Ian Shapiro Quotes

The principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, and it is hard to imagine that there is a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and its attainment seems typically to be followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It might be widely accepted that democracy is a good thing, yet it is equally apparent that democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. Of course, it is far easier to perceive the need for reform than to prescribe specific proposals.

Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.

First let me persuade you of my metaphysics and epistemology, then my theory of science, then my ethics and social theory, and then having done all that, I will convince you of my political theory. Over the past two decades, I have become convinced that this is a mug’s game... The reason Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, and Rawls (many others could be named) garner widespread attention as political theorists has much more to do with their destinations than with their starting points.

A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.

Wealthy people used to find democracy frightening. The reason was simple: the poor, once enfranchised, should be expected to soak the rich. This fear bred elite resistance to expanding the franchise, particularly beyond the propertied classes. Nor did this fear, and the reasoning behind it, go unnoticed on the political left.

The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.

An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.

So Sen is right that democracy can be pressed into the service of reducing injustice. Indeed this can happen against expectations. Had there been neoclassical economists around in the late eighteenth century, they would have scoffed at the possibility of abolishing the slave trade. In the absence of a system of multilateral enforcement, Britain had to bear the enormous expense unilaterally—over several decades—without any obvious prospect of a return. whether democracy fosters or hinders economic growth.

Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.