The Disenfranchisement Complaint and the Metaphorics of Injustice
Colin Kielty
Department of Politics, University of Virginia
ck7dn@virginia
[Draft: Please, please do not cite or circulate without permission]
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri. His killing,
the neglect of his bullet-ridden body, and the behavior of the Ferguson police
department—on one hand evasive and on the other repressive—all contributed to a
subsequent protest movement that achieved mass scale and national attention. But
as that movement gained momentum the domain of grievances that it articulated
widened. Not only did citizens voice complaints about Brown’s slaying itself. Nor did
they focus exclusively on the way in which the police responded to their protests,
immortalized in images of APC columns and truck-mounted snipers. In addition to
complaints about these things, protesters expanded the range of the relevant issues
to the general experience of simply being a citizen in Ferguson. Specifically, they
complained that part of that experience was the condition of being disenfranchised.
As Ferguson Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes described the source of
her community’s disaffection, “the African-American community [in Ferguson] has
been disenfranchised for a very long time.”1 Russell Gunn, a former state
representative whose district included part of Ferguson, described community
sentiment thusly: “Some people feel so disenfranchised, they wonder what good
“Between Ferguson's Police And Population, A Racial Divide,” NPR Interview,
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/13/340153388/between-fergusons-police-andpopulation-a-racial-divide
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[getting politically involved] is going to do.”2 And several commentators, such as The
Root’s Charles D. Ellison, stressed that the township’s black residents were both
“struggling and disenfranchised” well before Brown’s killing.3
The complaint has not been reserved to Ferguson. It was echoed in the wake
of the Baltimore Uprising ignited by the killing of Freddie Gray, and it has also
surfaced in Anglophone media coverage of social conditions in Paris’s outlying
banlieues.4 The language of disenfranchisement has even been deployed as an
analytic for understanding the grievances of the diffuse menagerie of movements
organized under the banner of “Occupy.” New York Times writers Jeff Zeleny and
Megan Thee-Brenan describe Occupy Wall Street as animated by “a sense that the
poor and middle class have been disenfranchised.”5 And Andrew Sullivan brings
Europe’s anti-austerity protests into the same fold, writing: “The theme that
connects them all is disenfranchisement, the sense that the world is shifting deeply
and inexorably beyond our ability to control it through our democratic
institutions.”6
Nick Timiraos and Dante Chinni, “Why Is Ferguson’s City Leadership Not Racially
Representative?”,
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/08/25/why-is-fergusons-city-leadershipnot-racially-representative/
3 Ellison, “Ferguson’s White City Leadership Must Change,”
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/08/ferguson_s_white_city_govern
ment_must_change.html
4 Charles Blow, “Violence in Baltimore,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/opinion/charles-blow-violence-inbaltimore.html
5 Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brenan, “New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of
Government,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/poll-findsanxiety-on-the-economy-fuels-volatility-in-the-2012-race.html?_r=1&hp
6 http://www.newsweek.com/how-i-learned-love-goddamn-hippies-68183
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How should we read such disenfranchisement talk? This essay argues that
political theorists should go beyond reading such complaints as expressing
unconsidered rhetorical whim. Instead, we should see them as signaling something
substantive and important about political language, democratic theory, and the
relationship between the two. This essay according takes these seemingly off-hand
invocations of disenfranchisement as an occasion to argue for a greater role for that
complaint in our critical and political imagination. By pursuing the ways in which
such talk challenges conventional ways of speaking and thinking—both about
disenfranchisement itself and about the adequacy of other languages for capturing
and criticizing injustice—political theorists can begin to construct an imaginative
frame that better captures important dimensions of democratic concern.
To make this argument, the essay brings together the two challenges
mentioned just above. On the one hand, this particular kind of disenfranchisement
talk challenges conventionally ways of thinking about the meaning of the term itself.
After all, in academic discourses, disenfranchisement refers almost exclusively to
the denial of the right or effective opportunity to vote. And while obstructions to
ballot access have been by no means eliminated, and while the practice of felon
disenfranchisement continues to disfigure the democratic landscape, complaints
about disenfranchisement are unlikely to be reducible to these phenomena.
Continued, yet non-standard, even “metaphorical” uses of the language of
disenfranchisement thus prompt us to consider whether the “literal” sense of the
term may fail to capture important resonances that are of fact of theoretical import.
3
Some of disenfranchisement’s metaphorical connotations are relatively
intuitive: the experience of being denied a meaningful say in the political life one
shares with others, or of being deprived of the means of projecting their voice in the
way democracy demands. The term evokes a scene of powerlessness,7 an inability to
get fair hearing, and the sense that one doesn’t even have the chance make one’s
impress bear on those forces that actively define one’s life. Yet, there will likely be
wide agreement that these experiences and conditions are unjust. Stumping for a
complaint that picks them out might then seem like a rehash of a certain common
sense. And this suggests that trying to supply disenfranchisement with a broader
meaning directly is unlikely to make the argument in full.
