Redistribution and Recognition

Fraser opened “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age” (New Left Review I/212, 1995) with the diagnosis that the “struggle for recognition” was fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. In these conflicts group identity supplanted class interest as the chief medium of mobilisation, cultural domination supplanted exploitation as the fundamental injustice, and cultural recognition displaced socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy and goal. Yet recognition struggles were taking place in a world of sharpening material inequality in income, property, paid work, education and health care. Rather than endorsing or rejecting identity politics wholesale, Fraser proposed a critical theory of recognition that would defend only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality. Her premise was that justice today requires both redistribution and recognition, and she took gender and “race” as the paradigm axes of injustice that are simultaneously cultural and socioeconomic. The argument was collected in Justice Interruptus (1997).

In this framework injustice takes two forms. Corresponding to distributive justice, a more equitable distribution of resources, is maldistribution; corresponding to recognition justice, the recognition of difference between social identities and groups, is misrecognition. Fraser argued that many social-justice movements since the 1960s and 1970s had sought recognition on the basis of race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity, and that the focus on correcting misrecognition eclipsed the importance of challenging persistent maldistribution.

The distinction was tested in Fraser’s debate with Judith Butler. In “Merely Cultural” (NLR I/227, 1998) Butler named Fraser’s Justice Interruptus and her 1995 essay and argued that the regulation of sexuality belongs to the mode of production itself. In her reply, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism” (NLR I/228, 1998), Fraser called injustices of distribution and of recognition two equally primary and real harms and defined misrecognition not as being thought ill of in others’ conscious attitudes but as being prevented from participating as a peer in social life by institutionalised patterns of interpretation and evaluation in law, social welfare, medicine and popular culture. Misrecognition is an institutionalised social relation, not a psychological state; in essence a status injury, it may accompany maldistribution but is analytically distinct from and conceptually irreducible to it. Whether one converts into the other depends on the social formation: in pre-capitalist, pre-state societies, where status is the overarching principle of distribution, misrecognition simply entails maldistribution, whereas in capitalist societies, with their institutionalised specialised economic relations, status and class can diverge.

In “Rethinking Recognition” (NLR 3, 2000) Fraser named two problems: displacement, as recognition struggles marginalised rather than enriched redistributive ones, and reification, as they simplified and froze group identities. Against the usual “identity model”, which starts from the Hegelian idea that identity is constructed dialogically through mutual recognition, she proposed a “status model”. On the status model misrecognition means not the depreciation of group identity but social subordination, being prevented from participating as a peer in social life, and the politics of recognition aims to establish the misrecognised party as a full member of society, able to participate on a par with the rest. Such misrecognition is not relayed through free-floating cultural representations but perpetrated through social institutions that regulate interaction according to parity-impeding cultural norms. The normative standard is “participatory parity”, the ideal that each subject can participate equally in public life: redistribution secures its objective condition, recognition its intersubjective condition.

In 2003 Fraser and Axel Honneth published Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Honneth gave priority to intersubjective relations of recognition, treating even grievances over the distribution of goods as struggles for recognition; Fraser criticised the priority of ethical categories such as recognition over structural social-political categories such as redistribution, pointing to injustices that stem not from misrecognition but from systemic features of capitalism, such as multinationals relocating factories and laying off workers to maximise profit.

With globalisation Fraser widened the framework. “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World” (NLR 36, 2005) argued that disputes now concern not only the “what” of justice but the “who”, as the assumption that the modern territorial state and its citizens form the unit of justice loses its self-evidence; and, as the title of her 2005 essay “Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation” indicates, she added political representation as a third dimension. Her formula became that social justice has three separate but intertwined dimensions, redistribution, recognition and representation, and that participatory parity, everyone’s ability to interact as a peer in all social spheres, results from justice in all three.