“Identity or Status?”
7/17/03
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recognition (Honneth 1995, Taylor 1992). They then posit a healthy and intact sense of
self as a crucial ingredient of the good for individual persons. Critical theorists of
recognition then attempt to identify obstacles to opportunities for attaining a healthy
sense of self in extant social relations of recognition and call for their overcoming, in the
name of each persons’ legitimate claim to an equal opportunity for realizing an
undistorted identity. Finally, most recognition theorists also attempt to connect up their
analytic and normative theories with actual developments in contemporary social
movements, often through clarifying and advocating certain strategies for practical
action.
In many ways Nancy Fraser’s work has appeared to follow this model for
developing a critical theory of recognition. One important distinction, however, concerns
her insistence on the crucial importance of struggles against injustices anchored in the
political economy of society, especially her account the myriad ways in which such
problems of maldistribution are not reducible to, nor analyzable within the framework of,
the intersubjective conditions of recognition (Fraser 1997a, b, c, 1998). Her influential
claim that there are persistent tensions and tradeoffs between those politics oriented to
cultural change and those to economic change has spurred recognition theorists to rethink
the practical limits of identity politics alone.
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Her most recent work has also brought to the fore a more subtle difference in her
approach: the attempt to rethink recognition outside of an account of individual identity
formation (Fraser 2000, 2001). The idea is to develop an account of groups struggling
for recognition from the external perspective of an objective, social-scientific observer,
who attends only to those distinctions between groups that are the result of
institutionalized social relations of subordination, whether economic, political, or
Convention