Abstract

The idea of equal mutual recognition (referencing Hegel's notoriously obscure dialectic of self-consciousness) is sometimes thought to provide the key to understanding multiculturalism in both theory and practice, that is, to be the most important and most revealing of all multicultural values. It has been said by one authority to provide "the moral foundations of minority rights." A close examination of Charles Taylor's treatment of this theme in an influential publication reveals that the recognition he is promoting would need to be neither equal nor mutual and that it would resolve the rivalry between different cultural groups only on the condition that it was accompanied by a mutual assimilation to a new "horizon" of meaning as yet undefined.