Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism 9780226234724

Citation preview

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

S h a r o n R . K r a us e

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Sharon R. Krause is professor in and chair of the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Civil Passions and Liberalism with Honor. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-226-­23469-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­23472-­4 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226234724.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Krause, Sharon R., author.   Freedom beyond sovereignty : reconstructing liberal individualism / Sharon R. Krause.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-226-23469-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-23472-4 (e-book)  1. Individualism—United States.  2. Liberalism—United States.  3. Agent (Philosophy)  I. Title.   JC574.2.U6K74 2015  320.510973—dc23 2014025468 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, who so often showed me the way; and to Tayhas, who brings the light.

C o n t e n ts

Ack n o w l e d g m e n ts

I n tr o ducti o n

One

T wo

/ ix

/ Reconstructing Liberal Individualism / 1 / Non-­sovereign Agency / 21

/ Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility / 58

Three

/ Vitalities of Non-­sovereign Agency / 98 F o ur

F iv e

/ What Is Freedom? / 133 / Plural Freedom / 165

C o n clusi o n s

/ Redeeming Freedom / 185 Notes / 195

Bibliography / 227 Index / 237

Ack n o w l e d g m e n ts

There are very few things in life that we actually accomplish alone, or so this book argues, and the book itself embodies that truth. I am grateful to the friends, family, and colleagues as well as the conference panels, colloquia, classes, and reviewers who have helped bring the book to fruition. My colleagues at Brown in the Political Science Department, as well as some from Philosophy, Religious Studies, Sociology, Economics, and Africana Studies, have generously shared their knowledge and commented on various parts of the project, and have made Brown a tremendously nourishing intellectual community. I am especially indebted in this regard to Mark Blyth, Corey Brettschneider, Steve Bush, Mark Cladis, Dave Estland, Alex Gourevitch, Bonnie Honig, Charles Larmore, Tal Lewis, Glenn Loury, Tricia Rose, John Tomasi, and Andre Willis. For fruitful feedback and conversation along the way I thank Brooke Ackerly, Libby Anker, Lawrie Balfour, Yvonne Chiu, Joshua Dienstag, Jason Frank, Michael Frazer, Samantha Frost, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Don Herzog, Nancy Hirschmann, Leigh Jenco, David Kim, Harvey Mansfield, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Tamara Metz, Michael Morrell, Emily Nacol, Jenny Nedelsky, Lorraine and Tom Pangle, Philip Pettit, Dennis Rasmussen, Andy Sabl, Annie Stilz, Christina Tarnopolsky, Chip Turner, Dana Villa, Drew Volmert, and Liz Wingrove. The project profited immensely from the opportunity to present parts of it at Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Reed, Stanford, Tulane, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, University of Houston, University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, UT Austin, University of Wisconsin, Washington University St. Louis, Wesleyan, Vanderbilt, and Yale as well as the Political Philosophy Workshop and the Religion and Critical Thought Colloquium at Brown. I am grateful for those fruitful discussions. Thanks are also due to the members of my fall 2013 graduate seminar for

x / Acknowledgments

their spirited engagement with the manuscript. Jennie Ikuta and Michal Ben-­Noah provided expert editorial assistance along with incisive commentary. Parts of several chapters were published in earlier form as “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics,” Political Theory 39, no. 3 (June 2011): 299–­32; “Plural Freedom,” Politics and Gender 8, no. 2 (May 2012): 238–­45; and “Beyond Non-­Domination: Agency, Inequality and the Meaning of Freedom,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (February 2013): 187–­208. I appreciate the editors’ permission to draw from that material here. Of all the debts the book has incurred, the deepest and the sweetest is owed to my partner Tayhas. Our shared experience and continuing conversation run through many of its pages, and without her the book could never have come to be as it is. Her courage inspires me, her hand steadies me, her adventurous heart enchants me. What luck that she walks this earth in my time, for where she goes light and laughter and love unexpectedly, exuberantly erupt.

Introduction

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

What does it mean to be free? America is the land of the free, or so our national anthem boasts. We certainly invoke the word frequently. Among other things, freedom is the darling of both political campaigns and product advertising in the United States. Yet American society is saturated with failures of freedom today. The race-­based disadvantages that systematically constrain the life chances of African Americans and thereby hinder their freedom offer but one example. Almost fifty years after the civil rights movement black people in the United States are still twice as likely to be unemployed when compared with whites, three times more likely to live in poverty, and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned.1 Blacks also suffer at higher rates from chronic disease, and they die younger.2 Indeed, on many, many measures of a decent human life blacks on the whole fare substantially worse than whites do—­even in the age of Obama. Inequalities such as these, racial and otherwise, both reflect and regenerate the limited life prospects of the marginalized. They undercut individual agency in systematic ways, and compromise both justice and freedom. These failures are not new, of course; they have haunted American society for a long time now. We must find a way to do better. The United States promises freedom and justice for all, and as American citizens we have a collective obligation to fulfill this promise. To remedy the failures of freedom that plague American society today we need to rethink some fundamental assumptions that we hold, assumptions that are prevalent in political theory and that permeate our popular culture. These assumptions bear on the meaning of freedom but they also involve common conceptions about the human condition more generally and about the nature of human agency in particular. Above all, we need to

2 / Introduction

move beyond the idea that agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, as self-­determination or control over one’s action. Hannah Arendt once said that if we genuinely care about freedom then we must learn to renounce the aspiration to sovereignty in this form.3 She had noticed the tendency, so familiar in the philosophies of the modern West, to conflate agency with the ideal of sovereignty, and she diagnosed this tendency as the source of many ills for freedom. Arendt was not right about everything, and there is plenty to object to in her theory of politics, but she was on to something important in criticizing the aspiration to sovereignty as a personal ideal. This way of conceiving human agency does indeed make trouble for freedom. The notion of sovereignty is especially associated with the rise of the modern state, of course, a defining feature of which is the capacity to exercise control over a territory and a population.4 A state is sovereign to the extent that no other entity has the power or the right to determine what happens within its domain. Alongside the idea of the sovereign state, there emerged within modern liberalism a quasi-­parallel conception of the human being. On this view, evident in one way or another in thinkers from Locke to Kant to John Stuart Mill, the individual is likewise understood, at least in principle, to be the master of her domain. The presence of a rational will gives her the capacity to control her action, it is thought, and the equal moral status of persons means that she is entitled to do so, or at least that she has no natural obligation to obey anyone else. To be sure, the notion of sovereignty as applied to individual agency has never been as absolute as sovereignty in the context of the state.5 Neither the power nor the right to exercise personal control over one’s action was ever understood to be unlimited. Liberal thinkers all acknowledge that agency is regularly influenced and impeded by many external factors, for instance, and they insist that the individual’s right to control her action is properly constrained by the state in view of the demands of social coordination and the rights of others. Nobody believes that individuals are perfectly sovereign. Yet being an agent is generally understood within the liberal tradition in ways that draw on the notion of sovereignty, however implicitly. To be an agent, on this view, is to be in control of what one does rather than being controlled by others or by circumstance. It means acting on one’s own intentional choices (meaning, on some views, one’s autonomously generated choices) rather than acting from instinct or necessity or deference. The rational will is usually thought to be the source of agency insofar as it gives us the capacity to make choices, to guide ourselves, and thus to control our actions. If most of us doubt that human beings ever achieve perfect con-

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  3

trol in this sense, many of us do assume that the closer one comes to this ideal the more agentic one will be. And we commonly locate the sources of agency in internal faculties of the person, especially the faculties of reason and will. We hold to a sovereigntist view of agency to the extent that we identify agency in the ideal case with being in control of one’s action, where the content of one’s will defines the meaning of the action, and one’s effects manifest one’s own reasoned choices rather than the wishes of others or the random effects of chance. While everyone acknowledges that human agency rarely instantiates the ideal of sovereignty perfectly, this way of understanding agency does pervade many of the most familiar and influential theories of freedom today, including (for instance) the ideal of non-­interference found in the work of Isaiah Berlin and the republican model of non-­domination defended by Philip Pettit and others.6 On both views, the function of freedom, as an enabling condition of human agency, is to protect the individual’s capacity for intentional choice and control. The ideal of sovereignty is also implicit in much of the freedom talk that is everywhere in American popular culture. Freedom for us almost always refers to the freedom to choose, and thereby to exercise control over our actions and our destinies. Whether it concerns health care options, or reproductive rights, or cable TV providers and auto insurance, our ability to control our action through the exercise of choice is, we think, the measure of our freedom. There are good reasons to find the sovereigntist view of agency attractive. We very much wish to have the kind of control that it promises. Among other things, we want to believe that we can rise above the power of our circumstances, that our actions can be self-­generated and hence subject to our control because their origin is inside us. We also quite rightly accept the normative injunction that is implicit in the ideal of personal sovereignty, namely that individuals and their choices should be treated with respect. Much as the principle of state sovereignty refers to both the power and the right of a state to control a particular population and territory, so the ideal of personal sovereignty involves both a descriptive claim about human agency as consisting in the rational capacity for control over one’s action and a normative claim about the right to such control. The latter is an example of what we might call normative individualism, the idea that the individual human being has intrinsic moral value as an end in herself and is therefore entitled to various protections, including respect for her choices. Choosing is indeed one way that we exercise agency, and a society that restricted individual choices arbitrarily or too fully could not count as free. The normative individualism inherent in the ideal of personal sovereignty

4 / Introduction

is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy, and it should never be abandoned. But the descriptive claim that agency consists in the capacity for personal control over one’s action, that it is an internal property located in the individual will, and that it always takes the form of intentional choice is something that should make us skeptical. We should be skeptical about this view because it fails to capture core features of how human agency works. Agency properly conceived is the affirmation of one’s subjective existence, or personal identity, through concrete action in the world. To be an agent is to have an impact on the world that one can recognize as one’s own. Agency thus has both an efficacy side and an identity side. The efficacy side distinguishes agency from mere willing—­or dreaming. You are not an agent if you do not act so as to affect the world. You are, of course, still a human being even if you do not affect the world, and as such you are entitled to moral respect and protection. But you are not in that case entitled to be called an agent. As long as we acknowledge the efficacy side of agency, and recognize the distinction between agency and mere willing, we must admit that agency is not an exclusively internal capacity of the person. Agency does involve some faculties that are internal to the person, such as willing and believing and desiring, but agency is not reducible to such faculties. The reason agency is not reducible in this way is that our effects frequently depend on the social uptake provided by other people—­on how they interpret what we are doing and how they respond to it. The impact we have on the world is not subject to our personal control. The constitution of many actions—­as embodying both the agent’s personal identity and her effects—­depends as much on other people as it does on the agent herself. Individual agency is an emergent property of intersubjective exchanges in this respect, not solely a function of faculties such as the will that are strictly internal to the individual. Because agency depends on social uptake, it is a socially distributed phenomenon. This feature of agency often goes unseen, especially by those who are privileged. When social uptake consistently functions to sustain one’s agency, as in the case of the privileged, it disappears from view, generating the illusion of personal sovereignty.7 Where social uptake is systematically denied, as among the marginalized, its role in sustaining agency comes into sharp focus. It is important to see that agency eludes personal control in a fundamental way, not just contingently. The point is not simply that human beings sometimes (or even regularly) fail to achieve full control because they exercise their agency only imperfectly. On the contrary, even the perfect exercise of agency often will be a failure from the standpoint of personal control because many of the effects we have are by their nature not subject

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  5

to our control. For the same reason that individual agency eludes personal control, it also regularly comes apart from our choices and intentions because we are commonly the agents of outcomes we did not foresee or wish to bring about. Agency thus extends beyond intentional choice. For both reasons—­because agency eludes personal control and because it extends beyond intentional choice—­the exercise of agency is a non-­sovereign experience, to invoke the language of Hannah Arendt once again. So one reason to be skeptical about the sovereigntist view of agency is that it fails to capture core features of how agency works. Another reason to be skeptical concerns the implications that the sovereigntist view has for personal responsibility. Agency and responsibility are closely connected, partly because responsibility comes into play only on the condition that agency is present. We do not hold people responsible for events in which their agency played no role. And how we conceive human agency affects how we attribute personal responsibility. When viewed through the lens of democratic politics, the sovereigntist approach to agency generates a conception of personal responsibility that is both excessively restrictive and overly demanding. It is too restrictive because it justifies the privileged in denying our responsibility for impersonal structures of oppression to which we contribute without meaning to do so. If I did not intentionally set out to discriminate, the thinking goes, then the entrenched patterns of inequality that I see around me must not be a function of my agency, and hence they must not be my fault. Perhaps it would be nice of me to do something about them, but because I am not actually responsible for creating them I have no real obligation to change them. We see this logic in play, for instance, in debates about reparations for slavery, in discussions of how to address America’s failing public schools, in connection with the persistent gender-­ based wage gap, and in arguments about the sometimes harmful effects of globalized capitalism. In each case, assignations of personal responsibility are troubled by our strict identification of agency with intentionality and control. We are right to assume that responsibility presupposes agency. Yet if agency implies intentionality and control, then there will be many social dynamics that fall outside the scope of individual agency and personal responsibility because they outrun our intentions and elude our control. Our sovereigntist assumptions about agency are too restrictive in this respect to sustain an ideal of personal responsibility that is adequate to the demands of democratic justice. Somewhat paradoxically, the sovereigntist view of agency also generates a notion of personal responsibility that is too demanding insofar as it

6 / Introduction

makes us individually responsible for doing things that no one person can accomplish alone. If the source of my action is located in my personal will, and if my agency consists in the capacity to control my deeds, then at least in principle I should be able to rise above the power of my circumstances. However difficult this may be, I have the capacity and hence the responsibility to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and others can reasonably demand that I do so. This logic comes into play in the diagnosis of the “cultural pathologies” that are said to characterize America’s racialized ghettos, a diagnosis that indicts the behavior of marginalized individuals while letting the privileged largely off the hook for social dynamics to which both groups contribute. Indeed, the sovereigntist ideal of agency often gets deployed in ways that (however unintentionally) justify the privileged in an unconscio­ nably narrow sense of responsibility and exaggerate the responsibility of the marginalized. Both the restrictiveness and the demandingness of personal responsibility so conceived derive from our attachment to a sovereigntist idea of human agency that identifies agency with intentional choice and control. Both tend to exacerbate existing inequalities. And both are deeply disabling for democratic citizenship, or at least for practices of democratic citizenship that promote justice for all. One last reason to resist the sovereigntist view of human agency has to do with how it affects our pursuit of freedom. Here and throughout the book I use the term “freedom” in a political sense, as a function of interpersonal relations and the political institutions and social practices that shape them. The study of freedom in political theory has a long history of very diverse approaches, but for all the diversity most theorists have agreed in seeing freedom as an enabling condition of human agency; to be free is to be in a position to exercise one’s agency. If agency is an internal faculty of the person rooted in the individual will and manifest in the activity of choosing, as the sovereigntist view assumes, then freedom will mostly be a matter of ensuring that other people and groups (including the state) stay out of the individual’s way. Thus both Berlin’s ideal of freedom as non-­interference and Pettit’s ideal of freedom as non-­domination focus on protecting individual choice. True, Pettit’s view calls for quite a lot in the way of social provision and state intervention, but the purpose of all this is to protect the individual’s ability to choose from being interfered with by others (persons and governments) who have the power to do so arbitrarily. Both views see freedom as the ability to carry out the control over one’s action that agency, conceived as an inner faculty, makes possible. And they both locate freedom primarily in political institutions and in the public status of citizenship,

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  7

including the formally established rights and liberties that constitute this status. On the non-­sovereign view, by contrast, the fact that agency is not solely an inner faculty of the individual but an emergent property of intersubjective exchanges means that the protections associated with non-­interference and non-­domination will not be enough to support agency and establish freedom. Formal institutional mechanisms are not likely to be sufficient either. Beyond our political institutions and public status as citizens, the quality of our informal interpersonal interactions will matter quite a lot to individual freedom because these interactions are constitutive of agency as a socially distributed phenomenon. If agency involves the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds, freedom refers to the whole constellation of conditions that make this affirming action possible. Establishing the right political institutions and the proper slate of rights and liberties will be only the beginning, even for an explicitly political account of freedom. A non-­ sovereign theory of freedom will need to be attentive to subtle, often unconscious social dynamics that undercut agency in systematic and unjust ways precisely because agency is not a strictly internal affair. In view of agency’s non-­sovereign character, these informal social dynamics matter to freedom not at the margins but at the core. They matter far more than is true on many familiar models of freedom today. And they matter in ways that go beyond what the state itself can and should try to control. Political freedom is in large measure a function of what we often think of as private exchanges. It involves the state, but it also points beyond the state and beyond the formal rights and liberties that are the focus for the pursuit of freedom on more sovereigntist models. The non-­sovereign view of agency calls for a “micropolitics” of freedom, and it emphasizes an emancipatory ethos of democratic citizenship.8 The effort to rethink agency and freedom in non-­sovereign ways is of a piece with recent work by social scientists such as Cathy Cohen and Loïc Wacquant, among others, who seek to reconceptualize the conventional “structure/agency” divide more productively, especially as it bears on race and poverty.9 This effort also answers to the challenges posed by theorists such as Elizabeth Anderson, Michelle Alexander, and Glenn Loury, who articulate so powerfully the persistent, if shifting, landscape of racial inequality in the United States. This landscape manifests the practical effects of America’s attachment to the ideal of personal sovereignty. Anderson, for example, studies the re-­segregation of American public schools in the post-­ 1980s period, tracking its progress and finding rising racial inequalities in

8 / Introduction

its wake.10 Americans (both black and white) tend to blame blacks themselves for these inequalities, although it is not difficult to show that their causes are far more complex.11 We blame the victims, Anderson says, partly because we do not see much intentional discrimination either in ourselves or in those around us. White people do not for the most part consciously intend to dominate or oppress black people, and they do not as individuals control the complex constellation of causes that contribute to these outcomes. Where there is no intentionality and no control, we think, there can be no agency, hence no freedom, and consequently no personal responsibility. And if white people are not the agents of racial inequality then black people must be doing it to themselves.12 Michelle Alexander makes a similar point with respect to the racial dynamics of mass incarceration in the United States today. Both legal principle and public sentiment require that racially unequal outcomes must result from conscious intentionality if they are to register as something for which we hold individuals responsible. Here again our sovereigntist assumptions are implicitly in play. We hold people responsible only if they are agents, and we only count them as agents if their actions manifest their intentions and reflect their control. Because many of the actions that lead to unequal outcomes in the criminal justice system are unintentional and beyond any one individual’s capacity to control, we have a hard time identifying racial bias in the system and assigning responsibility for it. The result is widespread injustice, with blacks six times more likely than whites to lose their freedom (i.e., be imprisoned) for identical crimes.13 In some parts of the country, a substantial majority of black men (three out of four in Washington DC) serve time in prison, mostly on drug charges, despite the fact that people of all colors use and sell drugs at similar rates.14 Other recent work on race and politics reinforces the idea that we cannot understand racial inequality in the post-­civil rights era, and the violations of freedom it entails, in terms of the old categories of intentional discrimination and conscious prejudice, meaning against the background of our sovereigntist conception of agency.15 The traditional vocabulary of the civil rights struggle, as Eddie Glaude puts it, needs “recalibration.”16 Among other things, we need to move away from the language of racial discrimination, as the conscious effort to disadvantage others, to the language of “racial stigma,” which covers the background beliefs, values, and practices that sustain racial inequality and compromise freedom but that are not the intentional products of any sovereign agents.17 One of the distinctive features of racial inequality today is that it coexists with markers of real racial progress. This is the age of Obama, after all.

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  9

Yet while President Obama’s election was a tremendously significant and promising event for the country, it has not brought an end to racial inequality here. In some ways, in fact, it introduced new complacency in the face of this inequality. As early as election night 2008, conservative pundits were insisting that henceforth there could be “no more excuses” for the kinds of racial disparities that are so much a part of the American landscape.18 The election proved, they said, that anybody could become anything in America, and hence that all limitations in life must be self-­imposed, in effect chosen. The election of Barack Obama was not the first time that one individual’s success has been taken to redeem the failed freedom of countless others. Consider Richard Rodriguez’s reflections on the performance of Leontyne Price the night that the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center first opened: You are probably too young to remember or perhaps you have forgotten what a pride for America that evening was—­the most modern opera house in the world . . . and with Leontyne Price, the reigning dramatic soprano of her day, enshrined at the center. And yet, the Metropolitan Opera seemed at that moment—­eight o’clock, September 16, 1966—­to mark the very crossroads of American history, the division of the old era and the new. Leontyne Price seemed the apotheosis of African America, of new America, as if uncountable degradations inflicted upon African Americans might be ransomed by a single, soaring human voice. . . . That same year, 1966, there were thirty-­eight race riots in American cities.19

Similarly, the age of Obama is an age of rising inequality, and this inequality has a racial hue, as recent work on education, unemployment, and the criminal justice system shows.20 What one commentator has called “the enduring injustice” of racial inequality in the United States surely reflects the fact that since the end of legalized discrimination racial injustice has been sustained largely through informal practices and patterns of social exchange rather than through officially sanctioned laws and public policies, and through social stigma rather than intentional prejudice.21 Indeed, many of the systematic failures of freedom that characterize our social landscape reflect subtle dynamics of agency and inequality that we frequently fail to see and that we do not fully understand. Because we do not grasp the intersubjective nature of human agency, we cannot respond effectively to the troubles of those whose freedom is compromised by these dynamics. We also have a hard time acknowledging our own responsibility for their troubles. If agency is equated with

10 / Introduction

intentional choice, and if responsibility tracks agency, as we have seen, then our responsibilities will extend only as far as our intentional choices do. Yet if we let ourselves and others off the hook for social dynamics that we did not intentionally choose, nothing will ever change. Hence the enduring character of racial and other systematic injustice in our time, and the failures of freedom that go with it. The influence of liberal theory is partly responsible for our myopia. For all its virtues—­and there are many—­liberal theory has never been very good at addressing the informal, often unwitting ways that power interacts with human agency to compromise justice and constrain individual freedom. Poststructuralists, feminists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, and other critics of liberalism have generally been more successful in diagnosing these dynamics. Yet they have not on the whole offered enough in the way of empowering solutions to the problems they identify. If we are to make good on liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and justice for all, we will need to do better. We will need to move beyond the myth of sovereignty, where individual agency is conceived as an internal property of the person and identified narrowly with intentional choice and control. We must move beyond the myth of sovereignty if we are to appreciate the troubled agency of the marginalized, to grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change, and to understand the full complexity of freedom. Yet we need not dissolve individual agency into socially constituted identities or prevailing relations of power. Human agency is an assemblage of the communicative exchanges, background meanings, social interpretations, personal intentions, self-­understandings, and even bodily encounters through which one’s identity finds affirmation in one’s deeds. So conceived, agency is non-­sovereign but it is nevertheless robust and potent. Indeed, the agency of those who are dominated and oppressed frequently surprises us with its vitality. Revolutions happen. Moreover, individual initiative matters a great deal to human agency; there can be no agency without it. The non-­sovereign view of agency defended here affirms the power of agency and the importance of individual initiative even as it contests the myth of sovereignty. This view is also compatible with liberal individualism as a normative ideal. The normative commitment to individual freedom that forms the core of liberal theory is both sound and valuable, and it ought not be abandoned. The distinction between agency as a practical capacity and the normative status of the individual is crucial here. The concept of agency is sometimes invoked to express the moral standing of persons as free and equal, a status that is in principle inviolable. Agency as a practical capac-

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  11

ity can be undone as a result of systematic inequality (or because of more random factors) but agency when conceived as a normative status is not vulnerable in this way. Yet while it is true that agency as a normative status should be understood as inviolable, it is crucial to remember that agency in this sense is not the same thing as the practical capacity to affect the world through action. We tend to conflate, however unconsciously, the practical capacity with the normative status, thus imputing an inviolability to the actual exercise of agency that is misleading. Because we believe that everyone ought to be treated as if he were an agent, we often act as if each individual (even those subject to systematic social inequality) simply is an agent. This practice makes it all too easy to wash our hands of the failed freedom of other people and to demand actions from them that no one can accomplish alone. We must be mindful of the distinction between agency as a practical capacity and the normative status of persons as morally free and equal. With this distinction in mind, we can move beyond the false ideal of personal sovereignty without leaving either normative individualism or individual freedom behind. Still, the non-­sovereignty of human agency is bound to have important implications for how we understand the meaning of freedom. In exploring these implications I focus especially on American society, which like many other democracies today is free in some respects but unfree in others—­and unfree in ways that track systematic social and economic inequalities. My emphasis is less on formal political institutions and laws than on informal, interpersonal dynamics, cultural values, and social practices. It is certainly true that the formal and the informal features of any society interact in reciprocally reinforcing ways. Yet the two can be distinguished conceptually, and each one must be understood on its own terms too if we are to have a full picture of the political community as a whole. Who we are as a country is shaped in fundamental ways by countless interpersonal dynamics that interact with but are not reducible to the formal institutions and public principles that constitute the basic structure of our society.22 These dynamics are difficult to theorize. They are not written down anywhere in the manner of laws and constitutional doctrines. They cannot be traced, as political institutions are, through tangible documents or publicly visible buildings and offices. Indeed, many of the dynamics are quite ephemeral. They exist as they are enacted—­and they are enacted all the time—­but they rarely announce themselves as such. They often involve beliefs and values that most people (including those who enact them) would never admit to holding. For all these reasons, they are frequently left out of political analysis or shunted to the sidelines. We ignore them at our peril, however. We cannot

12 / Introduction

hope to understand who we are as a political community unless we are willing to look beneath the surface of things. And without a full understanding of who we are, we will never repair the wreckages of our past or heal the wounds that still fester within. We will never become all that we could become as democratic citizens and as Americans, or all that we are obligated to be. We have a responsibility, as James Baldwin once said, to “achieve our country,” and while we have come far in this regard in the last fifty years, we are still a long way off.23 This book means to help us on that journey. It is a book about things we do not quite know how to talk about, things that many of us never see but that powerfully shape who we are and the world we live in. I draw on a wide variety of sources, ranging from analytic philosophy to Foucault, queer theory, critical race studies, feminism, and empirical social science, as well as some novels and memoirs. I make common cause with many different views but follow none. My challenge to the ideal of sovereignty will surely call to mind the communitarians, feminists, poststructuralists, and Arendtians who have criticized different aspects of this ideal over the years. I have learned from each of them—­the debts will be clear as the analysis unfolds—­but the view developed here breaks with them all in crucial ways. In contrast to the communitarians, for instance, my view is an emphatically individualist one. In these pages the individual, not the community, is the normatively significant unit of analysis. While I acknowledge the value of community and the deep ways that communities shape us, my goal ultimately is to make it possible for the distinctive individualities of diverse persons to flourish. Similarly, although my account of socially distributed agency resonates with feminist theories of “relational autonomy,” the two views are quite distinct.24 The idea of relational autonomy generally refers to the intersubjective conditions that facilitate the development of autonomy as an inner faculty of the individual involving personal choice and control. That literature investigates how personal relationships can support the kind of psy­chological development that issues in an autonomous person, conventionally conceived. Insofar as it privileges intentional choice and treats autonomy as an inner psychological capacity, the relational autonomy literature stops short of the more radical view embodied in the notion of non-­ sovereign agency as a socially distributed phenomenon, as should become clear in what follows.25 Foucauldian poststructuralists, such as Judith Butler, and Arendtians, such as Linda Zerilli and Patchen Markell, may be sympathetic to the language of non-­sovereignty in this project, but they will surely dispute my

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  13

characterization of it. While their work has opened up new ways to think about human agency and freedom, we disagree about the role within agency of an enduring self or identity. I do not believe that it is possible to make sense of agency—­including non-­sovereign agency—­without a self that precedes and extends beyond any particular action. Virtually everyone who defends a non-­sovereign view of human agency sees it differently. They regard the sense of self as a fiction or fantasy, as an idea that embodies a will to sovereign control that can end only in domination. The arguments are engaged in detail in what follows. For now it is enough to say that those who excise personal identity from agency conflate the idea of the self with the idea of a sovereign self, but the two need not be equated. We do not need a sovereign self to be agents, but we do need a self. Without a personal identity that precedes and endures after any given action, we cannot make sense of the experience of individual agency as action that is one’s own. And it is only because personal identity has a place in non-­sovereign agency that agency can sustain individual responsibility and bear the normative weight it must bear to make justice, freedom, and democratic politics possible. So the view of non-­sovereign agency defended here differs fundamentally from others both in its core conception of what agency is and in the normative force that it carries. Much as the idea of the self often is conflated with the idea of a sovereign self, so liberal individualism sometimes is mistaken for a theory of personal sovereignty. It is true that liberal individualism has commonly been conceptualized in excessively sovereigntist terms both in the history of political philosophy and in American public consciousness. Yet it need not be so conceived. Liberal individualism can accommodate a more capacious understanding of the self and action.26 In fact, a core aim of this book is to show that liberal individualism is not only compatible with a non-­ sovereign, socially distributed account of human agency but that liberal individualism, properly conceived, requires such an account. For if liberal individualism means anything at all, it means that every individual is entitled, within the limits set by the equal entitlement of all, to live in this world in a way that manifests her distinctive individuality. Achieving this end is something that is only possible once the non-­sovereignty of human agency is understood and accounted for, both in the structure of our institutions and in the dynamics of our informal interactions. The view developed here is an emphatically liberal-­individualist one in this sense. It begins from the assumption that all individuals are equally entitled to be free, and it aims for a political community in which the distinctive individualities of diverse persons can be fully lived.27 And while it

14 / Introduction

recognizes that individual identities arise in the context of social relations, that individual action is itself an intersubjective phenomenon, and that liberation from domination and oppression typically require action in concert, it does not privilege political participation or collective activity aimed at public purposes. Individual freedom, as the enabling conditions of human agency, takes diverse forms, happens in many different places, and aims at a variety of ends. This last feature of the view sets it apart from that of Arendt and many of her contemporary followers, and from participatory democracy more generally.28 Freedom Beyond Sovereignty is a liberal-­individualist view, normatively speaking, with respect to both its assumptions and its aspirations. Yet in clarifying the true nature of individual agency and the real conditions of individual freedom, the book reconstructs liberal individualism in fundamental ways. It gives us new categories for conceiving human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty. It presses us to think more comprehensively about the spirit of all our interactions with one another, formal and informal, private as well as public. This is an individualism that has its eyes wide open to the non-­sovereignty of individual agency but that holds fast to the noble ideal of individual freedom. The book begins by elaborating the concept of agency in chapter 1, showing how it is a non-­sovereign experience. Although this idea is introduced in chapter 1, its meaning is fully worked out only in the course of the remaining chapters. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty is unlike many books of political theory in this regard. Rather than first specify the core concept and then apply it to various problems or cases or related ideas, my approach is to specify the core concept through a series of problems, cases, and related ideas. The analysis is iterative and layered rather than linear. The upshot is that no single chapter contains a complete account of the book’s main ideas. Chapter 1 begins—­but only begins—­the work of laying out these ideas. Because the language of non-­sovereignty as applied to human action was first introduced by Arendt, I spend some time in chapter 1 exploring her view.29 Arendt developed the concept of non-­sovereignty as part of a larger effort to protect human plurality against the ravages of political tyranny and to recover an experience of freedom that she feared had been lost to the modern world. While I agree that a non-­sovereign view of human agency is needed, I depart from Arendt and many contemporary Arendtians in important ways. Arendt’s view of non-­sovereignty is troubled by internal tensions, by her denial of an enduring personal identity as a factor in action, and by difficulties in her account of responsibility. I therefore use her theory less as a model to emulate than as a point of departure for developing my own views of agency and freedom.

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  15

Chapter 1 draws inspiration from other literatures as well, including the philosophical literature on moral luck, driven by the work of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, and the new materialism that has emerged in political theory in recent years in thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Samantha Frost, Diana Coole, and Davide Panagia. The new materialism helps us understand the corporeal and materially distributed dimensions of individual agency, and it illuminates certain dynamics of domination and oppression that may otherwise remain invisible. It also serves as a useful counterpoint to Arendt’s emphatic insistence that bodily, material factors have no place in action, properly understood, and are antithetical to freedom. At the same time, the new materialism poses challenges to the normative dimensions of agency and its ability to sustain a viable model of personal responsibility, not unlike Arendt’s account. Ultimately, we will need to move beyond both Arendt and the new materialists to fully comprehend the meaning and implications of non-­sovereignty. Insofar as agency emerges from the interplay of subjective and intersubjective sources, its socially distributed character makes it vulnerable in deep ways to social inequalities. Inequalities affect agency on both its dimensions, on the efficacy side and on the identity side. With respect to efficacy, many of the effects we have on the world are themselves affected by the social interpretations given to our actions and the intersubjective backgrounds of meaning against which these interpretations emerge. This is part of what it means to say that individual agency depends on social uptake. Social inequalities can powerfully disrupt this uptake, thus undercutting efficacy. With respect to identity, social inequalities can lead to internalized stigma and a hobbled, fragmented sense of self. Under these conditions, agency as the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds can be difficult or even out of reach entirely. Chapter 2 explores the contours of agency under conditions of systematic social inequality, especially inequalities of race, gender, and sexual orientation. These are inequalities of social standing and status, of privilege and exclusion. They may involve relations of both domination and oppression. They interact with economic inequalities, and they often issue in de facto inequalities of political power and representation, even in societies where equal formal rights prevail. Although social inequalities can be more difficult to characterize and measure than economic inequalities, and although they are often considered to be less important than political inequalities, they have powerful effects on the course and quality of the lives that people can lead. And they can be deadly—­one need only think of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, or Tyler Clementi’s 2010 suicide,

16 / Introduction

or the public non-­response to the AIDS crisis when it first emerged, or the persistently elevated mortality rates of young black men in the United States today. Social inequality can kill. And even when it does not kill, social inequality fundamentally obstructs individual freedom by undercutting human agency. I focus especially on inequalities that are systematic and unjust because they matter in a special way for political freedom and for the obligations of democratic citizenship. Systematic and unjust social inequalities generate systematic and unjust failures of social uptake. They violate core liberal-­ democratic principles of equal respect and reciprocity. In occluding the distinctive individualities of persons, such inequalities deny them their rightful status as ends in themselves. The disabling of agency that results is normatively problematic for liberal democracies in ways that random disruptions of agency are not. A theory of freedom beyond sovereignty must attend to them with special care.30 The dynamics of agency and inequality raise questions about personal responsibility. The vulnerabilities that agency faces under social inequality, like the socially distributed character of agency itself, make trouble for standard models of responsibility, which typically presuppose a sovereigntist conception of agency as intentionality and control. If agency is non-­ sovereign and affected by inequality in deep ways, one might reasonably wonder how we can hold people responsible for the things they do. To have any value for political theory, the notion of non-­sovereign agency must be able to sustain responsibility in a meaningful way. The challenge is to make sense of responsibility for outcomes in which the standard control condition fails to apply, including the responsibility we all have for impersonal patterns of inequality that affect others, such as racism and sexism, and the responsibility that individuals have for their own actions in the presence of inequalities that compromise their agency. Chapter 2 explores these issues, arguing that a non-­sovereign view can indeed meet the challenge. Yet it suggests the need for a more differentiated conception of responsibility as it bears on the obligations of democratic citizens than we normally see. The non-­sovereign model of responsibility sketched at the end of chapter 2 identifies three different forms of responsibility that are important for us as non-­sovereign agents. It distinguishes responsibility as culpability from responsibility in the forms of accountability and responsiveness, and shows how these various types of responsibility are necessary to make good on the demands and the promises of democratic citizenship. What we will see is that the non-­sovereign view of agency not

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  17

only can sustain a robust model of personal responsibility but extends and enriches the responsibilities of democratic citizens in surprising ways. Although the non-­sovereign character of individual agency makes agency vulnerable to social inequalities in ways that run deep, people sometimes surprise us with the vitality of their agency even under hostile conditions. Think of Frederick Douglass rising in physical resistance to his slave master, or the Stonewall uprising in which gay people suddenly fought back against a prevailing context of oppression. The world is replete with transgressive responses to power. However disabling social inequality may be as a general matter, the alchemy of agency makes individual instances of agency unpredictable—­sometimes unpredictably forceful.31 Moreover, agency is never an all-­or-­nothing affair; we should think of it as existing on a continuum. Partly because social life is complex and partly because our personal identities involve multiple intersecting strands that are affected by inequality in cross-­cutting ways, individual agency regularly arises (however incompletely) even in the absence of full freedom. Chapter 3 explores the vitalities of human agency under conditions of systematic social inequality. Drawing on experiences of the marginalized, I identify three factors that help sustain agency despite the presence of domination and oppression. The first is imagination, the capacity to see and feel possibilities for living beyond the bounds imposed by present configurations of power. The second factor is counterpublic conversation, conceived as the communicative exchanges within marginalized groups that support mutual understanding and help bring the action of the marginalized to fruition, thus enabling their agency. The third factor is the transformations of self and society that transpire, often in fits and starts and never with any guarantees, as the imagination and counterpublic conversation of activists spread from the localized field of the marginalized group to take hold in the wider society. The dream of an agency that rises, spontaneous and fully formed, from the ash heap of domination to defeat singlehandedly the effects of deprivation is a mirage. That dream recapitulates an aspiration to sovereignty that is itself disabling. Even bold, radically transformative exertions of agency frequently carry the marks of existing oppressions, and they are never single-­handed. Yet to insist that human agency is socially distributed is not to say that it is socially determined or strictly defined by prevailing relations of power. The vitalities of agency’s resistance to power are an important part of the story of freedom beyond sovereignty. Chapter 4 pursues this story by turning to questions that are explicitly about freedom. As we have seen, freedom in the most general sense refers to

18 / Introduction

the enabling conditions of human agency; to be free is to be able to exercise one’s agency. What is required to be able to exercise one’s agency is subject to rival interpretations, of course, generating divergent conceptions of freedom. In chapter 4 we examine several views of freedom that are highly influential in political theory today: freedom as non-­interference, freedom as non-­domination, and freedom as collective world-­making. To these three accounts of freedom I add a fourth—­freedom as non-­oppression—­and I show why a non-­sovereign theory of freedom will need to include it. The chapter explores the value and the limitations of each account in light of the non-­sovereign model of human agency. Non-­ interference, non-­ domination, non-­ oppression, and collective world-­making mark out distinctive forms and experiences of freedom. While there are ways in which they are mutually supporting, none can be simply subsumed under any other. All are forms of political freedom, although not necessarily in the sense that they require political participation or are sustained primarily through state action. They are political partly in that they structure relations among citizens and relations between citizens and the state. Freedom in all these forms is an interpersonal experience, not merely an intrapersonal one. In some cases, there is a relationship between what happens inside the individual and the character of her interactions with others, but the freedoms in play here always do involve others. In this respect, none is reducible to a merely personal ideal. Partly, too, these four concepts of freedom are political in being deeply engaged with prevailing relations of power, sometimes in ways that serve to limit the exercise of power, sometimes in ways that transform it. Moreover, although each one is incomplete as a description of freedom, and some of the accounts need to be adjusted to accommodate the facts of non-­sovereign agency, they all tell us something important about what it means to be free. The forms of freedom investigated in chapter 4 are not only different from one another but are also likely to conflict on a regular basis. Although they can be mutually reinforcing, they also press opposing demands on us. Which one in the end is truest to the conditions of non-­sovereign agency and the aspirations of a suitably reconstructed liberal individualism? If Americans were to get serious about the obligation to support freedom for all, which model of freedom should we pursue? Chapter 5 argues that no single account fits the bill: Non-­sovereign freedom is plural freedom. A pluralist view of freedom recognizes multiple forms of freedom that operate concurrently in the same domains, and it resists an easy rank ordering of them. It insists that no one account of freedom can capture without remainder all that is important to the meaning of freedom in any sphere of activity. In

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism  /  19

defending freedom’s plurality, the chapter explores how the different forms of political freedom can be expected to interact, what considerations are important in the effort to find a principled balance among them, and what advantages there are in conceiving freedom in this multidimensional way. A pluralist approach to political freedom is valuable partly because it answers more accurately than monist views do to the real complexity of human agency as a non-­sovereign phenomenon and the multiple conditions required to sustain it. The value of a pluralist model also comes from the greater awareness it generates regarding the ways that individual freedom is often compromised even in free societies, and the costs that such compromises impose on people’s lives. Monist theories of freedom tend to occlude their own freedom-­compromising effects or to minimize the costs of these effects. By contrast, because a pluralist theory of freedom always holds in view the multiple forms that freedom can take, it makes visible the costs that pursuing freedom exclusively in any one form inevitably entails. It forces us to acknowledge that the realization of freedom is always bound to be imperfect because of the tensions that exist among the different types of freedom. These tensions mean that freedom can never be achieved without loss, including losses to freedom itself in certain forms. In this way, the pluralist view protects against the easy complacency that so often accompanies life in ostensibly free societies, which tend to let the achievement of some kinds of freedom obscure from view the dearth of freedom in other forms. It can also inhibit the hubristic tendency to think that we have perfected the art of freedom and are therefore entitled to impose it on others around the world.32 Moreover, a pluralist view of freedom helps make sense of why human agency so often is simultaneously vital and impaired. In any given social context, some forms of freedom will be better established than others. Agency will be more and less enabled, and enabled in different ways, to the degree that each form of freedom is instantiated in existing institutions and social practices. Finally, by emphasizing the multiple experiences that constitute freedom and the various conditions that sustain it, a pluralist view encourages us to be open to new articulations of freedom. The meaning of freedom should be conceived as open-­ended because it must be responsive to changes in the human condition and in our mutual understanding of one another’s lives. Hence the full meaning of political freedom cannot be settled once and for all. Plural freedom is a dynamic project that invites continuing critical reflection and intersubjective engagement. Throughout the book I explore agency and freedom especially with an eye to race, gender, and sexual orientation. In this respect, Freedom Beyond

20 / Introduction

Sovereignty is a book about the experience and the limits of freedom among those who are marginalized in ostensibly free societies. But it is not only that. The perspectives of the marginalized can help illuminate social dynamics that affect everyone. The notion of the “privileged perspective of the poor,” familiar from liberation theology, is prone to its own pathologies, of course.33 No one perspective can capture all of what is true in complex societies and political contexts. Then, too, the perspectives of the marginalized can be clouded by the corrosive effects of domination and oppression. So no perspective is complete or infallible, and all should be subject to critical scrutiny. Still, because the failures of freedom that shape American life today so often elude the intention, control, and consciousness of the dominant classes, we need to hear the voices of the marginalized for whom these dynamics are all too palpable. Their perspectives illuminate the terms of democratic citizenship today in ways that go beyond their own experiences. They help us see where our institutions, principles, and practices—­and where we ourselves—­are falling short. Their particular perspectives thus carry wide significance. My goal is to bring these voices from the margins of our political life to its center, to reconstruct liberal individualism in light of their experience, and thereby to recast the meaning and conditions of freedom for all of us. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty is a philosophical project in this sense. Its primary purpose is to advance knowledge and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our common life. But the book is also intended to be political, and in an emancipatory way. It means to remedy our collective myopia, to engage our energy and initiative for a public purpose, to move us closer to a future that finally achieves our country—­and the freedom it promises us all.

One

Non-­sovereign Agency

To call human agency non-­sovereign is to say that the exercise of agency regularly comes apart from intentional choice and consistently eludes individual control. It means that agency extends beyond the internal faculties of the person to include intersubjective exchanges, which makes other people integral to the agency of the individual. Individual agency is non-­sovereign because it is a socially distributed phenomenon in this sense. Moreover, agency is materially distributed as well as socially distributed because bodies (both human and nonhuman) have a part in agency. This chapter elaborates the various ways that agency is non-­sovereign, emphasizing both its socially distributed and its corporeal character. I highlight the fact that individual agency extends beyond the boundaries of the self but insist that personal identity is a crucial component of agency. In addition, although agency eludes control and often comes apart from intentionality, it is by no means ineffectual. On the contrary, the non-­sovereign approach shows that our agency is far more potent than we often think—­or may wish to believe. Understanding both the limits of human agency and its sometimes unexpected potency is crucial to making progress against enduring injustice and establishing conditions for the freedom of all. The first part of the chapter gives a preliminary statement of what agency is and what it means to say that agency is non-­sovereign, the second part explores Arendt’s account of non-­sovereign agency, and the final part engages the new materialist literature to illuminate the bodily dimensions of agency. Arendt’s view is generative for theorizing the non-­sovereignty of agency but it is troubled by difficulties in her accounts of personal identity and responsibility. In a similar way, although the new materialism helps us understand the corporeal dimensions of individual agency and clarifies some dynamics of domination and oppression that are otherwise difficult to see, it often

22 / Chapter One

denies the importance of individuated identities and undercuts personal responsibility. For these reasons, I go some distance with Arendt and the new materialists but not all the way. In particular, I insist upon the importance of an enduring, individuated, and norm-­responsive self as a key component of individual agency even while acknowledging agency’s socially distributed and corporeal dimensions.

The Two Sides of Agency As the affirmation of an individual’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world, agency has both a subjectivity or selfhood aspect, and an aspect relating to efficacy or impact on the world. In parsing agency this way, I draw inspiration from the work of Bernard Williams. Williams identifies “two sides to action,” which he calls deliberation and result.1 His distinctive “two-­sides” approach offers a valuable analytic framework for beginning to theorize the contours of agency, although it does not provide everything we will need to elaborate these contours fully. The deliberation side of action connects agency to what Williams refers to as character and what I am calling selfhood, or personal identity, or subjective existence.2 Agents act deliberately, meaning in a way that reflects the unique constellation of dispositions, desires, beliefs, abilities, and personal histories that establish their distinctive characters and make them who they are as individuals. It is worth emphasizing here that while the selfhood that figures in agency is robust, it should not be understood as singular or fixed or essential. Every self is something of a plurality containing multiple strands, some of which may sit uneasily with one another. Moreover, because we exist in dynamic relationship with our social and material environments, we are all subject to change. None of us remains perfectly identical over time. And because our characters evolve in connection with our changing circumstances, it would be wrong to think that any particular feature of our subjective existence constitutes an a priori essence. Even our most intransigent qualities take on shifting significance for who we are as our lives unfold because how these qualities figure in the constitution of our subjectivity depends partly on how the social and material contexts shape our experience of them. Finally, the self ’s transformation over time is itself a part of agency because we sometimes become new to ourselves in important ways as a result of what we do. In this respect, subjectivity or selfhood has a plural, open-­ended quality. We shall return to this point presently. Although personal identity is not strictly singular and is never fixed once and for all, it would be difficult to deny that we identify ourselves (and

Non-­sovereign Agency / 23

others) with particular characteristics. While most of us recognize the ways that we change over time—­and it is not uncommon to feel disconnected from aspects of ourselves that were more prevalent in earlier stages of our lives—­we generally experience from one moment to the next a sense of relatively unified subjectivity. When the teapot sings out, it is no mystery to me whether or not I was the one who set it to boil. There is an “I” who got out of bed this morning, made breakfast, and walked to work. This is the same “I” now seated before my computer. There is no confusion in my mind about who I am or how I got here, as there would have to be if nothing about us were continuous, if selfhood were thoroughly unstable.3 Other people perceive my selfhood, too. They address me by the same name each time they greet me; they expect me to remember the conversation we had yesterday. I have a friend who reminds me of my father. My partner, who knew my father well, agrees about the similarity. I do not doubt that the characteristic qualities in my friend that remind me of my father could change over time, or that they arose through a complex interaction of influences (i.e., I do not hold the qualities to be fixed or essential), but I would be very surprised—­ indeed, fundamentally disoriented—­if the next time I saw him, none of the familiar features of his personality were on view. The distinct selfhood that each of us has, which contains multiple strands and is always evolving but which is generally recognizable to ourselves and others as ours, is what Williams meant by character and what I mean by subjective existence, or selfhood, or personal identity. To define agency in terms of the affirmation of one’s subjective existence implies that there is indeed something to be affirmed through one’s actions, a self (however complex and evolving) that precedes any particular deed. It also implies a subject with sufficient reflexivity to be capable of recognizing herself—­her character, her unique identity—­in her actions and effects. Experientially speaking, this reflexive sense of self is crucial. Without it, the common experience that we all have of being agents, of seeing that the world is different because of something that we in particular have done, would be impossible. The reflexive self is not the sole source of agency, but it is an important part of the picture. In addition to a sense of selfhood, agency involves deeds; the efficacy dimension of agency also is crucial. To be an agent is to have an impact on the world, and this generally involves more than mere willing; it involves real action and its effects.4 Significantly, however, one’s effects can affirm one’s subjective existence without bringing to fruition the specific intentions that motivated the action. We tend to assume that agency coincides with the exercise of intentional choice. Yet the effects of our actions frequently

24 / Chapter One

outrun or counteract our conscious intentions without thereby eradicating our agency.5 Greek tragedy dramatizes this dynamic. Oedipus, for instance, in no way intended to do the dreadful deeds that later brought him so much misery. Still, the reason for his misery is precisely that they were his deeds despite the fact that they were, in an important sense, unintended. We might also think of the ways that we unwittingly perpetuate norms of racism and sexism: a woman’s excessive deference in the company of male colleagues; a white teacher’s heightened scrutiny of the black student. Clearly, we can be agents of racism and sexism even when we do not set out to discriminate. Oedipus’s deeds and those of the unwitting sexist or racist reflect what Patchen Markell refers to as the “involvement” aspect of agency, the idea that when agency is in play “whatever it is that’s happening” is “happening through you, through your activity.”6 Markell distinguishes agency-­as-­ involvement from agency-­as-­control, meaning action that is directly re­ flective of one’s intentions. Even when agency-­as-­control is absent—­when it is thwarted by domination, for instance, as in the case of slavery—­agency-­ as-­involvement may still be present. Slavery eradicates agency-­as-­control on the part of the slave. Yet the labor of slaves “though directed by others, nevertheless happen[s] through them, through their activity.”7 Slave labor may serve the master’s purposes, but it is still the slave’s labor. As Markell points out, to identify agency exclusively with control or the exercise of intentional choice is to miss the very real, albeit limited, “agency of the oppressed.”8 It leads us to underestimate the potentially vital agency of those on the losing end of prevailing power relations, to write them off as mere victims and implicitly deny them the grounds of personal responsibility. It also neglects the complexity of the agency of the oppressor, which is often unintentional and even unconscious in how it affects others. Agency is not “unidimensional,” as Markell puts it, and not to be equated in any simple way with intentionality or control. In showing how agency can persist even in cases where our intentions and our effects come apart, the notion of agency-­as-­involvement connects up with Williams’s work on moral luck. Williams illustrates the idea of moral luck with the example of a truck driver who unintentionally runs over a small child in the street.9 Not only was the action unintended, as Williams tells the story, it was entirely blameless, at least on any reasonable account of moral responsibility. The driver had not been drinking; he was not speeding; he had not fallen asleep. He ran the child down through absolutely no fault of his own. He came around a corner, and seemingly from nowhere the child darted into the path of his truck. He slammed on the brakes but it was

Non-­sovereign Agency / 25

too late. The truck driver is bound to feel regret, Williams says, although no one could blame him for what he did. The driver feels regret because he reflexively recognizes his own agency-­as-­involvement in the deed, despite not having intended or controlled the outcome. True, the driver’s responsibility in this instance is different than it would be if he had run down the child on purpose. Yet the absence of malicious intent does not let him off the hook entirely, either in his own eyes or in ours. His regret is natural, even salutary. Indeed, Williams insists that “it would be a kind of insanity never to experience sentiments of this kind.”10 It would be insane because we know (however inchoately) that agency is more than the enactment of our intended projects. The reason we can relate to the truck driver’s regret and to tragic heroes such as Oedipus is that we understand, as Williams puts it, “that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done.”11 Tragedy is not the only way that we experience the non-­sovereignty of our agency either. For example, I am my sister’s “Rock of Gibraltar,” or so she tells me, although this is not anything I ever set out to be. The effect that I have on her in this regard does not embody my will exactly but it does manifest something distinctive about me. No one else in her life has this effect; it results from the specific combination of qualities and ways of being that uniquely defines my personal identity in the context of my relationship with her. Consequently, although I never intended to be her Rock of Gibraltar, on reflection I can see that this is a label that fits. I can identify with the acts that have had this effect on her; they have indeed manifested my subjective existence concretely in the world. Consider again the ways that our actions frequently operate to reinforce racial hierarchies in society—­hierarchies that reflect deeply ingrained self-­ understandings—­even when we do not set out to discriminate. Imagine a white business owner interviewing candidates for a job in her company. She is a good person, let us say, who is committed to the principles of liberty and justice for all. She prides herself on being fair-­minded, and she harbors no conscious ill will toward people of other races. Yet like most individuals living in societies that are as racially stratified as the United States, her perceptions of others and her responses to them are affected, however unwittingly, by implicit bias in the form of racially tinged misunderstanding, suspicion, and stigma. Sure the black candidate looks good on paper, but can he really do the job? Will he fit in? Can he be trusted? As commonly happens, she may be more apt to notice the weaknesses in his record than the equally significant weaknesses in the records of the white candidates. She may find

26 / Chapter One

that his lack of outward self-­assurance makes her doubt his abilities. When she decides not to hire him, it may not be fair to accuse her of intentional discrimination. Yet if he was indeed qualified for the position, this decision surely makes her an agent of racial injustice.12 Her agency in this regard does not exactly track her will because she never set out to unfairly exclude or obstruct, despite the fact that this is indeed the effect she has had. Yet if this effect does not track her will, it does manifest something fundamental about her identity, for who she is reflects how she sees and responds to the world. Indeed, the fact that she remains unaware of the unintentional racism that permeates her deliberation is a mark of how deep white privilege runs within her identity. Her impact on the world can affirm key features of her identity even when it does not re­ flect her will. Agency is non-­sovereign in part because our effects frequently diverge from our intentions. In this sense, the non-­sovereignty of human agency makes it more potent than we often realize, or potent in ways that we are not accustomed to acknowledge. As we shall see, coming to terms with the non-­sovereignty of our agency in this regard means recognizing a significantly wider scope for individual responsibility than we typically assume.13 If these examples illustrate how agency can come apart from intentionality, they also demonstrate the important connection within agency between efficacy and identity. Markell’s notion of the involvement aspect of agency implicitly puts a premium on personal identity, although he resists this association.14 To say that the labor of a slave reflects his involvement even when it transpires under conditions of domination, as Markell (quite rightly) does, is to assume the subjective existence of a “him.” Likewise, Oedipus can recognize himself in his tragic deeds only because he has a sense of selfhood that reflexively connects the effects he has had on the world to himself, to his own identity or subjective existence. The effects I have on my sister similarly count as instances of my agency because they manifest me rather than someone else or the random influence of chance. If the involvement aspect of agency necessarily brings personal identity into the picture, however, it does so in a way that distinguishes identity from will and selfhood from sovereignty. Although we have a tendency to conflate identity and will, they are not the same thing. They are linked, to be sure, as the exercise of will both reflects and shores up the enduring (though never fully fixed) collection of dispositions, desires, beliefs, abilities, and personal history that comprises one’s identity. But we are more than our wills, and the exercise of will does not exhaust personal identity.15

Non-­sovereign Agency / 27

Consequently, to say that individual agency consists in the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world is not to equate agency with the exercise of will. The distinction between identity and will is a crucial piece of the non-­sovereign model of human agency. Likewise, selfhood is not the same thing as sovereignty. The self that sustains Oedipus’s agency-­as-­involvement is not a self that is fully in control of its effects. The selfhood that figures in human agency is itself non-­sovereign. We shall have more to say about personal identity later in this chapter and in the next one. For now, it is enough to note the difference between identity and will, and between subjectivity as the experience of reflexive selfhood and sovereignty as the experience of control. It is also worth emphasizing that to affirm one’s identity through action is not necessarily to celebrate it in the sense of endorsing its value but rather to make it manifest, to give it expression in the world. To be an agent is to affect the world in ways that concretely embody who one is, to see oneself and be seen by others in the effects one has had, to recognize one’s deeds as being in some sense one’s own. I can affirm my identity in my action in this respect without thereby endorsing the value of this identity. In fact, I may regret an action that I recognize as my own precisely because I see some embarrassing aspect of my character in it. Moreover, one can affirm one’s identity in one’s action without making this identity the direct object of the action. We do this all the time. When I deliver a lecture on Aristotle to my students, for instance, my objective is to illuminate Aristotle, to stimulate my students to think deeply about his ideas and their relevance for political life today. Yet everything about the lecture—­from the passages I decide to focus on to the interpretations and illustrative examples I offer—­all of it manifests or affirms my subjective existence, however indirectly. It is my lecture, my performance, my action because I am in the deed. Still, the point of the action is not to manifest me for I am not in this deed as its direct object. My purpose is to explain Aristotle. Think again about the unconsciously racist business owner. The objective of her action is to hire a new employee not to assert her identity, but in carrying out the hire in the distinctive way that she does, her action indirectly manifests who she is in important ways, including the unconscious racism and white privilege that run through her. And it is only because her action affirms her identity in these ways that we can call it her action, can recognize the deed as an instance of her agency. If the action does not manifest her in any way, it will appear to her (and to us) as someone else’s deed, or perhaps as a mere event devoid of human agency entirely.

28 / Chapter One

The conception of individual agency developed here differs in this regard from George Kateb’s notion of “individuality.” As Kateb describes it, with individuality one acts primarily for the purpose of expressing one’s uniqueness; the manifestation of one’s identity is indeed the direct object of the action.16 Individuality so conceived is a valuable disposition, and Kateb is right to think it has an important place in democracies. Yet that ideal is quite different from the notion of agency described in these pages. Agency as the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world is compatible with an infinite range of human purposes. These purposes may include self-­expression, or the display of one’s identity as an end in itself, but they are not limited to that. The fact is that we manifest our identities whenever we act on the things we care about, or act from the habits that constitute our characters, or enact the beliefs and desires, the talents and the deficits, that make each of us who we uniquely are. The conservative Muslim women of the mosque movement in contemporary Egypt, whom Saba Mahmood documents in Politics of Piety, offer a good illustration.17 They act from a desire to embody and restore traditional Muslim values. These are values they have inherited and accepted as given rather than generated for themselves. And their objective certainly is not to express their identities per se. Yet when they act we see who they are in what they do. It is their action—­they count as agents—­precisely because what each one does affirms who each one is, however indirectly. Thus to define agency as the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world is to locate the experience of agency in a self that is reflexive, potent, and individuated but not sovereign. It is to insist that agency involves real action and its effects, not mere willing, but also that action without personal identity makes no sense. And while agency so conceived is compatible with liberal ideals of the self, such as Kateb’s democratic individuality, agency is not reducible to such ideals but makes room for a wide variety of ways to be a person. Likewise, although to affirm one’s subjective existence in the world may involve celebrating it, the exercise of agency need not entail the positive evaluation of one’s identity. Moreover, if the experience of agency is located in the individual subject, the sources of agency are more widely distributed because they include the bearers and the bodies that help bring our actions to fruition. Insofar as efficacy matters to agency, individual agency will extend beyond the boundaries of the self. It will be more than just an internal capacity of the person rooted in inner faculties such as the will. Individual agency is an emergent property of exchanges that are both intersubjective and corporeal, as we are about to see.