But, on the other hand, the stress on disenfranchisement—either literal or
metaphorical—departs widely from the stock set of terms to which political theory
has devoted sustained attention and development as productive idioms for
capturing injustice—terms like misrecognition, oppression, exclusion and,
especially, domination. Talk of disenfranchisement, even when taken in a more
expansive sense, can prompt us reconsider the extent to which the existing range of
terms adequate for capturing the forms of injustice that characterize the
contemporary moment.
The essay then builds its case for disenfranchisement indirectly, by way of
engagements with authors similarly concerned with implications of our political
Iris Young recommends a language of “powerlessness” as way of capturing and
complaining about a distinctive dimension of oppression. See Young, “The Five
Faces of Oppression.” It is not clear, however, what the democratic status of the
corresponding ideal—that of being “empowered”—would be. It is because the
language of disenfranchisement, and its suggestion of an ideal of enfranchisement,
evokes explicitly democratic commitments that I rely upon them here.
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vocabularies, but who favor of different forms of complaint. Specifically, I argue that
the self-conscious turn within much of political theory to a language of
domination—as Danielle Allen suggests, a term that “has become a near synonym
for injustice”8—itself illuminates much about the meaning and the significance of
disenfranchisement as a related, but distinct phenomena. In fact, many of the best
arguments for domination’s claim to serve as the chief orienting complaint of our
political imagination themselves highlight a set of experiences and theoretical issues
from which a language of domination may actually distract.
Several authors have already questioned domination’s ability to serve as the
sole term for capturing injustice, “wholly sufficient to describe and explain objective
inequalities or structural power-asymmetries, subjective injustices, and the
motivational bases of collective action”—what Veit Bader describes as “monism”
about injustice.9 Patchen Markell and Sharon Krause have explicitly challenged the
sufficiency of domination, each focusing primarily on the work of Phillip Pettit.10
Both take Pettit’s conceptual account of domination to miss important forms of
subjection that should register as worthy of complaint and contestation. Their
arguments thus channel an underlying concern that the kind of argument that Pettit
makes—going “all in” for a single complaint—can flatten our critical sensibilities
and unnecessarily narrow our imaginative range.
Allen, “Invisible Citizens,” 29.
Bader, “Against Monism: Pluralist Critical Comments on Danielle Allen and Philip
Pettit.”
10 Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-domination”; Krause, “Beyond NonDomination: Agency, Inequality And The Meaning Of Freedom.”
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There is much to this concern. But it risks eliding the fact that the ways in
which we talk about injustice, and thereby the ways we imagine it, not only reflect
the world as it exists as independently from us, but also structures the way we
encounter it. Danielle Allen highlights this “prefiguring” dimension of political
language by reading together two other forms of complaint—exclusion and
domination—each with wide public and academic currency.11 Exclusion, for its part,
rhetorically evokes horizontal spatial images of inside and out, while simultaneously
projecting normative valuations of each. Being “kept out” or “denied access” become
quintessential locutions for capturing the experience of injustice; being “brought in”
or “gaining entry” in turn describe the kinds of aspiration that would remedy it.
Allen doesn’t deny the existence of experiences and social practices that conform to
this picture. But she does question whether the picture can help us best remain
sensitive to and apprehend the experiences and social practices that characterize
the contemporary social and political landscape. To the extent that it does not, a
different language, one with a different “metaphorical architecture,” will be needed.
As a way of evaluating whether a language will productively orient strategies
for combatting injustice, Allen’s analysis explicitly highlights the imaginative
connection between a complaint and its corresponding aspiration or ideal. Explicit
attention to this relationship, for Allen, is what should deepen our concerns about
exclusion. This is because exclusion’s corresponding ideal of inclusion on her view
rests on a sanitized picture of what life is like “inside.” Robert Goodin makes a
similar observation, noting how the language of inclusion often operates with a “just
11
Allen, “Invisible Citizens: Political Exclusion and Domination in Arendt and Ellison.”
6
over the line” logic that encourages indifference to those who are “in,” yet still
“borderline.” As he puts it, “Being borderline, even if on the right side of the line,
carries clear costs, even where [according to the ideal of inclusion itself] seemingly
it should not matter.”12
But Goodin himself continues to rely on a horizontal spatial image. Preferable
in his view to a “just over the line” logic is an emphasis on “getting all the way to the
centre.”13 And, even were this emphasis implied by or compatible with the ideal of
inclusion — something Goodin denies — the spatial dynamic implied by centrality
might still be misleading. Allen doesn’t just want to draw attention to the possibility
of residual injustice for those “just over the line.” She also highlights how regimes of
white supremacy are not merely regimes that keep some citizens out of the
otherwise healthy set of civic practices of the included. Pursuing inclusion within
them—even, or perhaps especially, should this imply moving to the center—is
clearly a poor response to the injustice at stake; it may even be a complicit. Aspiring
to be central to a structure of racial hierarchy would sustain, rather than combat,
the injustice that defines it.14
Goodin, “Inclusion and Exclusion.”
Ibid.
14 Judith Shklar, despite defining the evolution of American citizenship as a “quest
for inclusion,” notes that many immigrant groups sought standing at the same level
as the dominant male, white mainstream, even though this form of inclusion
obviously left in tact, and even bolstered, structures of racial and sexual hierarchy.
