  Mutuality has always served as the explanatory and normative core of the concept of recognition. Most theories draw on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who was, in turn, heavily influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (for their common roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau see Neuhouser 2008). According to Fichte we become conscious of our own autonomy by being challenged—or as Fichte would characterize it: “called upon”—by the actions of another subject. Only by understanding that the other’s actions are intentional can we also grasp our own actions and utterances as expressions of an intentional self. This thought is most famously expressed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit where this interpersonal encounter logically culminates in a struggle of life and death (see esp. Kojève 1947 whose reading strongly influenced Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan; also the contributions in O’Neill 1996). Within the Phenomenology this idea is first and foremost a thesis about how we can gain self-consciousness as autonomous agents, namely only by interacting with other autonomous subjects (see in more detail 2.1 below). However, this idea also leads Hegel to consider the importance of differing forms of mutual recognition. Already in his early writings in the Jena Realphilosophie of 1805/06 Hegel expands the Fichtean motif by referring to the Hobbesian idea of a fundamental struggle—albeit not of self-interest but of recognition. In Hegel’s story of the state of nature social relationships are a (perhaps forgotten) given: A person who attacks your property does not primarily want to gain material goods. Rather, she wishes to remind you, the first possessor, that she is a person with moral standing as well who has been neglected by the act of first acquisition (Siep 1979, 39; Honneth 1992, 44–45). As becomes especially clear in the Phenomenology: By fighting against the other the subject wants to affirm her own freedom by proving that her normative status is of more importance to her than any of her (animal) desires, including—at an extreme—her desire to live. However, such fighting, expressive of autonomy, must lead to an impasse as it cannot achieve mutual recognition: either one of the subjects dies or subjects herself as a slave to the other, the superior master, and thus fails to express her autonomy. Furthermore, in this case the master does not receive adequate recognition either, because the recognizer has proven to be a “mere” slave who does not count as an autonomous and competent judge. Thus, adequate recognition can only be achieved within an institutionalized order of rights that secures genuinely mutual recognition (Williams 1997, 59–68). Hegel develops this latter thought most systematically in his mature Philosophy of Right. Here, the relationships and implicit norms of the three spheres of, first, love within the family, second, contractual respect within civil society and, third, solidarity within the state are supposed to be necessary in order to actualize individual autonomy, but not in the sense of mere “negative” but of “social” freedom. These spheres allow the subjects to feel at home within (or “reconciled” with) the ethical life of their community (which is organized as a state) because it provides the subjects with the meanings necessary for a fulfilling individual life that they can embrace (see also 2.3 below).