Non-­sovereign Agency / 29

Arendt and the Social Distribution of Agency Hannah Arendt’s account of the non-­sovereignty of human agency has become increasingly influential in recent years.18 At the heart of her view is the idea that there are “two parts” to any action, “the beginning made by a single person and the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise, by seeing it through.”19 “Action” is a term of art for Arendt; it covers forms of human activity in the public sphere that are neither forced upon us by necessity, like what she calls “labor,” nor prompted by utility, like what she calls “work.”20 Labor refers to the activities associated with the production of life’s biological necessities, including reproduction. Work covers activities involved in the fabrication of the objective world for the satisfaction of human purposes, including the built environment and the technologies required for it, as well as the (fabricated or non-­performative) creations of artists and the intellectual products of philosophers and historians.21 Action is distinguished from labor and work by its “spontaneity” and its “practical purposelessness.”22 It is spontaneous in the sense that it involves “beginning something new on our own initiative” in a way that breaks with the “automatic processes” of both nature and culture.23 It is purposeless in that it aims for no separate outcome or objective; action is activity that is its own end.24 Like the activity of playing the flute, which produces nothing beyond itself and has no practical value, action is about doing rather than making. Action is also revelatory, for it is activity with speech that publicly discloses the distinctive identity of the agent. In action “men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”25 The revelatory dimension is crucial to distinguishing action in the technical sense from forms of activity that are less spontaneous and more infused with necessity. As Arendt puts it, “without the disclosure of the agent in the act, action loses its specific character and becomes one form of achievement among others.”26 It is true that “most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent.”27 Thus the activities of political actors, which can include “constitution-­making and the establishment of a new government” as well as “expressing, discussing, and deciding” on matters of public importance, may count as action despite being guided by specific political objectives.28 Even where individuals “wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object,” she says, their activity may constitute action if it discloses their distinctive identities

30 / Chapter One

and if it marks a new beginning.29 In fact, Arendt sometimes suggests that there is an “inevitability” to the fact that in their activities “men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons” (183), however purposeful their deeds may be. These remarks imply that action is not so much a separate type of activity as a particular way of engaging in activity, namely a way that begins something new and reveals who one is. So action’s first moment involves individual initiative, an exertion of the human capacity to begin that also discloses the distinctive identity of the agent. Yet if action needs individual initiative and involves the disclosure of individual identity, it “is never possible in isolation” but also “need[s] the surrounding presence of others” (188). Other people are needed as “co-­actors” who participate with the agent in “the actual achievement” of her “enterprise” or objective (189, 190). Just as a leader’s initiatives depend for their success on the support of his followers, “without whose help he would never be able to achieve anything” (190), so the enterprises of any individual in the public sphere regularly require a community of bearers to help bring them to fruition. To act in politics is to insert ourselves in word and deed into an already existing web of human relationships. Although to count as action, on Arendt’s definition, our effort must involve “beginning something new on our own initiative,” we cannot make good on our initiatives by ourselves (177). Whatever it is that we initiate inevitably falls onto a field of “innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions” (184). The wills and intentions of others affect how we affect the world; they shape the unfolding narrative of enterprises and effects that constitutes the story of what we have done. Only with the help of others, Arendt says, can one who initiates a deed “really act, carry through whatever he had started to do.”30 The second moment of action, then, refers to action’s completion and its need for bearers. Think of Rosa Parks refusing to relinquish her seat on the bus. In doing so, she began an action that was only fully realized through the understanding and subsequent acts of many other people in the civil rights movement and beyond. It would be wrong to regard even the beginning of her action as pure spontaneity. Parks was selected well ahead of time by civil rights leaders for the role she would play on that bus, and she was trained in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.31 Still, her action did involve individual initiative and it did begin something new, namely the Montgomery bus boycott. It broke with the ostensibly automatic processes of a racially segregated society and helped open the door to political transformation. Yet her initiatory moment of beginning was not enough to complete the action. It was in large part because others were there

Non-­sovereign Agency / 31

to name what she did, to give it a determinate interpretation and articulate its public significance, that her action was “finished” in Arendt’s sense of the word. They gave the otherwise mundane (or rude or crazy) act of holding one’s seat its power and effectiveness as the distinctive action it became, a forceful defense of freedom and human dignity. The efficacy dimension of agency, in other words, is subject to the contingencies of social interpretation and response. What we can accomplish through any particular deed depends significantly on how others understand what we are doing and on how they react. In this respect, one might say that those who took part in bearing what Rosa Parks began were co-­ participants in the exercise of her agency. Her ability to affect the world in ways that manifested her subjective existence would have been much different without them. There is more to an action than the exercise of the agent’s will; insofar as action includes the two moments of beginning and bearing, it makes other people a part of individual agency. Human agency is non-­sovereign in part because it is a socially distributed phenomenon.32 Martin Luther King Jr.’s agency in the civil rights movement also depended on bearers. James Scott has emphasized the “essential reciprocity” between political leaders and their followers in this respect. This dynamic of reciprocity is evident in a speech King gave in December 1955 at the Holt Street YMCA in Montgomery. The speech took place after Rosa Parks was convicted but before the bus boycott began.33 It shows King using the call-­and-­response tradition of the black church to find “the right pitch that would resonate with the deepest emotions and desires of his listeners,” adjusting his emphasis and “repertoire of metaphors” as he spoke with an eye to both his own principled purposes and the social uptake of his audience. We can see in the speech, Scott says, how “the seemingly passive listeners to his soaring oratory helped write his speeches for him. They, by their responses, selected the themes that made the vital emotional connection, themes that King would amplify and elaborate in his unique way.”34 The upshot was a “two-­part harmony” in which King’s initiative and the social uptake provided by the audience were fully entwined, and action that was begun by him came to fruition through them.35 The non-­sovereignty of action is also a function of what Arendt calls its “boundlessness” and “unpredictability.” Action is boundless because what we have done in any given instance is a combination of the beginning that we initiated together with “its consequent deeds and sufferings,” meaning the effects it generates given the social field onto which it falls. Insofar as this medium is comprised of the “wills and intentions” of others, “every reaction becomes a chain reaction,” for each “reaction, apart from being a

32 / Chapter One

response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others.”36 We cannot possibly control all the indirect effects that arise this way as a result of our initiatives, many of which will be unintentional, even unknown to us. The boundlessness of action refers to the potentially limitless expansion of action’s constitutive effects, the marks it makes on the world.37 Action is unpredictable for the same reason that it is boundless. The meaning of any action—­what in particular one has done—­depends in part on how the chain of effects that it initiates unfolds. Only when the action (conceived as the two-­part whole of beginning and achievement) has ended can “its full meaning . . . reveal itself.”38 Because the process of interpretation and response that helps to constitute the action is largely out of the agent’s hands, the meaning of his action as well as its effects elude his control. In fact, Arendt insists that the agent’s own understanding of the action is intrinsically incomplete. Action “reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.”39 For Arendt, the agent’s conception of what he did has no special authority in defining the action “because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows,” a story that he may not know or ever live to see.40 Arendt discusses non-­sovereignty in the context of her treatment of action as a particular form of activity, but it is reasonable to think that non-­sovereignty covers a wider range of activities than those associated exclusively with action in the technical sense. In fact, she acknowledges that non-­sovereignty is “characteristic not of political action alone, in the narrower sense of the word,” where it refers to great action in the public realm.41 It also covers even “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances” because “one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”42 Non-­sovereignty is a general feature of the human condition, deriving from the fact that our “natality,” or capacity to begin, can only be enacted in the presence of plurality, the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”43 Thus Arendt can speak of “human non-­ sovereignty” in a way that applies to human agency in general. It conveys the idea that individual action in a nontechnical sense has a socially distributed character and therefore is neither a strictly internal faculty nor fully controlled by the individual will. Arendt’s concept of action clearly includes both an identity dimension and an efficacy dimension, and in this respect it is friendly to the preliminary view of agency sketched at the outset of this chapter. Yet what she has to say about both aspects of action is plagued by difficulties. The first difficulty is that despite her insistence on the “two parts” of action, Arendt regularly

Non-­sovereign Agency / 33

privileges the moment of beginning. When she says that “action and beginning are essentially the same,” she seems to suggest that action just is beginning.44 Action is “the spontaneous beginning of something new,” for to act “means to take an initiative, to begin.”45 In fact, she insists at one point that the “innermost meaning of the acted deed . . . is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or for worse.”46 The distinctively non-­instrumental character of action, in other words, which distinguishes it from other types of human activity on Arendt’s account, rests on a disjunction between action as the moment of beginning and action as achievement that requires bearers. After all, it can only be true that the meaning of an action is “untouched by any eventual outcome” if the action is limited to the first, initiatory moment. If action includes both the beginning and the bearing, then its meaning surely will be touched by the outcome. The whole point of characterizing action as boundless and unpredictable is to emphasize that its meaning is not contained by the moment of initiative but is profoundly “touched” by what happens subsequently, by its outcomes. The implicit disjuncture between the two moments of action to which Arendt sometimes alludes and her periodic association of action with beginning alone cut against her “two parts” view and destabilize her notion of non-­sovereignty. The non-­sovereignty of human action on her view follows from the fact that action cannot be reduced to the moment of initiative or isolated from outcomes. We are non-­sovereign because action involves more than just what we begin or set out to do. If action is mere beginning, then it is not socially distributed, not constituted by effects that may outrun the agent’s intentions and understanding. In short, if action is reduced to the moment of initiative it can be achieved solely by an exertion of individ­ ual will and hence falls within the agent’s control. Arendt’s periodic identi­ fication of action with mere beginning thus recapitulates (albeit unwittingly and ambivalently) the aspiration to sovereignty that she means to reject.47 A further difficulty concerns the role that individual identity plays within action on Arendt’s account. On the one hand, her insistence on the “unique distinctness” of each human being implies that we are individuated selves with identities that are distinctive and recognizable as our own.48 Moreover, we are able to “express this distinction,” to “communicate” to others who we are.49 Indeed, the communication of a “who” is at the heart of action. In the revelatory moment of initiative, it is precisely the “who” that defines each individual that “appears so clearly and unmistakably to others.”50 On the other hand, Arendt also means to deny the notion of an identity that is antecedent to action. The “uniquely distinct ‘who’” of any action, she

34 / Chapter One

says, is “originally intangible” and only “can become tangible ex post facto through action and speech.”51 We can only know who one is by means of the story of his deeds.52 There is a sense in which this must be true. We come to know one another as our characters are made manifest in what we do. Moreover, the unique selves that we are arise over time partly as the result of the actions that our experiences provoke. Nature and nurture have roles here, too, of course. Who we are depends on our genetic makeup and on the relationships we have with others as we mature. And it sometimes happens that the things we find ourselves doing turn out to have lasting (even transformative) effects on our identities. So personal identity is never fixed once and for all, and it develops through activity. Yet Arendt goes further, indicating that there is nothing “tangible” about one’s identity in advance of one’s deeds, even that each action constitutes a new “birth” of the subject, implying a notion of identity that is too fluid and shapeless to sustain agency. For if there is no tangible you in advance of a particular action, then it will be impossible for you to find yourself in the deed and impossible for others to see you there. And even when our actions have transformative consequences for our identities, the transformation is almost never complete. Some parts of us change and other parts remain the same. Only because of what remains the same is it sensible in these cases for one to make reference to an “I” who has changed. Then, too, the “who” that each of us is makes its appearance only through repeated action, as the result of recognizable patterns that give an enduring shape to our identities. A single action cannot yield enough information to really know who the agent is. If I see you stand up on the floor of the state house to make an impassioned plea for increasing the value of public assistance vouchers for housing the poor, I may be impressed by your public spiritedness. If I see you the following week collecting rent from the low-­income tenants in the dilapidated apartment buildings you own, who are paying you with those very state-­funded vouchers, I will have to revise my understanding of who you are. Now it appears that your character may be more self-­interested than public-­spirited. Our ability to see particular individuals in the actions they perform depends on a practice of pattern recognition in which we string together, however unconsciously, the various performances we have observed over time and the distinctive (meaning tangible and enduring) selves that repeatedly make appearances. If the identity disclosed in your deeds is different every time you act, others cannot know who you are or comprehend the meaning of what you have done. Arendt’s own idea that one’s identity is only fully disclosed by the whole story of one’s life points to the importance of some recognizable consistency

Non-­sovereign Agency / 35

in one’s identity over time.53 Yet her equally (perhaps more) forceful insis­ tence that each action is “like a second birth” denies this larger patterned perspective.54 It implies continuing breaks with the past, with patterned probabilities, with the consistent and the expected.55 In every action, Arendt seems to say, the agent is reborn as someone new, for action is always “the beginning not of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.”56 It is true that we need to be able to make sense of humanity’s capacity for initiatory acts that break with the automatic processes of nature and culture, that resist the expected, and that introduce new ways of being and thinking into the world. But the way to make sense of this is not by excluding tangible identities from action. Human agency makes sense only in the context of action that affirms a particular, enduring self. It is the existence of this self that gives the agent something to disclose and gives others something to recognize and take up.57 There is more trouble for Arendt in the claim that both the identity of the agent and the meaning of the act are hidden from the agent himself. In action, Arendt says, “one discloses one’s self without ever either knowing himself or being able to calculate beforehand whom he reveals.”58 Yet for the agent there is no possibility of recognizing his action as his own—­and thus having the experience of agency—­without some background understanding of who he is. If I do not know enough about myself to be able to identify a particular effect as mine, then my experience of my actions is bound to be an experience not of agency but of mere events at which I happen to be pres­ ent. Self-­knowledge is always imperfect, of course, and it is not uncommon for us to learn new things about ourselves by observing our own actions, but without some measure of self-­knowledge the experience of agency will be out of reach. And while there are certainly instances in which a person acts without knowing himself, in such cases we rightly regard agency as troubled or incomplete. If I promise to meet you for coffee on Tuesday, fail to show up, and when questioned confess quite truthfully that I cannot imagine that I ever would have made such a promise, you will be right to think there is something seriously wrong with me. This kind of experience is bound to be full of confusion for the agent himself as well, and rife with a sense that things are happening to him without being done by him. The case of an unwitting boor who alienates others with his overbearing demeanor expresses a similar logic. His actions disclose his obnoxious identity but this aspect of his identity is unknown to him. Consequently, what he perceives is not that he is affecting the world in a way that turns others against him but rather that others are against him, whatever he does. He is bound to feel powerless rather than agentic in the face of their hostility,

36 / Chapter One

for his experience is of something that happens to him, something devoid of his own doing. The absence of self-­knowledge, when it occurs, is a hindrance to agency. It stands in the way of our ability to find ourselves in our deeds, to identify with the effects on the world that we have initiated (albeit not singlehandedly achieved). So while it is possible for individuals to disclose themselves without knowing themselves, it is a mistake to regard this condition as a defining feature of action, as Arendt does. In a related way, Arendt’s insistence that the agent’s own understanding of his action carries no authority in establishing its meaning is deeply disabling from an experiential standpoint. As we have seen, for Arendt the meaning of an action “can reveal itself only when it has ended” and is available “only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian.”59 The agent cannot know the meaning of his action “because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows” but is confined to the moment of initiative.60 Arendt is right to say that the agent’s understanding of the deed cannot control its meaning in a definitive way—­only a sovereigntist view would insist upon that. How one actually affects the world depends significantly on how one’s action is taken up by others, how it is interpreted by them, and how they respond to it with their own actions. But the experience of agency also depends on the degree to which the interpretations and responses of others carry the action through in a way that is commensurate with the agent’s own perspective on it. Arendt neglects the importance of the connection between the agent’s understanding of the action and its social reception. If what the agent has done, considered in light of the broader set of social understandings, has no relation at all to what he thought he was doing, he will not experience the deed as an expression of his agency. It will confront him instead as an alien event. The deed will feel like something that has happened to him or despite him rather than being something of his own, something that affirms his subjective existence concretely in the world. By way of illustration, picture a pair of lovers (two men) walking down the street one evening, hand in hand, quietly enjoying the feeling of their joined bodies moving in step through the night air, affirming with every stride the abiding love for one another that is central to each one’s personal identity. Now imagine that their neighborhood is riven by homophobia, so that what other people see when they pass this pair is not a quiet affir­ mation of abiding love but an aggressive assertion of perversion, a hostile attack on sacred family values, an anarchical challenge to civilized social order. The couple’s action offends and outrages their neighbors, and it is not much of a stretch to think that under such conditions it may well elicit

Non-­sovereign Agency / 37

a violent response, or at least insults and threats. What other people think the couple has done—­and, in fact, the effect they really have had on the world—­is very different from what the couple themselves think they have done. Their understanding of the action is deeply at odds with its social reception. We could imagine, too, that it will be at odds with the later interpretation of the historian if homophobic values continue to hold sway in the community over time. There is a way in which the two lovers are indeed agents on Arendt’s account. They have disclosed their identities and they have affected the world. Yet in circumstances such as these, where the constitutive effects of one’s action are so far from one’s own understanding of the action’s meaning, the experience of agency will be deeply troubled. Our couple will find that for them the two parts of action do not—­cannot—­come together successfully. As the meaning of their action morphs in the field of social understanding onto which it falls, they find that they are not actually affirming their subjective existences concretely in the world, and their experience will be one of failed or frustrated agency.61 The agent’s subjective perspective on his action is as important to the lived experience of agency as the intersubjective perspective of those who bear the action and the ostensibly objective perspective of the historian. To locate the meaning of an action exclusively in sources that may be blind and deaf to the agent’s own understanding of it—­however incomplete this understanding may be—­is to put the actual experience of agency systematically out of reach for those who are socially marginalized and whose understanding of their actions is therefore unlikely to register with others. Thus while Arendt was right to think that human agency often requires bearers to bring it to fruition, the social uptake required will be somewhat different from what she assumed. Social uptake properly conceived means that others understand your action in ways that are consonant with your understanding of it, and that they respond to the action in ways that sustain its meaning and impact. Not all human activity requires social uptake in this sense. I can flip on a light switch while standing alone in a room and not depend on anyone else for the achievement of the action. In social and political contexts, however, individual efficacy regularly depends on social uptake.62 The role that other people play here may vary, although this too is not something that Arendt herself made clear. Sometimes social uptake involves others taking action themselves, as when a political leader depends for the success of his enterprise on the actions of his followers. At other times, social uptake involves other people simply interpreting an action against a background of shared understanding in a way that makes the

38 / Chapter One

action mutually intelligible to all. For example, a political activist who takes to her soapbox in Harvard Square to deliver a spirited critique of the government may have the experience of exercising agency even if she persuades no one to join her movement. To count as an agent she does not need other people to join the movement or even to be persuaded to her point of view, but for agency to be in play she does need them to understand what she is doing in a way that is commensurate with how she understands it. If instead of seeing her speech as an instance of political activism her audience interprets it as a mark of insanity and responds accordingly, then her exercise of agency will indeed be thwarted. Her effects will confront her as alien, and she will not have the experience of affirming her identity through her action. So the uptake required by agency as a socially distributed phenomenon involves a connection between the social interpretation of the action and the agent’s own understanding of it, and the role that other people play in social uptake varies. These last considerations take us beyond Arendt’s own view. We must move beyond her view if we are to make sense of the non-­ sovereignty of human agency because she never adequately developed the relationship between the two parts of action. She clearly intended the two parts to be entwined, but what she says regularly cuts against this idea. She vacillates between treating action as if it were all about the beginning, located in the spontaneous, initiatory performance of the agent independent of its socially mediated effects, and equating action so fully with its socially mediated effects that the agent’s own understanding of what he initiated turns out to be irrelevant. Similarly, Arendt sometimes writes as if the two sides of action were discrete moments, occurring, as she puts it at one point, “in two different stages”: first the agent’s performance, then later the historian’s interpretation of it.63 In reality, however, the two parts of action are not strictly sequential but often simultaneous. It is true that the effects of one’s action sometimes extend or reverberate across time, and future generations may remember and reinterpret one’s deed in ways that give it effects one never intended and could not have foreseen. Yet the experience of agency, experientially speaking, is far more sensitive to social uptake among one’s contemporaries than by posterity. And this uptake (or lack of uptake) is part of the actual doing of the action, not independent of and subsequent to it. What it means to say that agency is socially distributed is that what I can do here and now—­the meaningful effects that I have on the world—­depends significantly on how other people, here and now, understand and respond to what they believe I am doing, even as I am doing it. Consequently, the nature of my effects and

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the degree to which they affirm my subjective existence is a function of the interaction between my own and others’ contemporaneous conceptions of my deed. It is because agency turns on this interaction that it is so vulnerable to social inequality. Failures of agency arise when a background of bigotry prevents the social interpretation of an act from affirming the agent’s understanding of it, or when social stigma constitutes the action as something with which the agent herself cannot identify, as in the case of the two lovers holding hands on the street. Arendt never discusses such failures, partly because the interaction between the agent’s perspective on his deed and the interpretation of the deed by others remains underdeveloped in her account. In part, too, she radically underestimated the corrosive effects that social inequalities have on human agency and freedom.64 One last difficulty concerns individual responsibility, which Arendt’s view renders problematic. There are multiple dimensions to the difficulty, deriving from the different emphases that Arendt gives to the two parts of action. To the extent that she privileges the moment of initiative and equates action with beginning alone, she disconnects agency from effects. Where “the innermost meaning of the acted deed” is understood to be “untouched by any eventual outcome” there is nothing to hold the agent responsible for.65 Moreover, if each action constitutes an entirely new beginning that breaks with “the commonly accepted” and reaches “into the extraordinary,” no shared standards of right can apply to it.66 This explains why Arendt says at one point that action is not subject to moral evaluation. Action “can be judged only by the criterion of greatness,” which is not governed by standards of good and bad, or right and wrong.67 Greatness is the measure for deeds that are “unique and sui generis,” and whose “specific meaning . . . can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement.”68 If action cannot be right or wrong, there will be no standards to hold the agent responsible to.69 The first problem, then, is that in detaching action from outcomes and moral standards, Arendt’s non-­ sovereign view of action immunizes the agent against responsibility. Clearly this is not something she intended. Her essay on Eichmann and her work on totalitarianism show a deep and abiding commitment to the concept of personal responsibility.70 Yet it is nevertheless an implication of her view.71 And although Arendt did take up the issue of responsibility in later work, she never fully resolved these difficulties.72 Arendt’s denial of an enduring identity also causes trouble for responsibility. If the tangible self exists only in the moment of disclosure, if each

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action constitutes the birth of a new being who lasts only as long as its performance, how can we hold anyone responsible for his action once the deed is done? This difficulty is exacerbated by Arendt’s insistence that the “being” and the “reality” of “the mortal actor” depend entirely on his appearance before others. One’s reality as a self “comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men.”73 The reality of the self “is the same as appearance,” and “whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream . . . without any reality.”74 To collapse the distinction between being and appearance in this way is to misconstrue the experience of countless individuals in innumerable contexts whose identities have failed to register in the field of public appearance. The “invisible” identities of gay people living in the closet are only the most obvious example. The failure to be seen in this context certainly does have damaging effects on the scope of one’s agency and the quality of one’s life. It can negatively affect one’s identity, too, insofar as the stigmatization of homosexuality that obstructs public recognition of gay people is internalized. But our identities are very real to us even when they are invisible to others. However vulnerable to the world of public appearance the self may be (and it surely is vulnerable to this world), its reality is not reducible to its appearance. The experience of marginalized people everywhere attests to this reality. It is precisely the durability of beings who once failed to appear that enables us to become aware of the limited, exclusionary character of the public norms that make some people visible and keep others in the shadows, and it gives us grounds for thinking that these exclusions are wrong. The durability of the self also makes it possible to hold people accountable for the things they have done. Without it, no attributions of personal responsibility would make sense. It is difficult to hold accountable the mere “dream” of a person, even if the harms he has inflicted on others are all too real. So the intangible and fleeting dream-­self that Arendt envisions as part of her non-­sovereign account of action further undermines the possibility of personal responsibility. Because all action is “boundless” in the scope of its effects, thus connecting the agent to a potentially unlimited collection of harms, the question of responsibility is a pressing one. Non-­sovereign agency implicates the individual in a far wider range of outcomes than a sovereigntist view could reasonably allow, insofar as the latter ties responsibility to intentionality and individual control over one’s action. Rather than confronting the issue of responsibility directly, Arendt sidesteps it, speaking of the need for “redemption from the predicament of irreversibility.”75 Irreversibility refers

Non-­sovereign Agency / 41

to the fact that we cannot undo the unintentional and often highly indirect effects that we have had. It captures the moral dilemma of non-­sovereign agency as Arendt conceives it, the fact that we are agents of what inevitably turns out to be a very extensive set of effects. Redemption from irreversibility means that we must be “released from the consequences of what we have done” by being forgiven for the harms we have inflicted.76 Action, Arendt says, “needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly.”77 In one sense, the need for forgiveness is undeniable, given the boundlessness of human agency. It would be crazy to hold individuals fully responsible for every last effect in the interminable chain of reactions unleashed by their deeds. Yet if every action is something that we do unknowingly, as Arendt regularly implies, then it begins to look as if we will need to be “released” from everything we have ever done.78 This would be to eradicate the possibility of responsibility entirely. One might also wonder why we should be released from consequences of our actions that injure others, however unwittingly, as when we unintentionally contribute to sustaining relations of injustice. Where this is the case, blanket forgiveness and nothing more is bound to perpetuate injustice rather than remediate it. And because those with greater power have more extensive effects, many of which are felt with special force by the less powerful, the upshot of Arendt’s call for forgiveness is to enjoin the weak to forgive the strong, the oppressed to redeem their oppressors. Arendt is absolutely right to think that the non-­sovereignty of human agency poses a predicament for responsibility, at least for responsibility as it has traditionally been conceived. Responsibility looks problematic from the standpoint of non-­sovereign agency because the most familiar models of responsibility presuppose a sovereign self. What is needed is not mere forgiveness, however, but a robust notion of non-­sovereign responsibility, one that sustains the possibility of moral accountability while still acknowledging the many ways in which human agency comes apart from intentionality and falls short of control. We shall pursue this theme in chapter 2. For all its deficits, Arendt’s concept of non-­sovereign action is a generative one. It is itself something of a “beginning” for it opens the door to new ways of thinking about human agency, and it illuminates agency’s socially distributed character. It breaks with conventional philosophical assumptions about both the doer and the deed, and it inaugurates an extraordinary approach to freedom. The accounts of agency and freedom developed in this book owe a great deal to Arendt’s work. Yet she never fully brought

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the insights she initiated to fruition. We will need to move past Arendt if we are to understand the non-­sovereignty of human agency, but in moving past her we should remember that the journey we are on is one that she began.

Corporeal Agency: Bodies, Subjects, Norms The non-­sovereignty of human agency extends beyond the social distribution of agency that Arendt described and beyond the innumerable ways that agency comes apart from intention and control. Non-­sovereignty also refers to the ways in which agency is corporeally instantiated, thus interrupting the common association between agency and rational autonomy.79 The corporeal dimensions of agency have been explored in recent years by an emerging new breed of materialist thinkers. In contrast to the older, Marxian strands of materialism that have long had a presence in the field, the new materialists look at human agency not primarily through the lens of economic conditions but with a view to the experiences and interactions of bodies, both human and nonhuman. Their work has emerged alongside efforts to explore the political implications of new findings in the life sciences that document the corporeal dimensions of individual consciousness and action.80 The new materialism is not so much a cohesive movement as a disparate collection of work with a range of different purposes and methods.81 Yet diverse as it is, the work converges in emphasizing the corporeality of human agency. It helps flesh out aspects of human agency that neither Arendt nor the moral luck literature fully grasped. From the standpoint of the “two-­sides” approach to agency, in which agency arises through the interaction of identity and efficacy, what the new materialism literature suggests is that both our identities and our effects are constituted materially, through our own bodies and their interactions with other bodies in the wider material world. On the identity side, Samantha Frost’s recent exposition of Hobbes is a good example because it offers a “phenomenology of material subjectivity” rooted in “thinking-­bodies.”82 As against Cartesian dualism, which assumes that all matter is inert, Frost’s materialism (following Hobbes) asserts a variegated view of matter, according to which some bodies are not only vital rather than inert but also marked by language capacities and rationality.83 One need not posit non-­corporeal faculties (the immaterial soul, transcendent reason) to account for the differences between human beings and rocks. This claim is consistent with the research coming out of neuroscience and neuropsychology today, which is charting with increasing sophistication the material basis in the brain of human personality, rationality, and consciousness.84

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On Frost’s account, the distinctive subjectivities that characterize individual human beings arise over time through complex chains of perceptions together with the thoughts, memories, habits, and desires they generate. Each thinking-­body is irreducibly unique, a “singularity,” because “the ineluctable specificity of each individual organism’s first encounters with the material and social world, the manner in which those encounters are digested and remembered, and the ways in which those enfleshed memories both shape and are shaped by later encounters means that no one person’s thoughts and feelings upon experiencing a shared event can be exactly the same as those of another.”85 One’s identity or subjective existence is an embodied phenomenon in the sense that it arises and is experienced through one’s material engagement with the world. It is also ineluctably reflexive insofar as the capacity to reflect on oneself is a necessary condition for individuals, as Frost puts it, to “have a sense of who they are.”86 If our identities arise through our reflexively embodied experience, it is also true that our effects affirm these distinctive identities in material ways, as Diana Coole’s fascinating account of “corporeal communicators” shows.87 Human bodies, Coole points out, “exhibit agency by exercising and experiencing their own corporeal modes of power.”88 In face-­to-­face communicative encounters, for instance, we frequently experience sensate reactions to others and respond physically to them. The body “shuns the touch or proximity of those it finds unattractive; it may be repelled by their smells; it is pleased or disgusted by the tones of their voices,” and so on.89 Our bodies enact these reactions in concrete movements and gestures that communicate our identities in meaningful ways. Likewise, facial expressions, eye movements, physical gestures, and postures convey an immense amount of information in communicative exchanges. Sometimes our bodies react in ways that are unwelcome even when they convey something true about us. By blushing involuntarily in your presence I may disclose that I am intimidated by you, for example, and I may regret this disclosure. Because we so thoroughly identify agency with intentional choice, bodily reactions like these are typically treated as being orthogonal to agency.90 Yet what we commonly say in describing them tells a different story. We say, “I blushed,” or “I grimaced,” thus acknowledging the relationship between our bodies, our identities, and our deeds, a relationship that sometimes contravenes our intentions. If a bodily act has an impact on the world that manifests key features of the agent’s identity, then it makes sense to see it as a part of her agency. In fact, our ability to affect the world in ways that affirm our identities depends significantly on the efficacy of our corporeally communicative gestures, many of which are unintentional.

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Consider the force of physical carriage. How we carry ourselves both re­ flects and reinforces a great deal about our characters, including (among many other things) our levels of confidence and self-­respect. Our bodies are inscribed by power, not just in the sense that the bodies of the poor and the marginalized are prone to particular physical pathologies but in the sense that we regularly enact our social status in physical ways.91 The slumping shoulders, the downturned head, the eyes that constantly look away—­these physical markers of the oppressed also serve to reinscribe their subjugated status because of what they actively convey to others, namely an identity riven by domination and oppression. By the same token, the physical carriage of the privileged classes reinforces their privilege in ways that manifest their identities, however unintentionally, and that powerfully affect the social world.92 This is another way that human agency has a material life, a life that is always political in the sense that it engages us in prevailing relations of power. Understanding how agency operates in this corporeal register is crucial to grasping the subtle, often unconscious, ways that power circulates in and through us—­not simply to constrain our agency but also to constitute and invigorate it.93 It throws light on the shadowy dynamics that infuse virtually all social and political interactions, what Coole calls the “visceral and stylistic aspects of embodiment [that] help sustain inequalities through practices that often seem too trivial or mundane to identify as modes of power”—­or to treat under the rubrics of justice and freedom.94 As democratic citizens, we ought to be more attentive than we typically are to the politics of our own bodily agency, the ways that we often unwittingly perpetuate patterns of domination and oppression (our own as well as that of others) through our material “involvement” in the world. These considerations also suggest that agency should not be equated in any simple way with liberatory action; the agency of the dominated and the oppressed frequently functions to reinforce their subordinate status. The fact that human agency does not always track the conscious intentions of agents suggests that it would be a mistake to describe the agency of the body in purely instrumental terms. Coole usefully distinguishes the “instrumentalist perspective” on corporeal agency from one that sees “the body as agentic-­expressive.” The former view treats the body as “being directed by an actor’s will in pursuit of his or her broader purposes,” and assumes that the body can be “rationalized, mastered, and subdued, as well as pressed into service” by an agent conceived as having sovereign authority over her body.95 Seen in this light, the body itself is not agentic but is the passive tool of a subject whose agency rests rather on the will, conceived as

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a nonmaterial faculty. If agency cannot be simply equated with intentional choice or will, however, then this instrumentalist view fails. By contrast, the body understood as “agentic-­expressive” in its own right can accommodate the fissures that exist between agency, on the one hand, and intentionality or control, on the other. This perspective recognizes “the way that bodies as such function as sites of power [and action], rather than merely being the instruments of the powerful.”96 Coole is on to something important in treating bodies as sites of power and action, but the theory of corporeal agency needs to be attentive to the issue of selfhood in ways that Coole neglects. Not every movement of the body constitutes an instance of agency. To be nauseated at the tone or content of a political speech and to convey this displeasure through unintentional gestures and expressions is an exercise of agency in a way that flu-­induced nausea is not. The difference lies in the fact that political nausea and its concomitant gestures affirm the subjective existence of the agent; they reflect key features of who he uniquely is, and their meaning refers back to this selfhood. The meaningfulness of action makes the difference between instances of human agency and merely random occurrences or non-­agentic bodily functions. This meaning is partly determined by social interpretations, as we have seen, but it also issues from or affirms the subjective existence of the agent himself. We can distinguish corporeal agency from other kinds of bodily movement by looking for meaningful manifestations of the agent’s identity in the deed. It is perhaps worth reiterating that to insist upon subjectivity as a crucial component of human agency is not to posit a sovereign self as the source of agency. We have seen that selfhood is not the same thing as sovereignty. Even the capacity for creative or unpredictable forms of action need not presuppose a self that is an uncaused cause or fully in control, as we often assume. Although human agency operates within the laws of material causality, the causal factors that figure in human action are so many and the causal chains are so complex (and often hidden from view) that many human actions remain effectively unpredictable. Moreover, the causes of our actions are often internalized aspects of our character or sense of selfhood. When we act from these causes, we experience our action as having issued from ourselves, as indeed it has done, even if it does not reflect our control. Finally, because some of these internalized causes are unconscious, the actions they generate may have a spontaneous or creative cast even for the agent herself. William Connolly has argued along these lines that “the fecundity of thought is bound up with . . . fugitive passages from unthought to thought, passages that leave signs and remainders but are not themselves susceptible

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to representation.”97 The fecundity of thought, conceived by Connolly as simultaneously corporeal and culturally inflected, helps explain the creativity of human agency without positing anything like a sovereign subject.98 The corporeal and socially distributed aspects of human agency are linked because the bodily life of agency is itself an intersubjective affair. Frost draws fruitfully on Hobbes’s distinction between “active power” and “passive power” to bring out the ways in which individual material agency is socially distributed. What Hobbes calls “power” is not “a property of a body but rather a situation in which a body finds itself; power consists in a particular configuration of numerous causal factors in a given context.”99 The causal motion of an agent is an active power that requires for its realization the passive power of a patient. What I can accomplish or effect in any particular instance depends not only on what I do, or am capable of doing, but on the people who receive my deed. The cause of something, as Hobbes puts it, includes “the power of the agent and patient together, which may be called entire or plenary power.”100 Human agency is a “plenary power” that includes the power of the actor and recipient together. What this means is that individual agency does not reside exclusively within the individual, as Arendt saw, but often depends on the actions and reactions of other people. The material life of human agency is socially distributed in the sense that “others become the agents of the individual’s action.”101 The embodied self, then, is never the sole source of its own agency. Rather than being located exclusively within an individual body, agency is better understood as a product of intersubjective bodily encounters as they intersect with personal self-­understandings and social interpretations. What our bodies convey—­corporeal agency—­depends a great deal on existing backgrounds of social meaning. Think again about the physical carriage of the oppressed. The hyper-­macho male stride that conveys inviolability and elicits respect in the ghetto functions very differently in middle-­class white neighborhoods. There it reads as foolish or threatening (or both). It marks the agent as an outsider, reinforcing his exclusion and reinscribing his subordination. The corporeal and the socially distributed dimensions of agency interact.102 Agency is distributed across more than just the social domain of human bodies, for the nonhuman material world also may figure in the constitution of human agency in particular cases. The proponents of actor network theory (ANT), one strand of the new materialism, agree that agency “should be understood as distributed, emergent, and interactive” rather than as an exclusively internal property of individuals.103 But rather than simply stressing the role that other persons play in the constitution of individual

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agency, they insist on the importance of nonhuman bodies, too. Lambros Malafouris has explored this line of thought using the activity of pottery-­ making as an example. When a potter fabricates something on the pottery wheel, his creative intentions are shaped by the properties of the clay, by the effects of the wheel, and by the physical capabilities of his own hands. The potter and the “task-­environment display a dynamic coupling between mind and matter that looks like a dance of agency” in which the person and the material world are “equal partners.”104 What the potter can achieve—­the effects he can have on the world—­ depends on the material properties of the clay. Even his intentions are not, strictly speaking, his own but result from a dynamic interaction between his capacities and these properties.105 In fact, if his intentions are not shaped by the matter, they will never come to fruition in action. The skilled potter knows what clay can and cannot “do,” and the projects he takes up, while affirming his own subjective existence, succeed only to the extent that they work with what the clay itself brings to the wheel. He wants to make a drinking vessel but would never set out to throw something that looks like Waterford crystal. His effects (like his intentions) are his own, but they are not only his own for they are also partly the progeny of the clay and the wheel. Most of the time, what we conventionally think of as the agency of the human individual actually reflects what Jane Bennett calls an “assemblage” of material “actants” that includes far more than the individual alone.106 If one looks closely enough, Bennett says, “the productive power behind effects is always a collectivity.”107 And the collectivities that constitute agency encompass materialities beyond human beings. Still, it is one thing to acknowledge that nonhuman bodies contribute to human agency and another thing to attribute agency to them, as Bennett does. Although she acknowledges agency-­relevant differences between human beings and other “ontological forms,” which distinguishes her view from some of the ANT theorists, she does insist that “agency crosses the human-­nonhuman divide.”108 As she sees it, “there are various sources or sites of agency, including the intentionality of a human animal, the temperament of a brain’s chemistry, the momentum of a social movement, the mood of an architectural form, the propensity of a family, the style of a corporation, the drive of a sound-­ field, and the decisions of molecules at far-­from-­equilibrium states.”109 Attributing agency exclusively to human beings understates “the ontological diversity of actants.”110 In using the language of “actants,” Bennett means to convey the sense of “agentic capacities” as “the ability to make a difference, to produce effects, or even to initiate action,” but to detach these capacities

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from “figurations of agency centered around the rational, intentional human subject.”111 Actants may therefore include “electrons, trees, wind, electromagnetic fields,” and other inanimate objects.112 Bennett is right to resist the strict equation of agency with rational intentionality, and right to see agency as arising out of assemblages. There is also something admirable in her effort to counter “the history of agency as a philosophical concept,” which is generally “a history of attempts to mark the uniqueness of humans.”113 The human exceptionalism that she points to here has been the cause of vast ecological destruction and immeasurable suffering among nonhuman beings. It also supports a self-­understanding that is in many ways illusory, lacking in a fitting humility, and counterproductive for humanity’s own purposes. The “vitalism” or “enchanted materialism” that underlies Bennett’s alternative treatment of agency is therefore undeniably appealing. Among other things, it calls us to acknowledge our dependence on nonhuman materialities and to act with greater sensitivity and respect toward them. It also asks us to notice the ways that we are like the rest of nature rather than apart from—­and above—­it. Nevertheless, Bennett moves too quickly from the notion of agency as something that is emergent from processes that include inanimate objects to the direct attribution of agency to such objects. What inanimate objects lack is the reflexive sense of self required for the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world. As we have seen, to be a self involves the experience of being aware of oneself as a self. This reflexive self-­awareness is unavailable to beings and objects that lack higher cognitive functions. True, it would be wrong to equate reflex­ ive self-­awareness with a form of cognition that transcends affective, bodily experience. Many of the experiences that constitute self-­awareness involve physical and emotional sensations together with reasoning. Similarly, much of what constitutes personal character takes the form of reflective sentiment and the integrated affective-­cognitive apparatus of habit. Thus the notion of a reflexive self need not imply an ideal of personal sovereignty grounded in a putatively transcendent faculty of reason, although reflexive selfhood often has been understood this way. The reflexivity involved in selfhood is far from the pure practical rationality that Kant theorized. It is affective as well as cognitive, socially embedded not autonomous, and not reducible to the exercise of will. Still, the capacity to stand in reflective relationship to oneself is at the heart of the very reasonable distinction between an agent and a mere cause. Electrons and falling rocks, having no power of reflexivity, have no sense of

Non-­sovereign Agency / 49

self to affirm in the world and no capacity to experience this affirmation. Admittedly, there is much about the material world that we still do not know, and future research could discover reflexivity among what we now consider to be inanimate objects. In that event, the boundaries around our concept of agency would need to be rethought. But based on what we now know about inanimate objects, it is fair to say that they lack reflexivity and hence the capacity for a sense of self and the ability to affirm that self in action.114 The reflexivity implicit in the sense of selfhood also makes it possible for human beings to be responsive to norms in ways that inanimate objects cannot be. We regularly experience ourselves in a way that is mediated by principles of right and conceptions of the good. In addition to needs and desires, we have aspirations and regrets. Indeed, who I am is partly a function of the particular aspirations and regrets that I feel, the distinctive ways that I relate to the ethical dimensions of our social world. As human beings, we live in a normative register; to have a particular identity is at least in part to have a particular sense of right and wrong (whatever its content may be), a particular kind of responsiveness to the felt pressures of what ought to be. It would be a mistake to identify this norm-­sensitivity with reason alone. As much recent work in neuroscience and neuropsychology has shown, the sense of right and wrong involves a complex mix of cognitive and affective modes of consciousness.115 We feel as much as reason our way to what we ought to do. Nor are the standards that orient us subject to our autonomous choice. We can adopt a more or less reflective attitude toward the standards that help to shape our character, but this never involves unmitigated choice immune to social context. We only ever assess particular standards that we hold in light of others that remain (at least for the moment) uncontested constituents of who we are. The normative dimensions of our identities are not reducible to our wills any more than to our cognitive faculties. The capacity for norm-­responsiveness is not always exercised—­it will not be visible in every action we undertake—­but the fact that we are the kinds of beings who are capable of responding to norms is a crucial aspect of human agency. And this capacity is closely tied to the reflexive sense of self. The norms that move us to act typically do so because they have been internalized as parts of our characters or identities. Responding to norms and affirming our identities through action are thus linked. It is only in view of the fact that we have a sense of who we are that we can feel ourselves to be accountable for what we ought to do. The norm-­responsiveness that is implicit in agency helps explain why praise and blame necessarily presuppose agency.116 It adds something

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significant to the non-­sovereign, two-­sides approach developed so far, and it poses a challenge for the new materialists. An agent is an actant who can respond to standards, to sanctions, and to pleas: Respect my rights! Listen to my point of view! Be kinder! To talk of agency is to conjure a world not simply of interactions among bodies but of relationships among beings who share sufficiently in reflexivity to be capable of responding to one another’s normative claims, a material world that lives in an ethical register marked by communication and reciprocal coordination.117 Bennett’s own account implicitly acknowledges this norm-­sensitivity. She clearly has in mind the kinds of actants who cooperate with one another in ways that are reciprocally responsive to mutually agreed-­upon standards. At one point, for instance, she remarks that the prevention of future electrical blackouts (after the North American blackout of 2003) will require “a host of cooperative efforts” by agents that include not just the US Congress but also electrons. The “reactive power” of the relevant electromagnetic fields, she says, “will also have to agree to do its part.”118 Yet entering into agreements and reflexively adhering to norms (“doing its part”) are not among the capabilities of electrons, at least so far as we know. When it comes to agency, selfhood and efficacy interact in ways that are not only distributed socially and materially but are also open to reflection and saturated with normativity.119 How exactly the norm-­sensitivity involved in agency operates—­or what the genesis and practice of this responsiveness entails—­is the subject of some dispute today in philosophy, psychology, political theory, and neuroscience, among other domains. I have sketched one view of this responsiveness in other work, emphasizing a faculty of reflec­tive sentiment that is compatible with a non-­sovereign view of agency and with at least some materialist approaches.120 To fully elaborate the contours of reflexivity and the nature of normativity in light of the new materialism and related discourses would take us far afield of our present subject, but it is important work both for the new materialism and for political theory more generally. Thus while we are a part of the material world, as Bennett and the ANT theorists insist, we are a more distinctive part of it than they acknowledge.121 We are distinctive both in the kind of damage we can do to the material world (including one another) and in our ability to respond to norms in ways that do good. Insofar as this distinctive capacity itself arises from matter (the matter that is us), we should abandon whatever smug self-­ satisfaction our distinctiveness might tempt us to harbor. We should revere rather than disparage the material world that helps make our distinctive agency possible. Yet we should not lose sight of this distinctiveness, because

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it is our distinctive agency that enables us to hold ourselves accountable for the damage we have done and for the good we ought to do. We need to protect the nonhuman material world and repair the harm we have inflicted on it because electrons and rocks and bears cannot do this work without us. Likewise, we need to attend to other human beings, to what is broken or stunted or neglected in them, partly because the nonhuman world is indifferent to human suffering and partly because in many cases—­many more than we are used to recognizing—­we are in some measure responsible for what has gone wrong. Because the body has so often been seen as the passive partner to reason’s more active mode of being, one might think that corporeal agency would be antithetical to freedom, that it would perpetuate “embodied rituals that act as a reservoir of sedimented memories,” anchoring itself in the past and the present in ways that foreclose a creative future.122 And to the extent that power inscribes our bodies, corporeal agency may seem to risk reifying existing relations of power. This vulnerability is one reason why the myth of rational autonomy has had such a powerful and persistent hold on the minds of philosophers and political theorists. We turn to the putatively nonmaterial power of reason to liberate us from the real vulnerabilities that attend our material constitution. Thus to treat agency as socially and materially distributed may seem to risk disabling it. These worries are not unreasonable. Yet it would be a mistake to see non-­sovereign agency as simply hamstrung by its corporeality and hence as necessarily conservative.123 Davide Panagia has recently argued, for example, that “sensation” has a “political life” precisely because it can generate transgressive responses to conventional opinions and open up new ways of seeing political questions. Sensation, as “the heterology of impulses that register on our bodies without determining a body’s nature or residing in any one organ of perception,” sometimes interrupts “our conventional ways of perceiving the world and giving it value.”124 Our sensate responses—­to laws, to candidates, to political arguments or party platforms, to the multitude of norms and interactions that shape politics—­have the potential to stimulate new ways of configuring ourselves and our associational life.125 The power of sensation to inspire new possibilities for politics comes about because of the ways that sensation can resist the disciplinary force of “common sense.” It is true that sensations often reflect rather than resist this disciplinary force—­think of the excitement stimulated by commercial products that Madison Avenue wants us to want—­and Panagia understates this fact somewhat. Then, too, because mind and body are deeply entwined in human beings, many if not

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most of our sensations are experienced in connection with ideas and values. The “impulses that register on our bodies” rarely do so in a thoroughly unmitigated way. Yet Panagia is right to insist that sensation sometimes takes the form of “disjunctive intensities flowing in and through us”—­disjunctive in the sense of introducing fissures into the common sense or conventional assumptions that structure democratic life.126 To see how transgressive the political life of sensation can be, one need only look at the gay rights movement, where the sensation of renegade sexual desire not only has catalyzed the political agency of activists in recent years but over time has led to the substantial reconfiguring of subjectivities and associational lives for many citizens. It has opened the door to new ways of understanding family, fairness, equality under law, and toleration, among other things, and hence has reconfigured democratic citizenship in important ways. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, often said to be the Bible of the decolonization movement,127 also develops a fascinating account of the potent corporeality often found in the political agency of the oppressed. Fanon insists that despite being interpellated by those in power as uncivilized, unintelligent, untrustworthy, and worse, colonized subjects can be forceful agents of political change, and their political agency is decidedly corporeal in character. Fanon locates it in the body of the colonized subject, in the “aggressiveness sedimented in his muscles”: “The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing.”128 The physicalism of agency here is striking. Fanon refers repeatedly to the “muscles” of the oppressed, and to the “muscular tension” that generates revolutionary action.129 True, the resistant agency of the colonized subject also reflects cognitive evaluations of the illegitimacy of colonial domination. But these evaluations are entwined with a physical drive for agency. As one commentator puts it, Fanon focuses on “those forceful and fragile ‘psycho-­affective’ motivations and mutilations that drive our collective instinct for survival . . . and nourish our political desire for freedom.”130 What he describes is a simultaneously cognitive and physical repulsion to domination, including a restlessness of the body, a corporeal energy oriented to affecting the world in ways that affirm one’s distinctive subjectivity. In the colonial context, Fanon says, the exercise of political agency that answers to this physical drive takes the form of violent rebellion. Decolonization is “always a violent event that involves exchanging the role of “game” for that of “hunter.”131 Violence is more than just a necessary means. Fanon

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insists that the physical experience of violence is itself “a cleansing force” for the colonized because it rids them “of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-­ confidence.”132 Violence redeems the colonized’s lost sense of agency, as Fanon sees it, by making agency’s physical presence felt. Fanon’s endorsement of violence is not anything we should affirm as a normative matter, but his account may help explain some instances of public action that have baffled standard social science accounts, such as contemporary suicide missions by terrorists. Such missions “violate common expectations about people’s behavior” because they “seem to breach the dictates of instrumental rationality.”133 They therefore “pose a major challenge for social science”—­and for many citizens of Western liberal democracies, who also find suicide missions difficult to fathom.134 We tend to write them off to religious zealotry, but suicide missions sometimes happen in the absence of religious feeling. Even when the perpetrators explicitly claim to be animated by piety, it is never clear whether their religious beliefs motivated their action or simply rationalized it.135 Fanon’s account suggests that the physical drive for agency is primordial, and that when it is thwarted through domination and deprivation it may well turn violent. If the primordial drive for agency is indeed behind violent extremist action, then perhaps the way to avoid terrorism is not through greater control of restive populations and dissident groups, as governments around the world frequently assume, but by finding ways to enhance opportunities for more moderate exercises of agency among the relevant populations. Still, physicality is one thing but violence is another. If we can learn from Fanon’s account of the former, we need not accept his defense of the latter. Violence is closely connected to the sovereigntist model of agency as mastery and control that we have found reason to reject. The effect of violent action, after all, is to shut down the agency of others. The violent revolutionary, Fanon says, is “a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor.”136 He wants not to eradicate the relations of domination that colonialism entails but simply to change his position in the hierarchy, to become the “hunter” rather than the “game.” To achieve liberation for the colonized through the domination of their former masters is normatively indefensible so long as freedom is understood as something to which all persons have an equal claim. The physicality of agency as Fanon presents it may spur powerful forms of political resistance, but it also generates violence and compromises freedom for all. Is it possible to learn from Fanon’s insight about the physical dimensions of transformative agency while avoiding these difficulties?

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The work of Judith Butler offers some valuable resources for developing this line of thought. For Butler as for Fanon, there is an irreducibly physical or material dimension to human agency. Yet whereas in Fanon the physicalism of agency mainly takes the form of a bodily impulse to act, and specifically to resist domination, Butler conceives the material life of agency as mixing the vigorous enactment of novel forms of individual subjectivity with subjugation to existing norms of “materialization.” On her view, agency and identity are co-­original because identities are performed through the repeated actions of subjects. These actions, which are largely scripted by prevailing norms, actually shape the bodies we have. The differences between male and female bodies, for instance, are produced at least in part by the regulatory ideals of “masculinity” and “femininity.”137 The “matter of bodies,” Butler says, is “the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects.”138 Male and female bodies materialize in particular forms—­strong and physically imposing, slender and weak—­partly as a reflection of hierarchies of power, which they also perpetuate. In pressing this point, Butler develops Foucault’s notion of the productive force of power, the idea that abiding by prevailing norms simultaneously constitutes a subjugation of the individual and a form of individual empowerment, at least within the world defined by those norms. Materialization is a process of the “sedimentation” of power on the subject but it is also “the acquisition of being through the citing of power [by the subject], a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the ‘I.’ ”139 The key point for present purposes is that the experience of agency is often a physical one. This is not merely to say that our bodies shape the forms of agency available to us. That would be to imply that agency resides in but is not of the body; it would suggest that the seed of agency is immaterial, something akin to the old idea of a ghost in the machine. Butler’s thought is rather that agency, as the performative enactment of one’s subjectivity, never stands above the body but only exists in the bodily performances that constitute subjects with particular identities and effects. Agency materializes, in the sense of “arises,” with the materialization of the subject. This way of understanding agency resonates with Fanon’s description of the musculature of agency in the colonized rebel. Both views help to disrupt the common assumption (usually implicit) that agency exists in the head rather than the heart, that it is a function of thinking rather than feeling, of the mind distinguished from and in command of the body. No one disputes the idea that passions are powerful

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motives to action, of course, but the dominant views in philosophy and political theory still distinguish agency from action that is driven by the passions of the body and from the motions of “mere” bodies. Agency is instead thought to rest on a form of reason that insulates one’s action from the vagaries of the passions and the tyranny of bodily impulse, and that distinguishes agency from what bodies actually do. The sovereignty of mind over body is a key component of the control that establishes individual freedom, or so it is often thought. It would be wrong to deny that reflection is a part of agency, of course, for we have seen that agency requires a reflective self. Yet the reasoned reflections that we undertake in the course of exercising agency never fully leave the body behind—­or control it. Think again of Fanon’s colonized subject. His reflective evaluation of the illegitimacy of colonial rule, which prefigures his acts of rebellion, is rooted in the cognitive-­physical need to see and feel his effects on the world, effects that affirm his subjective existence. Moreover, his evaluation of colonialism takes the form of passionate anger. This judgment is something he feels in the “violence rippling under the skin” rather than experiences simply as a form of detached, dispassionate evaluation.140 Or consider the critical consciousness of individuals whose bodies fail to materialize in socially acceptable ways (to use Butler’s language), such as the effeminate male or the lesbian. Their critical consciousness arises from their nontraditional physical experiences. For him, ostensibly feminine gestures find greater physical resonance than a macho swagger (this is how his body wants to move); for her, critical consciousness is kindled by her outlaw sexual desire. In becoming aware of their nontraditional physical experiences, both realize that the norms regulating bodies, which present themselves as natural and universal, are in fact constructed and partial. We can accommodate the reflectiveness and critical consciousness that agency entails without falling back on a sovereigntist model of agency as rooted in a form of reason thought to stand above the passions and independent of the body. Agency exists as materialization, or at least it cannot be understood separately from corporeal enactments of subjectivity. And some of these material enactments have radical, emancipatory implications. Notice, too, that agency can involve novelty, or departures from the given, without necessarily implying intentional choice and control. Perhaps because we are so imbued with liberal assumptions about agency as sovereignty, we tend to interpret actions that break with social norms as highly voluntaristic. This is especially true when a nontraditional action is carried out in the name of affirming one’s subjective existence. Yet this interpretation is often wrong. The newness (or unconventionality) that characterizes

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the agency of openly gay men and lesbians today is animated by what Butler calls “the desire to persist in one’s own being” and by the felt clash between one’s own being and traditional sexual norms—­none of which is itself a matter of choice.141 One’s experience of outlaw sexual desire mixes with the primordial quest for the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds, and this potent brew generates action that emerges from prevailing relations of power but also breaks with them, an agency that is one’s own yet is not fully intentional or subject to individual control.142 These considerations show that we need not recur to the voluntarist model of agency as mastery to accommodate agency’s ability to be creative and socially transformative, to originate new modes of being in the world. Despite its potency, even radical and emancipatory agency is never a simple exercise of will, and hence not a form of mastery or sovereign control. So a non-­sovereign model of agency need not be mired in determinism or conservativism. It can give rise to action that “outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence” without recapitulating the myth of sovereignty.143 Another way to envision the transformative possibilities of material agency is suggested by Connolly, who insists that the “arts of the self ” can make large-­scale social and political change possible. These arts involve working in material ways to transform one’s own subjectivity with proliferating effects: You thus participate, repetitively and experimentally, in a series of interceded activities that impinge upon the self at several levels, allowing a mixture of images, gestures, rhythms, memories, arguments, and ethical concerns to become folded into your sensibility. You do so to recode modestly your experience of time and the ways that experience is now joined to modified ideas of meaning, ethics, and causality.144

Such strategies over time allow for new sensibilities to emerge on all kinds of political matters, Connolly says, ranging from immigration to abortion to questions of war and peace. If we take the materiality of human agency seriously, we will see that the cultivation of an ethical sensibility among citizens that can sustain justice and freedom for all can only “proceed through the cultural layering of affect into the materiality of thought,” as a “constellation of thought-­imbued intensities and feelings.”145 These accounts suggest that corporeal agency has the potential to generate new ways of being and new forms of collective life. It can be a powerful source of personal and political change.

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Still, the tendency evident in both Butler and Connolly to identify agency with individual acts of resistance has the effect (however unwitting) of championing an ethos of creative self-­assertion without much attention to the importance of social uptake in the constitution of agency. Given the fact that agency is socially distributed, local communities of bearers will be crucial to sustaining unconventional exertions of agency.146 We shall have more to say about the role of such communities in chapter 3. The key point for now is that rather than being an exclusively internal possession of the person, rooted solely in reason and will, individual agency is a function of the communicative exchanges, background meanings, personal intentions, social interpretations, self-­understandings, and bodily encounters through which one’s identity finds affirmation in one’s deeds. Agency so conceived involves a kind of alchemy, an unpredictable intermingling of materialities and subjectivities that shapes how we affect the world and the degree to which our effects affirm our own sense of our identity.147 Like the gold that ancient alchemists hoped to create through the transmutation of base metals, individual agency emerges from interactions that no one ultimately controls or ever fully understands. The language of alchemy, with its overtones of mystery and the quest for a mastery that proves elusive, conveys the unpredictability and sometimes surprising vitality of individual agency. Rooted in intersubjective, corporeal exchanges but not reducible to prevailing relations of power, individual agency emerges from dynamics too complex for anyone to fully comprehend, much less control. If the subjectivity that orients our agency is shaped by forces outside our control, and if our effects depend on social and material assemblages that we can never fully master, what room remains for personal responsibility? As we have seen, both the Arendtian approach and the new materialism pose difficulties for conventional conceptions of responsibility. And unless non-­sovereign agency can sustain personal responsibility, it will generate irresolvable dilemmas for individual freedom and democratic politics. These concerns are exacerbated by the presence of social inequality, which can disrupt both the identity and the efficacy aspects of agency. The non-­ sovereignty of human agency makes it vulnerable to social inequality in deep, potentially disabling ways. In the next chapter we explore the dynamics of agency in the presence of inequality, and investigate the meaning and sources of non-­sovereign responsibility.

Two

Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility

The idea that social inequality affects agency may seem familiar, even obvious. Social scientists have long documented the fact that those with fewer resources tend to be less participatory in politics and to lack the strong sense of personal efficacy found among the more privileged.1 The basic insight is that people typically do less—­at least in politics—­when they have less, because effective action requires resources. Yet the problem is not limited to the fact that those without resources lack the equipment needed to mobilize their existing agency in effective ways. The difficulty for the marginalized is that under conditions of systematic social inequality the very constitution of agency may itself be troubled, and hence they may have little agency to mobilize, however hard they try. Because agency is not simply an internal property of the person but a socially distributed phenomenon, inequality attacks agency at its core, on both its identity dimension and its efficacy dimension, unsettling its very foundations. These effects are not always determinative, of course. Human agency is resilient even if it is non-­sovereign, and it can arise with some degree of vitality in less than friendly circumstances, as we shall see in chapter 3. Still, inequality’s effects on agency run deep, and in ways that we often fail to appreciate. This chapter explores the contours of agency under conditions of systematic social inequality, diagnosing the ills that arise for agency on both the efficacy side and the identity side. The inequalities I have in view here are especially inequalities of race, gender, and sexual orientation. They are inequalities of social standing and status, of privilege and exclusion. They can involve relations of both domination and oppression. They interact with economic inequalities, and even in societies where equal formal rights prevail they often issue in de facto inequalities of political power and representation. Although social inequalities can be more difficult to characterize

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and measure than economic inequalities, and although they are often considered to be less important than political inequalities, they have powerful effects on the course and quality of the lives that people are able to lead, on agency, and therefore on freedom. Our emphasis is on inequalities that are both systematic and unjust in that they affect whole categories of persons in ways that contravene liberal democracy’s commitment to equal respect and reciprocity. I do not mean to suggest that agency is jeopardized only by factors that are systematic and unjust. Failures of social uptake, for example, will make trouble for agency whenever they occur. Sometimes their occurrence will be random rather than systematic and will have nothing whatever to do with justice. An extremely idiosyncratic individual may have difficulty affirming her identity in her deeds because others simply do not understand who she is or what she is doing, and they may respond in ways that thwart her action rather than help sustain it. Similarly, a person with severe mental illness may lack the capacity for a stable, reflexive sense of self to such an extent that he has little ability to see himself in his deeds. When agency is compromised in these ways it is unfortunate for the individual involved, but it is not a matter of injustice and not something that democratic states and citizens have a political obligation to remediate. There is good reason to believe that as human beings we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to help such individuals, but the general ethical obligations that bear on the exercise of agency and its failures are beyond the scope of this study. Here and throughout the book our focus is on social inequalities that are systematic and unjust because the failures of agency they generate have special relevance for the political obligations of democratic citizens and the political freedom that is our theme. The potentially disabling relationship between agency and inequality makes the concerns about personal responsibility raised at the end of chapter 1 even more pressing. Given the vulnerabilities that non-­sovereign agency faces under conditions of social inequality, how can a non-­sovereign view sustain a viable model of responsibility? The second part of the chapter explores this question. Non-­sovereign agency does disrupt traditional ways of thinking about responsibility. We shall spend some time investigating the tensions between them and establishing the need for an alternative approach. A more differentiated conception of responsibility as it bears on the obligations of democratic citizens is sketched toward the end of the chapter. Because this conception rests on a non-­sovereign notion of human agency, I call it “non-­sovereign responsibility.” It includes responsibilities that the privileged bear for unintended social dynamics that hamper the agency

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of the marginalized, and it covers the responsibilities of the marginalized themselves even under conditions of inequality. It distinguishes responsibility as culpability from responsibility in the forms of accountability and responsiveness, and shows how these various types of responsibility are necessary to make good on the demands and the promises of democratic citizenship.

