Redistribution, Recognition, and the State

• Published date: 01 June 2002
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591702030003007
• Author: LEONARD C. FELDMAN
• Date: 01 June 2002
• Subject Matter: Articles

POLITICAL THEORY / June 2002Feldman / REDISTRIBUTION, RECOGNITION, AND THE STATE

REDISTRIBUTION,

RECOGNITION, AND THE STATE

The Irreducibly Political

Dimension of Injustice

LEONARD C. FELDMAN

Grinnell College

Recent work in political theory has examined progressivepolitical move-

ments in terms of the claims made by these movements for redistribution and

recognition. Rather than accepting a simplistic division between a “real” pol-

itics of class and a suspect politics of identity,Nancy Fraser, in particular, has

explored the tensions between economic and cultural claims in movements

for gender and racial equality, and developedan original and insightful syn-

thesis of claims for economic and cultural justice by advocating a combined

socialist politics of redistribution and deconstructivepolitics of recognition.1

But what remains less well developedin Fraser’s work is the particular role of

the state and “the political” in struggles over distribution and recognition.

This difficulty,I believe, reflects some broader tensions in thinking about

state and civil society as sites of injustice. Where liberal theory constructs a

division between state and civil society in which the state is the locus of

(legitimate, sovereign, controllable) power-as-coercionand civil society is a

realm of (individual or associational) freedom, a long history of critics have

exposed the power (and injustice) in civil society. From Marx’s equation of

civil society with capitalist domination and exploitation to Foucault’srecast-

ing of civil society as “the paradigmatic terrain for the disciplinary deploy-

ments of power in modern society,”2critical theory has sought to redirect

attention away from the “obvious” sites of power to the places and practices

410

AUTHOR’SNOTE: The author wishes to thank Christine Di Stefano, Jamie Mayerfeld, Stephen

White, two anonymous reviewersfor Political Theory, and especially Ira Strauber for their valu-

able comments and suggestions.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol.30 No. 3, June 2002 410-440

© 2002 Sage Publications

of power,oppression, and injustice that are veiled by the pieties of individual-

ism, limited government, voluntary association, and choice.3But this refo-

cusing of critique and political action has its costs: as Wendy Brown puts it,

“domestic state power” becomes a “lost object of critique.”4And further-

more, when the state is lost as an object of critique, it is also found as an

uncritically embraced, undertheorized instrument for confronting the injus-

tices of civil society.

I would suggest that state power becomes a kind of “blind spot” in the

redistribution/recognition framework that, while decisivelyrejecting Marx’s

reduction of civil society to capitalism, has maintained Marx’s prioritization

of civil society over the state. The real power—the real injustice—develops

in civil society,through economic relations of exploitation and cultural rela-

tions of stigmatization. While the state may be acknowledged as a player in

these relations, what is missing in the redistribution/recognition framework

is appreciation of the state as “a crucial source of oppression and hardship in

itself.”5

The state and its specifically political dynamics of inclusion and exclusion

need to be explicitly thematized in a theory of justice. First of all, this requires

thematizing their absence in current discussions of recognition and redistri-

bution. Thus, I examine the “displacement of politics”6both in theoretical

accounts (part 1) of the tensions that arise between redistribution and recog-

nition and in a practical political discourse (part 2)—the asserted conflict

between recognition for the homeless and redistribution for the homeless. I

argue that state power is a blind spot in the theory of economic and cultural

justice, and I show how this blind spot appears in a contemporary political

argument about the proper response to the injustices of homelessness. Sec-

ond, in order to incorporate an appreciation of state power into a theory of

economic and cultural justice, I develop Fraser’s “bivalent” framework for

analyzing injustices by expanding it. I argue in part 1 that Fraser’s theory of

maldistribution and misrecognition should be expanded to incorporate an

account of specifically political forms of injustice.7Pragmatic, empirically

grounded, and theoretically incisive analyses of contemporary forms of

injustice of the sort that Fraser provides are best developed within a “triva-

lent” framework that brings into view the interrelated yet analytically distin-

guishable dynamics of maldistribution, misrecognition, and political exclu-

sion. In part 2, I apply this trivalent framework to the issue of homelessness,

showing how attention to the irreducibly political dimension of injustice can

clarify what is at stake in homeless criminalization policies, constitutional

litigation of these policies, and the politics of homeless encampments.

Feldman / REDISTRIBUTION, RECOGNITION, AND THE STATE 411