What’s more, those citizens “also knew that their concern for their social standing
[was] not entirely compatible with their acknowledged democratic creed.” (Shklar,
American Citizenship, 2) See also Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White; and
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race.
12
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The metaphorics of exclusion, then—its images, tropes, archetypal
experiences and scenes—are likely to misdirect both our critical and our practical
attention. Domination, for Allen, does better. Leveraging a spatial dynamic of on top
and underneath, domination directs attention to the ways in which even inclusive
relationships can express asymmetries and hierarchies, and how practices and
institutions on the ostensible inside may nevertheless remain corrupt. It thus casts
the position and experience of those suffering injustice as a matter of subordination,
not just exclusion. And for Allen, this question of terms is of neither “purely
academic,” nor “purely historical” interest; she means it here and now. Writing in a
symposium dedicated to the political aftermath of Ferguson, Allen pulls no punches:
“two generations of scholarship in history and political philosophy have shown that
the inclusion/exclusion paradigm is inadequate to reality. Our problem is not
exclusion, to be solved by inclusion. Our problem is domination, to be solved by nondomination.” 15
Here Allen herself draws from Pettit, borrowing his phrasing for
domination’s corresponding ideal. Indeed, while Allen attributes domination’s
academic roots to class analysis, it recent rise is likely far more attributable to the
success of the neo-republican movement in political thought of which Pettit has
been among the most recognizable exponents.16 Both Pettit and Quentin Skinner—
“Forum: Ferguson Won't Change Anything. What Will?”
http://bostonreview.net/forum/ferguson-wont-change-anything-whatwill/danielle-allen-danielle-allen-response-ferguson-forum
16 The term “republican revival” is sometimes used to encompass this development,
though it antedates the invocation of explicitly neo-Roman themes, chief of which is
the stress on domination as the chief form of political complaint. See Michael Sandel,
Democracy and its Discontents; Cass Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival.”
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and a host of others in following17—have for the past several years undertaken
painstaking theoretical work to move domination to a central place in our political
imagination. But while Skinner’s historical excavations were first responsible for
throwing a spotlight on the distinctively neo-Roman understanding of unfreedom
that came to define the tradition,18 Pettit’s work has been so attractive to converts
and critics alike because it does the most to elaborate and defend the centrality of
domination conceptually. Pettit himself, after all, doesn’t cast his work as a matter of
retrieval alone. He also explicitly sees it as matter of clarification and refinement,
hoping to provide an account of domination with enough precision and coherence to
withstand significant intellectual scrutiny. If Allen denies that she is working “in the
spirit of an analytic philosopher whose goal is to clarify the ‘concepts’ of exclusions
and domination,”19 the fact that Pettit is doing this is what makes his work invite
such wide engagement.
Like Allen’s, Pettit’s work is highly attuned to the relationship between
complaint and aspiration. But not only does Pettit explicitly attend to the
implications of both the domination complaint and the corresponding ideal of nondomination. His work is also characterized a “dialectic” of sorts, constantly testing
complaint and ideal against one another to ensure that no cases appear in which the
ideal could be met and complaints left unanswered.
See also Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice; Maurizio Viroli,
Republicanism; Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and
Political Philosophy.
18 See his 1984 essay, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern
Perspectives.”
19 Allen, “Reply to Bader and Orwin.”
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This dialectical testing can in part explain the appeal to “non-domination” in
the first place, despite its linguistic awkwardness. It is not, at first glance, the most
intuitive to serve as the inverse of domination, particularly in light of the other
options on offer. Emancipation, in particular, may seem like a more obvious
candidate to stand as the opposing ideal, particularly given that term’s explicit
associations in the republican tradition between domination and the condition of
slavery.20 Pettit’s use of non-domination, however, is motivated by his desire to
normatively authorize a form of non-dominating power that would enable civic
vigilance against the encroach of domination, wherever it arises.21 Because we
would not expect domination to be the property of any one, or even any finite set, of
agents, institutions or practices, non-domination ought to describe a status that can
be achieved within the context of ongoing social and political relationships, and not
simply in the wake of their overthrow. It can’t be brought about by cutting off the
king’s head alone.22 We would have no framework for criticizing what comes after.
The interplay between domination and non-domination in Pettit’s work,
however, deserves closer scrutiny. And this is not because, despite careful
development, it still misses important dimensions of injustice—the objection from
Taking the connection between domination and slavery as it historically existed
might also lead us to a different opposing ideal, freedom as “marronage.” See Neil
Roberts, Freedom as Marronage.
21 Melvin Rogers is one of the few commentators to hone in the significance of this
authorizing unction of Pettit’s account. See Rogers, “Republican Confusion And
Liberal Clarification.”
22 Claude Lefort coins this expression to caution against the temptation to
ideologically fill the “empty place” of power left from the collapse of traditional
legitimation narratives and thus potentially enable new forms of domination. See
Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 17. Pettit’s view, however, is better put as a
warning to guard against the practical occupation of the place of power, something
for which the denial of ideological justification is insufficient.