Agency and Inequality In its insistence that individual agency is a socially distributed phenomenon, the non-­sovereign way of conceiving agency calls to mind the social construction of identity. Any viable theory of human agency must acknowledge that our identities are shaped in part by social context. Yet the idea of socially distributed agency is not the same thing as the social construction of identity. The social construction of identity is about how we came to be who we are. The idea of socially distributed agency is about how who we are (however we came to be that) is manifest in (or fails to be manifest in) what we do, in the effects that we have. It conceives agency itself as a relational experience rather than an inner faculty. It is also important to see that on the non-­sovereign view the social construction of identity need not preclude the possibility of agency, although it sometimes is thought to do so. If our identities are shot through with social influences that we did not choose, the worry goes, then our actions will never be wholly our own and our agency will be compromised. On the non-­sovereign view, by contrast, we can affect the world in ways that manifest our identities, and thus exercise agency, even when these identities are socially inflected. The social construction of identities is only a threat to agency if agency is equated with autonomy and located in the exercise of a self-­determined will, or in choice that is self-­generated all the way down. But individual agency is not located exclusively within the will and it is not reducible to the exercise of choice, as we have seen. In view of agency’s non-­ sovereign character, the facts about the social construction of identity do not themselves make agency impossible or even intrinsically problematic. Still, there are real questions about how social inequalities affect agency, given its non-­sovereignty, and how they may compromise responsibility and freedom. Power inequities affect agency on both the efficacy side and the identity side. On the efficacy side, they can distort the social interpretation of actions, thus undercutting the community of bearers and the social uptake needed to bring an action to fruition. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is a powerful illustration of how the racial inequality that pervaded mid-­century America and rendered invisible the distinctive identities of

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black individuals shaped the meaning of their actions in ways that impeded the effective exercise of their agency.2 Ellison’s nameless protagonist cannot affirm his individual identity through action in the world because racial stereotyping and stigma make it impossible for others (whites especially but also other blacks) to see his distinctive individuality and to find it in his deeds. As a result, the social interpretation of his actions is consistently at odds with his own understanding of what he is doing, and the effects he has on the world regularly fail to affirm who he is. The novel is one long nightmare of failed and frustrated agency. Or consider this passage from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son: “To be a negro, precisely, meant that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.”3 Where the meaning of one’s action is interpreted through the lens of racial stigma and stereotypes, others will understand what one is doing with reference to what they expect of one’s type instead of in terms that are receptive to one’s distinctive individuality and one’s own understanding of the action. Against this background of racial stigma, the link between one’s identity and one’s effects, which sustains the experience of agency, is disrupted. Baldwin consequently finds that he is “doing” things that he never intended and that he can neither understand nor identify with: “I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know what I had done.”4 His actions are read by others as hostile, or aggressive, or crazy, for instance, when for him they simply reflect his personal sense of dignity and his ambition. A woman who thinks she is conveying her opinion in a direct, straightforward manner to her colleagues at work but who is interpreted by them as antagonistic because her manner fails to comport with norms of feminine deference may experience a similar confusion. Such experiences are common among the marginalized and the subordinate. They involve subtle dynamics of social uptake and non-­uptake that powerfully affect individual agency in ways that are informal, often invisible, and very difficult to articulate.5 The failures of agency that Ellison and Baldwin describe are not simply reducible to a disjuncture between their intentions and their effects. We have seen already that one’s effects may come apart from one’s intentions without necessarily compromising one’s agency. For agency to be in play, one must have intended to do something, and one must have actually done something, but one need not have intended to do what one actually did, where “what one actually did” refers to the effects on the world that contribute to constituting the action. What must be the case in order for what one actually did to count as an instance of agency is that in its constitutive effects the action manifests the agent’s identity. A common way for action

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to manifest one’s identity is through one’s intentions but this is not the only way to manifest identity in action, and one’s identity may be manifest in one’s action even if one did not intend to do what one actually did. Although I never intended to be my sister’s Rock of Gibraltar, insofar as I can identify with the acts that have had this effect on her and affirm that they have indeed manifest my subjective existence concretely in the world, we can say that the relevant actions are instances of my agency. The failures of agency that we see in Ellison and Baldwin involve a different dynamic, and the difference has to do with the background of systematic social inequality that characterizes their experience, something not present in the relationship between my sister and me. The deeds that they are understood by others to have performed are not ones that manifest their own sense of who they are. Even on reflection, they cannot find themselves in their effects because these effects are defined by a cultural background of racial stigma that makes their actual individual identities invisible and distorts the meaning of their action. Under such conditions, agency is bound to be troubled. In the presence of social inequality, in other words, the agency of marginalized individuals frequently lacks the bearers needed to bring it to fruition. The story of Rosa Parks is somewhat unusual in this regard. It is a story of successful social uptake, in which the action of a racially marginalized woman came to fruition through the participation of a well-­organized community of bearers despite the broader social background of inequality. We shall have more to say in chapter 3 about the conditions that help sustain social uptake—­and agency—­in cases such as this one. Yet the Rosa Parks story coexists with countless instances of failed and frustrated agency in which inequality systematically stands in the way of social uptake. Consider the well-­documented practice among many American police departments of racial profiling in traffic stops. Imagine a successful and well-­paid lawyer, a youngish black man we’ll call Darryl, who drives a late-­ model Lexus that is his pride and joy. For Darryl the car embodies something significant about who he is; it is a mark of the intelligence, the work ethic, and the social grace that help to constitute his identity and make him successful in his professional life. As he sees it, driving this expensive car affirms his subjective existence concretely in the world. Yet when the local police officers see him coming down the road they interpret his action in a different light.6 To them the Lexus does not convey Darryl’s intelligence, hard work, and social grace; instead, it conveys potential criminality. The racial stigma and cultural bias that form the background for this interpretation give Darryl’s action a meaning that is very different from the meaning it

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has for Darryl. When the officers pull him over, they address him with suspicion and scorn; their questions imply that he has either stolen the car or bought it with money obtained from dealing drugs, and he is told to get off the streets and stay out of trouble. And when he responds angrily, what they see is not the natural reaction of a dignified man defending his integrity but a confirmation of their general belief that young black men are unruly and their suspicion that he in particular is trouble. Darryl’s action shows him (in their eyes) to be lawless, resistant to authority, a threat to social order. In one sense, there is a right and a wrong in this story. Darryl is not actually a criminal; the police officers made a mistake in stopping him. It is also true that whatever the Lexus meant to them, its meaning for Darryl is real. For him, the act of driving his Lexus manifests important features of his identity. Yet Darryl’s agency will remain unrealized so long as the actual effects he has on the world are at odds with this identity. True, there is one respect in which Darryl is unambiguously an agent here. He is piloting his car around town, and this deed is responsive to his intentions, which is one way to manifest one’s identity in one’s action. But what Darryl is “doing” in piloting this expensive car around town, given the broader background of racialized social expectations, includes raising a red flag of potential criminality. Against this broader background, his action has meaning and effects that go beyond anything contained in his own understanding of it. However much Darryl’s interpretation of his action matters, to restrict the scope of his action solely to the parts that he himself intended and controlled is to turn a blind eye to the realities of how he has actually affected the world. If what really happens to him when he drives his Lexus is that he is criminalized and humiliated by others, then although he may have managed to pilot his vehicle across town he has not after all succeeded in affirming his subjective existence concretely in the world. The problem is not exactly that some of his effects in this instance are unintended by him, since agency regularly comes apart from intentions. The real difficulty here is that some of these effects are not ones with which Darryl can identify. He cannot find himself in the action the officers see because that action does not reflect who he is. No one ever understands us or our actions in quite the same way that we do, of course. The human condition, as Arendt said, is fundamentally constituted by plurality.7 For all our commonalities, human beings are also different enough that the social uptake that supports individual agency will often be imperfect. Still, not all failures of social uptake are equivalent from a normative point of view. The disabling dynamic in Darryl’s case is clearly a function of systematic

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inequality sustained by cultural norms and social practices that, however unintentionally, undercut the agency of a whole class of persons in ways that are deeply inconsistent with liberal democracy’s promise of liberty and justice for all. One might think, too, of the ways in which contemporary norms of femininity, which continue to privilege qualities such as deference, humility, and gentleness, cut against women’s ability to exercise authority in public contexts. On the one hand, to be effective in positions of authority requires acting with confidence, courage, conviction. Against the background of a patriarchal culture’s norms of femininity, however, such action is often interpreted by others in ways that undermine a woman’s efficacy—­as nasty, or demanding, or domineering. On the other hand, conforming to traditional norms of femininity requires manifesting qualities such as deference and timidity that make it difficult for others to see her as authoritative, and therefore undercut her agency from the other direction. This double bind has been the focus of much feminist analysis over the years. What it shows is that inequality affects agency in constitutive ways. When social inequalities are systematic and unjust they deny individuals their rightful status as ends in themselves. Their disabling effects on agency consequently generate problems for liberal democracy, problems that democratic citizens and states are obligated to address.8 Clearly, there are women who find ways to exercise authority effectively despite existing inequalities, which suggests, like the Rosa Parks case, that inequality’s disabling effects on agency are not strictly prohibitive. The drive to affirm one’s subjective exis­ tence through action in the world is fundamental to the human condition, and it is resilient and adaptive. Then, too, power is never perfectly seamless. Agency will rise wherever it finds—­or can create—­an opening. The dynamics of inequality that hamper agency also are periodically interrupted by relationships of respect that can sustain moments and domains in which agency flowers. Yet the difficulties that inequality poses for agency are real and deep. These difficulties reflect the non-­sovereign character of human agency, the fact that much of the time we cannot accomplish our actions on our own. This insight is difficult to swallow. In Darryl’s case, for instance, we very much want to believe that his agency is not vulnerable to the interpretations and uptake of racist police officers. To acknowledge that it is vulnerable in this way seems to put far too much power into their hands, and to disempower Darryl and anyone else unlucky enough to be on the losing end of social inequality. This well-­intentioned concern underwrites the success of

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the myth of sovereignty as a way of understanding human agency. If Darryl’s agency is reduced to the exercise of his will, to his intentional choices, then it never has to be vulnerable in this way—­or so we hope. The irony is that far from actually protecting the integrity of individual agency, the sovereigntist solution more or less guarantees the undoing of agency, especially among those who are marginalized. When we close our eyes to the actual effects that we have on the world (including the unintentional ones) and to the social dynamics that help generate these effects, we make them invisible but we do not neutralize their force. The result is enduring injustice, the continuing disempowerment of marginalized individuals through dynamics that no one fully sees, or understands, or takes responsibility for changing. Diagnosing Darryl’s dilemma is not by itself sufficient to deliver him from it, but it is a necessary first step. The exercise of non-­sovereign responsibility is an important part of the remedy, as we shall see, and the potentially vitalizing sources of agency under conditions of inequality as elaborated in chapter 3 offer valuable resources as well. The real vulnerabilities of Darryl’s agency in the traffic stop case are not the whole story of agency under inequality. But unless we begin by acknowledging these vulnerabilities, the story will never have an empowering end. However difficult it may be, we must acknowledge reality if we care about freedom for all. If social inequality has an impact on the efficacy dimension of agency it also can make trouble on the identity side. I have said already that the fact that our identities are in part socially constituted need not in itself undermine the possibility of individual agency. Yet what about social contexts that are shot through with inequalities of power? How can the affirmation of a subjective existence that itself reflects relations of domination and oppression constitute agency? Can “wounded attachments,” to use Wendy Brown’s language, sustain agency?9 The answer is complicated. On the one hand, a background of social inequality may produce identities that are riven by internal conflict of the sort that W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness” or that Sandra Bartky characterizes as psychological “fragmentation.”10 Du Bois describes this dynamic with reference to a personal experience in which, as a young child, “the shadow” of racial stigma first “swept across” him: In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-­cards—­ten cents a package—­and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl . . . refused my card—­refused it peremptorily,

66 / Chapter Two with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.11

Double consciousness involves knowledge of what is real and authentic in one’s “heart and life and longing” together with an awareness of the identity seen by others through the “vast veil” of devaluation and marginality. The result is the pervasive “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”12 Living this double life, one feels “a painful wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.” This fragmentation of the self gives rise to “a painful self-­consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-­confidence.”13 The experience of double consciousness damages individual agency because it undermines one’s ability to fully manifest one’s subjective existence in the world. Instead of acting onto the world in a way that straightforwardly affirms one’s heart and life and longing, one second-­guesses, undercuts, and withholds oneself. The result is action that denies as much as affirms who one is. Action driven by double consciousness may well generate effects, but they are not effects that the actor can be at home in, effects that are authentically his own. This is rarely an all-­or-­nothing matter because agency admits of degrees. Insofar as one’s actions manifest something of one’s authentic identity there will be some agency in play. Consequently, even when it is disabling, double consciousness may not eradicate agency entirely. Yet the less one is able to identify with one’s deeds, the more fraught one’s agency will be. Not all inner conflicts are equally disabling for agency. Most personal identities are complex, after all, and contain diverse, sometimes contrary dispositions and desires. Our actions can reflect this internal diversity without necessarily undermining our agency. I may love my partner and value the chance to sit together in the backyard drinking coffee on a summer morning, but I may also be deeply invested in finishing the book I am writing, which is under deadline. If as a result I sit with my partner drinking coffee while regularly checking my watch and wearing a pained expression on my face, my action will reflect my inner conflict. Yet insofar as I can identify with both parts of my conflicted self as authentic to who I am, the action will nevertheless be my own; it will reflect me and will count as an instance of my agency. With double consciousness, by contrast, part of one’s identity results from a social context of stigma and bias that denies or debases

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core aspects of who one is. This part of one’s identity is not something that one can be at home in, however familiar it may become. Action that manifests this part may affect the world but it will confront the individual himself as hostile or alien, and his agency will be compromised, albeit not necessarily eradicated entirely. Along these lines, Simone de Beauvoir wrote powerfully more than fifty years ago about the ways that social norms undercut the agency of girls. Commenting on the coming of female puberty, she pointed out that for the young woman there is a contradiction between her status as a real human being and her vocation as a female. And just here is to be found the reason why adolescence is for a woman so difficult and decisive a moment. Up to this time she has been an autonomous individual: now she must renounce her sovereignty. Not only is she torn, like her brothers, though more painfully, between the past and the future, but in addition a conflict breaks out between her original claim to be subject, active, free, and, on the other hand, her erotic urges and the social pressure to accept herself as passive object.14

This passage understates somewhat the extent to which social norms deliver conflicting messages about female agency from the start, and it overstates the degree to which the experience of agency coincides with sovereignty. But Beauvoir’s remarks point to the double consciousness that arises from experiencing oneself simultaneously as “subject, active, free” and as the character portrayed on the stage of our public consciousness in cultural images of women as passive, inept, and vulnerable to violence. Things have changed since Beauvoir’s day, and the images of women as non-­agents that permeate our culture are now increasingly sharing the stage with real women who are more fully agentic, whether as athletes or Presidential candidates or Supreme Court justices. Even so, the cultural messages that generate double consciousness in women persist and continue to be internalized in disabling ways. From the earliest of ages women are still barraged with cultural messages that deny or debilitate our agency. When was the last time you saw a movie in which the main event was a man or a boy who was stalked, raped, and hacked to pieces? Yet violence against women remains a constant theme of American movies, novels, and television, despite nearly two generations of feminist criticism. And when women are portrayed as the victims of violence in these venues, they almost never defend themselves effectively. Instead, they typically panic and flail about, making things worse for themselves until they either die or are saved by a strong, clear-­thinking, eminently agentic male.

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I remember going to a children’s play with some friends a few years ago in Palo Alto to watch their son perform. My friends were on the liberal end of the political spectrum, and the play was sponsored by the private school their son attended, which was populated by the children of other well-­resourced, highly educated Lefties like them. If ever one would expect a population to be aware of the subtle dynamics of gender bias, it would be that one. But the action of the play took a familiar form: the girls stood on stage and looked cute and vulnerable while the boys ran around doing things. Literally, the girl characters were stationary on the stage in virtually every scene, either standing or sitting, whereas the boy characters continually charged across it with purpose. They had far more lines than the girls, and their speeches drove the development of the story, which centered on saving the girls from danger. However unintentionally, cultural practices such as these foster double conscious in girls and young women. They make us doubt ourselves and our capacities; they foster excessive concern (or the wrong kinds of concern) for the opinions of others; they interrupt the enactment of our distinctive individualities in our effects. As Beauvoir and Du Bois both knew, the experience of double consciousness and the fragmentation of the self that it entails have a chilling effect on agency. Consider recent research on racial and gender disparities in standardized test results. When African American students are asked to identify their race before starting a test, they score significantly lower than they do when not asked to identify their race.15 Likewise, women subjects score lower in quantitative areas when asked to identify their gender prior to testing. Social psychologists hypothesize that the awareness of race-­and gender-­based stereotypes operates as a “threat” in such situations in the sense that test subjects become hyperaware of themselves, project back onto themselves society’s low expectations of them, lose confidence, and worry that they will reinforce stereotypes about their group by doing poorly. The result, not surprisingly, is that they do poorly, or more poorly than is otherwise the case. This heightened state of self-­consciousness and self-­doubt undermine performance; it prevents individuals from manifesting all the capabilities that help make them who they are, which are on fuller display when they are not asked to identify their race or gender—­in this case, their intelligence, skills, and knowledge. This dynamic thus stands in the way of their ability to affirm their full subjectivity in their actions. It is very much in keeping with what Du Bois called double consciousness and what Beauvoir diagnosed as the fractured sense of agency among women.16 The empirical studies of standardized test performance give us a small window into a dynamic that is otherwise difficult to capture but is pervasive

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and potent in its effects on individual lives. With race and gender, after all, every face-­to-­face interaction is equivalent to the tests that asked subjects to identify their race or gender in advance. Our social encounters identify us to one another and reflect this identification back to us in ways that always transmit prevailing social interpretations and valuations. The impaired performance in the standardized test situation translates in broader social contexts of racial and gender-­based inequality to a more generalized dis­ abling of agency. Du Bois did acknowledge that double consciousness is not always or entirely negative. He thought it also provided a distinctive view into the deep moral inconsistencies that pervaded American society, and even that it could be marshaled to redeem the polity by holding Americans accountable to their professed ideals of freedom and justice for all.17 As one commentator puts it, “what was initially felt to be a curse—­the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile—­gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions of the modern world become more likely.”18 As we shall see in chapter 3, the cognitive dissonance generated by double consciousness sometimes produces social critique and spirited resistance. In this sense, it can inspire the exercise of agency rather than simply disable it. Butler registers a similar ambivalence. One the one hand, she notes that “I may . . . feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable.”19 On the other hand, while this dilemma can be deeply disabling it can also be the very “juncture from which critique emerges,” spurring the imagination and opening up “the possibility of different modes of living.”20 There has always been some ambiguity about double consciousness, then, for its effects can be both “tormented and fruitful.”21 Yet even where individuals find ways to make good on their double consciousness, it puts pressure on agency that the privileged rarely face. The effects of social inequality on identity sometimes go beyond double consciousness as well. In extreme cases, oppression and domination can even impede the development of a distinctive sense of self altogether. Consider Toni Morrison’s poignant description of the slave woman, Sethe, in Morrison’s novel Beloved: the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.22

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Here the experience of affirming one’s subjective existence through action will be elusive because the individual’s subjective existence is so troubled and uncertain. If who she is constitutes a painful puzzle for her, it will be difficult for her to identify with any particular action as being her own, as a manifestation of who she distinctly is. To the extent that social inequality produces double consciousness or stunts the very formation of a self, it will tend to undermine individual agency. The effects of social inequality on individual identities admit of variation, of course. One does sometimes find in contexts of inequality identities that are well defined and relatively free of internal conflicts of the sort that Du Bois, Beauvoir, and Morrison depict. Some women, for instance, tell us that they are genuinely at home in highly traditionalist, patriarchal female identities. They experience none of the inner conflict associated with double consciousness, and they have a clear and coherent sense of who they are. Although their identities position them in subordinate roles relative to their husbands and define their domain of action narrowly, none of this troubles them. Indeed, they may find their lives deeply fulfilling. Even on reflection, they can affirm that the identities manifest in their actions are authentic for them. Women who occupy roles with a subordinate status but who experience no sense of fragmentation or impoverishment because of it, who are not plagued by double consciousness but feel at home in their identities, can indeed have the experience of affirming their subjective existence through concrete action in the world. They can be agents. To the extent that the identities they feel at home in rest on a worldview that generally devalues women or systematically limits their life chances relative to those of men, we have justice-­based reasons to criticize this worldview, and we should recognize that their freedom is incomplete in ways that will become clear in chapters 4 and 5. But the moral validity of the beliefs and values that underpin someone’s identity should not be confused with the viability of her agency. We can be agents even when our personal identities are infused with values that are morally suspect. Moreover, it is perfectly permissible for us to question or challenge one another’s identities. We should speak up when we see what we believe is domination or oppression reflected in the identities of others, or in our own. But it would be a mistake to think that the moral correctness of one’s identity is a precondition for one’s agency. I do not mean to deny that false consciousness—­or adaptive preferences, or wounded attachments—­can be real hindrances to individual agency. False consciousness is a problem for agency when one’s sense of who one

Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility  /  71

is or society’s sense of who one ought to be conflict with features of one’s authentic subjectivity. False consciousness is false because it fails to capture some truth(s) about who one actually is or cannot help but be. The point of consciousness-­raising is to put one in touch with the dispositions and desires, the beliefs and abilities that constitute one’s subjective existence but that have been occluded or devalued by prevailing social norms and expectations. Just as false consciousness only makes sense on the assumption that there is something true in us, an authentic core that cannot be reduced to what society tells us about ourselves, so the notion of “wounded” attachments presupposes some standard of what is healthy or whole for us. The meaning of what is authentic or healthy or whole for any particular individual need not be fixed or universal, of course. My authentic identity may be quite different from yours, and some features of it may change over time. Nor must authenticity imply a self that is altogether impervious to social influence. It does entail that there are some features of our identities that are core to defining who we are and that are not infinitely malleable and not simply reducible to what society says we are supposed to be. Some things that are authentic in this sense may be shared with others but many will be distinctive to us as individuals. Only if each person has an authentic core can we account for the common experience among the marginalized of being trapped in social norms that disfigure or stunt or violate them. Authenticity is necessary to make sense of this experience descriptively and also to say normatively why it is objectionable.23 Thus while agency is non-­sovereign in the sense that it is socially distributed, the individual identities that play a role in constituting agency are not themselves socially constructed all the way down. Our identities are partly socially constructed and partly a function of psychological, genetic, and idiosyncratic factors that cannot be reduced to or determined by social influences. These factors vary quite a lot across individuals, so it would be wrong to equate them with some singular or universal ideal of the human essence. They interact with the socially constructed parts of us, and their role and significance within our identities can change over time. For all these reasons, the notion of authentic identity invoked here avoids the dangers associated with essentialism. Essentialized identities are understood to be fixed once and for all; they are fully immune to both social influence and individual choice. They are typically rooted in ascriptive, group-­based aspects of who one is, such as race, religion, gender, or ethnicity. Often such identities are thought to be natural or biologically determined. They are also frequently conceived as highly unified, allowing for no internal plurality within the self. Finally, essentialized identities are

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generally assumed to have an objective status that makes their subjective affirmation irrelevant. If your essential identity as female includes the role of mothering, for instance, then mothering is right for you, however you may feel about it as an individual. We have good reasons to resist all these aspects of essentialism. They confound the true complexity of individual identities as distinctively individuated, as subject to change over time, as internally plural and intersectional, and as reflecting both social influence and individual choice or creativity. The putative objectivity of essentialized identities also undercuts our obligation to respect the individual’s own lived experience of who she is and her deepest sense of who she ought to be. In contrast to essentialism, the concept of authentic identity as it figures in non-­sovereign agency is highly individuated. It is also a plural and complex whole, and its parts may not always fit together easily. It can change over time, although it rarely changes all at once. To distinguish the authentic core in oneself from what is superficial or contingent is not always easy. Sometimes core aspects of our identities are obvious to us, as when artistic or musical ability is manifest at an early age and remains a basic organizing principle of one’s personality over a lifetime, but this is not always that case. Often we only come to know what is authentic in us over time, as a result of experience. Occasionally it becomes visible to us through personal conflict, through the experience of being asked to do or to be something with which we simply cannot identify. Many gay people come to know they are gay when they reach puberty and realize that their sexual desires are in conflict with social expectations. Try as they might, they cannot will themselves into the sexual orientations that seem to come so effortlessly to their peers or reconcile themselves to that way of life. For many gay people, in fact, a conventional heterosexual life would do violence to something that is part of the authentic core of who they are, something they could not give up without irreparable loss. In a similar way, a recent documentary on the American Amish tells the story of a woman raised in a traditional Amish community who found on coming of age that she was suffocated by the Amish way of life. She left to strike out on her own, found a job and an apartment, fell in love with a non-­ Amish man. When her family reached out to call her back, however, the pull of those old ties was strong and she went home. She tried her best to make a go of it, staying in the community for nearly three more years. Eventually she left again, this time permanently. Looking back decades later, she says that however hard she tried she never could make herself “fit” the Amish life. As powerful as its influence on her had been, something fundamental

Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility  /  73

to who she is simply could not be at home there. Core parts of herself were stifled; core parts of herself resisted. She describes her final leaving as a liberation and her new life as free because of how it makes room for who she authentically is.24 The range of dispositions, desires, beliefs, and abilities that can count as authentic is very wide—­perhaps endless—­and the conflicts that can reveal us to ourselves are likewise diverse. We come to know the contours of our authentic individualities through experience, reflection, and feeling. For all of us there is likely to be some uncertainty in this regard. Partly this uncertainty results from the fact that self-­knowledge is never perfect or complete. Partly, too, it reflects the always mixed sources of who we are and the human adaptability that allows for personal growth and change. I heard a radio interview recently with a famous singer now in her early sixties and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The illness has made it impossible for her to sing on key, and she spoke movingly about what this loss has meant to her. Singing has always been a core constitutive aspect of who she is, and to lose the ability to sing has meant losing a part of herself. A combination of native talent and social influence (she grew up in a musical family), her singing was far from self-­generated although she worked hard over a lifetime to cultivate her craft, and she exercised plenty of choice and creativity in doing so. Just how deep it ran in her identity became clear to her as she began to lose it. Even so, part of what made her story remarkable was her resilience in finding new ways to exercise and express the aspects of herself that singing had always given life to. Her story, which depicts just one of innumerable forms that authenticity can take, shows that what is authentic in us admits of plurality, may have multiple sources, and although fundamental to who we are is also adaptable. In all these ways, the authentic individual identities that figure in non-­sovereign agency defy the dangers of essentialism. It is perhaps worth reiterating why personal identity matters so much to agency, especially since much of the recent work on non-­sovereign agency insists otherwise. Butler’s emphasis on agency as performativity, for instance, contests the idea that identity precedes action or performance in any meaningful way.25 For her, agency does not consist in the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds because one’s identity only arises as a result of the deeds that one performs. Likewise, on Markell’s Arendtian account, identity is a retrospective phenomenon, something that emerges as a result of the narrative constructions of those who bear one’s action, or bring it to fruition.26 Antecedent identity has no authoritative role in constituting agency for him.27

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Coole’s effort to decouple agency and individuality points in a similar direction. On her account, the agentic subject is not to be conceived as an individuality. Instead it is part of a more generalized material field in which individual constellations of agentic capacities are unstable, forming and reforming over time in ways that are marked by contingency and impermanence. The individual subject disappears into the shifting material fields through which agency emerges. Coole means to detach “agentic properties from any specific ontological assumptions as to whom or what exercises them.”28 She situates agency not uniquely in subjects with particular selves but in “diverse, partial, often haphazard manifestations” of “agentic processes.”29 These processes range across a spectrum that includes “pre-­cognitive bodily processes,” “singularities,” and “transpersonal, intersubjective processes.”30 The agency of singularities does entail a sense of “selfhood” that implies a “meaningful but open whole[],”but no special link exists between such subjectivity and agency per se.31 Coole emphasizes that no point on the agency spectrum—­least of all the point of singularities—­ has a privileged status. Instead, the novelty of her view consists precisely in disrupting the connection between agency and the “singular” selfhood of individuals.32 Like Samantha Frost, discussed earlier, she conceives “the self not as a unified entity bound in and by the skin but rather as a discrete but nonetheless porous body among other bodies.”33 Butler, Markell, and Coole, different as they are in many respects, all associate the notion of identity or subjective existence with the ideal of sovereignty.34 While they are right to reject the ideal of sovereignty, it is wrong to think that the only way to understand identity or subjective existence is in terms of a sovereign self. Although we are capable of working on ourselves so as to consciously cultivate particular capacities or correct certain deficits, our characters are not perfectly within our control or fully subject to our choices. Agency does require a reflexive sense of self, and this reflexivity can help us sort out what is authentic in us from what is wounded. But no one is wholly self-­generated, and much of what is most authentic in us was given to us rather than created by us. So no self is sovereign. Yet antecedent to any particular exercise of agency, as we saw in chapter 1, there must be a self that has an identity that can either be affirmed in the action or fail to be af­ firmed in it. If you do not know who you are, after all, you cannot say what you have done, or indeed if you have ever done anything at all. And if others cannot recognize a distinctive you, they cannot be the bearers of action that is yours. Thus we cannot make sense of agency without an antecedent self that, while never fixed, endures more or less over time and gives a particular

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shape and trajectory to agency. And we cannot make sense of the trouble that social inequality often generates for agency—­and the wrong that this entails—­without reference to a notion of authenticity. The authentic self is not a sovereign self, but it is a necessary condition of non-­sovereign agency. Social inequality can disrupt both the identity and the efficacy dimensions of agency, then. It disrupts identity when it generates double consciousness or fragmentations of self that make it impossible for the individual to affirm in what she does the self she authentically is. Inequality disrupts efficacy when it forecloses the community of bearers needed to bring one’s action to fruition. We are never fully transparent to one another or to ourselves, even under the best conditions. The misunderstandings that result from our lack of perfect transparency mean that agency will almost always be realized only imperfectly. The exercise of human agency is subject to contingencies that go beyond the effects of social inequality, and many of the contingencies that confound agency will be unobjectionable from the standpoint of justice, however frustrating they may be for the individual. The failures of agency that matter for democratic politics and that we are obligated as citizens to remediate result from systematic, unfair inequalities. Such inequalities compromise agency in a deep and constitutive way. Once we understand the non-­sovereignty of human agency—­its socially distributed character—­we can see that social inequality is not simply an external barrier to the effective exercise of agency but cuts to its very core.

Agency and Responsibility It may be obvious by now that the non-­sovereign view of agency poses challenges to conventional conceptions of responsibility. Criteria for establishing responsibility in philosophy and political theory today typically center on a view of human agency that emphasizes intentional choice and control of one’s action. If human agency regularly fails to instantiate these conditions, as the non-­sovereign approach suggests, then personal responsibility will be perennially problematic. The disruptions of agency generated by social inequality will exacerbate this difficulty. It may even seem that the grounds of responsibility dissolve entirely if agency is non-­sovereign. Yet if standard models of responsibility are not true to who we are as agents, then the guidance they offer is bound to be incomplete—­or worse. Indeed, they may tend to perpetuate injustice and undermine freedom unfairly by minimizing the responsibilities of the privileged and exaggerating the responsibilities of the marginalized. A non-­sovereign account of responsibility can

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help. Before we take up the task of elaborating the meaning and basis of non-­sovereign responsibility, however, we should be clear about the limits of responsibility as it is conventionally conceived. Responsibility and Control One of the richest recent accounts of responsibility reflecting the dominant, control-­centered view is the one contained in Philip Pettit’s theory of freedom. Part of what makes Pettit’s account of responsibility especially valuable is that even as it focuses on individual control, it acknowledges the ways in which individual action is always situated within a social and political context. It also brings out with special clarity the reasons people have for associating responsibility with a sovereign conception of agency. In view of these considerations, Pettit’s theory provides a fruitful starting point for exploring the relationship between agency and responsibility. It is among the best of the sovereigntist views, and its deficits help to clarify why an alternative, non-­sovereign model of responsibility is needed. Pettit’s discussion of responsibility is developed as part of his larger theory of “freedom in the agent.”35 Freedom in the agent is distinguished from freedom as a political ideal because the former deals with psychological or intrapersonal aspects of the self that Pettit thinks are not properly the subject of political coercion, while a political ideal of freedom focuses exclusively on interpersonal factors that can be effectively and legitimately regulated by the state. The two aspects of freedom are related, and Pettit’s larger ambition is to generate “a single theory” that covers both the intra­ personal and the interpersonal domains so as to produce “a unified theory of freedom in general” (2–­3). Chapter 4 takes up Pettit’s political ideal of freedom as non-­domination; here we focus more narrowly on the meaning of freedom in the agent as he conceives it, and the picture of responsibility that it yields. Freedom in the agent consists in being “fit to be held responsible for something” (8). To be fit to be held responsible, in turn, requires above all that the agent be able “to see the action as his or her own. The agent cannot be detached from the action, or from the process leading to the action, in the way they may be detached from a reflex or a pathology or even an obsession or compulsion. The agent must not be a mere bystander or onlooker of what happens; they must identify with what is done by their hands” (10). So far, this aspect of Pettit’s account seems to be consistent with the non-­ sovereign approach to agency, which also requires that the agent identify with the action, that she be able to find herself in her deeds. Yet Pettit’s

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understanding of what it takes to identify with one’s deeds departs signifi­ cantly from the non-­sovereign view. For him, what it means for the agent to identify with her deeds is that she is “in control of the action,” meaning that she is the primary controlling factor in what happens (11). There are three ways to be in control of one’s action, on Pettit’s account. One can exercise “rational control” over one’s action to the extent that one acts “properly as [an] intentional subject[].” An agent who has rational control will “do whatever it is rational to do in light of the beliefs and desires that are present” (35). Here rationality takes the form of instrumental reason. To act rationally is to act in a way that effectively satisfies one’s beliefs and desires. It means “performing as a rational, intentional subject” (36). To the extent that one’s action reflects one’s intentions, one can be said to be in rational control of the action. On this view, what it means to see oneself in one’s deeds is to find one’s will in one’s effects. Pettit insists that control so conceived is incomplete as a basis for agency and responsibility, however. The reason is twofold. First, if the agent herself is not in control of the desires that constitute the intentions that determine her action, then she is not really in control of the action. Second, if the agent is not in control of the external factors that set the range of options within which she performs as a rational, intentional subject, then she is not in control of the action either. If a thief demands my wallet at gunpoint, for example, it is rational for me to comply. Doing so manifests my intention to keep living, and in this sense it reflects rational control over my action. Yet my agency here is clearly compromised and my responsibility will be limited. For Pettit, to be an agent “requires that the crucial elements of control, whatever they are thought to be, are not lost to any other agent or collection of agents” (44). So while rational control is a necessary part of the control that constitutes agency and sustains responsibility, it is not sufficiently comprehensive to establish the conditions of responsibility on its own (47). What Pettit calls “volitional control” involves a second-­order capacity to will the desires that form one’s first-­order intentions. To be in control of one’s action, he thinks, one must not only act in a way that rationally intends to satisfy one’s desires; one must also intend these desires, or intend that these desires be the controlling factors in one’s action. Volitional control addresses the first problem identified in respect to rational control, which is that we may be moved to act on the basis of beliefs and desires that we did not ourselves choose. Rational control is perfectly compatible, in other words, with the social construction of the self. This is a problem on Pettit’s view because a self that is constituted by factors not themselves subject to its own will cannot be a free self. Control must go all the way down

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in order to sustain responsibility. One cannot have control over one’s action if one does not have control over oneself. Yet it turns out that to have control in this sense requires more than just having the capacity for second-­order desires, for who is to say that one’s second-­order desires are any more intentional than the first-­order ones? Higher-­order volitions, too, “may represent brute givens about which you, as an agent, can do nothing. They may be the unmoved movers of the system” (59). To establish agency and the grounds of responsibility, the only “unmoved mover” must be the agent herself. What Pettit calls the “recursive character of responsibility” implies that to count as responsible for (i.e., in control of ) an action, one must be responsible for (i.e., in control of ) “all the controlling influences in virtue of which an action is put down to an agent in the first place”—­one must be in control of “every link in the chain” (11). The recursive character of responsibility seems to demand the impossible, as Pettit acknowledges, for how could anyone ever control all that? The notion of “discursive control” is intended to resolve this dilemma, to show how the control that constitutes agency can be complete (11). To act with discursive control means that all the intra-­and interpersonal relations in the context of which one’s action emerges answer to reason. Discursive control thus has both psychological and social aspects, involving an internal, ratiocinative capacity for reason-­giving that is responsive to common reasons and shared standards of truth and falsity, and an external, relational status of being subject to the influence of others only through such practices of reason-­giving (68, 70). To have discursive control over one’s action, then, means that one acts from common reasons or reasons that all could endorse, and these reasons determine the action. To the extent that one acts from common reasons, Pettit thinks, one will be insulated from the agency-­ deadening influence of both one’s own unreflective desires and the coercive power of other persons. Action under discursive control, in other words, tracks “the demands of reason, undisturbed by psychological or social pressures” (101). Action can fulfill this requirement in either an “active” or a merely “virtual” way. With virtual discursive control, “discursive considerations” control the action indirectly, through the force of “habit, in a more or less unthinking way” (91–­92). Assuming that the habits that guide us could themselves be endorsed on reflection and in light of common reasons, their influence on our actions is compatible with our exercising discursive control. Hence control in this virtual form does not require constant reflectivity in which every action is the direct product of conscious, shared reason-­giving. It does demand, however, that every action be controlled by intentions or a will

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that could on reflection answer to reason in this sense, or pass the test of conscious, shared reason-­giving. Discursive control constitutes freedom of action and establishes the grounds of responsibility. One will be responsible for one’s action to the extent that it is discursively controlled, whether actively or virtually (103). The ideal of discursive control expresses familiar intuitions about the relationship between reason, will, and responsibility. Yet it gives rise to some difficulties. First, the key to agency, Pettit has told us, is the experience of action that is one’s own. It must be the case, he says, “that the agent is able, indeed compelled, to see the action as his or her own . . . they must identify with what is done by their hands” (10). This experience of ownership establishes the action as free and the agent as responsible. At the same time, discursive control means that the grounds of one’s action must be common reason. Yet why should we think that answering to common reason is necessary to an action being one’s own? Pettit’s view implicitly presupposes that the core of our distinctive identities is a will that is constituted by common reason. This assumption is dubious. Much of what is most authentically our own vis-­à-­vis our personal identities is unique to us as individuals, and at least some of this may not be easily subsumed under the rubric of common reason. This is not to deny the existence of common reason or its capacity to guide action. It is only to say that agency—­as action that is one’s own—­is perfectly possible in the absence of common reason’s control. The notion that one is only truly an agent when one’s action is immune to “psychological pressures” is similarly suspect. Experientially speaking, psychological pressures are among the very things that make us who we are. Our characters are constituted by dispositions, desires, beliefs, and abilities that exert pressure or influence on us in particular, patterned ways. Some of these pressures are more reflective and some are more authentic than others, but the degree to which they are consciously willed by us is not necessarily a reliable indicator of how central they are to our personalities, to making us who we are. Why did Jane pursue a PhD in philosophy while Harriet became a professional dancer? Both paths involve moments of decision and hence a reflective will, but they inevitably manifest the influence of many psychological factors—­Jane’s love of learning, her talent for conceptual analysis; Harriet’s natural grace, her need for physical challenge—­many of which are neither willed nor particularly reasoned. Many of them could not rightly be said to answer to common reasons. Yet there is no Jane without the love of learning, no Harriet without natural grace. Who each one is is not reducible to what each one wills, much less reducible to what each one wills in light of common reasons. It is not obvious that there is more

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agency in acting from common reasons than in acting from the particular psychological factors that form the core of one’s identity. There is thus a tension between Pettit’s insistence on agency as identification with one’s action and agency as discursive control. Or at least there is a tension here if one insists—­as one should—­that personal identity is not reducible to a common rational will. Pettit nowhere explicitly defends the view that personal identity is best conceived in terms of a common rational will, but this idea is implicit in the notion of agency as discursive control and in the concept of responsibility that it generates. Pettit’s tendency to connect agency and responsibility to the control of a will that has been purged of any influence that does not answer to common reason gives rise to another difficulty as well. In the quest for an ever more purified will as the controlling factor in agency, action itself begins to recede from view. This paradox becomes evident in Pettit’s discussion of responsibility and virtual discursive control. We have seen already that discursive control is compatible with habitual action and need not entail conscious intentionality with respect to the discursive grounds of any particular act. As Pettit puts it, “If an agent does something that is under the control of discursive considerations, then, whether that control is exercised in active or virtual mode, the action is guided by the agent’s values” (93). Under such conditions, the action is free and the agent, given her virtual discursive control over the action, is fit to be held responsible for it. The category of virtual control also extends beyond the agent’s own habitual action. It covers cases in which one’s action is controlled by a friendly coercer, meaning a coercer who is “guided by the coercee’s avowable interests” in the way (for instance) that Ulysses’s sailors were guided by his expressed desire in being bound to the mast of his ship so as to resist the song of the Sirens (75). Friendly coercion is a form of virtual discursive control on the part of the coercee to the extent that its outcome tracks “the coercee’s avowable interests and those interests are the discursive considerations that are intuitively relevant to what should happen” (76). In view of her virtual discursive control, the coercee will count as the agent who is “ultimately in charge,” and responsibility for the outcome “must rest squarely” with her (76–­77).36 Leaving aside the question of how to specify what counts as “intuitively relevant to what should happen,” what is puzzling here is the degree to which agency comes apart from action. One can be responsible, on this account, for deeds that one not only did not effect but never even autho­ rized. If the real source of agency lies in the controlling influence of common reason or discursive considerations, as Pettit’s account implies, and if a free agent is one whose outcomes manifest not distinctive features of her

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particular identity but common reasons that every free agent shares, then what does it really matter if she herself has a hand in bringing about the outcomes? Insofar as an outcome is controlled by reason, and insofar as one’s will is determined by common reason and one’s identity is equated with common reason, then one’s will and one’s identity are in effect controlling the outcome. Agency becomes the mere possession of a discursively rational will; it need involve no action, no experience of personally affecting the world in a way that one can recognize as uniquely one’s own. In the effort to ground agency in a perfectly pure (i.e., discursively reasoned) will, action drops out of the experience of agency, and one is left with the activity of willing itself, specifically willing according to common reasons. Yet this “activity” is compatible with doing nothing at all, as Pettit’s own account shows.37 Pettit is right to recognize the importance of the interpersonal in agency, to acknowledge that the exercise of individual agency depends on the presence of the right kinds of relationships among persons. Yet the function of the relevant relationships, on his view, is limited to establishing a non-­ coercive background against which the control of the individual agent may emerge unhindered. His account treats agency as socially embedded but misses the ways in which it is socially distributed. Rather than seeing agency as socially distributed, Pettit locates it in the subject, specifically in the subject’s capacity to act intentionally from discursive considerations (i.e., in the reasoned will). To be sure, he acknowledges that in order for this capacity to be effective in practice, other persons must recognize the discursive status of the subject, must treat her as a member of the discursive community who is bound by (and entitled to) the practices of reason-­giving. Still, all this means is that any interference in her choices must be justified with reference to common reasons. Provided that she acts from common reasons and in the absence of unjustified interference from others, the individual has full control over her action, and this personal control establishes her agency and makes her responsible. It would be nice if all we needed from others to sustain individual agency were the relations of discursive control (and, at the political level, non-­ domination) that prevent them from interfering arbitrarily in our actions. As we have seen, however, social uptake is also frequently necessary. Social uptake matters to agency if efficacy matters because our effects often depend on how others interpret and respond to what we are doing. Individual agency thus needs more than a social context of discursive relations. It needs a community of bearers who can take up the agent’s deeds and help bring them to fruition in ways that are consonant with her own understanding of

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her action and identity. The relational or intersubjective conditions of individual agency run deeper in this respect than Pettit acknowledges. The identification of agency with control also is a mistake. Even when people enjoy discursive relations with others and a political context of non-­ domination, the individual regularly will be dependent on others to achieve her agency. And in achieving her agency, what she achieves is not control so much as the affirmation of her identity in her acts. Sometimes this affir­ mation will involve seeing her intentions brought to fruition, but this will not always be the case because the self is not reducible to the will. So the control that Pettit sees as the basis of responsibility is elusive. Moreover, the effort to purify the will that grounds responsibility by making it answer to common reason leads us away from ourselves and disconnects agency from action. These difficulties, which Pettit’s account of responsibility makes visible, are not restricted to his theory. They figure in other prominent models of responsibility, and they will plague any effort to treat responsibility in sovereigntist terms, as a function of individual control.38 Given these dif­ ficulties, we have reason to look beyond the standard, control-­based approach to something new. Non-­sovereign Responsibilities The non-­sovereign view of human agency calls for a more capacious, internally differentiated account of responsibility than we normally see, one that can acknowledge agency’s complex, socially distributed character. It is especially fruitful for thinking about individual responsibility in contexts of social inequality, where systematic structures of domination and oppression set the terms for human action. As Iris Young points out, in debates about justice—­especially those involving race and urban politics—­there has been a tendency to think in terms of either the power of social structures or the force of personal responsibility.39 This dichotomy aligns somewhat with partisan perspectives that justify different degrees of social welfare spending, different approaches to incarceration, different levels of commitment to public education, and the like. Yet neither view gets it right. The power of impersonal structures to influence human action does not eradicate the fact of individual responsibility, but neither does the fact of responsibility justify the sovereigntist assumptions about agency that underlie conventional approaches. To be sure, we are right to connect responsibility to agency. Individuals are properly held responsible only for actions that are their own. Yet as we have seen, it is often the case that one’s actions are not exclusively one’s own. As a socially distributed phenomenon, individual

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agency frequently involves more than just the agent. And although the mark of agency is the manifestation of the individual’s identity in her deeds, identity is not reducible to the will, and consequently agency sometimes exceeds or counteracts the individual’s intentions. Still, an agent has a special relationship to action that is hers, and it is in view of this special relationship that we properly connect agency to responsibility. The most familiar way for one’s identity to be manifest in one’s deeds (although by no means the only way) is for one’s effects to affirm one’s consciously willed intentions. In this kind of case, the responsibility involved is commonly characterized in terms of liability. The language of liability calls to mind the courtroom and the juridical context of punishment, where it has a special home. But liability as a model of responsibility is applicable more broadly, wherever praise and blame come into play. The most prevalent views of moral responsibility in philosophy and political theory take legal liability as their point of departure and apply the concept to a wide range of actions.40 And while the concept gets modified in different ways, the modifications almost always preserve two core features of legal liability. The first is that the actions for which one may be held responsible must have been intentional; the second is that one may be held responsible only for actions and outcomes subject to one’s control. The “control condition,” as the second criterion is sometimes called, is widely thought to be “the very essence of moral responsibility” in liberal societies.41 Pettit’s view of responsibility, which makes agentic control the centerpiece, clearly fits this model. The liability view is troubled by the lived complexities of human agency as non-­sovereign and social life as frequently saturated with inequality, as has often been acknowledged. The philosophical work on moral luck, for instance, illuminates the ways that people can both cause harm without intending it and intend harm without causing it, largely because their actions elude their control. This “disjunction between intention and outcome complicates attributions of fault,” as one commentator notes, insofar as it undercuts the criteria for responsibility on the liability view.42 Recent discussions of responsibility for climate change and environmental degradation pose related challenges because they involve actions that are unintentional with outcomes that are too complex for any one person (or even one collectivity) to control.43 Likewise, new efforts to theorize the duties of justice in a globalized economy inevitably raise questions about our responsibility for the unintended and highly mediated effects that our actions have on persons in distant places.44 The effects that social inequality has on agency further complicate the story of liability.45 With the exception of Young’s late

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work on what she called “the social connection model of responsibility,” which moves in a genuinely new direction and is discussed below, contemporary theories of responsibility tend to acknowledge the deficiencies of the liability view (when they do) without resolving them.46 Once the non-­ sovereignty of human agency is understood, these deficiencies loom large. The liability view is not entirely without merit, however. The experience of seeing our intentions brought to fruition in the world is indeed a common part of the wider set of experiences that constitutes agency. Yet even where intentionality figures in agency in this familiar way, non-­sovereignty means that we are rarely alone in bringing our intentions to fruition. When I step up to the lectern on the first day of a new semester, for example, the students in my classroom fall silent and take up their pens. I make something happen in that room, and what I make happen in this instance tracks my intentions: I begin the course. But I do not make this act of beginning the course happen by myself. The students who interpret my bodily motion as an authoritative act of beginning and respond appropriately also participate in bringing the action to fruition. And they interpret my action as they do—­in a way that successfully completes the action—­because the context of the action is laden with a background of social understandings and expectations that are in harmony with my intentions. The students know this background well, and on this first day of class they have been waiting for a professor to materialize and bring them to attention. I bear the familiar marks of the authority that they expect to see: I am older than they are and dressed for the part, and I am carrying the tell-­tale manila folder with my lecture notes in it. So when I step up to the lectern, everything about the context has prepared them to receive my action in the very terms in which I myself understand and intend it. Yet although in this instance my effects bear the mark of my intentions, it would be a mistake to think that I accomplished the deed on my own. Even here, where agency looks most like a sovereign exertion of will, my action is an emergent feature of intersubjective exchanges. It eludes my control because it depends on how what I have done is interpreted by those on the receiving end, whose responses are part of what constitutes my effects. Imagine a world not so distant from our own in which no women were ever professors. Now let a woman like me step up to the lectern on the first day of the semester, and the effects of this motion are likely to be quite different. In this social world, there is no community of bearers who are prepared by the background of social meanings and expectations to interpret the motion of a woman at the front of a classroom as the authoritative call to begin the course.

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The frustrations of agency that result from a mismatch between the agent’s understanding of an action and its social reception are a common experience of the marginalized, as we have seen. These frustrations admit of varying degrees, and they do not always entail the full failure of agency. A female colleague mentioned to me recently that she had started dressing more formally for her lecture classes after the following incident: She arrives in her classroom on the first day of class, dressed in jeans and clogs. Amid the usual cacophony of student conversations, she steps up to the lectern. The cacophony continues. A few students look at her and then look away, engrossed in their conversations. One student approaches her, saying, “Hey—­you’d better go make more copies of the syllabus. The professor didn’t make enough.” Male professors who arrive to class in jeans and clogs are rarely mistaken for secretaries, of course. The gendered background of social meaning that disrupted her exercise of agency affects male and female agency differently in our society. This background is by no means a seamless whole. It is subject to contestation and revision, and marked by sometimes conflicting beliefs and values. In the United States today, it is itself something of a cacophony, in which patriarchal beliefs and values mix uneasily with more egalitarian ones. These fissures and ambivalences sometimes can make room for individual exertions of agency that the background as a whole does not fully or unequivocally sustain. Thus as soon as my colleague announced herself as the professor, everything changed in the classroom. Yet it changed not simply because of what she did but because there was an existing framework of meaning, however imperfect or marred by residual sexism, in which it could make sense for a woman to be a professor and for her action in stepping up to the lectern to mean that the course was indeed beginning. What this means for responsibility is mixed. On the one hand, the intentionality of the action in these cases gives a special cast to the responsibility in play. I intended to call my classroom to order when I stepped up to the lectern, and as such my responsibility comes closest to the liability model, with its requirement of intentionality and its emphasis on praise and blame. It is perfectly reasonable to blame people for the bad things they intentionally do and to praise them for the good things they do, to hold them responsible in a special way for their voluntary, chosen actions. On the other hand, liability’s reliance on the control condition is too demanding. When ascribing praise and blame we should be more attentive than we generally are to the ways in which the social mediation of action can interrupt the smooth translation of intentions into effects and distort the agent’s intentions. My purpose, then, is not to excise the notion of liability entirely but to

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modify it—­and to displace it as the dominant paradigm for thinking about responsibility in moral and political life. We would do better to conceive responsibility in the classroom case and others like it in terms of culpability rather than liability. Like liability, culpability on this account requires intentionality and is focused on praise and blame; in contrast to liability, it eschews the control condition because it rests on a non-­sovereign view of human agency that reveals the limits of individual control. Moreover, responsibility as culpability incorporates a nuanced conception of intentionality, one that recognizes the ways that individual intentions can be affected by the fields of social meaning onto which they fall. It allows us to make sense of praise and blame not only under the general conditions of non-­sovereignty but also in specific contexts of social inequality. As one part of a multidimensional model of non-­ sovereign responsibility, it helps us conceive, with suitable subtlety and differentiation, the responsibilities of both the privileged and those subject to domination and oppression. Consider in this connection Tricia Rose’s fascinating discussion of rap music and hip hop culture.47 Rap (as a particular genre of music) and hip hop (as a cultural ethos, urban identity, aesthetic sensibility, and style of fashion) emerged in the late 1970s in the South Bronx as a homegrown expression of young, black, especially male, urban identity. It reflected a critical consciousness about racial inequality and about the workings of social, political, and economic power, and it articulated aspirations of justice and liberation.48 Even in its earliest forms, rap music often depicted violence—­the perils of ghetto life, including police brutality—­and it sometimes gave voice to a palpably menacing rage. It was never innocent or one-­ dimensional. But it embodied a sense of outraged justice, communicated social criticism, and aimed for emancipation. And in the early days, the artistic actions of the musicians found a local community of bearers who understood these actions in ways that were consonant with the musicians’ own self-­understandings, thus sustaining their agency.49 As Rose tells the story, however, all this changed over time.50 As rap and hip hop took hold of the popular imagination, as records and styles started selling beyond the local community of the New York ghetto to the white middle class, the link between the musicians’ identities, intentions, and effects grew troubled. Against a broader background of social meaning and interpretation that was marked by racial stigma, by economic inequalities, and by the alienation of the races from one another, the meaning of rap music and the actions of black rappers morphed into something new. Their social criticism began to fall on deaf ears, or on ears that were deaf to that

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particular tune. Their angry accusations of injustice came to be heard instead as unruly challenges to all authority. Over time, it turned out that what sold best to the mass (i.e., predominantly white) public was rap music that contained no social criticism at all, music that instead manifested the racially stigmatized black identities that white consumers were prepared to see.51 In its violence, its degradation of women, its glorification of criminality, its exaggerated materialism, the new genre of gansta rap instantiated all the things that the white middle class feared, loathed, and expected in black people. Above all, it seemed to many whites to provide a rationalization for the dismal conditions of life among ghetto blacks. And because there was a lucrative market for gansta rap, there was no dearth of artists willing to produce it. This is a story of intentions both realized and distorted by social inequality, of efficacy that is simultaneously sustained and hobbled by social uptake—­and in ways that reproduce enduring injustice. As Rose makes clear, there are some rap and hip hop artists today who resist this dynamic, whose work retains a critical edge, and whose agency is taken up in more liberatory ways by local communities of bearers and frameworks of social meaning that are not so riven by racial stigma.52 The effects that social mediation has on agency are never absolute or strictly determinative. And Rose rightly insists that the critical agency embodied in emancipatory hip hop has the potential to move beyond its local community and to reshape the beliefs and values that define the wider culture.53 Social transformation along these lines is a product of the agency of the oppressed, and it opens the door to new forms of agency on the part of both the oppressed and the privileged. The key point for present purposes, however, concerns responsibility as culpability. The hip hop story is interesting partly because it is a story of intentionality without control. Intentionality plays a crucial role in the agency of rap artists all along the way insofar as they are willing producers of their music. Gangsta rappers do affect the world in ways that manifest their intentions—­they make music that wins them wealth and fame, they intimidate and awe, they have beautiful women at their beck and call. Given the presence of intentionality, a culpability model of responsibility is not out of place, although the liability model surely would be because the pressures of inequality considerably undercut the control condition. These artists are culpable for their effects, and when their effects are harmful or unjust we are right to blame them for what they have done. The fact that their intentions and effects are mediated in distorting ways by social inequality does not fully alleviate this responsibility; it does not excuse their wrongs. At the same time, responsibility as culpability recognizes that the intentionality in

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their action is not equivalent to control. In view of this fact, the culpability that we properly attribute to them will not capture the whole story of the responsibility in play. It would be wrong to attribute responsibility for what gansta rappers have done only to them. All of us who participate in sustaining the social structures that shape which of the intentions of black rappers are seen and heard, and how their intentions are taken up, also bear a sig­ nificant measure of responsibility here, although the kind of responsibility we bear will be different from the culpability that follows from intentional action. Culpability differs from liability in this respect as well, for we tend to think about liability in fairly dichotomous terms. If you are liable for something and fit to be blamed for it, then I am off the hook. This tendency is visible in white responses to gangsta rap. When interpreted through the lens of liability, this music and the videos that accompany it, with their images of black-­on-­black violence and the exploitation of women, among other things, invite white people to exculpate themselves from the systematic patterns of racial and sexual inequality that have been instrumental in producing gansta rap: Look at what they are doing to themselves.54 In this respect, of course, gangsta rappers function as stand-­ins for ghetto blacks more generally. This is the logic of the “cultural pathologies” thesis, with its emphasis on personal responsibility for dysfunctional individual behavior among the marginalized. What we need to recognize is that responsibility in any given case—­including the culpability that follows from intentional action—­is often a multifaceted phenomenon. We should hold gansta rappers culpable for what they intentionally do, but we should also acknowledge the responsibility we collectively bear for our racist popular culture, a culture that only wants to hear from young black men and women in ways that reinforce white people’s sense of justification for our society’s persistent and pervasive inequalities of race and sex. The concept of culpability has an important place in the theory of non-­sovereign responsibility, then, although it does not exhaust the meaning of responsibility. Culpability is properly partnered in many cases with responsibility in other forms.55 If responsibility is not exhausted by culpability, what other forms does it take? What are the conditions and criteria for the wider distribution of responsibility? We have seen that agency may include forms of action that exceed or run counter to one’s intentions. To establish agency in such cases, we look for marks of the individual’s identity in her deeds. On reflection, can she see herself in what she has done? Can others find her in her effects? I can own the actions that have made me my sister’s Rock of Gibraltar—­ even though I did not intend this effect and even though the effect owes a

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good deal to my sister and the ways she has interpreted what I have done—­ because I recognize these actions as authentic expressions of my character. Sometimes it may be difficult for an agent to recognize himself in his deeds even when others do so. Consider the boor again—­a person who is so self-­ assured and full of confidence in his opinions as to be overbearing in his relations with others. He tends to irritate and alienate people, but he cannot figure out why. What he sees reflected in their responses is not himself and his own arrogant character but their character flaws: they are intolerant, he thinks, or too sensitive. Yet the effects he has on the world in this regard are distinctive to him, and they do track key features of his personality. He is indeed affirming his identity in his actions, whether he sees this or not. Consequently, we are right to hold him responsible for the actions. The ways in which we contribute, unintentionally and often unconsciously, to perpetuating patterns of racism and sexism often have a similar character. We may not easily recognize ourselves in our effects but this does not mean we are not there. When we affect the world in ways that manifest who we are we have the kind of special relationship to our action that constitutes agency and makes us responsible. What responsibility entails in cases where our effects are unintentional is different from culpability, however. Lacking intentionality, praise and blame are generally out of place. In addition to responsibility as culpability, we need to make a place for responsibility as accountability. Responsibility in this form says that we have an obligation to remediate the harms we have helped to generate, however unintentional they may be. We are responsible for doing what we can to right our wrongs and to change our effects going forward, along with the character traits that generated them. In contrast to culpability, which looks backward to establish grounds for punishment and compensation, focusing on blaming the agent for what he has done in the past, responsibility as accountability mainly looks to the present and the future. Although it takes note of what one has done, its emphasis is on what one can do differently now. To hold me responsible for the ways that my actions over time have helped to perpetuate racism and sexism in our society, for instance, is not to saddle me with guilt about the past but to ask me to help change the present and the future, and to make the kinds of internal adjustments in myself and my character that will help foster this change. While this demand for change presupposes in me a capacity for norm-­ responsiveness and an ability to act with intention, it is important to remember that neither one is at odds with non-­sovereign agency. Although not every instance of agency is norm-­responsive in this way—­sometimes what we do has no ethical or moral significance, and sometimes what we

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do is willfully insensitive to what right requires—­part of what distinguishes human agency from the movements of nonhuman objects and most other animals is that our actions can be guided by norms, as we saw in chapter 1.56 Even in cases where a particular action is not itself guided by a norm (for example, the act of making a tuna sandwich), human agents are constituted in such a way (barring pathology) that when a normative claim is pressed upon them they can change the course of their action in response. No kind of responsibility would be possible without a general background condition of norm-­sensitivity in this form. Likewise, without the capacity for action that is intentional it would be pointless to ask anyone to do anything at all, especially to change. While intentionality is not a sufficient condition for agency, it is an important part of the background of agency. So neither norm-­sensitivity nor intentionality is antithetical to non-­sovereign agency. Still, the non-­sovereignty of human agency does imply that in asking people to change their effects going forward we should acknowledge that they are likely to need help. Particularly as one’s action bears on large-­scale social systems, one’s individual efforts to change will need to be taken up by others if they are to produce meaningful outcomes. Moreover, given the fact that our agency can generate effects that run counter to our intentions, we should be alive to the unintended consequences that our intentional efforts to change may produce. Part of being responsible in the sense of accountability, then, will involve a continuing awareness toward the world and other people. We will need to be on the lookout for inadvertent harm, listening to what others tell us about their experience and about how what we do affects them. Responsibility as accountability has a close parallel in Young’s social connection model of responsibility. On this model, “all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice.”57 Although not tied to a non-­sovereign theory of human agency per se, the model begins from the assumption that social life involves interdependent processes of cooperation and competition, and that our involvement implicates us in the effects of these processes.58 Where the effects are unjust, we have an obligation to do what we can to modify them, even if we did not intend to bring them about. Much like the non-­sovereign view, and in contrast to standard accounts of responsibility as liability, Young resists the idea that to hold someone responsible requires showing that he was in control of his action and its outcomes. As she rightly points out, when it comes to complex structures of oppression, no one person ever exercises full control. And yet many do contribute to these effects, for such structures only continue to exist because large

