The Master-Slave Dialectic

Hegel's most famous passage. Two self-consciousnesses meet; each demands recognition; a life-and-death struggle ensues; one yields and becomes the slave, the other the master. But the master needs the slave's recognition to be a master, and the slave, through work on the world, becomes more fully self-conscious than the master. The dialectic of recognition runs through Marx, Fanon, Sartre, Beauvoir, and contemporary identity theory.