Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition helps explain the injustice inflicted for three decades on Tai Ji Men.
Michele Olzi*
*A paper presented at the webinar “No Social Justice Without Freedom of Belief: The Tai Ji Men Case,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on February 20, 2026, United Nations World Day of Social Justice.
The case of the systematic persecution of Tai Ji Men constitutes one of the most persistent and controversial examples of conflict between citizens and state institutions in the recent history of Taiwan. For three decades, members of the movement have been subjected to arrests, judicial proceedings, repeated tax sanctions, and ongoing public delegitimization, despite favorable court decisions in 2007 and 2018 that recognized their innocence, the lawful nature of their practices, and the absence of tax evasion. This long sequence of repressive interventions cannot be adequately understood as a mere accumulation of administrative or judicial errors; rather, it reveals a systematic persecution that has deeply affected the dignity, identity, and autonomy of those involved. To critically analyze this phenomenon, Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition—first introduced in his 1996 work “The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts”—provides a particularly fruitful conceptual framework.
In contemporary debates on social justice, Honneth has focused less on the mere violation of formal rights and more on the social conditions that make individual and collective autonomy possible. According to his theory, autonomy is not a natural attribute of the subject but the outcome of successful processes of socialization grounded in relations of recognition. Society can thus be understood as an order of recognition: a set of practices and institutions that promise individuals the confirmation of their moral and social worth.
Honneth distinguishes three fundamental spheres of recognition. The first is that of love or care, which concerns the person’s physical and psychological integrity and provides the basis for self-confidence. The second is the legal sphere, in which the
recognition of rights guarantees self-respect by acknowledging individuals as equal members of the normative order. The third is the sphere of social esteem, which concerns the value attributed to individuals’ capacities, contributions, and forms of life, thereby grounding self-esteem.
From this perspective, injustice manifests itself as misrecognition or disrespect: a partial or total denial of the forms of recognition necessary for the development of identity. When disrespect becomes embedded in institutional practices, it takes the form of structural social domination. It is precisely at this level that the persecution of Tai Ji Men can be interpreted.
At the level of personal integrity, arrests, searches, intimidation, and prolonged legal uncertainty have produced insecurity, fear, and humiliation, undermining the basic trust that the state ought to guarantee to its citizens. At the legal level, the persistence of punitive and fiscal actions despite definitive favorable court rulings amounts to a practical suspension of the recognition of the movement’s dizi (disciples) as full subjects of rights. This form of legal misrecognition directly affects self-respect, as it signals that formal equality before the law is not effectively ensured.
Likewise, the sphere of social esteem is compromised. The public portrayal of Tai Ji Men as a cram school or a deviant entity accused of fraud or even of “raising goblins” symbolically devalues the movement itself. In Honneth’s terms, such devaluation undermines collective self-esteem by conveying to the movement’s members that their contributions have no value to the rest of the community. The combination of personal, legal, and social misrecognition thus constitutes a pathology of the order of recognition, where disrespect is endemic and systemic.
Tai Ji Men’s response to this situation has not taken violent forms. Still, it has instead been expressed through a long and persistent struggle for recognition: legal appeals, public mobilization, and engagement with democratic institutions and the international community. According to Honneth, social struggles emerge when disrespect is experienced as a moral injustice rather than as mere misfortune. In this sense, Tai Ji Men’s resistance can be understood as a claim to dignity and to recognition as legitimate bearers of a form of life within the social order.
This analysis acquires further significance when situated within the symbolic context of the commemoration of February 28, 1947, the date of the 228 Incident/Massacre in Taipei and the Penghu Islands. That historical trauma represents for the Taiwanese a radical rupture in the order of recognition: the state ceased to treat part of its population as morally and politically legitimate subjects, responding to demands for recognition with mass violence. Without establishing improper equivalences, the memory of 228 can function today as a critical criterion for identifying and preventing more subtle yet persistent forms of institutional misrecognition, such as the one affecting Tai Ji Men.
To conclude this reflection in proximity to the commemoration of February 28 is to reaffirm that democratic justice does not consist solely in condemning the violence of the past but also requires constant vigilance over present practices. Applying Honneth’s theory of recognition to the Tai Ji Men case allows us to question the capacity of institutions to learn from history and to remain faithful to the fundamental promise of recognition: to guarantee all citizens the social conditions of autonomy, so that tragedies of misrecognition, old or new, are not repeated.
Michele Olzi is currently teaching assistant to the chair of Political Theory and to the course of Religion and Media at the University of Insubria (Varese and Como). His interests include political theory, collective imaginaries, history of ideas, history of religions, religion & media, new religious movements, “technognosticism,” hyper-real Religions, religions and politics. He is a member of the organizing and scientific committee of the annual conference of Foro di Studi Avanzati Gaetano Massa. He edits the online journal La Rosa di Paracelso.
