Political Theory

How to do political philosophy

 * Normative models have theoretical value, prescriptive models have pragmatical value
 * Is the best we can aspire to a kind of low-level descriptive account of the various ways in which the political systems that we have encountered in the past or the present are actually organised, or can we get beyond this to formulate some generalisations about the types of systems that exist, or can we even fi nd for the realm of politics something like the general laws that hold in the realm of nature, laws that will support counterfactuals and allow us to predict what will occur?
 * We do not simply want to understand how the apartheid system worked in South Africa in the 1970s; we wish to judge it as being better or worse (in some respect) than other systems. There is no obvious single dimension along which we distinguish the good, the bad, the better, the worse, the best.
 * The assumption that there is a single dimension (moral evaluation) for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority over other types of evaulation, is probably the result of the long history of the Christianisation and then gradual de-Christianisation of Europe. Evaluation need not mean moral evaluation, but might include assessments of efficiency, simplicity, aesthetic appeal etc.
 * Thus, humans want to understand, evaluate and at least have a general orientation for action
 * Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one’s existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behaviour, but these elements are in principle separable.
 * Political philosophy as helping people to understand, evaluate, orient and providing conceptual/theoretical innovation (e.g. the "state")
 * Concepts are introduced together with a theory about the nature and the source of the phenomenon that the concept describes (e.g. the concept "state" has a theory about authority which the abstract entity "state" is supposed to have → thus any concept has an underlying normative theory)
 * Having the concept meant that one saw certain problems clearly, namely, the problems of ensuring political order in an incipiently atomised society without recourse to religion, and it also meant that one had a solution, or at any rate a suggestion for a solution that one could try to put to work. Having the concept of “the state” could give one, then, an important analytic tool that could allow one to think more clearly about social processes in train, and could help one to see what actions are required.
 * Often you can’t see the original problem clearly until you have the conceptual instrument, but having the instrument can then change the “real” situation with which one is confronted so that other, unforeseen problems emerge.

Hobbes & Berlin

 * A common assumption is that freedom primarily requires nonsubjection to the will of others
 * For Hobbes, freedom means that being externally hindered in the choice of a given option takes from your freedom only if you have ‘a will to’ do it; only if you prefer that option; i.e. you are not made unfree by having an option removed or replaced, if you happen not to want to enact it. Put differently, he thinks that your freedom of choice requires only that the option you prefer, and not necessarily any other option, is available to you.
 * For Berlin, your negative liberty is not ensured by being positioned to do what you actually want to do; you must be positioned to do whatever you might happen to want or try to do among the relevant alternatives. Freedom is not “the absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of a man’s desires,” as he later puts it, but “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.” He makes the a priori assumption that you cannot make yourself free by accommodating yourself to restrictive constraints, only by challenging them. We cannot settle for the more parsimonious strategy of worrying about keeping an option open only to the extent that it is likely you will choose it. That would be to worry about promoting your preference-satisfaction, not strictly your freedom of choice.
 * Pettit: you are free in a given choice only to the extent that you are not subject to the will of another as to how you should choose (i.e. ingratiating with the sovereign). As republicans see it, the horse will be unfree just in virtue of having someone in the saddle; free rein is not enough for free choice. A choice is free to the extent that it is not made under conditions of dependency on
 * Wouldn't it be freedom to simply have an intense training in stoic/Buddhist acceptance of the given and then lock oneself up in a room? Or is the slave who has fully embraced his situation free if free is simply the availability of options to choose from? He can buy stuff with his little money after all. In short, adapting your preferences so as to choose/wish things that are accessible to you cannot make you free, even if it can increase your comfort or contentment. Equally, adapting your attitudes so as to ingratiate yourself with me -or with any power in your life-cannot make you free, even if again it can make life more comfortable. Is freedom, then, not being subject to the will of another as to how you should choose? Or is this insufficient since what if the dictator so far always gave me what I wanted? Is it about being sub
 * The ideal of preference-satisfaction requires only that actual interference and actual frustration of preference be avoided. The ideal of freedom of choice requires the avoidance of counterfactual interference too.
 * Some theories claim that freedom is reduced when others frustrate you, some when others interfere with you, some when others dominate you. In maintaining this line, they may focus on the freedom of a particular choice or on the freedom of a person, where people’s freedom as persons is usually identified with their freedom over a common range of important choices, on a common social and legal basis
 * Non-frustration (freedom of choice requires nonfrustration: the option you prefer must be accessible)
 * Non-interference (i.e. Berlin's position; it requires noninterference: every option, preferred or unpreferred, must be accessible—every door must be open)
 * Non-domination (that each option be accessible and that no one have the power to block access; the doors should be open, and there should be no powerful doorkeepers; the conception of freedom as nondomination counts as republican in the classical, neo-Roman sense of the term, according to many recent accounts
 * As the plausibility of the antiadaptation assumption argues that all the doors in a free choice must be open, so the plausibility of the anti-ingratiation assumption argues that there must be no dependence on the good graces of a doorkeeper.
 * The institutional requirements for promoting freedom as non-frustration (i.e. simply don't obstruct people's plans) across a society are weaker than the requirements for promoting freedom as noninterference (providing the possibility for people to reach goals), and they in turn are weaker than the requirements for promoting freedom as non-domination
 * Am I free if the door I want to go through is open while the non-preferred one is locked?
 * Positive vs. negative freedom:
 * What is the source of the constraint? Some theorists include as constraints on freedom only obstacles brought about by human action (e.g. Hayek for whom freedom was free from coercion), whereas others also include obstacles with a natural origin (genetic etc). However, distinguish between the causal location of the source and the actual location: if brainwashed, the causal location is not within myself but the constraint very well
 * A second dimension is that of the type of constraint involved, where constraint types include the types of internal constraint but also various types of constraint located outside the agent, such as physical barriers that render an action impossible. Thus, theorists differ in which types they conceive of as potentially constraining freedom. Strict libertarians with a pure negative view would see "Your money or your life" not as a constraint since it is only the anticipated cost of the one option that would make one unfree. Only when faced with the actual consequent (death) would one be, according to this pure negative view, unfree
 * Egalitarians typically (though not always) assume a broader notion than libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom.
 * Act combinations vs. single acts: although a law against doing some action, x, does not remove the freedom to do x, it nevertheless renders physically impossible certain combinations of actions that include doing x and doing what would be precluded by the punishment. There is a restriction of the person's overall negative freedom — i.e. a reduction in the overall number of act-combinations available to her — even though she does not lose the freedom to do any specific thing taken in isolation
 * If one thinks of freedom as involving self-direction, on the other hand, one has in mind an exercise concept of freedom as opposed to an opportunity concept. If interpreted as an exercise concept, freedom consists not merely in the possibility of doing certain things (i.e. in the lack of constraints on doing them), but in actually doing certain things in certain ways — for example, in realizing one's true self or in acting on the basis of rational and well-informed decisions.
 * Those on the ‘positive’ side see questions about the nature and sources of a person's beliefs, desires and values as relevant in determining that person's freedom, whereas those on the ‘negative’ side, being more faithful to the classical liberal tradition, tend to consider the raising of such questions as in some way indicating a propensity to violate the agent's dignity or integrity. One side takes a positive interest in the agent's beliefs, desires and values, while the other recommends that we avoid doing so.
 * The moralization question: Is the constraint-absence condition qualified by some moralized exemption clause, according to which morally permissible constraints (e.g. "non-arbitrary" or "just" ones) do not count as freedom restricting?
 * The robustness question: Is the constraint-absence condition fortified with a modal robustness requirement, according to which freedom requires the absence of the constraints in a sufficiently large class of possible worlds (relevant hypothetical scenarios) over and above the actual world → Modal robustness: is the scenario robust in a sufficiently high number of hypothetical (but still realistic/accessible) worlds? Or will the whole outcome/thinking change if a minor detail is changed?
 * Arbitrariness is most readily interpreted as a moralized notion: something is arbitrary if it is unjust, illegitimate, capricious, or not governed by the right principles. If non-arbitrary constraints do not restrict freedom, then a justly imprisoned criminal, a justly taxed anarchist, and an addict forced by a legitimate state into rehabilitation for his own good are not made unfree
 * Contrary to some libertarians' or anarchists' views, it is by no means true that additional layers of legislation, regulation, or state activity always reduce people's social freedom. To the contrary, even under the arguably demanding conception of freedom as independence, additional legislation, regulation, or state activity can sometimes promote freedom. And this does not depend at all on any non-arbitrariness criterion for "excusing" certain acts of interference. Rather, it stems from the way in which legislation, regulation, or state activity can affect which worlds are socially possible, relative to the actual world, and which not

List

 * An agent’s freedom to do X is the absence of relevant constraints on the agent’s doing X.
 * This leaves open whether the relevant constraints include only intentionally imposed ones or also non-intentional ones (such as structural constraints, which are byproducts of social arrangements). Similarly, it leaves open whether the relevant constraints include only physical ones or also psychological ones, and so forth.
 * The moralization question: Is the constraint-absence condition qualified by some moralized exemption clause, according to which morally permissible constraints (e.g., “non-arbitrary” or “just” ones) do not count as freedom restricting? For example, non-arbitrary constraints such as just imprisonment, legitimate regulation, or well-designed traffic laws can count as freedom-restricting.
 * The robustness question: Is the constraint-absence condition fortified with a modal robustness requirement, according to which freedom requires the absence of the constraints in a sufficiently large class of possible worlds (relevant hypothetical scenarios) over and above the actual world? Thus, whether someone’s mere power to interfere, even if not actualized gives rise to unfreedom
 * Freedom could require
 * 1) actual/non-moralized: the actual absence of the relevant constraints, without any moralized exemption clause; freedom = actual absence of relevant constraints (e.g. a slave with a friendly master) - Berlin's conception
 * 2) actual/moralized: the actual absence of the relevant constraints, except when those constraints are morally permitted; freedom = actual absence of unjust relevant constraints (a child with parents who protect it from potential danger) - Nozick/Dworkin's moralized liberal freedom
 * 3) robust/non-moralized: the robust absence of the relevant constraints, without any moralized exemption clause; freedom = the robust absence of relevant constraints (e.g. a citizen in a real democracy or rather anarchy?) - List's freedom as independence
 * 4) robust/moralized: the robust absence of the relevant constraints, except when those constraints are morally permitted; freedom = robust absence of arbitrary relevant constraints (e.g. a tax-paying citizen in a real democracy) - Republican freedom in Pettit’s sense


 * The functional-role desideratum: Restrictions on action as sources of unfreedom and hence any such restriction is a legitimate object of justificatory appraisal ("on what grounds are you locking me up/restricting my freedom?"). The conception picks out as sources of unfreedom those modal constraints on action (by which we mean actual or possible constraints) that stand in need of justification

Egalitarianism

 * Distinguish egalitarian (distributive) justice:
 * Currency
 * Welfare/opportunity for
 * Resources
 * Capabilities
 * Advantage
 * Shape
 * Equality
 * Priority (prioritize the worse-off)
 * Sufficiency (everyone have enough)
 * Scope (to whom does the egalitarian justice apply?)
 * Local
 * Global

Cohen (welfarist)

