Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

I noted that neither nationalism nor religion were about to disappear as forces in world politics. They were not about to disappear because, I argued back then, contemporary liberal democracies had not fully solved the problem of thymos. Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior.

Liberal democracies have been pretty good at providing peace and prosperity (though somewhat less so in recent years). These wealthy, secure societies are the domain of Nietzsche’s Last Man, “men without chests” who spend their lives in the endless pursuit of consumer satisfaction, but who have nothing at their core, no higher goals or ideals for which they are willing to strive and sacrifice.

To propel themselves forward, such figures latched onto the resentments of ordinary people who felt that their nation or religion or way of life was being disrespected. Megalothymia and isothymia thus joined hands.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.

According to Hegel, human history was driven by a struggle for recognition. He argued that the only rational solution to the desire for recognition was universal recognition, in which the dignity of every human being was recognized. Universal recognition has been challenged ever since by other partial forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, or by individuals wanting to be recognized as superior. The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies is one of the chief threats that they face, and unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

Identity grows, in the first place, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity.

Individuals throughout human history have found themselves at odds with their societies. But only in modern times has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of the former.

Finally, the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition. It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence. Self-esteem arises out of esteem by others. Because human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of their worth.

economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.

people are not rational in practice, that they for example choose default behaviors over more optimal strategies or economize on the hard work of thinking by copying the behavior of others around them.

The state of nature is, however, just a metaphor for human nature; that is, the most basic characteristics of human beings that exist independently of one’s particular society or culture.

Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two. Thymos is the seat of judgments of worth: Leontius believed he was above staring at corpses, just as a drug addict wants to be a productive employee or a loving mother. Human beings do not just want things that are external to themselves, such as food, drink, Lamborghinis, or that next hit. They also crave positive judgments about their worth or dignity.

Those judgments can come from within, as in Leontius’ case, but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth. If they receive that positive judgment, they feel pride, and if they do not receive it, they feel either anger (when they think they are being undervalued) or shame (when they realize that they have not lived up to other people’s standards). This third part of the soul, thymos, is the seat of today’s identity politics.

But a civil union would have had lower status than a marriage: society would be saying that gay people could be together legally, but their bond would be different from that between a man and a woman. This outcome was unacceptable to millions of people who wanted their political systems to explicitly recognize the equal dignity of gays and lesbians; the ability to marry was just a marker of that equal dignity.

These warriors were seen as morally different from shopkeepers because of their virtue: they were willing to risk their lives for the public good. Honor accrued only to people who deliberately rejected rational utility maximization—our modern economic model—in favor of those who were willing to risk the most important utility of all, their lives.

The rise of modern democracy is the story of the displacement of megalothymia by isothymia: societies that only recognized an elite few were replaced by ones that recognized everyone as inherently equal.

Yet the story is more complicated than that. Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group’s superiority.

Recognition of everyone’s equal worth means a failure to recognize the worth of people who are actually superior in some sense.

since human beings are so obviously varied in their talents and capacities, we need to understand in what sense we are willing to recognize them as equal for political purposes. The Declaration of Independence says this is “self-evident,” without giving us much guidance on how we are to understand equality.

while thymos is a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed, the belief that each of us has an inner self that is worthy of respect, and that the surrounding society may be wrong in not recognizing it, is a more recent phenomenon.

In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation,

Luther sought the remedies of mortification recommended by the Catholic Church, before realizing that he could do nothing to bribe, cajole, or entreat God. He understood that the Church acted only on the outer person—through confession, penance, alms, worship of saints—none of which could make a difference because grace was bestowed only as a free act of love by God.

Luther was horrified by the decadence and corruption of the medieval Church, but the more profound insight was that the Church itself was unnecessary and, indeed, blasphemous in its efforts to coerce or bribe God.

Karl Marx and contemporary neoclassical economists would say that Luther’s ideas were derivative of the material conditions: had there not been widespread economic discontents and divisions among the German princes, his views would never have spread the way they did. On the other hand, the sociologist Max Weber argued for the primacy of ideas: the very material conditions that economists study could only come about because they were legitimated by changes in the way people thought about them; similar conditions in previous times did not produce the same results because the intellectual climate was different.

Material conditions obviously shape people’s receptivity to certain ideas. But ideas have their own inner logic, and without the cognitive framing they provide, people will interpret their material conditions differently.

