used to be the basis for honor. I am using honor in the ancien
régime sense in which it is intrinsically linked to inequalities.
For some to have honor in this sense, it is essential that not
everyone have it. This is the sense in which Montesquieu
uses it in his description of monarchy. Honor is intrinsically
a matter of “préférences.”1 It is also the sense in which we
use the term when we speak of honoring someone by giving
her some public award, for example, the Order of Canada.
Clearly, this award would be without worth if tomorrow we
decided to give it to every adult Canadian.
As against this notion of honor, we have the modern notion
of dignity, now used in a universalist and egalitarian
sense, where we talk of the inherent “dignity of human beings,”
or of citizen dignity. The underlying premise here is
that everyone shares in it.2 It is obvious that this concept of
dignity is the only one compatible with a democratic society,
and that it was inevitable that the old concept of honor was
superseded. But this has also meant that the forms of equal
recognition have been essential to democratic culture. For instance,
that everyone be called “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss,”
rather than some people being called “Lord” or “Lady” and
others simply by their surnames—or, even more demeaning,
by their first names—has been thought essential in some
democratic societies, such as the United States. More recently,
for similar reasons, “Mrs.” and “Miss” have been collapsed
into “Ms.” Democracy has ushered in a politics of
equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the
years, and has now returned in the form of demands for the
equal status of cultures and of genders.