{"id":193751,"date":"2026-06-17T11:46:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T19:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193751"},"modified":"2026-06-17T14:16:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T22:16:34","slug":"improving-on-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193751","title":{"rendered":"‘Improving on Democracy’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the title of chapter two of the 2023 book, Making Democratic Theory Democratic<\/em><\/a>.
\nStephen Turner wrote: <\/p>\n

In the decades after John Rawls<\/a>‘ A Theory of Justice<\/a> (1971) and especially over the past 20 years or so, many books have been published with the same aim: to vindicate and explicate something that is usually called social democracy<\/a> on philosophical or social science grounds. After the intense ideological rivalries of the twentieth century, this political ideal has become the default position of virtually all academic thinkers in relevant areas. A century that began with the frank acceptance of the irreconcilability of political value choices, and proceeded with extraordinarily intense ideological warfare, ended with a surprisingly broad, though loose, consensus. One could list such works as Philip Pettit<\/a> (1997), Amartya Sen<\/a> (2009), and Alan Gewirth<\/a> (1978) as examples. And in sociology, one could give Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (Bourdieu, 2008; Wacquant<\/a>, 2005) and J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/a> (2001) as more or less full members of this consensus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After Rawls<\/a> (1921-2002), Anglophone political philosophy converged on an egalitarian liberalism. Most people working in the field treated it as a given. Dworkin<\/a>, Nagel<\/a>, Scanlon<\/a>, Nussbaum<\/a>, and the analytic Marxists around G.A. Cohen<\/a> (1941-2009) argued about how to specify equality, not whether to pursue it. Nozick<\/a> (1938-2002) put the libertarian objection with force in Anarchy, State, and Utopia<\/em><\/a> (1974) and then lost the departmental argument; he drifted toward the center. As a report on the field, Turner describes something true and widely noticed. Cohen complained about the same convergence from his left.
\n“Social democracy” flattens distinct projects. Rawls preferred property-owning democracy<\/a> to the welfare state and worried that welfare-state capitalism left too much wealth concentrated. Pettit<\/a> (b. 1945) in Republicanism<\/a> (1997) starts from freedom as non-domination, a republican<\/a> rather than a liberal premise, even where the policy is social democracy<\/a>. Sen<\/a> (b. 1933) in The Idea of Justice<\/em><\/a> (2009) attacks Rawls’s habit of designing ideal institutions and pushes the capabilities approach<\/a> instead. Filing all of them under one consensus catches a family resemblance in conclusions while smoothing over disagreement in foundations.
\nGewirth<\/a> (1912-2004) sits oddest in the list. Reason and Morality<\/em><\/a> (1978) derives rights to freedom from the logic of agency, the Principle of Generic Consistency<\/a>. He reaches welfare conclusions by a rationalist route most Rawlsians rejected. He joins the consensus by destination.
\nThe sociology pairing runs uneven. Habermas<\/a> (b. 1929) fits. Discourse ethics<\/a>, deliberative democracy<\/a>, his defense of the constitutional welfare state and then the European project all sit inside the camp Turner names. Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) fits worse, and Turner hedges with “more or less” because he needs the hedge. Bourdieu did not write normative political philosophy and often treated the universalist normative project with suspicion. His late activism against neoliberalism, in Acts of Resistance<\/em><\/a> and Firing Back<\/em><\/a>, reads as combative left politics. Wacquant<\/a> (b. 1960) carries the same critical edge.
\nInside normative political philosophy the phrase “relevant areas” holds. Widen the lens to economics, public choice, much of law and economics, or large stretches of political science, and the consensus thins. Chicago economics<\/a> and public choice theory<\/a> ran strong through the same decades.
\nThe century-long arc is Weber’s home ground. The century opened with the value pluralism<\/a> of Weber<\/a> (1864-1920) and the decisionism<\/a> of Schmitt<\/a> (1888-1985), the claim that ultimate political commitments resist rational adjudication. It ran through fascism, communism, and liberalism at war. It closed, in the academy at least, with the loose post-1989 settlement that Fukuyama<\/a> (b. 1952) caught. This settlement does not make evolutionary sense. There’s no one method of political organization that is fitter than all alternatives on a global scale. Different situations create incentives for different politics.
