‑‑ draft‑‑ Forthcoming in: Niall Kean, Chris Lawn: Companion to Hermeneutics, Malden: Wiley‑Blackwell 2015. Recognition and Freedom David Espinet & Matthias Flatscher Recognition and freedom function not only most prominently as a key concept in current social and political theory, notably in Critical Theory (Honneth, Habermas, Fraser) and in (post‑)structuralist debates (Althusser, Butler), as well as in pragmatic‑ skeptical conceptions (Wittgenstein, Cavell), the concept also receives considerable treatment within the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition. In particular, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricœur and Jean‑Paul Sartre have visibly elaborated the concept of recognition in a significant way; however, one can also find seminal indications for a nuanced understanding of the intrinsic relation of recognition and (un)freedom in the thinking of Hans‑Georg Gadamer, Merleau‑Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. Schematically, in all conceptions, there can be discerned a “positive” and a “negative” understanding of recognition – and hence of freedom, as recognition is in many ways linked intimately to the concept of freedom. Both concepts are, indeed, correlative. A positive understanding of recognition takes its departure from the assumption that the subject can only achieve a practical self‑relation if she experiences affirmation and acceptance from others. Those from whom, however, recognition is withheld – e.g., in racist, sexist or colonial contexts – have difficulty affirming their own overall life projects. The intrinsic relation of recognition to freedom is obvious: the autonomous subjectrecognizes both the limits of her own freedom and that of other autonomous persons (cf. Honneth 1996). In contrast, the negative understanding of recognition starts with the observation, that existing orders of recognition force the subject to adopt given identity‑attributions in conformity with the system and with an effective apparatus of power. Recognition then no longer is what enables freedom, but is in fact what makes freedom impossible (cf. Althusser 1971). Obviously the positive and the negative forms of recognition cannot be developed in isolation from one another. In phenomenological hermeneutics a noteworthy standpoint has been developed by tracing the ambivalent character of the intrinsic relation of recognition and (un)freedom; this approach basically undermines the dichotomous opposition of a positive and a negative conception of recognition and thus of freedom. Heidegger As Honneth highlights, Heidegger’s understanding of care includes more than a neutral “perspective of the participant”: it “is always connected with an element of