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Jeffrey Edward Green : The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy . (Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2016. Pp. xi, 252.)
Ali Aslam : Ordinary Democracy: Sovereignty and Citizenship beyond the Neoliberal Impasse . (Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2017. Pp. xi, 209.)
Book Reviews
These two books begin with a similar and similarly disheartening assessment of the citizenship experience in contemporary democracy: this experience is deeply disappointing and frustrating, especially if citizens have expectations that their participation might make a difference or that they will be treated as free and equal. These are "false expectations" (3) according to Green and, when disappointed, lead to "devitalized agency," says Aslam. Both authors also lay the blame for the sorry state of citizenship on unjust and unequal economic forces that set up what appear to be insurmountable barriers to equal participation and what might be called the fair value of citizenship. Thus both books are keenly aware of social injustice and inequality and both books take issue with contemporary theories of democracy for failing to see the true nature of the malaise experienced by contemporary democratic citizens. Despite these similarities these two books have nothing in common. It borders on the bizarre that two books written in the field of political theory about citizenship and contemporary democratic theory should be in such completely different universes. Between the two of them they list approximately (and conservatively) 650 separate works in their respective bibliographies, yet Green and Aslam share only six references (Connolly, Locke, Rancière, Tocqueville, Weber, Wolin). (Both also cite Foucault, Josiah Ober, and Plutarch, but not the same texts.) Perhaps this is a reflection of the state of the field of democratic theory, both that there is too much to read and that we do not read across or outside our bailiwicks. But the lack of connection is startling and leads me to abandon a comparative analysis for separate sequential discussions of these two books.
The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy is a wonderful book with which I found much to disagree. Let me begin with the wonderful parts. Green's analysis of the failings of liberal democratic orders is spot on. We are told by philosophers and...