Charles Taylor The Politics Of Recognition Summary

MacIntyre once wrote “Politics has become civil war carried on the others means.” These means consist of the deeper underlining cultural and philosophical issues in the modern day politics. Charles Taylor in his essay the The Politics of Recognition examines the inherited philosophical issues of the recognizing need of identity within the society. This issue of recognizing, finding, and defining one’s identity is impossible to do without the strong influence of the public sphere. As a society we cannot go without the judgment of express labeling from within the public.
Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain low self-esteem.
The identification of a political ideologies has become a large stressor upon the public arena of politics.
Thus, creating a civil war between publicly defined rival ideologies, which can be reflected in the “politics of equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the years, and has now returned in the form of demands of equal status of cultures and of genders.” Furthermore, this can be seen within the public arena of politics creating a society of self label policies. This recognizing of political identity (whether that be republican or democratic) has hand the issues upon gay marriage, women in the work place, or the most recent one the transgender bathroom policy that were passed in North
Carolina. Not only is there a deep underlining philosophical issues in the realm of modern day politics, there is also a cultural issue. The innate cultural issue can be found within Freidrich Nietzsche cultural expression of morality found in his novel The Gay Science. Morality is both a set of practices in of how we interpret and live in the given society and exercise of one’s power. “Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet come balances and outweighs his influence.” Implying the notions of morality creating an underlining civil war of either creating yourself or allowing someone to create you. This create the ability for an individual to express their given set of moralities in the practices of belie, actions, and institutions in the public sphere of politics. One again creating a sense of tension between opposing ideologies. Not on the bases of self identification but on the notions of the given set of beliefs found within morality. The idea of a peaceful and humane realm of politics in our world would look like something we have never seen before. There would be no political identification, no political stances on issues, no disagreements upon what is right and what is wrong. In a world of humane and peacful politics there would be no politics at all. Where the governance of man would not allow for the the cruelness of human nature to judge what is right and what is wrong and to allow for actions to be taken upon this judgment on society. “To come to the point: “when a human being judges ‘this is right’ and the infers ‘therefore it must be done’, and then proceeds to do what he has thus recognized as right and designated as necessary—then the essence of his action is moral.”