 * An equalisandum claim specifies that which ought to be equalized, what people should be rendered equal in. An unqualified or strong equalisandum claim, says that people should be as equal as possible in the dimension it specifies. A qualified or weak equalisandum claim says that they should be as equal as possible in some dimension but subject to whatever limitations need to be imposed in deference to other values: those limitations are not specified by the claim in question.
 * An egalitarian objection rests on a view about the right way to treat people equally. The egalitarian objector thinks that people should be (to some extent) equal in something other than what the claim he opposes specifies. Thus, the egalitarian objector does not object to the strength of that claim as such only to the thing in which equality should exist
 * A nonegalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim says that, while the claim might correctly identify what should be equalized, it fails to defer to nonegalitarian values which restrict the extent to which the form of equality it proposes should be pursued - i.e. conflict between two things that should be equal
 * In short: it's about the thing to be equalized as well as the extent to and ways in which it should be equalized if the equalizing happens to detriment of other things to be equalized/conflicting things.
 * A large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the influence of brute luck on distribution
 * Equal opportunity for welfare vs equal access to advantage
 * Equality of resources vs. equality of welfare vs. equality of opportunity for welfare vs. equality of access for advantage:
 * Welfare egalitarians want equality of welfare (welfare defined as happy state of consciousness + satisfaction of the preferred state of the world) → but what if my welfare is only fulfilled if I torture? → Offensive tastes criticism of welfare: the pleasure a person takes in discriminating against other people or in subjecting others to a lesser liberty should not count equally with other satisfactions in the calculus of justice
 * Expensive tastes criticism: what if one person's welfare is high with beans and the other needs expensive wine for his welfare? → a welfare egalitarian must, ceteris paribus, provide the epicure with a higher income than the person of modest taste
 * Equality of opportunity for welfare might be a better reading of egalitarianism than equality of welfare itself (since some willingly gamble away their opportunity or forego it as self-denial).
 * Cohen's idea: egalitarianism as the elimination of involuntary disadvantage (i.e. for which I cannot be held responsible since it doesn't reflect choices I made/would have made
 * Cohen wants equal access for advantage (he prefers 'access' instead of 'opportunity' since an incapable person might very well have an opportunity but no access due to being mentally incapable & 'advantage' as more inclusive than 'welfare')
 * Cohen worries about choice and responsibilty: if you're responsible for your expensive preferences, it's not our job to satisfie them → Cohen assumes that there is at least some free will because witout free will we wouldn't be responsible
 * Egalitarians would give a free wheelchair to a handicapped person even if she was happy (i.e. equality of resources trumps equality of welfare since she already is happy)
 * Take a man who can easily move his arms but it hurts, i.e. it is not difficult but costly. The extreme of the difficulty continuum is the 'impossible' whereas the extreme of costliness is the 'unbearable'
 * Whatever number of dimensions the space of disadvantage may have, egalitarianism, on my reading, cuts through each of its dimensions, judging certain inequalities of advantage as acceptable and others as not, its touchstone being a set of questions about the responsibility or lack of it of the disadvantaged agent.
 * A person with wantonly expensive tastes has no claim on us, but neither does a person whose powers are feeble because he recklessly failed to develop them. There is no moral difference, from an egalitarian point of view, between a person who irresponsibly acquires (or blamelessly chooses to develop) an expensive taste and a person who irresponsibly loses (or blamelessly chooses to consume) a valuable resource. The right cut is between responsibility and bad luck, not between preferences and resources.
 * Dworkin says: sorry, Louis, we egalitarians do not finance expensive tastes; whereas I say: sorry Louis, we egalitarians do not finance expensive tastes which people choose to develop (or which they can unlearn) → in this case, egalitarians have good reason not to minister to deliberately cultivated expensive tastes, and equality of welfare must, therefore, be rejected.
 * Expensive tastes are embarrassing for the theory that equality means equality of welfare precisely because we believe that equality condemns rather than recommends compensating for deliberately cultivated expensive tastes
 * For some expensive/difficult to obtain tastes, it is its unchosen and uncontrolled, rather than its dispreferred, character, which renders compensation for it appropriate. Meaning that it's a piece of bad luck not that he has the taste itself but that it happens to be expensive. Whether I identify with my expensive taste preference or not, need not matter too much because identification and disidentification matter for egalitarian justice only if and insofar as they indicate presence and absence of choice.
 * On either side of the preference/circumstance line people both find things and form things.
 * The distinction required by equality of resources is the distinction between those beliefs and attitudes that define what a successful life would be like, which the ideal assigns to the person, and those features of body or mind or personality that provide means or impediments to that success, which the ideal assigns to the person's circumstances
 * Cheerfulness is a welfare-enhancer independently of being a goal-promoter.

Anderson

 * Recent egalitarian writing has lost sight of the distinctively political aims of egalitarianism. The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression (i.e. equality is about relations to one another), which by definition is socially imposed.
 * Its proper positive aim is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others. The most fundamental test any egalitarian theory must meet is that its principles express equal respect and concern for all citizens.
 * Two different conceptions of equality:
 * "Luck egalitarianism/equality of fortune": takes the fundamental injustice to be the natural inequality in the distribution of luck; luck egalitarianism relies on two moral premises: that people should be compensated for undeserved misfortunes and that the compensation should come only from that part of others' good fortune that is undeserved.
 * "Democratic equality": In seeking the construction of a community of equals, democratic equality integrates principles of distribution with the expressive demands of equal respect. In such a state, citizens make claims on one another in virtue of their equality, not their inferiority, to others.
 * Proponents of equality of fortune reply that they take from the fortunate only that portion of their advantages that everyone acknowledges is undeserved. On the receiving side, the critics protest that egalitarianism undermines personal responsibility by guaranteeing outcomes independent of people's personal choices. 16 In response, luck egalitarians have moved from an equality of outcome to an equality of opportunity conceptionof justice: they ask only that people start off with equal opportunities to achieve welfare or access to advantage, or that they start off with an equal share of resources. 17 But they accept the justice of whatever inequalities result from adults' voluntary choices. All place great stress on the distinction between the outcomes for which an individual is responsible (option luck) and the outcomes for which she is not responsible (brute luck)
 * The resulting theories of equality of fortune thus share a common core: a hybrid of capitalism and the welfare state. For the outcomes for which individuals are held responsible, luck egalitarians prescribe rugged individualism: let the distribution of goods be governed by capitalist markets and other voluntary agreements. For the outcomes determined by brute luck, equality of fortune prescribes that all good fortune be equally shared and that all risks be pooled.
 * Luck egalitarianism: the view that equality requires all and only outcomes derived from circumstance rather than choice to be equalized
 * Luck egalitarians thus view the welfare state as a giant insurance company that insures its citizens against all forms of bad brute luck. Taxes for redistributive purposes are the moral equivalent of insurance premiums against bad luck.
 * You can separate luck egalitarians into two camps: one which accepts equality of welfare as a legitimate (if not the only) object of egalitarian concern (Arneson, Cohen, Roemer, probably Nagel), and one which only equalizes resources. All parties accept an analysis of an individual's welfare in terms of the satisfaction of her informed preferences.
 * Equality of fortune succeeds not in establishing a society of equals, but only in reproducing the stigmatizing regime of the Poor Laws, in which citizens lay claim to aid from the state only on condition that they accept inferior status. This is most evident in their distinction between the deserving and the undeserving disadvantaged-between those who are not responsible for their misfortune and those who are.
 * Three critiques towards luck egalitarianism:
 * 1) it excludes some citizens from enjoying the social conditions of freedom on the spurious ground that it's their fault for losing them. It escapes this problem only at the cost of paternalism.
 * 2) equality of fortune makes the basis for citizens' claims on one another the fact that some are inferior to others in the worth of their lives, talents, and personal qualities. Such principles stigmatize the unfortunate and disrespect the fortunate by failing to show how envy can obligate them
 * 3) equality of fortune, in attempting to ensure that people take responsibility for their choices, makes demeaning and intrusive judgments of people's capacities to exercise responsibility and effectively dictates to them the appropriate uses of their freedom.
 * Thus, in summary → equality of fortune underwrites a hybrid institutional scheme: free markets, to govern the distribution of goods attributable to factors for which individuals are responsible, and the welfare state, to govern the distribution of goods attributable to factors beyond the individual's control. Free choice within a set of options does not justify the set of options itself. The guiding idea here is that individual autonomy is protected by "consumers' sovereignty." In focusing on correcting the supposed injustices of nature, luck egalitarians have forgotten that the primary subject of justice is the institutional arrangements that generate people's opportunities over time.
 * Democratic equality aims to abolish socially created oppression. Democratic equality regards two people as equal when each accepts the obligation to justify their actions by principles acceptable to the other. Certain patterns in the distribution of goods may be instrumental to securing such relationships. But democratic egalitarians are fundamentally concerned with the relationships within which goods are distributed, not only with the distribution of goods themselves. Goods must be distributed according to principles and processes that express respect for all. People must not be required to grovel or demean themselves before others as a condition of laying claim to their share of goods. The basis for people's claims to distributed goods is that they are equals, not inferiors, to others.
 * Egalitarian principles must identify certain goods to which all citizens must have effective access over the course of their whole lives. Some goods are more important from an egalitarian point of view than others, within whatever space of equality is identified as of particular concern for egalitarians. And starting-gate theories, or any other principles that allow law-abiding citizens to lose access to adequate levels of these goods, are unacceptable.
 * Equality of fortune aims to correct what it takes to be injustices generated by the natural order. Democratic equality is what I shall call a relational theory of equality: it views equality as a social relationship. Equality of fortune is a distributive theory of equality: it conceives of equality as a pattern of distribution.Thus, equality of fortune regards two people as equal so long as they enjoy equal amounts of some distributable good. Social relationships are largely seen as instrumental to generating such patterns of distribution.

Freedom & equality-Methodological takes

 * Hall: claims must socially presentable & and must take general conditions of modernity as given
 * Jubb: luck egalitarianism is the wrong way to go about theorizing about equality
 * Universal account (every power has to have a legitimation - and the subject's acceptance must not stem from the power itself, i.e. the critical theory test) + a context-dependent interpretation of current practices = the normative (e.g. liberalism)
 * Distinguish:
 * Desirable (worth it)
 * Achievable (can you get there from here)
 * Feasible (once you have it, is it stable/sustainable)

Justification & Legitimacy

 * Difference between concepts and conceptions: concepts as the umbrella under which all the conceptions fall
 * When morality runs out, you need politics
 * The legitimation of political power part of the very struggle for power that is fundamental to the political

Justification:
 * Justice/justification: the extent to which its basic social, political, and economic institutions and practices are in line with the demands of justice). Put differently, the general quality or virtues of a state, i.e., those features of it appealed to in its justification
 * Just states invariably treat some subjects badly; beneficial states invariably fail to benefit all. Justified states are those that are on balance good things
 * Justifying an act, a strategy, a practice, an arrangement, or an institution typically involves showing it to be prudentially rational, morally acceptable, or both. Justification, we might say, is in large measure a ‘‘defensive’’ concept, in that we ask for justifications against a background presumption of possible objection
 * Maximizing/optimality moral theories (requires that acts or institutions be the best possible) vs. non-maximizing/permissibility justifications (allow that all acts or institutions which avoid breaching applicable moral rules are justified)
 * Justifying the state means justifying it against anarchist objections where a common anarchist view is that anything that is sufficiently coercive (hierarchial, inegalitarian, etc.) to count as a state is also necessarily, and for that reason, morally indefensible and prudentially irrational. If it is logically and physically possible that a state arise and operate without violating anyone’s rights, and if such a state would be rationally preferable to nonstate alternatives, then the anarchist objection is rebutted

