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12 Res Publica 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/respub12 and id is 1 raw text is: Res Publica (2006) 12: 1-7 © Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s11158-006-0012-6 DAVID MIDDLETON INTRODUCTION * 'Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one another.' What is respect? Is it something we are duty-bound to give to oth- ers? If so, which others? And how should we manifest our respect for them? It seems unlikely that we should respect everybody equally. But it also seems that respect is very much worth having. A denial of respect is often accompanied by actions of oppression, exploitation, violence, or just plain old rudeness. So whilst we can see that at some level we all seem to need respect, it is not clear what this means beyond a basic recognition of a person as a wor- thy object of respect. But if personhood, whatever that might en- tail, is sufficient reason for being respected then it would seem that normatively, respect is fairly hollow. If persons as diverse as Nel- son Mandela, Myra Hindley and General Pinochet are entitled to respect simply for being persons then whatever respect is, it may seem, as a notion, so thin as to be worthless. So perhaps, as the quotation suggests, we need to think of respect in terms of location rather than its personification. In this sense respect is located in hu- man community and within the reciprocal nature of community life. Nobody simply receives respect; everybody is engaged in a mu- tual exchange of respect. In this way respect flows around the com- munity. Like mortgage rates our stock of respect can go down as well as up. The political discourse of respect is played out in two overlap- ping fields. In the practical sphere of politics, respect has a sharp rhetorical focus. Most of us are only too familiar with the ascrip- tion of social ills to a 'breakdown' of respect in some or other form. Respect for our betters, respect for our elders, respect for justice, respect for life - all these and more are familiar rhetorical

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