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insufficiency noted above. Instead, over time, Pettit’s account subtly transforms to
draw acute attention to a set of conceptual concerns that his early work had largely
glossed over. However, the language of domination itself is actually a poor fit with
these concerns. In fact, despite updating what counts as domination at the
conceptual level, the set of images and experiences on which Pettit relies—and
which the language of domination intuitively evokes—fails to track these changes.
In short, Pettit’s considered view on the meaning of domination leaves the term’s
metaphorics behind. I argue that this new set of concerns is thus better captured by
a different language, that of disenfranchisement.23
The engagement that follows involves the kind of conceptual exposition for
which the technical literature on Pettit’s theory is well known. But it adds to this an
examination of the tropes, images and affects that Pettit builds in to his account. It is
only by doing this that we can see clearly how Pettit’s own struggle to accomplish all
that he would like with his account of domination in fact brings us (his readers, and
I think, himself) to a place that, upon reflection, looks meaningfully different from
the place he takes himself to have gone. The upshot of this exposition is that it can
give reason to those concerned with domination to consider a different normative
vocabulary, leveraging much of the work Pettit has already done to move
disenfranchisement, rather than domination itself, to the forefront our political
imagination.
This is not entirely surprising, as one of Pettit’s earliest (if quickly abandoned)
terms for his republican ideal of liberty was the “franchise.” This usage is clearly
metaphorical in the sense I have been describing: the scare quotes around are used
by Pettit himself, who explicit states that his sense of franchise invests the ideal with
“a much richer array of powers than the right to vote.” See Pettit, “The Ideal of a
Republic.”
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Section: The Architecture of Domination
Framing Pettit’s goals as of a piece with Allen’s might seem strange upon
reflection. This is because Pettit and other neo-republican authors are not
ostensibly interested in distinguishing domination from a competing exclusion
complaint, as Allen is. Their primary target is instead a complaint about
interference, a complaint they identify as paradigmatic of the liberal tradition to
which they mean to offer an alternative.24 The vast majority of the critical literature
on the neo-republican movement thus focuses the success of these distinctions,
between domination and interference and between republicanism and liberalism.25
However, while the republican/liberal and domination/interference
distinctions are indeed Pettit’s primary targets, he and other neo-republican authors
also explicitly distinguish the republican position from a “populist” alternative that
would make the quality of democratic participation the most significant criterion for
evaluating whether political and social arrangements are unjust.26
This makes sense. Part of domination’s appeal—mirroring its liberal
counterpart, in fact—is meant to stem from the complaint’s ability provide an
For defining statements of this view, see Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 114–
119; Pettit, Republicanism, “Preface,” and “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On
a Difference with Quentin Skinner.”
25 See, for only a small but representative set of challenges to these distinctions,
Robert Goodin, “Folie Republicaine”; Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights,
Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism; Melvin Rogers, “Republican Confusion and
Liberal Clarification.”
26 See Pettit, Republicanism, 8–20. Nadia Urbinati and John McCormick both criticize
both Pettit and his historical predecessors on precisely this score. See Urbinati,
“Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy”; McCormick,
“Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's ‘Guicciardinian
Moments’.”
24
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independent set of considerations against which participatory arrangements could
be assessed. Non-domination expresses a negative, rather than a positive picture of
liberty—as both Pettit and Skinner have long argued—and is thus able to make
sense of citizens’ complaints even when they are ostensibly politically involved. And
this dimension of republican argument runs parallel with Allen’s critique of
exclusion. Both stress the need to understand injustice beyond the simple matter of
being in or out, and instead hone in on the normative landscape within a practice.
Domination is meant to provide just this kind of critical leverage.
Moreover, the stability of the distinction between negative, republican ideals
and positive, “populist” ones has generally been taken for granted. While several
critics have tried to show that the more prominent distinction between
republicanism and liberalism is itself unstable—because the complaint about
domination is not fundamentally distinguishable from the conventional liberal
complaint about interference—the distinction between non-domination and
participation has gone essentially unquestioned.27
Fascinatingly, however, that distinction has largely collapsed in Pettit’s
recent work. In fact, in his 2010 Seeley Lectures, Pettit relies at length on precisely
the “definitional” connection between a kind of political involvement and nondominated status that the republican tradition at large had previously eschewed.
For arguments concerning the historical and conceptual compatibility of
liberalism and republicanism, see Richard Dagger, “Autonomy, Domination, and the
Republican Challenge to Liberalism” and Charles Larmore, “A Critique of Philip
Pettit's Republicanism.” From the other direction, even authors like Urbinati and
John McCormick—authors who challenge the adequacy of the neo-republican
framework—do so because they see republicanism as meaningfully distinct from a
democratic “populism.” See, Urbinati, “Competing for Liberty,” McCormick,
Machiavellian Democracy.
27
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This shift, despite its significance, has goes largely unacknowledged by Pettit’s
interlocutors, and to some extent by Pettit himself. Yet, it shouldn’t have been
entirely unexpected, as the shift develops from within the logic already internal to
Pettit’s work, specifically the dialectic between complaint and ideal to which he is so
attentive. It is through the effort to define domination in such a way that it can
address the whole range of concerns that animate the republican project that Pettit
subtly changes its definition over time.
