Politics against Domination

Ian Shapiro

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674986756, 9780674743847
• eBook ISBN: 9780674970069
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ian Shapiro makes a compelling case that the overriding purpose of politics should be to combat domination. Moreover, he shows how to put resistance to domination into practice at home and abroad. This is a major work of applied political theory, a profound challenge to utopian visions, and a guide to fundamental problems of justice and distribution.

"Shapiro's insights are trenchant, especially with regards to the Citizens United decision, and his counsel on how the 'status-quo bias' in national political institutions favors the privileged. After more than a decade of imperial overreach, his restrained account of foreign policy should likewise find support."
—Scott A. Lucas, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Shapiro has a brief and compelling section on the importance of hope in his first chapter. This book enacts and encourages hope, with its analytical clarity, deep engagement of complicated political issues that resist easy theorizing, and emphasis on the politically possible."
—Kathleen Tipler, Political Science Quarterly

"Offers important insights for thinking about democracy's prospects."
—Christopher Hobson, Perspectives on Politics

CHAPTER ONE

ADAPTING AGAINST DOMINATION

HUMAN BEINGS LIVE in flux. For millennia we have been adapting to an environment that changes partly as a result of what we do. In some ways we are more fragile than many other species; in other ways we are more resilient. Crocodiles have persisted in more or less their present form for hundreds of millions of years and through countless calamities. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago and reached full behavioral modernity only about 50,000 years ago—a blink of an eye from a crocodilian point of view. On their time scale, we have scarcely been tested. Yet humans could render crocodiles extinct in a few generations by destroying their habitats. Indeed, we might do so inadvertently unless we take active conservationist measures. Cockroaches have been around for at least as long as crocodiles, but so far we have been unable to stamp them out—not for want of trying. Cockroaches beat just about everything on the resilience front.

Even if we wiped out crocodiles and cockroaches, this would not mean that we were better survivors. One would have to be pretty sanguine to bet that we humans could have a 200-million-year run in anything like our present form, given our vulnerability to fairly moderate changes in the environment and our capacity for self-destructive behavior. A large meteorite or some comparable catastrophe could wipe us out. Or we might do it to ourselves, if not as the result of some monumental Armageddon that we contrive, then as a by-product of activities that we find ourselves unable to curb in a timely way. We might turn out to be lethal mutations of nature.

But we might not. And how we turn out is to some extent in our hands, a fact that differentiates us from crocodiles and cockroaches. Their survival depends wholly on whether their blind instincts continue working in their favor, given changes that they can neither comprehend nor control. We can contemplate our circumstances, understand them to some extent at least, and think imaginatively about alternative courses of action that might improve our lot. Our social, economic, and political arrangements live in the shadow of untested possibilities that we envision with varying degrees of clarity and enthusiasm.

How realistic these alternatives are, and how pressing—if urgent at all—is the imperative to experiment with them, is congenitally controversial among humans, if only because we are so differently situated from one another. No system of human organization has yet been devised that operates to the mutual benefit of all, and even when there are shared gains from cooperation, these can be distributed in many different ways. As a result, people’s relative fortunes vary. They often strive to create circumstances in which they think things would be better for themselves, for groups with which they identify, or for everyone. But no recipe for improvement has ever commanded universal assent.

Demands for change frequently emanate from the disadvantaged, but not always. Greed and the desire for glory can also put pressure on existing practices, as can people with fervent religious or ideological commitments. People who are determined to achieve change can shake the world up radically—whether they succeed or fail. Nor does the possibility of doing things differently arise only in connection with seeking improvements. Sometimes it arises from losses that must be coped with and apportioned, most obviously as the result of economic depressions, environmental catastrophes, and military defeats.

Those who benefit from the status quo will usually resist the pressure for change, sometimes violently. But repressing all opposition is almost never entirely successful—whether those who try to do so claim divine authority, hereditary power, the will of the people, or any other basis for their authority. Even that most notable defender of absolute power Thomas Hobbes recognized that no political system can endure if it rests exclusively on repression and fear. Rather, it must claim the legitimacy that comes from governing in the interests of its subjects.¹

There is invariably a gap between prevailing political arrangements and better ones that might displace them. How consequential the gap is depends on how many in the population are dissatisfied with existing practices and believe some particular alternative would be better, how intensely they believe it, and whether—given the risks—they have the inclination and resources to try to replace the status quo with the alternative. The aspiration to create a More Perfect Union, as the preamble to the United States Constitution has it, reflects the understanding by its authors that the health—and perhaps even the survival—of any political order depends on narrowing the gap or at least keeping it manageable.

