Association and recognition in authoritarian societies: A theoretical beginning

New questions

If putting democracy and civil society in causational wedlock inhibits the formation of new questions about civil society’s existence outside of democracy, the architecture of a theory calling for a different sort of conversation should begin by proposing new questions. This is not to cancel and nullify the traditional questions asked about civil society, but to enrich the landscape of inquiry with more possibilities. The following discussion will be organized around three questions that should be asked about associations existing outside of a democratic milieu, with each question explained in light of relevant historical and contemporary ideas underpinning that question’s relationship to associations, recognition and civility.

Do the members of the association see themselves as objects or subjects to one another? In other words, is ‘intersubjective recognition’ (to be defined below) practised within the association?

Objects or subjects of association?

If the modality of recognition existing between individuals in an association matters in determining whether that association might promote civility in the larger society, then it must be asked whether members conceptualize other members as objects in relationship to the association’s goal, or whether an association’s members are treated as subjects with intrinsic value. The notion of ‘intersubjective recognition’ derives from the idea that two human subjects, when interacting with one another, can come to an understanding of each other through relating their own subjectivity to the subjectivity of others; through understanding oneself in light of others, others will come closer to understanding you. If a moment of intersubjective recognition has occurred, the categories through which two subjects come to see each other are not objectively or previously determined, but rather dynamically derived from the interaction of human subjects understanding each other to be subjects, not objects, to one another. Or, as Hegel famously put it, the ‘I’ comes to be seen in the ‘We’. ⁵ This matters for civil society organizations because the way people interact with one another in association matters for how that association impacts the individuals involved, the surrounding society, and the potential political import of that association. The presence of shared intersubjective understanding and recognition between subjects means there is more civility and less chance of misrecognition and conflict. ⁶

Since Hegel first examined this idea, other scholars have developed understandings of recognition in order to take into account the changes of modernity. In The Struggle for Recognition, for example, Axel Honneth uses Hegel in combination with sociological theory to argue that the ‘moral logic of social conflicts’ is driven by the individual’s struggle for recognition from his society and the various constitutive elements of that society. ⁷ Honneth calls for a closer analysis of the ‘sub-cultural semantics’ which frame social struggles for recognition, as well as calling for more examination of the ‘structures of ethical life’ which allow for conversations about semantics to be transformed into political action. This is useful for theorizing civil society, even if Honneth himself does not develop such an idea directly, as civil society organizations are saturated with subcultural semantics and are key players in the structures of ethical life.

Honneth argues that subcultural semantics and the structures of ethical life predict the shape and form of social conflicts over recognition. His conclusion leaves the specifics of the ‘structures of ethical life’ open with regards to time and place; he does not go so far as to suggest that there are universal ethical and semantic structures produced by the universal search for recognition. Partially following Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, however, he acknowledges that the community will create structures of ethical life and the corresponding patterns of intersubjective recognition in ways consistent with that community’s culture and history:

A conception of ethical life in terms of a theory of recognition proceeds from the premise that the social integration of a political community can only fully succeed to the degree to which it is supported, on the part of members of society, by cultural customs that have to do with the way in which they deal with each other reciprocally. For this reason, the basic concepts with which the ethical preconditions for such community-formation are described must be tailored to the normative characteristics of communicative relations. ⁸

Honneth attributes the origins of this formulation to Hegel, but is careful to explain that his theory does not focus on the overarching predominance of the state in determining social and political relations. Focusing instead upon the social roots of a community, Honneth advocates examining the cultural customs that guide reciprocal relations, customs that should shed light upon the predominant conceptions of ethical life, as well as the ‘normative characteristics of communicative relations’. Modes of gathering are an example of the customs that create reciprocal relationships, so examining associations is clearly one part of getting to the bottom of how a society organizes its ethical life. This was not just a Hegelian premise, but also the foundation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s research on associations in Democracy in America. ⁹

Honneth’s conception of intersubjective recognition is particularly relevant for discerning whether civil society organizations might be important elements of the ‘structures of ethical life’, in particular as organizations and institutions apart from the homogenizing tendencies of the state, democratic or non-democratic. He argues, for example, that ‘[t]he more conceptions of ethical goods are open to different values and the more their hierarchical arrangement gives way to horizontal competition, the more clearly social esteem will be able to take on an individualizing character and generate symmetrical relationships’. ¹⁰ This ‘generation of symmetrical relationships’ is the core of a society with functioning avenues of mutual recognition. In a political and social landscape of struggle, social subgroupings become important as sites where recognition is sought through solidarity:

The practical relation-to-self that such an experience of recognition allows individuals to attain is thus a feeling of group-pride or collective honor. Here, the individual knows himself or herself to be a member of a social group that can collectively accomplish things whose worth for society is recognized by all other members of society. In the internal relations of such groups, forms of interaction normally take on the character of relationships of solidarity, since each member knows himself or herself to be esteemed by all others to the same degree. ¹¹