To see the conceptual logic that I am alleging at work, it helps to begin with
the central metaphor of Pettit’s account of domination, the analogy between
domination and the condition of slavery. This analogy is central across the range of
republican literature as well. As Pettit writes, “The Republican tradition is
unanimous in casting freedom as the opposite of slavery, and in seeing exposure to
the arbitrary will of another…as the great evil.”28 And his own work is replete with
descriptions (including those of the historical republicans he cites) of this “scene of
subjection”29: the image of “living in the shadow of another person’s presence”; the
almost involuntary reaction in which one is “unable to look the other in the eye”; the
experience of being “forced to toady or fawn or flatter in the attempt to
Republicanism, 31–2. See also Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, and
“Republicanism and Political Values.” As Alex Gourevitch documents, the analogy
was also widely deployed by 19th century labor agitators through the idea of “wageslavery.” See Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and
Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century.
29 I borrow this term from Saidiya Hartman, though it departs significantly from her
usage. Hartman herself is skeptical than any direct description of subjection in the
vein that Pettit offers can adequately render what it is like to be actually enslaved.
28
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ingratiate”30; a life of fearing the theft of one’s patrimony31; the insecurity of being
left at the mercy of a wretched and violent lord; the need “to look with a degree of
apprehension at a master” who does not interfere, but could.”32
Pettit’s account leverages this analogy to do two things. In the first place,
describing such scenes of subjection mobilize a set of affects that are liable to be
stronger than those mobilized by complaints about interference, or even exclusion.
They prime readers to respond to domination complaints with heightened anxiety
and concern.33 But the analogy also plays a different role through the trope of the
benevolent slave-owner, a trope that makes clear it is not actual abuse, but the
condition of merely being subject to the will of another, that constitutes the
substance of a violation. Even if one manages to escape abuse, or any interference at
all for that matter, one’s subjection and vulnerability is nevertheless still complaintworthy. Domination is thus definitionally present whenever one is vulnerable in this
kind of way.
Pettit construes the heightened sensitivity of the domination complaint, and
not just its affective depth, as its primary advantage over the focus on interference
that he takes to characterize liberal thought. By illuminating this condition, Pettit’s
view enables a complaint that might otherwise escape (liberal) sensitivities; or, at
All of these scenes are set immediately in the introduction (p. 5) of Pettit’s
Republicanism.
31 Pettit, Republicanism, 32.
32 Ibid., 123.
33 The drama of the slavery analogy might also be seen as somewhat disingenuous.
As Mary Nyquist notes, the threat of “political slavery” has often selectively evoked
connections to actually existing chattel slavery, with which republican citizens
would have been familiar but into which they would not have been at risk of falling.
See Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 1–10.
30
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least, might otherwise be marginal enough in our political imagination that we
would direct our attention and activity primarily elsewhere.
These two dimensions of the slavery analogy—the affective and the
conceptual—might appear pull in different directions. As mentioned above,
invoking slavery can in turn lead to a strong intuition that the appropriate response
to conditions of domination would be matter of deconstruction and dismantling. The
relevant political ideal would be one of “emancipation” or “abolition,” the complete
overthrow of a system of power rather the more partial achievement of “nondomination.”
Non-domination, however, is not solely meant as a critical ideal. Pettit also
invests it with an authorizing function, enabling forms of power that can transform
the ideal’s negative, critical potential into tangible checks and constraints. Because
all social and political arrangements have the potential to become dominating when
inevitably asymmetric power relationships emerge within them, the ability to
actually interfere with those at the top of a power structure—removing them from
office, forcing them to submit to regulatory laws, or otherwise compelling them to
behave well—will be necessary for securing against the possibility of domination.
In early work, Pettit uses the term “arbitrary” to describe the bad-making
quality of actual or reserve interference, and thus the key to the distinction between
dominating and non-dominating power. To be interfered with in a non-arbitrary
way should give no grounds for complaint. It should simply be seen as part of the
price of living in a democratic society. Moreover, the reliance on arbitrariness keeps
Pettit firmly within the linguistic tradition of the earlier republicanisms he claims to
16
revive.34 And while Pettit—consequentially, as we will see—walks back from this
term in later work, he never repudiates it. So it can serve as a good provisional
starting point for exploring the fine balance between his account’s critical and
authorizing dimensions.
One can interpretatively locate three argumentative strategies for defining
arbitrariness in Pettit’s work. The first involves defining arbitrariness simply as a
matter of subjection to someone else’s will, rather than one’s own, where that will
expresses pure unchecked discretion. This definition fits most closely both with the
ordinary language sense of arbitrary35 as well as with the original image of the
slave’s subjection: complete vulnerability to a master’s whims and proclivities,
accompanied by a sense of sheer insecurity and a willingness to shape one’s desires
and hopes according. While this interpretation receives the least conceptual
developed from Pettit, it is the interpretation with which much of his rhetorical
imagery most clearly resonates.
If intuitive, however, this definition quickly runs into theoretical problems.