Those who aspire to bridge the gap are constrained by the reality that our reach often, perhaps even characteristically, exceeds our grasp. It is easy to misdiagnose the sources of present dissatisfaction, given the meager condition of causal understanding in the human sciences. Moreover, critics often underestimate the disadvantages of untried possibilities, comparing flawed existing arrangements with idealized versions of proffered alternatives. And even when objectives have been well thought out and would be workable in principle, we often lack viable means of reaching them. Much that passes for political philosophy calls to mind the joke about the traveler who approached a farmer in Donegal asking for directions to Dublin and elicited the response, “Well, sonny, I wouldn’t start out from here.” People who are confident of the desirability of change often overestimate their ability to bring it about. If they are political philosophers, this condemns them to irrelevance. If they are energetic political agents, they can do great harm.

But if reckless reform is perilous, mindless resistance to change scarcely makes sense either. Burke recommended “infinite caution” before rejecting established ways of doing things.² Interpreting that admonition literally would blind people to genuine opportunities for improvement, enabling bad institutions to persist unnecessarily. And as circumstances change, ways of doing things that worked in the past can become dysfunctional. In the early 1920s the British Liberal Party effectively committed suicide when H. H. Asquith misread the emerging dynamics of working-class politics and ceded the anti-Tory role to Ramsay MacDonald’s ascending Labour Party rather than adapt to the new reality. In 1979, by contrast, at the height of apartheid, Afrikaner leader P. W. Botha recognized that his people had to “adapt or die”—though many of them were then unwilling to hear it.³ But his successor, F. W. de Klerk, convinced them to accept the imperative and embrace terrifying change. Although it would cost their National Party its existence, it was a wise decision because more than a political party was at stake. Their choice avoided civil war and gave the Afrikaners a viable place in a new democratic order.⁴

The South African example underscores how much can be at stake in assessing claims about the need for change. The world’s population, which grew from under a billion to more than six times that number over the past two centuries, will likely close in on ten billion by the middle of our own.⁵ Countries with populations in the hundreds of millions, and even billions, confront new challenges of political accountability. Snowballing industrialization has altered the planet and its atmosphere, perhaps irreversibly. This has produced transnational ecological threats that were unimagined only a few decades ago. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction creates security dilemmas that have been transposed into a new key by the end of the Cold War, as does the widely unanticipated resurgence of ethnic, national, and religious political affiliations across the world.⁶ The political institutions of the modern West might be tried and tested, but their capacity to cope with present and future challenges is debatable. Designing viable alternatives, and devising incentives to move people toward them, are tasks to which we might not prove equal. We might feel constrained to try, but we are stuck with the limitations of our actual minds and the possible worlds we can conjure up.⁷ The imperative to adapt and reinvent inherited practices and institutions is seldom accompanied by workable blueprints.

People often know more about what is inadequate than what would be adequate. During the 1980s, many who lived in Soviet bloc countries could detail the fine contours of their oppression, as could victims of apartheid in South Africa. Yet they could supply only haziest accounts of what their worlds would be like without communism or apartheid, and why they would be better. Comparable stories could be told about those who have opposed fascism and other forms of subjugation. The inability to depict the details of a viable alternative was not a failing on their part. It reflected the reactive character of the human condition. People reject what is painful and oppressive in the hope that something better can be created, even though the destination and path forward are often, perhaps congenitally, shrouded in fog. My goal in this book is to develop an account of political action and institutions that takes these reactive features of the human condition seriously, and builds on them.