When the larger society becomes more unequal in its distribution of social esteem, therefore, the suggestion here is that the relations of subgroupings within the society become more important as sites of recognition. This presumes that formally equal rights at the level of the state do not necessarily guarantee overall equality of opportunity for mutual recognition and social esteem, and therefore people turn away from the larger society and state towards smaller subgroupings (such as civil society organizations) for their social esteem and mutual recognition. ¹² What brings such groupings together, furthermore, is often the search for the recognition that is missing – either in terms of rights or in terms of solidarity. In coming together as a group of people, an intersubjective value horizon is created, and from that shared understanding the individuals recognize one another reciprocally.

In applied terms, Honneth’s theorization describes the acts of many civil society organizations: they set out to do what cannot be accomplished by one individual, come together and recognize each other’s ability to contribute to that shared goal, a group-pride or collective honour is generated, and therefore a relationship of solidarity and intersubjective recognition between the individuals can be created. The framing and articulation of such collectively shared goals are not, however, universal:

Empirically, whether the cognitive potential inherent in feeling hurt or ashamed becomes a moral-political conviction depends above all on how the affected subject’s cultural-political environment is constructed: only if the means of articulation of a social movement are available can the experience of disrespect become a source of motivation for acts of political resistance. The developmental logic of such collective movements can, however, only be discovered via an analysis that attempts to explain social struggles on the basis of the dynamics of moral experiences. ¹³

The construction of the cultural-political environment matters for the form in which social struggle will occur. Honneth advocates looking towards the dynamics of moral experiences within a particular cultural landscape in order to isolate the possibilities for political resistance. If a civil society organization is one way a social movement can be articulated, this could be rephrased to say that civil society organizations will often form where there is a struggle being articulated in moral terms. This may or may not become grounds for acts of political resistance, as the extent of actions will depend upon the specific environment where that struggle occurs. Yet more importantly, if civil society organizations are structures of ethical life, then social conditions will greatly influence how the individuals in those groups will articulate their search for recognition against society’s disrespect; gathering together for mutual recognition will look quite different in different cultures.

Honneth’s theorization of the relationship between the structures of ethical life, intersubjective recognition and group solidarity can be helpful for understanding civil society organizations in non-democratic contexts. If a civil society organization generates intersubjective recognition between its members, where individuals can come to share understandings of one another derived through common social conditions and shared moral and ethical understandings, it will likely draw membership and support because of the fact it provides its members with mutual recognition and treats them as subject and not as objects. While not a foolproof measure of civility, if such understandings between members have been intersubjectively generated, and the understandings are therefore genuinely a combination of the ‘I’ in the ‘We’, the civility of that organization will derive from the mutual agreement to recognize each member as a valuable and contributing subject within a framework of solidarity with others. Each subject, when intersubjectively recognized and not objectified, therefore has the ability to interactively and dynamically contest the terms of solidarity with the other members on a shared basis of equal recognition. Such recognition can be important criteria for civility and the prevention of oppression, at least within the microcosm of the association, even if the wider political context is authoritarian.

Gathering for what ends?

In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Adam Ferguson wrote how ‘mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarreled, in troupes or companies. The cause of their assembling, whatever it may be, is the principle of their alliance or union.’ ¹⁴ Discerning the cause of human gathering, as Ferguson suggests, is one key to understanding the principles bringing human beings together into ‘alliance or union’. The ‘cause of assembling’ in authoritarian states can sometimes be an aspiration to change the form of government towards something less abusive or corrupt, which is why so many authoritarian regimes are suspicious and brutal towards assemblies of their citizens. Yet there are also associations that gather just to gather, because such is the way we ‘wander and settle’ more generally. The pursuit of mutual recognition sits within this general condition of the human need to gather together cited by Ferguson. An association does not need to have any telos beyond merely the goal of gathering, furthermore, for intersubective recognition and civility to be fostered within such an association. These ‘associations without a purpose’ can matter, furthermore, in promoting civility more generally within any society, democratic or non-democratic.

