A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years?

Abstract

This article explores why over the past thirty years political theorists largely failed to address the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the debilitating effects of growing inequality on the lives of ordinary people and on the nature of democracy. The article argues that the predominant focus of political theory from the 1980s onwards on the role of group identity in political action and on epistemological questions of the nature of the self, while having the positive effect of helping theorists to interrogate forms of domination that cannot be reduced to class, also led many “radical” political theorists to downplay how the macro-structural workings of late capitalism—and the neoliberal erosion of social rights—limit the possibilities for human freedom. The article concludes by arguing that if radical political theory is to inform political practice it must revitalize a theoretical understanding of social solidarity and of democratic equality.

Notes

¹ For a related argument that also examines whether a politics of democratic egalitarianism is feasible under conditions of globalized, late capitalism, see Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality: Reconstructing Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America (New York: Routledge, 2009).

² The most cited work in the politics of difference vein remains Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), and the most influential work in post-structuralist social theory is still Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990).

³ See as indicative of the focus of radical theory on the tension between inequality and democracy, Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); see also C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Michael Walzer, “In Defense of Equality,” Dissent 20:4 (1973), pp. 399–408; Michael Walzer, “Town Meetings and Workers' Control: A Story For Socialists,” Dissent 25:3 (1978), pp. 325–333; and Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (New York: Little Brown, 1960).

⁴ Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); and Robert Dahl, Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). See also Walzer, “Town Meetings and Workers' Control.”

⁵ See Benjamin Page and Jeffrey A. Winters, “Oligarchy in the United States?,” Perspectives on Politics 7:4 (2009), pp. 731–751.

⁶ See Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); see also Martin Gillens, Affluence and Influence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and in a more historical-institutional and less behavioral mode, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

⁷ See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

⁸ The paper treats Iris Marion Young as the most influential and paradigmatic of “difference” theorists. In the past twenty-two years since the publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference only the writings of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas have been cited more than Young's (with Justice and the Politics of Difference having an astounding 7952 cites on Google Scholar). The works of Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and William E. Connolly are treated as representative of radical theorists who draw on post-structuralism. The four theorists analyzed in detail in this article are not selected at random. A recent survey of over six hundred American political theorists ranked three of these four among the top ten most influential political and social theorists writing over the past forty years. See Matthew Moore, “Political Theory Today: Results of a National Survey,” PS: Politics Science and Politics 43:2 (2010), pp. 265–272. In answer to the survey question as to who is “doing excellent work today whose work will be influential during the next twenty years,” Wendy Brown ranked second, William Connolly third and Judith Butler ninth (though Butler is primarily known as a literary critic and gender studies scholar). Young would have undoubtedly been among the top ten if she had not succumbed to a long bout with cancer just before the survey was taken.

⁹ On “performativity” see Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 88–89 and pp. 136–147; and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10, 45.

¹⁰ The “agonal” nature of “anti-foundationalist” politics is stressed in Wendy Brown's State of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

¹¹ Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

¹² For paradigmatic examples of longing for a non-existent past of universal solidarity see Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); see also Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

¹³ Among the classic critiques were Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review LVII (1962), pp. 947–952; and William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1974).

¹⁴ Karl Marx, “The Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), pp. 526–546.

¹⁵ Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference, Or the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14:1 (1988), pp. 33–50.

¹⁶ Seyla Benhabib attempts to merge her Habermasian democratic belief in the possibility of communication across difference with a commitment also to cultural pluralism. See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Benhabib's work is highly promising, but she may be overly optimistic that inter-group communication will lead to the abandonment of illiberal practices by non-democratic cultures living in liberal democracies. Nancy Fraser's emphasis on the need to blend a politics of “redistribution” with a politics of “recognition” comes closest to my own approach; though I am not as certain as she appears to be that the “transformative” or “redistributive” democratization of power relations will lead to a loosening of group identity and thus a decrease in demands for “recognition” by culturally specific groups. See Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-Socialist Age,” New Left Review 212 (1995), pp. 68–93.

¹⁷ See Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

¹⁸ See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference and Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

¹⁹ On the struggle against homophobia within the African-American church see Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Cornel West and bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991).

²⁰ See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 184.

²¹ See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 139–150.

²² Ibid., 115–120.

²³ See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957); and T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), Ch. 4, pp. 65–122. These are two social theorists whose work should be reintroduced into today's democratic theory classroom.

²⁴ See as paradigmatic works, Brown, State of Injury; see also Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 35–58; Butler, Gender Trouble; and Butler, Bodies that Matter; and William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

²⁵ On Foucault's concept of “capillaries of power” that constitute the self, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (eds), The Essential Foucault (New York: New Press, 2004), pp. 229–245.

²⁶ For this criticism see Nancy Fraser, “False Antithesis: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” in Feminist Contentions, Ch. 3, esp. pp. 66–71; see also, Susan Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), esp. Ch. 1, “Constructing Identity,” pp. 1–37; and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), in passim.

²⁷ On “performative” resistance see Butler, Feminist Contentions, pp. 45–46; see also Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 88–89 and pp. 136–147; and Butler, Bodies that Matter, pp. 10, 45 and, in passim, Chs 3 and 4.

²⁸ See Wendy Brown, “The Mirror of Pornography,” in State of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), Ch. 4, pp. 77–95.

²⁹ For Brown's post-Arendtian, post-Nietzschean conception of identity, see in particular Chapter 2, Wendy Brown, “Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations,” in State of Injury, pp. 30–51. Connolly rests the nature of radical democracy in the resistance to any fixed or “normalized” conceptions of the self or of institutions and practices. Everything must be open to constant reconfiguration and contestation. See Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, esp. pp. 85–93 for his critique of “normalization.”

³⁰ See Butler, Feminist Contentions, pp. 47–51.

³¹ R.H. Tawney, Equality, 4th ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 197.

³² The concept of equality of standing or democratic equality advanced here is, in some ways, a more political and policy-oriented version of Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's human capabilities approach to theorizing about justice. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).