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Anticipations of recognition, and the demands and struggles that may follow when recognition is refused, are an abiding feature of the social world. But it is only in the past couple of decades that they have become an explicit focus of philosophical and scientific inquiry.¹ Reflecting the rising visibility of struggles for recognition in the public sphere of late modern societies, two publications, both appearing in 1992, got the current academic discussion around recognition going: Charles Taylor's essay "The Politics of Recognition' and Axel Honneth's book Kampf um Anerkennung (The Struggle for Recognition) (Honneth 1992, Taylor 1992). While the main aim of Taylor's essay was to defend a version of liberal pluralism that was not hamstrung by a defective conception of the neutrality of the state, it suggested a thesis about the political recognition of cultures that was taken up, often highly critically, in much of the subsequent literature on recognition in political theory (Smith 2010a). Taylor's apparent claim that states ought to recognize and give material support to cultures as a whole, even in cases where that recognition abrogated certain individual rights, was widely seen as an inadequate basis not just of multiculturalism in the sense Taylor sought to endorse, but also of the rights to recognition of individual members of cultural minorities (Habermas 1993, Cooke 1997, Benhabib 2002).

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