When associations are studied only in terms of the goals and products of the association (such as research focused on an association’s contribution to political democratization), whether or not members of an association are objects or subjects to one another has no import. Yet by not asking about the internal dynamics of an association in terms of intersubjectivity and in light of the possibilities of objectification, much is left unknown about the possibilities of civility engendered by that association. Two related concrete examples will make less abstract the consequences of what follows. First, think of associations that are created ‘from the outside’ as part of democratization efforts, which might create the appearance of democratic outcomes, but would not have ever come to exist without help ‘from the outside’. ¹⁵ Second, imagine a debate about undemocratic and autocratic leadership styles within democracy-promotion NGOs. ¹⁶ These two issues receive little discussion in theoretical tracts about civil society, but are fodder for serious discussion within practitioners’ debates about how to push civil societies to grow in arid political climates. Both phenomena point to the complication of means–ends issues within the study of associations: if democratic goals can be achieved through associations that have top–down leadership structures or are supported only by outsiders, then the internal dynamics of an association do not matter for discussions about the supposedly causal relationship between civil society and democracy. To be more blunt, if the foreign aid branch of the EU designed and funded a civil society organization in Kazakhstan led by a dictatorial tribal chieftain (or a dictatorial EU bureaucrat), and this association happened to succeed in multiplying interest groups, supporting women’s rights, encouraging multiple candidates to run for regional elections and effectively monitored government corruption, would it really matter that its internal modality of association objectified its members? If only democratic outcomes matter, then probing the insides of the associations that promote democracy would not be important. ¹⁷

There are, however, serious consequences should researchers choose to look at only the outcomes of associations’ activities. A Polish dissident involved with the Solidarity movement in Poland (seen as a pre-eminent case of a civil society association arising in an authoritarian context towards democratic ends), framed the question like this:

The dissident movement was sometimes known as the ‘democratic opposition.’ This better described the movement’s aims than the means used to achieve them … The dissident movement tended to favor personal authority over democratic procedures. Democracy is usually understood to be a system that tolerates pluralism. The emphasis the dissident movement placed on unity, and its tendency to indulge in black and white moral rhetoric, were inimical to the expression and clarification of differences. Thus, to some extent, unity and uncompromising moral stances have hindered the attainment of democracy. Dissident protests did not concede that the other side might be partly right, as is usually the case in political life. ¹⁸

In the end, however, this leadership style was not the main obstacle to the sustainability of the association (impediments came from secret police and martial law). Furthermore, this has not meant that the memory of Solidarity has been recast as a case of incivility (non-violence was maintained throughout). The author of these statements goes on to suggest that it only created a problem in the consolidation stage, when it came time to build democratic politics out of the authoritarian landscape. Yet if a researcher were to go back and ask of early Solidarity members whether everyone was mutually recognized, including whether dissenting voices were given a fair hearing, the struggles to consolidate democracy later on could have been easily predicted. This is, therefore, a question that should be asked of the emerging movements ‘for democracy’ throughout the Middle East, movements largely arising from associations in non-democratic contexts.

Calling on researchers to probe the relationship between objectification and subjectivity within associations, in addition to the usual examination of democratic outcomes, is to ask what sort of mutual recognition occurs within associations. When this question is asked, the value of intersubjective recognition for promoting civility within and beyond an association comes to light. Research on associations should continue to ask the direct goals and purposes (the telos) of why members of an association have come together, as most investigations into civil society have traditionally done. However, when an association is ‘found’ by researchers that seems to have no telos – whether a political purpose or a social purpose – it should not be assumed that such an association does not ‘matter’. An association that might implicitly exist to provide its members with mutual recognition may not be visible if judged and counted only by an outwardly stated political mission. In authoritarian societies, it is dangerous to have a political mission, so one possibility is that organizations hide true purposes to remain below the radar of the authorities. Furthermore, even if there is no outright subterfuge on the part of those gathering together, and it is the case that what is advertised as a non-political association is actually non-political – something like a group of artists that gathers together to paint pictures of still-life arrangements in a private apartment – this by no means precludes asking the previous question about intersubjective recognition arising from such gathering, and the corresponding question about the fostering of civility therein.

A theoretical and conceptual basis for discussing intersubjective recognition as a purpose for gathering into associations in authoritarian contexts can be found within the writings of the dissidents who explain why they gather in authoritarian contexts despite great risks. The deepest case of related thinking is the theorization of ‘anti-politics’ and the ‘parallel polis’ by Eastern European philosopher-dissidents. These concepts allow for discussion about how associations with non-political purposes have important existential impact on their members by fostering intersubjective recognition. If these concepts are thought about (to use Honneth’s terms) as the customs that guide reciprocal relations in authoritarian societies, or as vessels for the articulation of local subcultural semantics about the lack of recognition, the concepts of ‘parallel polis’ and ‘anti-politics’ help researchers understand associations outside of democracy more generally. While I draw here on familiar examples from Eastern European dissidents before 1989, the thematic repetition of these concepts would be a useful framework for examining dissidents in many political contexts. ¹⁹

When Vaclav Benda described the parallel polis, an idea taken up by his more well-known fellow dissident Vaclav Havel, he described it as a way to associate for the purpose of gathering together, to humanize the structures of reciprocal relations:

I suggest that we join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in the existing structures, and where possible, to use those existing structures, to humanize them. ²⁰

