In this insightful, well-argued, and systematically structured book, Danielle Allen makes the case that those who are concerned with justice should focus not only on questions about how to fairly distribute income, wealth, and other valued resources but also, and centrally, on how to achieve political equality. Justice, she writes, is “best, and perhaps only achieved by means of democracy” (p. 4).
Allen introduces what she characterizes as three “guiding design principles” that aid the pursuit of justice: the value and interdependence of negative liberties and positive liberties, a commitment to political equality, and what she calls “difference without domination.” The last design principle directs those who would pursue justice in political societies characterized by social, economic, and political differences to be alert to the possibility that laws, institutions, norms, and other social constraints might contribute to domination, and therefore they should restructure those social constraints in domination-reducing ways.
After introducing her guiding design principles, Allen applies them to what she characterizes as four distinct realms: the political realm, the social realm, the realm through which people define membership in political societies, and the economic realm. Here, her aim is to ascertain which institutions, rules, laws, and norms follow from the guiding design principles in each realm or, in her words, to develop “domain-specific version[s] of the guiding design principles.”
To give readers a sense of both the scope and pragmatic focus of this project, it is worth spelling out some details of these domain-specific applications. In the political realm, the relevant domain-specific principles include the accountability of political authorities to the people; checks and balances that militate against the concentration of power, in whatever form that might take; political inclusiveness; government capacity to act (“energy”); and protections against rights abuses (“republican safety”).
In the social realm, the guiding design principles recommend what Allen calls “a connected society”: that is, one “in which citizens have ample opportunities for both bonding and bridging relationships” (p. 103). In other words, social and cultural rules, norms, and institutions should enable people to form connections that strengthen bonds with members of the particularistic groups to which they belong and with which they identify, and they should encourage people to form ties across such groups, with members of groups to which they do not belong and with which they do not identify.
When it comes to political membership, Allen argues for what calls “polypolitanism”: the idea that people should be enabled and encouraged to develop connections with multiple particularistic groups. Those connections, she writes, should encourage us to be open to “the possibility of embracing many other, nonoverlapping affiliations, both for ourselves and for others” (p. 130). A “polypolitan” system of political membership fosters welcoming and accepting attitudes toward migrants and “draws on the resources of layered polity memberships, multiple affiliations, and multiple pathways to voice to ensure that migrants have access to political equality within receiving countries” (p. 152).
In the economic realm, Allen recommends what she calls “empowering economies.” On her view, among the domain-specific versions of the guiding design principles that apply to the economic sphere is “free labor,” which recommends ending enslavement and wage theft, enabling labor mobility, and promoting “good jobs”; that is, jobs that enable workers to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, career growth, fulfilling work, and free time for other pursuits. Additional domain-specific versions of the guiding principles recommend the organization of firms in ways that promote difference without domination, investment in relationships that bridge the divisions produced by competition, and the use of democratic means to steer economies.
As Allen stresses throughout this book, her principles differ from the principles of justice advanced by John Rawls, who argued in his 1973 Theory of Justice that justice requires an equal distribution of the most extensive set of basic liberties feasible; equal opportunities to attain positions of power and responsibility; and an equal distribution of income, wealth, and other valued resources, unless an unequal distribution benefits the least well-off. Allen’s critique of Rawls is consonant with that Iris Marion Young advanced in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference. For Young, people cannot organize societies justly only by distributing resources and other valued goods fairly. Instead, justice requires democratizing “decisionmaking power and procedures” in multiple realms, including the formal political sphere, civil society, and the economy. On Young’s view, a society is just to the extent that it enables people to develop and exercise their capacities, express their experiences, and participate “in determining [their] action and the conditions of [their] action]” (Young 1990, p. 20).
Danielle Allen likely would characterize the last sentence in the previous paragraph as summarizing Young’s vision of human flourishing. Young sees humans as beings who thrive when they develop and exercise their capacities, express their experiences, and participate in determining their actions and the conditions that shape them. Allen describes herself as a eudaemonist (or, more specifically, a “eudaemonist democratic pragmatist”; p. 7); she believes that, to know what justice is and what justice requires, one needs to know what makes people flourish. Indeed, this belief grounds her key departures from Rawls. For Allen, it is because human flourishing requires being a co-creator of the rules, laws, norms, and other social constraints that delimit one’s action that the road to justice goes through democracy.
Allen’s view of human flourishing strikes me as eminently plausible. However, so does Iris Marion Young’s view, which seems to include, depending on how you count, one or two additional conditions. I am not a eudaemonist, and I am not quite sure how one adjudicates among competing visions of human flourishing. I can imagine a more traditional liberal like John Rawls reading Justice by Means of Democracy and responding, “Allen’s is one possible vision of the good life, but might not another involve the rejection of politics in pursuit of some higher good; for example, a religious purpose that eschews participation in creating and re-creating laws, norms, and other social structures?”
In the acknowledgments to this book, Allen describes her remarkably politically engaged family, which includes her grandfather, who helped found a chapter of the NAACP; her father, who ran in the Republican primary for the 1992 US Senate special election in California; and her aunt, who ran for Congress that same year on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in California’s District 13. As these examples attest, an important part of what it means to live a good life can involve participating in politics. Yet in my own family, I can think of people for whom politics is sufficiently emotionally taxing, even anxiety inducing, that participating politically inhibits (to recall Iris Marion Young’s vision of human flourishing) the development and exercise of their capacities. Some people seem to flourish when they turn away from the project of participating in co-creating the conditions that structure social action and toward other purposes such as artistic expression, spiritual fulfillment, or intellectual discovery. Perhaps the trouble—the injustice—that such choices highlight is a politics so divisive, so pernicious that it undermines (some) people’s well-being. If so, then Danielle Allen’s vision of justice provides an excellent guide for the challenging work of re-democratizing our politics.