\nTurner names the consensus to question it. He says the vindication books assume what they set out to prove, that social democracy became the default by drift rather than by defeating value pluralism on the merits. Weber’s problem never got solved. It got dropped. So if you ask whether the academy converged, yes. If you ask whether the convergence rests on the demonstrations its authors claim for it, the answer is no.
\nTurner wrote: <\/p>\n

The common element in the accounts that are directly concerned with vindicating this consensus is that they attempt to replace the terms of the earlier twentieth-century debate, especially the terms of the conflict between justice and freedom. These writers all reject the idea of freedom as non-interference or choice as inadequate or wrong; they all decry great wealth, the power of money or the power that money gives people, as a form of injustice; and all involve some idea of autonomy governed by reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True.
\nThe earlier quarrel set freedom against justice: Hayek (1899-1992) against the planners, Berlin (1909-1997) sorting negative from positive liberty, the Cold War habit of treating redistribution as a tax on liberty. The post-Rawls move dissolves the quarrel by redefining freedom as non-domination, or as capability, or as autonomy, and redistribution no longer costs you freedom; it buys you more of it. The trade-off vanishes. Turner names the move as evasion.
\nHis three features hold at different strengths. The rejection of freedom as non-interference is solid. Pettit builds non-domination against it. Sen builds capability against it. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) wrote the essay against it.
\nThe decrying of great wealth needs a qualifier. Rawls does not condemn wealth. The difference principle licenses inequality when it lifts the worst off, and his worry about money turns on the power it buys over politics. Sen centers deprivation at the bottom more than accumulation at the top. The accurate version runs narrower: the camp inverts the libertarian presumption. Nozick treats market wealth as presumptively just and redistribution as the thing owing a defense. The consensus flips that. Great wealth becomes suspect.
\nAutonomy governed by reason is the Kantian inheritance showing through. Rawls and the reasonable, public reason, Kantian constructivism. Habermas and communicative reason. Gewirth and the logic of agency. The person in these accounts is a rational chooser whose freedom lies in reasoned self-governance. That separates the camp from the economists, who model preference satisfaction, and from Weber, who held that reason cannot rank our final ends. The Kantian conception of autonomy is the quiet premise that lets the consensus treat its politics as the deliverance of reason and not as one value choice among rivals.
\nThe clause fits Bourdieu poorly because he spent a career against the picture of the reasoning chooser. Habitus runs below reason.
\nSo: fair as a map of the philosophers, looser at the edges where the sociologists sit. The shared content Turner lists describes egalitarian liberalism. The camp did not win the old argument between freedom and justice. It retired the argument by rebuilding the word freedom so the conflict could not arise. A defender calls that progress. Turner is preparing to call it a convenient way around Weber’s question, and on this passage he has the better of it, because the redefinition gets asserted across the camp far more than it gets defended.
\nTurner: <\/p>\n

The arguments needed to produce the conclusions are less stable than the conclusions: they know that freedom as non-interference is wrong because it comes to the wrong result, namely, a non-egalitarian (as well as vulgar and money-grubbing) society, but they differ in how to replace this notion of freedom. They use the language of rights, but only if it is extended to cover rights to well-being, and they acknowledge that there are collisions between these rights and the rights of classical liberalism, which they concede must give way, to some extent. They cannot bring themselves to be simply radical egalitarians, even if in their heart of hearts they think reason and justice dictate equality, because they know that this outcome can only be produced by means that are visibly oppressive, and worse, undemocratic, in that they would never get the consent of people who have had the experience of freedom and a more or less meritocratic order. So, they are against something else: domination, a notion that can be extended to cover all sorts of humiliations, such as a lack of recognition of identities, as well as a lack of money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turner stops describing the consensus and starts diagnosing it.
\nThe opening claim is right. The conclusions outrank the arguments. The egalitarian result sits fixed, and freedom as non-interference gets convicted because it yields the wrong society. The history backs him. The camp converged on the same politics from incompatible foundations: Rawls<\/a> from a contract, Sen<\/a> from capability, Gewirth<\/a> from agency, Dworkin (Ronald Dworkin<\/a>, 1931-2013) from equality of resources, Cohen<\/a> from Marx, Nussbaum (Martha Nussbaum<\/a>, b. 1947) from Aristotle. Foundations that contradict each other cannot all be the reason for a shared conclusion. When the conclusion holds steady while the premises under it keep changing, the conclusion came first. Rawls conceded this when he built reflective equilibrium<\/a> into the method, which licenses adjusting principles to fit considered judgments. The field’s own procedure lets the conclusion discipline the argument.