For Benda, the need of a parallel society apart from the officially dictated communist society was an outgrowth of how everyone already lived a dual life: one official, public and deferential to communist regulations, the other private, unofficial and independent from official society. The parallel polis both described and prescribed. It was not just a space where individuals could pretend to be escaping the state, but it was also where they could be moved to participate in civil discourse distinct from the ideological discourse of mandatory gatherings, rallies and party activities. In its daily realization, the parallel polis included various non-institutional institutions: an underground press, religious worship in churches, a black market economy, music concerts and other similar initiatives to gather together. ‘Parallel’ came to mean ‘separate from the established communist norms’, but also implicit in ‘parallel’ was the assumption that these spaces would not be in direct confrontational opposition to the communist regime. ²¹ As a Romanian dissident described:

The ‘parallel societies’ in Eastern Europe are only islands of freedom in a totalitarian sea, tolerated only so long as they do not challenge the political power of the communist party. This is not democracy, as understood in the West. But of course, these islands are far better than nothing at all. ²²

The parallel spaces were above, below or to the side of the state and party; they were not perpendicular to the state, and therefore did not challenge its existence. As Vaclav Havel expanded the idea:

What exactly is a ‘parallel culture’? Nothing more and nothing less than a culture, which for various reasons will not, cannot, or may not reach out to the public through the media which fall under state control. In a totalitarian state, this includes all publishing houses, presses, exhibition halls, theaters and concert halls, scholarly institutes, and so on. Such a culture, therefore, can make use of only what is left – typewriters, private studios, apartments, barns, etc. ²³

Enacting the parallel polis, and a parallel culture to go with it, was part of the overall attempt to carve out a space of civility away from corruption and general claustrophobia. ²⁴ Rhetoric about ‘civil society’ as a parallel sphere was an attempt to open the doors and windows and let in some air. It was done with acknowledgement of what could be and what could not be: the political regime could not be changed, but something about everyday life could be changed.

Hungarian dissident György Konrad described this sway between persistence and resignation:

Limited democratic institutions, a social contract, independent political structures – at present, it appears, these things will not work within the framework of Yalta. Little circles of friends, of independent people, go on. We are grouping for a firm basis, a level beneath which it would be impossible to sink. ²⁵

Whether such a basis was found was less important that the search for it through gathering together with one another under some guise of ‘independence’. They were political only insofar as they existed with the threat of forceful retaliation looming in the background. ²⁶ They were ‘anti-political’ in the sense of not directing pursuing a change in government; dissidents focused instead on the customs that guided reciprocal relations within the associations of civil society:

The success of this independent ferment cannot be measured by the replacement of one government by another, but by the fact that under the same government society is growing stronger, independent people are multiplying, and the network of conversations uncontrollable from above is becoming denser. Let the government stay on top; we will live our lives underneath it. ²⁷

If human dignity and mutual recognition the ultimate, the success of having such public meetings in private spaces was not measured by how some action directly changed a government policy, as it would be in a democratic country with free civic associations. ²⁸ These gatherings continued because they defined success in terms of how friendship networks and informal gathering could disseminate new ideas, provide shoulders to lean on and create an amorphous subversive energy among those who came to meetings. As Konrad described:

We are not trying primarily to conquer institutions and shape them in our image but to expand the bounds of private existence … considerable scope is available for the development of civil society … Just imagine if interesting conversations were going on in a million homes … ²⁹

The home as the last space available for genuine, honest conversation was also the spirit behind the Flying University in Poland and the meetings of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, all of which took place in private homes. These were attempts to act ‘as if’ the home could be a meaningful public space – in the sense of an open space – where conversation, discussion, the exchange of meaningful ideas, intersubjective recognition and a change of the terms of engagement could be enacted and rehearsed, with the hope that sometime in the long-distant future a genuinely public performance would be possible outside of the ‘private’ boundaries of the home.

In reference to some of the first ‘organizations’ formed in 1976 in Poland, Adam Michnik described this paradox:

The principal theme of these ideas was openness – openness at any price. Some people went as far as to walk voluntarily into a home where an open but illegal lecture of the Flying University was to take place and the secret police had already arrived. ‘Open but illegal’ – in this somewhat paradoxical expression lies the very essence of the tactics of that era. Books and periodicals were printed underground, but the names of their authors and editors were openly disclosed. Openness was a way of fortifying collective courage, of widening the ‘grey area’ between the censor’s scissors and the criminal code, of breaking down the barrier of inertia and fear. The chances for success lay in openness, not in conspiracy. ³⁰

Dissidents’ homes became places of potential truthfulness amidst lies, places with a greater possibility of coming to recognize others as they saw themselves. Dissidents used these private-but-public spaces to act out their vision of what public space should be like. In Hungary, Konrad described, ‘[o]fficial premises belong to the state, homes to “society.” Home and free time: these are the spatial and temporal dimensions of civic independence.’ ³¹ In homes they gathered, and it was there that an existential revolution occurred, long before any political revolution was foreseeable.

