For Mead, the three crucial forms of recognition are love, legal rights, and solidarity (Honneth 1996, 94). Honneth (1996, 129) reformulates Hegel and Mead’s approaches and argues that emotional support provided by the family and friends, cognitive respect by legal rights, and social esteem given by solidary communities of value are the three modes of recognition in society.
Taken together, the three forms of recognition – love, rights, and esteem – constitute the social conditions under which human subjects can develop a positive attitude towards themselves. For it is only due to the cumulative acquisition of basic self-confidence, of self-respect, and of self-esteem – provided, one after another, by the experience of those three forms of recognition – that a person can come to see himself or herself, unconditionally, as both an autonomous and an individuated being and to identify with his or her goals and desires (169).
Social recognition would be the ‘presupposition of all communicative action’ (Honneth 2007a, 71). Disrespect would mean a lack of recognition. In relation to the three dimensions of social activity, disrespect would mean abuse and rape, exclusion and the denial or rights, denigration and insult (Honneth 1996, 129).
Honneth (1996, 94) argues that the distinction of three realms of society can be found in many social theories, not just in Hegel and Mead’s works. Therefore ‘a division of social life into three spheres of interaction has a high degree of plausibility’ (94). Honneth however argues that it ‘is evidently quite natural to distinguish forms of social integration according to whether they occur via emotional bonds, the granting of rights, or a shared orientation to values’ (94).
5.3.2. Marx and Recognition
Honneth (1996) argues that Marx discusses the struggle for recognition in a ‘narrowed version’ (146) that focuses on the alienation caused by the proletariat’s lack of control over the means of production. ‘Marx narrows Hegel’s mode of the “struggle for recognition” in the direction of an aesthetic of production’ (148). By ‘reducing the goals of class struggle to only those demands that are directly connected to the organization of social labour, he made it easy to abstract from all the political concerns stemming from the violation of moral claims as such’ (149). Certainly there are not just class struggles, but also other political struggles in heteronomous societies. But Honneth disregards the fact that all structures, including decision-making structures and morals, are the outcome of social co-production processes, which gives a special relevance to the notion of production that Marx foregrounds in his theory and that Honneth rather neglects in favour of the concept of recognition.
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Critical Theory of Communication