Abstract
This chapter characterises the harms of global poverty as a specific form of misrecognition , found by attending to the writings of Emmanuel Renault on the concept of social suffering. Renault’s concept derives from recognition theory, although it reorients this discourse to focus on the diversity of subjective experiences of despair and hopelessness in contexts of extreme deprivation. I suggest that Renault’s concept avoids difficulties with Axel Honneth’s more well known conception of misrecognition , since it provides a more credible link between the social, psychological and material conditions of extreme poverty. Yet the project of focusing on the often invisible misrecognitions of global poverty should be related to a larger recognition-based global normative perspective to challenge extreme poverty. In this respect , Renault’s hint of the connection between social suffering and a certain form of alienation in a globalising world proves vital. Extending Renault’s point, I suggest that, along with his focus on social suffering, a productive emancipatory discourse would suggest how the humanity of the very poor may be supported through a positive global politics of recognition. A crucial route would involve resistance to alienation, conceived in a culturally open sense.
I would like to thank the participants in the ‘Recognition and Poverty’ workshop at Salzburg University in November 2018, and the attendees of the Philosophy Departmental Research seminar at Reading University in February 2019. In particular, I am grateful to Gottfried Schweiger for his support; for his very kind invitation to contribute to this volume; and for his extremely helpful comments on a previous draft of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
In particular, Renault suggests that in academic and ordinary language it is difficult to express and understand suffering, even when it is our own. This is partly because, when people suffer, they are continually involved in processes of coping with and resisting this state (Renault 2017: 6).
- 2.
The suggestion is not that these features of social suffering are unique to Renault’s conception. However, his focus on connections between suffering and poverty especially render his theory especially relevant to consider in this chapter.
- 3.
Symbolic capital, as suggested above, is perhaps as difficult a concept to define as social suffering. The central idea is that a person’s power and capacity is not reducible to one’s income or culture as such. Indeed, in his discussions of symbolic capital, Bourdieu seems to argue that neither brute force nor material possession are alone sufficient for the effective exercise of power. He identifies a hierarchy of ‘capitals’ (symbolic, economic, social and cultural); and believes that symbolic power is the result of the exercise of the other forms.
- 4.
This point is also forcefully made in a somewhat different vein by Neera Chandhoke (2013).
- 5.
As I mention later in this chapter also, Weinert (2016) in particular outlines different processes that aid the production of recognition in world society, which he takes to include resistance against forms of oppression; reflection on the worth of others; norm-reproduction, and taking responsibility for both the self and others.
- 6.
Many of Bales’ examples arise from some of the more poverty-stricken countries of the world such as Brazil, Mauritania and Thailand. His examples from India are particularly striking, in that it is a country with some of the strongest anti-slavery laws globally (2012: xxv).
- 7.
There is of course considerable controversy over the relevance of the Marxist conception of alienation to debate concerning global justice. See Wilde (2011) and Pontuso (2015), who attempt to positive critical readings of the Marxist conception in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Renault, in contrast, disputes the idea that ‘alienation from one’s labour product’ specifically, if Marx is interpreted to defend this idea, could ground a credible approach in late-modernity (Renault 2017: 167).
- 8.
As Arendt writes: ‘The world is not identical with the earth or nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which goo on amongst those who inhabit the man-made world together’ (1958: 136).
- 9.
A core question here may be why, if the issue is the content or object of alienation, one should not return at this point to a theory of redistribution, rather than recognition, one which focuses on the relevance of material goods. In other words, the objection may be that in fact language of human recognition and alienation is less apt normatively than reference to a person’s lack of specific material goods or opportunities. To respond, I suggest that the focus on alienation remains crucial, as it suggests most crucially that the self becomes estranged from itself through the lack of certain material goods or opportunities. Although it may be that this form of estrangement is also implied by global justice debates which focus more straightforwardly on basic resources. However, a focus on alienation, it seems to me, remains crucial because the concept concentrates on the conditions (goods; institutions; material structures; opportunities) are central to, or even constitutive of, the person’s agency. While this question ideally would require a fuller response than I am able to provide in this chapter, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this volume for pressing upon this issue.
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Mookherjee, M. (2020). The Harms of Global Poverty as Misrecognition : Social Suffering, Invisibility, Alienation. In: Schweiger, G. (eds) Poverty, Inequality and the Critical Theory of Recognition. Philosophy and Poverty, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45795-2_10
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