As Vaclav Havel wrote of the association of Charter 77 signatories, ‘it was as though the mere awareness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experience were enough to transform people and the climate of their lives, as though it gave their public work a more human dimension that is seldom found elsewhere’. ³² This transformation began not at the level of politics, not within an open public sphere, but at the level of individuals, a handful of intellectuals who decided to make a claim against injustice by gathering together and mutually recognizing one another. Such activists within totalitarian regimes had almost no outspoken recognition from the wider society; they had no recognized non-governmental status, no volunteers, no foreign donors and no access to the press. ³³ What they were doing was seen as something bordering on suicidal: as Havel wrote in the 1970s, ‘to become a dissident … means to becoming a member of that microscopic “suicide-pact” enclave surrounded by the unspoken good wishes of the public but at the same time by unspoken amazement that anyone would choose to risk so much for something as hopeless as seeking to change what cannot be changed’. ³⁴

Havel and other dissidents in the Eastern Bloc identified their efforts and their gatherings, however, as ‘civil society’. This term had both historical and theoretical resonance, becoming connected to their everyday actions and their insistence on associating with one another. Their ‘civil society’ had no hope of bringing about democratic transition when it was first initiated in the 1970s, but it did provide its members with a venue for intersubjective recognition from their peers. This made life much more bearable than it otherwise was, ‘changing the climate of life’ and ‘fostering a human dimension’. Havel had began his dissidence as a writer trying to find a ‘truth’, but soon found that the goal of unmasking false ideological language required the shared experience of conversation with others to reclaim a modicum of honest space within a world that abused human dignity.

This required, ironically, living ‘as though’ and ‘as if’ one were indeed able to speak freely, even if this meant losing one’s freedom and going to prison. Such a stance was central to realizing the fruits of this intersubjective recognition of a shared experience that could transform the climate of oppression, if only one heart and mind at a time. One had to pretend, to be slightly delusional, and in this pretending, this ‘as if’, a new standing for individual and collective consciousness could be found. Or, as Konrad hoped: ‘Our greatest act on behalf of freedom is to behave toward everyone as though we were free men – even toward those whom we fear.’ ³⁵ Even if the events of 1989 depended more upon external political circumstances for their peacefulness than they depended upon the actions of the dissidents, ³⁶ the power of rhetoric such as Havel’s, when coupled with the idea of ‘civil society’, not only endured in various layers of the use of ‘civil society’ as a social-political concept after 1989, but also gave the dissidents reason to believe that what they did had a significance for themselves as individuals within the context of the intersubjective recognition of the ‘We’ into which they put the ‘I’. When Havel reflected on this situation, he called it an ‘existential revolution’:

This as yet unknown way out might be most generally characterized as a broad ‘existential revolution’ … a solution cannot be sought in some technological sleight of hand, that is, in some external proposal for change, or in a revolution that is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, or even merely political. These are all areas where the consequences of an existential revolution can and must be felt; but their most intrinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest sense of the word. ³⁷

The principle of association behind many civil society gatherings in Eastern Europe under communism was a type of recognition that was able to transform participants existentially, to believe that gathering in the company of others was worthwhile, despite hopeless and forsaken political circumstances. This was the atmosphere where the contemporary allure of ‘civil society’ first caught on, where it came to embody hope for a more just, more ethical, and more open society. ‘Civil society’ was not just about democracy and democratic change; it was, in the bleakest moments of totalitarianism and dictatorship, about the mutual recognition of those within a group. Even without a reference to a potentially better future, dissidents saw the meaningful benefits of such face-to-face gatherings in and of themselves.

These gatherings also helped mitigate the effects of demoralizing objectification. As Havel described:

For some time now I’ve been burdened by the feeling that I’ve been thrust into a predetermined, static situation, that someone, somewhere, has already described me and classified me, and that I’ve merely been accepting this passively and playing the role I’ve been handed without engaging my own imagination … I felt the need to stir things up, to confront others for a change and force them to deal with [this] situation. ³⁸

While his willingness to enter into dangerous conversations was not a common action in his own society, here Havel explains why he chose to write controversial ideas and engage in illegal conversation with other dissidents: to avoid being put into objective and pre-classified categories, and instead to be treated like a subject and interlocutor, in the process engaging his own individual imagination in the name of the common good of ‘social self-awareness’. These are lofty goals of intersubjective recognition, and probably never fully reached even in the most civil of civil society organizations, but this ideal type of mutual recognition symbolizes an existential alternative to isolation and societal atomization. The search for such recognition occurs in both democracies and non-democracies, and looking at civil society in non-democracies as necessarily defined by the group’s civil disobedience only towards a political regime, and only in the name of democracy, limits our understanding of a vast array of gathering for existential purposes.

