that identity, and subtly devalues those who articulate the identity in a different way.

In a smartly written new book on recognition, Patchen Markell develops what is effectively a distinctive and novel challenge to the politics of recognition, albeit one that has certain affinities with the essentialism objection just mentioned. In Markell's view, the guiding ideal of equal recognition rests on incoherent, even impossible, ontological foundations, and the attempt to realize it is likely to lead to unfortunate social and political consequences. It may often be preferable to refuse equal recognition to subordinated groups and instead to direct what he labels a “politics of acknowledgment” at privileged and dominant groups.

The politics of recognition, Markell argues, is driven by a discredited “fantasy” of sovereign agency: a belief that if only agents could be known and respected for what they really already are, they could regain autonomous control over their lives. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, and developing his argument through readings of Sophocles' Antigone and (surprisingly and creatively) Hegel's Phenomenology, Markell seeks to show how the finite and nonsovereign character of human action continuously subverts the attempt to secure identity and agency through recognition. Recognition is not the key to undoing subordination and oppression. Instead, he concludes, subordination and oppression arise from a failure of acknowledgment, from a futile attempt by the powerful to achieve a semblance of sovereign agency through practices that are harmful to others. Subordination and oppression are thus most effectively redressed through a politics of acknowledgment that would encourage the powerful to come to terms with their own vulnerability and finitude.

Markell develops this argument by contrasting two different views of the connection between temporality and agency. He finds in the proponents of recognition a particular view of this connection that is one-sidedly backwards looking. An individual's identity is seen as fixed by the past, principally by the community into which he or she is born and its history. Sovereign agency, or “authenticity,” consists in being true to this antecedently given identity, something that is assisted by the accurate and respectful recognition of identity by others and confused and thwarted by misrecognition or nonrecognition. The author contrasts this picture with one that he finds in the work of Arendt. For her, identity is something that is formed vulnerably, through risky public interactions, and so is not fully under the control of any particular individual. Our identity is something that we can perceive only in retrospect, and, as Greek tragedy teaches, achieving this final moment of self-understanding does not always produce happiness.

Markell's book is a serious piece of scholarship that should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in the topic of recognition. It develops an original line of argument and offers generally compelling rereadings of a variety of key authors, including Sophocles, Herder, and Hegel. In spite of these impressive strengths of Bound by Recognition, I found myself resisting its central line of argument.

The main problem, as I see it, lies in Markell's unsatisfactory treatment of the politics of recognition, whose main spokesman in the book is Charles Taylor. Markell thinks that Taylor oscillates between two different ideas of recognition, one that understands recognition as the cognition of a person's already given and fixed identity, and another that characterizes it as an act that brings something new into being (pp. 39-41). The first, cognitive sense of recognition is connected with a Herderian idea of authenticity: Recognition helps a person to be true to who she or he really already is. The second, constructive conception is associated with Taylor's emphasis on dialogue and interaction and his critique, elsewhere in his writings, of the aspiration to sovereign agency that the first view of recognition seems to reinstate. For Markell, there is a basic tension between these two conceptions. Taylor wants to say both that recognition should track a person's preexisting identity and that identity is the product of successful relations of mutual recognition (so that misrecognition can distort identity). But these views cannot both be true: “[T]he politics of recognition, then, is at odds with itself” (p. 59).

This critique does not really do justice to Taylor's account of recognition. For one thing, Taylor never characterizes authenticity as fidelity to a fixed, preexisting identity. He repeats the Herderian view that each individual has a unique identity, but he is pretty clear that the content of this identity is worked out dialogically, through risky and sometimes disastrous interactions with others (Taylor talks of “relationships” and “wrenching breakups”). Where Taylor does clearly differ from Markell (and perhaps from Arendt, who Markell cites approvingly) is in insisting that dialogue is not just something that extends unpredictably into the future. It also has a past, and that past can involve relationships of misrecognition and nonrecognition that distort or compromise the agency of some participants. The politics of recognition aims to ensure that nobody's social characteristics (skin color, sexual orientation, mother tongue, etc.) are made into a pretext for diminishing one's agency and thereby endangering the opportunity to participate as an equal in inherently unpredictable, identity-forming, and authenticity-articulating interactions with others.

I think that a way of laying this out more clearly, perhaps, than Taylor does would involve distinguishing three different forms of identity. My identity refers 1) to what really is of fundamental importance to or about me, something that, as Markell insists, may only be knowable retrospectively (my retrospective identity). It also refers 2) to what I think is essential to me at a given moment in time, in part because this is how others identify me (my occurrent identity). Finally, my identity could be understood as 3) what my retrospective identity would turn out to be under hospitable conditions of identity formation (my authentic identity). An adequate and plausible version of the politics of recognition seeks to establish the hospitable conditions needed for people to articulate their authentic identities by fighting against social relations that lock them into reduced and depreciated occurrent identities. Formulated in this way, the politics of recognition can withstand the important challenge developed in Markell's stimulating and exciting new book.