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numbers of individuals regularly act in ways that sustain them. Finally, like responsibility as accountability, the social connection model is less concerned with blaming people for their past actions than with changing the future.59 And while the responsibility in play attaches to individuals, it cannot be discharged by the individual acting alone. Responsibility for justice “is a responsibility I personally bear, but I do not bear it alone,” because it emerges from my involvement in intersubjective processes.60 For the same reason, I can only take up my responsibility through working together with others to intervene in these processes so as to produce better outcomes.61 Young’s model applies specifically to impersonal social processes that bear on injustice. It is not meant to replace or even to revise the liability model of responsibility but only to supplement it. And while it presupposes that no one person exercises control over the impersonal processes that affect structural injustice, it makes no broader claims about the nature of human agency and its relationship to control. In these respects, the account of non-­sovereign responsibility offered here goes further. It ties responsibility to an account of agency that fundamentally challenges our conventional beliefs about both agency and responsibility. Rather than simply supplementing the standard liability view, it reconstructs the concept of responsibility more broadly. On the non-­sovereign view, accountability will track both the extent of one’s contributions to the outcome and the extent to which one’s contributing actions manifest one’s identity. By way of illustration, imagine a scenario in which a ship’s officer presses a button thinking it will summon a steward to bring him a cup of tea, but in fact it fires a torpedo that sinks the Bismarck.62 The officer did not mean to sink the Bismarck, and consequently we will not hold him culpable for its demise, even though under the right circumstances we will reasonably attribute a greater degree of responsibility to him than would be the case if he had simply been thrown into the button by a rogue wave. The difference between sinking the Bismarck by pressing the wrong button and sinking it by being thrown into the button by a wave does not turn on the degree of intentionality in the action, of course, since neither action is intentional. The key is rather the degree to which the action manifests the identity, or subjective existence, of the officer. How much of himself can he find (and can we see) in this deed? Perhaps the officer is characteristically absent-­minded, for instance, or sloppy in carrying out his duties; perhaps he pressed the wrong button because he was trying to do too many things at once, as he often does, something that is a familiar feature of his personality, a reflection of his personal arrogance, or his longstanding tendency to overestimate his abilities, or something else. Perhaps

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pressing the wrong button is something that those who know him best will not be surprised to hear that he has done. “This is just the kind of thing he would do,” they may say, given what they know about his character. When he himself reflects honestly on the tragedy, he knows that they are right. He feels accountable for what happened in a way that he would not feel if he had been thrown into the button by a wave. Although he did not mean to do it, his identity is clearly displayed in his deed, and so the event bears the mark of his agency. We could also imagine a contrasting scenario in which there is nothing at all of the officer in the act. He is a meticulous man, let us say, careful at every turn. The button that released the torpedo is a new one and it was placed by the ship’s engineer in the very spot formerly occupied by the button that calls for tea. The two buttons are indistinguishable. Here nothing about the sinking of the Bismarck reflects anything fundamental about the officer’s identity. “It could have happened to anyone,” his friends will tell him, by which they mean that they see nothing distinctive to him in the deed. In this scenario, no significant difference exists between pushing the button, thinking it calls for tea, and being pushed into the button by a wave. Similarly, when it comes to people’s unintentional contributions to social structures of domination and oppression, we will hold them more accountable the more of them that we see in their deeds. Their accountability will also track the power and force of their contributing effects. Those whose unintentional (but identity-­affirming) effects weigh more heavily in the relevant outcome will bear more accountability for it. People who are wealthy enough to buy lots of clothes produced in third-­world sweatshops, for instance, have a larger role in unwittingly perpetuating the exploitation of the sweatshop workers who produced the clothes than do those who buy little. They are also better equipped to purchase their attire from fair trade shops where prices may be higher, and to use their resources to publicize and reform the exploitative practices of the industry at large.63 It should be clear by now that when contrasted with traditional models of responsibility the non-­sovereign approach broadens the scope of our properly attributed responsibilities. It allows us to distinguish culpability from accountability, and to hold people responsible for a wider range of outcomes than is possible on a view that bases responsibility on conscious intentionality and control. In this sense, the distributed approach to agency poses no threat to the concept of responsibility but rather enhances it. Among other things, it implies that we are right to call people to account for the effects of their unintentional racism and sexism. More generally, this view illuminates the breadth of our own involvements and effects, the ways

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that we are mutually implicated in injustice and mutually called to be the bearers of one another’s agency. The line between culpability and accountability is sometimes a blurry one, to be sure. The more I know about the exploitative conditions of the global apparel industry, for example, the less unintentional my participation in it will be and the more my responsibility will approach culpability as opposed to accountability. Likewise, the culpability that one bears for an action that is intentional may be mitigated by extreme inequality in the social context. Consider again Morrison’s Beloved. In the defining moment of the novel, Sethe, now a fugitive slave settled in a free state, takes her two small boys and her baby daughter to a shed behind the house with the intention of killing them and herself. She slits the baby’s throat, and although someone intervenes before she can harm the two boys, the baby dies. Her action was precipitated by the arrival of the foreman of the plantation she had fled, there to capture her and her children and return them to bondage. She thinks of what she is doing when she goes to the shed as an act of protection. She cannot bear to turn the children over to the fate she knows awaits them, or to surrender herself to it. Her act is intentional, but her intention is to protect. The social context of domination warps and distorts both the content of Sethe’s intention and the relationship between her intention and her effects. It would be wrong to say that she has no culpability—­no one forced her to put the knife to her baby’s throat—­but it is because of the social context that the only way she can see to protect that baby is to kill her. The blame that may properly be directed her way on the non-­sovereign view is therefore limited. Her responsibility better fits the accountability model because although she clearly affects the world, and in a way that manifests her identity, both her intentions and her effects are highly distorted by the extreme inequality in which they are positioned. Non-­sovereign culpability may approach accountability, in other words, if the social context is suf­ ficiently disabling.64 Nor do culpability and accountability exhaust the forms of responsibility available to us as non-­sovereign agents. A third form of responsibility involves responsiveness to the demands of ethical and political life in a way that is entirely unconnected to one’s own past actions. Imagine crossing a bridge on a snowy morning, when suddenly from below you hear the cries of a small child who has fallen into the icy water.65 You did not make this happen; there is no sense in which the calamity results from action you intended or controlled, or even from unintended effects that you have had. No one could possibly blame you for the situation, or hold you accountable in any way for the child being in that icy water. Yet provided that you are

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able, we would expect you to respond by doing your best to help. Doing so would be the responsible thing to do. Responsibility as responsiveness in this form is entirely forward-­looking. In contrast to both culpability and accountability, it is not concerned with the obligation to remediate past harms to which we have contributed. It is rooted in agency, but in the promise of our future efficacy rather than the claims of our past effects. Responsibility as responsiveness draws on our capacity for norm-­sensitivity, our ability to be moved by a sense of right. As such, it is crucial to democratic politics, for without citizens who acknowledge and act from responsibility in this form, a free and just society will always be out of reach. This is true in the sense that democratic citizens need to be prepared to act on behalf of others to remedy failures of freedom and justice even when they themselves have not actually participated in the relations that generated these failures. It is also true in the sense that citizens who are harmed by such wrongs must themselves be willing to resist them and able to aspire to something better. Responsiveness to the right principles and standards of justice is empowering, especially for those who are dominated or oppressed, in whom it can inspire the exercise of agency in the face of otherwise disabling conditions. The principles contained in the American Declaration of Independence, for example, have provided fuel for the political agency of the country’s marginalized since they were first articulated. Although early articulations of the principles coexisted with social and political practices that were patently antithetical to them, the principles were sufficiently fertile to inspire and to justify the eventual (albeit still incomplete) overthrow of these practices. As a recent analysis of grassroots community organizing in the United States shows, good community organizers typically seek to connect the personal experiences of those they mean to mobilize to broader ideals of freedom and justice.66 This connection engages individuals’ responsibility as responsiveness on their own behalf. It is true that responsibility in this form is no magic bullet; it cannot guarantee empowerment. Think again about Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man. At the beginning of the novel he believes fervently in the American promise of liberty and justice for all. As a young black man, he sees racial inequality all around him, and yet he believes that if he plays by the rules and excels in his endeavors he can overcome the effects of racism. He is a nearly perfect embodiment of responsibility as responsiveness, guided by a deep faith in the American creed. Indeed, his attachment to the creed is a constitutive feature of his identity. Yet again and again in the course of the novel the American creed betrays him, and his responsiveness to it fails to

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sustain his agency. His identity and his effects regularly come apart as his agency is undercut by the racial stigma that thwarts the promise of the creed, renders his distinctive subjectivity invisible, and distorts his effects. Still, if responsibility as responsiveness is no magic bullet, it does have enormous potential as a resource for social transformation. James Baldwin’s essay, “The Fire Next Time,” opens with a letter to his nephew that expresses this potential. The letter is Baldwin’s effort to interrupt the effects of racial stigma. It answers to a larger challenge that Baldwin says all black parents face: how to create in their children an antidote to the poison of internalized racism, how to instill a sense of their own honor and dignity despite the messages disseminated by the wider culture.67 Baldwin tells his nephew, among other things, that “what [whites] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”68 The letter manifests Baldwin’s urgent responsiveness to what he knows is true and just, and it means to remediate harms that he had no part in bringing about. The ideals of freedom, equal dignity, and love orient the essay, as they oriented so much of his writing and his own extraordinary life. His responsiveness shores up Baldwin’s own agency as much as that of his nephew. Having grown up black, bisexual, and poor in prewar Harlem, Baldwin certainly accomplished far more than what his circumstances and the social context could have been expected to allow, and more than what most similarly situated individuals actually achieved. Responsibility as responsiveness can be a powerful source of individual resistance and social transformation. Yet Baldwin makes it clear that his responsiveness to the principles and aspirations that empowered his agency was not simply self-­generated. Instead, he credits his friends, especially the painter Beauford Delaney and the singer Marian Anderson, with instilling this sense of responsibility in him. “Beauford and Miss Anderson were on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people,” he says. “[The masters] . . . were not to hang me: I was to see to that.”69 They showed him the meaning of “courage and integrity, humility and passion,” and how not to be “bowed” by the weight of a racist society. Their example served “as an enormous protection” so that Baldwin “was never entirely at the mercy of an environment” steeped in racial stigma.70 Because of them, he writes, he was “forced to know that I was valued.”71 Without their support, he says, “I might very easily have become the junky which so many among those I knew were becoming then, or the Bellevue or Tombs inmate . . . or the Hudson River corpse which a black man I loved with all my heart was shortly to become.”72 So while responsibility as responsiveness

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involves individual initiative, it also has an intersubjective dimension. It can be a source of personal resistance to dominant social structures but it, too, needs bearers. We do not do it by ourselves, and it cannot be reduced to the mythical self-­generated action of the bootstrapper. Like the other forms of responsibility identified here, it rests on agency. Yet more than culpability and accountability, responsibility as responsiveness also stimulates agency. It has the potential to inspire action that may otherwise seem to be out of reach, particularly among the marginalized under conditions of social inequality.73 Taken together, culpability, accountability, and responsiveness demonstrate that non-­sovereign agency can indeed sustain personal responsibility. They also show that the non-­sovereign approach significantly extends the reach of our responsibilities to ourselves and to one another as democratic citizens. One might reasonably worry, in fact, that this view extends responsibility too far. To the extent that it makes us responsible for injustices that we did not intend to commit, that are experienced by people we may never meet, and that happen in places we have never been, non-­sovereign responsibility has the potential to generate burdens that are psychologically overwhelming. Yet democratic citizenship on virtually any account will include obligations to others the perfect fulfillment of which would be overwhelming to most people. If we are honest with ourselves, we always have more responsibilities than we can comfortably or conveniently honor in a complete way. Then, too, our responsibilities sometimes conflict with one another. Consequently, moral remainders are a common feature of the human condition. For both reasons, we regularly find ourselves having to prioritize. Non-­sovereign responsibility is not unique in this respect. Where our responsibilities are too many to fulfill all at once or are at odds with one another, we need to exercise judgment in choosing where to focus our energies. Here it is reasonable to be guided by considerations of both justice and prudence so that we give priority to responsibilities where the injustices in play are more serious, where our contributions to them are more signifi­ cant, and where our ability to be effective in making change is greater. There may still be remainders, insofar as fulfilling certain responsibilities makes it impossible to honor others. Again, there is nothing unique about non-­ sovereign responsibility in this sense. Such remainders are familiar features of both moral and political life. The danger that citizens may be overwhelmed by their non-­sovereign responsibilities also can be mitigated by identifying ways to coordinate action for the fulfillment of individual responsibilities that can more effectively be carried out cooperatively. Political institutions have a role here, but more

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informal coordinating associations and social practices also will be crucial. Civil associations, churches, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations of various stripes can all provide venues that magnify the individual’s efficacy. In doing so, they provide mechanisms that enable us to honor the responsibilities that we have to others and to ourselves, whether it is the responsibility to reconfigure patterns of racial inequality, or the responsibility to eradicate gender-­based barriers to achievement, or the responsibility to resist oppressive norms of homophobia. The practice of prioritizing and the availability of vehicles for the enactment of individual responsibility in ways that multiply the individual’s own effects may not always prevent people from feeling overwhelmed by their responsibilities, of course. Still, this feeling is not necessarily a bad thing. To the extent that it reflects a dawning awareness of our real complicity in injustices that bring misery to others and obstruct their freedom, feeling overwhelmed for a time by the burdens of our own agency may be a necessary condition of change for the better. In this, as in so much else that matters in life, we will need to help each other if we are to move forward productively. Personal responsibility is compatible with non-­sovereign agency, then, and this is true even in view of the ways that agency is vulnerable to social inequality. In fact, a non-­sovereign approach opens up richer, more capacious ways of understanding personal responsibility than conventional thinking allows, and it helps us assign responsibility in appropriate ways to both the privileged and the marginalized. Conceiving our responsibilities in this more capacious way can help move us beyond the structure/agency divide in the study of politics. It is also important for the practices of democratic citizenship. Non-­sovereign responsibility is a core feature of the ethos of citizenship that we need if we are to make good on liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and justice for all. It will need the support of our educational practices and our public culture. Yet if given the support it needs, non-­sovereign responsibility has the potential to be a powerful friend to freedom. It helps make sense of why agency that is non-­sovereign still can be so potent, and how even the least empowered can sometimes change the world. In this respect, the practices of non-­sovereign responsibility suggest that while agency’s vulnerability to social inequality is real, it is only one part of the picture. To see the whole picture of non-­sovereign agency we must look more closely at the sometimes surprising vitality of agency in the presence of domination and oppression—­and explore its multiple sources.

T hr e e

Vitalities of Non-­sovereign Agency

The non-­sovereign character of individual agency makes agency vulnerable to social inequalities in ways that run deep, with effects that can be disabling. Social inequalities thus run counter to political freedom as an enabling condition of human agency. Yet people sometimes surprise us with the vitality of their agency even under hostile circumstances. Think of Frederick Douglass rising in physical resistance to his slave master.1 Or consider the nineteenth-­century American suffragists whose political activism transformed the relations of domination from which it emerged. The Stonewall uprising is another case of unexpectedly forceful agency that developed despite a prevailing context of oppression. Fanon wrote powerfully along these lines about the agency of the millions of people living under colonial rule whose “black voices have screamed against the curtain of the sky.”2 Reflecting on what was by then the disintegrating authority of colonial power in the developing world, he went on to say that the curtain of colonial oppression, having been “torn from end to end, [and] gashed by the teeth biting its belly of prohibitions,” had finally “fallen like a burst balafon.”3 However disabling social inequality may be in general, the alchemy of agency makes agency periodically unpredictable—­sometimes unpredictably forceful. Although it is a socially distributed phenomenon, agency is never in a strict sense socially determined. It is always more than the simple product of prevailing relations of power. At the same time, the agency of the marginalized is not always emancipatory in the sense of leading inexorably to liberation.4 As one commentator puts it, “the dichotomy of submission versus resistance obscures the complexity” of human agency in the presence of domination and oppression.5 This chapter explores the potential vitality of agency in such contexts. Drawing on experiences of the marginalized, I

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identify three factors that help sustain agency under conditions of social inequality. The first factor is imagination, the capacity to see and feel possibilities for reaching past “the curtain of the sky” and living beyond the bounds imposed by present configurations of power. Imagination engages the empowering force of responsibility as responsiveness discussed in chapter 2 as well as the corporeal and norm-­responsive aspects of agency addressed in chapter 1, among other things. The second factor is counterpublic conversation, conceived as the communicative exchanges within marginalized groups that support localized communities of bearers who help to bring the action of the marginalized to fruition, thus enabling their agency.6 The third factor is the transformation of self and society that transpires, often in fits and starts, and never with any guarantees, as the imagination and conversation of activists spread from the local field of the marginalized group to take hold in the wider society. It is important to acknowledge from the outset that the stories we have to tell here are not always triumphalist in a simple sense. The dream of an individual who rises, spontaneous and fully formed, from the ash heap of domination to defeat singlehandedly the effects of deprivation is a mirage. That dream recapitulates an aspiration to sovereignty that is itself disabling. The experiences documented in this chapter demonstrate the remarkable robustness and vitality of human agency, but they also suggest that agency is never an all-­or-­nothing affair. Even bold, radically transformative exertions of agency sometimes carry the marks of existing oppressions. Moreover, while the vitality of agency depends on the presence of bearers, only some of the stories in what follows are about collective action or explicitly political participation. The fact that individual agency is a socially distributed phenomenon means that there are intersubjective conditions for the exercise of agency, but it does not mean that the only way to experience agency is through action in concert for political purposes. Agency under the curtain of the sky takes a variety of forms. How agency in its various forms arises under the covering sky of an oppressive social order, and how it sometimes works—­against all odds—­to change that order, is the subject of this chapter.

Imagination It is well known that the imagination can be empowering, and theorists frequently point to the imagination when trying to explain action that breaks with prevailing relations of power.7 Marginalized people commonly testify to the role that imagination has played in generating and sustaining their agency.8 Baldwin, for instance, clearly sees the imagination as a crucial

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resource for inspiring the agency of African Americans, and ultimately for transforming the conditions of racism that inhibit their agency. We must “free ourselves from the myth of America,” he writes, and envision “a new sense of life’s possibilities.”9 He thinks that generating the impetus for this new vision is especially the function of American writers, whose currency is imagination.10 Their job is to engage the imaginative faculties of others, both black and white, to stimulate dreams of a better world and new conceptions of individual potential. The “intangible dreams of people,” he insists, “have a tangible effect on the world.”11 In particular, they can inspire the individual to conceive and affirm her subjective existence in ways that rise above the limits of the social world as she knows it. They can also re­ configure the fields of social meaning onto which her exercise of agency is projected and against which it is interpreted by others. Yet imagination is sometimes invoked by theorists interested in emancipatory political agency like a deus ex machina, as a faculty that is inexplicably impervious to the influence of the social context that it ostensibly enables the agent to resist. When they take this form, invocations of the imagination tend to reproduce, often unwittingly, the ideal of agency as sovereignty. The imagination is empowering (or at least it can be empowering) but it need not be sovereign to inspire action under difficult circumstances. Sometimes, in fact, the imagination is stimulated by the very features of the social context that tend to disable agency. Fanon discusses this dynamic as it emerges in the colonial context. Under colonialism, the agency of the colonized is undercut by countless material deprivations. At the same time, colonialism typically entails lavish consumption on the part of the dominant class, as the colonizer reaps the rewards of his exploitative rule: The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-­of leftovers. . . . The colonist’s sector is a slated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things . . . [whereas] the colonized’s sector . . . is a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.12

The contrast between the two sectors, Fanon says, not only stimulates envy but gives rise to visions of a new order. In particular, he writes, “there is not one colonized subject who at least once a day does not dream of taking the place of the colonist.”13 The experience of relative deprivation, as social

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scientists call it, can stimulate the imagination to envision a world orga­ nized differently. Imagination sometimes reflects the pressure of necessities one does not choose or create; its revelations can spring from factors that confront the agent as given rather than issuing, free-­form, from her will. It is true that on Fanon’s account the dreams of the colonized center on occupying the colonist’s position of domination rather than eradicating it. Consequently, they are not likely to lead to a freer or more just society overall. To achieve freedom and justice for all, a fundamentally new social order would need to be imagined and constructed, one that does away with domination altogether. So the presence of imagination is not sufficient to generate agency that is fully or thoroughly emancipatory. Yet Fanon emphasizes that the capacity to imagine the world differently is one of the things that inspires anticolonial movements for liberation. And his description of how dreams of a different world arise shows the imagination to be embedded in and responsive to features of the existing world rather than fully spontaneous. Somewhat paradoxically, the imagination’s transformative potential is often closely tied to its embeddedness. Like agency itself, the imagination is non-­sovereign. The contradictions generated by experiences of relative material deprivation are not the only kind of contradiction to inspire the imagination. Sandra Bartky has written about what she calls “the double ontological shock” that can arise for women in ostensibly democratic societies that are nevertheless shot through with residual patriarchy. The shock involves realizing, on the one hand, that “what is really happening is quite different from what appears to be happening” and, on the other hand, that because the terms of the social world deny and render invisible what is really happening, one lacks the ability to name it or convey it clearly to others.14 You tell your five-­year-­old niece how beautiful she looks in her pink princess outfit with the high-­heeled shoes. It seems that you are being supportive of her, shoring up her confidence—­and this could well be your intention. Instead, however, the effect is to interpellate her as the object of (i.e., imprison her within) the gaze of another, and to constitute her as subject to standards of male, heterosexual desire. And because the social meaning of female beauty in our culture is defined in these terms, which embody gender-­based domination without acknowledging it, the damage you do in praising her beauty is impossible for most people to see and difficult to articulate. Coming to awareness of this dynamic can be disorienting on multiple levels. Yet the double shock that Bartky describes also can be a moment of awakening that generates critical consciousness and spurs the imaginative desire

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for an alternative way of life. When you suddenly realize that something that has always felt reassuring to you is in fact imprisoning you, that people you thought were affirming you are actually oppressing you (however unintentionally), and that the terms of social discourse mask these harms and render them incommunicable, the awareness of the contradictions forces a broader critical perspective on the social context. This broader view may not lead to emancipatory action, but it does invite in the imagination. For to quell the cognitive dissonance that such contradictions generate, to make sense of the conflict and resolve it, one is forced to think and feel beyond the limits of the established order and its norms. Here again, the potentially transformative power of imagination has roots in the very social context that it potentially undoes, insofar as contradictions in the lived experience of the marginalized can function to stimulate their dreams of a better world. Internal contradictions can also destabilize the experience of selfhood in ways that give rise to the exercise of imagination. Baldwin writes along these lines about the year he worked in a defense plant in New Jersey as a young man, the furthest south he had ever lived. Being a black man in America, he was familiar with racism. But that year, he says, “made a great change in my life.”15 He had always known how white people “treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave,” namely as inferior and with submission. Yet it had never occurred to him until the year in New Jersey “that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way.”16 He acted there as he “had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself . . . with results that were, simply, unbelievable.”17 The pride and confidence that were constitutive parts of his character ran up against the humility and deference that are expected of the subjugated, which his white bosses and co-­workers demanded to see. As a result, he almost immediately generated “unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility,” and was ultimately fired from his job.18 Moreover, because the identity he manifested in his action was so much at odds with what the white world expected of him, because others could not make sense of this identity in light of the prevailing norms for black men, they came to see him as crazy. “They really believed that I was mad,” Baldwin writes, and he acknowledges that in time “it did begin to work on my mind.”19 He was not actually mentally ill, but the psychological conflict that he experienced was very real; he speaks of it as having brought about a great change in his life. To feel the clash between the self that he identified with and the self that the white world saw—­or demanded to see—­made palpable for him a fundamental feature of racism and of the African American condition in the United States. He came to realize that no amount of individual

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effort or excellence can make one visible as an individual until the general condition of racial stigma is reversed. The insight generated by the internal conflict Baldwin experienced that year is also an example of how double consciousness can simultaneously undercut agency and open a door to critical consciousness. The conflict undermined his efficacy at work and hobbled his ability to affirm his identity in his deeds, but it also made him want to find a way to end America’s “racial nightmare.”20 It spawned his dream to “dare everything” in the quest “to achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”21 Not everyone who experienced that conflict of personal identity under mid-­century American racism had the powerful imagination of Baldwin or the talent to unleash it upon the world in the transformative way that he did. But his imagination was a crucial factor in driving his agency forward despite the obstacles. Moreover, his imagination was no deus ex machina; it was stimulated by concrete experiences that were themselves shaped by features of his social context. If the imagination can generate visions of a better world that inspire the individual to initiate action under conditions of systematic inequality, it also has a role in reconfiguring the social meaning of that action in ways that can help bring it to fruition. Think again about Baldwin’s letter to his nephew. One of the things that Baldwin tries to do in the letter is to imaginatively reconstruct the meaning of the impairments of agency that he knows his nephew will experience as a young black man. His nephew’s disrupted efficacy is not to be read as an indication of weakness or inferiority on his part but as a reflection of the structural condition of racism. “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you,” Baldwin writes.22 “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”23 With these words, Baldwin reimagines for his nephew the meaning of his nephew’s action and also the meaning of the actions of white people that contribute to sustaining racism and undercutting the agency of young black men. He interprets these actions not in light of dominant norms and social meanings but through the lens of black experience. This imaginative reinterpretation of the meaning of action—­the action of both the oppressed and the privileged—­is very much of a piece with old-­ fashioned feminist consciousness-­raising. Feminism reimagines women’s traditionally deferential action as a mark of unjust subordination instead of seeing it as a virtue; it reconceives sexual harassment as a debased assertion of power rather than a natural response to unrequited love. Feminism also imaginatively generates novel fields of meaning against which women’s

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agency can become newly efficacious. It gives us visions of femininity that include confidence, courage, and physical strength, so that women who manifest these qualities act onto a field of meaning that allows others to make sense of their action as confident, courageous, and strong—­rather than as strident or demanding or unnatural, and hence easy to dismiss. So imagination serves the agency of the oppressed by reconfiguring the background of meaning against which action is interpreted, enabling both the agent herself and others to understand her deeds in ways that sustain rather than inhibit her efficacy. A common source of inspiration for the imagination is normative ideals and principles of right. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, norm-­responsiveness is a fundamental feature of human agency and a condition of responsibility. Non-­sovereign norm-­responsiveness is a more socially embedded and physically embodied faculty than some sovereigntist views would allow. Yet it is a powerful source of both imagination and action. Although our sensitivity to norms is part of what makes us vulnerable to unjust social inequalities (such inequalities are frequently sustained through the internalization of dominant norms) it is also true that this sensitivity can open us to more fully just possibilities. And without the ability to be moved in our actions by claims of right, it is difficult to see how progress toward justice could ever happen. This is the “doubled truth” of normativity that Butler has in mind when she points out that while “we are constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us,” still “we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world.”24 Principles of right inspire our imaginations and nourish our dreams, and they engage our capacity for responsibility as responsiveness.25 Principles can have a transformative impact on the agency of the oppressed even when they are imperfect, or have been incompletely understood and only partially instantiated in the wider society. Consider the fascinating history of African American Freemasonry in the United States, as told by Corey Walker. Founded in 1775 with the initiation of the first African American Freemason (Prince Hall), the association offers insight into how a stigmatized group can find and create resources for cultivat­ ing agency despite oppressive social conditions.26 The guiding principles of Freemasonry play a powerful role in this story. In particular, its appeal to “the brotherhood of man,” which echoed the ostensibly (but not then in practice) universal principles of the Declaration of Independence, was a forceful attraction for many participants and a source of inspiration (8, 126). It championed “a universal brotherhood based on the values of honor, love, virtue, integrity, and discipline” (61), and it offered a distinctive set

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of “symbols, rites, and rituals” (19) for enacting these values. Freemasonry cultivated agency among black men in part by inspiring them with the principles of equality and liberty that the American polity simultaneously promised and denied them. Black Freemasons felt this contradiction keenly. Through membership in the lodges, they could enact a quasi-­citizenship that was denied them at the level of the state. At the same time, the empowerment effected by this membership equipped them to contest their subjugated public status. From early on Freemasons were regularly suspected of being instigators of slave revolts (104), and in the post-­Emancipation period the lodges were sites of economic self-­help geared toward enhancing the public standing and power of black men (123). More generally, Walker says, black Freemasonry generated “the presence of new political actors” on the stage of American public life (178). There is more to this story than the power of principles to inspire the imagination and generate agency, but the power of principles in this regard is certainly at the heart of the story. The dreams they gave rise to produced new “landscapes of possibility” for black (male) agency in America (160). Mahmood’s study of the women’s mosque movement in contemporary Egypt mentioned earlier also speaks to the empowering potential of principles for the agency of the oppressed. The women who initiated the movement were responding to a widespread sense that Islam as a principled “means for organizing daily life had become marginalized under modern structures of secular government” and the pressures of Westernization.27 They wanted to serve the principles of Islamic piety and to see these principles embodied more consistently in the lives of ordinary people. The idea was to educate Muslim women from all walks of life “in the virtues, ethical capacities, and forms of reasoning” prescribed by core religious texts, and thereby to restore the traditional conditions of a pious life. Their goals were traditionalist in this sense, but in pursuit of these goals they took up leadership roles within the mosques that were unprecedented. In effect, the principles of Islamic piety inspired these women to imagine new forms of action for themselves as well as a new (more pious) vision of social order. In this respect, the movement resembles black Freemasonry. The two cases do differ with respect to the content of the principles in play and the degree to which the aims of each group were self-­consciously emancipatory. In contrast to the Freemasons, Mahmood emphasizes that neither the principles nor the ambitions of the Egyptian women were concerned with resisting traditional norms or ways of life in favor of more liberatory ones. On the contrary, the women meant to rehabilitate the very traditionalism that they felt modernization had undercut. Their teachings

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therefore included virtues of submission, deference, and service to one’s husband, among other things, qualities that perpetuate the subordinate status of women in Egyptian society. Mahmood insists that agency can involve inhabiting, even consolidating, traditional norms rather than contesting them.28 She is right to press this point, and her study of the mosque movement constitutes an important corrective to theories that too narrowly equate agency with resistance.29 Sometimes the affirmation of one’s subjective existence in concrete action transpires through existing norms rather than by breaking with them. The imagination enables radical transformations, but it also opens up more modest forms of activity. The content of the principles in play makes a difference to the kinds of worlds we are inspired to imagine. So we should bear in mind that while principle-­driven imagination can be a powerful source of agency among the oppressed, it does not always point the oppressed in emancipatory directions. The imagination can be a source of agency even when the agency it inspires is not explicitly liberatory in the sense of aiming to increase freedom for all. Principles are not alone in inspiring the imagination either; sometimes relations of care do this work. Baldwin reflects regularly on the ways in which the love of particular friends and mentors stimulated in him an ability to see beyond the limits of racial stigma. Their love enabled him to visualize his own value as a person as well as possibilities for his future that exceeded anything the dominant social context was structured to encourage or even allow. Beauford and Miss Anderson, as we have seen, were especially important figures in this regard.30 The letter to his nephew, in which Baldwin speaks directly of love, is clearly intended to have a similar effect, to fuel with love the younger man’s self-­understanding and aspirations. Baldwin emphasizes that the work of care in this sense requires regular reinforcement, as African Americans must continually “struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity.”31 They must use their love to “create in the child” an antidote to the “poison” of racial stigma.32 Baldwin makes it clear that love is not always enough in this regard, but he shows it to be a powerful source of the capacity to imagine oneself and one’s life in ways that transcend the terms of the existing social order. Love has long been a source of imaginative inspiration and transformative action among gay people, of course. In this context, the experience of being in love forces a new perspective on one’s own subjective exis­tence and on the socially defined field of possibilities for acting. Love opens the door to a new way of imagining what one’s world could become. As it functions in this setting, love entails something of the capaciousness that one hears in Baldwin’s use of the word. By “love,” he says, he means not only the

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love of a particular individual “in the personal sense,” but also “a state of being . . . in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”33 Love is “a state of grace” that opens us to doing and becoming more than we could do and be without it, and more than the world as it currently exists could authorize.34 Love can be transformative, then, both for the one who feels it and for the one who receives it. And its transformative potential is tied directly to the way it enables us to imagine our agency beyond the limits of prevailing relations of power and outside the bounds of existing social norms.35 The imagination can be stimulated by affective and corporeal experiences beyond love as well. We saw in chapter 1 that the bodily life of human agency contains seeds of transformative action. Think of the physicalism of agency in Fanon’s account of anticolonial resistance, with its dreams of running, jumping, and climbing, or recall the critical consciousness that can arise from the experience of a body that fails to “materialize” in accordance with prevailing gender norms. Then, too, both norm-­responsiveness and relations of care themselves involve a faculty of reflective feeling in which cognition and embodied affect are integrated. The faculty of imagination that helps generate agency under conditions of domination and oppression has multiple sources. And although imagination helps the individual to rise above the influences of a disabling social order, it would be a mistake to regard the imagination as impervious to this influence. Imagination as it figures in agency is embedded in the very social contexts that it enables us to transcend and sometimes transform. This feature of the imagination is of a piece with the non-­sovereign nature of human agency itself, which while never impervious to conditions of domination and oppression is full of unpredictable vitalities.

Counterpublic Conversation As important as the imagination is, it cannot sustain the agency of the marginalized on its own. Another crucial support is counterpublic conversation. I borrow the language of counterpublics from Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, who define them as scenes of discourse and belonging that allow for communicative exchange but that operate according to norms and shared understandings that are different from (and often subversive of ) those that shape the wider society.36 Counterpublic conversation, as I mean to develop the concept, covers the communicative exchange of sentiments, ideas, and perspectives within such subaltern or alternative communities of mutual understanding. It is a matter of common knowledge that individual

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members of subordinate groups become more effective agents when they band together. The power of numbers is real, especially in explicitly political contexts where a large group mobilized for common purpose can exercise influence on those in charge and affect outcomes in concrete ways. For those who are marginalized by stigma and lack of recognition, the value of association goes beyond the power of numbers, however. It also helps to sustain the link between one’s identity and one’s effects that constitutes agency in the first place. And the value of association in this respect is especially to be found in the conversation it makes possible. Counterpublic conversation enables members of marginalized groups to collectively constitute for themselves some of the conditions of individual agency that are denied them by the wider society. Like imagination, conversation within the group can support agency on both the identity side and the efficacy side. On the identity side, in-­group conversation can help to remediate the often debilitating effects of double consciousness and to reconstitute the distinctive individualities of the oppressed in ways that are less troubled by inner fragmentation and internalized stigma. With respect to efficacy, conversation within the group can rewrite the meaning of action in ways that mitigate the damaging effects of social inequality in much the way that Baldwin’s letter to his nephew attempted to do. Conversation in the associational context of marginalized counterpublics gives rise to localized or partial communities of bearers who can help sustain the efficacy of the oppressed. A couple of caveats are important to bear in mind here. First, conversation within the group does not always or inevitably lead to individual identities and social meanings that are empowering. Sometimes it has the opposite effect, as when (for instance) academic achievement is conceived in racially stigmatized ghetto communities as “acting white” and thus as the betrayal of black identity. Sometimes, too, in-­group conversation works to support the agency of some members of the group in ways that sacri­ fice the agency of others, as when local norms facilitate the enhancement of male agency through the subordination of women. Finally, while conversation within the group can be an effective way to support individual agency among the marginalized, ultimately the conditions of oppression and domination that marginalize certain groups of people within the wider society will need to change if freedom is to become possible for all. Broad and deep transformation will be required, and to achieve this change the conversation will need to extend beyond the group. We shall have more to say about the conditions of transformation in the next section. For now we

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focus on counterpublic conversation as a feature of local or group-­based association, exploring its agency-­enhancing effects even as we keep our eyes open to their limits. Thinking first about the effects that counterpublic conversation can have on the identity dimension of agency, Baldwin is once again instructive. Against the background of double consciousness—­the conflict between who one feels oneself to be and who one knows oneself to be in the eyes of the dominant other—­the more straightforward recognition available to the individual within the black community can be freeing. Baldwin writes along these lines about the church suppers of his youth where we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and we had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.37

Where there is no need to pretend to be what one is not, the inner fragmentation of self that is such a common experience among the marginalized fades. Social inequality means that others are consistently responding to you as if you were someone other than the person you feel yourself to be. It would be nice if we could simply will ourselves to be immune to the effects that others have on us in this regard. The old adage about sticks and stones, meant to inoculate us from such effects, may well offer some protection on the playground against the insults of a bully. The adage also suggests a general principle of great value, namely that you should never believe uncritically what the world tells you about yourself. Yet no flesh and blood human being can remain unmoved by a lifetime of responses from others that repeat the refrain of inferiority and embed it at every level of social interaction, in markers of cultural meaning and value that pervade all aspects of life. We are simply not constituted to be immune to the effects that others have on us. In fact, crucial human functions such as rapid decision-­making under pressure, social cooperation, compassion, love, and even moral judgment depend on our ability to be moved by others in various ways.38 Full immunity is not possible, then, nor would it be desirable. But local associations of solidarity, free of stigma and the demand to be someone other than who one authentically is, can provide relief. Thus the fragmented individual identity that so often accompanies social inequality can be mitigated by a community of others who see one as a distinctive individual rather than as a stigmatized type. It is worth emphasizing

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that the recognition provided within such communities is not recognition of one’s group-­based identity but acknowledgment of one’s distinctive individuality. Indeed, group-­based identities are part of the problem insofar as they make the individual visible only as a type. What matters is that individuals appear to one another in their distinctiveness. For if I am not with my every action being seen through the lens of an identity that is not mine but that I cannot evade, my ability to affirm my subjective existence through my actions is much enhanced. This explains why the memory of church picnics is for Baldwin a memory of freedom—­an experience of agency untroubled by inner fragmentation, nourished by a context of equality and solidarity that makes each individual visible as the unique singularity she authentically is. While agency involves affirming an individual identity that more or less endures over time, the exercise of agency sometimes includes an experience of personal transformation in which certain aspects of the agent’s identity shift in ways that are welcome to her. Counterpublic conversation can support this kind of transformation. Jeffrey Stout’s account of grassroots efforts to organize citizen initiatives in places such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, in the shantytowns of south Texas, and in the Latino neighborhoods of southeast Los Angeles illustrates this dynamic. In each of these places, community organizers have worked to mobilize local people to identify the needs of their neighborhood and then pressure public authorities to address them. House meetings are an important part of the initiatives because they bring people together face-­to-­face, enabling conversation on a small scale and in a relatively informal way. This counterpublic conversation involves the exchange of information, and it allows individuals to see connections between their own particular struggles and those of others. It also helps them place their struggles within a larger context—­for instance, to see that the difficulties that New Orleans residents often had in recovering from Hurricane Katrina were tied to longstanding, racially inflected practices of exploitation and political exclusion. Even more, Stout shows that counterpublic conversation in the form of house meetings is conducive to agency-­ based and agency-­empowering experiences of personal transformation. The story of Carmen Anaya, a local leader in the Texas shantytown movement of the 1980s and 1990s, is a case in point. The shantytowns, known locally as colonias, housed approximately 300,000 people in small, ramshackle communities outside city limits across south Texas from El Paso to Brownsville. Lacking the public services that come with incorporation, the colonias had no water lines, no sewers, and no paved roads, and they were consequently filthy and disease-­ridden.39 Residents were almost entirely Latino/a and very poor, and most were itinerate fieldworkers. Yet over time,

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the movement succeeded in pressuring public officials to bring in basic services, transforming the colonias into livable communities. Carmen Anaya was one of the movement’s most respected and effective leaders, and conversation in the house meetings helped her to get there. Stout describes the effects that this conversation had on Carmen in the following way: Carmen, by engaging in this sort of discussion for the first time, begins to have a sense of herself as a public being, not merely identified with her roles as daughter, mother, and wife. When she speaks, others listen. They are moved by what she says. She is moved by what they say. Someone tells her that she speaks powerfully and wisely. Someone else tells her that she is courageous when she stands up for her family. . . . Now she is receiving an image of herself back from them. Over time, people outside her circle of family members and personal friends not only defer to her judgment, but explain to her what, in their eyes, her story and identity are.40

Carmen gradually comes to see herself as a leader with a new confidence and sense of purpose as she internalizes the faith in herself that her associates have shown. They see her for who she is, but they also see in her things that she does not yet know about herself. Then, too, in the efforts she makes on behalf of the colonias she finds that she is developing new skills and abilities, becoming more as a result of her action than she was before undertaking it. Crucially, however, the new aspects of Carmen that emerge from her action and from the community’s responses to it are compatible with at least some core features of her personal identity, and they are qualities that she can affirm as authentic for her even if they are new.41 In both ways the image of herself that Carmen internalizes differs from the self-­image thrust upon Baldwin by his racist employers and co-­workers in New Jersey. Their understanding of his identity bore no relationship at all to who he authentically was; their racism made it impossible for them to see him as a distinctive individual. And the identity they wanted him to embody—­as submissive and inferior—­was not an identity that he could be at home in. Carmen moves with comparative ease into her new sense of self because although it represents real growth and change, it is also continuous in important ways with who she has known herself to be in the past and with qualities in herself that she values.42 The difference between the two cases reflects the contrast between the social background of racial hierarchy operative for Baldwin and the

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ethos of equality, respect, and solidarity found in the colonias movement. Conversation with others is not likely to generate agency-­affirming personal transformations unless it is free of stigma and bias. When it is free in this sense, counterpublic conversation has the potential to nourish the identity side of individual agency in powerful ways. This potential helps explain why the counterpublic conversation of the marginalized is such an important resource for political mobilization. It also suggests another reason for thinking that the aspiration to immunity from the influence of others is misguided. If our sensitivity to others makes agency vulnerable to social inequality, this same sensitivity means that our agency can be strengthened and enriched by others as well. Consider Michael Warner’s depiction of the “circle of drag queens who came together, from the mid-­fifties to the mid-­sixties, in a New Jersey house they called Casa Susanna.”43 Here the personal transformation effected by one’s action has a far more intentional aspect than what we saw in Carmen’s case. The ladies are self-­consciously trying to enact their identities in new ways. Yet their communicative interactions are a crucial condition of their success. As Warner puts it, the ladies “are doing glamour, which is both a public idiom and an intimate feeling . . . its thrall allows them to experience their bodies in a way not possible without mutual witnessing and display.”44 The counterpublic of Casa Susanna facilitates agency among this group of transvestites by establishing conditions that support the integration of personal identity and enable the affirmation of this identity in action. For someone whose identity feels feminine from the inside but reads masculine to others, the experience of agency is bound to be conflicted. How can you affirm your identity in your deeds if no one can see your identity—­if, in fact, the identity they see is antithetical to the one you feel? You will find yourself constantly having effects on the world that do not feel to you as if they are your own. Casa Susanna is a community of people who see each other as the particular women that each of them feels herself authentically to be. Like Baldwin’s church picnic, this opportunity to be with others as one is helps to sustain agency by ameliorating the experience of a fragmented identity. And like Carmen’s participation in the colonias movement, the ladies’ performances are personally transformative. Each one becomes new to herself in important ways as a result of her embodied improvisations before others. Her action and its reception reflect back to her an identity in which she can finally be at home. In this respect, counterpublics such as Casa Susanna do not simply reflect personal identities formed elsewhere, as Warner says, but

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in conjunction with individual initiative they can actually help to form and transform identities as well.45 Think again about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The protagonist’s role as a speaker for the Communist Party in 1940s’ New York illustrates in a similar way how recognition in the counterpublic context can strengthen the agency of the marginalized, and how this can involve an experience of personal transformation. Recruited by the party for his speaking skills and his black skin, the nameless subject of Ellison’s story finds to his surprise that he comes alive on taking the stage for the first time. Until this moment, he has been an invisible man, unseen as the distinctive individual that he is because his “skin color renders him anonymous and beyond public concern.”46 Now suddenly in the spotlight, speaking to the crowd, telling them his life story, hearing their murmurs of assent and understanding, he becomes visible as an individual for the first time, and in becoming visible he feels himself transformed. “To be looked upon by so many people,” he says, “was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else” (336). He had finally “made contact,” had found “my true people,” a community of others whose experience and understanding were similar enough to his own that they could see him for who he was (342, 346). In the past he had suffered from the disabling internal conflicts of an identity that was riven by racial stigma. If only all the “contradictory voices shouting inside,” he says at one point, “would calm down and sing a song in unison” (259). Early in the novel this feeling of fragmentation is so strong, in fact, that he cannot trust his own sense of who he is. Although he is hardworking, well-­intentioned, capable, and intelligent, his personal identity and his actions are constantly misinterpreted by others, who cannot really see him through the haze of racial stigma. As a result, he regularly affects the world in ways that he cannot understand and that leave him confused about who he is. He speaks longingly about a future time when he might come to “discover who I am.” If that day should arrive, he says, “I’ll be free” (243). When he takes the stage and starts speaking, the inner reconciliation that he was looking for transpires. The audience sees and is moved by him, by the self his words disclose, and they reflect back to him through their responses an image that for the first time confirms rather than denies or distorts his own sense of who he is. The transformation is an experience of becoming “more human” and more agentic (345). “With your eyes on me,” he says, “I feel able to get things done,” and he later reflects that “my possibilities suddenly broadened.”47 The recognition he receives here, which is

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simultaneously reinforcing of who he knows himself to be and transforming of the fractured self he has been in the past, clearly enhances his agency. The communicative exchange in this counterpublic context shores up his sense of self, enables him to act with new efficacy and authority, and gives him a glimpse of the freedom he longs for. Things turn sour not long after this scene takes place. As the novel continues to unfold, Ellison makes us see the contingency and instability of agency under conditions of social inequality. As suddenly as our protagonist’s agency materializes, just as quickly does it dissolve as he comes to realize that he is more invisible to his white comrades in the movement than he thought.48 Once again, he finds himself confused by the deeds that others believe he has done, unsure about the meaning of his own action and even the content of his identity. In the end, the invisible man tastes but never fully achieves his agency, and in this mixed experience we see both the value and the fragility of counterpublic conversation. These sketches are admittedly schematic. They are meant to illustrate how the personal identities that figure in individual agency interact with social context. And they are intended to show that social contexts of equality and solidarity operate differently in this regard than contexts of inequality and alienation. Most of the time, however, social contexts—­including counterpublics—­are a mixed bag, combining elements of solidarity with forms of inequality and bias. The easy authenticity of individual black identities that Baldwin depicts at the church picnics, for instance, must have been limited in some respects for him, given his nontraditional sexual orientation. It is difficult to believe that a gay or bisexual man at a church picnic in the 1940s “had no need to pretend to be” what he was not. Likewise, the transformations of self that local communities of solidarity help to effect can sometimes be painful and disorienting even when they open up liberatory possibilities. Stout presents Carmen’s journey as a relatively smooth one, but he notes that some other women who became similarly empowered through their participation in the colonias movement faced marital dif­ ficulties at home. Their new identities were at odds with key features of their old selves and the terms of their old lives, including their marriages. In effect, the qualities that other movement participants projected back onto them generated fragmentations of identity in their own right, hobbling rather than enhancing these women’s agency. Some dropped out of the movement as a result. We shall have more to say later about the internal dynamics of local associations as they bear on individual agency. For now it is enough to note that the relationship between counterpublic conversation

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and individual agency is not simple or straightforward, and this conversation often affects agency in ways that are mixed. Still, the recognition and transformation generated for marginalized individuals through counterpublic conversation can be vital sources of empowerment. They can help the individual to withstand—­and stand up to—­the misrecognition and failures of social uptake that happen at the level of the larger public.49 Their effects in this regard may be easy to overlook, especially when they are sufficiently subaltern to go unnoticed by the majority.50 As a result, we frequently interpret the actions of notable dissenters in excessively sovereigntist terms. Such people often appear to embody a solitary, bootstrapping capacity for transcendence. Susan B. Anthony is a good example. Her name is frequently invoked to make the point that the individual really can do anything she sets her mind to do: Despite all the nineteenth-­century obstacles to women’s action and achievement, look what she did through the sheer force of her own will! We want very much to believe that she did it herself because if she did it, then we can do it too. Or, more cynically, if she did it herself then they (i.e., those subject to domination and oppression today) can do it too—­and without our help. The sovereignty that we attribute to activists such as Anthony is the sovereignty we desire for ourselves. It is also the sovereignty that, when attributed to others, exculpates us from responsibility for their struggles. As if to confirm our hopes in both regards, Anthony once said that a person who is concerned with freedom “must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”51 Historians of the movement for women’s suffrage know that Anthony was part of a vibrant counterpublic, of course, and that the strength of her agency owed a great deal to that community. A particular resource was the deep bond that Anthony had with her friend and mentor Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The many letters the women exchanged convey just how much they cared about one another’s estimation.52 Stanton clearly saw Anthony for the distinctive individual she was, and consistently urged her on toward the woman she could become, providing the simultaneously reinforcing and transformative recognition that we saw in the counterpublic of Carmen’s colonias movement and in Casa Susana. Anthony could risk being anything or nothing in the world’s estimation because she knew that she was something in the estimation of those who mattered most to her. What looks and sounds like personal sovereignty—­the sovereignty of the heroic individual who alone wills her way to freedom against all odds—­is usually something else.

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This is not to deny that Anthony was heroic. Her courage, vision, and intelligence were extraordinary. She was indeed a heroic individual and she should be an inspiration to us. Nor should we minimize the crucial importance of personal initiative. We have seen already that individual initiative always figures in agency; there can be no agency without it. No one can enact your agency for you, after all. Other people can provide enabling conditions for your agency, and they can obstruct it, but only you can do it. Likewise, a crucial condition of the agency of the oppressed is what one commentator calls the “refusal to accept that others control our fates,” and this refusal surely involves an act of individual will.53 Yet we should pay attention to the multiple sources of activist agency such as Anthony’s, which extend beyond any one person’s individual initiative and will. We should also acknowledge the difference between the real heroic individualism that Anthony embodies and the false ideal of individual sovereignty, which she, like we, could never achieve. Real heroic individualism accepts the non-­ sovereignty of human agency even as it insists on the importance of individual initiative, calls attention to individual vitality, and celebrates individual greatness. For all of us, but perhaps especially for the marginalized, faith in the value of individual effort and a belief in genuine heroic individualism can be empowering, provided that we bear in mind the limits of individual sovereignty. If counterpublic conversation can generate support for the identity dimension of agency, it can also help on the efficacy side. In conjunction with the imagination, it can support agency by providing alternative interpretations of the actions of the marginalized, interpretations that bring the meaning of the action more fully into line with the agent’s own understanding of it. Counterpublics constitute communities of bearers for actions that lack social uptake at the level of the wider public. Casa Susanna is a good example. In the wider society of 1950s America the performances of drag queens were interpreted as perverse, artificial impersonations of females by males, as the antithesis of being oneself. This view is still widely held today. Likewise, male-­to-­female drag continues to be seen as a disavowal and a debasement of masculinity. The background of social meaning against which drag is understood in mainstream society is marked more generally by a binary conception of sex and gender: one is either male or female, with very specific and antithetical dispositions and bodily comportments assigned to each category. Against this background, the deeds of drag queens will consistently generate effects that are at odds with the performers’ own understanding of what they are doing. Far from artificial impersonation, many queens see their performances as embodying the most authentic

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expressions of who they are. Rather than debasing masculinity, many understand their activity as enriching the range of gendered ways of being in the world. The counterpublic conversation within Casa Susanna reads drag in these alternative terms, thereby establishing the conditions of social uptake that sustain the agency of participants. Within this community and against the backdrop of this conversation, the ladies can affirm their subjective existences in their actions. Here they can identify with the effects they have instead of being frustrated and confused by them, for their effects genuinely do manifest who they understand themselves to be. Walker’s account of black Freemasonry displays a similar logic. The lodges provided communities of bearers for the agency of black men in an era in which the wider public was systematically structured to obstruct it. Against a background of social norms that required of black men submission and dependence, those who showed ambition or confidence or initiative were seen as threats to social order, and their actions affected the world in ways that could be dangerous for themselves and those they loved. The Freemasons introduced a new lexicon of meaning for black men’s action. As a result of the counterpublic conversation that happened in the lodges, one’s ambition, confidence, and initiative could be understood by other masons as such, and hence as marks of honor and integrity. Those who made the effort could actually find themselves running a local business, winning social status, gaining political efficacy, and the like. Their agency was sustained by the new fields of meaning constituted by the Freemason counterpublic, a community of others who could help bring this agency to fruition. In a similar way, Cristina Beltrán’s account of the counterpublics that have sustained Latino movements for immigrant rights in the United States in recent years demonstrates the agency-­enhancing effects of alternative backgrounds of meaning. Latinidad contests dominant norms and social understandings that construct the laboring activities of immigrants either as a form of “giving,” where the expectation is that they will submissively work long hours for little pay, or as a form of “taking,” where the perception is that they steal jobs from “real” Americans, drive down wages, and burden taxpayers with their dependency on social services.54 These counterpublics rewrite the meaning of immigrant labor to emphasize the dignity of the worker and the economic contributions of her work. They also create shared spaces where the political action of immigrant men and women can be seen as manifesting “enormous courage” and “heroic excellence.”55 Here again, counterpublic conversation enables members of a marginalized group to affirm their individual identities in their effects in new, agency-­enhancing ways.

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Sometimes the alternative backgrounds of meaning generated by counterpublic conversation are concealed from the view of the wider society, or at least from the dominant group(s). James Scott has written forcefully about the effects that “hidden transcripts” can have on the agency of the oppressed. Hidden transcripts are discursively produced backgrounds of meaning and value that run counter to key elements of the dominant worldview and established power structure. Found mainly in societies marked by high levels of domination and oppression, they are products of individual and collective imagination that reinterpret or “negate the existing social order.”56 Scott explores hidden transcripts in a wide range of contexts, from forest-­ crimes in eighteenth-­century Europe to slavery in the American South to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Hidden transcripts enable the oppressed to reconceive the meaning of their own actions and those of the privileged in ways that contest the meanings articulated by the dominant narrative. Because open contestation in such contexts is dangerous, often deadly, hidden transcripts frequently dissemble, using “codes, dialects, and gestures” that carry double meanings opaque to the dominant (121). The Br’er Rabbit stories told by American slaves are a case in point. “At one level,” Scott says, “these are nothing but innocent stories about animals; at another level they appear to celebrate the cunning wiles and vengeful spirit of the weak as they triumph over the strong” (19). Slaves could “identify with the protagonist, who managed to outwit, ridicule, torture, and destroy his more powerful enemy” (164). They could also interpret their own highly constrained actions and those of their peers in light of the ethos of insurgency that Br’er Rabbit represented. Consider the common slave practice of pilfering, for instance. What was the meaning of the action? Publicly, as Scott points out, “the master’s definition of theft prevailed.” Yet “behind the scenes, theft was seen as simply taking back the product of one’s labor.” When viewed through the lens of the hidden transcript, taking grain or chickens from one’s master was a redemptive assertion of dignity and a defense of justice. It was therefore “encouraged and celebrated.” Against the background of the hidden transcript one could affirm something of one’s identity in the deed of pilfering; one could be an agent. Thus “the discourse of the hidden transcript does not merely shed light on behavior or explain it; it helps constitute that behavior” (188). Hidden transcripts give the actions of subordinate individuals a meaning that is more consonant with their own understanding of their actions than what the dominant narrative allows. They connect the identity and efficacy dimensions of action in ways that support agency.

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While hidden transcripts can enhance the experience of agency among marginalized persons within the counterpublic context, their effects often spill over to sustain the agency of the oppressed in the wider society as well. Walker insists, for example, that the coded meanings and rituals of black Freemasonry were intended not only to enhance agency within the group but also to surreptitiously “assault[] the political sensibilities of the dominant culture.”57 Indeed, the “rituals and language of Freemasonry are a critical mediating matrix in the revolutionary attempt by African Americans to make real the idea of democracy in America.”58 Over time, by encoding the “everyday language” of American public life (the principles of liberty and equality for all) with “multiple social and political meanings” (the inclusion of black men), African American Freemasons were able to assert a new political presence in American democracy.59 Hidden transcripts in this sense can support effective, transformative political action. They are not just “an offstage discourse of the powerless” with effects that are limited to the internal dynamics of subordinate groups, or the experience of agency within the group.60 If their effects were limited in this way, one might reasonably worry that they could turn out to be “a substitute for real resistance.” 61 As both Walker and Scott make clear, however, hidden transcripts often provide a crucial underpinning for political action that is both visible and effective. Along similar lines, Tricia Rose’s account of early hip hop includes a story about the power of hidden transcripts to generate an agency of resis­ tance that breaks into the wider public. The story begins with a 1989 rap song by Boogie Down Productions addressing the issue of police brutality called, “Who Protects Us from You?” FIRE! Come down fast! You were put here to protect us, but who protects us from you? Everytime you say, “that’s illegal,” does it mean that it’s true? [Chorus:] Un hun. Your authority’s never questioned, no one questions you If I hit you, I’ll be killed, if you hit me, I can sue [Chorus:] Order, order!62

The opening cry of “Fire!” is a reference to the “common Rastafarian metaphor for massive social change,” a call for the “total destruction of current social structures” (108). And although the song never refers to the police by name, it calls attention to the abuse of power by police officers that is such

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a familiar part of life for black people, especially (but not only) the urban poor. It poses a potent challenge to the legitimacy of police authority and more generally contests the “public transcript” that equates the police with social order and young black men with criminality. The song was widely understood in the black ghetto at the time as “a hidden text” that embodied “a contemporary discourse about social injustice” (110). Rose observed the power of this hidden transcript to inspire agency one day while walking through a black, working-­class neighborhood in New Haven. A black teenage boy was riding his bicycle in the middle of the street while conversing with a friend who was sitting on the front porch of one of the houses. A police car, driven by a white officer, came slowly down the street. Impeded by the boy on the bicycle, who appeared to be oblivious to the police car, the officer came to a stop and got out of his car. He then went over to the teenager sitting on the porch and angrily demanded identifica­ tion, asking both boys where they lived and why they were on the street. When the boy on the porch asked if it was a crime to stand on his porch, the officer “told him not to answer . . . with a smart mouth if he knew what was good for him” (109). Suddenly, from the street, the boy on the bicycle said, “Who protects us from you?” The officer stopped for a moment and looked up again, hoping we had gone away, I imagined. The boy repeated himself, this time a bit louder: “Who protects us from you?” The words rang out like a communal protest; I could sense the tables being turned on the officer. His consensual authority slipping, he told the boy to watch his step, returned to his vehicle, and sped off. (110)

The words of the song, which at the time had “significant weight and communal resonance,” were “part of a hidden transcript that was used as a means to destabilize the police officer’s performance of mastery” (110). That transcript reconfigured the meaning of the officer’s action, revealing it to be a simple exercise of domination, devoid of legitimacy. Against this reconceived background of social meaning, the agency of the officer lost its power and the agency of the boy on the bicycle was enhanced. It made the boy’s act of speaking up intelligible to all as something more than mouthing off, as an instance of political agency, a defense of justice and freedom. His power to disarm the officer and end the harassment was tied directly to the meaning that the hidden transcript gave to both their actions. Moments such as this one, in which a hidden transcript suddenly bursts onto the public stage in a way that challenges the abuse of power openly, can be transformative for both the individual who makes the declaration

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and those who witness it. Changes in the background of social meaning that enhance the efficacy side of individual agency can affect the identity dimension of agency as well. Scott documents the “enormous impact” that “the first public declaration of the hidden transcript” typically “has on the person (or persons) who makes the declaration” as well as on the audience (206). As an example, he mentions “the revolution of the soul” that many participants in the Polish Solidarity movement felt when a strike broke out at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980. He quotes Timothy Garton Ash, who documented the uprising in The Polish Revolution: To appreciate the quality of this “revolution of the soul” one must know that for thirty years most Poles had lived a double life. They grew up with two codes of behavior, two languages—­the public and the private—­two histories—­the official and the unofficial. From their schooldays they learned not only to conceal in public their private opinions but also to parrot another set of opinions prescribed by the ruling ideology. . . . The end of this double life was a profound psychological gain for countless individuals . . . Being able to speak the truth in public was part of that sense of recovered dignity.63

Scott is right to emphasize that the public articulation of hidden transcripts can have a healing effect on the psychological fragmentation of the subordinate and oppressed, particularly when it is taken up by a local community of bearers. Hidden transcripts embody aspects of our identities that have been suppressed or shut out by domination and oppression. To voice them is to finally bring these aspects of ourselves into the world, to affirm them concretely in our actions. As such, the articulation of hidden transcripts enables us to act from our full subjectivity rather than just a part of it, and hence to overcome the inner dividedness that is so common in contexts of systematic social inequality—­and, as the Polish example illustrates, totalitarianism as well. And since agency consists in the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world, personal transformations of this sort will be agency enhancing. It is no surprise, then, that the healing of such inner rifts is often experienced as a liberation. Even as we acknowledge the value of counterpublic conversation, however, it is important to be explicit about the ways that social inequalities within counterpublics can enhance the agency of some members at the expense of the agency of others. Walker’s account of black Freemasonry, for instance, is emphatically a story about male, not female, agency. In fact, Walker shows clearly that “the cultural politics of masculinity” that was so central to nourishing the agency of black men within the movement “projected a

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pejorative and, at times, an oppressive ideology of black femininity.”64 The Freemasons cultivated an ethos in which “the black male body as capital producer for the household also served as the primary representative of the family to a wider public.”65 As black men became agents, black women were made increasingly dependent and enclosed. Indeed, women’s dependence and enclosure were conceived (however implicitly) as the conditions for the redemption of men’s agency. There was nothing distinctive about black Freemasonry in this regard, of course. It merely reproduced a dynamic pervasive in the dominant white society. Rose makes a similar point about hip hop, which too often ties the agency of men to the debasement and control of women. The male rapper is more agentic the more “hoes” and “bitches” he has kneeling before his crotch. Tales of sexual domination, she says, “falsely relieve” for male ghetto youth “their lack of self-­worth and limited access to economic and social markers for heterosexual masculine power.”66 Yet the idea that men can gain agency by dominating women is in no way original to hip hop or the black community. Rose makes no apologies for the deep and pervasive sexism in hip hop, but she is quite rightly “skeptical of the strategic deployment of outrage” about rappers in this regard.67 It is not as if black “rappers have infected an otherwise sexism-­free society” with the domination of women. On the contrary, the domination of women suggests itself as a mechanism for the assertion of black male agency precisely because it is so thoroughly engrained in the wider culture. So while counterpublics can provide respite from the social inequalities that permeate the wider society, they can also reproduce these inequalities. They may generate new ones of their own as well. Think of Fanon’s colonized subjects who wish not only to be free of the domination imposed on them by the colonizers but to dominate their former masters for themselves, to redirect rather than eradicate the abuse of power. To the extent that counterpublics equate agency with sovereignty, they will be particularly vulnerable to such abuses. To sustain individual agency reliably they need to be guided by norms of reciprocity both internally and in their relations with other counterpublics. It is also worth noting that the same counterpublic conversation that can be a source of individual agency among the marginalized within the group also can work to inhibit the individual’s agency outside the group. Loïc Wacquant’s study of “advanced marginality” in contemporary American and French ghettos calls attention to “the pressure toward social uniformity which weighs on those who try to rise above the poverty level common to most people in their area.”68 The felt need to sustain tight bonds of solidarity

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as protection against the indignities and injustices of a hostile society can generate excessively restrictive internal norms. Then, too, marginalized individuals who succeed by the standards of the dominant culture (economically or otherwise) can appear to have abandoned the group, and their success can have the effect of highlighting the perceived inferiority of others in the group. One influential study of white working-­class men in the United States illustrates this dynamic well. The study found that a “sense of working-­class solidarity” among American laborers in the 1960s and 1970s provided grounds for “the respect as equals that workingmen may not get from those who command them.” At the same time, however, the desire to maintain the “feeling of fraternity” with one’s class associates can impede the individual’s efforts to achieve and to extend her sphere of activity beyond the bounds of the group. “Being competent and so earning acceptance from above,” it turns out, can mean “a person risks losing acceptance from those around him.”69 This danger will be especially strongly felt among those for whom the counterpublic has been the one reliable source of recognition and support. We have already mentioned the norm against academic achievement among many ghetto students, where studying hard is seen as “acting white,” a rejection of black identity that severs one’s solidaristic ties to the community. Counterpublic conversation can help make the distinctive individualities of persons visible in ways that are precluded by the wider society, but it can also foster a conformism that threatens to overwhelm individual distinctiveness within the group. This dynamic can not only inhibit the exercise of agency in a wider field but also complicate the very sense of oneself as an agent. Consider the case of George O’Mora, interviewed soon after being promoted from the job of hammering railroad ties to polishing floors at the company where he worked. The interview reveals that on one level he is proud of having landed the better job, which he believes he got “because he is a diligent worker.” On another level, however, he believes “his success to be something that happened to him, that his ability there exists at arm’s length.” This sense of fatalism and passivity allows him to reconcile his individual success with the demands of group solidarity. Denying his own efficacy helps him to maintain a “feeling of fraternity with his co-­workers” and avoid the appearance of “desertion.”70 Yet it comes at a cost, for even a partially pervasive fatalism can hinder the individual initiative and imagination that are so crucial to the agency of the oppressed, and it can make the distinctive identity of the individual disappear into the collective identity of the group. The group solidarity that is generated and sustained through counterpublic conversation can make trouble for agency as well as enliven it.

