recounts as the master-slave dialectic (1977, §178–98; §413–39), which famously describes the first meeting of two primeval human beings. Both have a sense that they are unique conscious beings while simultaneously being vaguely aware that they each belong to a universal species. Crucially, they only suspect that their particular and universal natures are true but they do not know for certain; they cannot be sure until they gain recognition of another human consciousness. Unfortunately, when they meet they do not know how to engage in such a reciprocal act as recognition, and thus they at- tempt to overcome each other physically through a fight to the death in which each seeks to subsume the other’s human identity. As the fight progresses and one overwhelms the other, the loser has a moment of sudden self-realization: that death would categorically negate her all-too-precious human life and therefore she submits. As a result a relationship is forged in which the victor is the master over the loser, who thus becomes a slave.
Yet the fight for recognition continues, as both human consciousnesses still require recognition in order to make certain of their identity and status. Yet their relationship is extremely one-sided: the master cannot acknowl- edge the humanity of the slave, seeing instead the mere extension of self; the slave simply enacts the orders of the master, and thus does not act as a self- determining individual human being—“what the slave does is really the action of the master” (Hegel 1977, §191). Conversely the slave undergoes a process of self-realization. The slave is a creative being, even if her creations are for the benefit of somebody else (i.e., the master) and through work ob- jectifies their creative essence. The production of objects and the creative labor involved allows the slave to recognize her own true self: her existence for herself and also for another.
Misrecognition continues throughout history. The fate of Antigone (Hegel 1977, §470) was sealed by adherence to the universal (divine law) at the expense of the particular. The unhappy consciousness of religion projects its own human essence as an external God to worship (Hegel 1977, §207–13), an argument, incidentally, which was entirely replicated by Feuerbach’s Essence
of Christianity. The debate for Hegel scholars is whether or not history achieves universal mutual recognition. Some have argued (most notably Kojeve [1969]) that it was only in the anarchy of the French Revolution that such a state was attained. The revolution itself unveiled our universality while the shock of the terror made us equally aware of each other’s personal fears. Others have considered the Philosophy of Right to describe mutual recognition in action: through the institutions of family, civil society, and state (Williams 1997).
The intricacies of this particular debate are of little consequence here; and the idea of recognition may seem to be a case of old wine in new skins
32 MICHAEL MACAULAY
and it may appear to have more than a passing similarity with a number of other concepts. The Christian commandment of doing unto others what you would have them do unto you, for example, indicates an element of reciprocal recognition. Kant’s second formulation of the moral law tells us to treat each other as end rather than means (“Act so that you use humanity, as much as in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and merely as means” [Kant 2002, 46]), which again acknowledges a view of common humanity. Yet Hegel’s notion was designed to augment what was, in his view, the empty formalism of Kant’s moral law: as pure intersubjectivity, recognition has a concrete view of human ends rather than an abstract formulation. Abstraction is necessarily unable to realize a state of recognition. What is important here is simply that recognition is in and of itself an important normative concept, albeit one that will require a great deal of refining. Yet it also has a further and much more fundamental role in Hegelian philosophy: it is the foundation for morality itself. There can be no ethics unless recognition exists as its underlying moral force.
Recognition and Administrative Ethics
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel suggested that the bureaucratic state was the ultimate moral system, which allowed for recognition of groups and in- dividuals to flourish. Within this system administrators had a special place: “The highest civil servants necessarily have a deeper and more comprehen- sive insight into the nature of the State’s institutions and requirements and, moreover, a greater skill in the habituation of government, so that they can achieve what is best” (Hegel 1960, §309).
Civil servants had the knowledge and expertise to distinguish between competing societal claims and the protection of rights arguably allowed the universal aspects of our common humanity to coexist with our particularized existence as individuals. Such notions do not seem too far removed from the Weberian view of bureaucracy that posits state mechanisms, but this view could arguably be viewed as one of the central parallaxes of administrative ethics: treating concrete individuals in a universal way.
Modern political and administrative organizations are set up to deal with humans as abstract beings. What is our political existence without abstraction: as workers, voters, welfare recipients, and criminals? This was, of course, the thrust of Fukuyama’s (1992) argument (which in itself extended Hegel, albeit controversially) that liberal democracy allowed for a recognition of the particular through the protection of rights. But a right is a legal abstraction, not a human quality. We need only think of the conflict between the prolife/ prochoice movements to see that rights are something that we append to a
THE I THAT IS WE 33