I begin by exploring of how best to think about untested possibilities, given our critical and imaginative limitations. Starting from Immanuel Kant’s dictum that “ought entails can,” I argue in sections 1.1 and 1.2 for a pragmatic and experimental attitude to the limits of possibility that involves ruling out what is plainly impossible and developing, and constantly recalibrating, strategies to move away from oppressive circumstances in the direction of something better. This leads to a discussion of the role of counterfactual thinking in political argument, where I contend that we should agree with the elder John Rawls that there is no reason to require more agreement in politics than is needed to sustain the goals we seek to achieve. However, Rawls is implausible in claiming that this can support one ideal theory of political arrangements as superior to other pretenders. Moreover, his tabula rasa focus on what he describes as the “basic structure” of political institutions belies our reality. Humans inevitably make political choices at the margin, redesigning inherited institutions as they reproduce them into the future. We rebuild our ships at sea.

People who resist domination hope to create something better, even though it is often impossible for them to determine the odds of success. Human cognitive capacities are easily overwhelmed by the social world’s complexity, and the behavior of others—on which success often depends—can defy prediction. But this does not make hope irrational. In section 1.3 I note that hope helps motivate people to act in the face of daunting challenges, and it can be integral to securing cooperation from others to escape domination. Drawing on Robert Axelrod’s research on cooperation in the face of uncertainty, I argue in section 1.4 that adopting hopeful strategies, geared to discovering and securing cooperation from others, can be vital for combating domination. Hopeful strategies are not mindlessly cooperative or forgiving, but they lead people to test the cooperative waters and to open themselves to reciprocation and comparable probing from others. Cooperative solutions are not always available, but when they are, hopeful strategies help us converge on and build upon them.

But what are people avoiding when they avoid domination? Defining domination is difficult because it is what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as a family resemblance concept. Each instance of domination shares features with others, but there is no single defining element common to them all.⁸ This should caution us not to search overly hard for watertight definitions, or to expect too much of any account that we can supply. There will be exceptions and borderline cases to almost everything we say about domination, but this need not render our observations about it wrongheaded or useless. Instead, it suggests that we calibrate our expectations to take account of the kind of subject at hand. With these cautions in mind, I characterize domination in section 1.5 as involving the avoidable and illegitimate exercise of power that compromises people’s basic interests, and I argue that attempts to escape it are rooted in the particular—in ways that appeals to ideals like freedom, equality, and impartiality are not. Rather than try to escape domination as such, people try to escape instances of domination that they experience or by which they feel threatened.

The flipside of uncertainty over whether domination can be undermined is uncertainty over whether it can be sustained. This works in nondomination’s favor, generating a rationale for resisting domination that stretches at least from primitive hunter-gatherer societies through George Kennan’s defense of containment in the 1940s. It cleaves to the idea that if you cannot be confident of your ability to dominate others, the next best thing is to create a world that no one can dominate. I explore the foundations and some implications of this logic in section 1.6, noting its elective affinities with democratic politics understood as institutionalized uncertainty of outcomes. This is a logic that arises in different ways throughout the book, captured in Machiavelli’s defense of democracy on the grounds that it allocates power to those who want not to be dominated rather than those who seek to dominate others. It is a logic that, once established, can become durable, though it is by no means immune to invasion by less sanguine political agendas and dynamics. As I note in section 1.7, history promises us nothing.

1.1 Utopian Thinking and the Limits of Possibility

Responding to present dissatisfactions by positing a future in which they will melt away is as old as the human condition. Sometimes these portrayals combine past and future utopias as endpoints in a teleological sequence, as with the Judeo-Christian narrative in which an innocent world has been lost but in which redemption is available to adherents who follow a prescribed course. Utopias are often connected to—even defined against—dystopias, which might be eternal hell or reincarnation as a lower form of life. Dystopias figure in utopian thinking partly to incorporate and emphasize the human capacity for choice; they speak to our proclivity to believe that our fate is in our hands. Choosing well is defined against the possibility of choosing poorly, both for an individual, where damnation or salvation is at stake, and for peoples who risk catastrophe if gods are displeased or vital actions are not taken to stave off an apocalypse.

Secular utopias might carry less metaphysical freight, though they sometimes e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Epigraph
• 1. Adapting against Domination
• 2. Power and Majority Rule
• 3. The Stakes of Political Conflict
• 4. Democracy against Republicanism
• 5. Against World Government
• 6. Resisting Domination across Borders
• 7. Politics against Domination
• Notes
• Index