Legitimacy:
 * Legitimacy: the state’s right to rule over those subject to it; the nature of its rights over any particular subject (i.e., that in which its legitimacy with respect to that subject consists). Judgments regarding legitimacy are assessments as to the right or authority of any collective political body to rule or govern those who are subject to it. Such a right to rule creates a special relationship between a particular state and those individuals who reside within its jurisdiction insofar as it affords the former with the authority to impose legal (and possibly moral) duties on its subjects and makes it permissible to coerce noncompliers via the use of power and violence if necessary.
 * If the conditions of legitimacy have not been met, then the state in question does not have the de jure right to rule, though it may still have the de facto ability to do so.
 * Particular states are legitimate in virtue of the actual history of their relations with their subjects, relations that establish the state’s right to rule and the subjects’ obligation to comply. Put differently, for Nozick legitimacy is a function of showing that the actual history of the state’s relationship to its individual subjects is morally acceptable
 * For Locke, political power is morally legitimate, and those subject to it are morally obligated to obey, only where the subjects have freely consented to the exercise of such power (i.e. voluntarism) and only where that power continues to be exercised within the terms of the consent given.
 * For Locke, binding (rational) consent can only be given to states that are demonstrably superior on prudential grounds to (or at least as good as) the state of nature. That is, a state must be on balance morally acceptable and a ‘‘good bargain’’ for our consent to succeed in legitimating it.
 * Attitudinal accounts of legitimacy: legitimacy of power solely in terms of people’s belief in its legitimacy; legitimacy is then just understood as the reservoir of loyalty on which leaders can draw, the subjects’ beliefs in the regime’s authority (or their feelings of allegiance, trust, or other attachment) that will typically produce compliance and support (or at least guilt feelings on occasions of noncompliance and nonsupport).
 * Just as subjectivist accounts of moral judgment implausibly understand my judgment that an act is wrong, say, as a statement that I have negative feelings about that act — so that the ‘‘moral judgment’’ oddly turns out to be about me instead of about the act—so attitudinal accounts of political legitimacy make judgments of legitimacy too much about subjects and too little about their states. On such (attitudinal) accounts states could create or enhance their own legitimacy by indoctrination or mind control;
 * No plausible theory of state legitimacy could maintain that a state has the rights in which its legitimacy consists—rights to exclusively impose and coercively enforce binding duties on its subjects—simply in virtue of its subjects’ feelings of loyalty or its own capacities to generate such feelings. Binding consent cannot be given under conditions that make it unfree or uninformed.
 * When people fail to uphold a state due to their own shortcomings, rather than to its lack of moral authority, this cannot plausibly be described as a diminution of its legitimacy. It is a mistake, then, to focus in an account of state legitimacy on the attitudes of subjects or on the capacity of a state to produce or sustain these attitudes.
 * A state’s legitimacy on this account, then, is its exclusive right to impose new duties on subjects by initiating legally binding directives, to have those directives obeyed, and to coerce noncompliers. This right and its correlative obligations constitute a special moral relationship between that particular state and each particular (consenting) subject.

The difference between them:
 * Legitimacy as the political, justification as the moral question
 * Neither a business nor a state, no matter how virtuous or how useful to its willing clients, can acquire, simply by its virtue or usefulness, the right to insist on participation in its enterprises by unwilling free persons.
 * From the fact that good states provide benefits for subjects (and treat subjects well in other ways) it does not follow that those states have with any particular subject the kind of morally significant relationship that could ground a state’s right to impose duties → from justification does not follow legitimacy. Put differently, the mere unsolicited provision of benefits (and good treatment) cannot ground a right to direct and coerce.
 * There may be numerous ways in which a state can be practically justified, in terms of its ability to maintain effective peace and order, for instance, or help resolve certain coordination and assurance problems. But for a state to be legitimate, it must be morally justified in the appropriate manner.
 * For Kant the justification of the state—its necessity for the realization of freedom and rights and justice—entails an obligation to enter civil society and accept the duties society imposes. In short, Kant never really seems to explain the crucial inference from justification to legitimacy—from the assertion that the state is necessary for securing rights and freedom to his conclusion that each state has the right to direct and coerce those within the territories over which it claims authority. Neo-Kantianism is that it takes the difference between de facto rule and legitimate rule to depend on whether a state ought to be accepted—not on whether it actually is accepted
 * For Rawls, the difference almost disappears: Political power is legitimate with respect to a set of persons if it would be reasonable for them to endorse it. The Rawlsian argument shows a type of state to be justified also shows all tokens of that type to be legitimate
 * For Rawls, if the state is just in you view, there is a political obligation correlative to obey its rule
 * Liberal theorists fail to properly appreciate the political nature of legitimacy. For them, any political society is legitimate as long as it is justified to the individuals living under it. Since unanimous consent is highly unlikely, liberal theorists have instead devised numerous ingenious ways to show how particular political and social institutions could be the subject of universal hypothetical consent by arguing that they would be rational for us to accept if we imagine ourselves in some idealized situation such as a state of nature or an original position (i.e. the hypothetical-consent, neo-Kantian position of the ought to consent)
 * An important step in ensuring that the regulative conception of justice is one that all persons can reasonably be expected to endorse is to construct it using the fundamental ideas and “settled convictions” implicit in the public culture of our liberal democratic society, ideas that Rawls assumes citizens will necessarily hold in common (such as the belief in eligious toleration, the rejection of slavery, and the idea of citizens as free and equal persons).

Political realism
constrained by factual claims find ourselves, alongside other morally imperfect people.
 * A moral psychology that includes the passions and emotions
 * A robust conception of political possibility and rejection of utopian thinking
 * The belief that political conflict — of values as well as interests — is both fundamental and ineradicable
 * A focus on institutions as the arenas within which conflict is mediated and contained
 * A conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is distinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be derived from individual morality
 * ‘Well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable
 * A modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility
 * Not only will ‘full compliance’ never be achieved, but also it is an assumption that yields misleading accounts of political norms
 * Realism tries to show how PT can and should be done
 * Define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity
 * Realists are committed to the idea that we should not reduce political philosophy (or politics) to moral philosophy (or morality) because they stress the distinctiveness and autonomy of the political from other spheres; the demands of politics are seen as distinctive and as compromising of ordinary morality
 * They endorse the Hobbesian claim that political order ‘is the sine qua non for every other political good
 * Realists maintain that political philosophy should not seek to regiment politics through morality; rather, it should theorise about the distinctive forces that shape real politics. Critics of realism see this move as a capitulation of normative theory in favour of descriptive approaches to politics
 * Realism is concerned with the modes of action most typical of politics
 * Methodologically speaking, as opposed to moralists who are more rule-based and channel your intuitions, realists engage in interpretative/sociological/historical endeavors
 * Realists want to distinguish between good and bad coercion without recourse to any pre-political moralistic judgement
 * For most realists, politics is given: the first question isn’t whether we should establish coercive political institutions but rather how we should structure them.
 * Realists reject what Bernard Williams dubs political moralism, or the ‘ethics first’ approach, in both its variants: the enactment model (deriving political prescriptions from pre-political ethical ideals such as happiness, equality or autonomy) and the structural model (specifying the limits of permissible political conduct through pre-political moral commitments like moral rights); political moralism reduces political problems to matters of personal morality
 * Realism can be distinguished on the basis of its choice of the relevant sources of political normativity; the defining feature of realism is the attempt to give autonomy to political normativity and political theorising through a fuller understanding of the sources of normativity in politics
 * The controversy largely turns on whether moral normativity is eliminable from political philosophy
 * Realism argues that politics remains a distinct sphere of human activity, with its own concerns, pressures, ends and constraints which cannot be reduced to ethics (nor law, economics, religion, etc.)
 * Realism is often construed in opposition to utopianism and so it is taken to be characterised simply by a concern for issues of feasibility
 * Realists posit a dichotomy between the realm of human action that is appropriately regulated by morality (or ethics – we use those terms interchangeably for now), and the realm of politics, which requires separate norms
 * The broadly Hobbesian thought is that if ethics could effectively regulate behaviour in political communities as it does amongst friends and acquaintances, we would not require politics.Politics cannot be a domain that is straightforwardly regulated by morality since it is precisely the sphere in which conflicting moralities that couldn't be resolved are tried to be managed → politics cannot be exhausted by morality and key political concepts such as legitimacy and authority need to be rethought in conditions of ineradicable moral and political disagreement
 * Realism insists that political theorists recognise their own partisan and non-neutral status as interested agents in the real-world struggle for legitimation
 * Political values (order, stability, tolerance, equality etc.) cannot be completely reduced to a set of moral considerations but must instead be understood through the way in which they feature in our institutions and practices and the various roles that we require them to play in actual politics
 * Realists insist that our beliefs about achievability should be grounded in a resolutely historical and sociological understanding drawing on the concrete lessons we have learned about how human beings are in fact likely to act in various institutional settings.
 * Realists hold that political arguments must begin ‘from where a given political community is
 * Although realists do not deny that political arguments will express normative commitments they reject the insistence that these must be set out as an ‘ideal theory’.
 * Realists focus on the politically realistic at the expense of the logically possible
 * Opponents (like G.A. Cohen) of realism are likely to contend that theorising in this way engenders adaptive preference formation, a ‘process in which a person comes to prefer A to B just because A is available and B is not’
 * Williams insists that we must embrace the impurity of political theory by asking if it is interesting or purposeful to imagine a social world where a constitutive feature of our lives – like economic competition – is not central, instead of simply interrogating our (idiosyncratic) moral intuitions about a range of real and imaginary cases.
 * Realism is not the same thing as nonideal theory even though realists and nonideal theorists both insist that political theorising must be
 * For Williams the formulation of a political value is context-bound, which means that various realist concerns about the nature of our politics and historical context are relevant to the theoretical task of constructing our political values.
 * Political decision does not ‘announce that the other party was morally wrong, or indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost’. Williams concludes that rather than treating our fellow citizens as moral interlocutors whose objections we can discount because they are intellectually mistaken, we should see them as losers of a political contest who may have genuine complaints
 * Considering the real motives people have, rather than the ones we wish that they had, is relevant because it can stop us from mistaking nostalgic lamentation, utopian imagining, or the ecstasy of sanctimony with coherent political argument.
 * Realism constraint: The basic thought, then, is that we cannot clarify the nature of various political values in any meaningful manner before we consider the historical and political question of what their elaboration requires ‘now and around here
 * If we genuinely want to move people to act in a particular way we must take seriously the need to speak to them in terms that they can embrace
 * Political values must be constructed in such a way that they have purchase in the unique historical and political situation in which we actually
 * Realism: general moral principle do not exist (free of context); e.g. lying to friends vs. in a political campaignit’s wrong for different reasons; the political makes no room for personal morality; inevitability of the political conditions
 * Realism is not the same as non-ideal theory. The latter is about not assuming full compliance (i.e. about feasibility)
 * Realism is not tied to feasibility constraints but instead is about the sources of normativity
 * Politics and morality have demands that pull in different normative directions (e.g. the lying politician)
 * The personal is more voluntary than the political (I can quit a friendship but not living with fellow citizens)
 * 3 kinds of realism:
 * Hobbesian: basic legitimation demand (political stability)
 * Machiavelli: practice dependency (does practice correspond to the goals)
 * Marxian: contesting legitimation stories
 * Looking mainly at feasibility constraints lead to status quo bias
 * What counts as a (valid) answer to demands of legitimacy? And why does it count as one? Who is entitled to make the critical judgment and why?
 * People believe that liberalism is a good thing because of the exercise of liberal forces in the past (thereby naturalizing liberal epistemic believes)

Values, moral and politics

 * Realism vs. moralism (e.g. political moralism as prioritizing the moral over the political vs. political realim)
 * Ideal vs. non-ideal (i.e. feasibility constraints & unintended consequences)
 * Value-freeness, value-neutral, value-independence
 * Evaluation need not be normative or prescriptive: you can say that something is good/bad without saying that it's right/wrong (i.e. ought to be changed)

