Civilizing Societies: Recognition and Respect in a Global World

The essay discusses the terms “recognition” and “respect” as new transcultural candidates for our post-ideological age. Although intimately connected with each other, the two terms have different genealogies, historical baggage, and ranges of application. The essay begins with eighteenth-century England, introducing the important bourgeois concepts of politeness and civility as new enlightened norms for social and transcultural behaviour. In the second part, the focus of the discussion is the anthropological concept of recognition as a vital resource for individual and collective identity construction. The last part introduces “respect” as a complementary term to “recognition,” offering a distinction between different forms of respect. It is the aim of this historical and conceptual analysis to reframe some of the crucial problems of our current social, political, and literary debates. Without disregarding differences, new global forms of respect simultaneously create and strengthen social ties that overcome the divisive aspects of difference through assertions of solidarity and similarity. In spite of, across, and underneath differences, civility is the practical response to the important recognition that we are all citizens of the same world.