In brief: The concept comes from Hegel, but it means something other than today’s debate usually assumes. Recognition is in him not an attitude one adopts or withholds but a relation that becomes actual in institutions – or not at all. That is an objection to both sides of the dispute.
What recognition is in Hegel
It is reciprocal or it is none. The analysis of lordship and bondage shows that the lord who does not recognise the bondsman as free is recognised by someone unfree – and so not at all. Recognition that is compelled, granted or handed down is by definition worthless. That is Hegel’s real discovery, and it has the force of a logical argument, not of a moral plea.
Second, recognition is in him not only a relation between persons but the structure of legal relations themselves. In contract two persons recognise each other as owners (§ 71 ff.); in punishment the offender is honoured as a rational being (§ 100 note); in an occupation particularity gives itself „its right, merit, and honour“ (§ 206); in the state particular interests „gain recognition of their right for themselves“ (§ 260). In Hegel, recognition is wherever right is.
The objection to a merely symbolic politics of recognition
If recognition has its actuality in institutions, then a politics that stops at language, disposition and visibility is, by Hegel’s own analysis, the stage of morality – to be taken seriously, but without effect so long as it does not become ethical, that is, appear in rights, offices, access and procedures. The sentence from § 209 note is in this no opposite of the recognition of particularity but its condition:
The human being counts, thus, because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, and so on.
Groundlines, § 209 note
Hegel adds that this consciousness is „of infinite importance“ and deficient only when it fixes itself, as cosmopolitanism, against concrete life in the state. The equality of the person therefore does not exclude particularity – it is the ground on which particularity can raise a claim at all.
The objection to the other side
Whoever concludes from this that formal equality before the law suffices and that everything further is touchiness will find an uncomfortable diagnosis in § 206 note. Hegel describes there orders in which subjective particularity has no place – and predicts what then happens:
Thus not taken up into the organization of the whole, and not reconciled within it, subjective particularity shows itself, precisely because it also emerges as an essential moment, as something hostile, as the corruption of the social order.
Groundlines, § 206 note
Conversely: „Preserved, however, by the objective order, in conformity with it, and, at the same time, in its own right, subjective particularity becomes the principle of all animation of civil society, of the development of thinking activity, of merit, and of honour.“ Whoever takes the claims of particularity for a disturbance gets the disturbance – not because that would be unjust, but because an order that excludes an essential moment has it against itself.
What this yields for the debate
Hegel gives neither side the victory and both a task. To the one: show in which institutions the recognition demanded is to become actual, instead of demanding it as an attitude. To the other: show where in the existing order particularity has its place, instead of declaring its claims an imposition. Both are empirical questions, and that is the gain: the dispute becomes decidable as soon as it is put in Hegelian terms.
Sources. Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter IV A. – Encyclopaedia (1830) §§ 430–437. – Groundlines § 35–§ 40 (person and capacity for rights), § 57 note, § 71–§ 74, § 100 note, § 192 (recognition in the system of needs), § 206 and note, § 209 note, § 253 (honour in the corporation), § 260. – In the glossary: Recognition, Intersubjectivity, Ethical Life. – Literature. Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie, Freiburg 1979; Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, Frankfurt a. M. 1992; Charles Taylor, „The Politics of Recognition“, 1992; Nancy Fraser / Axel Honneth, Umverteilung oder Anerkennung?, Frankfurt a. M. 2003.