Ideal vs. non-ideal theory

 * In practice all existing ideal theories are to more or lesser degrees partial theories, and thus their incompleteness means that the theory doesn’t tell us what to do if different dimensions of justice come into conflict.
 * The principles that are appropriate to the ideal world are not immediately applicable to nonideal worlds, such as the one in which we currently live. Thus, two main functions of nonideal theory: first, to enable us to make comparisons between different social states and evaluate which one is more just than the other and second, to guide our actions in order to move closer towards the ideals of society
 * One important part of nonideal theory is the development of principles for comparisons of justice in different social states. These principles would have to tackle the difficult issue of how to weigh different principles and domains of justice, or they may specify priority rules, i.e. how to make choices between different domains of partial justice theory
 * Idealizations (simplifications, abstractions, tabula rasa) as different from ideal theory. If we all agree that under any conceivable account of justice prejudices create injustices, then we know that at the level of ideal theory we can assume these injustices away by introducing idealizations. The transition from ideal to nonideal theory is everything but straightforward, and the more the ideal theory has been built upon idealizations, the farther away it will be removed from offering us clear guidance for the nonideal world. The problem is not that idealizations are not acceptable at the ideal level, but rather that we need to know how to deal with the idealization when moving to the nonideal level.
 * Idealizations that serve to model the absence of injustices in the fully just society are acceptable at the level of ideal theory; idealizations that do not meet this function, and instead introduce ideological biases such as those that are implicit in the concept of the person, are bad idealizations and should not be allowed in the construction of ideal theories.
 * In short, by its very nature, ideal theory is an enterprise that is different from non-ideal theory and justice-enhancing action design. Since ideal theory relies on assumptions that are not met in reality—idealizations—its resulting principles of justice cannot serve as principles for the non-ideal world
 * What is the difference between realism and non-ideal theory? Realism can be ideal well as non-ideal

Values

 * Value-freeness: a concept is value-free if its definition is such that the definiens contains no evaluative terms; to affirm a concept's value-freeness is to make a point not about the role of values in justifying a definition, but about the presence or absence of values in the definition itself. "What should politics do?" → is value-free but the very question and concept of politics is not at all value-independent
 * When moral philosophers refer to an "evaluative concept" they usually mean a concept the use of which necessarily involves an evaluation, or “essentially evaluative concept.” There are, however, many concepts that are not themselves evaluative in this strict sense but are often used evaluatively. These are concepts the use of which does not necessarily express an evaluation, but often has evaluative connotations (“nonessentially evaluative.”)
 * Value-neutrality: a concept is value-neutral if its use does not imply the superiority of any one of a set of contrasting substantive ethical points of view; to affirm its value-neutrality is to claim that it can be used in given contexts without implying the speaker’s allegiance to one or another member of a set of substantive ethical points of view.
 * Value-independence: a concept is value-independent if its definition can be justified purely in terms of theoretical-explanatory considerations, and not at all in terms of ethical considerations. To say that a given political concept is value-independent is to say that, although it might take on evaluative meanings in everyday political discourse, it can nevertheless be defined simply with a view to improving our understanding of empirical phenomena and without presupposing or referring to any of those evaluative meanings. To affirm the value-independence of an ethical or political concept is to make a point about the justificatory grounds (ethical versus non-ethical) on which to prefer one definition of that concept over another.

Ideology

 * An ideology is a set of beliefs, attitudes, preferences that are distorted as a result of the operation of specific relations of power; the distortion will characteristically take the form of presenting these beliefs, desires, etc., as inherently connected with some universal interest, when in fact they are subservient to particular interests
 * Ideologies can be problematic in different ways: morally, politically, epistemologically problematic. Flawed ideologies are, however, epistemologically disabling; this is why they are flawed. Flawed ideologies prevent us from gaining knowledge about features of reality, including social reality; it is a difficult to abandon false belief the presence of which hinders the acquisition of knowledge.
 * Ideology as beliefs that guide through social life as well as concepts that structure reality around those beliefs. Expectations based on beliefs guide social action: a prosperous slave-owning family believes that the slaves cook their dinner and, thus, in the evening expect dinner without having cooked. These beliefs thus explain everyday behavior. It is therefore by virtue of the ideology the family has, that they form beliefs that protect them against considering the hypothesis that slavery is an unjust institution. One might expect the ideology to lead the members of the plantation family to believe that blacks are inherently lazy and require the institution of slavery to instill in them a work ethic that they naturally lack. In short, an ideology in this sense is simply a social script that governs one’s expectations, normative and practical.
 * Thus, ideology as constituted by social practices together with the beliefs (+ the corresponding expectations) that guide these practices. These expectations lead them to adopt a justification for their expectations (i.e. legitimizing myths). Without legitimizing myths, hierarchy is merely stratification. With legitimizing myths, hierarchy becomes grounded in superiority and inferiority and formal distinctions become laden with norms
 * One distinctive feature of ideological belief is that it is very difficult to rationally revise in light of counter-evidence. Another distinctive feature of ideological belief often arises from being embedded in a practice together with people like you, your friends, and family.
 * Ideology often means the ideology formed by the ruling material force of society, the legitimation narrative they tell themselves about why they are deserving of their position. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. On this view, the ideological beliefs are the ruling classes’ self-legitimation, or self-justification, of the expectations that make up their ideologies.
 * One main source of the unrevisability of certain beliefs is that they are connected to social practices. The beliefs are ones I need to have in order to remain in those practices. one central source of ideological beliefs is our social identities. We value our social identities. Social identities are constituted by the practices and habits in which we engage; those we engage with are our community. We must at least act as if certain propositions are true in order to engage in those practices. To abandon these beliefs is to abandon certain practices and habits that constitute our social identity. To abandon these beliefs is therefore to abandon one’s community, to leave everyone with whom you identify behind. In other words, beliefs that are connected to one’s identity, which one shares with others, will be hard to revise one by one, because it is hard simply to abandon one’s identity. Beliefs that are connected to our identity will be emotionally dear/attached to us in ways that beliefs unconnected to our identity are not. However, this is individual-focused again. There might be nothing in the beliefs that is intrinsically cherishworthy. But the beliefs are preserved by dint of their connection to certain cherished practices. In short, an ideological belief is connected to identity and/or self-interest, and tends to contribute to its own maintenance. Just as self-interest can lead us to hold and retain beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, self-interest can also lead us to retain certain conceptual schemes (conceptions of how social reality is ordered - e.g. racially-hierarchically), ones that involve normative concepts that mislead us about our social world.
 * Ideology can also be reflected or explained by stereotypes: stereotypes are the social scripts that guide us through the world, make sense of it, and legitimate our actions within it. Again, they are difficult to abandon because stereotypes are connected to our identity.
 * A theory of ideology that restricts its explanations to the mental states of members of society does not just risk missing the source of the most worrisome kinds of ideology, which arise from unjust social structures, it also risks analyzing the problematic feature of ideological beliefs in terms of intrinsic features of mental states
 * Structural features of a society can inhibit rational revision of belief to preserve desirable outcomes for the group privileged by that structure. It is often in the interests of privileged groups to lack concepts that would make clear the unjust nature of their privilege. If debate about the belief (e.g. blacks as slaves) is prevented, it is hard to revise the belief. Structural features of a society are not merely the cause of flawed ideology; they also may constitute it.


 * The existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action. A “free market” requires constant intervention by powerful social agencies if it is to maintain itself in existence, but in a society in which that constant intervention has been overwhelmingly successful and its forms traditional, people’s basic beliefs and desires will have become channeled so that the “market” comes to seem natural. If this happens, then agents who have a particular interest in the maintenance of the market (e.g., companies that profit by providing private health services) will be in a position to present what are in fact merely their particular interests as universal interests.
 * Political theory can play a progressive role in combating ideological illusion, such as when the philosophy in question demonstrates the dependence of certain beliefs or desires on the continued existence of particular configurations of power that would otherwise remain hidden. On the other hand, it can itself play an ideological role. That is, a political theory can actively promote a certain conceptual confusion or an ideological appearance, or, negatively, it can divert attention away from the dependency of some form of consciousness on a particular configuration of power. A political theory can in principle divert attention from the distorting influence of relations of power without its even being the case that some part of content of the theory, narrowly construed, is false, wrong, or incorrect. Diverting attention from the way in which ertain beliefs, desires, attitudes, or values are the result of particular power relations, then, can be a sophisticated way of contributing to the maintenance of an ideology, and one that will be relatively immune to normal forms of empirical refutation. One way, then, in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.
 * One can think of ideology as a composite comprising three elements:
 * 1) a certain configuration of power;
 * 2) this configuration of power brings it about that certain contingent, variable features of our human mode of existence appear to be universal, “natural,” or necessary or spontaneously arising features
 * 3) as a result of (2), certain particular interests can plausibly present themselves as universal ones.

Ideology in political theory

 * The opting for “ideal” theory has served to rationalize the status quo
 * Ideal-as-descriptive: an ideal—in the sense of accurate—model of how P actually works; since a model is not coincident with what it is modeling, of course, an ideal-as-descriptive-model necessarily has to abstract away (simplifying assumptions, based on what one takes the most important features of P to be) from certain features of P; the ideal-as-descriptive-model is not just a minor deviation from ideal-as-idealized-model that is involved
 * Ideal-as-idealized: an ideal—in the sense of an exemplar—model of how P should work (not in moral but technical functionalist terms); what an ideal P should be like; think of ideal-as-idealized-model as an extrapolation
 * Morally, idealization involves the modeling of what people should be like (character), how they should treat each other (right and good actions), and how society should be structured in its basic institutions (justice).
 * What distinguishes ideal theory is not merely the use of ideals, since obviously nonideal theory can and will use ideals also (certainly it will appeal to the moral ideals). What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual. This is not a necessary corollary of the operation of abstraction itself, since one can have abstractions of the ideal-as-descriptive-model type that abstract without idealizing. Ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it
 * In its ignoring of oppression, ideal theory also ignores the consequences of oppression
 * Ideal theory necessarily uses some of the following concepts and assumptions
 * An idealized social ontology Moral theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will profoundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds.
 * Idealized capacities: The human agents as visualized in the theory will also often have completely unrealistic capacities attributed to them—unrealistic even for the privileged minority, let alone those subordinated in different ways, who would not have had an equal opportunity for their natural capacities to develop, and who would in fact typically be disabled in crucial respects.
 * Silence on oppression: Almost by definition, it follows from the focus of ideal theory that little or nothing will be said on actual historic oppression and its legacy in the present, or current ongoing oppression, though these may be gestured at in a vague or promissory way (as something to be dealt with later). Correspondingly, the ways in which systematic oppression is likely to shape the basic social institutions (as well as the humans in those institutions) will not be part of the theory’s concern, and this will manifest itself in the absence of ideal-as-descriptive-model concepts that would provide the necessary macro and micro-mapping of that oppression, and that are requisite for understanding its reproductive dynamic.
 * Ideal social institutions: Fundamental social institutions such as the family, the economic structure, the legal system, will therefore be conceptualized in ideal-as-idealized-model terms, with little or no sense of how their actual workings may systematically disadvantage women, the poor, and racial minorities
 * An idealized cognitive sphere: Separate from, and in addition to, the idealization of human capacities, what could be termed an idealized cognitive sphere will also be presupposed. In other words, as a corollary of the general ignoring of oppression, the consequences of oppression for the social cognition of these agents, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, will typically not be recognized, let alone theorized. A general social transparency will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and group-specific experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order
 * Strict compliance: Finally, some theorists (e.g. Rawls) also endorse ideal theory in the sense of strict compliance as opposed to partial compliance theory; the examination of the principles of justice that would regulate a well-ordered society. Everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions. This methodological decision (of Rawls) can plausibly be argued to have been a significant factor in influencing the whole subsequent direction of the field, though one might argue that his decision and its general endorsement also reflect deeper structural biases in the profession
 * In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved. It is no accident that historically subordinated groups have always been deeply skeptical of ideal theory, generally see its glittering ideals as remote and unhelpful, and are attracted to nonideal theory
 * Marxism was famous for emphasizing, as in The German Ideology, the importance of descending from the idealizing abstractions of the Young Hegelians to a focus on “real, active men,” not “men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived,” but “as they actually are,” in (class) relations of domination
 * Gender, class, and race theory converge on the need to make theoretically central the existence and functioning of the actual non-ideal structures that obstruct the realization of the ideal
 * The simple appeal to an ideal (say, the picture of an ideally just society) does not necessarily make the theory ideal theory, since nonideal theory can and does appeal to an ideal also
 * If we ask the simple, classic question of cui bono? then it is obvious that ideal theory can only serve the interests of the privileged, who—precisely because of that privilege (as bourgeois white males)—have an experience that comes closest to that ideal, and so experience the least cognitive dissonance between it and reality, ideal-as-idealized-model and ideal-as-descriptive-model.
 * As opposed to generalists who think general moral (potentially universal) principles exist, terms like patriarchy, white supremacy, class society, capitalism are abstractions that do reflect the specificities of group experience, thereby potentially generating categories and principles that illuminate rather than obfuscate the reality of different kinds of subordination.
 * Perceptions without concepts are blind - concern about conceptual adequacy is thus crucial. Marxists, feminists, and critical race theorists all have, as part of their theoretical analysis, elaborate metatheories (theories about theories) mapping how systems of domination negatively affect the ideational. The crucial common claim—whether couched in terms of ideology and fetishism, or androcentrism, or white normativity—is that all theorizing, both moral and nonmoral, takes place in an intellectual realm dominated by concepts, assumptions, norms, values, and framing perspectives that reflect the experience and group interests of the privileged group (whether the bourgeoisie, or men, or whites). So a simple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy; one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that “spontaneously”/naturally occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns
 * Think of the original challenge Marxist models of capitalism posed to liberalism’s social ontology: the claim that to focus on relations of apparently equal exchange, free and fair, among equal individuals was illusory, since at the level of the relations of production, the real ontology of worker and capitalist manifested a deep structure of constraint that limited proletarian freedom.
 * All these realizations (of non-ideal theorists), these recognitions, did not spontaneously crystallize out of nowhere; they required conceptual labor, a different map of social reality (i.e. a new social ontology), a valorization of the distinctive experience of women.
 * The nonideal perspective of the socially subordinated is necessary to generate certain critical evaluative concepts in the first place, since the experience of social reality of the privileged provides no phenomenological basis for them
 * Racism and sexism are framed as “anomalies” to a political culture conceived of as—despite everything—basically egalitarian
 * Materialism as signifying the commitment to locating moral theory in society and the interactions of humanbeings as actually shaped by social structures, by “material” social privilege and disadvantage. Recognizing how people’s social location may both blind them to important realities and give them a vested interest in maintaining things as they are is a crucial ! rst step toward changing the social order.

