Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy

Stephen Turner writes:

Works from Harvard in political theory have a special sociological interest because they come from a center of power and indicate the probable rationale for where the elite are next taking the government. The last 50 years have been dominated by Rawlsian redistributionism. Danielle Allen’s new book proposes a radicalization, correcting the flaws of Rawls. But it retains the basic animus of Rawlsianism, which is that justice is fundamentally about equality. The book is deeply indebted to the Harvard milieu and to a large group of interlocutors…

The focus of much of this work has been on diversity, meaning racial difference should be taken into account in normative democratic theorizing under the slogan “difference without domination” — the title of her co-edited collection with Rohini Somanathan. “Domination” is a term taken from a non-Harvard source, Phillip Pettit, who made the interesting move to replace the liberal notion of freedom as “non-interference” by the state (i.e., “negative freedom”) with the idea of non-domination. The point of the replacement was to relativize the goal of limiting power to the common knowledge of the people in the society in question about what was and was not legitimate interference in people’s lives. This meant that state intervention had no absolute limits. Some forms of power which rested on absolute rights of a negative kind, for example, socially disapproved cruelties, could be legitimately limited by the state. But, it also opened the door to “positive” interventions for the good of the recipient, however unwelcome…

…the majority may want coercive acts by the state that the minority regards as unjust and oppressive. And the minority may be oppressed by what is allowed, either by the state or by negative liberties. As Lawrence Bobo puts it, “modern racial inequality relies upon the market and informal racial bias to recreate, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.” Hence, the phrase “Laissez Faire Racism.” These are hierarchies of domination, which unjustly restrict opportunity, power, and influence. Rawlsian notions of justice, which preserve negative freedoms and prioritize redistribution with a market economy, do not touch, and indeed can exacerbate racial injustice, and assume homogeneity. Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, oriented to achieving a transformative consensus, fail to respect differences that should be preserved. Justice requires something else…

Democracy requires loss: people can vote, but they must “sacrifice” to the majority, which frequently(?) disempowers them. As a result, “democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”9 This turns to the emotional matters. To make these sacrifices acceptable, they should be honored as such, and grievances should be open to redress. And this can happen only if there is a basis in “friendship,” in which we are not strangers but are vulnerable to one another.

“Difference” is a challenge to this: it estranges and allows us to evade the mutual vulnerability necessary for friendship and trust. We need, she concludes, new habits for dealing with one another in spite of difference. Friendship answers this need: “friendship’s basic habits for establishing equality of material benefit, recognition, and agency do the same work as justice….the core practices that are necessary for a relationship to count as friendship are practices to equalize benefits and burdens and power sharing.” There is a further complication, addressed in Allen and Light’s volume: immigration. Can these arguments apply to immigration? To the digital sphere?

So who rules in this new order? On the one hand, she claims to support egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and self-transformative political liberty. On the other, she concedes that participation will not appeal to everyone. Similarly, the activity of political friendship and the making of bridging ties between quasi-representative group members with parallel figures from other groups, which is at the core of her model, will be for the very few. One gets the uncomfortable sense that she is describing a form of rule in which justice-enlightened multi-tasking people with good connections across groups, like herself, use state power to “steer,” one of her favorite terms, the rest of us.”