By Mitchell Bahnsen, Public Discourse. (Photo: Jordy Meow/Unsplash)
Tocqueville’s insight anticipates Taylor’s: a democracy built on dialogical identity easily turns into a society where individuals depend on the crowd for self-definition.
We live in a polarized time riddled with conversations about—and fixation on—the concept of identity. It seems the discussions of modern policy have become less about policy and rights and more about a struggle for recognition.
Enlightenment liberalism was generally characterized by politics as a framework of rules, most famously in the Lockean “night watchman state,” where the government’s role is limited to protection of rights. However, right now, the very idea of politics has taken on entirely different questions. Most notably, “Does the public see and affirm who I believe myself to be?”
Philosopher Charles Taylor discusses this shift in his 1994 essay “The Politics of Recognition,” presenting the move from honor under the premodern system, to dignity in the age of Enlightenment, to authenticity in the postmodern and postliberal era. This has drastic implications for the practice of politics and has in many ways rewritten the social imaginary of the Western world. This leads to a culture in which authenticity and dialogical identity reshape politics, no longer mediating interests, but turning the public square into a battleground where every group demands recognition as a precondition for flourishing.
Taylor best characterizes the cultural mood by explaining that “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” Those who have not received this recognition are said to have “internalized their own inferiority,” leading to internal self-depreciation, or perhaps a more well recognized term of “internalized oppression,” discussed often by the contemporary political left. In the world we live in, recognition is no longer seen as a mere courtesy, but a vital human need.
This is far different from the social imaginaries of our forefathers. In the premodern world, most notably in medieval Europe, honor was a far more preeminent virtue, scarce at some level and demanding preference and distinction, such as the valor of a knight in the king’s court, or the respect given to the clergy. This highly hierarchical structuring, dating back to classical antiquity and earlier, was the status quo for many millennia. But the rise of Christianity, exacerbated by the Reformation’s “priesthood of all believers,” shifts the paradigm from honor to the concept of dignity.