Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (review)

In Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Carol Gould continues the project she began in Rethinking Democracy (1988) to forge a coherent theory of global democracy from the best of contemporary justice theorizing, feminist philosophy and practice, and democratic theorizing and practice. Along the way, she eloquently and thoroughly maps the rough relationship between democratic theory and democratic practice, and its effect on addressing the challenges to both that globalization presents. Gould's recent book is richly complex and she intricately weaves theory together with practice, traditional concepts with critical re-visions, which will reward the reader with a deeper and more subtle appreciation of the utility of democratic and human rights theories and of their limitations. It is well worth the read.

Gould makes at least three significant contributions to the political philosophic literature on democracy, human rights, and global justice in Globalizing Democracy. First, she elaborates and applies the social ontology she began in Marx's Social Ontology (1978) and applied in Rethinking Democracy (1988). Here, Gould refines the account by demonstrating its application to human rights theory. It is possible, she contends, to conceive of human rights as foundational to an adequate conception of international justice and to a conception of democracy adequate to meet the challenges presented by globalization, without resorting to essentialism or succumbing to the worryingly relativistic social constructivism found in much postmodern theorizing on the subject. Her claim that we ought to understand democracy as framed by an ontologically contextualized conception of human rights is a thought-provoking and challenging refinement.

The second significant contribution this book makes to political philosophy is Gould's refreshing complex re-vision of the relationship between individual and state (something she tackled earlier but refines here) and, with it, a re-vision of the relationships among individuals within and across national borders. In this era of increasingly global trade, production and consumption of goods and services, and expansion of the means of economic production and development, combined with the decreasing power of the nation-state to direct these economic forces toward the public good, it is time to reconsider the proper or just relationship between individuals and nation states. This demands a reconsideration of (1) which individuals belong with which nation states (a question of citizenship), (2) what our obligations are to each other, regardless of nation states (a question of solidarity within and across geopolitical borders), and (3) who the stakeholders are in any given political decision or action (a question of community and democratic control). After finishing Gould's book, readers will no longer be satisfied with rigid and formulaic conceptions of the relationship between the individual and nation state characteristic of much traditional political philosophy. Readers will demand more not only from democratic and human rights theories but also from theories of justice, in their domestic and international guises, as the boundaries between 'domestic' and 'international' increasingly blur under current globalization trends. Gould's book is worth reading if for no other reason than to appreciate her refusal to subsume the complexities that result under the tired and ill-fitting conceptual apparatus of traditional democratic and human rights theories.

Gould does not reject all traditional conceptions and theories. Rather, she makes impressive use of C. B. Macpherson's work on liberal democracy, Isaiah Berlin's conception of positive liberty, and a Hegelian conception of reciprocity through mutual recognition, to refashion the theoretical and practical relationship of democracy and human rights. Gould does not limit her critical insights, however, to traditional realms of normative political theory; rather, she examines the ethical implications of a robust democratic theory on relationships among stakeholders in a variety of economic, social, and personal contexts. She also draws effectively on now-classic feminist theorizing about embodiment to refashion a conception of the relational subject who is taken both as the subject and agent of globalization and as the best possible standard of successful globalization—a globalization that bridges differences through care, strengthens shared bonds of struggle through solidarity, and seizes the democratic potential...