Charles Taylor- 'The Politics of Recognition'

Thus my discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others. That is why the development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new importance to recognition. My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.

Of course, the point is not that this dependence on others arose with the age of authenticity. A form of dependence was always there. The socially derived identity by virture of the very fact that it was based on social categories that everyone took for granted. Yet inwardly derived, personal, original identity for granted. Yet inwardly derived, personal, original identity doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail. What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition by the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. Thas is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time. In premodern times, people didn't speak of "identity" and "recognition"- not because people didn't have (what we call) identities, or because these were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such.

...

The importance of recognition is now universally acknowledged in one form or another; on an intimate plane, we are all aware of how identity can be formed or malformed through the course of our contact with significant others. On the social plane, we have been shaped by the growning ideal of authenticity, and recognition plays an essential role in the culture that has arisen around this ideal.