Justice by Means of Democracy

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her many books include the widely acclaimed Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality; Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.; Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education; and Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, the last two also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• Part I: A Theory of Justice RevisedPrologue. On Surprise and the Purpose of Political PhilosophyChapter 1. Justice That Sacrifices Democracy: An ErrorChapter 2. Justice by Means of Democracy: An Ideal and Its Design PrinciplesPart II: Subsidiary Ideals of Justice for Each DomainChapter 3. The First Subsidiary Ideal: Egalitarian Participatory Constitutional DemocracyChapter 4. The Second Subsidiary Ideal: A Connected SocietyChapter 5. The Third Subsidiary Ideal: PolypolitanismChapter 6. The Fourth Subsidiary Ideal: Empowering EconomiesPart III: From Ideal to Design Principles to PracticeChapter 7. A New Model for the Practice of Democratic CitizenshipEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“Allen is an important political theorist and classicist who’s tried to turn theory into action. . . . And Allen’s vision, which she puts forward in her new book, Justice by Means of Democracy . . . is something called power-sharing liberalism. To her, one mistake liberalism has made has been that it is willing, again and again, to deprioritize political equality in favor of material redistribution. But she thinks renewal isn’t going to come from people just getting more from government. They’re going to have to be more full participants in government, and that’s going to require fundamentally overhauling the system. And maybe more than that, it’s going to require potentially constructing entirely new possibilities within it.”