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42 3 The Struggle for Recognition The Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence? —Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (emphasis omitted) Struggle for Recognition Hegel first mentions the germ of what became his famous theory of the struggle for recognition and the ensuing dialectic of lordship and bondage (or mastery and servitude) in an untitled manuscript written in 1802–1803. It was published posthumously as System of Ethical Life. There Hegel writes that in the “recognition of life or in the thinking of the other as absolute concept, the other [person] exists as a free being, as the possibility of being the opposite of himself with respect to some characteristic. Thus, in this freedom there is just as easily posited the possibility of nonrecognition and nonfreedom.” At this level of “formal, relationless, recognition,” a “living individual confronts a living individual, but their power (Potenz) of life is unequal.” There “one is might or power over the other. One is indifference, while the other is [fixed] in difference. So the former is related to the latter as cause; indifferent itself, it is the latter’s life and soul of spirit.” In this relationship the “greater strength or weakness is nothing but the fact that one of them is caught up in difference, fixed and determined in some way in which the other is not, but is free. . . . This relation in which the indifferent and free has power over the different is the relation of lordship and bondage” (1979b, 124–25). The relationship of lordship and bondage is based on “the inequality of the power of life. At this point, there is no question of any right or any necessary The Struggle for Recognition 43 equality.” Hegel further states, “Equality is nothing but an abstraction—it is the formal thought of life, of the first level, and this thought is purely ideal and without reality. In reality, on the other hand, it is the inequality of life which is established , and therefore the relation [of lordship] and bondage” (1979b, 125). Hegel notes two aspects of the lord-bondsman relation: the natural and the ethical. “Lordship and bondage are therefore natural, because individuals confront one another in this relation.” But the “relation of bondage and obedience is also set up whenever individuals as such enter into [a moral] relation in connection with what is most ethical, and it is a question of the formation of the ethical order as framed by the highest individuality of genius and talent” (1979b, 125–26). In an analysis that sounds like what would later be called Marxist, Hegel writes, the “master is in possession of a surplus, of what is physically necessary; the servant lacks it, and indeed in such a way that the surplus and the lack of it are not single [accidental] aspects but the indifference of necessary needs” (1979b, 126). The most detailed accounts of the struggle for recognition, the subsequent lord-bondsman dialectic, ending in the realization of universal freedom, are to be found in Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. What reads as “lord” and “bondsman” in the Phenomenology is rendered as “master” and “servant” in Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Both sets of terms mean the same thing. We can apply this dialectic to understand all historical situations of mastery and servitude or lordship and bondage, including slavery, feudalism, colonialism , racism, and so on. In short, all forms of oppressive social relations, those not based on freedom for all, can be subsumed under the dialectical relation of mastery and servitude and can be scrutinized from this vantage point. In both the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, which I discuss in detail in this chapter, Hegel states that the struggle for recognition takes place in the state of nature. The outcome of such a struggle in the creation of the lord-bondsman (or master-servant) relation entails the establishment of society, a commonwealth (Hobbes), or what Hegel calls the “system of established rights” (1998–99, 1:466). This is the negation of the state of nature. The resolution of the contradiction of the lord-bondsman relation is the domain of universal freedom. It is the negation of negation. Hegel posits bourgeois society as the society of universal freedom, wherein the contradictions of the lord-bondsman relation have [18.227.24.209] Project...

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