Justice By Means Of Democracy

"Danielle Allen revisits Rawls' landmark A Theory of Justice to make the case that justice, which she defines as the necessary conditions for human flourishing, requires the protection of political equality or the ability of all people who wish to participate in the political process, to do so on an equal footing. She argues that Rawls, and other thinkers in his wake who focused on protection of individuals from intrusion of the state, as well as many economists with their focus on utilitarian approaches to public policy, have neglected political equality which has led to the denial of justice to many in our society. At a time when economic and political inequality have increased dramatically, and political inequality is threatened by efforts to limit the ability of many to engage in the most basic political right, voting, this book could not be timelier. This book builds on Allen's Berlin Lectures on COVID that we just published in arguing that policymaking fails when it excludes whole communities from participation in the political process. This manuscript is based on the Berlin Lectures that Allen originally intended to deliver in 2020. Allen substituted the lectures on policymaking for COVID given the urgency of the pandemic"--

Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure, and the other philosophical, focused on education’s value and purpose within the larger society. Rarely have these separate approaches been brought into the same conversation. Education, Justice, and Democracy does just that, offering an intensive discussion by highly respected scholars across empirical and philosophical disciplines. The contributors explore how the institutions and practices of education can support democracy, by creating the conditions for equal citizenship and egalitarian empowerment, and how they can advance justice, by securing social mobility and cultivating the talents and interests of every individual. Then the authors evaluate constraints on achieving the goals of democracy and justice in the educational arena and identify strategies that we can employ to work through or around those constraints. More than a thorough compendium on a timely and contested topic, Education, Justice, and Democracy exhibits an entirely new, more deeply composed way of thinking about education as a whole and its importance to a good society.

Around the globe, democracy appears broken. With political and socioeconomic inequality on the rise, we are faced with the urgent question of how to better distribute power, opportunity, and wealth in diverse modern societies. This volume confronts the dilemma head-on, exploring new ways to combat current social hierarchies of domination. Using examples from the United States, India, Germany, and Cameroon, the contributors offer paradigm-changing approaches to the concepts of justice, identity, and social groups while also taking a fresh look at the idea that the demographic make-up of institutions should mirror the make-up of a populace as a whole. After laying out the conceptual framework, the volume turns to a number of provocative topics, among them the pernicious tenacity of implicit bias, the logical contradictions inherent to the idea of universal human dignity, and the paradoxes and problems surrounding affirmative action. A stimulating blend of empirical and interpretive analyses, Difference without Domination urges us to reconsider the idea of representation and to challenge what it means to measure equality and inequality.

More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do? Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Robert Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.

Democracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the book argues that Americans think about democracy in ways that go beyond voting or elected representation. Instead, citizens have rich and substantive views about the material conditions that democracy should produce, which draw from their beliefs about equality, fairness, and justice. The authors construct a typology of views about democracy. Procedural views of democracy take a minimalistic quality. While voting and fair treatment are important to this vision of democracy, ideas about equality are mostly limited to civil liberties. In contrast, social views of democracy incorporate both civil and economic equality; according to people with these views, democracy ought to meet the basic social and material needs of citizens. Complementing these two groups are moderate and indifferent views about democracy. While moderate views sit somewhere in between procedural and social perspectives regarding the role of democracy in producing social and economic equality, indifferent views of democracy involve disaffection toward it. For a small group of apathetic citizens, democracy is an ambiguous and ill-defined concept.

Western moral and political theory in the last two centuries has widely held that morality and politics are independent of a divine reality. Claiming that this consensus is flawed, prominent theologian Franklin I. Gamwell argues that there is a necessary relation between moral worth and belief in God. Without appealing to the beliefs of any specific religion, Gamwell defends a return to the view that moral and political principles depend on a divine purpose. To separate politics from the divine misrepresents the distinctive character of human freedom, Gamwell maintains, and thus prevents a full understanding of the nature of justice. Principles of justice define "democracy on purpose" as the political form in which we pursue the divine good. Engaging in a dialogue with such major representatives of the dominant consensus as Kant, Habermas, and Rawls, and informed by the philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, this book makes the case for a neoclassical metaphysics that restores a religious sensibility to our political life.

The essays in this volume take off from themes in the work of eminent philosopher and political scientist Joshua Cohen. Cohen is a deeply influential thinker who has written on deliberative democracy, freedom of expression, Rawlsian theory, global justice, and human rights. The essays gathered here both engage with Cohen's work and expand upon it, embodying his commitment to the idea that analytical work by philosophers and social scientists matters to our shared public life and to democracy itself. The contributors offer novel perspectives on pressing issues of public policy from accountability for sexual violence to exploitation in international trade. The volume is organized around three central ideas. The first concerns democracy, specifically how we can improve collective decision-making both by elucidating our normative principles and enacting institutional changes. The second idea centers on how we confront injustice, investigating the role of emotions, social norms, and culture in democratic politics and public discussion. The final section explores how we develop political principles and values in an interdependent world, one in which theories of justice and forms of cooperation are increasingly extending beyond the state. The principle uniting this collection is that ideas matter-they can guide us in understanding how to confront difficult global problems such as the fragility of democratic institutions, the place of sovereignty in a globalizing world, and the persistence of racial injustice.

Today democracy is increasingly recognized around the world as the only form of government with moral legitimacy. The problems of establishing and preserving truly democratic institutions, however, vary dramatically from culture to culture. Justice and Democracy explores these problems from a wide range of perspectives, theoretical and practical. It addresses problems related to the distortion of democratic decision-making by the gross disparities in wealth that arise in capitalist economies, and, in particular, focuses on the problems relating to the reconciliation of democratic values with the indigenous religious and social values of a culture.