The Individual and the Other in Economic Thought by Ragip Ege Herrade Igersheim

Author:Ragip Ege,Herrade Igersheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The source of rights in recognition

There are two main original sources for the philosophy of recognition: Hegel and Rosmini.4 The latter found inspiration from the former about this specific issue, but developed his philosophical system in a different direction. The concept of recognition was originally developed by Hegel in “Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes” (1805–06). Hegel starts from the theorization of Kant and Fichte who assumed that rights and duties as well as the essence of the cognizing and willing individual are parts of the same unity. Kant developed his supreme law of morality – the categorical imperative – that we should consider others as ends and not as means; moreover, he also assumed the principle of non-contradiction as the universal criterion of moral rightfulness. Hegel refuses Kantian dualism between the ideal and the real. He departs from the Kantian approach by asserting that lawfullness and morality cannot be separated. The law represents the external life of man and morality his internal condition. Their unity is expressed as ethicity (Sittlichkeit). This implies also a radical epistemological shift, leading to Hegelian historicism.

In his Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel developed the concept of recognition in his legal-economic framework. The individual is seen as bearer of legal rights and a subject contributing to shaping those rights via an intersubjective cognitive process. The laws arise out of this interaction, and the juridical system is defined as the place of actualized liberties (Hegel, 1820, §4). Here, Hegel also formulates his juridical formal imperative, “be a person and respect the others as persons” (Hegel, 1820, §36). Consequently, the social structure of the historical world in which individual agents and institutions find their domain is constituted through recognition (Anerkennung), that is to say, through cognitive processes of reciprocal interaction (Testa, 2012, p. 176).

Civil society, in Hegel’s view, embodies the essence of economics (Ege and Walraevens, 2011). It is seen as a bond between the single autonomous members in a formal universality (Hegel, 1820, §157). Nonetheless, civil society alone cannot resolve all the tensions between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’. That means that markets are not self-reproducing the context they need to perform the desired results. Therefore, collective action is needed to produce merit goods and institutions to sustain market fairness (Ver Eecke, 2008; Mastromatteo and Solari, 2014).

Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014) emphasize how Hegel’s approach to the market and civil society, which is assimilated to Smith’s market, is in line with the idea of social and distributed cognition that was later proposed by Friedrich von Hayek. Cognizing (Erkennen) is the first form of individual identifiability; recognizing (Anerkennen) is a form of cognitive social interaction. The former indicates an identification of an individual and the latter indicates an expressive act of affirmation with a positive meaning.5Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014) interpret the socio-economic ontology of Hegel as based on continuity, performativity and recognition. Continuity identifies the emergent social phenomena with nature. Performativity means that theories (mental models) affect action. Finally, recognition means that human action is impossible without the mutual

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