Like many subsequent thinkers struggling with the question of identity, he began with an agonizing quest to understand himself, and the way in which he might be justified before God. This inner man was not good; he was a sinner, but could yet be saved through an inner act of belief that could not be made visible by any external action. Thus Luther is responsible for the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection.

Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him; while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.3

According to Rousseau, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. The first humans began their descent into society by mastering animals, which “produced the first movement of pride in him.” They then started to cooperate for mutual protection and advantage; this closer association “engendered in the mind of man perceptions of certain relations … which we express by the words great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other similar ideas.” The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness:

Like Luther, Rousseau establishes a sharp distinction between the inner self and the outer society demanding conformity to its rules. Unlike Luther, however, the freedom of that inner individual does not lie only in his or her ability to accept the grace of God; rather, it lies in the natural and universal ability to experience the sentiment de l’existence, free of the layers of accumulated social convention.

Rousseau’s secularization of the inner self, and the priority he gives it over social convention, is thus a critical stepping-stone to the modern idea of identity.

The modern concept of identity unites three different phenomena. The first is thymos, a universal aspect of human personality that craves recognition. The second is the distinction between the inner and the outer self, and the raising of the moral valuation of the inner self over outer society. This emerged only in early modern Europe. The third is an evolving concept of dignity, in which recognition is due not just to a narrow class of people, but to everyone.

Many modern democratic constitutions thus enshrine the principle of equal dignity. They are drawing on the Christian tradition that sees dignity rooted in human moral agency. But that agency is no longer seen in a religious sense, as the ability to accept God; rather, it is the ability to share in the exercise of power as a member of a democratic political community.

human dignity centers on an individual’s ability to make proper moral choices, whether defined by religion or by secular reason.

The Christian origins of the right to dignity are evidenced by the fact that it was Christian Democratic parties primarily that pushed for constitutional protections of dignity, beginning with the Irish constitution of 1937.

Rousseau followed Luther, but flipped the latter’s valuation: the inner self is good or at least has the potential for being good; it is the surrounding moral rules that are bad.

shared values serve the important function of making social life possible. If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate;

not everyone is a Nietzschean superman seeking to revalue all values. Human beings are intensely social creatures whose emotional inclinations drive them to want to conform to the norms surrounding them. When a stable, shared moral horizon disappears and is replaced by a cacophony of competing value systems, the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is.

crisis of identity leads in the opposite direction from expressive individualism, to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon.

Most people do not have infinite depths of individuality that is theirs alone. What they believe to be their true inner self is actually constituted by their relationships with other people, and by...

The politics of recognition and dignity had reached a fork by the early nineteenth century. One fork led to the universal recognition of individual rights, and thence to liberal societies that sought to provide citizens with an ever-expanding scope of individual autonomy. The other fork led to assertions of collective identity, of which the two major manifestations were nationalism and politicized religion.

Both nationalism and Islamism—that is, political Islam—can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of a hidden or suppressed group identity that seeks public recognition. And both phenomena arise in similar circumstances, when economic modernization and rapid social change undermine older forms of community and replace them with a confusing pluralism of alternative forms of association.

the demand for recognition often takes a more particular form, centering on the dignity of a particular group that has been marginalized or disrespected. For many, the inner self that needed to be made visible was not that of a generic human being, but of a particular kind of person from a particular place and observing particular customs.

He sought recognition, not for an abstraction like the “Man” in the Rights of Man, but rather for his particular people and, by extension, every other human community.

Herder

The “long nineteenth century” that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 saw two versions of dignity and two approaches to identity in competition with each other. The first sought recognition of the universal Rights of Man (not, at that point, necessarily of women as well). The other sought recognition of the dignity of particular peoples

The universal recognition offered by liberal societies was particularly conducive to capitalist development, since it protected individuals’ freedom to engage in commerce from the state and preserved their right to own private property.

As the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner explained, “A society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers.” This necessitates a uniform national language, and a state-sponsored educational system to promote national culture. “The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of individuals … now hinges on their education … Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.”

The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist.

Mainstream Islamist parties such as those mentioned above have been willing to participate in democratic politics and have won victories at the polls that have led them into government. Despite their public avowals of commitment to democracy, their secular opponents often remain highly suspicious of their long-term agenda. The same could be said about nationalists, either in the nineteenth century or today: they often play by democratic rules, but harbor potentially illiberal tendencies due to their longings for unity and community.

Roy has described this not as the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamicization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.8