Abstract
In recent years more and more attention has been afforded the role of recognition in Hegel’s practical philosophy. For the most part, however, such discussions have focused on Hegel’s account of individuals, their identities and their relationships. Less attention has been accorded the value of recognition theory as regards the identity and relations of groups, peoples, and nations. This chapter seeks to fill this lacuna, employing elements of Hegel’s theory of recognition and in particular his account of reciprocal recognition to elucidate themes in global justice. Attention is given to four specific topics: the place of national sovereignty in a transnational setting, cosmopolitanism, global distributive justice, and the idea of global community itself. Examining these themes from the perspective of recognition theory facilitates appreciation both of the distinctly Hegelian approach to these issues and the value of Hegelian thought for the general discourse on global justice.
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Notes
- 1.
Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
- 2.
Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- 3.
Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
- 4.
Compare, however, Klaus Vieweg, “Das Prinzip Anerkennung in Hegels universalistischer Theorie des äusseren Staatsrechts,” in Metaphysik der praktischen Welt. Perspektiven im Anschluß an Hegel und Heidegger, ed. Christoph Jamme and Andreas Grossmann (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000).
- 5.
It is true that in recent years Honneth has extended his account of recognition theory to themes in international relations, instructively addressing a question explored in the present chapter: how recognition theory might provide the basis for a viable approach to transnational relations of cooperation. It is noteworthy, however, that he does so with limited attention to Hegel’s account of international law. Indeed, his own position is fashioned in decided opposition to that of Hegel. Affirming that conventional view of Hegel as an advocate of the “realist” approach to international relations, one limited to accommodating the strategic self-interest of individual states, Honneth appeals to recognition theory in part to formulate an alternative to views associated with Hegel and others in this tradition. Indeed, he even speaks of the need for a “paradigm shift,” asserting “[it] is high time that international relations be viewed in a light other than it has by Hegel and his realist descendants.” See Axel Honneth, “Anerkennung zwischen Staaten. Zum moralischen Untergrund zwischenstaatlicher Beziehungnen,” in Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 183, 201.
In this chapter I dispute this view. Not only do I claim that Hegel fashions an alternative to the conventional realist approach to international relations, I claim as well that he does so with the tools of the concept of recognition he does deploy in his account of international law. To be sure, I employ Hegel’s theory of recognition is ways somewhat distinct from Honneth. For Honneth, recognition is invoked in response to forms of humiliation and disrespect experienced historically by groups and individuals. Recognition theory is thus valuable to clarify the injustices experienced by “underdeveloped, disenfranchised” (182) peoples, but it has only limited applicability to the constitutional states that comprise Hegel’s account of international law, oriented as it is to safeguarding the independence and strategic claims to self-assertion. By contrast, I regard recognition theory as a component of Hegel’s account of nation-state sovereignty itself, where openness to mutuality and non-instrumentality is at least normatively part of an account of national identity and self-assertion itself. In this regard, I understand Hegel’s account of international law or law of peoples (Völkerrecht) to be committed to relations of transnational cooperation, even if it attends to strategic interest as well. As such, Hegel’s conception of Völkerrecht is distinct from the more specifically inter-state version of Hans Kelsen that appears to guide Honneth’s thinking on this matter. Appreciation of the distinctiveness of Hegel’s position is important not least because it calls into question any rigid distinction between that claims of sovereign autonomy on the part of Western nation states and the experiences of underdeveloped and marginalized groups and peoples.
To be sure, many questions can be raised about Hegel’s position. One can, for instance, question the appropriateness of extending to international law notions of self-identity and social interaction that were conceived first for individuals and their relations—a question legitimately raised by Honneth, even if in modified form he makes this extension himself. The point I wish to make here is only that Hegel not only employs the tools of recognition theory for his account of international law, but that he does so in a way that challenges conventional realist accounts.
- 6.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 7.
For a recent rearticulation of this view, see, in addition to Honneth above, Dudley Knowles, The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 341.
- 8.
I have addressed this matter in a somewhat different way in “Hegel Conception of an International ‘We,’” in Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics, ed. Philip T. Grier (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 155–176.
- 9.
Hegel’s position can be compared to that of Habermas, who also seeks to reconcile individual state sovereignty with a robust account of global interdependency. For Habermas, this is achieved throw a “proceduralist conception of popular sovereignty,” one that supplants subject-centered versions, including those that link sovereignty with notions of distinct cultural identity. By contrast, Hegel remains committed, rightly or wrongly, to a model that does connect sovereignty to the identity of a people. Yet this view does not entail a notion of nation-state identity construed “as an organic and sovereignty ethical entity that is understood as an end in itself.” Nor does it imply that challenges to atomist, exclusionary notions of sovereignty entail an abrogation of national identity. In the recognitive account sketched here, political sovereignty understood in terms of the identity of peoples is not only compatible with “transition to the postnational constellation of a global society”; it depends upon it for its proper articulation. See Jürgen Habermas, “Does the Constituionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” in The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 115, 128, 153, and passim.
- 10.
With Hegel, she also construes transcendence of traditional notions of state sovereignty not as an abstract repudiation but as an endogeneously generated “denationalizing” of the nation-state itself. See Saskia Sassen, “Neither Global nor National: Novel Assemblages of Territory, Authority, and Rights,” Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 1–2 (2008): 61–79.
- 11.
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [hereafter PR], §331.
- 12.
PR, §331.
- 13.
Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Polity, 2000), especially 109–113 and 132–36.
- 14.