Brechtian defamiliarization/Verfremdungseffekt

 * Anticipate the plot or goal of something so that the audience can pay attention to the methods/manner of the plot/argument rather than to the course of events
 * Show alternative possibilities for action (Handlungsmöglichkeiten) which would have been available under other circumstances. Brecht: "Damit „ist gewonnen, daß der Zuschauer die Menschen auf der Bühne nicht mehr als ganz unveränderbare, unbeeinflußbare, ihrem Schicksal hilflos ausgelieferte dargestellt sieht. Er sieht: dieser Mensch ist so und so, weil die Verhältnisse so und so sind. Und die Verhältnisse sind so und so, weil der Mensch so und so ist. Er ist aber nicht nur so vorstellbar, wie er ist, sondern auch anders, so wie er sein könnte, und auch die Verhältnisse sind anders vorstellbar, als sie sind."
 * Reduce the distraction from flamboyant props
 * Maintain a mental distance to the role you play in order to avoid identification on the part of the audience with the role
 * Use fungible characters and exemplary behaviors such as 'nobody' or 'everybody'
 * Confront the spectator with contemporary societal problems, which are the cause of the actions of the protagonists. The spectator thereby becomes activated
 * The narrative proceeds in a curvy fashion and is not linear or chronological
 * Use a specific character as commentator (e.g. the choir), use signs, songs etc.
 * "Einen Vorgang oder einen Charakter verfremden heißt zunächst einfach, dem Vorgang oder dem Charakter das Selbstverständliche, Einleuchtende zu nehmen und über ihn Staunen und Neugier zu erzeugen [...] Verfremden heißt also Historisieren, heißt Vorgänge und Personen als vergänglich darzustellen"

Libertarian/capitalist ideology

 * The inner workings of this mode of production are reproduced at the surface level of society in a thoroughly mystified form. It is the surface appearances of capitalism which confront people in their daily lives. Bourgeois explanations are derived from these surface appearances and therefore ‘make sense’ to people. In fact, they become the ‘common sense’ under capitalism.
 * For example, the wage labor is seen as fair pay for a fair day's work. Inequality comes to be seen as something apart from the production process. It appears to grow out of differing personal capacities rather than capitalist social relations. This logic is not entirely misplaced because there is a real, logical basis for the belief that there is a fair trade‑off between workers and capitalists. It lies in the fact that workers can and do sell their labour‑power at its actual value, and are not defrauded in that sense.
 * For Marxists, however, the struggle for human liberation is a struggle against capitalist social relations per se. It is always necessary to identify how specific forms of oppression are reflections of underlying social relations.
 * Libertarianism has similar conclusions to neoliberalism, or market liberalism, or classical liberalism, but it is not the same view insofar as it has a distinctive justificatory route to these conclusions. Broadly, that route is characterised by a focus on individuals’ entitlements.
 * Entitlement-based justifications assess the justice and legitimacy of a set of political arrangements solely on the basis of whether the arrangements came about in a manner compatible with respect for the rights of those affected. Libertarianism is the archetypal entitlement theory
 * Libertarian conceptions of appropriation depend on the assumption that individuals are self-owners, which in turn presupposes some notion of private property rights. Nozick uses private property entitlements to show how individuals may use them to create a minimal state without violating other individuals’ rights (i.e. a theory of the justification of the state). However, the sort of folk belief in a right to private property is largely a product of the state.
 * The adoption of a capitalist mode of production is closely connected to an ideology of severe reverence for a specific conception of private property.
 * Specific to the capitalist system of production is the individual appropriation of resources, or PP1. It is precisely the right of the individual to exclude any other individual from using a certain resource that defines the starting point of libertarian analysis.
 * Though moveable property is held by individuals, land is held by a kinship-based collective sustained by an ethos of reciprocity. Even in regard to moveable property, however, it is important to bear in mind that sharing is the central rule of social interaction among hunter-gatherers, and that generalised reciprocity (i.e. giving something without an immediate expectation of return) is the general norm.
 * It was generally recognised that the purpose of access to land and other key productive resources was sustenance, and that sustenance required appropriation of some kind. What it did not require, however, was ownership. The prevailing principle was that no individual (or, most commonly, family) could claim exclusive use of any piece of land, and no individual or family could be excluded from resources they needed to subsist. All this principle required was some form of use-rights, not exclusive individual ownership.

Theory in context

 * The basic question which necessarily arises whenever an historian of ideas' confronts a work: what are the appropriate procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of the work? Two orthodox answers
 * It is the context "of religious, political, and economic factors" which determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide "the ultimate framework" for any attempt to understand it.
 * The other orthodoxy, however, insists on the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning. In this understanding, the aim, in short, must be to provide a re-appraisal of the classic writings, quite apart from the context of historical development, as perennially important attempts to set down universal propositions about political reality. For to suggest instead that a knowledge of the social context is a necessary condition for an understanding of the classic texts is equivalent to denying that they do contain any elements of timeless and perennial interest
 * Anachronism in the history of ideas:
 * There is the danger of converting some scattered or quite incidental remarks by a classic theorist into his "doctrine" on one of the mandatory themes.
 * The fact that ideas presuppose agents is very readily discounted, as the ideas get up and do battle on their own behalf. The doctrine to be investigated so readily becomes hypostatized into an entity as if the fully developed form of the doctrine was always in some sense immanent in history, even if various thinkers failed to "hit upon" it, even if it "dropped from sight" at various times, even if an entire era failed (note the implication that they tried) to "rise to a consciousness" of it
 * If all the writers are claimed to have meant to articulate the doctrine with which they are being credited, why is it that they so signally failed to do so, so that the historian is left reconstructing their implied intentions from guesses and vague hints?
 * The tendency to search for approximations to the ideal type yields a form of non-history which is almost entirely given over to pointing out earlier "anticipations" of later doctrines, and to crediting each writer in terms of this clairvoyance.
 * The first form, then, of the mythology of doctrines may be said to consist, in these various ways, of mistaking some scattered or incidental remarks by one of the classic theorists for his "doctrine" on one of the themes which the historian is (perceptually) set to expect.
 * A means to fix one's own prejudices on to the most charismatic names, under the guise of innocuous historical speculation. History then indeed becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead.
 * One thing is to have an account of how a sentence came about; the other is the meaning of a sentence which is its use; what was it meant to do
 * To write a history of political thought, you have to know a lot about the history/the context and how language was used

Race

 * The racial contract between those categoised white over the nonwhites, who are thus the objects rather than the subjects of the agreement
 * Racial discrimination is operating when a so-called racial characteristic (or set of characteristics) possessed by or attributed to the members of a social group is wrongly treated as a source or sign of disvalue, incompetence, or inferiority.
 * We can say that institutional racism exists when the administration or enforcement of the rules and procedures of a major social institution—say, the labor market or the criminal justice system—is regularly distorted by the racial prejudice or bias of those who exercise authority within the institution. Institutional racism can exist even when the content of the rules and procedures of an institution, when viewed in the abstract, is perfectly just, provided there is pervasive racial bias in the application of those rules and procedures.
 * Some think that equal opportunity exists if no important position or good afforded by social cooperation is unfairly denied persons on account of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, creed, or national origin. On this view, equal opportunity is simply nondiscrimination.
 * Two main possible relations between the moral contract and the political contract. On the first/classical contractarian view (Kant/Locke), the moral contract represents pre-existing objectivist morality (theological or secular) and thus constrains the terms of the political contract. In other words, there is an objective moral code in the state of nature itself, even if there are no policemen and judges to enforce it. On the second (Hobbesian) view, the political contract creates morality as a conventionalist set of rules. Morality is just a set of rules for expediting the rational pursuit and coordination of our own interests without conflict with those other people who are doing the same thing
 * Contractarianism is supposedly committed to moral egalitarianism
 * The color-coded morality of the Racial Contract restricts the possession of natural freedom and equality to white men. A partitioned social ontology is therefore created, a universe divided between persons and racial subpersons
 * It is taken for granted that the grand ethical theories propounded in the development of Western moral and political thought are of restricted scope, explicitly or implicitly intended by their proponents to be restricted to persons, whites. The terms of the Racial Contract set the parameters for white morality as a whole
 * Finally, the Racial Contract requires its own peculiar moral and empirical epistemology, its norms and procedures for determining what counts as moral and factual knowledge of the world. Thus, there is an epistemology associated with contractarianism in the form of natural law. This provides us with a moral compass, whether in the traditional version of Locke-the light of reason implanted in us by God so we can discern objective right and wrong-or in the revisionist version of Hobbes-the ability to assess the objectively optimal prudential course of action, and what it requires of us for self-interested cooperation with others. → think of this as an idealized consensus about cognitive norms
 * There is an understanding about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world, and for agreeing to this view, one is ("contractually") granted full cognitive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community
 * The Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made
 * Part of what it means to be constructed as "white" is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities.
 * There will be white mythologies, invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were-Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambas-but who attain a virtual reality through their existence in travelers' tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fiction, colonial reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema, living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on their alarmed real-life counterparts
 * One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self·deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and, moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental. hut prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses (agreement to misinterpret the world) and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity
 * There is an opposition of us against them with multiple overlapping dimensions: European versus non-Europeans (geography), civilized versus wild/savage/barbarians (culture), Christians versus heathens (religion). But they all eventually coalesced into the basic opposition of white versus nonwhite
 * Race gradually became the formal marker of this differentiated status, replacing the religious divide (whose disadvantage, after all, was that it could always be overcome through conversion)
 * The title of the Indians was not treated as a right of property and dominion, but as a mere right of occupancy. As infidels, heathens, and savages, they were not allowed to possess prerogatives belonging to the absolute, sovereign, and independent nations
 * Most whites don't think about it or don't think about it as the outcome or a history of political oppression but rather as just the way things are
 * The equality of human beings in the state of nature is somehow (whether as equality of opportunity or as equality or outcome) supposed to carry over into the economy of the created sociopolitical order, leading to a system of voluntary human intercourse and exchange in which exploitation is precluded
 * The world is essentially dominated by white capital
 * Wealth is more important than income in determining the likelihood of future racial equalization, since it has a cumulative effect that is passed down through inter-generational transfer, affecting life chances and opportunities for one's children.
 * White people, Europeans and their descendants, continue to benefit from the Racial Contract, which creates a world in their cultural image, political states differentially favoring their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others, and a moral psychology (not lust in whites but sometimes in nonwhites also) skewed consciously or unconsciously toward privileging them, taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and,not to be investigated further.
 * Obligation as citizen (within basic structure & rooted in the value of reciprocity) vs. moral agents (unconditional natural duties)
 * Whether deviance is unreasonable depends on the justness of the overall social scheme. When people criticize the ghetto poor for failing to play by the rules that others honor, they are assuming, if only implicitly, that these rules are fair to all who play

