Recognition & Protest

Andrew Hyams recognises what fuels protest movements.

- Andrew Hyams

Throughout the last decade, social protest movements have filled our TV screens and newsfeeds. From Occupy and the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, Extinction Rebellion, the Women’s Marches and Black Lives Matter, people's power is as alive as ever.

Sadly, it also remains as controversial as ever, as the media furore over the toppling of statues in the US and UK has shown. This highlights the poor appreciation by many commentators of what drives social protest. If we want mature responses to social movements, we must first consider the points of view of those doing the protesting.

A philosophical account of social movements that does just this is Axel Honneth’s ‘recognition theory’, originally developed in the 1990s. Honneth (b.1949), a German social philosopher, was reacting against a previously academically dominant Marxist explanation for social conflict, which reduced the agency of protestors by claiming that their activism was predetermined by economic and social factors. Honneth sought a new theory that gave proper agency to individuals, recognizing their feelings and hopes. To do this, he turned to an eighteenth-century concept from GWF Hegel (who had in turn been inspired by Fichte) known as ‘mutual recognition. Fichte and Hegel held that a condition of increasing human self-consciousness is that we mutually recognise each other as free. The theory says that we can only truly become free ourselves if we recognise others as free, and have them so recognise us back.