This is because it will likely fail to detect cases in which laws or norms do indeed
condition the exercise of power, depriving it of its character as the mere assertion of
unconstrained will or expression of subjective discretion, while still allowing species
of subjection that are still intuitively, and deeply, objectionable. As Patchen Markell
See, in particular, Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, and Nyquist,
Arbitrary Rule.
35 The first three definitions listed by Merriam-Webster are: “depending on
individual discretion,” “not restrained or limited,” and “based on or determined by
individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the
intrinsic nature of something.” See http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/arbitrary.
34
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points out, Pettit adds a second dimension to his definition of arbitrariness precisely
in order to get leverage against this “range of forms of principled or rule-bound
subordination.”36 Thus we get a new definition necessitating that, to count as nonarbitrary, the power in question must not only be constrained and neutered of its
willfulness, but also track the interests of those subject to it. As Pettit puts this
position in a 2002 essay, “I think that someone has an arbitrary power of
interference in the affairs of another so far as they have a power of interference that
is not forced to track the avowed or readily avowable interests of the other.”37
As Markell points out, however, the “avowed or readily avowable” qualifier
introduces a subtle, but consequential paternalistic element into Pettit’s account of
interests. This is because, with such a qualifier in place, arbitrariness is avoided not
only by disciplining the potentially interfering power, but also by disciplining the
interests of subjects themselves.38 For Markell, this suggests that yet another kind of
subordination may escape domination’s conceptual sensitivities: situations in which
those activities through which citizens come to hold and affirm the appropriate
kinds of interests are carried out without their involvement at all. This is a distinct
kind of complaint—one Markell calls “usurpation”—related but not reducible to
domination.
Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-Domination,” 14.
Pettit, “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin
Skinner.”
38 As Markell puts it, “power is non-arbitrary when its exercise is forced to track the
interferee’s interests and when those interests have themselves been validated,
deprived of their [own] arbitrary character by having been subjected to the
standards of commonness and avowability.” (“Insufficiency,” 15)
36
37
18
Markell’s critique, however, gets its leverage by relying on one of two related
but distinguishable interpretations of Pettit’s (admittedly complex and ambiguous)
definitional criterion, being “forced to track the avowed or readily avowable
interests.” The first interpretation, and the one engaged by Markell, places emphasis
on the “interests” side of Pettit’s formulation. Interests, properly defined (and
disciplined), can serve as an independent benchmark for assessing whether
interference is forced to track the right thing. Moreover, “forced,” on this
interpretation, would operate in the passive voice: as a mater of definition, we need
only look at whether a power of interference is forced in the right direction, or not.
Questions of “by whom” or “how”—and thus locutions in the active voice—are
secondary.
This interpretation is indeed the one encouraged by Pettit across the
majority of his oeuvre. It is also the most consistent with the historical republican
emphasis on the “rule of law.” And it is this emphasis, moreover, which has
historically been used to make a republican approach look distinct from, if not
opposed to, “populist” democratic approaches invested in a collective will or
popular sovereignty. As Nadia Urbinati puts it, “neo-republican theorists claim that
for liberty to be guaranteed and enjoyed what is essential is the empire of the rule of
law—procedures and magistrates—not necessarily participation regulated by
procedures.”39 Pettit’s sometime advocacy for “de-politicizing” institutions that
39
Urbinati, “Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy,” 612.
19
would check arbitrariness precisely by removing issues from practices of popular
will-formation further supports this interpretation.40
In later work, however, Pettit begins to emphasize a different interpretation,
one that downplays the significance of interests themselves and instead prioritizes
the nature of the “forcing” that this definition of arbitrariness had likewise evoked.41
What is most important, on this interpretation, is the ability of citizens themselves to
check the potentially powers to which they’re subject. In fact, in his most recent
work, Pettit alters how he articulates the quality that makes power dominating,
substituting “uncontrolled” for arbitrary. And in explaining this linguistic shift, Pettit
states that “In one usage, arbitrary interference is interference that is not subject to
established rules. But interference that conforms to rules, and is non-arbitrary in
that sense, may still be uncontrolled by you and can count is arbitrary in our
sense.”42 (Italics added.)
Two things are notable about this explanation. The first is the significance of
the fact that control must be by you, and that this stipulation is definitional. It isn’t
simply that the ability to exercise control over a potentially interfering power is
more likely, in instrumental terms, to make it less arbitrary and dominating. If
citizens are themselves not in a position to exercise the right kind of control, it then
this fact itself is what makes the power to which they are subject dominating.
See Pettit, “Depoliticizing Democracy.” This language, however, is also walkedback in later work. See On the People’s Terms, 231, fn44.
41 Pettit gives no indication that external criticism is what motivates this shift,
though it does offer a response to Markell’s concerns and could be driven by
anticipation (after the fact?) of potential criticisms in the same vein.
42 Pettit, On the People’s Terms, 58. The use of the term arbitrary this passage is
meant to be something of a last hurrah, as Pettit intends “to make little or no use of
the term” thereafter.