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So the relationship between counterpublic conversation and individual agency is not a simple one. Counterpublic conversation, like imagination, can enhance agency on both the identity side and the efficacy side. With respect to the recognition of individual identities as well as the reinterpretation of social meaning, counterpublic conversation often overlaps with the imagination. For it is often the imagination of the marginalized that enables them to revalue identities that the wider society disparages or fails to see. Likewise, imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of the hidden transcripts through which the meaning of action is reconceived so as to enhance its efficacy. Together, imagination and counterpublic conversation can be tremendously empowering for the agency of the marginalized. Yet on their own they cannot accomplish all that the full flourishing of agency requires, at least where systematic social inequality persists in the wider society. To achieve the full flourishing of individual agency a broader set of transformations is needed.

Social Transformation The American civil rights movement offers perhaps the classic illustration of how individual imagination and counterpublic conversation can help to generate agency among people who have been systematically dominated and oppressed. It shows that agency can arise and gain potency even in the face of ostensibly disabling inequalities of power. The movement for civil rights also reminds us of the importance of large-­scale social change, however. It was not enough that the movement enabled agency for African Americans internally through the in-­group community of bearers it made available. Ultimately, it also had to reconstitute the dominant norms that structured American society so as to make the wider public a receptive field for the action of African American citizens. This involved legal changes such as the end of officially sanctioned Jim Crow practices and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It also required efforts to dismantle the ethos of racial stigma that renders black people invisible as distinctive individuals and that can give rise to the inner fragmentation of double consciousness. The latter changes, of course, remain incomplete. The point is that unless the wider society that is the source of domination and oppression changes, the respite that marginalized individuals find in counterpublic communities will be inadequate to fully sustain their agency. Likewise, while the agency that marginalized individuals sometimes experience in the activity of political resistance can be tremendously valuable, it is not nearly enough. In a free society, the experience of affirming one’s

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subjective existence through concrete action in the world must be available to all, and available as a regular part of everyday life not just in exceptional moments of heroic opposition. A polity committed to liberty and justice for all must establish the conditions that make the exercise of agency common rather than exceptional. For any society that still harbors residual domination and oppression, including our own, this will require widespread transformation. A full theory of social transformation is beyond the scope of this proj­ ect but one thing is for certain: Widespread social transformation typically proceeds in fits and starts, its trajectory eludes control, and its outcomes are never guaranteed. Think about the gay rights movement, for example. In the 1950s and early 1960s, groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis began to constitute subaltern counterpublics of gay men and lesbians that provided some of the same agency-­enhancing resources that Baldwin recalled from the church picnics of his youth, but in a much more constrained—­in fact, secret and illegal—­context. By the 1970s gay counterpublics in New York City and San Francisco were beginning to develop an infrastructure in the form of gay neighborhoods, gay bars and bath houses, gay bookstores and newspapers, and eventually gay health centers, which brought them into more direct contact with the wider public. When the AIDS crisis exploded in the 1980s it forced many individuals and in some ways the gay community as a whole out of the closet. AIDS took a terrible toll, but it was the catalyst for social changes that turned out to be far more fruitful and more extensive than anyone at the time anticipated. Ironically, AIDS was the beginning of the humanization of homosexuals in mainstream American life, a shift that has been crucial to the progress of gay rights more broadly since the early 1990s but that no one could have predicted. Like other large-­scale social transformations, progress toward equality for gay people has involved the effort to create increasingly comprehensive communities of bearers. This change transpires in large part through the mediation of activists, who bring the hidden transcripts of the oppressed into conversation with the public transcripts of the wider society.71 This work is a matter of translation to some extent, articulating the perspectives, concerns, and demands of the marginalized in language that is intelligible and persuasive in light of dominant norms and publicly shared principles of right. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” is a classic example of this kind of translation, making the case for black liberation through appeals to “the American dream,” as well as “our Judeo-­Christian heritage” and the principles enunciated by the Declaration of Independence.72

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Or consider the AIDS quilt, one of the most powerful instruments of social change ever to grace—­and transform—­the stage of American public life. It made many, many people empathize with the losses that gay men and their families and friends were experiencing. And far more than just eliciting pity, the quilt had the effect of making viewers feel the dignity, the humanity, and the distinctive individuality of the men whose lives and love were stitched into those scraps of cloth. It was impossible to see the quilt and not be moved. Quilts are old-­fashioned emblems of domesticity and warmth, of course, and they call to mind comforting images of the American heartland. The AIDS quilt played to this iconography. Its hand-­stitched, homemade quality drew people in with the familiarity of its form, and its simple authenticity gave it socially transformative power without being threatening. Then, too, its concrete messages of remembrance established a palpable link between the particular experiences of individual gay men and the universal human experiences of love and loss. In effect, the quilt created an emotional-­cognitive landscape that bridged the divide between the marginalized and the privileged, between counterpublic and public. It stood, like any effective social activist, with one foot in the world of the Other and one foot in the world defined by the majority.73 The act of translation in such contexts typically involves transformation as well. The inclusion of African Americans in the polity as political equals through the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow meant a real change even if it did not bring an end to all racial inequality. Likewise, although gay marriage arguments often appeal to traditional values, the extension of marriage rights to gay people changes the social practice of marriage in ways that are not negligible, especially when compared with highly traditionalist conceptions. These changes are healthy ones insofar as they cut against the rigid, gender-­based patterns of domination and oppression intrinsic to many traditionalist conceptions of marriage, but they are real nonetheless. Social transformation happens when those on the outside appeal for inclusion on the basis of principles that are themselves both inside and outside the dominant norms, and when the process of including previously marginalized people changes what it means to be on the inside. To the extent that social transformation involves changing the terrain that counts as “inside,” the process of inclusion it entails is not reducible to a one-­sided assimilation of the marginalized to dominant norms. Yet if the back-­and-­forth of effective activism avoids a simple assimilationism, it may still be vulnerable to the pull of a more general homogeneity. The worry here is that the conditions of mutual understanding that sustain the social uptake of action and make it effective may undercut plurality and

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difference. There is a certain irony here. Recall that prejudice and bias render the distinctive individuality of oppressed persons invisible because the fog of social stigma obscures it. By eradicating such inequality we make it possible to see one another as individuals and to understand and take up one another’s actions in terms of the distinctive individualities that the actions affirm. This shift thus opens the door to more plurality and diversity. Yet what it takes to overcome inequality is typically the cultivation of a sense of commonality. We transcend racism, for example, by abandoning the notion that differences of skin tone are morally significant, by looking past these differences to focus on our common humanity, or our common citizenship, or our common profession, or whatever. When we stop seeing the individual as one of them and start seeing her as one of us we can begin to see her for who she is instead of seeing her in terms of the stigmatized stereotypes that characterize her group. So part of being able to see the individual in all her distinctiveness is being able to see her as belonging to a common whole. Yet seeing her as belonging to the common whole risks eradicating what is different and distinctive about her. The irony is that sharing in a common identity seems to be a condition of becoming visible as a distinctive individual. This is the complaint that many LGBTQ people have pressed about the gay marriage initiative. Does it win equality at the price of diversity? Does it suggest that the only way for gay people to gain dignity and achieve equal status is to acquiesce to a heteronormative standard? Must I look like everyone else to be visible at all? Another way to frame this dilemma is to ask whether the conditions of mutual understanding needed to sustain agency for all can be met in genuinely pluralistic societies that are marked by diverse identities and conflicting values. How much understanding is required? What kind of commonality is needed? It would be impossible to specify once and for all what we need to understand or hold in common in order to sustain individual agency in ways that are mutually nourishing. Times change. The circumstances of our individual and collective lives shift. Such changes open up new possibilities for agency and sometimes shut down older ones, and they regularly bring previously unrecognized identities to the fore. These shifts call for new forms of social understanding to support the agency of differently positioned individuals. For example, when the birth control pill made contraception easy and effective in the 1960s, the range of possible trajectories for individual agency among women exploded because the technological innovation of the pill established a material condition for women’s economic independence. Yet the invention of the pill was not by itself sufficient to sustain new forms

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of agency for women. Once this new material condition arose, the terms of women’s agency had to be reconceived at the level of society and culture. Now it became evident that there were new conditions of social understanding that had to be met in order for women to be able to make good on the possibilities that the pill opened up. Society had to stop seeing women as being by nature incapable of functioning effectively in nondomestic contexts if women’s action in these contexts were to have any hope of coming to fruition. Defenders of women’s equality existed before the invention of the pill, of course. But the pill made visible with special force the need for a new community of bearers who could take up on a large scale the nondomestic agency of women in ways that allowed it to be effective. Similarly, the rise of globalization and the concomitant migration of people across borders in recent years has made new forms of cross-­cultural social understanding necessary to the exercise of agency in our time. In earlier eras, when populations were less mobile and citizens more often shared a common culture, the background meanings against which individual action was interpreted were well established. Under the new conditions of multiculturalism, these background meanings now need to be consciously cultivated and negotiated in order to sustain agency reliably among diverse persons. The need for this new understanding follows historical changes in global economic relations, technological advances, political shifts, and so on. No one could have known in advance of these changes what new understandings would eventually become necessary. We become aware of them only as conditions change, and only by listening to what others tell us about their experience and about how the limits of our collective understanding inhibit the exercise of their individual agency. If we can never be sure what will happen next, and hence cannot predict what specific understandings agency may require in the future, there are nevertheless a few things we can affirm with confidence. They answer in a general way the question of what kind of commonality individual agency requires and hence what sorts of social transformation may be needed. Above all, we must cultivate reciprocity in our interactions with one another. We have seen that agency is undercut by prejudice and stigma, which generate fragmentations of individual identity and make the distinctive individuality of persons disappear from view. Social inequality also disrupts communication about the meaning of action in ways that make it difficult or impossible for marginalized individuals to effectively affirm their identities in their deeds. Agency therefore needs a social context that is free of inequality in these forms. Reciprocity is key.

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As a support for non-­sovereign agency, reciprocity refers in part to the mutual exchange of recognition, with an emphasis on the recognition of individual identities rather than group identities. This emphasis on the distinctive identities of individuals distinguishes the recognition involved in reciprocity from that associated with the old politics of recognition.74 The latter argues for the value of group-­based collective identities and for establishing institutional protections in politics that guarantee the survival and integrity of particular groups. The non-­sovereign view of agency does not necessarily oppose the politics of recognition but it should give us pause about reifying group-­based identities. Looking at one another through the lens of group identities too often makes it impossible for us to see one another’s distinctive individuality. Seeing this individuality is a necessary condition of the social uptake that helps bring individual agency to fruition. The old politics of recognition therefore may tend to exacerbate rather than remediate the failures of individual agency that concern us here. The recognition involved in reciprocity as a support for non-­sovereign agency is therefore focused on the distinctive identities of individuals. It implies a stance of equal respect such that each individual is presumed to be an end in herself, to have moral standing, to be a member of the social order entitled to have her identity and her concerns count with others. Reciprocity does not require us to satisfy the concerns of others in every case, or to positively endorse the value of their identities. Sometimes we will have principled reasons to reject the concerns of others or disapprove certain aspects of who they are. Reciprocity is not the same thing as the blind acceptance of others. What reciprocity requires is that in our interactions with other people we approach them with open minds and hearts. It asks us to lift the veil of stigmas and stereotypes and look in good faith for the individuals beneath. Reciprocity means trying to understand other people and their actions as they themselves experience them. Communication is crucial here. Reciprocity is a regulative ideal but it is also a communicative practice. We cannot hope to see and understand one another, and we will never be the effective bearers of one another’s actions, if we are not in conversation together. Conversation broadly conceived includes more than just face-­to-­face discussion; it also covers the whole range of political, cultural, and social expressions through which we convey who we are and how we understand what we are doing. Movies, books, television, blogs, YouTube videos, political speeches, public debates, plays, dance, and art can all be forms of conversation in this sense. They help us to know each other better. They are also the vehicles through which we collectively

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constitute the backgrounds of social meaning against which everyone’s actions are interpreted. The communicative practices that constitute reciprocity in this respect are regularly conflictual and contestatory. We learn about others and ourselves partly through our disagreements and the challenges we pose to one another’s ways of life. In a pluralistic society the background of social understanding will regularly reflect residual disagreements, and it will always be subject to revision. Reciprocity does not require perfect unity any more than it demands blind acceptance of others, yet as a communicative practice it does make us open to one another in the ways we must be for agency to be available to all of us. So the commonality that matters as the basic condition of individual agency is the commonality of reciprocity. To exercise reciprocity we must learn to see each other as being at once similar (in view of our equal moral standing) and different (in view of our distinctive individualities). In one sense, this dual orientation toward others is challenging because it involves inhabiting two different perspectives simultaneously. Yet nothing could be more familiar than just this duality. We are constantly engaged in interacting with others on multiple levels. Beginning with our earliest experiences as members of families, we see that we are like our siblings and parents—­ with shared experiences and common orientations, each having standing as a member of the whole—­but we also know that each of us is unique and not reducible to anyone else in the family. The ability to see and engage others as simultaneously common and individuated, alike and different, permeates our experiences as friends, lovers, neighbors, colleagues, and citizens. It is by no means out of our reach. It requires effort to do it well, especially when the others in play are at some distance, whether separated by geography or culture or the effects of social inequality. But we can certainly do it, and we are obligated to try. The communicative practice of reciprocity facilitates understanding across difference, but even when we are trying hard and even when our vision is not clouded by prejudice, we may sometimes fail to achieve the mutual understanding needed to sustain individual agency in the fullest way for everyone. Despite our best efforts, we sometimes remain opaque to one another and even to ourselves in ways that disrupt agency. This is an inevitable fact of the human condition of plurality, and it means that individual agency is always subject to contingency and vulnerable to failure, as we have seen. Random failures of agency are unfortunate for the individuals involved but they are not concerns of justice. Only when agency fails as a result of systematic and unfair inequalities of power does justice come into

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play. Reciprocity can alleviate systematic failures of this sort even if it cannot guarantee the perfect achievement of agency in every last instance. Sometimes reciprocity will enable us to understand identities and actions that we come to realize we have reason to disapprove. Reciprocity requires me to hear out the white supremacist, for instance, but justice demands that I reject his view. And while his agency depends on others understanding his action in light of his identity (and the values that help constitute it), justice in this instance requires the restriction rather than the instantiation of his agency, at least insofar as the exercise of his agency would bring harm to others. So the commonality that reciprocity requires is compatible with individual distinctiveness, and it allows us to make discriminating moral and political judgments. Social transformation that aims at achieving the conditions of agency for everyone will therefore emphasize reciprocity. It will require the formal institutional changes needed to eradicate systematic inequality but it will also depend on the widespread cultivation of reciprocity as an ethos of citizenship and a practice of communicative engagement. In exploring the dynamics of agency at the margins, we have seen that agency can be potent against all odds, and we have uncovered some of its sources in imagination and counterpublic conversation. A non-­sovereign view of human agency thus can be realistic about the deep vulnerabilities that social inequality generates for agency without ending in fatalism or a socially deterministic view of individual action. But neither does it simply equate agency with political resistance or social activism. The agency of the marginalized takes many forms. As Scott so powerfully demonstrates, we must recognize that “most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these polar opposites.”75 When we know where and how to look, whole worlds of individual agency open up before our eyes in the partial publics of subaltern communities. At the same time, it would be a terrible mistake to think that the resilient agency of marginalized individuals made possible by imagination and counterpublic conversation is tantamount to the freedom that liberal democracy promises to all. Rose’s meditation on the significance of chitterlings in Hip Hop Wars comes to mind here. An African American soul food tradition dating from slavery times, chitterlings, turn “pig guts into a grassroots delicacy.”76 They symbolize “black people’s resilience, tradition, and creativity” in the face of extreme deprivation for it took “a deft culinary skill” to make scraps such as animal intestines edible, and it showed a kind

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of tenacity and genius that “should be lauded and honored.”77 Yet we must never lose sight of the background of deprivation that chitterlings also represent. Ultimately, we need to avoid getting so caught up in celebrating the ability to create under limiting conditions that this context becomes an acceptable norm, a black badge of honor. . . . What would the genius of black creativity produce with normal levels of social resources, with less social starvation, and without high levels of violence and incarceration? Shouldn’t we demand more than the intestines of society, no matter how creative we have been with them?78

However admirable and important the exercise of subaltern forms of agency may be, without wide-­ranging social transformation that undoes the conditions of domination and oppression, subaltern agency will never be enough. Where domination and oppression exist, social transformation is needed to establish the general conditions of freedom that enable agency for all. In this respect, the vitalities of human agency under conditions of inequality point beyond themselves to something larger, to the need for freedom as the full constellation of conditions that support agency at the level of society as a whole. But what exactly are these conditions? What does the theory of non-­sovereign agency mean for freedom? What is non-­sovereign freedom?

Four

What Is Freedom?

If agency is the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world, political freedom comprises the set of interpersonal conditions that make this affirming action possible. To be free in this sense is to be able to exercise one’s agency, to live among others in such a way that the possibility of affirming one’s identity in one’s deeds is generally open, or not systematically foreclosed. Although agency and freedom are closely linked, they are not identical. One can exercise agency, for instance, without being fully free in the sense of enjoying all the various conditions that enable agency. As we saw in chapter 3, the agency of the marginalized can be a powerful experience that has a forceful impact on the world. In the complete absence of freedom in every form, of course, little agency would be possible. Yet we are sometimes able to affirm aspects of our identities in our deeds even in the presence of social structures that are oppressive or persons who are dominating. And as we shall see in chapter 5, it is often the case that even where freedom in one form is unavailable, freedom in other forms is present, if not at the level of society as a whole then in localized communities of solidarity. If it is possible to exercise agency without being fully free, it is also possible to be free without exercising agency. So long as the enabling conditions of agency are present, one is free, and some of these enabling conditions require no action on the part of the individual. By contrast, agency, unlike freedom in most forms, always involves action. Another distinction between agency and political freedom has to do with the special role that human beings play in obstructing or compromising freedom, which has no parallel in the case of agency. From the standpoint of agency, it matters not at all whether an obstacle to the affirmation of my identity in my deeds is generated by human hands or by natural causes. If I am trying to get to the other side of the mountain, a rockslide

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that blocks the only road will interrupt my agency just as much as a military checkpoint that forces me to turn back. Both prevent the affirmation of my identity in my deeds—­in this case the realization of my intention to cross the mountain. For political freedom to be at stake, however, human beings must be involved. The requirement that obstructions of agency must come from human sources rather than natural causes if they are to count as violations of freedom is a reasonable one. Political freedom—­like politics itself—­is a function of interpersonal relationships and intersubjective practices. Moreover, doing what we can to protect and promote the freedom of others is a duty of democratic citizenship. To treat every naturally caused obstruction of human agency as a violation of freedom would obligate us to far too much. It would make us responsible for ameliorating conditions that human beings can do nothing about. So we are right to think that violations of freedom must be carried out by human hands to count as such, and freedom will come apart from agency in this respect as well.1 Conflating freedom with agency may lead us to overlook or discount instances of agency that arise under conditions in which freedom is only incompletely established. When we equate the two we run the risk of assuming that those who lack freedom must also lack agency, implying that the dominated and oppressed are simply helpless victims. Paradoxically, the identification of agency with freedom also can make us overly sanguine about the agency of the marginalized. If we observe indicators of agency among them, and if we equate agency with freedom, we may come to believe that people can be free under any circumstances or that they are always free to rise above their circumstances. This familiar philosophy of the bootstrap does as great a disservice to the marginalized as treating them like helpless victims. We cannot hope to understand the subtle dynamics of marginality and emancipation without grasping how freedom and agency are simultaneously connected and distinct. As the constellation of conditions that sustain human agency, freedom in the most general sense has both interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions. Here we are especially concerned with the interpersonal dimensions of freedom because they are of greatest interest from the standpoint of politics. Political freedom has to do with how power is organized and exercised by human beings, and how persons interact with and affect each other. It involves intersubjective relations rather than merely psychological functions. It is true that political freedom in its various forms sometimes has intrapersonal dimensions too, as we shall see. So it would be wrong to think that it is exclusively a matter of institutions and practices that are entirely external to the individual, that our inner lives have no bearing on the intersubjective

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relations that constitute political freedom. Still, the language of freedom is sometimes applied to strictly psychological and spiritual conditions that are beyond the scope of our study here, and I leave those investigations to others. The idea that freedom consists in the enabling conditions of human agency points in multiple directions because these conditions are diverse. This chapter examines three views of freedom that are highly influential in political theory today: freedom as non-­interference, freedom as non-­ domination, and freedom as collective world-­making. In addition to these three I develop an ideal of freedom as non-­oppression, and I show what it adds and why it matters. The purpose of the chapter is not so much to offer an exhaustive treatment of political freedom in every conceivable form as to identify several especially important accounts and explore their value and their limitations in light of the non-­sovereign model of individual agency developed so far. Each view tells us something important about freedom even if none of them tells us everything we need to know. Freedom takes multiple forms because the enabling conditions of agency are diverse. More­ over, freedom, like agency, is more a scaler phenomenon than a binary one. We can be more and less free, and free in different ways, depending on which enabling conditions are present and on how deeply and widely entrenched in society they are. In chapter 5, I explore how the different forms of freedom relate to one another, sketching a theory of plural freedom that responds to the richly layered life of non-­sovereign agency.

Freedom as Non-­interference Isaiah Berlin’s defense of “negative liberty” as non-­interference set the terms for liberal theorizing about freedom for more than a generation. It captures what is still a dominant strand of liberal thinking about freedom, particularly among those of us who are committed to normative individualism as a core principle of politics. Freedom as non-­interference refers to “the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.”2 It covers protections against intentional interference by public authorities and by other individuals and groups.3 Berlin distinguishes negative liberty from what he calls “positive liberty,” conceived as “self-­mastery,” including collective self-­ rule in politics, and at the personal level an ideal of autonomy according to which reason rules over other parts of the self. As against positive liberty, negative liberty has no implications for who should rule or how one should make use of the protected sphere of personal choice and control that non-­ interference makes possible.

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The protection of personal choice is the raison d’être of freedom as non-­ interference. The capacity to choose rather than be chosen for is “what makes human beings human,” according to Berlin, and the exercise of individual will is the “human essence.”4 Berlin does acknowledge that individuals “are not, and cannot expect to be, wholly self-­sufficient or socially omnipotent.”5 Living in society, he says, “everything that I do affects, and is affected by, what others do.”6 Yet ultimately, each of us is by nature an “independent source of human activity, . . . an entity with a will of its own,” and the exercise of this will in the form of unobstructed choice and control is what freedom as non-­interference is meant to facilitate.7 Although Berlin favors negative liberty over positive liberty in “Two Concepts” and is known for his trenchant critique of the latter, he did emphasize that negative liberty could also be put to ill use. The “belief in negative freedom,” he acknowledged, “is compatible with, and (so far as ideas influence conduct) has played its part in, generating lasting social evils.”8 He had in mind, he said, “the bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition.”9 On the whole, however, he regarded positive liberty as being somewhat more vulnerable to appropriation by despots than negative liberty was. And he insisted that as an historical matter the language of positive liberty was “a rising force” in the world at the time in a way that “liberal ultra-­individualism” was not.10 Hence he saw “a greater need . . . to expose the aberrations of positive liberty than those of its negative brother.”11 Still, Berlin’s view of freedom was more balanced vis-­à-­vis the privileging of negative liberty than is often thought.12 To his credit, too, Berlin remarked on the difficulty of reconciling “our knowledge that men are free agents” with the fact that no agents are immune to the pressures of unchosen social and material forces.13 As he put it, “the notion of uncaused choice as something out of the blue is certainly not satisfactory”—­no more so than is a notion of strict determinism.14 So even as Berlin defended negative liberty with its core commitment to a sovereigntist ideal of individual control, he was “aware of how much more needs to be done” to make sense conceptually of human agency as simultaneously robust and constrained.15 The “solution” to the dilemma, he said, would require “a set of new conceptual tools, a break with traditional terminology,” even “a new model” of human action altogether.16 Berlin was right to think that new conceptual tools and a new model of human action were needed if progress were to be made in understanding freedom and instantiating it. They are still needed today. Berlin himself never undertook this work, and on balance his theory of freedom (both as negative liberty and as positive

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liberty) does more to extend than reform traditional liberal assumptions about human agency as sovereignty. Negative liberty, or freedom as non-­interference, enables agency by providing opportunities for action. Berlin emphasizes that freedom includes only “the opportunity to act, not the action itself.”17 What matters from the standpoint of freedom is that doors be open to me, so to speak; whether or not I actually walk through these doors is irrelevant. Berlin’s insistence on this point reflects a legitimate concern. He worries that defining freedom in terms of the exercise of action rather than the opportunity for action risks confusing freedom with other goods. If apathetic neglect prevents me from taking up the opportunities before me, for example, then I am bound to live a limited life. Although it would surely be better for me to live “a more vigorous and generous life” in which I made good on all my opportunities, a more vigorous and generous life is not the same thing as a more free life.18 To run them together is a “conflation of two values” that are analytically distinct.19 Berlin is right to remind us that not all good things are freedom.20 Freedom has to do only with enabling individual agency not with achieving the best human life. Still, to characterize freedom strictly as an “opportunity concept” as opposed to an “exercise concept” is problematic once the non-­sovereignty of human agency is understood.21 Consider again the metaphor of freedom as an open door. Berlin’s free agent, poised in that doorway, already has what he needs to walk through it because his agency is a naturally occurring, internal property located in his individual will. If I carry my agency inside me, then every open door is indeed the opportunity that Berlin conceives it to be. If instead agency is socially distributed, then these opportunities will be only imaginary, at least for those who are on the losing end of social inequality. For an open door will only constitute an opportunity to act if there are bearers for one’s action on the other side, people whose understanding of the action and responses to it help sustain its efficacy. It is one thing if I have the capacity to walk through the door but fail to do so because of some character-­based (or other) weakness on my own part. It is something else entirely if I lack the capacity to walk through the door because entrenched patterns of inequality make it impossible for others to see my distinctive identity and understand my action in ways that are true to who I am. In such cases my action will lack efficacy and my agency will fall flat even without anyone having interfered with it. Think again of Baldwin’s experience in New Jersey, or the difficulties that women so often face in exercising public authority. The failures of social

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uptake that result from systematic inequality and disable agency are not adequately captured by Berlin’s conception of interference. They pose a different kind of problem for freedom, a problem that results from the socially distributed nature of individual agency. Where agency is conceived strictly as a function of individual will, this problem never arises—­or rather, the problem remains invisible. My point here is not that all freedom should be understood as an exercise concept as opposed to an opportunity concept, at least as these terms are generally used. The point is that agency’s non-­ sovereignty makes the opportunity to act a more complex condition than Berlin’s ideal of negative liberty acknowledges. In a similar way, Berlin is wrong to dismiss the role that recognition plays in sustaining freedom. The fact that marginalized people seeking recognition often use the language of freedom in making their claims is not a simple category mistake on their part, as he claims it to be.22 The use of freedom language in these contexts reflects a felt understanding (however inchoate) of the socially distributed nature of individual agency and ultimately of freedom. Yet we should be clear about the kind of recognition that matters here. Berlin characterizes the quest for recognition as a desire “for union, closer understanding, integration of interests, a life of common dependence and common sacrifice.”23 The kind of recognition required to sustain non-­ sovereign agency and individual freedom does call for closer understanding but it is compatible with much more diverse and individualistic purposes than Berlin suggests. As we have seen, the role that recognition plays in sustaining individual agency is not primarily a matter of instantiating respect for group-­based identities or fostering collective belonging. It differs from Berlin’s understanding of recognition as much as from the old politics of recognition in this regard. Both conceived recognition as a matter of valuing particular identity groups, shoring them up, and honoring the individual’s deep identification with the group.24 Recognition operates quite differently on the non-­ sovereign view. Consider Darryl again, the black lawyer subject to racial profiling discussed in chapter 2. To affect the world in a way that is consonant with his identity, Darryl needs the local police officers to be open to seeing his action as he sees it, as a manifestation of his talent and success rather than as a mark of criminality. His impact on the world will not reflect his subjective existence until recognition in this form transpires. But he does not need the officers to share his interests or join with him in a thick sense of community characterized by common dependence and common sacrifice. He may simply wish to go his own way and pursue his own ends. Moreover, the recognition that Darryl needs involves other people seeing him as a distinctive

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individual, not celebrating the collective identity of the social group to which he belongs. In fact, what recognition requires in this instance is that others abstract from his group-­based (here racial) identity. It is precisely because others are seeing Darryl solely through the lens of his group that his individual agency has come undone. Thus the fact that agency is socially distributed and hence depends on recognition in no way implies that freedom requires thick community, or a highly collectivist form of social organization, or group-­based identities that engulf individuals. Recognition as it figures in non-­sovereign freedom is recognition of the distinctive individuality of each person. We can be bearers of one another’s agency without sharing one another’s purposes, and we can participate in patterns of social exchange that mutually sustain agency without collapsing our distinctive individualities into collective identities. Yet the right kind of recognition is an important part of establishing the basic opportunity to act. Given the non-­sovereignty of human agency, non-­interference as Berlin conceives it cannot accomplish all that he intended because it will often fail to generate real opportunities for action. This is not to deny the value of principled limits on the exercise of power both by the state and by individuals and groups, which is the hallmark of negative liberty. Berlin is right to say that freedom would be impossible without such constraints, and right to insist on the importance of a protected realm for individual action.25 It would be impossible for us to affirm our identities in our actions if we were constantly subject to intentional interference by others. For these reasons the ideal of non-­interference and the principled limits on political power it establishes are crucial to individual freedom. Yet it would be wrong to think that “the freedom of a society” can be adequately “measured by the strength of these barriers” alone.26 Formal barriers to the abuse of power are an incomplete measure of freedom, as critical theorists at least since Marx have shown. The reasons for the insufficiency of non-­interference extend beyond the Marxian account, however. The problem here is not simply the neglect of material and other resources that may be instrumentally necessary to the exercise of individual choice—­the idea that non-­interference is difficult to enjoy on an empty stomach. The problem is that because individual agency is socially distributed, recognition matters, and social inequality can undermine not just the exercise of choice but the very constitution of agency. Where this is the case no amount of opportunity as the mere absence of interference will be enough to sustain freedom. Non-­interference is insuf­ ficient for freedom because human agency is non-­sovereign. Part of the reason for the enduring failures of freedom that we see in American society today is that we have been too sanguine about the power of formal barriers

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to sustain our agency—­because, like Berlin, we have had too much faith in our own sovereignty. The ideal of non-­interference is a valuable principle for ordering social and political life, but only up to a point and not on its own.

Freedom as Non-­domination A rival conception of political freedom that has gained traction in recent years is the neo-­republican theory of freedom as non-­domination. Philip Pettit’s Republicanism is a masterful presentation of this view. It begins by telling a story about the rise and eventual eclipse of the republican way of thinking about freedom in the Western world. Born in classical Rome and rediscovered by Renaissance thinkers such as Machiavelli, this tradition was championed in the modern period by Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, among others. The view of freedom it defended made the concept of domination central. To be free was above all to be immune from domination both in the form of dominium, or the exercise of arbitrary will by particular others in the private sphere, and in the form of imperium, the exercise of arbitrary will by public authorities or the state. Domination as both dominium and imperium was associated with slavery, and consequently freedom on this view “is always cast in terms of the opposition between liber and servus, citizen and slave.”27 Indeed, the republican tradition “is unanimous in casting freedom as the opposite of slavery.”28 As Pettit tells the story, this way of thinking about freedom was overtaken in the nineteenth century by the theory of freedom as non-­interference proposed by William Paley and Jeremy Bentham, which went on to become the dominant account of freedom within the newly constructed liberal tradition found in thinkers from J. S. Mill to Berlin to Rawls, a dominance it continues to enjoy today.29 The ideal of freedom as non-­interference is deeply flawed, Pettit thinks. His purpose in Republicanism is to reconstitute the republican tradition of thinking about freedom, to show why freedom is best conceived in terms of non-­domination and how it can be achieved through contemporary political institutions. Critics have quite reasonably challenged Pettit’s sharp divide between republicanism and liberalism both as a conceptual matter and as it bears on the history of political thought. Liberalism is not unconcerned with domination, nor does it regard every instance of interference as antithetical to liberty. The conceptual connection between freedom and the rule of law is foundational to what most people call liberalism, for example, and the

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whole point of the rule of law from the liberal perspective is precisely that it protects individuals from living in the perpetual state of vulnerability to arbitrary power that Pettit characterizes as domination. As a conceptual matter, then, the concerns of republicanism and liberalism are not as far apart as Pettit implies. Likewise, his account of the history of political thought dichotomizes the liberal and republican perspectives in ways that are at odds with the actual views of key thinkers in the liberal tradition. From Locke to Kant to J. S. Mill—­the defining figures of this tradition by most any account—­central tenets of what Pettit calls republicanism are clearly present in the text alongside ostensibly liberal concerns about interference.30 All three recognized the important connection between liberty and law, for instance, and each was keen to establish protections for the individual against the arbitrary exercise of power. Thus Pettit goes somewhat “astray,” as Charles Larmore has said, in the opposition he sets up between the republican conception of freedom and the modern liberal tradition.31 Another aspect of Pettit’s account that deserves scrutiny is its narrowness in casting domination as the primary threat to freedom.32 Domination, as Pettit defines it, characterizes any relationship in which one person has “(1) the capacity to interfere; (2) on an arbitrary basis; (3) in certain choices that the other is in a position to make.”33 Crucially, the capacity to interfere need not be actually exercised in order for a condition of domination to exist. Thus a slave who is lucky enough to have a benevolent or non-­interfering master is still subject to domination, despite not actually being interfered with. Equally important, the requirement that interference must be “arbitrary” if it is to count as domination means that that the non-­arbitrary constraints on individual choice imposed by just laws or a legitimate state do not entail domination but are consistent with liberty. These features of Pettit’s account distinguish it from the theory of freedom as non-­interference, at least the most extreme versions of non-­interference. They push us to look beyond instances of actual interference for real but not yet actualized threats to the individual, and so they allow us to respond to violations of liberty that may remain invisible on the non-­interference account. Pettit’s view also reassures us that liberty is compatible with the authority of a legitimate state and hence need not end in anarchy. In both respects, his theory of freedom as non-­domination represents a real advance over a strict non-­interference ideal—­although it is worth reiterating that the strict non-­interference view is only one strand (and not the main strand) of modern liberalism. Still, it is a mistake to cast domination as “the supreme political value” and “the one and only yardstick by which to judge the social and political

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constitution of a community,” as Pettit does.34 Domination certainly does obstruct liberty but there are other threats as well, some of which are more pressing in contemporary liberal-­democratic contexts than domination. Domination, after all, is modeled by republican theorists on the paradigm of slavery, as Pettit periodically reminds us, and like slavery it always involves a relationship of personal control.35 Pettit acknowledges that the “absolute power” enjoyed by real masters over actual slaves “is not likely to be realized in many contexts,” especially in contemporary liberal democracies. Yet such power “is often approximated . . . at lower levels of intensity, even in rule-­governed societies.”36 We can expect variation in the intensity of the dynamic (meaning the degree to which power is absolute) but not in its fundamental logic of personal control. Even where slavery per se is not in play, domination still involves a relationship of mastery in which “some people keep others under their thumb,” coercing and intimidating their subordinates “with a view to getting their own way.”37 The relationship of personal control that characterizes domination is also typically a matter of “common knowledge” in the sense that “domination is generally going to involve the awareness of control on the part of the powerful, the awareness of vulnerability on the part of the powerless, and the mutual awareness—­indeed, the common awareness among all the parties to the relationship—­of this consciousness on each side.”38 Pettit’s examples include women who, in non-­ republican contexts, live “at the beck and call of husband or father” (139), and workers who are vulnerable to “petty harassment,” “blacklisting,” and “capricious practices of hiring and firing” at the hands of employers (141). He also has in mind citizens subject to the abusive power of government officials (155). There is no doubt that domination so conceived undercuts freedom. It clearly stands in the way of the individual’s ability to affirm her identity in her deeds. Yet the relationship of personal control is often missing from contexts that nevertheless constrain the exercise of individual agency and hinder freedom. Moreover, many of the social dynamics that systematically undercut agency for those who are marginalized operate without the conscious awareness of participants. Think about a young black man living in one of America’s racialized ghettos who is poor, unemployed, and ill-­educated. His prospects in life are severely limited, compromised by systematic inequality and a cultural background of beliefs and biases that undermine his exercise of agency. He is not under the control of anyone in particular, however, and it would be wrong to call him the instrument of some specific agent’s will, even a collective agent. In addition, many of the people who participate in sustaining the social dynamics that undermine

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his agency are unaware of these dynamics and their own role in them. His status does make him vulnerable to conscious control by others and hence to domination. But the damage to his agency wrought by the impersonal, unconscious social forces in play here is independent of whether the distinctive relationship of domination is present. The very limited nature of his life prospects itself reflects a deeply constrained power of action, too constrained to be compatible with freedom as the enabling conditions of human agency. Or consider the activists who rioted outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969 seeking gay liberation. Stonewall represents freedom to gay people today but not the freedom that comes from overthrowing a master. Before the gay liberation movement gay people were not exactly mastered by others in the manner of slaves. They were ridiculed, discriminated against, excluded, and subjected to violence, but their position in society was in principle different from the position of a slave relative to his master, with the personal control and conscious awareness this implies. We need to be able to recognize and respond to failures of freedom such as these even though they do not fit easily into republicanism’s slavery paradigm or manifest its logic of domination. The danger of excluding impersonal, unconscious social factors from the category of domination—­where domination is the supreme political value and the “only yardstick” of our institutions (80)—­is that we will fail to recognize the serious threats they pose. Recall that one of the advantages Pettit claims for the theory of freedom as non-­domination over the theory of freedom as non-­interference is that it covers a wider range of obstacles to freedom. Specifically, the non-­interference model recognizes only actual interference as jeopardizing freedom whereas non-­domination also covers cases in which the capacity for arbitrary interference, even when unexercised, undercuts the freedom of subordinates by making them live at the mercy of the dominant, bowing and cringing and “unable to look the powerful in the eye” (60–­61, 64). From the non-­interference perspective the slave of a benevolent (or non-­interfering) master has no legitimate complaint. The non-­domination view, by contrast, clearly justifies his complaint, and Pettit is right to see this as an advantage. Yet non-­domination is also limited in the range of threats to freedom that it covers. If we treat non-­domination as the sole yardstick of our social and political institutions we blind ourselves to other, very powerful threats to freedom. The cultural background that sustains racism and sexism in the United States today is rife with such threats but it operates without much conscious awareness and without necessarily involving relationships of personal control.

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The limits of domination in this respect are exacerbated by Pettit’s insistence that the arbitrary interference associated with domination, when it occurs, must be intentional. To be clear, interference need not actually transpire for domination to be in play. Domination means simply that one person is in a position to exercise arbitrary power over another. The person in the dominant position may not have intended to be there, even may regret that society is organized in such a way as to put him in a position of domination. Yet when actual interference does occur, Pettit says, it must be intentional to count as domination. It is important, he says, that “when I interfere I make things worse for you, not better. And the worsening that interference involves always has to be more or less intentional in character: it cannot occur by accident” (52). Likewise, he insists that “all interfering behaviors [that count as domination], coercive or manipulative, are intended by the interferer to worsen the agent’s choice situation by changing the range of options available,” and hence “interference always involves the attempt to worsen an agent’s situation” (53, 54). So while there can be cases of domination in which no active interference occurs (as with benevolent masters), there cannot be cases of domination in which interference actually takes place but is not intentional or does not intentionally make things worse for the subordinate. Pettit is not oblivious to the negative effects that unintentional or impersonal factors can have on individual freedom. Beyond the arbitrary power of individual husbands and fathers, for instance, he notes that women’s freedom can be hindered by “a deeply entrenched set of assumptions about the role of women, about the competence of women, and about what women are after if they walk the streets at night” (140). Furthermore, “workplace practices” and “habits of male dealing and male bonding” can inhibit the effective exercise of women’s freedom in ways that do not involve intentional interference. Yet Pettit insists that “any ideal of freedom” ought to regard intentional restrictions on a person’s freedom “as more serious than the impersonal restrictions that arise nonintentionally from . . . the way things are socially organized.”39 The intentionality requirement as applied to interference is common to the liberal tradition as well as republicanism. Berlin also insists upon it.40 Without this requirement, Pettit says, we risk running together forms of interference that are not of a piece. Specifically, “were nonintentional forms of obstruction also to count as interference, that would be to lose the distinction between securing people against the natural effects of chance and incapacity and scarcity and securing them against the things that they

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may try to do to one another.”41 Yet this way of thinking wrongly assumes that obstacles to individual action are either the products of natural (i.e., nonhuman) forces or result from intentional decisions by discrete human beings (the things we “try to do” to one another). In reality, many of the things that obstruct our freedom elude both categories. What it means to invoke a cultural background of racism or sexism is precisely to point up patterns of social interaction that are fully human—­not the “natural effects of chance”—­but are nevertheless largely unintentional at the individual level. With racism and sexism in this form, people enact discriminatory norms without intending to do so or even being aware when they do.42 Along these lines, Glenn Loury has argued that we should understand “the anatomy of racial inequality” in the United States today as a function of “racial stigma” instead of racial discrimination.43 Whereas discrimination involves the intentional disadvantaging of others, stigma is a matter of biased cultural values and social meanings.44 It concerns the often unconscious beliefs by observers about an individual subject’s “intrinsic nature which condition[] how other more specific pieces of evidence involving the subject will be interpreted.”45 Stigma involves “insidious habits of thought, selective patterns of social intercourse, [and] biased processes of social cognition” rather than “harmful or malicious acts.”46 Even though racial discrimination is no longer the problem it once was in this country, racial stigma continues, especially where race intersects with poverty, and it constitutes a real obstacle to freedom. Yet the challenge it poses to freedom cannot be comprehended or adequately addressed so long as we continue to focus on voluntaristic forms of interference. Pettit may be correct in attributing intentionality to the forms of interference associated with domination, but if he is correct about this then domination is not the only—­or even the primary—­impediment to freedom that we have an obligation to remediate. And in contemporary liberal democracies, where actual domination is largely proscribed, these other impediments may cover more violations of freedom than does domination, as Loury’s analysis of the anatomy of contemporary racial inequality suggests. Not only are we frequently unaware of how the power we hold affects others, but our exercise of power in any particular instance may point in multiple directions and reflect our own subordination to forces beyond our individual control as much as it manifests our control over others. Foucault’s account of how power operates in and through us without being fully controlled by us is instructive in this respect.47 The Foucauldian perspective on power unsettles assumptions about the nature of human agency

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implicit in Pettit’s theory because it means that much of the time we are neither simply dominant nor simply subordinate. In fact, it presses us to think about agency in a way that disrupts the dominant/subordinate dichotomy. This dichotomy distorts our understanding of human agency and occludes from view a great deal of the power that operates among us. I do not mean to deny that relations of domination as Pettit conceives them exist. Certain individual and collective agents sometimes are in a special position to exercise arbitrary control over others, and with conscious awareness on all sides. The point is that there are other ways for us to be unfree as well. Conceptualizing freedom in the more nuanced, non-­sovereign way called for here is difficult given our prevailing terms of analysis. In the English language verbs are either active or passive. English lacks what we might call a “middle” or intermediate voice, a means for conveying the experience of simultaneously acting and being acted upon.48 Yet this experience is quite common. Consider Vaclav Havel’s account of life in Soviet Czechoslovakia. The totalitarian system functioned there in ways that simultaneously controlled individuals and activated them in exercising control over others. To illustrate, Havel tells the story of a greengrocer who every morning places in the window of his shop alongside the tomatoes and cucumbers a sign reading, “Workers of the world, unite!” As a mark of his obedience to the regime the sign is “directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior” and also protects him against potential informers among his peers.49 But it does more than signal his subordination. The sign also makes the greengrocer himself “a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.”50 It extends the reach of the state’s power over all who pass by his shop, and in this sense the greengrocer is himself an agent of the domination that affects him and everyone else. Indeed, Havel presses the point that there is no one in the system, even at the highest level, who is simply master nor anyone who is simply slave. Instead, “all are both victim and supporter of the system.”51 And while Soviet-­style totalitarianism represents a unique form of domination in some respects, Havel’s account suggests that the non-­sovereign nature of power evident in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and the compromises of freedom it effects are features of power that generalize to many cases. Loury’s notion of racial stigma suggests that he is right about this. Racial stigma offers another perspective on both agency and power as lived in the middle voice. The biased social cognitions and racial meanings that stigma entails set up a system of social interactions in which unfreedom emerges without any masters or sovereign dominators.52 For example, young black

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men have a difficult time getting cab drivers to pick them up on the street in urban areas because of the prevalent fear among drivers of being robbed and the presumption that young black men are more likely than others to be robbers. Thus for most young men, anticipating a long wait will discourage dependence on taxi transportation. They may arrange to ride with friends, take public transport, or bring a car, and this is especially true if a young man is simply trying to get home. But a person bent on robbery will not be so easily deterred. Even though he knows most cabs are unlikely to stop, he only needs one to do so to get in his night’s work. Given that taxi drivers treat blacks differently, stopping less frequently for them, and that robbers are less easily deterred than are the law abiding, the drivers’ reluctance to stop will discourage relatively more of the law abiding than of the robbers among blacks from relying on taxi transportation. This effect will not be present for nonblacks, since drivers are quite willing to stop for them.53

As a result, there is likely to be a disproportionate number of robbers among the group of black men hailing cabs after dark. Racial stigma (here the assumption that black men are dangerous) tends to generate self-­confirming beliefs because of the patterns of social interaction it fosters. In this case, as Loury points out, “the drivers’ own behaviors have helped create the facts on which their pessimistic expectations are grounded.”54 Yet while their own behaviors interact with racial stigma in ways that contribute to the disadvantaging of black men, their agency in this regard is a far cry from the personal control that Pettit’s account of domination implies. None of them has single-­handedly caused the dynamics in play, and none is capable on his own of changing the overall environment of social cognitions and feedback effects that make the racial stigma regarding young black men self-­confirming in this instance.55 A great deal of human agency is lived in the middle voice like this, at the interstices of subject and object, dominant and subordinate. Agency is regularly undercut by forces that are altogether human without involving relations of personal control and the conscious awareness of them. This aspect of our experience illuminates another dimension of the non-­sovereignty of human agency, and it makes clear why non-­domination is insufficient for freedom. What all this suggests is that non-­interference and non-­domination are both incomplete. Think again about Darryl. The frustration of his agency in the traffic stop incident is a mark of his failed freedom, but this failure of

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freedom is not fully captured by either the interference or the domination paradigms. To be sure, what the police officers did constitutes interference. They intentionally obstructed Darryl’s ability to get where he was going, to fulfill his chosen purpose of arriving at his destination. This interference is one reason why the traffic stop thwarts Darryl’s freedom. But there is more to the story than just interference with his personal choice. The mismatch between Darryl’s sense of his action and the police officers’ perspective fundamentally disrupts the extent to which his action can affirm his subjective existence concretely in the world, as we have seen, something that is not reducible to the exercise of his personal choice. Independently of his thwarted intentions, the background of racial stigma that structures the interaction severs the link between the identity and the efficacy aspects of Darryl’s agency. From this perspective, Darryl is unfree well before the officers pull him over. Indeed, the fact that they targeted him for interference in the first place is a mark of how his agency has already been compromised. Because of the background of racial stigma, the act of driving his Lexus cannot affirm his subjective existence concretely in the world but rather manifests an identity at odds with who he is. If freedom enables human agency, then Darryl is certainly not free, for his agency is systematically undone in this exchange. And as a black man in a society permeated by racial stigma, his agency is perpetually vulnerable to being undone or remaining unachieved, whether or not anyone intentionally obstructs his choices. The dynamic of Darryl’s unfreedom goes beyond domination as well, at least in Pettit’s sense. It is true that once the officers have pulled Darryl over and ordered him out of his car they are in a position to exercise arbitrary power over him. As Darryl stands against the car and spreads his legs to be frisked there is no denying the relationship of personal control between them and the conscious awareness of this control on all sides. Yet the reason Darryl finds himself in this compromised position has more to do with an existing background of impersonal, unconscious inequalities that no one exactly controls than with domination per se. These inequalities and their effects on Darryl’s agency precede the traffic stop. The domination he experiences at the hands of the police reflects a prior failure of his freedom, a failure that transpired before the officers ever came onto the scene. Failures of freedom like this one make particular instances of domination more likely but they are not themselves reducible to domination. We need new categories and more capacious ways of thinking about freedom if we are to make sense of these dynamics—­and transform them. This is not to deny the reality and the dangers of both interference and domination. Although neither one captures all the threats to agency that we should care about, both

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are important. Non-­interference and non-­domination are crucial enabling conditions of agency and hence important forms of freedom, but they do not cover all that freedom must include.

Freedom as Non-­oppression To more fully comprehend freedom in light of the non-­sovereignty of human agency we might usefully distinguish interference and domination from oppression, where the latter refers to impersonal social and political conditions that systematically and unjustly impede agency on the part of certain people.56 In contrast to domination, which can be exercised by one individual over another, oppression is an intrinsically collective phenomenon in that it applies to individuals only in view of their membership in a particular group. The harm that comes from oppression harms the individual not the group—­at least the harm with which we are concerned here is harm to individuals rather than groups—­but the harm happens to the individual because of his or her perceived membership in the group. Another difference between oppression and domination is that whereas domination requires personal control and generally involves conscious awareness, oppression rests on impersonal, systematic patterns of privilege and prejudice, on dynamics that many people never see and that may not involve control over subjected persons. Oppression usually operates unintentionally and unconsciously, and there is never a single identifiable agent at its source. It works through social norms and internalized habits to confine the oppressed individual within boundaries that suffocate and disfigure, systematically undercutting her ability to be in and affect the world in ways that manifest her distinctive individuality fully and authentically. Liberation from the bonds of oppression is an important aspect of coming out as gay, for instance, which brings the freedom to affirm one’s full subjectivity in the world rather than just a fragment of it. Freedom in this form also is a liberation from the double consciousness that Du Bois described among blacks, and from the stifling social norms that for far too long confined women to lives that were often ill-­suited to their individual self-­understandings and their aspirations. It involves release from a cramped and fragmented existence rather than an exploited one. And it need not center on the exercise of unimpeded choice. As we have seen, the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through action in the world is not reducible to the act of choosing. This insight stands behind the largely successful effort by gay activists a decade ago to shift the language of “sexual preference” to that of “sexual orientation.” For many gay people, homosexuality is not a

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choice but an existential condition. The promise of freedom in this context has been at least as much about the ability to enact an identity that one did not choose as about increasing the range of available choices. Indeed, gay liberation is radically misconceived if it is reduced to the freedom of choice. A key dimension of this liberation is that it enables gay people to be who each one authentically is, and to act in the world in ways that manifest one’s full subjectivity rather than just a part of it. In a similar way, for many religious believers freedom of religion means something quite different from the freedom to choose what to believe. Not all religious people see it this way, but some regard their religious faith as a matter of divine inspiration or ancestral tradition rather than as a personal choice. For them, the freedom that religious liberty makes possible does not so much enlarge their scope of personal choice as make it possible for them to act from duty, to answer God’s call, to fulfill the dictates of a traditional heritage. Like gay liberation, this freedom serves individual agency as a non-­sovereign experience. Oppression often coexists with domination, of course. The system of racialized slavery in the United States clearly manifested both, as African Americans were subject to the arbitrary personal control of slave masters as well as to impersonal social conditions such as stigma and prejudice. Likewise, women in patriarchal societies may be dependent on men in ways that make them vulnerable to arbitrary power, but cultural norms tend to systematically privilege traditionally male perspectives and characteristics while devaluing the feminine in ways that also make the exercise of individual agency problematic for women. Although domination and oppression may coexist, however, it is important to distinguish them from one another. Otherwise, we run the risk of blinding ourselves to important failures of freedom. The danger of subsuming oppression under the category of domination, for instance, is that once overt practices of domination have been suspended we may wrongly believe that freedom is fully established, even as oppression continues to exist. The result will be precisely the kinds of enduring injustice that one sees regularly in the United States today, which affect the lives of countless Americans but which we find it difficult to talk about and even harder to resolve. Experientially, freedom as non-­oppression involves the ability to manifest through action one’s distinctive subjectivity fully not just partially, and in a way that is untroubled by systematic inequalities of power and internalized stigma. It is a non-­sovereign form of freedom in the sense that both the agency of the individual and the agency it protects the individual against are socially distributed. Freedom so conceived will almost always be realized

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only imperfectly. Even leaving aside the effects of inequality, it is rare to find people whose actions always wholly embody their authentic subjectivity—­ all that they could do or be. Innumerable contingencies can intervene to prevent us from affirming our identities fully in our actions. A debilitating disease or a natural disaster may undermine my agency, for instance, or my own natural tendency toward sloth may stand in the way of my doing and being all that I could. Then, too, the plurality of the human condition may impede the exercise of agency in ways that do not bear on justice. We have noted already that the inevitable differences among human beings—­many of which are morally and politically unobjectionable—­make it easy for us to misunderstand one another and can stand in the way of social uptake. Such factors do not constitute oppression if they do not result from patterns of social interaction that perpetuate unfair inequalities. Some diseases affect poor or marginalized persons disproportionately, of course, and a slothful character can sometimes be connected to the residual effects of social marginalization. So even ostensibly “natural” effects on agency sometimes have a social or political component that brings them into the domain of oppression and calls for critical scrutiny. Yet not every instance of failed agency constitutes a violation of freedom that requires remediation. Freedom as non-­oppression targets specifically the patterns of social exchange that systematically and unfairly undermine agency for particular categories of persons. In this respect, the ideal of freedom as non-­oppression implicitly leans on justice. It is perhaps worth reiterating that while oppression is a collective phenomenon in that it operates on people through their group-­based identities, the freedom it compromises is the freedom of individuals.57 It is through group-­based associations—­the fact that the world categorizes us by race, gender, ethnicity, and the like—­that social inequalities exercise their power over us. When an individual is a member of a marginalized group and subject to oppression based on that membership, this status compromises his ability to exercise agency as an individual. We must be mindful of the distinction between recognizing as a descriptive matter the important effects that group-­based memberships can have on individual agency, on the one hand, and insisting as a normative matter that group-­based identities are intrinsically valuable and worthy of special protections, on the other. I mean to argue for the first point but not to defend the second. The ideal of non-­ oppression takes no stand on the intrinsic value of groups, and there is no notion of collective desert or group entitlement that follows from this ideal. One need not celebrate the value of group-­based racial or gender identities, for example, to see that being black and female in American society today

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has certain systematic implications for the exercise of one’s agency. Group-­ based identities that are subject to systematic social inequalities affect what people are able to do and to be, and therefore must be a central concern for any theory of freedom that cares about the individual. The ideal of non-­ oppression marries a normative (and unabashedly liberal) concern for the freedom of individuals with a realistic acknowledgment of the actual effects that social inequalities, as they bear on group-­based identities, have on the ability of individuals to exercise their freedom. In a related vein, it is important to see why the inequalities that are relevant to oppression must be systematic and unjust rather than random and normatively neutral. From the standpoint of a comprehensive theory intended to cover freedom in every conceivable sense (e.g., psychological, metaphysical, aesthetic), all failures of agency may be equally problematic. Non-­oppression is an explicitly political ideal of freedom, however. Inequalities are relevant in a special way to freedom as non-­oppression when they represent violations of the core liberal-­democratic principles of equal respect, equal opportunity, and individual dignity. Random failures of individual agency that do not track unjust systematic social inequalities may generate unfreedom in nonpolitical forms, and this will be unfortunate for the individuals involved. But if they do not violate core political ideals or principles of justice they will not trigger the political obligation of remediation that oppression entails. It is true that the degree to which any particular systematic inequality violates political principles of justice may be subject to contestation. Reasonable disagreements may arise about which groups and which in­ equalities qualify as relevant to oppression. This contestability is important to acknowledge, but it should not be surprising. After all, disagreements exist about what constitutes “interference” and “domination” as well. The way to address the inevitable contestability of political freedom in this sense is to allow for debate, and for revision in our collective understanding of oppression over time, even as we insist that the definition of oppression must always be tied to core liberal-­democratic principles of equal respect, opportunity, and dignity. Productive contestation about oppression will require a background culture of deliberative engagement that enables us to see and hear the distinctive individualities of those affected. We must be responsive to all, the privileged as well as the disadvantaged. We may need to make a special effort to hear the distinctive voices of disadvantaged individuals in a way that is not occluded by our habitual prejudices and biases about their group, but hearing the disadvantaged is perfectly compatible with hearing the

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privileged too. We should also be aware that context matters to how we define the categories of “privileged” and “disadvantaged.” On many college campuses, for instance, those who are privileged by the standards of the wider society sometimes find themselves in the minority. Some of the same dynamics of oppression that render invisible the distinctive individuality of the individual black man or woman in our society can affect individuals on college campuses who are devout Christians or committed political conservatives. We fail to respect the distinctive individuality of the Christian student or the conservative if all we see when we look at them is our own biased stereotype of their kind. Of course, inequalities (even systematic ones) that make some individuals less influential on campus for the duration of a college education are fundamentally different vis-­à-­vis their disabling effects on individual agency than pervasive, persistent inequalities that structure virtually all one’s social interactions and opportunities over a lifetime, such as inequalities of race and gender. The point is that wherever bias and stereotyping undercut the agency of particular individuals they should be resisted. And we should always be attentive to the ways that what counts as “marginalized” is not fixed once and for all but can shift from one context to another. We must bear in mind the multiple, cross-­cutting layers of privilege and disadvantage that structure our interactions with one another in different contexts and that influence the exercise of individual agency and individual possibilities for freedom. The goal is always to clear the obscuring fog of systematic prejudice so as to make visible the distinctive individuals behind it. It is also worth noting that the presence of social justice in society may not guarantee that one’s agency will be unconstrained by the social structure. Some constraints on agency are justified, and justified constraints may well inhibit the full affirmation of certain individuals’ identities in their actions. Consider the white supremacist again. In a just society there will be no social uptake for agency that generates racial hierarchy. The absence of social uptake in this case will mean trouble for the agency of the supremacist, but it is not equivalent to oppression because it does not track unjust systematic inequalities. Indeed, a person whose subjective existence can only be affirmed through the suppression of black people ought to be prevented from exercising his agency, at least so far as to prevent harm to others and to be consistent with the equal exercise of freedom for all. There are simply some forms of agency that democratic societies must restrict. Justified constraint does not constitute oppression. Two issues call for emphasis here. The first is that the obligation we have as democratic citizens to bear the agency of others does not require us to

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blindly accept them. The content of people’s identities and the meaning of their actions may properly be the subject of critical exchange and contestation. As citizens we are obligated to respond to one another with respect and reciprocity but we need not acquiesce to one another’s beliefs and values uncritically. We may question and we may argue even when we may not coerce. And although freedom as non-­oppression requires us to do what we can to sustain the agency of our fellows, there are legitimate exceptions to this rule in cases where providing the social uptake that agency requires would generate injustice or violate the freedom of others. The second point to emphasize is that although freedom is a very important human good, it is not the only good, as Berlin so powerfully reminds us.58 Freedom is distinct from and can conflict with other goods that liberal democracies need to protect. Where the freedom of some con­flicts with justice for others, for instance, we may need to constrain freedom. The normative individualism that underlies the view defended here requires us to respect individual freedom but it does not rule out every restraint. Freedom as non-­oppression is in some respects a more demanding ideal than non-­interference and non-­domination. Both those concepts of liberty are “negative” in Berlin’s sense of the word, meaning that they represent immunity from certain kinds of intervention. We are free, on those accounts, because of what governments and other people do not (or cannot) do, namely, interfere or dominate. As Berlin puts it, negative liberty “means liberty from”; it does not point to anything in particular in the sense of directing the individual toward specific uses of her freedom.59 Likewise, both non-­interference and non-­domination are strictly interpersonal ideals; they rest solely on structural and institutional factors that regulate interactions between persons, and they do not look to the inner life of the individual. Freedom as non-­oppression is more complex. Insofar as oppression typically involves internalization by the individual of socially established patterns of stigma and bias, freedom as non-­oppression is at once an interpersonal and an intrapersonal ideal. At the intrapersonal level, the inner qualities of self-­awareness and self-­respect are crucial. We have seen already that agency presupposes a reflexive sense of self and that it must be relatively unhampered by deep inner conflicts such as double consciousness, which pit internalized stigmas against core features of one’s authentic individuality. Self-­respect and self-­awareness support a sense of one’s own value and a personal understanding of what is authentic to one’s character. They help protect the individual against the inner damage done by hostile social norms. Like both agency and freedom, they exist on a continuum.

