Social Institutions And The Politics Of Recognition

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism. Praise for the previous edition:

The first of three volumes, this definitive study explores the politics of social institutions, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Tony Burns focuses on those civil-society institutions occupying the intermediate social space which exists between the family or household, on the one hand, and what Hegel refers to as ‘the strictly political state’, on the other. Arguing that the internal affairs of social institutions are a legitimate concern for students of politics, he focuses on the notion of authority, together with that of an individual’s station and its duties. Burns discusses the work of such key thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, Jean Bodin, Charles Loyseau, John Calvin, Martin Luther and Gerrard Winstanley. He considers what they have said about the relationship that exists between superiors in positions of authority and their subordinates within hierarchical social institutions.

This second volume continues the story told in the first by focusing on the writings of a selection of seminal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England, the German speaking world and in France, ending with the debate around the French Revolution of 1789. Tony Burns discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Johannes Althusius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jean Barbeyrac, the anonymous author of Militaire philosophe, Claude Buffier, l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, l’abbé de Sieyès, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. The author concludes with an analysis of the concept of administration in the writings of Saint-Simon, as a point of transition to the discussion of the themes of bureaucracy, technocracy and managerialism in the third volume.

Via a wide range of case studies, this book examines new forms of resistance to social injustices in contemporary Western societies. Resistance requires agency, and agency is grounded in notions of the subject and subjectivity. How do people make sense of their subjectivity as they are constructed and reconstructed within relations of power? What kinds of subjectivities are needed to struggle against forms of dominance and claim recognition? The participants in the case studies are challenging forms of dominance and subordination grounded in class, race, culture, nationality, sexuality, religion, age, disability and other forms of social division. It is a premise of this book that new and/or reconstructed forms of subjectivity are required to challenge social relations of subordination and domination. Thus, the transformation of subjectivity as well as the restructuring of oppressive power relations is necessary to achieve social justice. By examining the construction of subjectivity of particular groups through an intersectional lens, the book aims to contribute to theoretical accounts of how subjects are constituted and how they can develop a critical distance from their positioning.

Presents the case for an exciting new research program in the social sciences based on the theory of recognition developed by Axel Honneth and others in recent years. The theory provides a frame for revealing new insights about conflicts and the potential of recognition theory to guide just resolutions of these conflicts is also explored.

The past several decades have seen the emergence of a vigorous ongoing debate about the 'politics of recognition'. The initial impetus was provided by the reflections of Charles Taylor and others about the rights to cultural recognition of historically marginalized groups in Western societies. Since then, the parameters of the debate have considerably broadened. However, while debates about the politics of recognition have yielded significant theoretical insights into recognition, its logical and necessary counterpart, misrecognition, has been relatively neglected. 'The Politics of Misrecognition' is the most meticulous reflection to date on the importance of misrecognition for the understandings of our political and personal experience. A team of leading experts from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, sociology, psychoanalysis, history, moral economy and criminology present different theoretical frameworks in which the politics of misrecognition may be understood. They apply these frameworks to a wide variety of contexts, including those of class identity, disability, slavery, criminal victimization and domestic abuse. In this way, the book provides an essential resource for anyone interested in the dynamics of misrecognition and their implications for the development of political and social theory.

This book explores the politics of localism, drawing on the work of groups in three communities in post-industrial Nottinghamshire. “Third Way” politics gave a high priority to local participation, seen as a way of rebuilding social networks, and shifting welfare provision from the state onto civil society. However, under increasingly difficult conditions of austerity, significant contradictions emerge between the aims of entrenching new markets for service provision, and reviving communities and democratic participation. Exploring in depth community organisers’ understandings of political economy and its local effects, and the governance practices which set the frameworks for fiercely independent community groups, the book outlines the forms of politics which emerge. This includes a challenge to the dominant thinking of the ‘neoliberal consensus’, but also frustration and a sense of political communal loss which has left these communities alienated from both national politics and the often-unattainable benefits of global mobility – an alienation which makes the Brexit vote of 2016 explicable as the disruptive outcome of a slow-burning political crisis of long duration.

Global justice is of every increasing importance in the contemporary political world. This volume brings a hitherto overlooked perspective – the politics of recognition – to bear on this idea. It considers how discussion of each of these illuminates the problems posed by the other, thus addressing an issue of vital concern for the years to come.