40
20
But the second notable fact is that Pettit sees this as a clarification of his
position and the best possible interpretation of the republican concern with
domination, rather than an actual change in position or a repudiation of the
republican values he had previously endorsed. Being in the right kind of control—
not, strictly speaking, of oneself, in the manner of Kant’s autonomy or Berlin’s
“positive liberty,” but instead of potentially interfering sources of power—is simply
what it means to be non-dominated. Or, I should say, what it means to enjoy the
ideal that Pettit finds most attractive. Whether the term “non-domination” actually
captures this ideal well should now appear as an open question.
Metaphorical Fit and the Language of Injustice
This conceptual evolution of Pettit’s account of domination has a number of salutary
features. It responds (while not always admitting as much) to several of the
critiques that the republican framework has received since its recent return to
prominence. On he one hand, its emphasis on positioning democratic citizens to be
guarantors of their own security, rather than passive recipients of protection, deals
at facially with charges of paternalism. On the other hand, more evenly balancing
the critical against the authorizing functions of the account by explicitly idealizing
popular control brings Pettit’s view much more closely in line with critics in a
democratic vein. Moreover, this is all accomplished while continuing to foreground
an interest in highlighting the complaint-worthy dimensions of subjection that
might otherwise go unremarked.
21
The language of domination, however, is itself stretched incredibly far in the
midst of this conceptual shuffling. And, tellingly, the images, scenes and tropes that
Pettit uses to illustrate his key terms largely do not keep up. Consider the case of
non-dominating power, the kind that Pettit hopes his specification of domination
can productively enable. The most prominent illustration used in Pettit’s late work
is that of a friend who hands the keys to their alcohol cupboard over to him, on the
condition he will only return them in line with that friend’s interests.43 Yet this
scene illustrates the earlier, abandoned appeal to non-arbitrariness as an interesttracking phenomenon. The friend, after all, is in no position to actually control
Pettit’s actions in the way the later definition suggests. It is thus unlikely to sensitize
our critical sensibilities to those situations in which citizens lack the ability to exert
ongoing control.
Pettit likely remains tied to such imagery, however, because the language of
non-domination itself remains fundamentally negative. The example of the
cupboard and keys elicits the intuition that handing over the keys actually prevents
the invidious interference of the alcohol. The key-holding friend acts to protect
against this interference in the same explicitly paternalistic fashion that caused (or
at least appeared to cause) Pettit to reject the interest-tracking view of nondominating power on a conceptual level. But the illustration likely comes so readily
because the language of non-domination itself evokes an image of protection and
immunity.
43
Pettit, On the People’s Terms, 57, 152–165.
22
Consider another, medical analogy that Pettit uses to explain the immunity
non-domination ought to entail. On this analogy, we should see the institutions
responsible for bringing non-domination about—including even those
“empowering” institutions consistent with the emphasis on control—as
“constituting” civic immunity in the same way that antibodies constitute the bodily
immunity that an organism possesses against disease.44 Antibodies, as Pettit puts it,
establish immunity without “waiting on the result of any contingent causal process”
in the same way the non-dominating institutions establish non-domination.45
The medical analogy is instructive. It does a good job of illustrating the
constitutive (definitional) relationship that connects non-dominating institutions
and practices to the condition that we as citizens would enjoy by virtue of them. But
it does so at pain of misrepresenting the kind of power that non-domination, on the
control view, is supposed to represent. If the paradigmatic image of non-domination
as self-controlled power is that of someone subject to interference that they
themselves actively direct, it doesn’t seem right to analogize potential interference
to disease. Again, rather than emphasizing the ways in which citizens can be
positioned to exert control over political or social power, this analogy simply
pathologizes that power. A disease can be protected against, but it is not the kind of
thing that could be transformed by way of productive democratic practices. The
metaphorical picture of non-domination as immunity remains tied to the
connotations of protection implicit in the language itself.
44
45
Republicanism, 108; On the People’s Terms, 124.
On the People’s Terms, 124.
23
But if the language of non-domination is infelicitous in the ways just
described, the language of domination itself may fit even less well with the
conceptual phenomena it is now meant to describe. It is unclear, even implausible,
that domination can be stretched to cover the experiences of citizens who don’t
enjoy the control-centric ideal that Pettit outlines. Consider how Pettit explains
what it would take to exert the right kind of control, the kind that could make one
effectively “non-dominated” (I phrase I try hold at some distance): one ought to
have “equal access to an efficacious system of popular control,” or otherwise have
“an opportunity for participation in that system that is available with equal ease to
each citizen.”46 The imagery of domination—being under someone else’s thumb,
keeping an eye over one’s shoulder in lookout—is decidedly inapt for capturing
ways in which citizens might experience the failures of these sorts of institutions or
practices. Phrases like “lack of access” or “lack of opportunity” don’t draw on the
tropes of domination, its dramatization of subordination and vulnerability at.
Continuing to appeal to it as the chief form of complaint risks distracting from the
conceptual emphasis on positioning and control.
There is an additional risk, however, that the vocabulary of complaint will
collapse back into the idiom of exclusion. “Access” and “availability” are both
locutions that do correspond much better with that complaint. And this shift would
elide the conceptual importance of being correctly positioned and able exert oneself
some “force” as a check on power. Or, at least, it would shift that concern onto a
macro subject like “the people,” and deny its relevance to citizens on the ground: the
46Pettit,
On the People’s Terms, 169.