Gender

 * To tell the story of the sexual contract is to show how sexual difference, what it is to be a 'man' or 'woman', and the construction of sexual difference as political difference, is central to civil society.
 * The sexual contract throws light onto the institution of marriage
 * The social contract, so the story goes, creates a society in which individuals can make contracts secure in the knowledge that their actions are regulated by civil law and that, if necessary, the state will enforce their agreements. Actual contracts thus appear to exemplify the freedom that individuals exercise when they make the original pact. According to contemporary contract theorists, social conditions are such that it is always reasonable for individuals to exercise their freedom and enter into the marriage contract or employment contract
 * Only masculine beings are endowed with the attributes and capacities necessary to enter into contracts, the most important of which is ownership of property in the person; only men, that is to say, are 'individuals'
 * Contract is seen as the paradigm of free agreement. But women are not born free; women have no natural freedom.
 * Sexual difference is political difference; sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection. Women are not party to the original contract through which men transform their natural freedom into the security of civil freedom. Women are the subject of the contract.
 * The exclusion of women from. the central category of the 'individual' has been given social and legal expression
 * The structure of the marriage contract may be very similar to other contracts
 * Contract always generates political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination.
 * For legal writers, 'contract' refers to a laissez-faire economic order, an order 'of freedom of contract'' in which substantive individual characteristics and the specific subject of an agreement are irrelevant.
 * Who is making a contract about what and under what circumstances.
 * Civil society is distinguished from other forms of social order by the separation of the private from the public sphere; civil society is divided into two opposing realms, each with a distinctive and contrasting mode of association. Yet attention is focused on one sphere, which is treated as the only realm of political interest.
 * The private sphere is part of civil society but is separated from the 'civil' sphere
 * The private sphere is typically presupposed as a necessary, natural foundation for civil, i.e., public life, but treated as irrelevant to the concerns of political theorists and political activists.
 * Patriarchal domination lies outside their frame of reference, along with questions about the relation between the marriage contract and employment contract and any hint that the employment contract, too, is part of the structure of patriarchy.
 * The 'individual' is the bedrock from which contractarian doctrine is constructed, and to the extent that socialism and feminism now look to the 'individual' they have joined hands with contractarians. When socialists forget that both acceptance and rejection of the individual as owner is necessary for their arguments, subordination (wage slavery) disappears and only exploitation is visible.
 * Contract is presented as freedom and as anti-patriarchal, while being a major mechanism through which sex-right is renewed and maintained
 * The 'gender' response assumes that 'individuals'- can be separated from sexually differentiated bodies.
 * To argue that patriarchy is best confronted by endeavoring to render sexual difference politically irrelevant is to accept the view that the civic (public) realm and the 'individual'are uncontaminated by patriarchal subordination. Patriarchy is then as a private familial problem that can be overcome if public laws and policies treat women as though they were exactly the same as men. However, modern patriarchy is not, first and foremost, about women's familial subjection. Women engage in sexual relations with men and are wives before they become mothers in families. The story of the sexual contract is about (hetero)sexual relations and women as embodied sexual beings. The story helps us understand the mechanisms through which men claim right of sexual access to women's bodies and claim right of command over the use of women's bodies. Moreover, heterosexual relations are not confined to private life. The most dramatic example of the public aspect of patriarchal right is that men demand that women's bodies are for sale as commodities in the capitalist market; -prostitution is a major capitalist industry
 * To talk about Woman, however, is not at all the same thing as talking about women. 'The eternal Woman' is a figment of the patriarchal imagination.
 * Understand the way in which the meaning of 'men' and 'women' has helped structure major social institutions
 * The fact that women are women is more relevant than the differences between them. For example, the social and legal meaning of what it is to be a 'wife' stretches across class and racial differences.

Nancy Fraser

 * Situate the trajectory of second-wave feminism in relation to the recent history of capitalism and integrate the best of recent feminist theorizing with the best of recent critical theorizing about capitalism.
 * The diffusion of cultural attitudes born out of the second wave has been part and parcel of another social transformation, unanticipated and unintended by feminist activists—a transformation in the social organization of postwar capitalism.
 * The cultural changes jump-started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.
 * Three analytically distinct dimensions of gender injustice: economic, cultural and political - the three dimensions of injustice became separated, both from one another and from the critique of capitalism. Split off from one another and from the societal critique that had integrated them, second-wave hopes were conscripted in the service of a project that was deeply at odds with our larger, holistic vision of a just society. In a fine instance of the cunning of history, utopian desires found a second life as feeling currents that legitimated the transition to a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational, neoliberal.
 * The second-wave feminist critique of androcentric state-organized capitalism as integrating concerns with three perspectives on justice—redistribution, recognition and representation.
 * State-organized capitalism: welfare states of what was then called the First World, which used Keynesian tools to soften the boom–bust cycles endemic to capitalism (i.e. dirigisme - including infrastructural investment, industrial policy, redistributive taxation, social provision, business regulation, nationalization of some key industries and decommodification of public goods.). State-capitalism had four characteristics:
 * Economism: By definition, state-organized capitalism involved the use of public political power to regulate (and in some cases, to replace) economic markets. This was largely a matter of crisis management in the interest of capital. Nevertheless, the states in question derived much of their political legitimacy from their claims to promote inclusion, social equality and cross-class solidarity. The quintessential social injustice was unfair economic distribution, and its paradigm expression was class inequality. The effect of this class-centric, economistic imaginary was to marginalize, if not wholly to obscure, other dimensions, sites and axes of injustice.
 * Second-wave feminism contra economism: Politicizing ‘the personal’, they expanded the meaning of justice, reinterpreting as injustices social inequalities that had been overlooked, tolerated or rationalized since time immemorial. Rejecting both Marxism’s exclusive focus on political economy and liberalism’s exclusive focus on law, they unveiled injustices located elsewhere—in the family and in cultural traditions, in civil society and in everyday life. Focusing not only on gender, but also on class, race, sexuality and nationality, they pioneered an ‘intersectionist’ alternative that is widely accepted today. Finally, second-wave feminists extended the purview of justice to take in such previously private matters as sexuality, housework, reproduction and violence against women (i.e. broadened the concept of injustice to encompass not only economic inequalities but also hierarchies of status and asymmetries of political power)
 * Androcentrism: the ideal-typical citizen as an ethnic-majority male worker—a breadwinner and a family man. It was widely assumed, too, that this worker’s wage should be the principal, if not the sole, economic support of his family. Equally important, by valorizing waged work, the political culture of state-organized capitalism obscured the social importance of unwaged care work and reproductive labour. → In rejecting the androcentrism of the family wage, second-wave feminists never sought simply to replace it with the two-earner family. For them, overcoming gender injustice meant ending the systematic devaluation of caregiving and the gender division of labour, both paid and unpaid.
 * Étatism: State-organized capitalism was also étatist, suffused with a technocratic, managerial ethos. welfare and developmental states treated those whom they ostensibly served more as clients, consumers and taxpayers than as active citizens. The result was a depoliticized culture, which treated questions of justice as technical matters
 * Westphelianism: a national formation, aimed at mobilizing the capacities of nation-states to support national economic development. Made possible by the Bretton Woods regulatory framework, this formation rested on a division of political space into territorially bounded polities. As a result, the political culture of state-organized capitalism institutionalized the ‘Westphalian’ view that binding obligations of justice apply only among fellow citizens → What began as a salutary attempt to expand the scope of justice beyond the nation-state has ended up dovetailing in some respects with the administrative needs of a new form of capitalism.
 * Economistic, androcentric, étatist and Westphalian—all characteristics that came under attack in the late 1960s and 1970s. In those years of explosive radicalism, second-wave feminists joined their New Left and anti-imperialist counterparts in challenging the economism, the étatism, and (to a lesser degree) the Westphalianism of state-organized capitalism
 * All told, second-wave feminism espoused a transformative political project, premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systemic critique of capitalist society. The movement’s most advanced currents saw their struggles as multi-dimensional, aimed simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy and political subjection.
 * Was there some perverse, subterranean elective affinity between second-wave feminism and neoliberalism? Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era. Claims for justice were increasingly couched as claims for the recognition of identity and difference. With this shift ‘from redistribution to recognition’ came powerful pressures to transform second-wave feminism into a variant of identity politics (downplaying the critique of political economy). In practice, the tendency was to subordinate social-economic struggles to struggles for recognition, while in the academy, feminist cultural theory began to eclipse feminist social theory.
 * Feminists absolutized the critique of culture at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy. As the critique splintered, moreover, the cultural strand became decoupled not only from the economic strand, but also from the critique of capitalism that had previously integrated them.
 * Capitalism periodically remakes itself in moments of historical rupture, in part by recuperating strands of critique directed against it. In such moments, elements of anti-capitalist critique are resignified to legitimate an emergent new form of capitalism, which thereby becomes endowed with the higher, moral significance needed to motivate new generations to shoulder the inherently meaningless work of endless accumulation.
 * The new ‘spirit’ that has served to legitimate the flexible neoliberal capitalism of our time was fashioned from the New Left’s ‘artistic’ critique of state-organized capitalism. It was in the accents of May 68, they claim, that neoliberal management theorists propounded a new ‘connexionist’, ‘project’ capitalism, in which rigid organizational hierarchies would give way to horizontal teams and flexible networks, thereby liberating individual creativity. The result was a new romance of capitalism with real-world effects - a romance that enveloped the tech start-ups of Silicon Valley and that today finds its purest expression in the ethos of Google.
 * The spirit of neoliberal capitalism includes a masculinist romance of the free, unencumbered, self-fashioning individual, which is aptly described. But neoliberal capitalism has as much to do with Walmart, maquiladoras and microcredit as with Silicon Valley and Google
 * Never mind that the reality which underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift—now often a triple or quadruple shift—and a rise in female-headed households. Disorganized capitalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice.
 * Second-wave feminism has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism. Our critique of the family wage now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and a moral point.
 * At both ends, the dream of women’s emancipation is harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation
 * It seemed but a short step from second-wave feminism’s critique of welfare-state paternalism to Thatcher’s critique of the nanny state. In the postcolonies, meanwhile, the critique of the developmental state’s androcentrism morphed into enthusiasm for NGOs, which emerged everywhere to fill the space vacated by shrinking states.
 * As to microcredit (and the following shrinking of macroeconomic programs fighting poverty), a perspective aimed originally at transforming state power into a vehicle of citizen empowerment and social justice is now used to legitimate marketization and state retrenchment.
 * Feminist ideas have undergone a subtle shift in valence in the altered context. Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism and Westphalianism now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism. After all, this capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the cornerstone of women’s waged labour, and seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate all the more freely on a global scale.
 * In the current moment, these two critiques of traditional authority, the one feminist, the other neoliberal, appear to converge
 * A cycle of socially caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability by marriage’, in which women’s traditional responsibility for child-rearing helps shape labour markets that disadvantage women, resulting in unequal power in the economic market-place, which in turn reinforces, and exacerbates, unequal power in the family. Such market-mediated processes of subordination are the very lifeblood of neoliberal capitalism.
 * Reconnecting struggles against personalized subjection to the critique of a capitalist system which, while promising liberation, actually replaces one mode of domination by another
 * A new feminism has to break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism. Reclaiming our critique of androcentrism, feminists might militate for a form of life that decentres waged work and valorizes uncommodified activities, including carework. Now performed largely by women, such activities should become valued components of a good life for everyone.

