Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Isothymia will therefore continue to drive demands for equal recognition, which are unlikely to ever be completely fulfilled.

Isothymia is therefore a problem of modern liberal democracies bc ppl want to be equally respected. Democracies give ppl space to express themselves and that isnt necessarily equality

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.

Much of what passes for economic motivation is, I will argue, actually rooted in the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means.

We need to address the issue of recognition. Not mere economics

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.

Fukuyama's thesis

The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

politics of resentment.

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.

believes that it has an identity that is not being given adequate recognition—either by the outside world, in the case of a nation, or by other members of the same society.

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.

Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was the ultimate driver of human history, a force that was key to understanding the emergence of the modern world.

economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect.

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:

This third part of the soul, thymos, is the seat of today’s identity politics.

democratic upsurge that would unfold in the two centuries after the French Revolution was driven by peoples demanding recognition of their political personhood, that they were moral agents capable of sharing in political power.

a world in which the dignity of only a few was recognized would be replaced by one whose founding principle would be recognition of the dignity of all.

government: it means human agency, the ability to exercise a share of power through active participation in self-government.

Equality in a modern liberal democracy has always meant something more like an equality of freedom. This means both an equal negative freedom from abusive government power and an equal positive freedom to participate in self-government and economic exchange.

the effective recognition of citizens as equal adults with the capacity to make political choices is a minimal condition for being a liberal democracy.

The desire for the state to recognize one’s basic dignity has been at the core of democratic movements since the French Revolution.

when economic modernization and rapid social change undermine older forms of community and replace them with a confusing pluralism of alternative forms of association.

How nationalism or forms of collective megalothyma arise

Nationalism is a doctrine that political borders ought to correspond to cultural communities, with culture defined largely by shared language.

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.

Origin of nationalism. According to Fukuyama it arose only on the nineteenth century w industrialization

harbor potentially illiberal tendencies due to their longings for unity and community.

Are unity and community essentially undemocratic?

They realized that they had an inner, unrecognized self that the outside world was trying to suppress.9

Why ppl.join terrorist groups

Is the rise of Islamist radicalism in the early twenty-first century best understood as an identity problem, or is it at base a genuinely religious phenomenon?

A great deal of what we conventionally take to be economic motivation driven by material needs or desires is in fact a thymotic desire for recognition of one’s dignity or status.

Thesis of chapter 9

Salary is a matter of recognition.

The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all the agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him

the pain of poverty is felt more often as a loss of dignity:

a job conveys not just resources, but recognition by the rest of society that one is doing something socially valuable.

the perception of invisibility.

As a means to usher populists into power

People understand their circumstances as the fault of guilty and less deserving people, not as the product of broad social, economic, and political forces.”

Economic distress is often perceived by individuals not as resource deprivation, but as a loss of identity.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways.

Under the therapeutic model, however, an individual’s happiness depends on his or her self-esteem, and self-esteem is a by-product of public recognition.

Identity politics is everywhere a struggle for the recognition of dignity. Liberal

individuals frequently wanted not recognition of their individuality, but recognition of their sameness to other people.

Identity politics aims at changing culture and behavior in ways that will have real benefits for the people involved.

National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system,

Highly divided countries are weak, which is why Putin’s Russia has provided quiet support to independence movements across Europe and has intervened in American politics to increase the level of political division there.

national identity is important for the quality of government.

third function of national identity: facilitating economic development.

fourth function of national identity is to promote a wide radius of trust.

A fifth reason national identity is important is to maintain strong social safety nets that mitigate economic inequality.

resources.8 The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy

National identity is built around the legitimacy of this contract; if citizens do not believe they are part of the same polity, the system will not function.

functioning of democratic institutions depends on shared norms, perspectives, and ultimately culture, all of which can exist on the level of a national state, but which do not exist internationally.

Democracy means that the people are sovereign, but if there is no way of delimiting who the people are, they cannot exercise democratic choice.

Basic human rights are universal, but full enjoyment of rights actively enforced by state power is a reward for membership in a national community and acceptance of that community’s rules.