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Those who lack self-­awareness and self-­respect not only hold themselves back but also tend to do things that make it easy for others to attribute their failed agency to their own choices. Baldwin was very much aware of this dynamic and tried hard to combat it in himself and those he loved. His letter to his nephew embodies an effort to cultivate self-­awareness together with a sense of “honor” and “dignity”—­meaning self-­respect—­in black youth.60 Without these inner resources, he thought, young black men end up in prison, or in mental institutions, or dead.61 They do themselves in, Baldwin says, enacting the dirty work of racism against themselves and letting white people off the hook. The language of “pride” as it has appeared in the gay rights movement (in gay pride parades, for instance) speaks to the same dynamic. Gay pride is a consciously cultivated sentiment of self-­ respect intended to reverse the internalized stigma against homosexuality in a violently homophobic society. In gay pride parades, self-­respect is dramatized in open displays of nonconforming subjectivities as a remedy for the shamed silence and invisibility of the closet. Because self-­awareness and self-­respect are so important to freedom as non-­oppression, efforts to foster them are frequently at the center of counterpublic community life. These qualities place demands on the inner life of the individual that have no parallel in non-­interference and non-­domination. Yet they are also properly political concerns despite their intrapersonal character. Self-­ awareness and self-­respect are political because they are necessary for freedom as non-­oppression, and freedom in this form is an entitlement of liberal democracy. This need not imply that the state is the only appropriate vehicle for promoting self-­awareness and self-­respect, or even that the state should have a direct role here. It may be that they are best fostered in more intimate forms of association than the state can provide, such as families, churches, community groups, and subaltern counterpublics. The point is that there is no easy divide between the intrapersonal and the interpersonal aspects of freedom as non-­oppression.62 For this reason, non-­oppression is a more complex ideal than either non-­interference or non-­domination. One might be tempted, in fact, to classify non-­oppression as a form of what Berlin called positive liberty. This association makes sense insofar as both non-­oppression and positive liberty attend to the inner life of the individual. Still, it would be wrong to see non-­oppression as a form of “self-­ mastery,” as Berlin characterized positive liberty, involving an effort “on the part of the individual to be his own master.”63 Positive liberty rests on the desire for sovereign control over oneself and one’s life, the wish to be independent of “external forces of whatever kind,” immune to all “causes which

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affect me, as it were, from the outside.”64 Self-­awareness and self-­respect do provide inner support against the debilitating effects of internalized stigma and double consciousness. Yet they should not be confused with self-­mastery. They make it possible for one to be at home in one’s identity but they do not require one to be the author of that identity, and they do not inoculate the individual against all external influences. The “freedom which consists in being one’s own master” is fundamentally at odds with the non-­sovereign picture of human agency, which denies that this sort of mastery is available to any of us.65 If non-­oppression makes demands on the internal life of the individual it also makes demands on others. It requires social uptake and the kind of intersubjective recognition that mitigates against double consciousness and stigma-­based fragmentations of self. To support freedom as non-­oppression, one must make an effort to understand others and to change any cultural values and practices that systematically and unjustly undercut their agency. Freedom as non-­oppression goes beyond the minimalist demands of negative liberty in this way as well. Yet it need not require for its realization the collective action or political participation that Berlin associated with positive liberty. Political self-­rule is not the sole path—­or even a privileged path—­to freedom in this form. On the contrary, freedom as non-­oppression is an individualist ideal focused on the experience of affirming one’s distinctive subjectivity in the world. For some people, this experience may come through identification with a larger social whole or through political participation, but this is by no means necessary. It is worth emphasizing that while non-­oppression is a political ideal, to insist on this point is not necessarily to make the state itself responsible for promoting it. Political ideals guide individual citizens in their daily lives as much as they guide the formal activities of states. The ideal of non-­ oppression entails an obligation to engage with one another in all our interactions in ways that foster the affirmation of our diverse identities in our deeds. It calls for the kinds of deliberative and contestatory exchanges that over time can help dismantle the background of bias that unintentionally disrupts the exercise of individual agency among members of marginalized groups. It asks us to take up the agency of our fellows in ways that nourish the promise of liberty and justice for all. The requisite engagement is perhaps best understood in terms of what William Connolly has called “mi­ cropolitics,” meaning multiple forms of social exchange in diverse domains through which individual actions can be interpreted, contested, reconceived, and brought to fruition.66 This deliberative engagement can transpire in formal ways and in public places. But it also happens informally in

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countless interpersonal exchanges, including many that take place in what we typically think of as the private sphere. Once again, responsibility in the forms of accountability and responsiveness will be important here, as well as the civic ethos of reciprocity. The existence of counterpublics is also crucial because they provide sites in which marginalized individuals can find the social uptake they need to sustain their agency—­and freedom as non-­ oppression—­even when the broader society fails to provide it. Thus if agency is the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds and freedom is the collection of conditions that make this affirming action possible, there will be multiple ways for agency to fail and hence multiple ways for us to be unfree. First, one’s scope of action and personal choice may be impeded by the intentional interference of others, including individuals, groups, and governments. Second, one’s action may be subject to the personal control of another, as in the case of domination, in which one becomes the tool of someone else, living “under his thumb,” and one’s activity reflects that person’s identity or purposes instead of one’s own. A third form of unfreedom will arise when, without being interfered with directly and without being under any particular agent’s personal control, one’s action fails to manifest her subjective existence as a result of impersonal inequalities that are systematic, unintentional, and unjust. Freedom fails in this sense when one’s efficacy is thwarted by misrecognition or by an identity that is fragmented and disabled by the force of bigotry and internalized stigma. Oppression covers the part of the story of Darryl’s failed freedom that neither interference nor domination can fully explain. It includes a wide range of pervasive social dynamics that subtly, informally, and without much conscious awareness compromise the agency of the marginalized in ostensibly free societies such as our own. The demands of non-­oppression are great, and a serious effort to meet them will inevitably take us into waters that are uncharted and sometimes rough. This is a challenge we should pursue with care, but we must pursue it. To forsake non-­oppression would be to ignore a whole class of persistent, pervasive failures of freedom and enduring injustices, to turn our backs on liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and justice for all. In truth, we have turned our backs in just this way, and for far too long. As a result, freedom in the United States today is stunted and conflicted for many individuals in ways that violate our most basic political principles and obligations. Ultimately, achieving freedom as non-­oppression will require broad social transformation and radical changes in democratic citizens on all sides of the inequality divide. We might think of the requisite transformation in terms of what Vaclav Havel once called “an existential revolution,” or a

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fundamental reorientation of civic self-­understanding.67 Havel wanted his compatriots—­and all citizens of “post-­totalitarian” societies—­to stop thinking of themselves as the passive victims of state power. The existential revolution that non-­oppression needs in the United States today is somewhat different. It involves opening our eyes to the non-­sovereignty of human agency, with all the vulnerability and the often unwitting potency that this implies. It means acknowledging the many ways that agency can fail even when no one intends or consciously controls it, opening our minds and hearts to the actions of others, and assuming responsibility for changes we can help to effect.

Freedom as Collective World-­Making Another important way of understanding political freedom today centers on the Arendtian ideal of action in concert that aims at public ends and brings about political reform and transformation. Freedom for Arendt combines “participation in public affairs”68 with the activity of “call[ing] something into being which did not exist before, which was not given.”69 Both the collectivism and the novelty in this ideal are important for our purposes because they go beyond anything contained in the conceptions of freedom canvassed so far. Freedom as collective world-­making has attracted attention in recent years in part as a response to what many have seen as the defi­ ciencies of negative liberty and the dangers of modern consumer society.70 Some democratic theorists have also taken inspiration from the agonistic dimensions of Arendtian freedom with its emphasis on plurality, individual self-­disclosure, and contestation. Hers is a view that seems to foster civic engagement and democratic empowerment without demanding homogeneity or sacrificing the individual to the collective, as communitarian accounts are often thought to do. Arendt’s conception of freedom also points up the ways in which the exercise of freedom can be a personally transformative experience, whereby in acting together with others to make the world anew, we ourselves may become new in important ways. This transformative potential can be an especially powerful part of the experience of freedom for individuals who are members of marginalized groups, as the experiences of Carmen Anaya and the ladies of Casa Susanna demonstrate. As important as the collective and transformative dimensions of freedom are, however, it would be a mistake to think that freedom always takes this form. Freedom is not always and only about beginning something new; sometimes it involves doing what one has always done, or honoring an old tradition, or enacting an

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established norm. Likewise, while collective political action is a valuable practice, it does not capture all that freedom includes. Freedom as collective world-­making is an important kind of freedom, but like the other ideals considered in this chapter it is not the whole of freedom. Arendt’s theory of freedom begins from a rejection of the view she associates with modern liberalism, according to which freedom consists in liberties that are “essentially negative” in that they protect the individual from “unjustified restraint” on the part of others and the state.71 Although civil liberties may protect freedom, Arendt insists that “they are by no means the content of freedom.”72 The content of freedom is given by the experience of action with others in the public sphere, action that engages the individual in the exercise of collective world-­making.73 It was best exemplified, she thinks, by Athenian democrats when they entered the public square or assembly to deliberate and take action on public matters.74 While the political forms associated with liberal government (checks and balances, individual rights, representation) can help to sustain a public sphere that is friendly to this experience, they also tend to undermine it.75 Without “a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance,” but the very principles that help to guarantee the public realm by establishing individual rights against other persons and the state also turn us away from this realm.76 The “rights of privacy,” for instance, and “the right to freedom from politics make us doubt not only the coincidence of politics and freedom but their very compatibility.”77 We tend to “measure the extent of freedom in any given community by the free scope it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic enterprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and intellectual activities.” 78 This is a big mistake, as Arendt sees it. While the right political principles and institutions can protect freedom, the freedom they protect too often appears to us to be something we can only experience outside politics. And the principle of representative government exacerbates the belief that freedom means “freedom from politics” because it deprives most citizens of the direct participation in public power that actually constitutes their freedom.79 Arendt was right to think that freedom as collective world-­making is a valuable experience, and contemporary Arendtians do us all a service in recovering this tradition of thought for contemporary liberal democracies. Participating in collective action in politics can be an effective way to affirm one’s subjective existence concretely in the world. Whether it takes the form of protest activism, or community organizing, or volunteering on a political campaign, or simply casting a vote in a local election, such activity can enable us to see the world become different because of what we have done. To

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the extent that collective action in politics constitutes an enabling condition of agency it can properly be counted as a form a freedom. It is perhaps worth noting that freedom so conceived can be put to ill purpose. Collective action sometimes ends in violence and injustice, after all. Think of Hindu mobs that carry out pogroms against Muslims, for instance, or the lynch mobs of the post-­Reconstruction American South. The members of such groups certainly experience their own power to make an impact on the world. Yet while their effects affirm their identities, thereby enabling their agency, they also unfairly undermine the agency (not to mention the lives) of others. We have seen already that when the experience of freedom for some comes at the expense of the freedom of others it should be constrained. The political value of freedom as collective world-­making is conditional upon the degree to which it enables individual agency without endangering other people. Freedom in this form must answer to core principles of liberal democracy, especially respect for persons. When it is agency-­enabling in this broad way, freedom as collective world-­making has an important place in liberal-­democratic life. And even though freedom as world-­making brings with it certain dangers, it is a crucial support for other types of political freedom. After all, freedom in all its forms regularly needs the support of individuals acting in concert for public purposes, activists who are willing to work together to defend freedom for all. Like non-­oppression, freedom as world-­making has affinities with what Berlin called positive liberty, in this case because it involves active political participation. Recall that Berlin describes positive liberty as an answer to the question of who rules. On the positive liberty view, as with freedom as world-­making, individuals are free insofar as they participate together with others in ruling themselves. Yet the collective self-­rule involved in freedom as world-­making need not be limited to formal procedures of self-­ government. It can include the activist practices of political reformers and revolutionaries, practices that may stand outside the official channels of governance. Freedom in this form also differs from the self-­mastery that Berlin associates with positive liberty, both because it cannot be reduced to control and because it need not require the subordination of one’s lower self to one’s higher self. Freedom as collective world-­making is not only agency-­enabling but also can be transformative. An experience of transformation—­both the transformation of the world and the transformation of the self—­sometimes is an important part of the experience of freedom. Consider Richard H. King’s account of the civil rights movement. The success of the movement resulted in African Americans gaining freedom from both interference and domi-

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nation through new laws and public policies that prevented arbitrary and exploitative power exercised along racial lines. Yet King identifies a further form of freedom in the very activity of participating in the movement and the experiences of transformation it entailed. Participants saw the world become a different place because of what they did together. The experience of so transforming the world felt like a liberation in its own right to people accustomed to having their efficacy tightly circumscribed not only by active interference and officially sanctioned domination but by impersonal patterns of social exchange and informal background meanings that routinely hindered their agency through oppression. King makes it clear that participating in the movement often brought about personal transformations as well. Movement leaders focused on developing capacities long suppressed or left to languish among blacks, including literacy skills and knowledge of government.80 More generally, leaders aimed to cultivate “a new way for participants of all descriptions to think and talk about themselves.”81 For many southern blacks, “to live in the region was to live at close quarters with fear.”82 Showing up to take part in a public protest in the presence of police dogs, fire hoses, and hostile sheriff ’s deputies was an intimidating prospect. Taking part meant opening oneself up not only to the contingencies of a situation one could not control but to the possibility of becoming new to oneself in significant ways. In the act of doing so, many participants achieved the “overcoming of a whole sense of self organized around . . . fear.”83 Courage, self-­respect, and a new feeling of possibility developed in people as a result of joining the movement. This “transformation of self,” King shows, was an “exhilarating” experience of freedom.84 It resonates with the transformative experiences of Carmen Anaya in the colonias movement of South Texas and the ladies of Casa Susanna. One of the great contributions of Arendt’s work is to remind us that freedom sometimes can be transformative in this way. For all the value in Arendt’s account, however, it would be a mistake to think that political freedom always requires collective action in the way she envisions. Freedom is not always a collective experience. The freedom to go one’s own way and do one’s own thing—­to simply be left alone—­is real freedom, too, insofar as it establishes some of the enabling conditions of individual agency. It is also a mistake to think that freedom must be limited to activity in the political domain. For Arendt, as one commentator says, “the life of political action is essentially supreme.”85 Why does she privilege political activity as the distinctive field of freedom? Her background assumptions about the opposition between freedom and necessity, where the latter pervades material life and the private sphere, help explain this

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emphasis. Freedom requires transcendence of “the necessities of life,”86 Arendt insists, above all “the life process which permeates our bodies and keeps them in a constant state of a change whose movements are automatic, independent of our own activities, and irresistible.”87 Necessity in this form generates a “fateful automatism of sheer happening” that is antithetical to freedom.88 Everything having to do with the satisfaction of bodily needs is captured by this necessity and subject to its automatism, but necessity also refers to processes beyond the biological. History, culture, and public administration involve patterns of social interaction that confront the individual as automatic, presenting themselves as if they could not be otherwise. Such processes sweep individuals along in the wake of their repetitive routines, rendering them the passive playthings of alien forces rather than sources of spontaneous action. Arendt thinks that one must overcome the influence of necessity in all these forms to make freedom possible.89 Thus she insists on insulating politics and the public sphere from any considerations that might be marked by necessity, including personal security and individual interests.90 Indeed, the public realm as she conceives it is “a realm where the concern for life [itself ] has lost its validity.”91 Only those who have transcended necessity are capable of being free, and only they have “the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic.”92 From a genuinely non-­sovereign perspective the stark opposition between freedom and necessity is suspect. There is nothing intrinsically freeing about resisting the kinds of “necessities” Arendt targets unless one equates individual freedom with personal control. Yet this is something that Arendt’s idea of non-­sovereignty in principle forecloses. The non-­sovereignty of human agency means that many factors that Arendt classifies as forms of necessity will inevitably play a role in constituting agency and sustaining the experience of freedom. We saw in chapter 1 the many ways that the material life of the body can be agentic and can instigate transformative exertions of agency without presupposing individual choice and control. The role of personal identity within agency also is important here. Many of the characteristic qualities that constitute each one of us as a particular individual are imposed upon us by our genes and our histories. We do intentionally work on ourselves (or many of us do), and this activity sometimes affects our identities. But much that is authentic in our characters is not self-­generated. This fact may be one reason why Arendt is so reluctant to posit a self that is antecedent to its own spontaneous action.93 Yet her reluctance in this regard makes trouble for her concept of non-­sovereign agency, as we saw in chapter 1. The strict dichotomy between freedom and necessity that underlies

What Is Freedom?  /  163

Arendt’s understanding of freedom simply does not hold. Once this dichotomy is dissolved, the privileged place of the expressly political sphere as the sole site for the exercise of freedom no longer looks so compelling. Collective world-­making can enable agency and sustain freedom even when it does not involve overtly political activities. We should conceive freedom in this form in a more capacious way to allow for collective world-­making in a wider range of contexts, such as Casa Susana, or the church picnics of Baldwin’s youth, or the house-­meetings of the colonias movement. If it is a mistake to think that freedom always involves action that is collective and expressly political, it is also wrong to regard it as requiring action that is altogether new, action that breaks with the past and the familiar pressures of nature, culture, character, and tradition. The notion that “the capacity for freedom” can only consist in “the sheer capacity to begin,” in the “miraculous” interruption of natural and historical processes, is ultimately unsustainable even within the terms of Arendt’s own non-­sovereign account.94 We have seen already that her periodic tendency to equate action narrowly with the moment of initiation undercuts the concept of non-­ sovereignty that she means to defend. If action is equated with beginning alone, then it is within the control of the individual and subject to the individual will. The same difficulty infects Arendt’s notion of freedom. Insofar as freedom is located in the moment of individual initiative, her view will tend to collapse into the kind of sovereigntist approach she rejects. The identification of freedom with sheer beginning also runs counter to many lived experiences of freedom, including experiences of freedom as world-­making. Recall Mahmood’s account of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt. In taking on unprecedented leadership roles within the mosques—­ conducting study groups, offering counsel, and giving sermons—­movement participants are indeed doing new things.95 Yet they are above all motivated by the desire to sustain an ancient tradition of Muslim piety, a tradition whose authority they accept as given. Their own understanding of their action in this sense is far from the spirit of novelty that Arendt associates with freedom. And while there are certainly ways in which the women remain unfree, to miss their collective world-­making and the freedom it entails is to neglect a dimension of freedom that is at least as common as the experience of sheer beginning, if not more so. The women of the mosque movement demonstrate that the exercise of freedom sometimes involves inhabiting and sustaining traditional ways of life, even ostensibly “automatic” processes of culture, rather than breaking with them. An action need not have the status of a “miracle” to count as free. We can learn from Arendt about the important place that experiences of personal

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and political transformation sometimes have in freedom, but we should remember that transformation is not always equivalent to sheer beginning. We should also acknowledge that not all types of freedom involve transformation. Sometimes freedom is simply a matter of being able to be in the world as one is—­and as the world is. Non-­ interference, non-­ domination, non-­ oppression, and collective world-­making all capture something important about what it means to be free. Yet none of them tells us all we need to know about freedom. None can be simply subsumed under any other, although there may be ways in which they interact, as we shall see in chapter 5. All are forms of political freedom but not necessarily in the sense that they require political participation per se or are sustained primarily through state action. They are political partly in the sense that they concern relations among citizens, and between citizens and the state. Partly, too, they are all political in being deeply engaged with prevailing relations of power, sometimes in ways that limit the exercise of power, sometimes in ways that transform it. Moreover, freedom in all these forms is an interpersonal experience, not merely an intrapersonal one. There is often a relationship between what happens inside the individual and the character of her relations with others, but the freedoms in play here always do involve others. In this respect, none is reducible to an exclusively personal ideal. Moreover, although each form of freedom is incomplete on its own, they all tell us something important about what it means to be free. This last claim may seem puzzling. These accounts of freedom are quite different from one another, after all. In fact, the requirements of some are patently inconsistent with those of others. Which one ultimately is truest to the conditions of non-­sovereign agency and the aspirations of our reconstructed liberal individualism? The answer, as we are about to see, is none of them—­and all of them. Non-­sovereign freedom is plural freedom.

Five

Plural Freedom

The question of what it means to be free is an old one in political theory, and we saw in chapter 4 that it has generated some very diverse answers. Yet most theories of freedom today are alike in being monist rather than pluralist in character, to invoke the language that Isaiah Berlin applied to values.1 Whether freedom is defined as non-­interference, non-­domination, collective world-­making, or something else, freedom is generally conceived to be just one thing. The idea that freedom could legitimately take multiple forms is not entirely unfamiliar, of course. We commonly distinguish economic freedom from political freedom, for instance. Sometimes economic freedom connotes unregulated capitalism whereas at other times it refers to a robust set of provisions and protections meant to guard against economic exploitation. Some people think political freedom means collective self-­determination, others equate it with individual liberties. Still, any one theory of economic or political freedom typically defines freedom in just one way. Within the economic sphere liberty means one thing; in politics it means one (different) thing. What this amounts to is more a sphere-­ differentiated monism than genuine pluralism about freedom. A pluralist view of freedom would recognize multiple forms of freedom that operate concurrently in the same domains, and it would resist an easy rank ordering of them. It would insist that no one account of freedom can capture without remainder all that is important to the meaning of freedom in any sphere of activity. The forms of freedom identified in chapter 4 each name something crucial to the experience of political freedom, for example, but none is sufficient on its own to describe all that we commonly mean by freedom in politics and all that we reasonably value in it. The non-­sovereign model of human agency points to the plurality of freedom because it helps us see both the limits and the value of political freedom in its various forms.

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In elaborating a pluralist approach to freedom, I mean to pursue possibilities opened up but never fully realized by Berlin. Although he has come to be associated especially with the ideal of freedom as non-­interference, we have seen that Berlin also identified real merit in the countervailing ideal of positive liberty.2 Indeed, he once said that he thought it necessary “to strike a compromise between them. For each of them makes absolute claims. These claims cannot both be fully satisfied. But it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction that each of them seeks is an ultimate value.”3 Still, Berlin never explicitly extended the conceptual framework of value pluralism to the study of freedom itself, and he never specified a vision for how multiple experiences of political freedom might coexist within a single society. Moreover, because he associated negative and positive liberty with different regime types, and because he emphasized with special urgency the dangers of positive liberty, his ideal of negative liberty is often appropriated and employed by others as if it were a singular ideal. Berlin’s nascent pluralism about freedom therefore remains unrealized. So while my defense of plural freedom draws inspiration from Berlin, it also moves beyond his analysis. I mean to show that freedom as the en­ abling conditions of human agency is a plural phenomenon because these conditions and the experiences of agency they sustain are diverse. In light of this diversity, we can distinguish at least four types of political freedom: non-­interference, non-­domination, non-­oppression, and collective world-­ making. Each one can be conceived as an end in itself and hence is not reducible to any other, and they may conflict. Then, too, no common stan­ dard of measure exists on the basis of which these various freedoms could be rank ordered relative to one another. The conflicts that arise between them frequently admit no perfect resolution. Although I focus on these four types of freedom, nothing in the analysis entails that this set is closed or that these are the only forms that political freedom could take, now or in the future. The primary reason for pursuing a pluralist theory of freedom is that the demands of non-­sovereign agency require it, as we began to see in chapter 4. If we take non-­sovereignty seriously, the importance of freedom as non-­ oppression becomes clear. Yet to protect freedom in this form is likely to require actions by individuals and the state that jeopardize non-­interference, which the non-­sovereign view of agency also shows to be an important enabling condition of human agency. The enabling conditions of agency sometimes conflict because agency is complex, as the affirmation of our identities in our deeds can take multiple forms requiring genuinely diverse supports. In trying to force unity upon this diversity, monist approaches

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tend to minimize or obscure from view their own freedom-­compromising effects. For example, if freedom really only means non-­domination, as Pettit’s view insists, then the state’s legitimate interference in individual choice poses no serious difficulties for freedom. Yet proponents of freedom as non-­interference are not wrong to think that the relatively activist state sanctioned by the ideal of non-­domination does regularly threaten to undercut the freedom of individuals by intervening in their choices. Freedom as non-­interference is not the only kind of freedom that should matter to us but it is real freedom nonetheless. And although we may have good reasons in some cases to limit non-­interference for the sake of non-­domination, we should never deny the cost to freedom that doing so entails. Because a pluralist theory of freedom always holds in view the multiple forms that freedom can take, it makes visible the costs that pursuing freedom exclusively in any one form inevitably entails. It forces us to acknowledge that the realization of freedom is always bound to be incomplete because of the tensions that exist among the different types of freedom. These tensions mean that freedom never can be achieved without loss, including losses to freedom itself in certain forms. In this way, the pluralist view protects against the easy complacency that so often accompanies life in ostensibly free societies such as our own, which tend to let the achievement of some kinds of freedom obscure from view the dearth of freedom in other forms. It can also inhibit the hubristic tendency to think that having perfected the art of freedom we are entitled to impose our view of it on others around the world. Moreover, a pluralist approach to freedom helps explain why agency sometimes arises despite hostile conditions. For it is often the case that even where freedom in one form is unavailable, freedom in other forms is pres­ ent, if not at the level of society as a whole then in localized communities of solidarity and communicative counterpublics. And by emphasizing the multiple experiences that constitute freedom and the various conditions that sustain it, a pluralist view encourages us to be open to new articulations of freedom. The meaning of freedom should be conceived as open-­ ended because it must be responsive to changes in the human condition and in our mutual understanding of one another’s lives. Hence the full meaning of freedom cannot be settled once and for all. Plural freedom is a dynamic ideal that invites continuing critical reflection and intersubjective engagement. The chapter begins by briefly spelling out the relationship between freedom and value pluralism in terms of the concepts of non-­interference, non-­ domination, non-­oppression, and collective world-­making. We then turn

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to the question of how these different forms of freedom can be expected to interact, what principles might be employed in the effort to balance them relative to one another, and what advantages there are in conceiving freedom in this multidimensional way. In closing, I reflect on what it means for the content of freedom to be open to revision based on insights not yet discovered and on circumstances that cannot be foreseen in advance.

Freedom and Pluralism It is a commonplace in liberal theory to associate freedom with value pluralism. If freedom is commonly seen to serve pluralism, however, it is rarely theorized as the subject of pluralism.4 Yet there are good reasons to believe that freedom, like moral value, has a plural character. On Berlin’s influential account, pluralism in the realm of values means, first, that there are diverse goods that have value for human life and, second, that there is no common standard of measure on the basis of which these various goods could be rank ordered relative to one another.5 Whether value pluralism is conceived as a deep claim about the true nature of moral values or less ambitiously in terms of the simple fact of political disagreement, individual freedom is often understood to be the most reasonable response to pluralism.6 Given the diversity of accepted values, the thinking goes, individuals should be free to pursue whichever of these values they find most attractive. Freedom answers to value pluralism because it enables people to pursue different ends. The concept of pluralism can be applied to political freedom in much the way that Berlin applied it to moral value. The forms of freedom explored in chapter 4 clearly fit the first core feature of value pluralism on Berlin’s account, namely irreducible diversity. Non-­interference, non-­domination, non-­oppression, and collective world-­making refer to experiences that are fundamentally different from one another. It is true that they are all enabling conditions of agency, which is why each one counts as a form of freedom. Yet the particular threats to agency that each one neutralizes are distinct and independent, and the experiences of freedom they sustain are diverse. None can be simply subsumed under any other. It may seem inconsistent to hold both that freedom is plural and that it is one thing (the enabling conditions of agency), but the enabling conditions of human agency are themselves multiple. What these various conditions entail in terms of institutions and interpersonal relationships is not always compatible. Insofar as the conditions of agency are diverse, and freedom is the collection of these conditions, freedom will take plural forms. Freedom is thus consistent with the first feature of value pluralism as Berlin conceived it because as we can

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identify genuinely diverse forms of freedom that are not reducible to one another and that may conflict. The second feature of pluralism on Berlin’s account is the incommensurability of values. Many moral ends are incommensurable, according to Berlin, in the sense that no common standard of measure exists on the basis of which they could be ranked in priority relative to one another. This feature is more complicated when applied to freedom. In one sense, there is of course a common measure between the different forms of freedom that we have identified insofar as all are conditions of human agency. To count as an instance of freedom, an experience or a set of conditions must be agency-­ enabling; it must support the individual’s ability to affirm her identity in her deeds. All forms of freedom have this much in common. At the same time, however, what they have in common in this regard is not something that lends itself to being expressed in commensurable, quantifiable units that could be measured relative to one another and traded or exchanged. Just as a loss in justice cannot be compensated by a gain in beauty, so a violation of freedom as non-­interference is not nullified by an especially invigorated experience of freedom as collective world-­making. As we shall see, there may be good reasons in certain cases for being willing to accept the loss of freedom in one form in order to gain freedom in another. But to the extent that different forms of freedom are distinctive, it is impossible to simply exchange one type for another. In this sense at least, they are indeed incommensurable. More of one cannot itself compensate for the loss of another. Then, too, although all four forms of freedom serve agency, the concept of agency provides no basis for ranking them in order of priority. It would be wrong to say that non-­oppression is simply more important to agency than non-­domination, for instance. The relations of power that prevail in a particular society at a certain moment in history may well make oppression a more urgent problem for agency in that time and place than domination is. Under these circumstances, as we shall see, freedom as non-­oppression may have a special claim to priority in terms of the efforts of activists and the focus of policy initiatives. But as a general matter, non-­oppression is no more necessary to agency than the other forms of freedom identified here. Nor is it more complete as a form of freedom than the others. Non-­ oppression, like non-­interference, non-­domination, and collective world-­ making, captures a part but not the whole of freedom. It covers some of the supports that are crucial to agency but by no means all of them. None of the forms of freedom we have identified is capable on its own of supplying all that is required for freedom as the enabling conditions of human agency. No one of the four types is more complete or more necessary than

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the others, and the different types cannot be exchanged for one another or compensate the losses of others. So on the incommensurability dimension, too, freedom fits the concept of pluralism. We can therefore talk sensibly about a “freedom pluralism” that runs parallel to Berlin’s value pluralism. Nevertheless, there are real differences between the two views. Above all, Berlin never suggests that the different ends pluralism accommodates are all necessary for a good life. A life lived in service to beauty at the expense of, say, political participation, need not be a morally deficient life, as he sees it. Value pluralism therefore calls for unhampered individual choice. Given the variety of valuable ends that exist, people should be free to decide for themselves which ones to pursue. By contrast, political freedom in all its forms is needed if agency is to flourish at the highest level. A society that achieved freedom as non-­domination but still maintained systematic relations of oppression would be seriously deficient from the standpoint of human agency. Consequently, the right response to the plurality of freedom is not to turn people loose to pursue whichever type of freedom they most prefer but for societies collectively to find ways to honor them all as much as possible. The need for a collective approach to managing freedom’s plural character points to another fundamental difference. Berlin clearly conceives the choice and pursuit of particular moral values to be a properly individual enterprise. Indeed, this activity reflects the capacity for sovereign self-­ determination that constitutes the human essence on his view. Once the non-­sovereignty of human agency is acknowledged, however, it becomes clear that freedom is not something that the individual can accomplish alone. Freedom requires social uptake, communicative engagement, and mutual recognition. To simply direct people to pursue their own freedom in their own ways—­as Berlin directs us to choose among the various human ends that have value—­would be to guarantee freedom’s failure. So rather than sanctioning a laissez faire brand of individualism, the pluralism of freedom requires collective responses, although the collective responses it requires support the freedom of individuals. But what kinds of collective responses are called for? What would it mean to honor freedom’s plurality?

Conflict and Balance in Plurality Any discussion of honoring freedom’s plurality must begin by acknowledging that this plurality brings inevitable conflicts. We will need to find ways to mediate these conflicts when they arise, and a pluralist approach to freedom must offer some general guidance. It is true that the different

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forms of freedom discussed here do not always conflict. In certain ways they are complementary, even interdependent. Where domination and oppression exist, for example, the experience of collective world-­making will be difficult, although it may not be impossible. Non-­domination and non-­ oppression thus can support freedom as collective world-­making. Likewise, non-­oppression and non-­domination are themselves mutually reinforcing insofar as the absence of entrenched privilege associated with freedom as non-­oppression makes people less vulnerable to personal control and exploitation, which accompany domination. And freedom as collective world-­ making can support freedom in all the other forms insofar as it generates activist resistance to interference, domination, or oppression. Still, conflicts are bound to arise. The case of veiling among Muslim women offers one example. For some women, especially in postcolonial contexts, wearing the veil is an act of resistance to what they perceive to be (or what is) Western imperialism.7 It is an instance of freedom as collec­ tive world-­making in which they stand up against what feel to them like the “automatic” forces of political aggression, economic exploitation, and liberal secularism. Working together with others in their communities, they mean to inaugurate a new and better way of life. Wearing the veil is a mark of their participation in this collective activity of world-­making; it affirms their agency. Moreover, even when women choose to wear the veil for reasons that ostensibly have nothing to do with world-­making—­because they simply wish to live a pious life, for instance, or to honor the traditions of their native land—­permitting them to do so instantiates freedom as non-­interference. If we value freedom in this form, we should respect their personal choices. Yet from the standpoint of freedom as non-­domination, wearing the veil may seem to symbolize women’s subordination to the authority of a patriarchal order in which they lack an equal share in power, are vulnerable to arbitrary interference, and can be instrumentalized for the purposes of others. And to the extent that the veil embodies women’s secondary social status and their confinement, it is also at odds with freedom as non-­oppression. Such tensions are endemic in complex societies that care about freedom. Affirmative action poses a similar kind of challenge. On the one hand, if state-­based affirmative action policies in hiring and education can help remediate the effects of unwitting stigma and bias in selection processes, they will promote freedom as non-­oppression. On the other hand, such policies constitute interference in the choices of individuals and institutions, and they may also disadvantage some persons (individual white or male candidates) for the advancement of others, thereby instrumentalizing the former

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in a way that approaches domination. Affirmative action thus may pit freedom as non-­oppression against freedom in the forms of non-­interference and non-­domination. Consider, too, the controversy over the efforts of a gay rights group to join the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston in the early 1990s. When parade organizers denied the group’s request to march, activists fought them in court, eventually winning a court-­ordered right to participate. Their victory was a boon to freedom as non-­oppression because it contested the informal relations of social stigma and cultural bias that motivated their exclusion. Parade organizers appealed, however, and in 1995 the Supreme Court struck down the lower court’s order, ruling that the parade was a form of protected speech not to be interfered with by the state, and consequently that organizers could exclude whomever they wished. From the standpoint of freedom as non-­oppression the Supreme Court’s decision was a blow. It affirmed the ability of parade organizers to uphold the social stigma against gay men and lesbians, and it protected the practice of marginalization that undercuts the agency of LGBTQ people. Yet the Court’s decision was at least arguably a positive one from the standpoint of freedom as non-­interference. People in the conservative, working-­class community of South Boston were left to do their own thing in their own way. Many residents clearly had experienced the early court order for inclusion as interference, both by gay activists and by the state. As one participant said of the activists, “It’s all [lies] . . . their putting their ideas on us.”8 The activists were “putting their ideas on” South Boston. The parade is emblematic of traditional cultural values and it expresses the identities of many members of the community in this regard. In targeting the parade for inclusion, activists meant to intervene in its message and ultimately to transform the broader values it expresses. In participating and contesting, they were indeed interfering. Freedom as non-­oppression may sometimes require interference, at least where the values people hold are marked by stigma and bias. In this respect, there is a natural conflict between these two forms of freedom. There are other potential conflicts as well. For example, freedom as collective world-­making may cause problems for freedom as non-­interference. World-­making breaks with the status quo in politics, culture, and society. It interrupts the given, the taken-­for-­granted, the socially accepted in favor of the new and previously unimagined. Its inaugural character explains why Arendt associated freedom especially with revolution. It also marks out the distinctive value of freedom in this form. None of the other types of freedom is intrinsically transformative in this sense; none delivers as a

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regular feature of its operation the distinctive experience of beginning—­ and becoming—­something new. This experience is a highly valued part of freedom for those who are marginalized. Yet for this reason freedom as collective world-­making may put freedom as non-­interference at some risk. Non-­interference requires us to take certain things as given, after all. Particularly as it bears on the limitation of the state, non-­interference presupposes settled bounds on the scope and power of government. In the American context, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution articulate these bounds. And while both documents are subject to shifting interpretations of meaning and application, it is also true that our freedom as non-­interference depends on the fact that most of us generally accept the limits they establish. As Madison says in Federalist no. 48, a constitution provides only “parchment barriers” without the settled opinion on the part of the people that makes its authority stable. If all of us were to exercise freedom as collective world-­making on a regular basis, the “automatic” assumptions that sustain freedom as non-­interference could hardly escape world-­making’s destabilizing effects. Likewise, freedom as non-­interference is likely to pose challenges for freedom as non-­domination. As Hobbes knew—­and as history attests—­it is often the case that the only agent strong enough to prevent individuals from dominating one another is the state. This insight is part of the driving force behind Pettit’s theory of non-­domination. We should not forget that it took the power of the federal government in the United States to bring an end to the racial domination embodied in Jim Crow, federal legislation to establish basic barriers (such as the minimum wage) against the economic domination of workers, and federal judicial decisions to protect women against the sexual domination of rape within marriage, to mention just three of many countless examples. Too much freedom as non-­interference prevents us from constraining those who would master and effectively enslave others in the private sphere. Similarly, the advance of freedom as non-­oppression may periodically require intervention by the state and other actors that a strict adherence to freedom as non-­interference would preclude, as we have seen. The court that required the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston to allow gay marchers did what freedom as non-­oppression demands even though in doing so it put a strain on freedom as non-­interference.9 It is important to see that the conflicts in play here are all conflicts of individual freedom. Even though collective world-­making involves action in concert, for instance, its value lies in the individual experience of freedom it makes possible, or at least this aspect of the experience is the relevant one for present purposes. When collective world-­making conflicts with

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non-­domination, it is the freedom of individuals that is at stake on both sides. Likewise, although freedom as non-­oppression requires attending to systematic social inequalities as they affect the members of marginalized groups, conflicts between non-­oppression and non-­interference are radically misconceived if they are thought to pit the rights of groups against the freedom of individuals. Non-­oppression is a form of individual freedom as much as non-­interference is. Several considerations can provide principled guidance for mediating the conflicts between these different types of individual freedom and achieving balance (if never perfect harmony) among them. The first is that freedom should be pursued individually and promoted collectively with an eye to the demands of justice. The specification of a full theory of justice is beyond the scope of this project, but the core commitment I have in view here is the same liberal-­democratic one that has figured throughout the book: Given the equal moral status of persons, all are entitled to be treated by one another and by the state with equal respect and consideration. Justice means that it is never legitimate to treat some persons as mere instruments for the satisfaction of other persons’ ends. If veiling is indeed a physical embodiment of women’s instrumentalization within certain cultural groups, it will be suspect from the standpoint of justice. This fact will give us reason to criticize the practice and the cultural backgrounds that give rise to it. Justice provides principled grounds for challenging both freedom as non-­ interference and freedom as collective world-­making in this instance. To be sure, a communicative response to the violation(s) in play sometimes will be preferable to a coercive one. It is certainly possible to permit veiling, and thereby to honor freedom as non-­interference and collective world-­making, while speaking out against the injustice of the background practices that may give rise to it. Principles of justice can help us navigate conflicts of freedom, then, but the guidance they offer will not always lead us to pursue coercive action by the state. Justice considerations may recommend communicative engagement rather than coercion.10 And they will rarely settle cases without remainders. Remainders are inevitable because of freedom’s plural character. This feature of freedom makes the veiling case resistant to the kind of resolution recommended by Nancy Hirschmann in The Subject of Liberty. Hirschmann’s objective is to combine a normative commitment to individual freedom for women with a descriptive account of the many ways that women’s freedom is compromised by inequality in patriarchal societies. Her approach is highly nuanced and richly developed. Yet for Hirschmann freedom ultimately means just one thing: unobstructed individual choice. She adopts

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an essentially non-­interference view.11 Voluntary veiling poses a difficult challenge for her because although it constitutes a choice, the background conditions out of which the choice emerges are often conditions of domination, which obstruct choice. Hirschmann’s response is twofold, and the two parts pull in conflicting directions. First, women must be co-­participants in the production of the cultural values and social norms that motivate their individual choices.12 It is only insofar as a woman’s choice to wear the veil arises out of a social context that she and other women have been equal partners in constituting that her choice is indeed a free one representing a genuine exercise of agency. Yet Hirschmann resists the natural implication of this view, which is that we should not respect choices that arise out of in­ egalitarian cultural backgrounds. In fact, she insists that we should respect the choices that women make, however they make them.13 This is the second part of her response to the question of veiling. Because freedom in the final analysis equals choice, protecting the freedom of women requires honoring their choice to wear the veil even when they have not actually had an equal hand in determining the cultural values that motivated this choice. To deny them their choice is to deny them their freedom. There are good reasons to be sympathetic to both strands of Hirschmann’s view. Yet if she is right about the effect that a cultural background of in­ equality has on individual choice then there is no reason to believe that the decision to wear the veil, when it arises against such a background, constitutes the kind of choice that instantiates freedom, and hence no reason to think that in respecting this choice we are protecting women’s freedom. Hirschmann never convincingly articulates why freedom requires us to honor choices that her account shows are unfree—­and that may serve to perpetuate unfreedom in the forms of domination and oppression. At the same time, restricting the unfree decisions that women make reeks of paternalism. It fails to take women seriously as agents, which (as Hirschmann points out) recapitulates the lack of respect that is so much a part of women’s secondary status under patriarchy. Hirschmann’s account is caught on the horns of a dilemma: either treat unfree choices as if they were free, which may abet the backgrounds of inequality that undermine women’s agency; or restrict unfree choices in the interest of reconstructing those backgrounds, but in the process deny the actual agency of women here and now. This dilemma is at least partly the product of Hirschmann’s monistic approach to freedom. A plural view can help. It explains why we have freedom-­based reasons to care both about the actual choices that individual women make and about the backgrounds that inform their choices and the degree to which these backgrounds manifest social inequality. Freedom as

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non-­interference and freedom as collective world-­making may be served by respecting women’s choices to wear the veil even where the cultural background that yielded these choices is marred by domination and oppression. At the same time, we will also have grounds to contest that background in view of freedom as non-­domination and freedom as non-­oppression. From the pluralist perspective, then, the question is not whether women who wear the veil are free but rather which forms of freedom are instantiated by wearing the veil and which forms of freedom are compromised. Accepting freedom’s plurality can help us make sense of all that is at stake in conflicts over practices such as veiling. Part of acknowledging what is at stake is admitting that there will regularly be moral remainders in the decisions we make. Justice considerations can help us steer a legitimate course in such decisions but they will not resolve every remainder. Another way that justice can help in adjudicating conflicts of freedom is to stipulate that we should prohibit the sacrifice of the freedom of some for the sake of the freedom of others. The justice-­based requirement to treat persons as moral equals and as ends in themselves makes such sacrifices unacceptable. Individual freedoms therefore may be properly restricted (indeed, must be restricted) to ensure the maximal freedom of each within the bounds set by the freedom of all. The white supremacist has a legitimate claim to freedom as non-­interference, which covers the right to hold and express his noxious views, but he should not be free to act on these views in ways that violate the freedom of others. For the supremacist to act on his views would be to jeopardize the freedom as non-­interference of racial minorities. Insofar as justice requires treating persons with equal respect, the freedom of the supremacist is properly limited to belief and speech. Even when his freedom is limited in this way, however, it may still con­ flict with freedom for racial minorities, considering the effects his speech may have in perpetuating racial oppression. If the expression of his racist views contributes to a background of social stigma and cultural bias, which undermines the agency of racial minorities in pervasive, patterned, and unjust ways, it counts as oppressive. The conflict in play is thus multi­ dimensional, involving both different persons and different types of freedom simultaneously. One way to handle the conflict between the freedom as non-­interference of the white supremacist and the freedom as non-­ oppression of racial minorities would be to simply restrict the speech of racists. Yet because no clear rank ordering exists among the different types of freedom according to which one could legitimately prioritize non-­ oppression over non-­interference, this response is difficult to justify.

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An alternative that is sensitive to the complexity of the conflict and is guided by the principles of justice and the demands of equal freedom would be to permit racist speech but to take active measures to counteract its oppressive, freedom-­denying effects. The state has an expressive power as well as a coercive one, as Corey Brettschneider reminds us, and it can exercise this power in ways that help to neutralize the adverse effects of speech that it is compelled to allow.14 In judicial decisions involving the speech of supremacists, for instance, the courts could make a point of emphasizing the fact that such beliefs fundamentally contradict the claims of justice (and America’s democratic principles), and point out the ignorance and fear that underlie them. Elected officials could use such decisions to recall the public to its own democratic values, and to reiterate the many achievements and contributions of those who are stigmatized by racist speech. Public funding could be directed to support educational efforts in schools and cultural initiatives in civil society that focus on deflating cultural bias, fostering communicative engagement across racial divides, and cultivating an ethos of respect. The activities of the state in this regard could be fruitfully supplemented by other bodies such as churches, civil associations, and arts-­based groups. Individual citizens themselves also have a role here insofar as our informal engagements with one another can challenge oppressive norms and contribute over time to reconfiguring cultural values along more emancipatory lines. Such efforts would nourish the sources of freedom as non-­ oppression in a way that is consistent with what justice requires but without obstructing freedom as non-­interference. A somewhat different kind of conflict arises when diverse forms of freedom impose contrary requirements with respect to a single individual. The veiling case is one example, where a woman’s freedom as non-­domination may demand something different from what her own freedom as non-­ interference allows and what her freedom as collective world-­making en­ courages. We could broaden this example to include a wide range of experiences among those who are marginalized or subjugated. Consider the gangsta rappers discussed in chapter 2, whose agency affirms identities that are suffused with racial stigma and sexual inequality. Freedom as non-­ interference requires that we permit the production of their music, but in the process we may find ourselves abetting the domination and oppression that the music reflects. Likewise, the performance of drag is often experienced by transvestites in terms of freedom as collective world-­making. Yet if it enacts identities that are steeped in standard gender binaries and expectations it may recapitulate the stereotypical images of male and female that

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confine so many of us in the first place and undermine freedom as non-­ oppression. In each of these cases, it is difficult to serve the freedom of the individual involved without simultaneously compromising her freedom or accepting its compromise. One way to approach such cases is through critical, communicative engagement. Consider the drag queen. We might honor her freedom as world-­ making (and non-­interference for that matter) but challenge the image of femininity she enacts, showing how it reflects and may tend to reproduce oppressive gender norms. In doing so, of course, we should be open to seeing things from her perspective as well, and to revising our assumptions in light of what we learn about her experience. We might work in broader ways, too, to support alternative gender identities, ones that are less confining and friendlier to the affirmation of distinctive individualities. Likewise, we can honor gangsta rappers’ right to produce the music they make even as we criticize its content and challenge the frameworks of meaning that have contributed to shaping it. We need not—­and we should not—­turn a blind eye to domination and oppression in our efforts to protect non-­interference and collective world-­making. We can support multiple freedoms simulta­ neously by calling attention to the ways in which the actions that freedom in one form allows may tend to compromise freedom in other forms. In mediating conflicts between different kinds of freedom, we would do well to bear in mind the special role that the state has, both as a guarantor of freedom and as a potential threat to freedom. Both considerations once again point to the importance of a constitutionally constrained political order. The basic structure of a limited state is crucial, where the rule of law prevails, where the constitutional framework establishes a separation and balance of powers, and where fundamental rights enjoy established protections. Equally important, however, is the special power and authority that the state has in promoting what Rawls called “the fair value of the political liberties,” namely the economic and social conditions needed to enable all persons to exercise the rights that the constitution protects.15 An extensive discussion of the policy prescriptions this points to would take us too far afield of our objectives, but we can at least say that a functional public school system and a basic social welfare net will be important. At the same time, however, the state is neither the only threat to freedom nor its only (or necessarily best) protector. Especially in ostensibly free societies such as the United States, some of the most pressing damage to freedom results from impersonal social forces that elude the direct control of the state. The state can formally prohibit discrimination in jobs and housing, for instance, and it can punish violators when their infractions can be

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proven. Yet much of the racial disadvantage that permeates our society at this point in history proceeds informally and undercover, without announcing itself as such or leaving any fingerprints.16 The stigmas that sustain the oppression of marginalized individuals today operate largely through interpersonal interactions that the state cannot hope to regulate—­and never should. To involve the state directly at the level where informal stigmas circulate would be far too intrusive. It would destroy freedom as non-­interference, undercut the possibility of freedom as collective world-­making, and risk making the state itself an agent of both domination and oppression. This is not to say that there is nothing the state can do about impersonal systems of oppression and informal practices of domination. As we have seen, the state can exercise its expressive power even when it does not coerce. It can also protect the rights to free speech, press, and association, which enable the concerns and perspectives of those who are marginalized to be heard and to gain influence over time. And it can indirectly support emancipatory initiatives run by others through the strategic allocation of funds, among other things. Yet to make freedom solely the state’s responsibility is to let the rest of us—­average citizens in our daily lives—­off the hook. The state has a role in defending freedom in all its forms, but it needs partners. The balancing act that plural freedom requires must be a decentralized endeavor with multiple sites and sources. If a constitutional balance of powers and a bill of rights serve freedom as non-­interference through the institutional structure of the state, for instance, a vibrant mix of cultural associations and arts groups can contribute to reconstructing racial and other stigmas in ways that promote freedom as non-­oppression. Likewise, while freedom as non-­domination is supported by equal voting rights, which institutionalize protections against arbitrary governance, it is also promoted by the political activism of reproductive rights groups such as NARAL, and by civil associations that publicize the racially disparate and dominating effects of incarceration practices in the United States. When it comes to non-­oppression, we know that promoting freedom requires undoing social stigmas and cultural bias. The visual and expressive arts are tremendously powerful sources of both the stigmas themselves and alternative perspectives that contest them. Movies, television, books, and music are all influential here. Artists, producers, and investors who generate works that contribute to recasting the marginalized in terms that transcend old prejudices are engaged in promoting freedom in this respect. Likewise, those who participate in communicative exchanges that convey the experiences and perspectives of the marginalized and bring them into conversation with dominant narratives in society are helping to generate the

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backgrounds of shared understanding through which the agency of marginalized individuals can better come to fruition. These exchanges can take place in myriad venues, from op-­ed pages and YouTube videos to conversations among colleagues at the water cooler. Insofar as they contribute to creating the conditions of non-­oppression, they offer resources for promoting this form of freedom in ways that do not sacrifice non-­interference, or at least do not require interference by the state. Freedom as collective world-­ making also can be pursued in a wide variety of ways and places. Because it requires collective action, civil associations are especially promising as potential sites for its exercise. Entrepreneurship in the economic domain is another way that people can have the experience of transforming the world and themselves through action in concert.17 Laws and policies that protect the right to associate and that foster entrepreneurship, and a civic ethos that prizes such activities, can help to promote freedom as collective world-­ making within the larger mix of plural freedoms. Action on behalf of freedom in all its forms therefore requires initiatives at multiple levels in society and in many locations. It is also worth noting that the specific constellation of circumstances that prevail at any particular moment in time may reasonably generate special interest in one type of freedom. In our own society, racial domination as a formal matter is legally proscribed now that the institutional apparatus of slavery and Jim Crow have been dismantled. For us the more pressing threat to freedom for racial minorities is not domination so much as oppression. I do not mean to deny that racial domination still exists in the United States. But thanks in large part to the civil rights movement, racial domination is legally proscribed, and when it arises it is widely recognized as such and generally disapproved, at least publicly. Racial oppression, by contrast, is still invisible to many of us much of the time.18 And many people among the racially privileged do not recognize oppression as an injustice that they are complicit in committing. They acknowledge neither the compromised freedom of others in this regard nor their own shared responsibility for it. In light of these circumstances, we have good reason to make freedom as non-­oppression a special focus of activist efforts and policy initiatives in the United States right now. This special emphasis is not equivalent to absolute priority. It would be wrong to simply sacrifice other forms of freedom to non-­oppression, even under present circumstances. The point is that as we think about balancing the different forms that freedom takes we should expect that the shifting demands of time and place will periodically make some forms of freedom more urgent than others. In Saudi Arabia today, legally sanctioned

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domination of women by men is a problem in a way that it no longer is in many other places around the world. In North Korea, unconstrained interference by government in the lives of citizens is an especially pressing threat. How we prioritize among the different forms that freedom can take, then, should be responsive not only to justice as an abstract ideal but also to the concrete demands of the local context with its particular historical legacies and distinctive threats. Together such considerations can give us principled grounds for concrete decision making in difficult cases. Think again about affirmative action in the United States. Although state-­based affirmative action policies do compromise freedom as non-­ interference, they have the potential to promote freedom as non-­oppression for individuals who are members of racial minority groups. Given America’s distinctive legacy of violent racial domination and the persistent, pervasive presence of racial oppression, together with the justice-­based requirement to promote the fair value of the political liberties, we have a sound justifica­ tion for pursuing affirmation action in the United States these days. This jus­ tification combines general principles of justice with sensitivity to the local context. As this context changes over time—­for instance, if we should succeed in conquering race-­based oppression or if affirmative action policies should fail to bear fruit—­the justification may lose its force. At that point we would need to seek a new balance of freedom as it bears on affirmative action. Then, too, different groups within a particular society sometimes face distinctive kinds of threats. Whereas the poor in the United States are regularly subjected to domination in the form of instrumentalization and exploitation, the freedom of gay people is more likely to be constrained by the dynamics of oppression. The two groups (which of course for some individuals overlap) will have reason to focus their efforts on behalf of freedom in somewhat different directions. Balancing freedom in its various forms is something that we do collectively but not something that we all do in the same way all at once. One thing that is always important, however, is communication. In order for the balance of plural freedoms to be defensible from the standpoint of justice it must treat persons as moral equals. It must be responsive to the legitimate concerns of all. The only hope of achieving responsiveness in this form rests on the free and open communication of perspectives and interests. This means that fundamental rights protecting free speech, press, and association are crucial because they set the framework within which such communication can transpire. It also means that support for public education and other venues in which persons of different backgrounds and views can regularly interact with one another is important. Americans

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should seek out far more social contexts for fostering communication across difference than we currently have. A civil service requirement, for instance, that asked every citizen to spend a year working with others on some collective project for public improvement would be valuable. We need to develop familiarity with the experience of others, skills in communicating with others about common and diverse concerns, and established channels for communication. Communication is crucial to freedom partly because of agency’s depen­ dence on social uptake, its need for bearers. As we have seen, social fields of shared understanding are necessary for individual agency to come to fru­ ition, for the identity and efficacy sides of agency to come together. The only way to create the needed understanding and to recreate it as conditions evolve is for people to be in communication with one another. Additionally, domination, oppression, and interference regularly arise in ways that many people are blind to, especially the privileged and the powerful. We need robust channels of communicative exchange to ensure that when new failures of freedom arise they can be publicly identified, contested, and remediated. Freedom needs communication for all these reasons. It also needs a civic ethos of reciprocity that opens our minds and hearts to others and makes us willing to hear them out, as we saw in chapter 3. The non-­sovereign responsibilities described in chapter 2 figure here as well. Responsibility as accountability and responsibility as responsiveness prepare the ground for the kinds of communicative exchanges that help us balance conflicting freedoms in ways that are mutually nourishing. The most recent effort to resolve the continuing dispute over the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston attempts, however imperfectly, to balance multiple forms of freedom in a way that is instructive. In March 2011 the traditional parade was held according to the terms established by the Supreme Court, excluding the gay marchers. Following one mile behind that parade, however, was a second procession, this one consisting of gay rights activists marching with a dual message that at once celebrated Irish heritage and gay pride. The development of the festivities in this way, which reflected input from both government and civil society, managed to serve freedom as non-­interference, freedom as collective world-­making, and freedom as non-­oppression all at once. It was not a perfect resolution of the tensions between them. Within the traditional parade itself, after all, freedom as non-­interference came at the expense of freedom as non-­oppression. But it was a step in the right direction, toward the kind of balance for which plural freedom should aim. For even in protecting non-­interference, this compromise approach supports the communicative engagement and critical

Plural Freedom / 183

contestation that over time have the potential to transform the backgrounds of social meaning that currently sustain oppression—­and that make it feel to locals like a violation when gay people want to march in their St. Patrick’s Day parade. The continuing saga of this case also brings out the way in which freedom is always an incomplete project, even in a largely free society. This is true partly because the human condition is not fixed, and consequently new kinds of claims inevitably arise over time as the conditions of our lives change. We come to see what we did not see before, and violations of freedom that once were invisible or seemed tolerable now become completely unsustainable. Partly, too, freedom is always an unfinished business be­ cause what is initiated in one time and place is rarely completed there. The pursuit of freedom in all its forms depends on narratives that extend beyond any particular set of actions and understandings. Just as gay rights activists today draw inspiration from the real but incomplete achievements of the civil rights era, so civil rights activists were inspired by nineteenth-­century abolitionists, and by Gandhi, and by the biblical story of Exodus. Even incomplete gains in freedom can plant seeds for future harvests. Part of cultivating these seeds is building, through contestatory and communicative engagement with others, the basis for new communities of bearers, people who can help bring the agency of those who lack freedom today to fruition tomorrow. What new forms freedom may take in the future will depend on how these communities of bearers emerge, on what possibilities our actions inspire in others, and on how shifting circumstances interact with the perennial human desire to affirm our identities in our deeds. The unfinished, open-­ended quality of plural freedom is reason to approach the pursuit of freedom with humility. Just as human agency eludes sovereign control, freedom is never something we can fully master. We should be bold and ambitious in our efforts on behalf of freedom but we should be wary of the unintended effects that our pursuit of freedom may unleash. It is also crucial to hold in view the plural forms that freedom takes in any given case, to refrain from the ideological defense of freedom in one form at the expense of others. The challenges of balancing plural freedoms involve far more than just coordinating the freedom of different individuals so that the exercise of each person’s freedom is compatible with the freedom of all. It also requires us to balance different types of freedom, to adjudicate the conflicts among them in light of the enduring principles of justice and the shifting demands of circumstance and history. No single schema could ever specify the right balance of plural freedoms for all time. Nor could any one authority or social body effectively bear responsibility for balancing

184 / Chapter Five

freedom alone. Although the state will certainly have an important role here, this work is best undertaken in a distributed way at multiple sites, through countless initiatives, and with the diverse involvement of us all. Because the perfect reconciliation of freedom’s plural forms is out of reach, meaning that the pursuit of freedom in one form will often impose strain on other types of freedom that are also valuable, we should never be too sanguine about living in an ostensibly free society. Even a free society will regularly be shot through with violations of freedom. We must not forget this. We must not let our gratitude and our pride for the real achievements of freedom among us blind us to the still unfinished business of freedom for those who today remain marginalized or who tomorrow may be subject to new forms of domination, oppression, or interference. We must be always on the watch for the striking sight, sure to come, of a freedom that no one has ever seen before but that we know, suddenly and ineluctably, is absolutely necessary.

