Critics of politics of ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ who argue that ‘material’ or ‘economic’ inequalities have been neglected have presented a fairly dichotomous picture of two hierarchies. Honneth has rightly questioned this dichotomy and the accompanying mythical histories, which represent the ‘old’ labour movement as being only concerned with economic inequalities and equal rights and treat struggles for ‘recognition of identities, cultures, and differences’ as something ‘new.’ His “turn toward recognition theory” claims to overcome these obstacles. Honneth presents his theory of recognition as a general, unifying, simple, and coherent conceptual and theoretical framework in order to describe, explain, and evaluate objective injustices as well as social experiences of injustice. He is “convinced that the terms of recognition must represent the unified framework for such a project.” “Even the ‘material’ inequalities … must be interpretable as expressing the violation of well-founded claims to recognition.”

In this chapter, I criticize these ambitious claims to internally link critical social sciences and political philosophy by means of a single monistic theory. I will argue that multi-dimensional analysis of structural power-asymmetries or serious inequalities in the social sciences, along with pluralist accounts of severe injustices in political philosophy, provide a more adequate and productive basis on which to articulate the basic moral intuitions that we share about critical social science and political philosophy. In a pluralist approach, collective discrimination or misrecognition is conceived of as being based in predominant hierarchies of prestige, which are intimately linked to other power-asymmetries.