  Some authors are not very optimistic about the prospects of emancipation through struggles of recognition.  If our expectations of being recognized as X are always contingent upon the social and historical context we live in, how is moral and political progress possible at all? Is it—in view of our basic dependency on the view of others—not more likely that our striving for recognition leads to uncritical conformity instead of an emancipatory struggle for recognition? It is just this suspicion which is expressed by the French Marxist Louis Althusser. He regards recognition as the central ideological mechanism by which the state confronts its citizens with the choice between obedience and the loss of social existence (Althusser 1970, 174–176). Hereby, Althusser follows a specifically French tradition that does not primarily conceptualize recognition as the condition of intersubjective freedom, but as a source of estrangement: Already in Rousseau’s Second Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau 1755) individuals lose themselves in vain pretense, because they inauthentically attempt to please others (for a more positive reading see Neuhouser 2008).  Finally, in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre individuals are reified by every kind of recognition because even the affirmation of others freezes the subjects in their present state, hereby denying their potential for change, i.e., their freedom (Sartre 1943, esp. 347–361).  According to this tradition, we do not suffer primarily from the fact that we are not recognized, but rather from the fact that we are held captive within a specific pattern of socially mandated recognition (Bedorf 2010). Struggles for recognition only entangle us ever deeper in a wrong dependency on power relations the workings of which we fail to adequately grasp. Whereas left-Hegelian approaches are designed to positively overcome ideological recognition orders for the purposes of social progress (Honneth 2004), post-structuralists maintain that one should not ask which features of one’s identity should be recognized. In doing so we only remain caught within the old (ideological) categories and are forced to define clear-cut identities.  Rather, one should question struggles for recognition as to whether and to what extent they increase spaces of freedom to think and act differently (Tully 2000, 469). Such work, often inspired by Michel Foucault, has also pointed to the motivational problem of all resistance to the established recognition order: How can you reject exactly those categories that constitute your identity? Does social criticism not necessary imply self-denial? Judith Butler has tried to circumvent this alleged paradox by pointing out that norms never remain valid by themselves but need constant reaffirmation. This process hereby opens up possibilities of—at least slightly—“reconfiguring” the dominant norms and changing one’s own identity (Butler 1997a, ch. 3; 1997b, 13, 40–41). Some authors even want to replace a politics of recognition with a politics of acknowledgment: an acknowledgment that we can never be sure about the changing identities (and thus normative claims) of others but have to remain open to new and unpredictable developments (Markell 2003, 180).  In a similar vein, feminist thinkers have claimed that the entire idea of being recognized in one’s given identity makes it impossible for us to gain an adequate understanding of how power and agency not simply react to such an identity but rather create it as an “embodied” identity in the first place (McNay 2008, 162–197). Finally, the idea that struggles for recognition cannot only lead to further progress, but should be grounded in a belief that modernity is already the result of such progress, has been criticized for its affinity to colonial forms of thought (Allen 2016, cf. Forst 2019).