News from Around the World

These are the sorts of issues that Markell’s books can speak to. While the majority of the book is concerned with technical issues in the political ontology of agency and identity which, despite how luminously well written it is, will be slow going for people who can’t immediately jump into discussions of Arendt, Hegel, Herder, and Taylor, the chapter on multiculturalism is perhaps the easiest way in to the argument for nonspecialists. Here his focus is on the politics of recognition (think Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Will Kymlicka, etc.). The politics of recognition has emphasized the way in which recognition and affirmation of one’s identity and culture is itself a social good which ought to be recognized in multicultural liberal states, and particularly Canada (home to Taylor and Kymlicka). However, Markell argues that this aspiration to mutual recognition is appealing but ultimately unsatisfying and even incoherent.