As suggested in the introduction, it also limits the researcher’s understanding of the sustainability of associations. How did these dissident associations sustain themselves in contexts of outright persecution? Why is it that some associations collapse when their money runs out, but these associations kept going and going with no money and little outside support? The wager this argument makes is that within an association’s ability to foster intersubjective recognition sits its potential for sustainability through good times and bad, both within and outside of the protections of democracy. The question of sustainability is being asked with more frequency in research on civil society, but it has not yet been asked in terms of intersubjective recognition. ³⁹ Gatherings that do not have outwardly political goals still promote civility within themselves by focusing on the gathering itself as the goal, especially in contexts where gathering is difficult. On the flip side, even gatherings with ‘democratic’ ends can be internally undemocratic and uncivil towards members themselves, and achieving democratic goals does not inherently mean the association also provides intersubjective recognition. The full consequences of this need to be further explored within both theoretical and empirical research.

Exclusive or plural recognition?

The most well-known theorization of recognition is Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, where the master ‘recognizes’ the slave as enslaved, suggesting that there is something within the idea of recognition quite unrelated to civility. The other question that therefore must be asked about the relationship of associations, recognition and civility is about the dangers of human interactions when they are built upon the demand for recognition. ⁴⁰ In other words, some types of recognition are more civil than others. Asking what mode of recognition might be at play in any given civil society organization can help reveal both the depth of civility within a gathering of people, as well as the incivility. Not all forms of political recognition actually recognize the individual as he recognizes himself; many in fact turn to identification, objectification and contentious claims of identity. ‘Identity recognition’, however, is perhaps the most commonly evoked type of recognition within academic and policy debates about the ‘politics of recognition’. ‘Identity-recognition’ is the demand to be recognized by others, including the state, for ‘who we are’, implicitly meaning that I want to be recognized for who I say I am, not necessary who you say I am. This is the battleground of identity politics par excellence: who gets to recognize me as what? This sort of demand for recognition leads to associations of people that do indeed create battlegrounds, and might not be entirely civil, unless such associations also provide for intersubjective recognition at the same time they provide for identity recognition. It is therefore necessary to say a bit more about why the politics of identity recognition points to a cautionary tale of potential incivility.

Charles Taylor, in his 1992 essay ‘Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”’, defines ‘identity recognition’ as one part of the historical development of various ideas about recognition. He excavates categories from the past to demonstrate that ‘our ancestors of more than a couple of centuries ago would have stared at us uncomprehendingly if we had used these terms [of recognition] in their current sense’. ⁴¹ Turning to Rousseau’s notions of authenticity as the precursor to ‘the development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity [that] gives a new importance to recognition’, ⁴² Taylor argues that ‘[w]hat has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail’. ⁴³ In an age of social hierarchies before the French Revolution, recognition was assumed and taken for granted; one was recognized in accordance with one’s social class and one’s family, with such fixity that the word ‘recognition’ denoted little besides identification in a pre-existing social or political category. ⁴⁴ Not until aristocratic and feudal structures began to break down did recognition of one’s own identity, in the disintegration and rearranging of pre-existing categories, come to be seen as necessary.

Taylor identifies the current ‘politics of recognition’ as a discourse where recognition of one’s identity is seen as a concrete social good necessary for modern life. ‘Misrecognition shows not just lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we own people. It is a vital human need.’ ⁴⁵ From these underlying assumptions arise two forms of politics, the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference:

Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms of nondiscrimination that were quite ‘blind’ to the ways in which citizens differ, the politics of difference often redefine nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment. ⁴⁶

Within both the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference, the calls for recognition have ‘been made explicit … by the spread of the idea that we are formed by recognition’. ⁴⁷ In other words, if one takes recognition to be the basis of identity formation of the human individual, then to deny recognition undermines both human dignity and the capacity to be distinct and different. Taylor does not address authoritarian societies, but the actions of those seeking their identities to be recognized, even though the state denies recognition to them, would be logically consistent with much of what Taylor argues. When identity, rather than intersubjectivity, is at stake, however, those reactions and struggles may be very uncivil.

