Recognition and Respect in the History of Political Thought: from Hobbes to Hegel and Beyond

This project foregrounds, and endeavours to explain, the pervasive interest of early modern political philosophers in one aspect of human nature in particular: our concern for the good opinions of others, and our aversion to their contempt. If modern recognition theory tends to trace its origins to Hegel’s early writings, this project shows that Hegel understood himself to be intervening in a conversation about the implications – moral, theological, but above all political – of our desire (/need) for esteem that had occupied a central place in European philosophy for the past century and a half. Here as elsewhere, Hobbes’s importance lay in his ability to articulate, with unprecedented clarity and boldness, anxieties that were widely shared: in this instance, regarding human pride, and the desire for social pre-eminence to which it frequently gives rise. This project suggests that Hobbes, to some extent at least, translated these insights from a primarily moral and theological, to a political register: the desire for recognition generates the most pressing problems that politics aims to address. But what if, pace Hobbes, our desire for esteem more often induces us to respect others as our equals, and to regulate our conduct towards them in ways that generate rather than undermine mutual trust and even affection? This possibility was probed by some, and disputed by others, between 1650-1800; and the insights thus produced speak powerfully to contemporary concerns in critical and political theory.