Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies. Edited by Allen, Danielle and Somanathan, Rohini . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 368 p. $105.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies. Edited by Allen Danielle. and Somanathan Rohini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 368 p. $105.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

“All around the world, democracy looks broken.” The first line of Danielle Allen and Rohini Somanathan’s edited volume sets the tone and points to the stakes of the important and rigorous work that will open for the reader over the next 11 chapters. The project of Difference without Domination is manifold, with two main conceptual moves underlying the rich and varied text. First and foremost, this volume presents a clear, well-reasoned set of arguments pointing out that the abstract universalisms that failed to take race, socioeconomic positioning, and dominative relations embedded in social, legal, economic, and institutional frameworks into account explicitly—whatever their merits—are now moribund. Furthermore, the operationalization of equality as “statistical mirroring” in positive social science does not actually provide the kind of data required for the pursuit of more just polities. Second, the volume is a methodological intervention that insists that we move beyond cordoning off ethics and theory from positive science because our global situation is such that our thinking must be as capacious, robust, and intricate as the problems we face. Ultimately, the authors seek to “reground conceptions of justice in an ideal of nondomination and political equality” (p. 4).

The volume, which is a welcome methodological blend of positive social science and political theory, urges a paradigm shift from the concept of equality as nondiscrimination as evidenced by statistical mirroring to nondomination as evidenced by the ability of marginalized and minoritized people to wield power over their lives and over decision-making in the polity. Consequently, Allen argues in the first essay that difference without domination should replace John Rawl’s difference principle because the difference principle is not attentive enough to real power asymmetries in the world as it is. She points out that there is no functional divide between the liberty of the ancients (positive liberty) and the liberty of the moderns (negative liberty) because the former is required for the latter. Allen and the group of authors she and Somanathan have assembled have sought to define a framework in which neither private nor public liberty is sacrificable because human beings require both...