Response to Ian Shapiro, ‘On non-domination’

Ian Shapiro’s ‘On Non-domination’ is the prolegomenon to a major restatement of democratic theory to be published by Harvard University Press. Shapiro’s work in political theory is characterized by a thorough-going pragmatism, by, that is, a deep concern with the way that ideas work in practice.¹ Yet this article is a fairly abstract exercise in theory, for the most part ‘conducted,’ as he says of Quentin Skinner’s account of freedom as non-domination, ‘at a pretty high altitude’ (321); for it is at that level that Shapiro positions himself against the other leading contenders in the bid to provide a satisfactory theory of democratic justice. Shapiro himself descends from this altitude only when he considers the work of Philip Pettit, Skinner’s close ally in developing a ‘republican’ account of non-domination, because, as Shapiro says, Pettit, in contrast to Skinner, engages ‘with institutional arrangements more directly’ (321). My response examines some of the possible institutional implications of Shapiro’s position that arise from his exercise in establishing a critical distance between himself and Pettit; in particular, the implications for the legally regulated processes in which democracies arrive at their judgments about policy and implement them.

In one significant respect, Shapiro’s account is closest to both Skinner and Pettit because for him non-domination is the foundational principle of democracy and they are the principal exponents of a neo-republican account of freedom as non-domination. At the outset of his argument, Shapiro sets out what he takes to be the basic problem for democratic theory to address: people’s vulnerability to domination. Neither democratic justice itself nor the role of a principle of non-domination within it can be explained, he argues, by a fundamental commitment to egalitarian or distributive considerations; and thus, he provides a detailed set of reasons for rejecting egalitarian theories of justice aimed principally at John Rawls but including a variety of other members of the egalitarian family.

One could quibble with Shapiro about how successfully he distinguishes his position from positions within the egalitarian family, despite the cogency of his arguments against Rawls and others. Shapiro says that non-domination has to take equality seriously insofar as ‘egalitarian distributive arrangements serve the goal of non-domination’ (296) and his ‘power-based resourcism’ (293-95, 308, 315) requires attention to people’s ‘basic interests in the security, nutrition, health, and education needed to develop into, and live as, normal adults’ (294). The basic interests include ‘developing the capacities needed to function effectively in the prevailing economic, technological, and institutional system, governed as a democracy’ (294).

Now Rawls’s redistributive principle – that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so as to benefit the least advantaged members of society² – can, without any violence, be understood as intended to ensure that all can participate effectively in the collective life of their society. And his constraint on such redistribution that it must be consistent with the equal right of all citizens to ‘a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties’³ is one that Shapiro would surely endorse, since such a scheme is part of the constitutional structure of democracy. In addition, there is hardly any difference between standard liberal formulations of the egalitarian intuition that one of the marks of a just society is that individuals should be able to pursue their own conception of the good in their own way, on the one hand, and formulations that talk of effective participation in collective life, on the other, unless the latter suggest that individuals’ lives are impoverished if they are not active participants in politics or fail to accept some robust account of the community’s values. And Shapiro makes no such suggestion. Rather, he says that ‘the basic challenge from the standpoint of non-domination [is] to enable people, as much as possible, to pursue the activities that give life its meaning and purpose while limiting the potential for domination that accompanies those activities’ (314). Democracy, on his view, is instrumentally valuable: it is essential to the project of ‘domesticating the power...