Recognising Taylor Rightly

In ‘Rights and Recognition: Perspectives on Multicultural Democracy’, Ethnicities

2(1) Morag Patrick (2002) makes the important point that not all demands for recognition or respect (terms she uses synonymously) can be met by recourse to rights. A richer, more responsive conception of the politics of recognition looks beyond the attribution and retrieval of rights to the role that forces such as language, symbols and interpretations – those we have of ourselves and of others – play. Patrick suggests that, because of

its preoccupation with rights, contemporary liberalism is unable to attend to this latter cluster of forces and, correspondingly, she proposes that a hermeneutic perspective offers the potential for a richer understanding of the politics of recognition.