Mouffe

 * According to Schmitt, the idea of human equality - which comes from liberal individualism - is a non-political form of equality, because it lacks the correlate of a possible inequality from which every equality receives its specific meaning. Equality is only interesting and invaluable politically so long as it has substance, and for that reason at least the possibility and the risk of inequality. The equality of all persons as persons is not democracy but a certain kind of liberalism, not a state form but an individualistic-humanitarian ethic and Weltanschauung.
 * Two very different ideas of equality: the liberal one and the democratic one. The liberal conception of equality postulates that every person is, as a person, automatically equal to every other person. The democratic conception, however, requires the possibility of distinguishing who belongs to the demos and who is exterior to it; for that reason, it cannot exist without the necessary correlate of inequality.
 * Democracy as a pure abstraction: equality can exist only through its specific meanings in particular spheres - as political equality, economic equality, and so forth. But those specific equalities always entail, as their very condition of possibility, some form of inequality. This is why he concludes that an absolute human equality would be a practically meaningless, indifferent equality.
 * The democratic concept of equality is a political one which therefore entails the possibility of a distinction
 * It is through their belonging to the demos that democratic citizens are granted equal rights, not because they participate in an abstract idea of humanity (thus, democracy of 'the people' and not of humanity)
 * Thus, according to Schmitt: if a state attempted to realize the universal equality of individuals in the political realm without concern for national or any other form of homogeneity, the consequence would be a complete devaluation of political equality, and of politics itself.
 * What Schmitt means by the need for homogeneity: the idea that democracy requires political equality, which stems from partaking in a common substance
 * Without any criterion to determine who are the bearers of democratic rights, the will of the people could never take shape.
 * By stressing that the identity of a democratic political community hinges on the possibility of drawing a frontier between 'us' and 'them', Schmitt highlights the fact that democracy always entails relations of inclusion-exclusion
 * The central concept of the liberal discourse is humanity, but it is not a political concept, and does not correspond to any political entity. The central question of the political constitution of 'the people' is something that liberal theory is unable to tackle adequately, because the necessity of drawing such a 'frontier' contradicts its universalistic rhetoric.
 * From this contradiction (universality/'humanity' vs. the necessity of discrimination between 'us' and 'them) we get a tension that installs a very important dynamic, which is constitutive of the specificity of liberal democracy as a new political form of society.
 * Liberal-democratic politics consists, in fact, in the constant process of negotiation and renegotiation - through different hegemonic articulations - of this constitutive paradox
 * As to advocates of the deliberative democracy approach: by proposing to view reason and rational argumentation, rather than interest and aggregation of preferences, as the central issue of politics, they simply replace the economic model with a moral one which - albeit in a different way - also misses the specificity of the political.
 * In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical, always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property
 * According to Seyla Benhabib, the main challenge confronting democracy is how to reconcile rationality with legitimacy - or, to put it differently, the crucial question that democracy needs to address is how the expression of the common good can be made compatible with the sovereignty of the people.
 * The very conditions of possibility of the exercise of democracy constitute simultaneously the conditions of impossibility of democratic legitimacy as envisaged by deliberative democracy. Consensus in a liberal-democratic society is - and will always be - the expression of a hegemony and the crystallization of power relations. The frontier that it establishes between what is and what is not legitimate is a political one, and for that reason it should remain contestable.
 * The hegemonic articulation of 'the people' through a particular regime of inclusion-exclusion is always contingent and temporary
 * Liberalism simply transposes into the public realm the diversity of interests already existing in society and reduces the political moment to the process of negotiation among interests independent of their political expression (i.e.a mere convergence of interests and a neutral set of procedures). There is no place in such a model for a common identity of democratic citizens; citizenship is reduced to a legal status
 * For Schmitt, either the State imposes its order and its rationality to a civil society characterized by pluralism, competition and disorder, or, as is the case in liberal democracy, social pluralism will empty the political entity of its meaning and bring it back to its other, the state of nature'.
 * Schmitt retains a view of political and social identities as empirically given
 * Call Schmitt's homogeneity rather commonality: how to envisage a form of commonality strong enough to institute a 'demos' but nevertheless compatible with certain forms of pluralism: religious, moral and cultural pluralism, as well as a pluralism of political parties.
 * An identity of the people must be seen as the result of the political process of hegemonic articulation. Democratic politics does not consist in the moment when a fully constituted people exercises its rule. The moment of rule is indissociable from the very struggle about the definition of the people, about the constitution of irs identity. Such an identity, however, can never be fully constituted, and it can exist only through multiple and competing forms of identifications.

Wagner

 * The developments of the past four decades can be seen as a transformation of capitalism in reaction to democratic demands
 * Market economy is not synonymous to capitalism. The former may be conceived as production and exchange by small individual producers, whereas the latter cannot be thought without wage-labour, thus a fundamental distinction between those who sell labour power and those who produce and sell other commodities
 * The interpretation of autonomy as the freedom of the producer in a self-regulating market economy presupposes a prior separation between autonomy in economic matters and in political ones
 * According to the view that capitalism and democracy are opposed, Across all variations, those theories held that a capitalist economy formed the basic structure of Western societies, democracy was nothing but a 'surface phenomenon'. Temporary co-existence was possible, but in moments of crisis democracy would tend to be abandoned to safeguard the interests of capital. Who speaks about fascism cannot remain silent about capitalism.
 * The persistence of capitalism explained as lying in the connection between welfare state and mass loyalty, parts of the surplus value were distributed in the form of welfare securities in return for electoral loyalty to capitalist principles.
 * Capitalism has co-existed for too long periods with non-democratic political conditions for the liberal theories to be easily accepted, and there has by now been too great persistence of capitalism under democratic conditions, even in times of crisis of the welfare state, for the critical theories to remain persuasive
 * Between 1890 and 1930, that is, during the period of the build-up and advent of the 'first wave of democratization', a combination of technical organizational and economic changes transformed capitalism: the Second Industrial Revolution, focused on electric and chemical engineering and pioneered in the US and Germany; the 'managerial revolution (, separating ownership from management; the emergence of 'finance capital' linking productive to financial organisations; the recognition of unions and the introduction of collective conventions; the 'scientific organisation of work' and finally the introduction of a new wage regime, gradually permitting workers to buy the products of their own work. The sum of these changes has been described as the creation of a new accumulation regime of a mass-production, mass-consumption economy increasingly being referred to as Fordist capitalism.
 * Whenever capitalism exists without democracy, it will be exposed to a critique of exploitation and injustice, likely to be expressed through calls for inclusive, egalitarian democracy.
 * Capitalism creates a distinction between a group of economic agents who decide about production and another one who are subject to the commands of the former group.
 * A situation of lacking satisfaction of needs, given the capacity of the existing economy, becomes likely for three distinct reasons:
 * deteriorating living and working conditions during the rise of capitalism and exit from the preceding form of economic organization
 * exploitation in the sense of appropriation of the major share of production by those who command production decisions
 * crises of market self-regulation that entail production below the possibilities and/or destruction of products that cannot be sold
 * This reasoning may explain why the dominated classes call for democracy, but no reason has yet been provided why the dominating classes should yield to this demand!
 * Historically, we can recognize that the dominant class in capitalism has in two main ways been dependent on the dominated class. First, industrial mass production relied on large numbers of workers who needed to some extent to be willing to work, given that this was 'free labour', even though Frederick W. Taylor tried to dissociate will and performance at the work-place and Max Weber maintained that modern capitalism did not require motivation any longer. Strikes have historically been effective because the withdrawal of the willingness to work touches capitalism at its core. Secondly, emerging mass-consumption capitalism required workers to buy the products of their own production, which in turn necessitates effective demand in the double sense of having the means to buy and being willing to buy the commodities offered.
 * The introduction of democracy helped easing some pressures on this form of economic organization, in terms of both increasing legitimacy and solving profitability problems – counter-acting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as Marx had put it, by creating a new accumulation regime
 * The very introduction of inclusive democracy was fraught with fears of the dominant class about an imminent socialist revolution, based on the observation that workers' parties and trade unions were pressing beyond the rights to formal political participation for the creation of economic and social rights that would indeed have limited the power of the dominant class. The anti-democratic turns of the early twentieth century that often entailed the temporary cancellation of the just-inaugurated democracies were the first solution to this problem.
 * Much of post WW2 political science was concerned with limiting the political passions suggesting, for instance, that a certain degree of citizens' apathy is a precondition for viable democracies or that organized representation will and should have the effect of filtering the more conflictive components of political debate so that they would not reach decision-making institutions
 * The rise of what has become known as neo-liberal global capitalism can to a considerable extent be understood as the outcome of a democratic crisis of capitalism.
 * In the decades of the 60s and 70s the following occurred:
 * the students' revolt of 1968
 * the return of spontaneous and large-scale working-class action in 1968 and 1969
 * the end of the international monetary system as established in Bretton Woods
 * the defeat of the US armed forces in the Vietnam War
 * the first general recession of the so-called advanced industrial economies since the end of the Second World War in 1974/75 and the rising doubts about the effectiveness of Keynesian demand management
 * the rise of the Japanese economy to worldmarket competitiveness
 * the oil price crises in 1973 and 1979
 * the Iranian revolution in 1979
 * the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 to government power in the UK and the US with neo-liberal, anti-union economic policies
 * This period can rather neatly be described as the move from the expression of a crisis through the workers' (and students') demands, the impossibility of resolving it through the established instruments such as concerted action between employers, governments and unions and Keynesianism, the deepening of the crisis through seemingly external events in East Asia and the Middle East, the increasing reception of more radical measures such as monetarism and supply-side economics in economic-policy thinking, and finally the adoption of such measures in government policies
 * The rise of democratic pressures on profitability, dissatisfaction with working and living conditions, now more seen as alienating than exploitative
 * The dissatisfaction with working and living conditions came more to be seen as alienating than exploitative - the deflection of the critical concerns in a transformation of both capitalism and democracy.
 * In other words, the 'governability crisis' and the 'legitimacy problems of late capitalism' did exist, but they were resolved in a way that was rather unexpected by the early 1970s. The processes we now refer summarily to as 'economic globalization', namely neo-liberalism, de-regulation, structural adjustment, shock therapy, the terminology varying with the specific circumstances, entail a relative decoupling of capitalist practices from their national institutional embedding and, thus, an escape from the reach of democratically voiced demands. This escape means, in contrast to the first such experience, that the crisis could be addressed without even temporarily abolishing democracy, but rather by transforming both democracy and capitalism.
 * Economic globalization means the relative decoupling of economic practices from the nation-state as the historical container of collective self-determination
 * Capitalism remains highly dependent on, and thus responsive to, the high-skill sector of the labour force and remains similarly dependent on large numbers of low-skilled, low-salary workers, which are now found globally, but not without repercussions such as global mobility and demands for global justice
 * Social demands were deferred either inconclusively, by reference to the absence of any alternative to obeying to the rules of the economy, or by shifts to other actors, such as the translocation to supranational or intergovernmental institution that are less exposed to legitimacy claims, such as the European Union or the International Monetary Fund.
 * The way in which a democratic citizenry is connected to capitalist after the 50s/60s 'welfare state and mass loyalty' should now be seen as 'liberal society and citizen disaffection'.
 * Savage global capitalism will enter into crises that create enormous social and ecological damage
 * European economy and boundaries: protecting agricultural production, demanding free trade for industrial production, and selectively admitting labour without granting political citizenship.
 * A significant part of the work for the satisfaction of material needs was performed by non-citizens: for much of the nineteenth century by non-enfranchised workers in Europe and slaves in the US or also Brazil; for the twentieth century by apartheid exclusion in South Africa; by colonial extraction in general; by imposing terms of trade by military or other means such as in the combination of British and then US imperial domination and free-trade ideology; and most recently (again) through large-scale immigration of people who are not and will not easily become citizens.