The critiques of Taylor’s argument ask how we might adequately recognize distinct groups without categorizing them according to reifying and stultifying categories inconsistent with their own self-understanding. How do we account for identities that change over time, furthermore, when individuals in modern societies shift between ‘identity’ groups? Is the presumption of ‘equal worth’ adequate when ‘worth’ itself is culturally and ethically constructed, perhaps only applicable to certain societies and social structures? If ethical claims must be made for recognition claims to be valid, are all theories of recognition culturally bounded, unable to address global issues? ⁴⁸ According to Patchen Markell, identity politics and theories of recognition based upon identity politics unnecessarily and harmfully reify identity:

The trouble is that the politics of recognition responds to this fact [of vulnerability to others] by demanding that others recognize us as who we already really are. Invoking ‘identity’ as a fait accompli precisely in the course of the ongoing and risky interactions through which we become who we are (or, more precisely, who we will turn out to have been), it acknowledges and refuses to acknowledge our basic condition of intersubjective vulnerability … If identity can only be reliably known in retrospect, then to wish for recognition is tantamount to wishing for the security of death. ⁴⁹

This critique of the reification of identity within discussions like Taylor’s provides a useful and cautionary reminder. ⁵⁰ We can indeed change who we are, including which social categories we might fit into, and oftentimes involuntary changes in our circumstances can change who we are; this is what Markell calls ‘intersubjective vulnerability’. He sees this vulnerability as an essential part of human existence, and ‘[i]n this sense, the pursuit of recognition involves a “misrecognition” of a different and deeper kind: not the misrecognition of an identity, either one’s own or someone else’s, but the misrecognition of one’s own fundamental situation or circumstances’. ⁵¹

Through his critique of identity-recognition, Markell warns that harmful objectification can come within identity-recognition, because it assumes fixed identities in a world where identities are more fluid and vulnerable. In the 1990s, a child with one Hutu parent and one Tutsi parent in Rwanda, or a child of an inter-ethnic marriage of an Orthodox Serb and Bosnian Muslim in Yugoslavia, would understand in his existence the fluidity of identity-recognition as a life or death matter, a choice between master and slave, or as the case was, between murderer and murdered. When identity-recognition trumps all other forms of recognition, and the political climate turns sour, violence is lurking very nearby. The type of recognition Markell advocates to overcome such reification of identity, which he calls ‘acknowledgement’, seeks to overcome the objectification and incivility lurking within identity-recognition:

[J]ustice does not require that all people be known and respected as who they really are. It requires, instead, that no one be reduced to any characterization of his or her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty or invulnerability, regardless of whether that characterization is negative or positive, hateful or friendly. It demands that each of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the uncertain, open-ended, sometimes maddeningly and sometimes joyously surprising activity of living and interacting with other people. ⁵²

In this joyous but maddening conceptualization, Taylor’s characterization of the contradiction between ‘the politics of difference’ and the ‘politics of equality’ are dissolved; Markell opens space for both alternatives across the span of time. ⁵³ Recognition is not constant through time, solved once and for all by a law, policy or the imposition of an ethnic state, but rather is a momentary linkage of past and present. At any given moment the availability of recognition for any given individual can come into question. Recognition is not something that will be consistent, and in a larger existential sense, Markell concludes that ‘[i]f we cannot do without the bonds of recognition, we also cannot do without the dark space between recognitions, which is the space of movement, of action, and of life’. ⁵⁴

This critique of the politics of identity-recognition is important for outlining the terms of recognition applicable to civil society. The structure of analysis offered by Taylor depends very heavily – too heavily in Markell’s eyes – on the role of the Markell argues,

A more modest hope … might lie in the multiplication and diffusion of the sites around which struggles for recognition are carried out, resisting the punitively sovereign state’s implicit claim to hold a monopoly on the distribution of recognition and to be the ultimate arbiter of contests over identity … The point of such a pluralization would not be to enable a more accurate regime of recognition … Instead, such a pluralization might enable resistance to recognition’s injustices by weakening the hold of any single exchange of recognition on our being: it may be safer and more conceivable to contest the terms of one exchange of recognition, or indeed to refuse that exchange altogether, if doing so does not amount to a kind of social death. ⁵⁵

The pluralization of sites of recognition within the wider society and the multiplication of places where humans can seek recognition of both their sameness and difference is, in other language, a call for less state involvement in bestowing recognition and more focus on how the diffuse institutions of society can provide multiple sites of recognition. Because of the injustices within the politics of recognizing identity, not everyone will benefit equally from an official state policy of recognizing sameness and difference. ⁵⁶ By moving the lens of analysis towards the possibility of the pluralization of sites of recognition within society, however, the injustices of state-based recognition, a recognition that is necessarily based upon identity-recognition and its objectifications, can be diffused in favour of more genuinely mutual recognition within the smaller gatherings of civil society. Notably Markell only suggests briefly that such a plurality of sites of recognition might possibly exist; he concludes his book with this evocation of the pluralization, and does not go so far as to call upon the institutions of civil society specifically. Given this opening in his conclusion, however, it seems he would be sympathetic to looking towards civil society organizations as sites capable of fostering a kind of recognition that transcends identity politics.