24
people as a whole should expect to exert officious control, but applying that
expectation to individual citizens is a category mistake. Yet Pettit is clear that to be
part of a meaningful ideal, the control in question must be “individualized” or
“shared equally.”47 So if citizens should indeed each be actually situated to exert
control, where their own efforts should exhibit at least some kind of efficacy, they
ought to have a complaint that picks out problems on precisely this front.
“Disenfranchisement” picks out this phenomenon: not simply being outside
or beyond the pale, and not just being underneath or insecure (though compatible
with both of these things), but being denied the tools to make one’s voice heard and
to make one’s input as a citizen felt. The ideal to which this complaint
corresponds—an ideal that we ought to see as perpetually in jeopardy, in the same
way that Pettit encourages us to see non-domination as perpetually in jeopardy—is
an ideal of enfranchisement. The language of enfranchisement explicitly carries with
it a commitment the right and effective opportunity to vote. But as the off-hand uses
cited at the outset of this essay show, it need not be reduced to this commitment
alone. What’s important is that the language of disenfranchisement attunes us to the
phenomenon of unheard voice; precisely those instances in which we might say that
a ballot, though cast, “doesn’t count,” or simply doesn’t do enough to endow its
bearer with their rightful share of democratic control. This is the phenomenon to
which Pettit draws our conceptual attention. What is needed is a language that can
sustain that attention across the whole range of political and social life, spotlighting
47
Ibid., 167, 169 and passim.
25
novel forms of injustice in the same way that Pettit and others thought that
domination would.
The upshot of this normative imagination can sometimes be hard to see.
While Pettit himself highlights the centrality of voting—in both elections and
referenda—for positioning citizens to exert their civic efficacy, he also
acknowledges that ballots don’t provide all citizens with the sense of efficacy to
which they aspire. Not everyone can feel they have had a meaningful influence on a
vote.
But the challenge posed by the idealization of enfranchisement is whether
such citizens—those who hold a ballot, but an “ineffectual” one—can continue to
complain about their lack of efficacy, or whether that complaint simply exhausts its
constructive value. The history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is instructive in
this regard. While the Act was largely, if slowly and painfully, successful in rolling
back those historical restrictions on the ballot most redolent of Jim Crow (poll taxes,
literacy tests, grandfather clauses and voucher systems, to name just the most well
known), black citizens and legal advocates—as well as their Latino counterparts—
soon began to realize that even the unmolested possession of the ballot could fail to
fully enfranchise its bearer.48
Accordingly, and almost immediately, those citizens and legal advocates
began to pursue a “second generation” of voting rights, spawning a previously
unknown legal doctrine concerned with the problem of “vote dilution.” This doctrine
Legal challenges took off in earnest with the Court’s 1973 decision in White v
Regester, which held that multi-member districts that kept minority voting blocs
from electing any representatives were unconstitutional.
48
26
described, defined, and outlawed electoral arrangements that were fashioned to
allow for minority voting while ensuring that those votes could never translate into
actual influence on the electoral outcome.49 “At-large” districts allowed white
majorities to outvote minority blocs for every office in the district, rather than
allowing minority voters to exercise electoral influence in at least some singlemember districts. White legislators could also gerrymander districts either by
fracturing minority voting blocs (that would then be “submerged” by white
majorities), or by packing minority voting blocks into in districts where there
influence could be contained and limited. In each case, complaining citizens
themselves asserted that the ideal of enfranchisement was not exhausted by the
possession of the ballot, despite lacking clearly established legal warrant
beforehand.50
Vote dilution is a complex and embattled (and perhaps only partially
coherent51) legal doctrine. But the urgency with which it emerged as an
embodiment of the VRA tells us something important about the viability of an ideal
of enfranchisement. Namely, this ideal doesn’t hinge on the question of whether we
can imagine voting, or any other democratic practice, fully providing the civic
efficacy to which citizens aspire. An ideal can be “fugitive” without devaluing its
For an overview of the different kinds of vote dilution claims, litigation, and
decisions, see Chandler Davidson, ed., Minority Vote Dilution, and Heather Gerken,
“The Right to an Undiluted Vote.”
50 Section 2 the VRA was amended in 1982 to further enable vote dilution
complaints in response to conservative turn in the Court’s voting rights
jurisprudence. But the amendments only codified what citizens had already
asserted, interpreting the ideal the VRA enshrined for themselves.
51 For reservations about the language of dilution, see again Gerken, “The Right to an
Undiluted Vote.”
49
27
currency.52 Instead, the ideal hinges on whether it can animate an ongoing program
of criticism and activism by illuminating the ever-proliferating ways in which
citizens can be disenfranchised. It deserves a greater birth in our political
imagination if it can.
See Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” and Stephen Best And Saidya Hartman, “Fugitive
Justice,” for treatments of ideals that are worth pursuing—and, when missing, worth
complaining about—but always receding from our grasp.
52
28