C o ncl u s i o n s

Redeeming Freedom

Freedom beyond sovereignty is not one thing. It is multiple experiences, each of which involves its own collection of agency-­enabling conditions, including social, political, economic, and cultural factors. Non-­interference, non-­ domination, non-­oppression, and collective world-­making rest on diverse, sometimes conflicting practices and policies. Consequently, the conclusions of this book cannot yield a single set of prescriptions for the future. This may be disappointing to some, but it is also instructive. The effort to direct all our policies and practices to promote freedom defined in one way cannot help but compromise freedom in other forms. Non-­domination will require forms of intervention by the state that violate freedom as non-­interference, for instance, and strict adherence to freedom as non-­interference will inevitably allow relations of domination to proliferate. Likewise, to support freedom for all requires attending to impersonal dynamics of oppression that elude both non-­interference and non-­domination. We must also recognize the great value of freedom as collective world-­making, through which individuals can experience the transformative power of their own agency. Freedom in this form calls for much more in the way of active political engagement than any of the others, and the radical potential implicit in collective world-­making may challenge from time to time the entrenched principles and practices that protect them. In all these ways, plural freedom is a tricky business. The prospect of historical changes over time that could bring new types of freedom into play only complicate matters further. There are a few conclusions we can draw with some confidence, however. First, we need to recognize the destructive force of systematic social inequality as it bears on human agency and freedom. We have seen that the non-­ sovereign nature of agency makes it vulnerable in deep ways to inequality. The subtle, informal dynamics of social inequality can be difficult to deal

186 / Conclusions

with. They frequently fly under the radar, and they often involve behavior that is not actionable from a legal standpoint. Moreover, they regularly take place in contexts that we think of as private rather than public, in which the strong arm and blunt instruments of the state have no place. And while individual actions matter a great deal to sustaining informal dynamics of inequality, such actions are often unintentional at the individual level, and no single individual’s action by itself sustains them. For all these reasons, liberal theory has not been very effective in pointing the way beyond those dynamics. Yet they are far from secondary concerns. The non-­sovereignty of human agency shows that they are fundamental to freedom. Because agency is a non-­sovereign phenomenon, to ignore social inequality is inevitably to compromise freedom. So the first thing we can say is that liberal theory needs to make informal social inequalities and their agency-­disabling effects a more central part of its analysis, and it must attend with greater care to the troubled relationship between social inequality and freedom. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty means to answer this call. It is perhaps worth acknowledging that the ideal of freedom as non-­ oppression, which especially targets social inequality, may generate some uneasiness among liberals who are otherwise sympathetic to the approach taken here, with its emphasis on individual freedom and its insistence on normative individualism. The ideal of non-­oppression may seem to justify a politics of identity that privileges group-­based claims—­or claims about group-­based harms—­over the interests of individuals, and that pits group against group in a potentially endless competition for recognition and retribution. Then, too, people will sometimes disagree about what counts as an instance of oppression. The contestability of the concept may seem to make it unworkable as a regulative ideal for a pluralistic society. These concerns are not unreasonable, but neither are they sufficient to reject the ideal of non-­oppression or to subordinate it to freedom in other forms. In the first place, non-­oppression is simply misunderstood if it is thought to justify privileges for groups as against freedom for individuals. It is a form of individual freedom, not group privilege, and its function is to illuminate and remediate threats to individual agency that otherwise go unseen. As to the danger of escalating competition for recognition of oppressed status, the aggressive pursuit of freedom as non-­oppression may well have the effect of bringing new claims of oppression to the table of public deliberation. But this is not a bad thing if it makes society able to see and respond to real violations of freedom that have hitherto been ignored. After all, individuals occasionally push the envelope by unreasonably claiming to be interfered

Redeeming Freedom / 187

with or dominated, too. The fact that people sometimes make unreasonable claims does not lead us to reject non-­interference or non-­domination as regulative ideals. Instead, it encourages us to cultivate the arts of political judgment and deliberation so that we can make discerning decisions when needed, and sort out the reasonable claims from the unreasonable ones. These same arts are relevant to the case of non-­oppression. Likewise, many freedom claims, including claims involving all the different types of freedom identified in this book, are contestable and subject to dispute. The solution is not to abandon freedom but to learn how to distinguish sound claims from unjustified ones, and to manage disagreement in ways that embody reciprocity and good sense. A second conclusion we can draw is that the formal apparatus of the state (including laws, public policies, and formal rights) is not the only mechanism for promoting freedom and redressing its failures, and it is not always the most effective one. We must ourselves step up. It can be difficult for us to see and accept our responsibility for the role we have in perpetuating the impersonal injustices that compromise freedom because impersonal injustices typically transpire in the absence of individual intentionality and control. This fact conspires with our sovereigntist assumptions about agency to encourage us to let ourselves off the hook far too easily. Understanding the non-­sovereignty of agency—­both our own and that of others—­can help us to better appreciate our complicity in the injustices that are everywhere around us. Because agency’s non-­sovereignty contests the conditions of intentionality and control that underlie much of our thinking about responsibility, it opens our eyes to the ways we are responsible for one another and for ourselves. When we think about responsibility from a non-­sovereign perspective we can see that while we rarely bear sole responsibility for outcomes, we are actually responsible more often and more broadly than we typically think for the compromised agency of others. We are also more able than we often assume to make a difference in the world. Culpability, accountability, and responsiveness not only comprise a robust model of personal responsibility, they also point us to a new ethos of democratic citizenship that nourishes non-­sovereign freedom and empowers us all. A third conclusion suggested by this analysis is that there is crucial work to be done in cultivating the communities of bearers who help bring the agency of marginalized persons to fruition and thereby sustain their freedom. Individual initiative is a key component of agency, of course, and it is especially crucial for action that breaks with prevailing relations of power. We need to celebrate the achievements of outstanding individuals whose

188 / Conclusions

imagination and courage generate social transformation. At the same time, we have seen the tremendously important role that communities of bearers play in helping to make good on individual initiative. So even as we celebrate outstanding individuals, we should look for and make visible the conditions that support their extraordinary effects. We need to mark and celebrate the bearers too. Doing so honors the historic counterpublics that have made freedom possible for so many of us over time, and it can help promote the emergence of new ones. More generally, we need to foster communicative engagement and mutual understanding among citizens so as to create the bearers needed to sustain freedom widely. An extensive policy analysis is beyond the scope of this project, but we can sketch briefly some institutional forms that might foster the right kinds of engagement. Programs that more effectively desegregate American schools have a place, as would a mandatory public service requirement. Public schools and public service (modeled perhaps on AmeriCorps) serve the dual purposes of building skills and fostering interpersonal interactions across difference. The deliberative forums championed by Gutmann and Thompson, which advise public decision-­makers in some American cities and states, offer another mechanism for the exchange of diverse perspectives.1 At the level of civil society, investment in voluntary associations also holds promise. The free chess club at my local branch of the public library sees people of different ages, classes, races, and countries playing chess together on Tuesday afternoons. The “Human Library” program serves a similar function. Begun in Copenhagen in the early 2000s and now active in more than thirty-­five countries from Europe to North America to China, the Human Library characterizes itself as “an innovative method designed to promote dialogue, reduce prejudices, and encourage understanding.”2 Individuals volunteer to be “human books” who make themselves available to be “read” by others through informal exchanges in a public space, most often the local library. The exchanges enable individuals to “break stereotypes by challenging the most common prejudices in a positive and humorous manner” and thereby “promoting tolerance and understanding.”3 They are free and open to all, although people must register in advance to be “books” and “readers.” The Human Library also reminds us of the importance of public spaces. Martha Nussbaum writes powerfully along these lines about the effect that Chicago’s Millennium Park has had in encouraging people from all parts of the city to talk, play, learn, and party together.4 Finally, we need support for cultural and artistic productions that give voice to the experiences of people from diverse backgrounds, productions that bring us into conversation (whether virtual or

Redeeming Freedom / 189

actual) with people we might otherwise never encounter but whose lives and freedom we may unwittingly affect. We should not expect that more communicative engagement among citizens will always lead to greater agreement on contentious matters; still less should we expect consensus. The objective of communicative engagement is not to establish uniformity but to make visible the harms (especially violations of freedom) that often go unnoticed by the privileged. It also aims to increase opportunities for new communities of bearers to arise, communities that can help sustain the agency and serve the freedom of those who have been left behind. It is not only the marginalized who are left behind in this regard, either. The privileged are also non-­sovereign agents, after all, because non-­sovereignty is a general feature of the human condition. They do have real advantages, of course. Part of what it means to be privileged is that one’s action regularly finds a receptive community of bearers that helps bring it to fruition. Still, the social uptake that sustains the agency of the privileged sometimes imposes costs on them, too. For example, the agency of straight white men in our society is generally supported by the social norms of masculinity in view of which their actions are interpreted and taken up by others. Yet there are some straight white men for whom these norms are not a particularly good fit, meaning they cannot inhabit the norms without doing damage to certain aspects of who they authentically are. It would be liberating for some of them if our norms of masculinity were less rigid, more plural, or substantively different. Communicative engagement about masculinity—­and about gender norms and expectations more broadly—­could be freedom-­enhancing for some of the privileged as well as for those who are marginalized or subordinate. In cultivating communities of bearers through communicative exchange, however, we should remember that these communities matter because they help sustain the freedom of individuals. The socially distributed nature of human agency means that individual freedom is an intersubjective affair but it does not make community life our highest calling. A properly reconstructed liberal individualism treats the freedom of individuals as an end in itself even as it acknowledges that this freedom is only ever possible through the right kinds of association. Liberal individualism needs to be more attentive as a descriptive matter to how group-­based memberships and systematic inequalities interact to affect freedom for those who are marginalized, but it should never lose hold of its normative commitment to the individual. It should be clear by now that the reconstructed liberal individualism pursued here has broad implications for American citizenship. An ethos of citizenship that supports non-­sovereign freedom must include an energetic

190 / Conclusions

sense of duty that covers all our interactions with other people, including many of our more intimate interpersonal relationships. We need to see that the quality of our relationships fundamentally affects our own agency and that of others. We must recognize our civic obligation to try to understand and support the agency of others in ways that sustain their freedom. Just as there is a presumption of reciprocity and equal respect that is owed by all to all in democratic societies, so there is a presumed duty to take up the freedom of our fellows. This duty admits of exceptions, of course. As we have seen, individual action will sometimes need to be constrained. The duty should be carried out with critical consciousness and in the context of continuing communicative engagement with others. Fostering communities of bearers and cultivating democratic citizenship are of a piece. The same institutional supports and communicative practices that generate communities of bearers will also contribute to shaping citizens who take seriously their duty to sustain the freedom of their fellows. We can look for inspiration to Havel’s “existential revolution.” The revolution we need today involves facing up to the limits of our sovereignty but also being clear-­eyed about the scope of our (often unintended) effects. Ironically, our non-­sovereignty means that we bear more not less responsi­ bility for our own freedom and that of others, significantly more than we may have thought. Making freedom real for all will require us to acknowledge this wider responsibility by attending more carefully to informal relations of inequality and working to transform them. It calls for resistance to oppression as well as domination and interference, and for engaging with others in the transformative practices of collective world-­making. In transforming ourselves and our shared world in the liberatory ways envisioned here, we also stand to transform our experience of freedom. American freedom is in need of transformation today. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that our freedom is in need of redemption. American freedom has been debased and disabled by being reduced to the narrow activity of making choices and exercising control, even to simply buying things. Responses to this development from within political theory have often been compromised by their own forms of narrowness. The call for a more collectivist spirit found in participatory democrats and some contemporary Arendtians is valuable, for example, but its insistence on action in concert and political participation does not fully capture the multiplicity of freedom’s forms, some of which are experienced in more individualized ways.5 And while communitarians a generation ago raised important concerns about our common conceptions of freedom, they were insufficiently

Redeeming Freedom / 191

attentive to the fact of plurality and the problems of social inequality, for which community itself is no panacea. Those who contest contemporary freedom from a poststructuralist perspective today also help us see its limits but they have been too timid in their visions of what individual freedom could be.6 We need to believe in freedom, in the plural freedom that allows for the enactment, with vitality, of diverse individualities. Yet we need to believe in freedom with our eyes wide open to the non-­sovereignty of human agency, and in a way that recognizes freedom as more than individual acts of choice and control. To reconceive freedom in a non-­sovereign but robust and plural way would be to redeem it, to give it a new life with new purpose and power. Much of the cynicism about freedom that one hears in poststructuralist and postcolonial circles today comes from the fact that freedom for some has so often come at the expense of freedom for others.7 This cynicism is not limited to academic domains either. One hears it anywhere there are people who have been consistently, systematically shut out of the American promise of freedom for all. We cannot redeem American freedom while ignoring its marred past and our own history of collective failures in this regard. George Shulman’s discussion of redemption in the context of America’s troubled racial history offers fruitful insight here. Shulman distinguishes between redemption from the past and redemption of the past. The former involves transcending or leaving behind past conditions in a way that leaves one unburdened for the future. Thus one can be redeemed from captivity or from sin so as to go forward newly whole, or pure, or free.8 By contrast, the redemption of the past involves not leaving it behind but coming to terms with it, which is “to endow it with meaning, to atone for it or heal it, to make it justified, worthwhile, of value.”9 One can redeem a history of suffering or oppression, Shulman says, by “drawing value from it, by making it meaningful, by seeking vengeance, reparation, or vindication.”10 When Martin Luther King Jr. called on white people to “redeem” the American promise, he meant they should “make good on it; and by making amends for conduct that violates the promise of equality, whites ‘redeem’ themselves and ‘make whole’ a union rent by injustice.”11 When it comes to American freedom, we cannot hope to simply transcend its (and our) troubled past. The redemption we need is a redemption that finds new meanings in freedom, that shines light on previously unseen harms, and that enables us to inhabit our freedom in ways that extend it more fully to others. We redeem our freedom by making our past and our present meaningful parts of a progressively unfolding narrative toward

192 / Conclusions

freedom for all. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about this trajectory. It depends on us and on what we do, both as individuals and together. And since we cannot ever master all our effects, given the non-­sovereignty of our agency, we cannot know for sure where our efforts to redeem freedom will end. But this redemption is something we must seek. We must show that the freedom of some need not rest on the mastery of others; and we need to make good, finally, on our country’s promise of freedom for all. A freedom that is redeemed in this way carries redemptive force of its own. It has the power to redeem us, to put us in right relation to one another and ourselves, to repair our political community, to make us a new kind of whole. A non-­sovereign approach to freedom can help with the redemption we need. Understanding freedom and the things that threaten it in the more capacious ways suggested here should allow us to diagnose violations of freedom that elude our common assumptions and expectations. It can help focus our attention and energy where they are especially needed here and now, including the pressing problem of oppression. Freedom as non-­ interference and freedom as non-­domination are crucial components of any free society, but they are not sufficient. We need to extend the responsibilities of democratic citizens to cover our participation in patterns of social interaction that systematically thwart the agency of particular categories of persons, however unintentional and even unconscious these interactions may be. Refraining from interference and domination is not enough; we also need to loosen the chains of oppression that sustain enduring injustice and persistent failures of freedom. And we must encourage and celebrate the more activist experiences of freedom involved in collective world-­making. The transformations of self and society that freedom in this form makes possible go beyond anything that non-­interference, non-­domination, and non-­oppression themselves could sustain. Finally, even as we acknowledge the intersubjective conditions of human agency we should never lose sight of the individual aspirations that freedom serves. The value of communicative exchange and mutual understanding, of communities of bearers and social uptake, of a richer, broader account of personal responsibility, and of freedom’s plurality is that all this makes individual men and women more free. It allows us to live out our distinctive individualities with vitality and effect, to fully inhabit our actions, to affect the world in ways that manifest who we authentically are. Non-­sovereign freedom is at once an intersubjective and an emphatically individualist ideal. And because we cannot know in advance or ever fix once and for all the possible range of human identities that may emerge in time, to seek

Redeeming Freedom / 193

freedom beyond sovereignty is to live somewhat on the edge—­on the edge of certainty, of comfort, of complacency. It means being willing to act into the unknown and to be receptive to the actions of others, people we may not understand yet or even fully see. In all these ways freedom beyond sovereignty calls for courage. Yet the promise of redemption it holds is one that we cannot refuse, for it is the American promise, long delayed, of a freedom that really is for all.

Notes

Introduction

1. CNN, “Report Sees ‘Sobering Statistics’ on Racial Inequality,” updated March 25, 2009, www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/25/black.america.report/index.html. 2. A 2005 report by the US Center for Disease Control, for example, found that “for many health conditions, non-­Hispanic blacks bear a disproportionate burden of disease, injury, death, and disability.” See “Health Disparities Experienced by Black or African Americans—­United States,” last modified January 13, 2005, http://www .cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5401a1.htm. See also Eileen Crimmins and Yasuhiko Saito, “Trends in Healthy Life Expectancy in the United States, 1970–­1990: Gender, Racial, and Educational Differences,” Social Science and Medicine 52, no. 11 (June 2001): 1629–­41; L. A. Clayton and W. M. Byrd, “Race: A Major Health Status and Outcome Variable 1980–­1999,” supplement, Journal of the National Medical Association 93, no. 3 (March 2001): 35S–­54S; David R. Williams and Chiquita Collins, “US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health: Patterns and Explanations,” Annual Review of Sociology 21 (August 1995): 349–­86; and Steven H. Woolf, Robert E. Johnson, and H. Jack Geiger, “The Rising Prevalence of Severe Poverty in America: A Growing Threat to Public Health,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 31, no. 4 (October 2006): 332–­41. 3. See Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961; New York: Penguin, 2006), 163: “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.” 4. Classic accounts of state sovereignty include Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994); and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For more recent treatments, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Jean Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton,

196  /  Notes to Pages 1–9 NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Jackson, Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); and Stephen D. Krasner, “Problematic Sovereignty,” in Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities, ed. Krasner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 5. The sovereignty of the state is increasingly challenged these days as well. See, for example, Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. 6. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 118–­72; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Both Berlin and Pettit are discussed at length in the chapters that follow. 7. Along these lines, Patchen Markell notes that social and political subordination are “ways of patterning and arranging the world that allow some people and groups to enjoy a semblance of sovereign agency at others’ expense.” Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5. 8. I borrow the language of “micropolitics” from William Connolly. See William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), esp. 136–­45. 9. See Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 10. Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 23–­24, 27, 51, 57. 11. When the Black Youth Project “asked black Americans aged 30 and over to explain why young blacks have a hard time getting ahead . . . at most only about a quarter of the respondents . . . thought discrimination was the primary reason black youth faced a hard time getting ahead.” Instead, as Cohen notes, “with little evidence or proof, large numbers of black Americans across the class divide, are condemning both black youth and the culture they generate and consume.” Cohen, Democracy Remixed, 25, 26. 12. As Anderson notes, when “confronted with evidence of massive racial inequalities, Americans often explain them by invoking contemptuous stereotypes of blacks as lazy, stupid, ignorant, violent, and criminal.” Anderson, Imperative of Integration, 25. 13. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 118. See also Reva Siegel, “Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-­Enforcing State Action,” Stanford Law Review 49 (1997): 111. Siegel shows that modern equal protection jurisprudence insists on discriminatory intent in order to prove discrimination, and that this doctrine has been interpreted in increasingly narrow terms over the years. 14. Alexander, New Jim Crow, 7. 15. Ibid.; Anderson, Imperative of Integration; Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-­Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (New York: Free Press, 2011); Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 16. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue, 129, 136–­37. 17. Loury, Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 10. 18. Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.

Notes to Pages 9–12  /  197 19. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 21–­22. 20. As of 2009, the median wealth of white households was twenty times that of black households. Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics,” Pew Research, Washington DC, 2011, last modified July 21, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26 /wealth-­gaps-­rise-­to-­record-­highs-­between-­whites-­blacks-­hispanics; Edward Luce, “US Inequality Will Define the Obama Era,” Financial Times, March 31, 2013, http:// www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2fb17b9e-­9554–­11e2-­a4fa-­00144feabdc0.html. Blacks lag behind whites in educational attainment on all fronts. See Kurt Bau­ man and Nikki Graf, Educational Attainment 2000, Census 2000 Brief (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2003), 5, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-­24.pdf; and Jennifer Laird, Gregory Kienzl, Matthew DeBell, and Chris Chapman, Dropout Rates in the United States: 2005, NCES 2007-­059 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2007), 27, http://nces.ed.gov /pubs2007/2007059.pdf. On unemployment, see Chinhui Juhn and Simon Potter, “Changes in Labor Force Participation in the United States,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 39; and David Williams and Chiquita Collins, “Racial Residential Segregation: A Fundamental Cause of Racial Disparities in Health,” Public Health Reports 116, no. 5 (September/October 2001): 408. The imprisonment rate for black males is six times higher than that of white non-­Hispanic males. See Heather C. West, William J. Sabol, and Sarah J. Greenman, Prisoners in 2009, NCJ 231675 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010), 9, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p09.pdf. Furthermore, the lifetime chances of going to prison for black males in 2001 was 32.2%, as opposed to 5.9% for white males. See Thomas Bonczar, Prevalence of Imprisonment in the US Population, 1974–­ 2001, Special Report NCJ 197976, Bureau of Justice Statistics (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 2003), 8, 1, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/piusp01 .pdf; and Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (January 2009), 224. 21. See Jeff Spinner-­Halev, “From Historical to Enduring Injustice,” Political Theory 35, no. 5 (October 2007): 574–­97; see also Spinner-­Halev, Enduring Injustice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 22. The “basic structure” language comes from John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 7. 23. James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998), 347. 24. See especially Marilyn Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Jennifer Nedelsky, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 25. Friedman notes that feminist theories of relational autonomy “tend to regard social relationships merely as causal conditions promoting autonomy but do not construe autonomy itself as inherently social.” Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics, 97. While Friedman is also not inclined to treat autonomy as inherently social, she does think the issue calls for further discussion (n. 73).

198  /  Notes to Pages 13–20 26. See Turner, Awakening to Race, 25. Turner’s book is motivated by a similar desire to reconstruct liberal individualism, and I take the language of reconstruction from him, although the reconstruction described in these pages is somewhat different from what he envisioned. We agree in thinking that when liberal individualism is rightly understood it is a powerful resource for addressing persistent racial inequality. 27. The basic assumption of the moral status of all persons as free and equal is not argued for here, but it may be useful to note that one need not posit a sovereign self as a descriptive matter to justify this normative status. The status may be grounded in the capacities for norm-­responsiveness and a reflective self, both of which (when properly conceived) are compatible with the non-­sovereignty of human agency as a descriptive matter, as we shall see in the course of this book. Hence there is no reason to think that normative individualism, as the commitment to the moral status of persons as free and equal, is incompatible with the non-­sovereignty of human agency. 28. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 38, 236–­38, 250–­ 55, 269; Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-­Domination,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (February 2008): 31; Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 347, 352–­53; Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31–­45; Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 59; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998). 29. Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 234–­35. 30. It is true that the core values of liberal democracy are regularly subject to disputes of interpretation and application. Hence people may disagree about whether a particular instance of inequality constitutes the kind of violation that puts political freedom in jeopardy. This kind of disagreement is a familiar feature of liberal democracies, and it reminds us that the practice of political freedom requires an open and robust context of deliberative engagement and contestation. This point is discussed in the chapters that follow. 31. Reflecting on the vitality of black agency even in contexts of racial oppression, Touré says, “Black people are damaged by these moments of racism, we are shaped by them, but we are not victims. We revitalize ourselves like the phoenix—­rebuilding our spirits and coming back stronger.” Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-­Blackness? 139. 32. For a rich discussion of how the myth of personal sovereignty infects Americans’ support for aggressive state power abroad and the erosion of civil liberties at home in the post-­9/11 era, see Elizabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodramatic Politics and the Pursuit of Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 33. See Thomas L. Schubeck, “Ethics and Liberation Theology,” Theological Studies 56, no. 1 (March 1995): 110; James Tunstead Burtchaell, “How Authentically Christian Is Liberation Theology?” Review of Politics 50, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 264–­81; Michael Novak, Will It Liberate? Questions about Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 151–­52; and Gordon Graham, The Idea of Christian Charity: A Critique of Some Contemporary Conceptions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 116–­20.

Notes to Pages 22–23  /  199 Chap t e r On e

1.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 69. 2. In what follows, I use the terms “self,” “selfhood,” “identity,” “subjectivity,” and “subjective existence” more or less interchangeably. 3. Or if our psychic life were nothing more than “a war of competing passions,” as Melissa Orlie has written, following Nietzsche and Freud. See Orlie, “Impersonal Matter,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 120. It is true that no self is free of inner conflict, and Orlie is right to say that we are mistaken if we “remain attached to a sovereign concept of subjectivity” (12). Yet to reduce the experience we have of ourselves as distinct persons to a “fantasy,” as Orlie puts it (132), is to err at the other extreme and to deny one of the most pervasive lived experiences of being human. Moreover, without distinct persons, the irreducible plurality of the human condition would dissolve and it would be difficult to make sense of human agency. Under such conditions moral life and democratic politics would both be out of reach. 4. In drawing attention to the efficacy dimension of agency I follow Arendt, who was keen to distinguish human agency and the experience of freedom it made possible from the imagined freedom of a will that exerts itself only upon itself while remaining impotent in the world (as in the case of Stoic self-­denial, or the recalibration of one’s desires so as to accommodate them to existing circumstances rather than transform circumstances to reflect one’s desires). See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 148–­ 49. Arendt was worried about withdrawalism because she thought that withdrawing from active engagement in the world would open the door to tyranny, leaving the political life unlived and freedom undefended. These are reasonable concerns. From my perspective, however, the main reason for insisting that mere willing cannot constitute agency is simply the fact that willing and acting are not the same thing. I can will something to happen, after all, without doing anything to bring it into being. To sustain conceptual clarity and make sense of our lived experience we need to acknowledge the distinction between willing and acting. It is true that the willed intentions I form can sometimes have an effect on me even when they do not seem to affect the world or the external circumstances of my life. Suppose I find myself imprisoned against my wishes and take up meditation, which does not change my circumstances but does bring me inner calm. In such cases the boundary between willing and acting may appear to collapse. Yet meditation is quite different from mere willing. Meditation is an active practice with an impact on the self, and the self is a part of the world. When meditation affects the self, it has an efficacy dimension. Contrast meditation with the simple formation of an intention that I never carry out (say the intention to arise early each morning to exercise). This intention is impotent because my will in this instance has no effect on the world, including on myself as a part of the world. There is no action here because there is no agency in the intention alone. The ability to form intentions and exercise will is a necessary condition of agency but not a sufficient one. It is worth noting, too, that there may be cases in which what appears to be inaction produces discernable effects. If I fail to show up for our dinner date because I am asleep on the couch at home, for example, I have had an effect on the world (namely, on you) without exactly doing anything. Yet what looks like inaction here actually

200  /  Notes to Pages 23–26 manifests an action, however indirectly, namely the action of allowing myself to fall asleep without setting the alarm, knowing that I may miss our date. Thus when I awake to discover that I have slept through the engagement I am apt to exclaim, not unreasonably, “What have I done?!” 5. See Markell, Bound by Recognition, esp. chapter 3; Arendt, The Human Condition, 173, 190–­91, 197, 234; and Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers: 1973–­1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. chap. 2, and Shame and Necessity, esp. chap. 3. 6. Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-­Domination,” 12. 7. Ibid., 13. 8. Ibid., 27. 9. Williams, Moral Luck, 28. 10. Ibid., 29. 11. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 69. Much like Arendt, Williams and Nagel never theorized non-­sovereign agency (or moral luck) in the context of systematic social inequality. See Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14. Even more, Williams and Nagel failed to consider the ways in which many factors that they categorized as “luck” actually result from (and contribute to) relations of injustice. On the latter point, see Martha Nussbaum, “Bernard Williams: Tragedies, Hope, Justice,” in Reading Bernard Williams, ed. Daniel Callcut (New York: Routledge, 2009), 216–­22. 12. There is a growing body of research on “implicit bias” that documents how prevalent this dynamic is in American society today. For a review of the recent literature, see Cheryl Staats, “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013,” Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University, Columbus, March 11, 2013, www.kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/reports/2013/03_2013_SOTS-­Implicit_Bias.pdf. 13. Markell uses the language of “acknowledgment” to express recognition of the ways that our non-­sovereign agency makes us complicit in injustice (Bound by Recognition, 177–­89). Important as acknowledgment is, however, it is not enough to undo the relations of injustice that Markell identifies. In addition to acknowledging our complicity in injustice we need to take responsibility for the generation of a more just future through concrete action in the world. 14. Markell rejects the idea that agency depends on “antecedently given identities.” He endorses the Arendtian view that “identity is only ever available to be recognized in retrospect,” meaning after an action is complete (Bound by Recognition, 13). He is wary of anchoring agency in antecedent identities because he quite reasonably worries about the ways that the social recognition of identities can unintentionally lock us into debilitating forms of existence and relations of domination. His response to this danger in Bound by Recognition is to detach identity from agency. Yet his account of agency, which defines agency in terms of “involvement” rather than “control,” ineluctably depends on a notion of identity. Agency as involvement, as we have seen, refers to the extent to which “whatever it is that’s happening, and however it’s being controlled,” is “happening through you, through your activity” (Markell, “Insufficiency of Non-­Domination,” 12). The actions of a slave do not reflect his control but they do manifest his agency insofar as they happen through him, through his activity. To say that the slave has agency because what is happening is happening through him implies the existence of a “him,” an individual who has a sufficiently tangible and reflexive identity that he is capable of seeing himself (and being seen by others) in his effects. If we cannot say whose activity it is, we cannot ascribe agency,

Notes to Pages 26–31  /  201 which means that agency only makes sense insofar as it is tied to personal identity. This point is elaborated more fully in what follows. 15. See Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–­44; and Michael J. Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (February 1984): 81–­96. 16. Describing individuality, Kateb writes, “More positively, one must take responsibility for oneself—­one’s self must become a project, one must become the architect of one’s soul. One’s dignity resides in being, to some important degree, a person of one’s own creating, making, choosing, rather than in being merely a creature or a socially manufactured, conditioned, manipulated thing: half-­animal and half-­mechanical and therefore wholly socialized.” See Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 90. In contrast to Kateb, I locate agency in a self that is authentic but not necessarily self-­generated. It can cover action that would not count as autonomous on most models. (For an interesting discussion of autonomy and its limits in democratic politics, see Lucas Swaine, “Heteronomous Citizenship: Civic Virtue and the Chains of Autonomy,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42, no. 1 [February 2010]: 73–­93, and “Ethical Autonomy: The Rise of Self-­Rule” [book manuscript in progress]). Another difference between my account of non-­sovereign agency and Kateb’s ideal of individuality is that non-­sovereign agency builds in an explicit discussion of how social and economic inequalities can impede the enactment of individuality in ostensibly free societies, something that Kateb’s ideal of individuality (valuable as it otherwise is) neglects. As Turner notes, the moral component of Kateb’s democratic individualism “is underelaborated and largely inadequate to structural injustice” because of its inattention to systematic social inequality (Awakening to Race, 116). 17. The movement emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s when women began to organize weekly religious lessons in local mosques for women to read the Koran, the Hadith, and other religious literature together. For more, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2004), 3, 4. 18. Arendt, The Human Condition, 234–­35. 19. Ibid., 189; and “What Is Freedom?” 166. 20. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177. 21. Ibid., 173. 22. Ibid., 177 n. 1. 23. Ibid., 177, 246. 24. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 151. 25. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. 26. Ibid., 180. 27. Ibid., 182. 28. Arendt, On Revolution, 235. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 183, 184. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 30. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 166. 31. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1986), 51–­53, 146. 32. The term “distributed agency” is not Arendt’s but comes from the literature on actor network theory, discussed later in this chapter. See especially Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (New York: Oxford University

202  /  Notes to Pages 31–33 Press, 2007); Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Towards a Non-­Anthropocentric Approach (New York: Springer, 2010); and John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 1999). The focus of those works is on the ways that human agency is distributed in the material world; my emphasis here is on the ways in which individual agency is distributed in the social world. It is also worth noting that the bearers of one’s action need not comprise a social movement engaged in political action. Frequently the role of bearers is more spectatorial than participatory in that what they provide is a shared background of social meaning in light of which one’s action can be interpreted and understood. In the Rosa Parks case, civil rights activists served this interpretive function and also took up collective political action in ways that enhanced the scope and power of the effects that Parks had in refusing to relinquish her seat on the bus. 33. James C. Scott, Three Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 23. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Ibid. 36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 190–­91. 37. Without addressing Arendt, Ian Carter implicitly takes up the boundlessness of action in his discussion of “the problem of indefinite causal chains” in A Measure of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 188. The problem he identifies is that “action chains might in theory continue forever” with the result that it is possible for one’s action to occur in part after one’s death (188). This result seems patently nonsensical to him, at odds with our common intuitions. His solution is to “limit the list of consequences . . . to those that we foresee as occurring in the event of the basic actions being performed” (188). Yet this solution, which reasserts the sovereigntist connection between agency and control, is unsatisfying. Although we may stipulate as a matter of theory that unforeseen consequences are not to count as part of one’s action, as a practical matter stipulation cannot eradicate the fact that such consequences are indeed part of the agent’s impact on the world and therefore part of the efficacy aspect of his agency. Closing our eyes to the boundlessness of human action does not make this boundlessness go away; it just blinds us to a fundamental feature of the human condition and mires us in the fantasy of sovereignty. Worse, it invites a heedlessness about one’s effects that undermines personal responsibility and may jeopardize justice. To act is to affect the world, and how one affects the world is what constitutes or defines the action as this action rather than another. And how one affects the world is never determined strictly by what one foresees or can control. It is true that the boundlessness of human agency poses challenges to our common intuitions about personal responsibility. We shall have more to say about this in chapter 2. Yet these challenges do not justify turning our backs on the facts, or fruitlessly trying to stipulate them out of existence. 38. Arendt, The Human Condition, 192. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 190. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 7. 44. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 169; Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

Notes to Pages 33–36  /  203 45. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177, 234. 46. Ibid., 205. Dana Villa notes along these lines that Arendt’s theory of action is an effort to think of praxis outside a teleological framework, and that for her “motives, goals, conditions, consequences: all become largely secondary to grasping action’s peculiar significance and reality.” See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 47, 53. Indeed, he says, “to judge action according to its motivation or result inevitably degrades its autonomy, destroying ‘the specific meaning of each deed’” (54). 47. Jerome Kohn has noted that there is actually something of a convergence between Arendt’s view and that of Kant in her emphasis on initiative over effects: “Because we cannot know in advance the results of what we do when we act with others, Arendt found the experience of freedom actualized in the process of initiation.” Kohn, “Introduction,” in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), xxii. In this regard, as Kohn puts it, “Arendt took a step in the direction of Kant,” who likewise sought to locate freedom in the will, or “in our motivation to act,” and thereby to protect the integrity of the actor from the effects of his own unintended consequences (xxi). Kohn’s reading aptly identifies in Arendt a tendency to disconnect the two moments of action and to privilege the first one. Although he does not say so explicitly, this privileging of initiative over effects cuts against Arendt’s own defense of non-­sovereignty. 48. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 179. 51. Ibid., 186. Villa notes in this connection that Arendt’s view is “not an expressivist theory of the self because there is no prior self to express in action” (Arendt and Heidegger, 86, 90–­91). 52. Arendt, The Human Condition, 186. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 176. 55. Ibid., 178. 56. Ibid., 177. 57. Arendt implicitly acknowledges these considerations in her discussion of promises. Promises stabilize identities, as she sees it. They counter the “basic unreliability of men who can never guarantee today who they will be tomorrow” (The Human Condition 244). They create “certain islands of predictability” (244) in human action and the identities it discloses, and they “confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills” (237). Indeed, without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, “we would never be able to keep our identities” (237). Some stability of identity, Arendt acknowledges here, is important. 58. Ibid., 192; and see 179. 59. Ibid., 192. 60. Ibid. We shall leave aside for now the puzzle that arises from the fact that the very thing that constitutes the meaning of the action for the agent (the disclosure of his identity) is something that the agent, according to Arendt, cannot know. We shall also ignore the tension that exists between Arendt’s forceful insistence on the socially distributed character of agency here—­the centrality given to the second part of action, its coming to fruition through the interpretation and co-­acting of bearers—­and her periodic tendency to collapse agency into mere initiative or beginning.

204  /  Notes to Pages 37–42 61. In this case the failure of agency is unjust because it results from bias against gay people, which violates core liberal-­democratic principles of equal respect and toleration. Frustrations of agency are not always unjust, however. In a racially integrated, egalitarian society the agency of a white supremacist will regularly be frustrated, at least with respect to enacting his racist convictions. This is as it should be. Failed and frustrated agency only requires remediation—­as an obligation of democratic citizenship—­when it tracks injustice. The role of justice in distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable failures of agency is discussed in later chapters. 62. It is worth noting here that because we commonly have the experience in nonsocial contexts of affecting the world in ways that are independent of the responses of others, we often overestimate our ability to do so in social contexts as well—­and thereby underestimate the importance of social uptake. 63. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 166. 64. See, for example, Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Kohn, where Arendt insists that “discrimination and social segregation are not the problem” for American blacks, and that only “racial legislation” can compromise their agency and freedom (194, 197). Indeed, although formal legal equality is required in politics, social inequality and even discrimination are not only acceptable but necessary in society. “What equality is to the body politic,” Arendt says, namely “its innermost principle,” so “discrimination is to society.” (205). She also insists there that “in any event, discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right. The question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and the personal sphere, where it is destructive” (206). 65. Arendt, The Human Condition, 205. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 205, 206. 69. On this point, see also George Kateb, “Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 139, 140, 144. 70. See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 59. 71. See George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), 33. 72. See, for example, the essays included in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment. 73. Arendt, The Human Condition, 198. 74. Ibid., 198–­99. As Kateb puts it, for Arendt “only others can say who I am.” Kateb, “Political Action,” 145. 75. Arendt, The Human Condition, 237. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 240. 78. See, for example, Arendt’s insistence that the individual “never quite knows what he is doing,” and that the meaning of the action “never discloses itself to the actor.” Ibid., 233. 79. Arendt’s own view is fundamentally hostile to this idea, insofar as she associates corporeality with necessity, the antithesis of action’s spontaneity and the enemy of freedom. As Kateb says, for Arendt “the bodily or biological,” like “the domestic and the social[,] . . . fail to measure up to the criteria of freedom” (Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 3, 8, 29). See also Villa, who remarks that for Arendt, “liberation ‘from’ the body

Notes to Pages 42–43  /  205 must—­must in this basic sense—­come first. Only then can we be ‘free for the world’” ( Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 346). 80. See, for instance, Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (December 2004): 691–­706; George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael Mac­ Kuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); George E. Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Neta Crawford, “The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships,” International Security 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000): 116–­56; Ted Brader, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Michael Morrell, Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Cheryl Hall, The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory beyond the Reign of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Sharon R. Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Many of these contributions draw on popular works in neuroscience, such as Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998). 81. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize the “plural, distinctive strands” of the new materialism in “Introducing the New Materialisms,” the introduction to their edited volume, New Materialisms, 4, 7. For other examples of the new materialism, see Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 347–­72, and “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 445–­65; and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53, no. 1 (March 2005): 124–­42; Coole, “Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 3 (2007): 413–­33; Coole, “Instrument, Agentic, Folded: Three Perspectives On the Body in Politics,” panel paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, August 28, 2008; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Knappett and Malafouris, eds., Material Agency; Law and Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After; Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 82. Frost, Lessons, 7, 12. 83. Ibid., 22. 84. See Damasio, Descartes’ Error; LeDoux, The Emotional Brain; and Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. 85. Frost, Lessons, 67. 86. Ibid., 113.

206  /  Notes to Pages 43–47 87. Coole, “Experiencing Discourse,” 413. 88. Ibid., 414. 89. Coole, “Instrument, Agentic, Folded,” 6. 90. And, as Coole notes, they have not been the subject of much analysis in the study of politics (“Experiencing Discourse,” 422). 91. A 2005 report by the US Center for Disease Control, for example, finds that “for many health conditions, non-­Hispanic blacks bear a disproportionate burden of disease, injury, death, and disability.” See US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “Health Disparities Experienced by Black or African Americans—­United States.” See also Crimmins and Saito, “Trends In Healthy Life Expectancy in the United States”; Clayton and Byrd, “Race”; Williams and Collins, “US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health”; and Woolf, Johnson, and Geiger, “The Rising Prevalence of Severe Poverty in America.” 92. These examples are admittedly schematic and hence simplified. In reality, the physical repertoires of the oppressed are multiple and diverse, and they sometimes point in contrary directions. Consider the exaggerated swagger of the teenage gang member, which on the one hand broadcasts to his peers a confidence he may not feel but needs to display and, on the other hand, marks him indelibly to outsiders as “ghetto.” We should also acknowledge that the physical repertoires of marginalized individuals sometimes resist prevailing relations of power in creative ways, whether intentionally or not. The “hidden transcripts” of the oppressed documented by James Scott, for instance, often have physical manifestations that are transgressive or emancipatory. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). The sometimes unexpected vitalities of human agency under conditions of domination and oppression are the subject of chapter 3. 93. Judith Butler’s work on the “materialization” of the subject develops this Foucauldian theme, as we shall see presently. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). 94. Coole, “Experiencing Discourse,” 413. 95. Coole, “Instrument, Agentic, Folded,” 2, 4. 96. Ibid., 5; and see “Experiencing Discourse,” 430. 97. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 112. 98. Ibid., 62, 65–­67. 99. Frost, Lessons, 139. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 144. 102. The effects of social and material factors are mutually interactive. Thus the background social meanings present in ghetto contexts and those present in white middle class neighborhoods simultaneously affect and are affected by corporeal agency and its material context. 103. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, “Material and Nonhuman Agency: An Introduction,” in Material Agency, ed. Knappett and Malafouris, xiv. 104. Malafouris, “At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency,” in ibid., 24, 25. 105. Malafouris refers to the kind of intentionality in play here (following John Searle) as “intention in action” (ibid., 30). It differs from “prior intention,” which is “premeditated” or “formed in advance of the action itself” (29). The intentionality found in intention-­in-­action blurs the boundary between internal states and the external world. Here “the internal, intentional state and the external movement become in-

Notes to Pages 47–50  /  207 distinguishable” (29) because the intentions of the agent are responsive to, indeed shaped by, the particular materialities of the world in which the action transpires. 106. Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages,” 446–­47. 107. Ibid., 463. See also Connolly, who insists that there are many types of agency in “forcefields.” Connolly, A World of Becoming, 7, 21. 108. Bennett, “Agency of Assemblages,” 446. See, for example, John Law and Annemarie Mol, “The Actor-­Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001,” in Material Agency, ed. Knappett and Malafouris, 58; Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, “Non-­Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time,” in Material Agency, ed. Knappett and Malafouris, 80–­82; and Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6–­7. 109. Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages,” 447. 110. Ibid., 453. Connolly, in A World of Becoming, 22, likewise insists that we should “appreciate multiple degrees and sites of agency, flowing from simple natural processes, through higher processes, to human beings and collective social assemblages.” 111. Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages,” 446, 453. 112. Ibid., 446. 113. Ibid., 460. 114. Even if agency is not properly attributed to inanimate objects, the fact that agency admits of degrees implies that the range of ontological subjects to whom agency in some measure applies may well extend to some nonhuman animals. A full analysis of the potential for agency among nonhuman animals is beyond the scope of this study but it seems reasonably clear that at least some animals have at least some agentic capacities. Indeed, some animals seem to manifest agency more fully than human babies and very small children. The boundary lines are not especially neat here, and they are likely to shift as we learn more. Because my concern in this book is especially with human agency, political freedom, and democratic citizenship, however, I leave aside for now the important question of animal agency. 115. See, for example, Damasio, Descartes’ Error; LeDoux, The Emotional Brain; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment; Marcus, Sentimental Citizen; Connolly, Neuropolitics; and Morrell, Empathy and Democracy. See also Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Hall, The Trouble with Passion. 116. Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12–13. 117. It is also important to note that while agency always entails the ability to be responsive to norms, many actions that agents undertake are not normative in any significant sense. The act of baking cookies, for instance, affirms my subjective exis­ tence without being responsive in any particular way to moral or political norms. Yet if challenged on the basis of some norm—­a friend complains that baking cookies is morally objectionable when there are people in town who do not have enough to eat, saying that I should donate the money spent on cookie ingredients to the local food bank—­I am capable of altering my action in response. Whether or not I do so is irrelevant for present purposes. To be an agent, one need not actually respond to norms but one must be capable of so responding. 118. Bennett, “Agency of Assemblages,” 454. 119. Along these lines, Connolly distinguishes between what he calls “proto-­agency,” “minimal agency,” and “complex agency” (A World of Becoming, 26). Only the latter

208  /  Notes to Pages 50–55 includes “self-­consciousness and the ability to work on oneself” (25–­26). Yet Connolly’s use of the language of agency (even with the qualifiers “proto” and “minimal”) to describe bacteria and yeast cells is ultimately unconvincing (24, 28). It is also unnecessary for the normative purposes that he, like Bennett, has in mind. The problem with viewing agency as exclusively human, they both think, is that doing so “treats the rest of the world as if it were mere objects” (31). It is true that human beings have treated the rest of the world this way, and we have justified this treatment with reference to a human-­only theory of agency. But the solution is not to attribute agency more widely. The solution is to acknowledge that agency is not the only basis for moral standing and the entitlement to respect. A full theory of human obligations to the nonhuman world is beyond what we can cover here. But surely it is possible to sustain such obligations without extending the category of agency so far that it covers virtually every living thing, including bacteria, and even (in the case of Bennett) many nonliving things. 120. Krause, Civil Passions. 121. Bennett’s frequent use of the term “actant” as opposed to “agent” is meant in part to acknowledge the fact that agency admits of degrees, and that different material bodies will manifest different degrees of agency. The agency she attributes to things is “not the strong kind of agency traditionally attributed exclusively to humans” (“Agency of Assemblages,” 463). Still, the degree of difference between the agency of human beings and the causal force of inanimate objects seems great enough to me to justify our common use of distinct terms to describe them. 122. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 130. As Coole notes, Judith Butler criticizes Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as embodied agency on precisely these grounds. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 141, cited in Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 130. 123. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 130. 124. Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, 2. 125. Ibid., 3. 126. Ibid., 18. 127. Interview with Stuart Hall in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, dir. Isaac Julien (Arts Council of England, 1996), quoted in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, foreword by Homi K. Bhabha (1961; New York: Grove Press, 2004), xvi. 128. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 15, 16. 129. Ibid., 15–­17, 31. 130. Bhabha, foreword to Wretched of the Earth, xviii. 131. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 1, 16. 132. Ibid., 51. 133. Diego Gambetta, foreword to Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ix. 134. Ibid. 135. See Stephen Holmes, “Al-­Qaeda, September 11, 2011,” in ibid., 131–­72. 136. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 16. 137. Butler, Bodies that Matter, x. 138. Ibid., 2. 139. Ibid., 15. 140. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 31. For further discussion of the affective dimensions of moral and political judgment, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought; Hall, The Trouble with Passion; Michael Walzer, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberal-

Notes to Pages 55–64  /  209 ism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Nedelsky, Law’s Relations; Jane Mansbridge, “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213; Christina H. Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s “Gorgias” and the Politics of Shame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Krause, Civil Passions. 141. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28. 142. As Butler puts it, “if in acting the subject retains the conditions of its emergence, this does not imply that all of its agency remains tethered to those conditions and that those conditions remain the same in every operation of agency.” Ibid., 12–­13. 143. Ibid., 130. 144. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 169. 145. Ibid., 107. 146. See Nancy Fraser’s important work on “subaltern counterpublics” in “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 109–­42; and Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, especially chap. 5. 147. I borrow the language of alchemy from Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Chap t e r Tw o

1. See Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially chap. 8; R. Robert Huckfeldt, “Political Participation and the Neighborhood Social Context,” American Journal of Political Science 23, no. 3 (August 1979): 579–­92; and Norman H. Nie, G. Bingham Powell Jr., and Kenneth Prewitt, “Social Structure and Political Participation: Developmental Relationships, Part I,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 2 (June 1969): 361–­78. Political and economic inequalities also pose problems for agency in related ways. Here and in what follows I focus especially on social inequality, meaning inequalities of power that attach to social identities (such as race, gender, or sexual orientation). These inequalities interact with political and economic inequalities, of course, so the contexts of social inequality that I explore in this chapter are often also contexts of economic and political inequality. 2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Random House, 1995). 3. Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Collected Essays, 68. 4. Ibid., 69 5. Part of what makes these dynamics invisible and difficult to articulate is our implicit assumptions about the sovereignty of human agency, both our own agency and that of others. 6. The officers may well be white here, but they could also be black or Latino or Asian (or something else). The unintentional racism, or racial stigma, that forms the background for this example infects people of color as well as whites, and sometimes (although of course not always) in surprisingly similar ways. 7. As Arendt puts it, “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. 8. The concept of justice in play here is a fairly standard liberal-­democratic one, which

210  /  Notes to Pages 64–68 insists on the equal moral status of persons and emphasizes what John Rawls called “the fair value” of basic liberties as well as the basic liberties themselves; see Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 150. It is true that principles of justice (even those that are agreed upon in the abstract) regularly generate disagreement at the level of application because principles must be interpreted to be applied. The degree to which any particular set of inequalities counts as unjust therefore may be subject to some dispute. We shall have more to say about this in subsequent chapters. The main point for now is that not all constraints on agency are problematic from the standpoint of political freedom. Principles of justice provide criteria here but the principles will need to be specified for particular cases through a deliberative process, and a measure of contestation may be a regular feature of this process. The same is true for most matters of justice in liberal democracies. 9. Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (August 1993): 390–­410, and Edgework, 85–­86. On adaptive preferences, see Nancy Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2003), ix, 5, 11–­12, 23; and Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111, 114. 10. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), 3. Baratunde Thurston notes that today for many African Americans it is still an “unforgettable experience to realize that you’re black,” and the experience usually has a negative valence. See Thurston, How to Be Black (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 23. Touré refers to this experience, following Henry Louis Gates, as “‘the scene of instruction’ . . . where someone discovers they’re Black and what that means—­the societal limitations and the emotional assault that comes along with Blackness”(Who’s Afraid of Post-­Blackness? 125). Thurston says that in his case the ideal of Black pride he absorbed at home was balanced by the mixed feelings of “embarrassment, rage, paranoia, and self-­restraint” that commonly accompany blackness in America (How to Be Black, 26). Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 32. 11. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 2. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, transl. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 336. 15. Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in American Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 153. See also C. M. Steele and J. Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African-­Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (November 1995): 797; C. M. Steele, “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape the Intellectual Identities and Performance of  Women and African Americans,” American Psychologist 52, no. 6 (June 1997): 617; and Steven J. Spencer, Claude M. Steele, and Diane M. Quinn, “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35, no. 1 (January 1999): 4. 16. Again, not all inner conflicts disable agency. The conflicts of agency with which we are concerned here are the ones that democratic citizens have an obligation to address. They involve internalized stigmas resulting from systematic inequalities that

Notes to Pages 68–82  /  211 are unjust in themselves and at odds with core features of the individual’s authentic identity. 17. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 126–­30, 134. 18. Ibid., 111. See also George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 131. 19. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4. 20. Ibid. 21. Shulman, American Prophecy, 136. 22. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Random House, 2004), 165. 23. The language of authenticity may call to mind Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). In contrast to Taylor’s view, however, I do not insist that the authentic self must have roots in the sacred (36), or that we can find “genuine fulfillment only in something . . . which has significance independent of us and our desires” (82). And while it may be true for some persons that what is authentic in their identity links them to “a wider whole” in the form of a community (91), I do not take the connection to community to be a necessary condition of an identity counting as authentic. 24. PBS, The Amish: Shunned, American Experience, 2012, DVD. 25. Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; London: Routledge, 1999), 127–­28. 26. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 13. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 125. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 128. 31. Ibid., 133. 32. Although Frost’s “phenomenology of material subjectivity” holds that each “thinking­body” is distinctive, she also emphasizes the degree to which each is constantly modified by experience and concludes that this dynamic “blurs the bound­aries of the self.” Frost, Lessons, 34. 33. Ibid. 34. The same is true of Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9. 35. Pettit, Theory of Freedom, 4. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 36. Pettit is clearly motivated in these passages by the desire to accommodate within his theory of freedom a place for the influence of a coercive but legitimate state. He means to show that nonarbitrary (i.e., interest-­tracking) interference on the part of such a state is no threat to freedom. 37. This critique has a parallel in Markell’s worry about the absence of “involvement” in Pettit’s theory of freedom as non-­domination, although Markell’s concerns are more directly political, having to do with the ostensibly nonparticipatory implications of Pettit’s model of freedom in the state. See Markell, “Insufficiency of Non-­ Domination,” 29, 31. 38. Commenting on Dworkin’s example of an individual who has a craving or obsession that he wishes he did not have, Ian Shapiro writes, “Are we to say of an alcoholic, whose affliction is so severe that he cannot even form the desire not to be an alcoholic, that his preference for alcohol results from his taste rather than his incapacity? I think not.” Shapiro, “On Non-­Domination,” University of Toronto Law Journal 62

212  /  Notes to Pages 82–84 (2012): 299. For the original example, see Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 302–­3. 39. Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 40. Classic treatments include Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–­38; Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Kent Greenfield, The Myth of Choice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 41. Tamler Sommers, “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor,” Biology and Philosophy 24 (2009): 48. See also Brian Barry, “Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice,” in Fairness and Futurity, ed. Andrew Dobson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 31; Young also treats it as the standard view; see Young, Responsibility for Justice, 96. 42. Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 183. On moral luck, see Williams, Moral Luck, 30; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 29–­31; Claudia Card, The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 13; Feinberg, Doing and Deserving, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. Also see the essays in Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993). For a detailed treatment of the relationship between luck and the good life for the ancients, see Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. chaps. 1, 11, and 12. 43. Vandereiden, Atmospheric Justice, 160, 208. 44. See especially Young, Responsibility for Justice. 45. There are few adequate treatments bearing on the responsibilities of the oppressed. This issue tends to be addressed in partisan, polarized fashion by those who either defend some version of the “cultural pathologies” thesis or shy away from talk of responsibility altogether in the interest of not blaming the victim. Exceptions are Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 45–­52, chap. 5; and Card, Unnatural Lottery, 41–­47. 46. This is true even of the most nuanced recent views of responsibility, which explicitly recognize, as one commentator puts it, that “our lives are increasingly complicated by regrettable things brought about by our associations with other people or with social, economic, and political institutions,” and that consequently “we find ourselves connected to harms and wrongs that fall outside the paradigm of individual, intentional wrongdoing.” See Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), 1. Kutz’s primary concern lies with the bad behavior of collective agents such as states and corporations, and with establishing principled grounds for holding individual citizens or stakeholders accountable for the actions of the organizations to which they belong. It is an excellent book, but in the end Kutz’s analysis of responsibility is limited by two factors. The first is his focus on what he calls “defined” collective agents, namely groups that have a bounded, singular identity and a specific set of shared projects (166). His theory thus covers individuals’ responsibility for their contributions to the actions of governments, cartels, and companies but has nothing to say about responsibility for undefined, impersonal systems of injustice, such as systematic social inequali-

Notes to Pages 84–91  /  213 ties that cannot count as “defined” collective agents aiming at shared projects. Thus the book makes almost no mention of systematic oppression or domination, and it offers little guidance as to what our responsibilities might be in these contexts. The second limiting factor is that despite Kutz’s unusually nuanced understanding of the complex interpersonal conditions of human action and his effort to develop a relational approach to responsibility, he ultimately defends a fairly standard liability view. For him, we are responsible for (as complicit in) harms that result from the ac­ tions of collective agents to which we belong only when we are willing participants in the shared projects that generated the harms. In a similar way, Steve Vanderheiden’s treatment of responsibility for environmental injustice, although a highly sensitive and sophisticated account, retains a fundamental commitment to the control condition and the principle that we can only legitimately be held responsible for things we chose to bring about. See Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice, 208, 219–­20, 227, 230. 47. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 48. Ibid., 19, 22, 33, 39, 101, 104–­5. 49. Ibid., 34, 99–­100. 50. Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), x, 2. 51. Ibid., 37–­38, 55, 58, 137, 141. 52. Ibid., 264. 53. Rose, Black Noise, 144. 54. Rose, Hip Hop Wars, 58, 65, 141, 145–­46. 55. Along these lines, a colleague once suggested to me that cities and states should be made to bear some responsibility for crimes committed by residents who are systematically marginalized in ways that have contributed to their criminal activity. This responsibility would supplement but not replace the responsibility attributed to individual wrongdoers. Where entrenched poverty, failed public schools, segregated housing, and racial bias in hiring combine to foreclose legitimate job opportunities for young men of color, for instance, perhaps the local communities that are complicit in sustaining these conditions should be penalized financially for every dark-­ skinned local drug dealer they justly convict and send to prison. Funds generated this way could be used for policy initiatives that target the relevant mechanisms of inequality, thus expanding employment opportunities and reducing crime. Operationalizing this kind of penalty system would be a challenge politically, but the spirit of the idea holds promise. It suggests a middle path between exculpating individuals whose agency is troubled by social inequality, on the one hand, and ignoring the real damage to agency done by such inequality, on the other. It acknowledges the multidimensionality of responsibility and answers to the facts of nonovereignty. 56. As we saw in chapter 1, this emphasis on norm-­responsiveness distinguishes my view of socially distributed agency from Bennett’s account of “the agency of assemblages,” to which it otherwise bears many affinities. 57. Young, Responsibility for Justice, 96. It also recalls Margaret Walker’s idea of the virtues of impure agency, or moral responsibility in the absence of the control condition. See Walker, “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency,” in Moral Luck, ed. Statman, 241. 58. Young, Responsibility for Justice, 105. 59. Ibid., 96–­97, 109.

214  /  Notes to Pages 91–98 60. Ibid., 109–­10 (emphasis in original). 61. Ibid., 111. 62. I take this example from Donald Davidson, although I use it to illustrate a view of agency and responsibility that departs significantly from the one he defends. See Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 54. 63. Young, Responsibility for Justice, 144–­45. It is true that the degree to which one’s actions contribute to the problem is not necessarily proportional to the degree to which one is equipped to contribute to solutions. Someone with a low income and a large family may buy lots of clothes made in sweatshops, thus perpetuating the problem, and be too poor to purchase her family’s clothes from fair trade shops. Then, too, different people may contribute in different ways to promoting solutions. Someone who is poor but influential in her community may be well positioned to effect change going forward despite the fact that she cannot purchase fair trade clothes. 64. Reflecting on Beloved, Glaude comments that even though the novel’s characters are constrained and haunted by slavery they still must act, and it is this combination that generates the novel’s tragic power. Glaude interprets the novel to suggest that tragedy is “an ineliminable part of being a black agent in this world” (In a Shade of Blue, 44). As Shulman notes, most interpreters read Beloved as a novel about the redemptive power of love. Shulman’s own reading, which is more in line with Glaude’s and the one offered here, sees it as pressing the ambivalent “(im)possibility of coming to terms with the past” rather than as a simple narrative of redemption (American Prophecy, 177). 65. The example is Peter Singer’s. See Singer, The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009), 3, 4, 12, 14, 16, 46, 60, 144–­ 46. 66. Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 134. 67. Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 78, and “Nobody Knows My Name,” in Collected Essays, 172. 68. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 293. 69. Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket,” in Collected Essays, 831 (emphasis in original). 70. Ibid., 832. 71. Ibid., 833. 72. Ibid. 73. In a similar way, Delia Popescu’s wonderful analysis of the work and political activism of Vaclav Havel makes the point that for Havel retrieving responsibility can be a powerful engine of civil resistance and is the essence of political life. See Popescu, Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought: The Responsibility of Resistance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 84. Chap t e r Th r e e

1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2003), 170–­82. 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 196. 3. Ibid. 4. Here and in what follows, I use the language of liberation and emancipation interchangeably to refer to increases in freedom as the enabling conditions of agency for all.

Notes to Pages 98–104  /  215 5. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue, 98–­99. The passage refers specifically to the African American experience, and in particular to “African American religious life and the existential dilemma of African American individuals,” but the point generalizes. 6. I draw on Nancy Fraser’s discussion of “subaltern counterpublics” as well as Michael Warner’s work on publics and counterpublics in developing this concept. See Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 109–­42; and Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002). 7. See, for instance, Zerrilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom; Jennifer Nedelsky, “Judgment, Diversity, and Relational Autonomy,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 103–­20; and Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8–11. 8. Robin D. G. Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). Inspired by “those marginalized black activists who proposed a different way out of our constrictions,” Kelly argues that “we must tap our own collective imagination” and “do what earlier generations have done: dream” (xii). He goes on to liken the imagination to “a magic carpet upon which we may soar” (31). See also Cornel West on “prophetic pragmatism,” which “calls for utopian energies” and keeps “alive a sense of alternative ways of life and struggle.” Prophetic pragmatism, West says, is a powerful source of human agency under oppression. West, “On Prophetic Pragmatism,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 167. 9. Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name,” in Collected Essays, 142. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 4. 13. Ibid., 5. Fanon cites Marx here, on the contradictions that arise in a capitalist economy and generate capitalism’s demise. We need not accept the full Marxian story, with its commitment to historical materialism and its insistence on the materially determined quality of ideas, to learn from Fanon’s account. 14. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 18. 15. Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Collected Essays, 68. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 69. 20. Ibid., 70; Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 347. 21. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 347. 22. Ibid., 293. 23. Ibid. 24. Butler, Undoing Gender, 206. 25. For example, Jeffrey Stout emphasizes that for purposes of political mobilization community organizers must connect the personal experiences of marginalized people to “big ideas” such as justice and freedom. See Stout, Blessed Are the Orga­ nized, 134. 26. Corey D. B. Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 48. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text.