\nA defender says convergence from many directions can mark a robust conclusion. Turner sees rationalization, the defender sees consilience<\/a>. To win, Turner needs to show the politics came before the philosophy in time and held independent of it. For most of the camp that holds biographically.
\nThe middle of the paragraph is accurate. They keep rights language and stretch it to cover well-being. They admit the new rights collide with the old classical-liberal ones, and they concede the old ones give way. The hedge “to some extent” is right. The camp subordinates property and contract to welfare and equality.
\nThe mind-reading carries the most risk and the most reward. “In their heart of hearts they think reason and justice dictate equality.” That fits Cohen, who argued in Rescuing Justice and Equality<\/em> that justice is equality and that the inequalities Rawls tolerates reflect the greed of the talented. It fits Rawls poorly, since Rawls had principled reasons for permitting inequality and did not pine for a leveled order. As a claim about “they” it overreaches. As a claim about the left wing of the camp it lands.
\nFull equality needs coercion that a free people with a memory of choice will not consent to. Turner adds a turn to the old argument. The trouble with radical leveling is not only that it fails the way Hayek<\/a> said it fails. It cannot win consent, which makes it undemocratic, which the camp cannot stomach. So the camp moderates. The moderation marks a democratic ceiling they accept, not a ceiling on how much equality they think justice demands. That gap, between the equality they half believe in and the equality consent allows, is the thing Turner has found, and it holds for the egalitarian wing.
\nThen the payoff: domination as the concept elastic enough to do the work. Turner describes a migration in left theory. Pettit<\/a> makes non-domination the republican flagship. Iris Marion Young<\/a> (1949-2006) widened injustice past distribution to oppression and domination in her five faces. The recognition turn in Honneth (Axel Honneth<\/a>, b. 1949) and the redistribution-versus-recognition argument with Fraser (Nancy Fraser<\/a>, b. 1947) ran on the same question Turner names: whether the left’s complaint concerns money or standing. Domination answers both at once. It covers the man with no money and the group with no recognition, and it folds the two agendas into one vocabulary. Turner reads the elasticity as convenience. A defender reads it as a real genus, the insight that deprivation and humiliation are both forms of subjection to another’s power. The early version in Pettit holds tight enough to look like a discovery. The later sprawl, where domination stretches to cover every slight, looks like the basket Turner describes. His charge fits the trajectory better than the origin.
\nSo the paragraph is fair where it points to structure and overconfident where it reads minds. The conclusion-first claim, the welfare-rights concession, the democratic ceiling on equality, and the migration to domination all hold. The blanket attribution of a buried radical-egalitarian faith to the whole camp does not. Turner sits closer to right than wrong, and the place he is most right is the least flattering to the consensus: it pursues the most equality consent will bear, calls the residue domination, and keeps quiet that it has traded the equality it believes in for the equality it can get.<\/p>\n

From a David Pinsof perspective, all of this reasoning is bullshit<\/a>. Social democracy ideas are not compelling as descriptions of reality, but holding them marks you as a member of the educated class. The consensus reads as a class badge<\/a>. Professors trade in cultural capital. A creed that ranks reason, taste, and virtue over wealth lifts the people who hold the first three and lack the fourth. Pinsof hears the educated class asserting its own hierarchy over the hierarchy of the rich. The animus against great wealth is not disinterested justice. It is the move of a status group that wins on reason and loses on money, redrawing the scoreboard so its own currency comes out on top. The Kantian flourish, autonomy governed by reason, flatters the priesthood of reason-users. The apparatus crowns the men who built it.
\nThe fancy talk pulls double duty. Elaborate argument signals intelligence, which buys status, and it lands on the team conclusion, which buys belonging. The pattern Turner found, incompatible foundations under one shared conclusion, is the signature Pinsof predicts. Loyalty fixes the conclusion. The foundations are each thinker’s private peacock display, a chance to show he can run the maze better than the next man. Rawls, Sen, Gewirth, all arrive where the coalition already stood. The arrival was the point. The route was the flex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the title of chapter two of the 2023 book, Making Democratic Theory Democratic. Stephen Turner wrote: In the decades after John Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice (1971) and especially over the past 20 years or so, many books … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stephen-turner"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t