Politics & markets

 * Production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, the production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper. A change in distribution changes production, e.g. concentration of capital, different distribution of the population between town and country, etc. Finally, the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This is the case with every organic whole
 * For a certain dimension of value to be realized in a good, or for the good to serve as the vehicle for the realization of our ideals, the production, distribution, and enjoyment of this good must take place within the context of certain social relations. When the good in question is an ideal, the argument is that the social relations that most adequately embody the ideal are undermined when people adopt market norms to regulate their interactions in these relationships. Thus, we need to ask "What sets of norms are best for realizing these values?"
 * A distinctive feature of modern capitalist societies is the tendency of the market to take over the production, maintenance, and distribution of goods that were previously produced, maintained, and distributed by nonmarket means.
 * Understand the nature of economic goods by investigating:
 * the ways we value commodities.
 * the social relations within which we produce, distribute, and enjoy them
 * the ideals which these relations are supposed to embody
 * Things or services are 'economic' insofar as their values are best realized through being traded on the market or otherwise treated in accordance with market norms - that is, as commodities. Ideals as 'economic' if governed by market norms
 * The significance of norms must be understood in the light of the ideals they are supposed to embody.
 * Norms understood as rules by which the participants in a practice govern & evaluate their behavior, or standards by which they understand the meanings of what they do or value. Often norms are justified as attempts to realize ideals to which we are committed
 * On the liberal view, freedom is primarily exercised in the choice and consumption of commodities in private life It consists in having a large menu of choices in the marketplace and in exclusive power to use and dispose of things and services in the private sphere without having to ask permission from anyone else. The freedom that the market gives us is the freedom to use commodities without the constraints implied by other modes of valuation (the market ideal interprets freedom as freedom from ties of obligation to others) → The economic ideal of freedom is closely linked with the way we value commodities.
 * The market ideal identifies freedom with the power to exclude others from participation in decisions affecting one's property.
 * The realization of the noneconomic values that inhere in things often requires constraints on use and, hence, constraints on the degree to which these things are treated as commodities.
 * The commodity market is, theoretically speaking, a sphere of exchange of equivalents. No one gets cheated, no one gets exploited in the exchange in capitalism. What the market does is redistribute value from one party to another. It's not, in Marxism, a sphere of exploitation. Exploitation happens elsewhere. However, the market is a condition of existence for capitalism to be possible (and thus, for exploitation to be possible)
 * Five features of the social norms & relations of the market that are particularly important for understanding the distinctive character of economic:
 * 1) Market relations are impersonal ones (i.e. freedom from personal ties and obligations): The parties have no precontractual obligations to provide one another with the goods they exchange. If each transaction between buyer and seller can be completed to the reciprocal advantage of each, leaving no unpaid debts on either side, then nothing ties the parties together over time. One need not exhibit any specific personal characteristics or invoke any special relationships to gain access to the goods traded on the market. The market is open to all indifferently, as long as they have the money to pay for the goods. Individuals' interests are independently definable and satisfiable only with respect to a certain class of goods. Such goods have the properties of exclusivity and rivalry in consumption.
 * 2) The market is understood to be a sphere in which one is free, within the limits of the law, to pursue one's personal advantage unrestrained by any consideration for the advantage of others
 * 3) The goods traded on the market are exclusive and rivals in consumption. If there is no means of excluding people from enjoying a good, it is impossible to charge a price for it.The value that can be obtained from commodities is rival, since it is typically realized through personal appropriation and use. Our ability to realize some goods may be impaired if we view them as exclusive and rival, rather than as shared.
 * 4) The market is purely want-regarding: from its standpoint all matters of value are simply matters of personal taste. The market responds to is "effective demand," that is, desires backed up by money or the willingness to pay for things. Commodities are exchanged without regard for the reasons people have in wanting them. The market does not respond to needs as such and does not draw any distinction between urgent needs and intense desires. The market does not draw any distinction between reflective desires, which can be backed up by reasons or principles, and mere matters of taste. Since it provides no means for discriminating among the reasons people have for wanting or providing things, it cannot function as a forum for the expression of principles about the things traded on it. The market provides individual freedom from the value judgments of others. It does not regard any one individual's preferences as less worthy of satisfaction than anyone else's, as long as one can pay for one's own satisfaction
 * 5) Dissatisfaction with a commodity or market relation is expressed primarily by "exit," not "voice"; an individual's influence on the provision and exchange of commodities is primarily exercised through exit. The customer has no voice - that is, no right to directly participate in the design of the product or to determine how it is marketed. However, citizens exercise their freedom in a democracy primarily through voice, not exit. Their freedom is the power to take the initiative in shaping the background conditions of their interactions and the content of the goods they provide in common. It is a freedom to participate in democratic activities
 * The norms that presently govern our actual practices often inadequately express the ideals these practices are supposed to embody.
 * A fundamental contrast between the sphere of personal relations and that of the market is that the former is properly governed by the spirit of the gift rather than the spirit of commercial exchange.
 * The exchange of gifts affirms and continues the ties that hold the donor and recipient together.
 * Whereas distributing goods through a system of bilateral transactions tends to emphasize either the separateness of persons (in the market) or some special relationship between the two traders (in personal gift relationships), providing goods out of pooled resources obliterates any connection of specific donors with specific recipients
 * The democratic freedom (of self-government) is meaningless unless citizens have the goods they need (e.g., education) to participate effectively in the project of self-government.
 * To attempt to provide these goods through market mechanisms is to change the kind of good they are for the worse. They contribute to human flourishing in lesser ways when they are provided through the market than when they are provided on a democratic basis. Providing a good on an exclusive basis may not merely provide it less efficiently, but change the kind of good it is for the worse.
 * The mistake in the libertarian picture seems to lie in the view that individual freedom is always increased when the common is divided into parcels over which individuals have exclusive control. While this regime would enable each person to be a despot in the territory she owns, she would be a mere subject to others everywhere else. This conception of freedom fails to grasp the point that some freedoms can only be exercised in spaces over which no individual has more control than others. These are the public spaces of free association among equals
 * When a park is being replaced by for example a mall, the value of this space deteriorates from one in which people can meet as equal citizens with common interests to one in which they can meet only as private consumers. Their space is depoliticized, and their public life correspondingly impoverished. Under these circumstances, the exercise of a private right to control what people do on one's property becomes in reality an exercise of political power, just as in the case of completely private roads
 * The principle of public access can change the kind of good something is for us by changing the ways in which we can value it.
 * The problem of making something up for sale: Attempting to increase the blood supply through financial incentives rather than appealing to a sense of civic duty or fraternity promotes the social expectation that people may feel entitled to some merely personal advantage for donating their blood. This attitude makes it seem as if small acts contributing to the health of one's neighbors should be seen merely as inconveniences requiring compensation instead of as enhancing the spirit of the entire community. The significance of my volunteer donation is trivialized when other blood is paid for.
 * There is a value in collectively taking a stand on what goods the community regards as so important that it would be a disgrace to let any of its members fall short in them
 * There is a distinction between urgent needs and intense desires. To treat these two as on a par is to trivialize and debase the concerns of those who have the needs and to hold itself hostage to those with extravagant tastes. what lies at the basis of this distinction between needs and wants is our capacity to draw distinctions of worth among goods.
 * As a market-based system (for education), a voucher system would replace institutions of voice with those of exit. Instead of discussing with parents the proper goals and practices of education in an attempt to arrive at common principles, parents would exercise their power of exit to remove their children from schools that do not suit their tastes. This undermines the good of education as a reflection of reasoned ideals. The argument for the voucher system assumes that the relevant wants that an educational system should satisfy are the given, unexamined wants of parents. But the preference for an education of a particular sort is not, like the preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream, merely a matter of given, primitive tastes for which no reasons can be offered. Such a preference is formulated in the light of particular ideals
 * Market mechanisms of exit do not respond to reasoned ideals any differently from unreflective wants. When people's choices are removed from the political forum and made in the market, they are reduced to isolated, publicly unarticulated decisions. The more the mechanisms of voice are opened up to broad, local participation, the greater are the possibilities for parents to realize their preferences as reasoned ideals rather than as merely private tastes.
 * In summary, the realization of some values demands that they be open to the public (nonexclusive), or confined to people who have personal ties to one another, or done for reasons other than merely personal advantage, or held to be valuable as a matter of ideals rather than as a mere matter of taste. The realization of some values demands that certain goods be produced, exchanged, and enjoyed outside of market relations, or in accordance with nonmarket norms
 * There are two classes of goods whose realization must take place within nonmarket norms of exchange: gift values and shared values. Gift values differ from commodity values in that their worth is at least partially constituted by the nonmarket motives for which they are given. They are valued as tokens of love, admiration, respect, honor, and so forth, and consequently lose their value when they are provided for merely self-interested reasons. Shared goods are undermined by the market norm of restricting access to those who can afford to pay for it.

Democracy

 * Schumpeter: democracy is ‘an institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realises the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will’.

Fascism

 * Psychoanalytical view of Wilhelm Reich: fascism to be ‘the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man’ and argued that ‘[i]n its pure form fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human being’.

Populism

 * The normal pathology thesis of radical populism: The idea is always the same: society is transforming fundamentally and rapidly, this leads to a division between (self-perceived) ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and the latter will vote for the populist radical right out of protest (anger and frustration) or support (intellectual rigidity). In short, under conditions of massive societal change, the ‘losers of modernisation’ will vote for populist radical right parties
 * Populist radical rights are largely grounded in nativism, authoritarianism (strictly ordered society with punishment for transgression and populism. Besides, populism is characterized by the idea of the 'pure people' vs. 'the elites'. Populism argues that politics should reflect the genereal will of the people - populism tends to simplify political issues, dichotomizing them into black and white and calling for yes or no answers
 * Populist radical right parties do not focus primarily on socio-economic issues, as most traditional parties do, but on socio-cultural issues
 * Populism’s optimistic view of majority rule puts it at odds with liberal democracy, which requires the will of the majority to be constrained by constitutional checks and balances that protect minorities and individual rights.
 * Increased success of populist radical right parties is to a large extent explained by the broader shift away from classic materialist politics towards some form of post-materialist politics