Politics Against Domination

288 Pages·2016·2.074 MB·English

by  Ian Shapiro

POLITICS AGAINST DOMINATION

P O L I T I C S A G A I N S T
(cid:85)
D O M I N A T I O N

(cid:85) IAN SHAPIRO (cid:85)
(cid:85)
THE BELKNAP PRESS
OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2016
Copyright © 2016 by Ian Shapiro
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Shapiro, Ian, author.
Politics against domination / Ian Shapiro.
pages cm
“This book is a companion to Demo cratic Justice, which appeared
in 1999.”—P reface.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-74384-7 (alk. paper)
1. Equality before the law. 2. Associations, institutions, etc.— Political
aspects. 3. Power (Social sciences) 4. Justice. 5. Po liti cal science.
6. Intergroup relations. I. Title.
JC578.S44 2016
323.42— dc23
2015031485
In Memoriam Brian Barry

CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. Adapting against Domination 1
2. Power and Majority Rule 31
3. The Stakes of Po liti cal Confl ict 46
4. Democracy against Republicanism 62
5. Against World Government 103
6. Resisting Domination across Borders 131
7. Politics against Domination 172
Notes 187
Index 261

PREFACE
This book is a companion to Demo cratic Justice, which appeared in 1999.
There I developed an account of justice rooted in the impulse to resist
domination, and I applied it to the analy sis of major civil institutions. A
separate volume was promised on public institutions. This is not exactly
the book I had in mind, but Chapters 2 through 4 come close enough to
delivering on the pledge that they render another book from me on the
subject unnecessary. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with global challenges to an
antidomination ethic that I had not envisaged writing about at the time.
But these challenges have become so intimately connected with national
politics in recent de cades that it seems impossible to think about the ex-
ercise of public power without attending to them. Not that my discussion
of t hese matters is comprehensive. In par tic u lar, it only scratches the sur-
face of distributive justice considerations that I w ill address more fully in
a book on democracy and distribution that is currently in preparation.
The term nondomination carries a lot of freight in this book. Its dis-
tinctive appeal for me is that it anchors philosophical refl ection in real
politics. Specifi cally, it captures the reactive character of the human con-
dition in ways that ideals like freedom, equality, and impartiality do not.
Po liti cal phil os o phers pay too little attention to the real ity that p eople
know a lot more about what they are against than what they favor, and
that one of the central things they resist is domination or the prospect of
it. My work takes this fact about the h uman condition seriously, and
builds on it.
A number of other writers have also found nondomination fruitful,
though for varying reasons. Michel Foucault brought the idea of resisting
domination to my generation’s consciousness with a series of brilliant his-
tories of the dark side of Western cultural and intellectual history. Jürgen
Habermas developed the idea of an ideal speech situation as the antithesis