ABSTRACT
The concept of recognition has recently returned centre stage to political and ethical argument.1 In radical social theory this has often been associated with a cultural turn in which issues of power and inequality in the sphere of political economy have been put aside for a politics of identity and recognition in the cultural sphere.2 However, in liberal political thought this is not the case. Rather, the concept of recognition has been used in a broadly Hegelian defence of the market economy: the market is justified as a sphere in which individuals receive proper recognition. The most influential version of that Hegelian argument is that of Fukuyama. My purpose in the following is to show that it is flawed. I do so by turning Hegel back against Fukuyama. Fukuyama employs a market model of recognition that Hegel himself had properly criticised. This flawed market model of recognition has a more general significance, permeating recent discussion of recognition in recent social theory. Its rejection gives us good reason to reassess the significance of the associational dimensions of economic life that were lost to Fabian and parts of the Marxian traditions of socialism.
