Liberal political philosophy has been under fire from the start. One of the essential facts about this centuries-old tradition is its resilience—fellow travelers will call it adaptability; anti-liberals might characterize it as slipperiness—in the face of attacks from both right and left. Two related critiques are commonly lodged at liberalism by thinkers aligned with emancipatory political projects: that the tradition, with its defense of private-property rights, authorizes economic inequality; and that it hollows out political life by theorizing the state as little more than the protector of individual rights. According to this latter critique, man no longer resembles the “political animal” described by the ancients but rather an isolated creature pursuing his private interests in civil society.
In his influential 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls attempts to redirect liberalism’s attention to the demands of social and economic equality. His famous difference principle—that inequalities in wealth or social status are justifiable only if they are to the benefit of the worst off—would, if realized, be almost revolutionary in its leveling of existing disparities between the rich and poor. But in the first part of her new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, the political theorist Danielle Allen argues that Rawls sacrifices political equality and the intrinsic value of political participation at the altar of economic redistribution. In the rest of the book, Allen develops a theory of justice that recovers the principle of political equality and the intrinsic value of political participation for liberal political philosophy.
Rawlsian liberalism, in Allen’s reading, prizes freedoms of individual autonomy and conscience—sometimes dubbed the “negative liberties”—over the positive liberties that guarantee meaningful influence over political decisions. Why does this become a problem? Because human beings are creatures who have purposes, who make judgments about how to pursue their own flourishing. This purposiveness, this capacity for judgement, is the basis of human moral equality. But our social context supplies many of the ingredients that we use to craft our purposes. What’s more, our social context constrains us in our pursuit of autonomy: every society enables certain courses of life and disables others. Political empowerment—the capacity to influence the rules that constrain a collective—is thus an essential component of human autonomy. If our equality is to be reflected in the political sphere, our polities must be democratic. Democracy is not just one regime type among many; it is a non-negotiable requirement of human equality.
Unlike many other versions of liberalism, Allen’s “power-sharing liberalism” sees justice as the ground of human flourishing. Armed with three principles of justice—political equality; the non-sacrificability of both negative and positive liberty; and “difference without domination,” a principle that prohibits any social distinctions from leaving some at the mercy of others—Allen devotes most of the book to teasing out the demands of human flourishing across the political, economic, and social spheres. She presents us with several subsidiary ideals across various domains of human life: a constitutional democracy that is egalitarian and participatory; a social sphere that prizes human connection and solidarity; and an economy that empowers everyone to satisfy their obligations as citizens.
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