The political economy of recognition

Abstract

Smith’s often noted ambivalence about commercial society in part turns around claims about the virtues and pathologies of recognition in commercial society. On the one hand, for Smith commercial society is a sphere in which actors mutually recognise each other as independent agents, each acting towards the other neither as benefactor nor as dependent. On the other, he acknowledges particular pathologies of recognition in commercial society: the social invisibility of the poor, the divorce of recognition from its proper object; the absence of limits on the pursuit of goods desired for appearance. For all the ambivalence apparent in the acknowledgement of these pathologies, Smith in the end defends commercial society. He does so partly in response to the contemporary egalitarian criticisms of commercial society in the work of Rousseau.1 Many of the themes in the debate between Smith and Rousseau reappear in later arguments between defenders of commercial society and their egalitarian critics. Hegel’s discussion of civil society as a sphere of mutual recognition, along with his sensitivity to pathologies of misrecognition, echo Smithian themes. The pathologies of recognition are central to later critics of commercial society – in particular the early writings of Marx. So also is a less often noted theme in egalitarian thought – the claim that defenders of commercial society fail to acknowledge unavoidable dependence and the forms of non-commercial networks of social support that this requires. These classical debates contrast with more recent work on recognition inwhich the political economy dimensions of recognition have largely disappeared and recognition focuses on the valuation of different identities in the cultural sphere. In the first section, I introduce the significance and distinctiveness of the classical debate on recognition in political economy through a contrast with more recent discussions of recognition and the particular reading of Hegel they assume. In the remainder of the paper, I explore these virtues and pathologies of recognition in more detail. In the second section, I outline Smith’s account of commercial society as a sphere in which actors recognise each other as independent agents. In the third section, I examine the pathological forms of recognition and Smith’s defence of commercial society in the light of these pathologies. In the fourth section, I consider later egalitarian responses to the pathologies. In the final section, I develop a version ofthe arguments from unacknowledged dependence at more length. A proper understanding of the virtues of independence needs to be more Aristotelian. The virtues of independence need to be contrasted not only with vices of deficiency, but also those of excess, of arrogant self-sufficiency and hubris. Both defenders and many critics of commercial society tend to be blind to the vices of excess.