This paper aims to explore and examine the implied commitment to the premises of recognition in Rawls’s account of redistributive justice. It attempts to find out whether or not recognition relations that produce humiliation and cultural injustice can be followed to their logical conclusion in his theory of redistribution. This paper makes two claims. Firstly, although Rawls does not disregard the harms of misrecognition as demonstrated in his notion of self-respect being the most important primary good, he cannot liberally accommodate (...) the idea of humiliation as a case of injustice without compromising the basic premises of his theory. Secondly, while resource distribution produces indirect side effects that can impact upon cultural injustice, addressing recognition issues through the prism of redistribution can inadvertently result in further misrecognition. The paper concludes that in the final analysis Rawls wrongly takes redistribution as the overarching principle of justice to which recognition is but a subservient principle. (shrink)

This article aims to critically examine how misrecognition is conceived as a challenge for pedagogic action.Krassimir Stojanov’s notion of the pathological behaviour patterns of teachers and Charles Bingham’s ‘pitfalls of recognition’ introduce how misrecognition may appear in schools, and offer advice to teachers and students on responding to the challenges of misrecognition.Their ideas elicit the problems embedded in the theory of recognition and the problems resulting from understanding misrecognition as a challenge for pedagogic action.This article concludes that recognition theory offers (...) pedagogic action a problematic challenge: it is as problematic to follow Honneth’s original ideas as it is to invent new directions in understanding misrecognition as a pedagogical challenge. (shrink)

This article seeks to sketch the contours of a good society, distinguished by its gender justice and the plural recognition of egalitarian difference. I begin by reconstructing Nancy Fraser’s arguments highlighting the link between distributive justice and relations of recognition, in particular as it applies to gender justice. In a second step, I show that the debate on the politics of recognition has confirmed what empirical analyses already indicated, namely that Fraser’s status model takes too reductive a stance towards the (...) identity-constituting effects of relations of recognition. The simple demand that identities be recognized, however, glosses over the paradox of recognition, which arises out of the ambiguity between the demand for equal respect and the demand for the recognition of difference. This paradox cannot be resolved unless one takes into consideration the compensatory effect of value pluralism, that is, the inherent pluralism of recognition, well captured in the notion of ‘egalitarian difference’. (shrink)