1 - Recognition and the Politics of Resentment

Summary

Studies show that feelings of misrecognition can explain much of the support for populism. The chapter draws on this insight but takes issue with the literature suggesting that feelings of misrecognition and resentment are blind emotions unconnected to facts and principles. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, Peter Strawson’s discussion of resentment, and John Rawls’s idea of principle-dependent-feelings, it argues that we should interpret the populist politics of resentment as a struggle for recognition based on moral experiences that are intimately connected to factual and normative beliefs. Resentment is based on the feeling that one is regarded and treated wrongly, and it is an incipient demand to be regarded and treated differently. Thus, the chapter provides an approach to populism and the politics of resentment that does not reduce them to ordinary citizens’ unthinking or automatic emotional reactions or political entrepreneurs’ manipulations of people. The proposed approach entails that we adopt a participant attitude and take people’s demands for recognition seriously. Democratic respect requires that we assess the validity of the claims people make, rather than regarding them with an observer attitude as pathological cases in need of treatment.