Throughout her authorship Rose was at pains to develop a critical theory of society which neither exaggerated nor underestimated the power and powerlessness of the individuals who compose society to effect social change. Rose achieved this through Hegel's idea of recognition. Recognition, for Hegel, refers to the experience of misrecognition that consciousness undergoes and which Hegel's phenomenologies document. It is from out of the domination of practical reason that the experience of misrecognition, and its recognition, arises. Recognition shows how the lack of identity between both theoretical and practical reason and the natural world corresponds to real social relations. It refers to the experience of domination quickened by the affirmation of a relative identity which is itself induced by the concept of practical reason. Practical reason, or freedom, is a presupposition of modern bourgeois society which dominates theoretical reason in such a way that what is dominated remains hidden. The strength in Hegel's thought lies in his recognition of the domination of practical reason and the illusions it encourages. His phenomenologies document the experiences of natural consciousness which, unbeknownst to it, presupposes practical reason but which, in its experiences of itself, also recognises as presupposed. In this way a unity of theoretical and practical reason emerges which is not so much posited but which is recognised as an identity that already exists but about which we have to repeatedly learn.
TBC
