The Excellence Award at the Fonds Ricœur’s Summer Workshop 2025 – "The Dialectic between Recognition and Compromise: A Foundation for Contemporary Political Ethics?"

This article aims to show that P. Ricœur’s thought offers a robust theoretical framework for conceptualizing the dialectic between recognition and compromise, serving as foundation for a political ethics suited to the challenges of pluralism in contemporary societies. Compromise serves to mitigate conflicts arising from demands for recognition and to provide practical avenues for solving such disputes, while the imperative of recognition prevents compromise from degenerating into a mere strategic negotiation and enriches the practical imagination necessary for collective action. A Ricoeurian approach to politics enables to sketch out a political ethics grounded both on a “will-to-live-together” and “just institutions,” one that acknowledges the inevitability of conflict but sustains the possibility of shared political existence.