PR, §340.
- 15.
This point is developed at greater length in my “Hegel’s Conception of an International ‘We,’ 162 and passim.
- 16.
Vorlesungen über der Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), 761, cited in Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 207.
- 17.
PR, §339.
- 18.
PR, §339A.
- 19.
PR, §340, The Philosophy of Mind, Part III of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) [hereafter EPM], §548.
- 20.
See Ludwig Siep, “Das Recht als Ziel der Geschichte: Überlegungen im Anschluß an Kant und Hegel,” in Das Recht der Vernunft: Kant und Hegel über Denken, Erkennen und Handeln, ed. Christel Fricke et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstaat: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 355–379.
- 21.
See Ludwig Siep, “Das Recht als Ziel der Geschichte.”
- 22.
The attempt to affirm cosmopolitanism in a way that appeals not to abstract principles but to processes of transnational communication can be discerned in John S. Dryzek, “Transnational Democracy: Beyond the Cosmopolitan Model,” in Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115–139.
- 23.
G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe III, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 197.
- 24.
EPM, §547.
- 25.
PR, §333.
- 26.
Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights,” in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. Obrad Savić and Beogradski Krug (London: Verso, 1999), 101–119.
- 27.
Cf. Depesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- 28.
I have dealt with this issue at greater length in “Is Hegel’s Philosophy of History Eurocentric?” in Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Values of Hegel Practical Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), Chapter 12.
- 29.
See “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Ulrich Beck et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 96 f. In the present context, one way in which such mutual interrogation may occur is through the East–west/North–south political debates surrounding the Covenants on Civil-Political and Social-Economic Rights and how these might lead to a general appreciation of the codependency of negative and positive rights. See Xiaorung Li, “A Question of Priorities: Human Rights, Development, and ‘Asian Values,’” Report from the Institute for Public Policy 18, no. 1–2 (Winter-Spring 1998): 7–12.
- 30.
PR, §248A.
- 31.
For a discussion of how on a Hegel’s recognitive account of mutual interrogation entails a complex and multifaceted combination of internal and external normative perspectives, see Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Values of Hegel Practical Philosophy, Chpt 11. Cf. David A. Crocker, “Insiders and Outsiders in International Development,” in Moral Issues in Global Perspective, ed. Christine Koggel (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 147–162.
- 32.
See, for instance, see Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (New York: Routledge, 1998) and Michael H. Hoffheimer, “Hegel, Race, Genocide,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 39 (2001): 35–62.
- 33.
EPM, §393A.
- 34.
Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 821–865.
- 35.
Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 151. The approach adopted here has much in common with McCarney’s. For an instructive exchange between McCarney and Robert Bernasconi, see Joseph McCarney, “Hegel’s Racism? A Response to Bernasconi” and Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel’s Racism: A Reply to McCarney,” Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003): 32–37.
- 36.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Boston/New York: Bedford Books, 1997) and Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- 37.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
- 38.
PR, §338.
- 39.
PR, §338.
- 40.
PR, §339A.
- 41.
See Heiner Bielefeldt, “Menschenrechte als interkulturelle Lerngeschichte,” in Philosophie, wozu? ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 289–300.
- 42.
Jürgen Habermas has construed the articulation and elaboration of human rights in terms of struggles associated with historical challenges to human dignity. See “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (July 2010): 464–80.
- 43.
PR, §324A.
- 44.
Ulrich Beck, World at Risk, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 56 f.
- 45.
Beck World at Risk, 61.
- 46.
Beck, World at Risk, 56 f.
- 47.
See Ludwig Siep, “Das Recht als Ziel der Geschichte,” 371.
- 48.
PR, §339A.
- 49.
PR, §343.
- 50.
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) [hereafter Lectures], 127, amended.
- 51.
Jonathan Rée, “Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationality,” in Cosmopoliticus: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 88. In the same volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah advances a similar understanding of cosmopolitanism, one that against “the desire for global homogeneity” characteristic of humanistic universalism “celebrates the fact that there are different local human ways of being.” See “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopoliticus, 91–114, especially 94.
- 52.
See, for instance, Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today (September 1974).
- 53.
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 229–243.
- 54.
The Law of Peoples, 105–120.
- 55.
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
- 56.
Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2: 113–47.
- 57.
Martha Nussbaum, “Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and the Global Justice,” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, ed. Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196–218.
- 58.
Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitanism and Justice,” in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas Christano and John Christman (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 387–407.
- 59.
PR, §183.
- 60.
For a longer discussion of these issues, see Chapter 11 of Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy
- 61.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft. Heidelberg 1817/18, transcribed P. Wannenmann, ed. C. Becker et al. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), §118.
- 62.
Martha Nussbaum, “Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and Global Justice.”
- 63.
PR, §36.
- 64.
G.W.F. Hegel, Political Writings, ed. Zbignew Pelczynski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 263.
- 65.
For a discussion of the European Union from the perspective of legal and political theory, see Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 66.
See Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), especially 97–114.
- 67.
Lectures, 65.
- 68.
PR, §331.
- 69.
See also Jürgen Habermas, “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” New Left Review 11(Sept-Oct 2001): 18.
- 70.
Cf. Bhikhu Parekh, “Principles of a Global Ethic,” Global Ethics and Civil Society, ed. J. Eade and D. O’Bryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 15–33.
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Buchwalter, A. (2012). Hegel, Global Justice, and Mutual Recognition. In: Buchwalter, A. (eds) Hegel and Global Justice. Studies in Global Justice, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8996-0_11
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