For the empirical researcher looking at a civil society organization claiming to fulfil demands for identity-recognition, Markell’s critique also offers another set of warnings. If an association includes the claim that it singularly and authoritatively is the grantor of identity-recognition, that association itself will deny the plurality of multiple kinds of intersubjective recognition. To be more concrete, certain kinds of associations can provide identity-recognition but undermine the civility of civil society: a nationalist association that demands its members to deny all social ties except those to the nation; a religious organization that demands of its members the denial of all connections with earthly associations and forces them to turn solely to God; or any organization which demands supremacy over the recognition claims of other organizations (i.e. racial supremacy organizations). An excess demand for identity-recognition, in other words, and a shortage of intersubjective recognition, can be the warning flag over an association that it will undermine the civility of its society.

In looking at associational activity outside of democracy and outside of the protections of the rule of law, making these distinctions between types of recognition is important when a researcher is trying to find the sources of civility within a non-democratic society. Instead of saying that all recognition claims fall within Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, or that all recognitions are interconnected within repressive communitarianism, in understanding the difference between identity-recognition and other types of recognition, interesting and relevant research questions can be added to the examination of civil society, both within and outside of democracy.

Conclusion

When Thomas Hobbes wrote that ‘the state of men without civil society, which state we may properly call the state of nature, is nothing else but a mere war of all against all’, ⁵⁷ he did not mean ‘civil society’ in the same way we currently use the term ‘civil society’ to describe civic associations, clubs, and other voluntary gatherings. To Hobbes, ‘civil society’ was the sphere of government, society, and economy bundled together, not yet differentiated as it is in current political theory; it was a more general way of characterizing those aspects of life shared in common with others. ‘Civility’ and ‘peace’ took primacy in Hobbes’s thinking on government, and he might be disconcerted to learn that ‘civil society’ is now considered the arena of life where freedom and voluntary associations are spoken of as the greatest goods, not necessarily embodying discipline and organized authority.

Hobbes’s formulation of ‘civil society’ assumed a natural human predilection for individual isolation and anxious loneliness in a hostile world; even without the occasion of an actual civil war, humans will naturally bowl alone, and can only artificially be made to break out of their rather anti-social tendencies:

For they who shall more narrowly look into the causes for which men come together, and delight in each other’s company, shall easily find that this happens not because naturally it could happen not otherwise, but by accident … We do not therefore by nature seek society for its own sake, but that we may receive some honour or profit from it; these we desire primarily, that secondarily. How, by what advice, men do meet, will be best known by observing those things which they do when they are met. ⁵⁸

Hobbes suggests we need something beyond ourselves to draw us out of our individual isolation on fortified islands; we need to come together for ‘some honor or profit’ to realize the fruits of trusting others and ‘delighting in their company’. The substance of this honour or profit was not something Hobbes elaborated upon very thoroughly; the achievement of peace and stability did not necessarily require looking into the ‘advice’ (or reason) by which ‘men meet’, as long as they submitted to the power of the Leviathan and did not meet for violent purposes. When Hobbes’s men gathered together into associations, we could imagine they recognized one another under a common state of submission, rather than assuming common subjectivity of the political subject, as Hegel would later formulate.

While motivations for the act of gathering and association have changed over time, in following Hobbes’s cue that reasons for meeting can be seen in ‘those things they do when they are met’, researchers should ask more questions about the mutuality of exchanges of intersubjective recognition within associations outside of democracy. Within such associations, in whatever type of political environment, others may potentially come closer to seeing us as we see ourselves, we may come closer to seeing ourselves as others see us, and through such a dialogue we may come to see the potential for civility in both ourselves and others. Such a scenario of genuine mutuality may be rare in lived experience, but the aspiration for such a possibility will bring people to associate with one another, and will be one thing, in Hobbes’s words, ‘they do when they are met’.

If the contemporary idea of civil society has been recognized primarily through its relationship to democracy, I have tried to evoke the idea that making democracy work using civil society is a variation on a longer standing theme of making society more peaceful through providing nodes of mutual recognition. Making democracy work is a variation upon this theme, but it is not the theme itself. If civil society gatherings last through time when they embody and seek to fulfil the human need for mutual recognition, we can surmise that the search for such recognition will continue to influence modes of gathering and modes of politics in significant ways far into the future. This search, furthermore, while helped by democracy and aspirations for democratic representation, goes beyond a mere desire for political representation, tapping into an existential need and a human condition beyond politics. Even though authoritarian politics may circumscribe institutional forms of association, people will nonetheless gather together despite those restraints. By asking questions about how mutual recognition occurs inside associations, new horizons of research can examine how civil society creates the potential for civility within democratic and non-democratic settings alike. While it is not the task of theory to operationalize these proposed questions for the field, this sketch has hopefully opened the door for such research.