Abstract

Both among professional social and political theorists and in common speech, the language of identity, inclusion, recognition, and respect has become somehow more important in the past twenty or thirty years. To speak of "the politics of identity" or "the politics of recognition" is in a way commonplace. But what does the use of these terms mean? Why is it suddenly necessary?

I argue that the new prominence of these ideas is the result of the civil rights revolution. This development is powerful testimony to the ability of politics to shape the hearts and minds in a profound way. If a change in the political order has brought forth a new morality, this by itself if a phenomenon worth exploring. But what it also very important is the fact that this new moral language breaks with and in some measure contradicts the traditional received morality of America's liberal democratic tradition. It is widely noted, for example, that "respect" goes considerably beyond the old liberal ideal of "toleration." Similar contrasts - between identity and liberty, or interest and recognition, for example - expose other lines of tension between the new and the old. Not only did the civil rights revolution usher in a new set of moral categories, but the new moral language marks out in a vivid way the depths of the change that revolution seeks to bring about. The ultimate question here, as with any new morality, is how to understand the ultimate character of its demands. What are we, as thinking citizens, to make of this new table of values?