Recognition, Poverty and Self-Respect

This Chapter examines the effects of poverty on self-respect (and self-esteem). Though Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition offers an insightful framework for analysing the way poverty tends to undermine its victims’ self-respect and self-esteem, its high level of abstraction means the precise ways that poverty affects individuals’ feelings of self-worth merits further investigation. After some preliminary remarks on (what I call) the ‘normative harms’ of poverty, the Chapter sets out a novel view of self-respect where that concept consists of four dimensions: confidence in one’s status as a person and agent; confidence in claiming one’s rights and legitimate entitlements; a responsible willingness to meet others’ rights and entitlements; and a willingness to demonstrate morally admirable (but not morally required) respect for others in one’s society. Self-esteem, it’s suggested, has a more complex relationship to self-respect than Honneth allows, with linkages with each of these dimensions. The Chapter goes on to argue that the normative harms of poverty can all be viewed as pathologies of self-respect on the four dimensional view: specifically, diminished agency, lack of confidence as a rights bearer, a weakened sense of being a contributor to society and more generally the sense of not being a participant in it. These pathologies, furthermore, are related to the experiences of marginalisation, helplessness, anxiety and, above all, shame which also invariably accompany economic poverty.