216  /  Notes to Pages 105–115 27. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 4. 28. Ibid., 164. 29. Glaude also objects to what he calls “an unproblematized invocation of agency as political resistance” (In a Shade of Blue, 91, 97, 98). Thinking especially about the mixed experiences of agency associated with black Christianity under slavery, he insists that the tendency to link “black agency to a form of emancipatory politics has often blocked the way to a more nuanced understanding of the role and function of African American Christianity in the context of slavery.” (99) The result has been not only to flatten the complexity of African American religious experience but to misrepresent the plural experiences of agency under domination and oppression. 30. Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket” 832. 31. Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name,” 172. 32. Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 78. 33. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 341. 34. Ibid. 35. For discussion of the political value of love, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013); and David Kyuman Kim, “The Public Life of Love,” The Good Society 19, no. 2 (2010): 37–­43. 36. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; and Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 37. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 311. 38. See Krause, Civil Passions, esp. chap. 3; and Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives—­ How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do (New York: Little Brown, 2009). 39. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 83–­85. 40. Ibid., 155–­56. 41. She had long been something of a leader in her church congregation, for example, presumably because some of the qualities valued by the movement were also valued by her fellow congregants; see ibid., 110–­11. 42. This is not to say that personal transformations are always easy when they are agency-­ enhancing. Stout also comments on the marital difficulties that movement participation generated for some women in the colonias (ibid., 111–­12). More generally, it can be disorienting in painful ways to see familiar aspects of oneself fall away. Still, this is a fundamentally different situation from what Baldwin describes, where the images of him that society had were based on ignorance of who he actually was, and were fundamentally incompatible with authentic aspects of his personal identity. 43. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 13. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 56–­57. 46. Ellison, Invisible Man, xi. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 47. Ibid., 346, 353. For an interesting discussion of this scene, see John F. Callahan, “Frequencies of Eloquence: The Performance and Composition of Invisible Man,” in New Essays on Invisible Man, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 72. 48. Ellison, Invisible Man, 359, 475. 49. We have seen how this support operates in several counterpublics already. Scott insists, along similar lines, that the restricted social sphere of local slave communities afforded those who were radically subordinate at the level of the wider society “a partial refuge from the humiliations of domination” (Domination and the Arts of Re-

Notes to Pages 115–126  /  217 sistance, 114). See also Ernest Allen Jr., “On the Reading of Riddles: Rethinking Du Boisian ‘Double Consciousness, ’” in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 54. 50. Our sovereigntist assumptions about agency also contribute to our myopia is this regard because they obscure from view the intersubjective character of individual agency and lead us to overlook social relationships that help to sustain it. 51. Cited in Ann E. Cudd, Analyzing Oppression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 187. 52. See the correspondence contained in Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–­Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). 53. Popescu, Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought, 84, 93. 54. Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 133. 55. Ibid., 141. 56. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 80. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 57. Walker, A Noble Fight, 20. 58. Ibid., 89. 59. Ibid., 10. 60. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 184. 61. Ibid. 62. Rose, Black Noise, 107. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 63. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 281, quoted in Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 211–­12. 64. Walker, A Noble Fight, 186. 65. Ibid., 147. 66. Rose, Black Noise, 15. 67. Ibid. 68. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 178. 69. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 29, 209, 212. 70. Ibid., 212, 213. 71. Scott points out that the charisma often attributed to effective activists and leaders is not so much a reflection of some mystical “personal quality or aura” that enables them to fill “essentially empty heads with novel ideas” but rather a function of their ability to articulate an existing hidden transcript that is already shared by some group of marginalized people (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 221–­22). The first public declaration of a hidden transcript thus always has a “prehistory” that helps explain “its capacity to produce political breakthroughs” (227). 72. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 289–­302. 73. There is admittedly some disagreement about the value and effects of the AIDS quilt. Whereas Judith Butler sees it as a powerful emblem of agonistic activism and an exemplary instance of “publicly avowing limitless loss” (Psychic Life of Power, 148), Douglas Crimp has argued that the quilt may have mired gay men in mourning at the expense of emancipatory political action. He also wonders if “society’s loving attention to the quilt” may reflect an unspoken homophobic satisfaction at “the evidence

218  /  Notes to Pages 126–136 of the mass death of gay men.” See Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 199–­200. Others have worried that the quilt may serve to “sanitize and sentimentalize gay life”; see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 173. I am indebted to Bonnie Honig’s excellent discussion of this debate in Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 61–­66. Symbols such as the AIDS quilt almost always have multiple valences. Indeed, their social and political power often comes from the multiplicity of meanings they evoke. It would be a mistake to think that the meaning of the quilt was simple or unitary, just as it would be naive to think that progress for gay people has been untouched by ambivalence and loss. At the same time, however, life is on the whole far freer for gay people in the United States today than it has ever been, and for most gay people this is a good thing even if it is not a perfect thing. The AIDS quilt played a significant role in that change. 74. See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–­74. For a critique of the politics of recognition, conventionally conceived, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially chap. 5; and Markell, Bound by Recognition. 75. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 136. 76. Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 265. 77. Ibid., 265–­66. 78. Ibid., 266–­67. Chap t e r F o u r

1.

We can insist on this point while denying that the human role in violations of freedom must be intentional. 2. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 122. 3. Intentionality matters for Berlin. Violations of negative liberty require “the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.” Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 122; see also 130 n. 1. 4. Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, lx; Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 136. 5. Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, lxiii. 6. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 155. 7. Ibid., 156, 157. 8. Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, xlv. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., xlvi–­ii. 11. Ibid., xlvii. 12. One question we might ask today is whether the relative dangers of the two forms of liberty are different now than they were in Berlin’s time. What he called “liberal ultra-­ individualism” is certainly on the rise in many domains at present, most especially in the context of economic globalization. To be sure, there are new sorts of dangers on the positive liberty side as well, including various strands of nationalism, tribalism, and religious fundamentalism. Yet we may have good Berlinian reasons to worry more about negative liberty than Berlin himself did.

Notes to Pages 136–141  /  219 For an influential discussion of the relationship between negative and positive liberty subsequent to Berlin, see Gerald C. MacCallum Jr., “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312–­34. 13. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 171. 14. Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, xxxvi. 15. Ibid., xliii. 16. Ibid., xliii, xxxvi. 17. Ibid., xliii. 18. Ibid., xlii. 19. Ibid., xlii, xliii. 20. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 125. 21. This language is introduced by Charles Taylor in “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–­93. 22. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 155–­58. 23. Ibid., 158. 24. See Taylor, “Politics of Recognition.” 25. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 163, 166. 26. Ibid., 166. As noted at the outset of this chapter, Berlin himself did not actually believe that the freedom of a society could be measured solely on the basis of its instantiation of negative liberty. The point here is that negative liberty models freedom in a limited way. Berlin saw these limits better than many of those who have since appropriated the model. At the same time, however, Berlin never understood that the reason why negative liberty is insufficient has to do with the non-­sovereign nature of human agency. Nor did he develop an account of how negative liberty might be combined or balanced with freedom in other forms. 27. Pettit, Republicanism, 31. For a more recent treatment of non-­domination that is essentially compatible with Pettit’s but elaborates the links between non-­domination and justice see Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 28. Pettit, Republicanism, 31. 29. Ibid., 45–­50. 30. Pettit classifies Locke as a republican rather than a liberal largely because of Locke’s very explicit equation of liberty and law (ibid., 40). As Charles Larmore points out, however, “that is a desperate remedy. Surely something is amiss in a definition of liberalism which accommodates Hobbes [as Pettit’s does] but excludes Locke”; Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 186. 31. Larmore, Autonomy of Morality, 184. 32. Markell has called attention to this narrowness in “The Insufficiency of Non-­ Domination.” In particular, Markell challenges Pettit’s insistence that freedom is served so long as political decisions track the “commonly avowable interests” of all citizens, regardless of whether citizens themselves play a role in decision making. Pettit’s view, says Markell, raises the specter of political institutions that, while protecting against arbitrariness by forcing the people’s representatives to track their interests, nevertheless foreclose the actual agency of average citizens by rendering them passive recipients of decisions made by elites. The exercise of power along these lines—­even by non-­dominating elites—­can “stultify and stifle” citizens and thereby undermine their freedom as involvement (12). Thus freedom as non-­domination,

220  /  Notes to Pages 141–146 achieved through what Pettit calls “discursive control,” is “insufficient” to the extent that it allows for the “usurpation” of self-­rule as popular “involvement” or participation. This is a valuable critique of non-­domination. The present study approaches non-­domination from a different but complementary vantage point, emphasizing among other things that domination itself presupposes notions of intentionality and sovereign control on the part of the dominant that fail to track many of the real operations of agency and power among us, and introducing the additional category of oppression to cover instances of unfreedom generated by impersonal, unconscious social forces, which elude the category of domination. For additional articulation of the limits of non-­domination, see also Hirschmann, Subject of Liberty, 26–­27. 33. Pettit, Republicanism, 52. 34. Ibid., 80. See also Ian Shapiro’s recent discussion of non-­domination as “the primary political value” in Shapiro, “On Non-­Domination,” 1. Shapiro’s account of domination departs somewhat from that of Pettit (see especially “On Non-­Domination,” 16–­22), and it insists that domination need not be conscious or intended (8, 10). 35. Pettit, Republicanism, 31, 32, 39, 57, 61. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. Pettit, Theory of Freedom, 139, 176. 38. Pettit, Republicanism, 60. Subsequent page numbers appear in the text. 39. Pettit, Theory of Freedom, 132, 142. 40. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 122; see also 130 n. 1. 41. Pettit, Republicanism, 53. 42. Hirschmann makes a similar point in The Subject of Liberty, 28–­29. Note, too, the nuanced conception of domination developed by Clarissa Rile Hayward in “What Can Political Freedom Mean in a Multicultural Democracy?: On Deliberation, Difference, and Democratic Governance,” Political Theory 39, no. 4 (2011): 468–­97. Hayward insists (among other things) that domination “need not be the intended product of people’s conscious choices” (478). 43. Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10. 44. Ibid., 71. 45. Ibid., 162. 46. Ibid., 168. 47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 26–­27. As we saw in chapter 3, Butler fruitfully develops this Foucauldian perspective on the productive force of power, the idea that abiding by prevailing norms constitutes simultaneously a subjugation of the individual and a form of individual empowerment, at least within the world defined by those norms. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 15. See also Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 10. 48. Along these lines, John Law and Annemarie Mol have commented that the “English language makes it easy to write sentences that are active or sentences that are passive. But writing somewhere in between ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ is much more difficult. The divide between ‘mastery’ and ‘being mastered’ is thoroughly embedded in English and in its neighboring European languages. Active or passive, control or slavery, the division is an enduring central Western concern. And it is precisely this way of building the world that here we seek to interfere with.” Law and Mol, “The Actor-­Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001,” 66.

Notes to Pages 146–158  /  221 49. Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Living in Truth: 22 Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Vaclav Havel (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 42. 50. Ibid., 46. 51. Ibid., 53, 49. 52. Loury, Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 26. 53. Ibid., 30–­31. 54. Ibid., 31. 55. Ibid., 39. 56. For present purposes, I include economic factors in social and political conditions, since most of those that influence individual agency are subject, however indirectly, to political decision-­making, the policy choices made by political authorities for the regulation (or not) of economic actors. Iris Young distinguished between domination and oppression, and I follow her lead in using these terms to mark out different sorts of violation. My own understanding of what the two terms cover is different from hers, however. She treats domination as involving constraints on “self-­determination” and oppression as involving constraints on “self-­development.” Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 37. Given the non-­sovereign notion of human agency that forms the background of my account, the ideal of “self-­ determination,” at least in the strict sense of the term, is somewhat problematic. And my own view of freedom as non-­oppression does not privilege self-­development over self-­expression. The affirmation of one’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world can involve the formative development of the self but it need not do so for freedom to be in play. 57. Oppression also may compromise the freedom of groups, if such a thing exists, but that kind of violation is beyond the scope of this study. Here we are concerned with the freedom of individuals. Oppression compromises individual freedom, whatever else it may do. 58. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 125. 59. Ibid., 127. 60. Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 291–­95. 61. Ibid., 291. 62. This is another place where the non-­sovereign approach differs from that of Pettit, who insists that autonomy, being an intrapersonal ideal, is of no concern for politics. I do not defend his ideal of autonomy, but it is misguided to think that intrapersonal aspects of freedom cannot be political concerns. The mistake is twofold: First, it equates politics with direct state action; and secondly, it fails to acknowledge the ways that the intrapersonal aspects of freedom are not simply a function of individual will but have intersubjective conditions for their realization, conditions that may be compromised by prevailing relations of power. 63. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 131. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. See Connolly, Pluralism, 31–­33; A World of Becoming, 55; and Neuropolitics, 21. 67. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 115. 68. Arendt, On Revolution, 32. 69. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 151.

222  /  Notes to Pages 158–162 70. See, for example, Villa, Public Freedom; and Ben Berger, “Out of Darkness, Light: Arendt’s Cautionary and Constructive Political Theories,” European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 2 (2009): 157–­82. 71. Arendt, On Revolution, 32. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 34. 74. See Villa, Public Freedom, 97, 339. 75. Jeremy Waldron emphasizes the importance, for Arendt, of civil liberties and a constitutional structure that establish political equality, sustain regular procedures, and allow for collective decision making. See Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 203, 206, 209, 211. Waldron is right to remind us that Arendt’s theory of freedom is not all novelty and agonism. In this respect, he offers something of a corrective to Kateb, who holds that “politics is all the more authentic when it is eruptive rather than when it is a regular and already institutionalized practice” because it is most fundamentally concerned with initiatory acts and the break with automatic processes (Kateb, “Political Action,” 134–­35). Waldron points out that Arendt knew that “politics needs a housing and the framing of a constitution” if it is to make freedom possible (Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” 203). At the same time, however, she clearly means to distinguish the constitutional framework from the meaning of freedom. She also insists that a liberal constitution—­with its distinctive slate of individual rights—­tends to have corrosive effects on the experience of freedom even as it helps to sustain this experience. Waldron understates the fundamental ambivalence in her view. See also Villa on the importance of “a durable, man-­made world of laws and institutions” (Villa, Public Freedom, 215). Yet Villa also attends carefully to the agonistic moments in Arendt. In this respect, his reading captures Arendt’s ambivalence with greater nuance than many others. 76. Arendt, “What is Freedom?” 149. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid.; Arendt, On Revolution, 236–­38, 250–­55, 269. 80. Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 43. See also Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 175–­78. 81. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, 46. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 50. 84. Ibid., 51. 85. Villa, Public Freedom, 350. 86. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 148. For an influential critique of Arendt’s insistence on this point, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 87. Arendt, On Revolution, 59. 88. Ibid. 89. See Villa, Public Freedom, 346. 90. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177. 91. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” 156. 92. Arendt, On Revolution, 279.

Notes to Pages 162–168  /  223 93. Self-­initiated action initiates a new self, on Arendt’s account, as much as it generates a novel action. 94. Arendt, The Human Condition, 168, 169. 95. Mahmood, Politics of Piety. Chap t e r F iv e

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 168–­69. Positive liberty, he writes, “conceived as the answer to the question, ‘By whom am I to be governed’, is a valid universal goal.” Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, lvii. Indeed, it can be an important counterweight to negative liberty. For “belief in negative freedom is compatible with, and (so far as ideas influence conduct) has played its part in, generating great and lasting social evils. . . . The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition” being among them (Berlin, “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty, xlv). Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 166. An exception is Larmore, who in The Autonomy of Morality sketches very briefly an account of freedom’s plurality that tracks value pluralism directly. Larmore holds that “the ideal of freedom is essentially pluralistic,” and he attributes freedom’s plurality to the fact that it encompasses “a number of different values” (Autonomy of Morality, 182). The reason freedom encompasses different values is that “a viable notion of freedom depends on distinguishing between harmful constraints [on human action] and enabling conditions, and clearly such a distinction embodies some prior understanding of the human good” (182). For example, if we focus on the good involved in reaping the rewards of our labor, then tax policies that interfere with this good will appear to be harmful constraints on action rather than enabling conditions of it. If we focus instead on the good involved in “being able to look others in the eye as our equals,” then the rule of law will appear as an enabling condition rather than a harmful constraint (182). Freedom is consequently “unintelligible except by reference to other human goods, and it takes a different shape depending on the standpoint we adopt” (183). Relative to the good of reaping the rewards of one’s labor, freedom consists in minimal taxation; relative to the good of equal standing, freedom consists in the rule of law. Larmore is right to recognize freedom’s plurality, and this plurality surely does have some connection to moral pluralism. Non-­interference, non-­domination, non-­ oppression and collective world-­making are all moral goods in addition to being types of freedom. Still, the connection Larmore draws between freedom and other moral goods seems to me to be unnecessarily tight. All we really need in order to explain why freedom is plural is to recognize that the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds requires diverse conditions. Different kinds of social and political dynamics will support the exercise of agency in different ways. Tax policies that enable people to reap the rewards of their labor and governance that allows citizens to look one another in the eye as political equals are both forms of freedom not because they serve other moral goods but because they both support the exercise of agency. These forms of freedom do also serve other moral goods, and this fact gives us reason to value them and justifies protecting them, but it does not explain why they are forms of freedom. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 168–­69. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 168–­69; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 55–­56.

224  /  Notes to Pages 171–188 7. See Hirschmann’s account of  veiling in The Subject of Liberty, chap. 6. See also the essays collected in Susan Moller Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 8. Eric Moskowitz, Travis Andersen, and Christopher J. Girard, “Two Parades Celebrate a Peaceful St. Patrick’s Day in South Boston,” March 20, 2011, http://www.boston .com/yourtown/news/south_boston/2011/03/two_parades_celebrate_a_peacef.html. 9. The conflict described here focuses on the parade organizers’ freedom as non-­ interference as it comes up against gay activists’ freedom as non-­oppression. One might also view the conflict as one that pits parade organizers’ freedom as non-­ interference against the same type of freedom for gay activists, who are being prevented from exercising their choice to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The conflict is multidimensional, then, involving tensions between different freedoms (for the same and/or different persons) and tensions between different persons over the same freedoms. 10. For a defense of the power and legitimacy of the expressive role of the state, see Corey Brettschneider, When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 11. Hirschmann maintains that “the ability to make choices and act on them is the basic condition of freedom” (Subject of Liberty, 30). 12. Ibid., 175, 181, 189, 194. There is a parallel here between Hirschmann’s view and Pettit’s insistence that to be free means to be in control of one’s action, and that to be in control of one’s action requires that one be in control of all the controlling factors that bear on the action. 13. Ibid., 237. 14. Brettschneider, When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? 71. 15. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 150. 16. Alexander, New Jim Crow, 99–­100; Anderson, Imperative of Integration, 65; Loury, Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 88–­89. 17. Although Arendt herself would not have included economic activities under the category of freedom, as we have seen, given her strict association of economic activities with necessity as opposed to freedom. 18. Even the violations of freedom associated with racial disparities in incarceration in the United States are better understood in terms of oppression than as forms of domination, at least as these concepts have been elaborated here, given the impersonal and often unconscious character of many of the dynamics involved. Conclusions

1.

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 158. Citizen advisory boards often play a similar role. See, for example, Jason Courter, “Citizen Advisory Board,” Participedia, last modified June 4, 2010, http://participedia.net/en/methods/citizen-­advisory-­board; and Municipal Research and Services Center of  Washington, Local Government Citizen Advisory Boards: Examples, Options and Model Practices for the Effective Use of Advisory Boards by Local Governments, Report No. 63 (Seattle, WA: Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington, August 2008), http://www.mrsc.org/Publications /lgcab08.pdf. 2. The HUMAN Library Organization, “What Is the Human Library?” accessed February  4, 2014, http://humanlibrary.org/what-­is-­the-­living-­library.htm. 3. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 188–191  /  225 4. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 299–­301. 5. See, for example, Villa, Public Freedom, 347, 352–­53; Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 31–­45; and Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” 59. 6. See, for example, Butler’s insistence on referring to her work as “postliberatory” in The Psychic Life of Power, 17–­18. 7. See Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom, and Desire (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2010). 8. Shulman, American Prophecy, 248–­49. 9. Ibid., 249. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 248–­49.

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Index

accountability, responsibility as, 16, 60, 89–­93, 157, 182, 187 achieving our country, 12, 103 acknowledgment, Markell on injustice and, 200n13 action: affirming one’s identity, 4, 27–­28, 133; Arendt on (see Arendt’s concept of action); Berlin’s call for new model of, 136; Berlin’s concept of negative liberty and, 137; breaking with social norms, 55–­56; Butler on materialization and, 54; Coole on bodies as sites of, 45; efficacy dimension of agency and, 23–­24; Fanon on resistance through, 54; imaginative reinterpretation of, 103–­4; liberal individualism and, 13, 14; Pettit’s theory of freedom and, 76–­82, 224n12; social uptake of, 15, 37; with uninten­ tional effects, 23–­25; unpredictability of, 45; Williams’s two sides of, 22, 23 activists: Arendtian collective action and, 160; mediating hidden transcripts for wider society, 125, 217n71 actor network theory (ANT), 46–­47, 201n32 advanced marginality, 122 affirmative action, 171–­72, 181 African American Freemasonry, 104–­5, 117, 119, 121–­22 African Americans. See black Americans agency: in affirmation of traditional norms, 106; alchemy of, 17, 57, 98; apart from intentionality, 5, 21, 23–­26; creativ­ ity of, 45–­46, 56, 57; defined, 4; as emergent property, 4, 7, 28, 46, 48, 84; enduring self required for, 13, 23; failed

or frustrated by social reception, 37, 204n61; freedom compared to, 133–­34; involvement aspect of, 24, 25, 26–­27, 200n14; nonhuman material world and, 46–­49, 50–­51, 207n114, 207n119, 208n120; as normative status, not practi­ cal capacity, 10–­11; of the oppressed, 24, 44; of the oppressor, 24; racial stigma and, 148; two sides of, 4, 15, 22–­28, 32 (see also efficacy dimension of agency; personal identity); unintentional under­ mining of, 142–­43; vitality under con­ ditions of social inequality, 10, 17, 97, 98–­99, 131–­32, 198n31 (see also counter­ public conversation; imagination; social transformation); vulnerable to social inequality, 39, 57, 58–­62, 75. See also corporeal agency; non-­sovereign agency; socially distributed agency AIDS crisis, 16, 125 AIDS quilt, 126, 217n73 Alexander, Michelle, 7, 8 American society, 1, 11–­12 Amish way of life, and freedom, 72–­73 Anaya, Carmen, 110–­12, 115, 158, 161, 216n41. See also colonias Anderson, Elizabeth, 7–­8 Anderson, Marian, 95, 106 ANT (actor network theory), 46–­47, 201n32 Anthony, Susan B., 115–­16 Arendt, Hannah: defense of discrimination by, 204n64; on personal responsibil­ ity, 14, 21, 39–­41, 57; views related to corporeal agency, 15, 162, 204n79 Arendtians, 12, 14, 190

238 / Index Arendt’s concept of action, 14, 29–­42; agent’s own understanding and, 35–­37, 41, 203n60, 204n78; bearers needed for, 30–­31, 33, 37, 201n32, 203n60; bodily, material factors and, 15; boundlessness in, 31–­32, 33, 40–­41, 202n37; collective world-­making in, 158, 159; emphasis on beginning in, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 163–­64, 203n47; personal identity and, 14, 29–­30, 33–­35, 39–­40, 162, 200n14, 203n51, 203n57, 223n93; plu­ rality and, 14, 63, 209n7; purpose or purposelessness and, 29–­30, 203n46; so­ cially distributed character of, 31, 32, 41, 203n60; two parts in, 29, 32–­33, 38–­39; unpredictability in, 31, 32, 33. See also Arendt’s concept of non-­sovereign agency Arendt’s concept of freedom, 158–­64, 222n75; aspiration to sovereignty and, 2, 14; bodily, material factors and, 15, 162, 204n79; as generative approach, 41–­42; necessity and, 161–­63, 204n79, 224n17; privileging of initiative in, 203n47; revolution and, 172; willing vs. acting and, 199n4. See also collective world-­making Arendt’s concept of non-­sovereign agency, 5, 14, 15; difficulties for, 21, 32–­33, 41; freedom and, 2, 14, 41; as generative ap­ proach, 41–­42. See also Arendt’s concept of action; non-­sovereign agency Ash, Timothy Garton, 121 authenticity, 71–­73; non-­oppression and, 154; social inequality and, 75; of some traditionalist identities, 70; Taylor’s concept of, 211n23 Baldwin, James: on achieving our country, 12; counterpublic conversation and, 109, 110, 114, 163; on encounter with white expectations, 102–­3, 111, 137, 216n42; failures of agency experienced by, 61–­62; letter to his nephew, 95, 103, 106, 108, 155; on love, 106–­7; resources of imagination and, 99–­100, 103; responsibility as responsiveness and, 95; self-­respect and, 155 Bartky, Sandra, 65, 101–­2 bearers: Arendt’s concept of, 30–­31, 33, 37, 201n32, 203n60; cultivating com­ munities of, 183, 187–­88, 189, 190;

frequently absent for the marginalized, 62; importance of communities of, 57; included in sources of agency, 28; recognition and, 139; responsibility as responsiveness and, 96; undercut by social inequality, 60, 75. See also socially distributed agency; social uptake Beauvoir, Simone de, 67, 68, 70 Beloved (Morrison), 69–­70, 93, 214n64 Beltrán, Cristina, 117 Bennett, Jane, 15, 47–­48, 50, 207n119, 208n120, 213n56 Bentham, Jeremy, 140 Berlin, Isaiah, 135–­40, 153–­54, 155, 156, 166, 218n3, 218n12; sovereigntist view of agency and, 3, 6, 136, 137, 140, 170; value pluralism and, 165, 166, 168–­70. See also negative liberty; positive liberty birth control pill, 127–­28 black Americans: “acting white” some­ times criticized by, 108, 123; Arendt’s defense of social discrimination against, 204n64; blamed by blacks and whites for inequalities, 8, 196nn11–­12; coun­ terpublic conversation among, 108–­9; disadvantages in American society, 1; health disparities experienced by, 1, 206n91; police brutality experienced by, 119–­20; realization of one’s blackness by, 210n10. See also slavery; and specific race-­related entries black men: Baldwin on inner resources of, 155; cab drivers’ fear of, 147; elevated mortality rates of, 16; equated with criminality, 120; Freemasonry among, 104–­5, 117, 119, 121–­22; mass incar­ ceration of, 8, 179, 197n20, 224n18 blame, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91 blaming victims: of racial inequalities, 8, 196nn11–­12; responsibilities of the op­ pressed and, 212n45 Boogie Down Productions, 119 Bourdieu, Pierre, 208n122 Br’er Rabbit, 118 Brettschneider, Corey, 177 Brown, Wendy, 65 Butler, Judith: on agency as performativ­ ity, 73; on agency not fully intentional, 56, 209n142; on AIDS quilt, 217n73; associating identity with sovereignty, 12–­13, 56, 74; on Bourdieu’s notion

Index / 239 of habitus, 208n122; on “doubled truth” of normativity, 104; Foucauldian perspective on power and, 220n47; on material dimensions of agency, 54–­56; on positive use of double conscious­ ness, 69; on the “postliberatory,” 225n6; social uptake and, 57 capitalism: Berlin on evils of, 136; glob­ alized, 5, 83 Carter, Ian, 202n37 Casa Susanna. See drag queens of Casa Susanna chitterlings, 131–­32 choice. See intentional choice citizenship, 6–­7. See also democratic citizenship civil rights movement, American, 1, 124, 160–­61, 180 civil society, 177, 188 Clementi, Tyler, 16 climate change, 83 coercion, Pettit on allowable instances of, 80, 211n36 Cohen, Cathy, 7 collective world-­making, 135, 158–­64; in conflict with non-­domination, 173–­74, 178; in conflict with non-­interference, 172–­73; by drag queens, 177–­78; im­ portance of, 190; in pluralist approach to freedom, 18, 164, 165, 166, 185; resources for promotion of, 180; veiling among Muslim women as, 171, 174, 176, 177; violent or unjust instances of, 160. See also Arendt’s concept of freedom colonialism. See Fanon, Frantz; postcolo­ nial contexts colonias, 110–­12, 114, 115, 161, 163, 216n42. See also Anaya, Carmen communication: for balancing plural freedoms, 179–­80, 181–­82; corporeal, 43–­44; as practice of reciprocity, 129–­ 31. See also counterpublic conversation communicative engagement among citi­ zens, 188–­89 communitarians, 12, 190–­91 community organizing: as Arendtian col­ lective action, 159; connecting personal experiences to broader ideals in, 94, 215n25; counterpublic conversation in, 110

Connolly, William, 45–­46, 56–­57, 156, 196n8, 207n107, 207n110, 208n120 consciousness-­raising: feminist, 103–­4; goal of, 71 constitutional framework, 173, 178, 179 control: actions breaking with social norms and, 55–­56; American freedom cur­ rently reduced to, 190; Arendt’s concept of action and, 32; English verb structure and, 146, 220n48; involvement aspect of agency and, 24; moral responsibil­ ity and, 83; non-­sovereign aspect of agency and, 4–­5, 21; Pettit’s theory of freedom and, 76–­82, 142, 224n12; sovereigntist view of agency and, 2–­3, 4, 5–­6, 10, 16 control condition, 16, 83, 85, 86, 87, 212n46, 213n57 Coole, Diana, 15, 43–­45, 74, 206n90, 208n122 corporeal agency, 15, 42; Arendt’s views in conflict with, 15, 162, 204n79; Butler on, 54–­56, 208n122; Connolly on, 46, 56–­57; Fanon on the oppressed and, 52–­53, 54, 107; imagination and, 107; socially distributed aspects linked to, 46, 206n102; vulnerabilities attending, 51. See also new materialism counterpublic conversation, 17, 99, 107–­24; concept of, 107–­8; conformism some­ times fostered by, 122–­23; efficacy dimen­ sion of, 108, 116–­24; in Ellison’s Invisible Man, 114; identity dimension of, 108–­16, 121, 124; mixed effects of, 108, 114–­15 counterpublics: defined, 107; of gay men and lesbians, 125, 155; promoting emergence of, 188; providing some forms of freedom, 167; restrictive inter­ nal norms in, 122–­23; self-­awareness and self-­respect in, 155; social uptake within, 157. See also counterpublic conversation creativity of human agency, 45–­46, 56, 57 Crimp, Douglas, 217n73 critical race theory, 10, 12 culpability: responsibility as, 16, 60, 86, 87, 187; blurred line between account­ ability and, 93 cultural and artistic productions, 177, 188–­89 “cultural pathologies” thesis, 88, 212n45

240 / Index Darryl. See racial profiling by police Daughters of Bilitis, 125 Davidson, Donald, 214n62 Declaration of Independence, 94, 104, 125, 173 Delaney, Beauford, 95, 106 democratic citizenship: duties of, 134, 189–­90; non-­sovereign model of responsibility and, 16–­17, 94, 96, 97, 187; non-­sovereign view of agency and, 7; perspectives of the marginalized and, 20; reconfigured by gay rights move­ ment, 52; sovereigntist implications for responsibility and, 6; systematic social inequalities and, 16. See also liberal democracy; state discrimination: Arendt’s defense of, 204n64; legal requirement for intent in, 196n13; racial stigma and, 8, 9, 25–­26, 145 discursive control, Pettit on, 78–­79, 80–­82, 219n32 distributed agency, 201n32. See also socially distributed agency domination: affecting both master and slave, 146; agency sustained despite, 17; in classical republican theory of freedom, 140; colonial, 52–­53; com­ plexity of human agency in presence of, 98; corporeal dimensions of, 21, 44; hidden transcripts associated with, 118; Hirschmann on choice under condi­ tions of, 175; informal practices of, 179; intentional choice and, 219n32, 220n34, 220n42; vs. oppression, 149, 157, 221n56; oppression coexisting with, 150; perspectives of the marginal­ ized clouded by, 20; Pettit’s examples of, 142; responsibility under conditions of, 93, 94; unintentional contributions to, 92. See also non-­domination double consciousness, 65–­67, 68, 69, 70, 75; Baldwin’s experience of, 103, 109; conversation ameliorating effects of, 108; defined, 109; among gay people, 149; non-­oppression and, 154, 156; among women, 149. See also fragmenta­ tion of the self double meanings of hidden transcripts, 118 Douglass, Frederick, 17, 98 drag queens of Casa Susanna: collec­ tive world-­making by, 158, 161, 163;

counterpublic conversation and, 112–­ 13, 115, 116–­17; gender stereotypes and, 177–­78; imagination and, 116 Du Bois, W.E.B., 65–­66, 68, 69, 70, 149 Dworkin, Ronald, 211n38 efficacy dimension of agency, 4, 23–­24, 199n4; corporeal aspect of, 43–­45; involvement aspect of agency and, 26; social inequalities and, 15, 60–­61, 75; subject to social response, 31. See also action Eichmann, Adolf, 39 Ellison, Ralph, 60–­62, 94–­95, 113–­14 emancipation, defined, 214n4 environmental degradation, 83, 212n46 equal respect: conflicting types of freedom and, 176; in democratic societies, 174, 190, 204n61; social inequalities and, 16. See also respect essentialism about identities, 22, 71–­72, 73 exceptionalism, human, 48, 50–­51, 208n120 existential revolution, 157, 190 fair value of political liberties, 178, 181, 209n8 false consciousness, 70–­71. See also double consciousness Fanon, Frantz, 52–­53, 54, 55, 98, 100–­101, 107, 122, 215n13 femininity, confident and strong visions of, 104 femininity, norms of: in black Freemasonry, 122; double consciousness generated by, 67–­68; of drag queens, 178; frustra­ tions of agency associated with, 61, 64, 67; social meaning of female beauty and, 101; women who authentically conform to, 70 feminism, 10, 64, 103–­4 feminist theories of relational autonomy, 12, 197n25 forgiveness, 41 Foucauldian poststructuralists, 12. See also Butler, Judith Foucault, Michel, 12; on power, 145–­46, 220n47 fragmentation of the self, 65, 68, 70, 75; counterpublic conversation ameliorating effects of, 108, 109–­10, 112; of Ellison’s Invisible Man, 113;

Index / 241 non-­oppression and, 156, 157; public articulation of hidden transcripts and, 121. See also double consciousness Fraser, Nancy, 107, 215n6 freedom, 17–­20, 133–­35; agency compared to, 133–­35; American hubris about, 19, 198n32; American society and, 1, 3, 11–­12; in Baldwin’s memories of black community, 109, 110; in conflict with other goods, 153–­54; contemporary cynicism about, 191; corporeal agency and, 51, 55; degrees of, 135; economic and social conditions for exercise of, 178; Ellison’s Invisible Man and, 113–­14; en­ during American failures of, 9–­10; liberal democracy’s promise of, 10, 20; liberal individualism and, 13–­14; micropolitics of, 7, 156, 196n8; non-­sovereign theory of, 7; as normative status distinguished from practical capacity, 10–­11; as open-­ ended project, 183–­84; racial stigma and, 148; redemption of, needed in American society, 190–­93; republican model of, 3, 140 (see also Pettit, Philip); social transformation to establish conditions of, 132, 157; sovereigntist view of agency and, 3, 6–­7, 10; state’s role in protecting, 7, 173, 178–­79, 184, 187; types of failure of, 157; undercut by social inequality, 16 (see also social inequality). See also Arendt’s concept of freedom; collective world-­making; non-­domination; non-­ interference; non-­oppression; plural freedom freedom in the agent, Pettit on, 76 freedom of speech: as framework for com­ munication about freedoms, 181; state protection of, 179; St. Patrick’s Day Parade case and, 172; of white suprema­ cist, 176–­77 Freemasonry, African American, 104–­5, 117, 119, 121–­22 Friedman, Marilyn, 197n25 Frost, Samantha, 15, 42–­43, 46, 211n32 gangsta rap, 87–­88, 177, 178 Gates, Henry Louis, 210n10 gay marriage, 127 gay people: agency of the openly gay, 56; Arendt’s denial of enduring identity and, 40; authentic identities experienced

by, 72; Baldwin’s experience and, 114; coming-­out experience of, 149–­50; corporeal agency of, 55; counterpublics of, 125, 155; love as source of transfor­ mation for, 106–­7; oppression of, 181; Stonewall uprising by, 17, 98, 143; St. Patrick’s Day Parade issue involving, 172, 182–­83, 224n9; unjust frustration of agency of, 204n61. See also homo­ phobia; sexual orientation gay pride, 155 gay rights movement, 125–­26; inspired by civil rights movement, 183; Panagia on political life of sensation and, 52 gender: agency and freedom in context of, 19–­20; inequalities of, 15–­17; mate­ rialization in accord with, 107; wage gap associated with, 5. See also sexism; subordination of women gender stereotypes, 177–­78; degrees of, in United States today, 85; standard­ ized test performance and, 68–­69. See also femininity; masculinity: norms of; stereotypes Glaude, Eddie, 8, 214n64, 215n5, 216n29 globalization: Berlin’s concern about indi­ vidualism and, 218n12; cross-­cultural understanding and, 128; responsibility under economic conditions of, 5, 83 government. See the state group-­based identities: oppression and, 149, 151–­52, 186, 221n57; recognition and, 129, 138–­39 Gutmann, Amy, 188 Hall, Prince, 104 Harrington, Michael, 140 Havel, Vaclav, 146, 157–­58, 190, 214n73 Hayward, Clarissa Rile, 220n42 hidden transcripts, 118–­21, 124; public declaration of, 125, 217n71 hip hop culture and rap music, 86–­88, 119–­20, 122 Hirschmann, Nancy, 174–­75, 220n42, 224nn11–­12 Hobbes, Thomas, 42, 46, 173, 219n30 homophobia: disruptions of social uptake and, 36–­37; internalized stigma effected by, 155. See also gay people human exceptionalism, 48, 50–­51, 208n120 Human Library, 188

242 / Index identity. See group-­based identities; per­ sonal identity imagination, 17, 99–­107, 124, 215n8 immigrant rights movements in United States, 117 implicit bias, 25–­26, 200n12 impure agency, Walker on, 213n57 individualism: vs. communitarianism, 12; as heroic despite its limits, 116; liberal, 13–­14, 18, 20, 164, 189, 198n26; non-­ oppression as ideal of, 156; plurality of freedom and, 170; recognition and, 138–­39; reconstruction of, 14, 18, 20, 164, 189, 198n26; redemption of freedom and, 190–­91, 192. See also normative individualism individuality, Kateb’s notion of, 28, 201n16 inequality: in American society, 1, 9, 11; exacerbated by sovereigntist idea of agency, 6; sustained through bodily practices, 44. See also racial inequality; social inequality injustice: in criminal justice system, 8; guaranteed by sovereigntist solution, 65; Markell on acknowledgment of, 200n13; moral luck and, 200n11; unintentional contributions to, 41, 187; withholding social uptake in cases of, 154; Young’s model of responsibil­ ity and, 90–­91. See also justice; social inequality: systematic and unjust intentional choice: actions breaking with social norms and, 55–­56; agency extend­ ing beyond, 5, 23–­25; American freedom currently reduced to, 190; Berlin’s con­ cept of non-­interference and, 135, 144, 218n3; corporeal aspect of agency and, 43; domination and, 219n32, 220n34, 220n42; freedom as protection for, 3, 6; Hirschmann on basic condition of free­ dom and, 175, 224n11; as insufficient condition of agency, 199n4; in legal discrimination cases, 196n13; moral luck and, 25; non-­sovereign agency and, 5, 21; Pettit’s concept of non-­domination and, 144, 145; relational autonomy literature and, 12; sexual orientation and, 149–­50; sovereigntist view of agency and, 2–­3, 4, 6, 10, 16 intentional choice and responsibility, 5–­6, 8, 9–­10; culpability and, 86, 87–­88;

Kutz on, 212n46; liability model and, 83, 84, 85; Pettit on, 77; unintentional effects and, 26, 88–­89, 187 intention in action, of Malafouris’s materi­ alism, 206n105 Invisible Man (Ellison), 60–­62, 94–­95, 113–­14 involvement aspect of agency, 24, 25; per­ sonal identity and, 26–­27, 200n14 Jim Crow, 124, 126, 173, 180 justice: in balancing conflicts between types of freedom, 174, 176, 177, 181, 183; compromised by inequalities in American society, 1; in conflict with freedom, 154; constraints on agency in service of, 153; failures of agency and, 204n61; in liberal democracies, 209n8; non-­domination and, 219n27; non-­oppression and, 151, 152; personal responsibility and, 5, 6, 82, 94; as social responsibility, 91. See also injustice Kant, Immanuel, 2, 48, 141, 203n47 Kateb, George, 28, 201n16, 204n79, 222n75 Kelly, Robin D. G., 215n8 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 31, 125, 191 King, Richard H., 160–­61 Kohn, Jerome, 203n47 Kutz, Christopher, 212n46 Larmore, Charles, 141, 219n30, 223n4 Law, John, 220n48 lesbians: in early gay rights movement, 125; nontraditional agency of, 55, 56; in St. Patrick’s Day Parade conflict, 172. See also gay people liability view of responsibility, 83–­84, 85–­86, 212n46; vs. culpability, 87–­88; Young’s social connection model and, 90, 91 liberal democracy: Arendtian view of freedom and, 159, 160; disputes about instances of inequality in, 198n30; equal respect in, 174, 204n61; justice in, 209n8; non-­oppression and, 152, 155, 157; normative individualism as pre­ condition of, 4; promise of freedom and justice for all in, 10, 20; systematic social inequalities and, 16. See also democratic citizenship

Index / 243 liberal individualism, 13–­14; reconstruc­ tion of, 14, 18, 20, 164, 189, 198n26. See also individualism liberalism: Arendt’s rejection of nega­ tive liberty and, 159; ideal of non-­ oppression and, 186; Pettit on freedom and, 140–­41, 219n30; sovereign indi­ vidual in, 2–­3 liberal theory: commitment to individual freedom in, 10–­11; constraints on free­ dom and, 10, 186; freedom associated with value pluralism in, 168; informal social inequalities and, 10, 186 liberal ultra-­individualism, Berlin on po­ tential evils of, 136, 218n12 liberation, defined, 214n4 liberation theology, 20 Locke, John: Pettit on, 140, 141, 219n30; sovereign view of agency and, 2 Loury, Glenn, 7, 145, 146–­47 love, 106–­7 Lovett, Frank, 219n27 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 140 Madison, James, 173 Mahmood, Saba, 28, 105–­6, 163, 201n17 Malafouris, Lambros, 47, 206n105 the marginalized: Arendt’s collective world-­making and, 173; as category defined by context, 153; city and state responsibility for crimes committed by, 213n55; communities of support for (see bearers); complex agency of, 98, 131; counterpublic conversation of, 131; double consciousness damaging agency of, 66; enduring identities of, 40, 71; freedom of expression and association for, 179; frustrations of agency among, 37, 85; imagination of, 99, 131; limited life prospects of, 1; oppression of, 149, 151, 157; perspectives of, 20, 179–­80; physical carriage of, 44, 46, 206n92; recognition and, 138; responsibili­ ties of, 6, 60, 75, 96, 97; social uptake denied among, 4; sources for promot­ ing freedom of, 179–­80; sovereigntist view of agency and, 4, 6, 10; under­ mined without conscious awareness, 142–­43. See also counterpublic con­ versation; inequality; oppressed; social inequality

Markell, Patchen: associating identity with sovereignty, 74; on involvement aspect of agency, 24, 26, 211n37; on Pettit’s theory of non-­domination, 211n37, 219n32; resisting agency’s dependence on identity, 12–­13, 26, 73, 200n14; on semblance of sovereign agency at others’ expense, 196n7 Marx, Karl, on freedom, 139 Marxian materialism, 42, 215n13 masculinity, norms of, 54, 55, 189 mass incarceration, racial dynamics of, 8, 179, 197n20, 224n18 materialism. See corporeal agency; new materialism materialization, Butler on, 54–­55 Mattachine Society, 125 micropolitics of freedom, 7, 156, 196n8 Mill, John Stuart, 2, 140, 141 Mol, Annemarie, 220n48 Montesquieu, 140 moral luck, 15, 24–­25, 42, 83, 200n11 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 69–­70, 93, 214n64 Muslim women, veiling among, 171, 174–­ 76, 177 Nagel, Thomas, 15, 200n11 negative liberty, 135–­38, 154, 158, 166, 218n3, 218n12, 219n26; potential dan­ gers of, 136, 218n12, 223n2; value of, 136, 137. See also non-­interference new materialism, 15, 21–­22, 42–­52; Arendt’s views in conflict with, 15, 204n79. See also actor network theory (ANT); Bennett, Jane; Coole, Diana; corporeal agency; Frost, Samantha; Panagia, Davide New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, 110 non-­domination, 3, 6–­7, 18, 135, 140–­49; affirmative action and, 172; in conflict with collective world-­making, 173–­74, 178; in conflict with non-­interference, 167, 173, 185; ideal of sovereignty and, 3; justice and, 219n27; Markell on, 211n37, 219n32; non-­oppression compared to, 154, 155; not capturing all threats to agency, 148–­49; Pettit on, 3, 6, 140–­42, 146, 147, 148, 167, 173, 211n37, 219n32; plurality of freedoms and, 164, 165, 166; veiling and, 171, 175–­76, 177. See also domination

244 / Index non-­interference, 3, 6–­7, 18, 135–­40; affir­mative action and, 171–­72, 181; in conflict with collective world-­ making, 172–­73; in conflict with non-­domination, 167, 173, 185; in conflict with non-­oppression, 166, 172, 173, 174, 224n9; for gangsta rappers, 177; government structures serving, 179; non-­oppression compared to, 154, 155; not capturing all threats to agency, 148–­49; Pettit on, 140–­41, 143; plural­ ity of freedoms and, 164, 165, 166, 178; St. Patrick’s Day Parade case and, 172, 182–­83, 224n9; tradition of, 140; in veiling among Muslim women, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177; for white suprema­ cist, 176. See also negative liberty non-­oppression, 18, 135, 149–­58; affirmative action and, 171–­72, 181; in conflict with non-­interference, 166, 172, 173, 174, 224n9; contestability of concept of, 186–­87; as demanding ideal, 154–­56, 157–­58; intrapersonal dimensions of, 154–­56, 221n62; plural­ ity of freedoms and, 164, 166, 178; promoted by state and civil society, 177, 179; racist speech and, 176–­77; resources for creating conditions of, 179–­80; responsiveness to all individu­ als in, 152–­53; St. Patrick’s Day Parade case and, 172, 182–­83, 224n9; veiling and, 171, 175–­76 non-­sovereign agency: basic conception of, 10, 21, 28, 57; Berlin’s concept of nega­ tive liberty and, 137–­38; dependence on material world, 47, 51; distinction between identity and will in, 26, 27; enduring self required for, 13; liberal individualism and, 13, 14; Markell on injustice and, 200n13; non-­oppression based on awareness of, 158; normative individualism and, 10–­11, 198n27; norm-­responsiveness and, 49–­50; plurality of freedom and, 165, 166, 170; requirements for freedom and, 7, 11; socially transformative, 56; vulnerability to inequality, 64, 185. See also agency; Arendt’s concept of non-­sovereign agency; corporeal agency; socially dis­ tributed agency

non-­sovereign responsibility, 16–­17, 57, 59–­60, 75–­76; in balancing conflicting freedoms, 182; broader than traditional models, 92–­93, 96, 187, 190; coordina­ tion of individuals for, 96–­97; moral remainders associated with, 96. See also accountability; culpability; personal responsibility; responsiveness normative individualism, 3–­4, 189; Berlin’s concept of negative liberty and, 135; non-­oppression and, 154, 186; non-­ sovereign agency and, 10–­11, 198n27; restraints on freedom consistent with, 154. See also individualism norm-­responsiveness, 49–­50, 207n117; accountability and, 89–­90; responsive­ ness and, 94; socially distributed agency and, 213n56; as source of imagina­ tion and action, 104–­6, 107. See also responsiveness North Korea, 181 Nussbaum, Martha, 188 Obama, Barack, 1, 8–­9 Oedipus, 24, 25, 26, 27 O’Mora, George, 123 the oppressed: agency of, in emancipa­ tory hip hop, 87; agency of, not always emancipatory, 106; responsibilities of, 24, 212n45; responsiveness of, 94. See also marginalized oppression: agency sustained in spite of, 17, 98; Arendt’s call for forgiveness and, 41; defined, 149; domination coexist­ ing with, 150; domination compared to, 149, 157, 221n56; new material­ ism and, 21, 44; perspectives of the marginalized clouded by, 20; as pressing problem, 192; racial disparities in US incarceration as, 224n18; responsibility for sustaining complex structures of, 90–­91; role of state in counteracting, 179; unintentional contributions to, 92, 149, 192 Orlie, Melissa, 199n3 Paley, William, 140 Panagia, Davide, 15, 51–­52 Parks, Rosa, 30–­31, 62, 64, 201n32 participatory democracy, 14, 190

Index / 245 paternalism, 175 personal identity (selfhood, subjectivity): affirmed in one’s action, 4, 7, 27–­28; Arendt on, 14, 21, 29–­30, 33–­35, 39–­40, 162, 200n14, 203n51, 203n57, 223n93; Baldwin’s encounter with white expectations and, 102–­3; Butler on, 12–­13, 54, 56, 73, 74; causes of ac­ tions issuing from, 45–­46; Connolly on transformative possibilities of, 56–­57; corporeal aspects of, 22, 42–­44, 45, 48–­50, 55; decoupled from agency by recent thinkers, 73–­75, 211n32; essen­ tialism and, 22, 71–­72, 73; as fiction in poststructuralist and Arendtian thought, 12–­13; of gay men and lesbians, 56; liberal individualism and, 13; norm-­ responsiveness of, 49–­50, 89–­90, 94, 207n117; Orlie’s denial of, 199n3; Pettit’s theory of freedom and, 81, 82; plural, open-­ended quality of, 22–­23; racial inequality and, 60–­61; reciproc­ ity and, 129; reflexive sense of, 23, 43, 48–­50, 74; relatively unified quality of, 23; social construction of, 60, 65, 71, 77; social inequality and, 15, 65–­75; sovereignty distinguished from, 13, 26, 27, 45, 74–­75; terms used interchange­ ably with, 22, 199n2; will distinguished from, 26–­27; Williams’s concept of character and, 22, 23. See also double consciousness; fragmentation of the self personal responsibility: difficulties in Arendt’s account of, 14, 21, 39–­41, 57; intentional choice and (see intentional choice and responsibility); liability view of, 83–­84, 85–­86, 87–­88, 90, 91, 212n46; liberal individualism and, 14; of the marginalized, 6, 60, 75, 96, 97; need for forgiveness and, 41; new mate­ rialism and, 15, 22, 57; non-­sovereign (see non-­sovereign responsibility); of the oppressed, 24, 212n45; personal identity required for, 13; Pettit’s control-­ centered view of, 76–­82, 83; social con­ nection model of, 84, 90–­91, 214n63; sovereigntist view of agency and, 5–­6, 8, 10, 16, 82, 187; three forms of, 16 (see also accountability; culpability; responsiveness)

personal transformation: Arendt on exer­ cise of freedom as, 158; disorienting aspects of, 114, 216n42; of drag queens of Casa Susanna, 112–­13; of Ellison’s Invisible Man, 113–­14; by public articu­ lation of hidden transcripts, 121; sup­ ported by counterpublic conversation, 110, 112, 115. See also transformation of self and society Pettit, Philip: on allowable instances of coercion, 80, 211n36; on control, 76–­82, 142, 224n12; intrapersonal aspects of freedom and, 221n62; on non-­domination, 3, 6, 140–­42, 146, 147, 148, 167, 173, 211n37, 219n32; on responsibility, 76–­82, 83 plural freedom, 18–­19; balancing various forms of, 180–­84; Berlin’s value plural­ ism and, 165, 166, 168–­70; communica­ tion for promoting, 179–­80, 181–­82; complementary aspects of different forms in, 171; familiar forms of, 165; introduction to, 165–­68; of Larmore, 223n4; multiple sources contributing to, 179–­80; necessity of, 166–­67, 170; non-­sovereign model of agency and, 165, 166, 170; unfinished quality of, 183–­84 plural freedom, conflicts in, 18–­19; as conflicts of individual freedom, 173–­74; moral remainders associated with, 174, 176; prescriptions for future and, 185; principles for mediating, 174, 176; role of state and, 178–­79, 185; for single in­ dividual, 177–­78; in veiling of women, 174–­76 police brutality, 119–­20. See also racial profiling by police political freedom, 6; agency compared to, 133–­34; defined, 133; distinctive forms of, 18–­19. See also democratic citizen­ ship; freedom; liberal democracy politics of recognition, 129, 138 Popescu, Delia, 214n73 positive liberty, 135, 136–­37; Berlin on compromise of negative liberty with, 166, 223n2; dangers of, 218n12; freedom as world-­making and, 160; non-­oppression and, 155–­56 postcolonial contexts: cynicism about free­ dom in, 191; veiling of women in, 171

246 / Index poststructuralists, 10, 12, 191. See also Butler, Judith poverty: black Americans’ rate of, 1; domi­ nation accompanying, 181; liberation theology and, 20; racial stigma and, 145; structure/agency divide and, 7. See also marginalized power: corporeal modes of, 43, 44, 45, 51, 54; of federal government promoting freedom, 173; Foucauldian perspective on, 145–­46, 220n47; four concepts of freedom and, 18; Hobbes on distributed nature of, 46; imaginative action against relations of, 99; of impersonal struc­ tures and personal responsibility, 82; limitations of liberal theory involving, 10; non-­domination and, 141, 142, 144, 219n32; non-­interference and, 139; of non-­sovereign agency, 10, 21; transgres­ sive responses to, 17 praise, 85, 86, 89 Price, Leontyne, 9 prisons. See mass incarceration the privileged: as category defined by con­ text, 152–­53; costs borne by some of, 189; failures of freedom unnoticed by, 20, 189; as non-­sovereign agents, 189; physical carriage of, 44; responsibilities of, 59–­60, 75, 97; responsibility denied by, 5, 6, 180; social transformation af­ fecting, 87; sovereigntist view of agency and, 4, 5, 6, 196n7 privileged perspective of poor, 20 promises, Arendt on, 203n57 prophetic pragmatism, 215n8 public schools, 5, 7–­8, 181, 188 public service requirement, 182, 188 queer theory, 10, 12 racial domination, 180, 181 racial inequality, 15–­16; blaming black people for, 8, 196nn11–­12; denying responsibility for, 8, 9–­10; frustration of agency caused by, 60–­61; implicit bias and, 25–­26, 200n12; liberal individual­ ism and, 198n26; in ostensibly free so­ cieties, 19–­20; persistent US landscape of, 1, 7–­10, 197n20; responsibility in context of impersonal structures of, 82; sovereigntist conception of agency and,

8; standardized test performance and, 68–­69; structure/agency divide and, 7. See also social inequality racial oppression, 180, 181, 224n18 racial profiling by police, 62–­65, 138–­39, 147–­48, 209n6. See also police brutality racial progress, 8–­9 racial stigma: Baldwin’s answer to, 95, 106; Baldwin’s experience and, 61–­62; compromising agency, 61–­62, 148; contributions to reconstructing, 179; discrimination and, 8, 9, 25–­26, 145; in Ellison’s Invisible Man, 61–­62, 95, 113; Loury on, 145, 146–­47; rap music and, 86–­87, 177 racism: Baldwin’s realizations about, 102–­3, 155; black resilience in face of, 198n31; internalized, 95; limits of non-­domination perspective and, 143, 145; in popular culture, 88; unwitting perpetuation of, 24, 26, 27, 89, 92. See also white supremacist racist speech, 176–­77 rap music and hip hop culture, 86–­88, 119–­20, 122 Rawls, John, 140, 178, 209n8 reason: Berlin’s concept of positive liberty and, 135; liberation from material vul­ nerabilities and, 51; material basis of, 42; norm-­sensitivity and, 49; Pettit’s rational control and, 77, 78–­79, 80–­81; sover­ eigntist view of agency and, 2–­3, 48, 55 reciprocity, 16, 128–­31, 154, 157, 182, 187, 190 recognition: Berlin’s view of, 138; non-­ sovereign view of, 138–­39; politics of, 129, 138; reciprocity and, 129 reflexive sense of self, 23, 43, 48–­50, 74 relational autonomy, 12, 197n25 religious freedom, 150 reparations for slavery, 5 republicanism, Pettit on, 3, 140–­41, 144 resistance: agency not equated with, 106, 216n29; hidden transcripts leading to, 119; responsiveness as source of, 95–­96 respect: for individual’s choices, 3; as liberal-­democratic principle, 152, 154, 160; self-­respect, 154–­55, 156. See also equal respect responsibility. See non-­sovereign responsi­ bility; personal responsibility

Index / 247 responsiveness, responsibility as, 16, 60, 93–­96, 187; in balancing plural free­ doms, 181, 182; inspired by principles of right, 104; non-­oppression and, 157. See also norm-­responsiveness Rodriguez, Richard, 9 Rose, Tricia, 86–­87, 119–­20, 122, 131–­32 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 140 school desegregation, 188 schools, public, 5, 7–­8, 181, 188 Scott, James, 31, 118, 119, 121, 131, 206n92, 216n49, 217n71 Searle, John, 206n105 self. See personal identity self-­awareness and self-­respect, 154–­55, 156 sensation, Panagia on political life of, 51–­52 sexism: gangsta rap and, 177; limits of non-­domination perspective and, 143, 145; unintentional perpetuation of, 24, 89, 92. See also gender; subordination of women sexual orientation: agency and freedom in context of, 19–­20; as existential condi­ tion, 150; inequalities of, 15–­17. See also gay people shantytown movement. See colonias Shapiro, Ian, 211n38, 220n34 Shepard, Matthew, 16 Shulman, George, 191, 214n64 Siegel, Reva, 196n13 slavery: African American Christianity in context of, 216n29; black Freemasons and, 105; Br’er Rabbit stories and, 118; communities of slaves providing partial refuge in, 216n49; contrasted with racial oppression, 180; Frederick Douglass rising against, 17, 98; involvement aspect of agency and, 24, 26, 200n14; Morrison’s Beloved and, 69–­70, 93, 214n64; oppression coexisting with domination in, 150; Pettit on domina­ tion and, 141, 142; pilfering and, 118; reparations for, 5; republican tradition on freedom and, 140, 143; Scott on hid­ den transcripts of, 118 social connection model of responsibility, 84, 90–­91, 214n63. See also Young, Iris social construction of identity, 60, 65, 71, 77

social inequality, 1, 15–­17; Arendt’s argu­ ment for necessity of, 204n64; Arendt’s underestimation of effects of, 39; authentic self and, 75; Berlin’s concept of non-­interference and, 137–­38, 139; choice influenced by background of, 175–­76; within counterpublics, 108, 114, 121–­22; culpability and, 86, 87–­88; as fundamental concern for redeeming freedom, 185–­86; group-­based identi­ ties and, 152; liability and, 83; moral luck and, 200n11; responsiveness of the marginalized under conditions of, 96; sustained by impersonal forces, 142–­43; sustained by unintentional actions, 186; systematic and unjust, 16, 59, 64, 75, 130–­31, 209n1, 210n16; vitality of agency under conditions of, 10, 17, 97, 98–­99, 198n31. See also marginalized; oppression; privileged; racial inequality socially distributed agency, 4; Arendt’s con­ cept of action and, 31, 32, 41, 203n60; Berlin’s concept of non-­interference and, 137, 138, 139; corporeal aspects of agency linked to, 46, 206n102; crucial to sustaining unconventional exertions, 57; vs. feminist theories of relational autonomy, 12; freedom and, 7; liberal individualism and, 13, 189; non-­ sovereign agency as, 12, 21, 28; norm-­ responsiveness and, 213n56; oppression and, 150; Pettit’s limited understanding of, 81; vs. social construction of identity, 60; vulnerable to social inequality, 15, 75. See also bearers; social uptake social transformation, 124–­32; to achieve freedom as non-­oppression, 157; Butler on norms needed for, 104; to enable agency for all, 132; responsiveness as source of, 95; unpredictability of, 125, 127–­28. See also reciprocity; transforma­ tion of self and society social uptake: agent’s own understanding of action and, 36–­38; Arendt’s theory of action and, 37–­39, 63; Berlin’s concept of non-­interference and, 137–­38; com­ munication needed for, 182; consis­ tently functioning for the privileged, 4; counterpublic conversation in face of failures in, 115, 116, 117, 157, 216n49; denied among the marginalized, 4, 37;

248 / Index social uptake (cont.) dependence of agency on, 4; disrupted by inequalities, 15, 16; of Martin Luther King’s speeches, 31; Pettit’s limited ac­ knowledgment of, 81–­82; of rap music, 87; required for non-­oppression, 156; successful in Rosa Parks story, 62; to sus­ tain acts of resistance, 57; undercutting plurality and difference, 126–­27; un­ derestimating importance of, 204n62; withheld to prevent injustice, 154. See also socially distributed agency Solidarity movement in Poland, 118, 121 sovereigntist view of agency: Arendt’s critique of, 2 (see also Arendt’s concept of non-­sovereign agency); Berlin’s ideal of freedom and, 3, 6, 136–­37, 140, 170; in counterpublics reproducing inequalities, 122; defined, 3; enduring injustice fol­ lowing from, 65; failing to capture how agency works, 4–­5; interpreting success­ ful dissenters as solitary individuals, 115; in liberal tradition, 2–­3, 10, 13; norma­ tive claim implicit in, 3–­4; overlooking social relationships that sustain, 115, 217n50; personal responsibility and, 5–­6, 8, 10, 16, 82, 187; Pettit’s theory of freedom and, 76; the privileged and, 4, 5, 6, 196n7; and promise of freedom and justice for all, 10; racial inequal­ ity and, 8; selfhood or personal identity and, 13, 26, 27, 45, 74–­75; violence connected to, 53. See also control; inten­ tional choice; non-­sovereign agency sovereignty of the modern state, 2, 3 standardized test results, racial and gender disparities in, 68–­69 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 115 the state: in classical republican theory of freedom, 140; role of, 7, 173, 178–­79, 184, 185, 187; sovereignty of, 2, 3. See also democratic citizenship stereotypes: Human Library program and, 188; of the ostensibly privileged, 153; reciprocity in place of, 129; standard­ ized test performance and, 68–­69. See also gender stereotypes Stonewall uprising, 17, 98, 143 Stout, Jeffrey, 110, 111, 114, 215n25, 216n42 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, South Boston, 172, 182–­83, 224n9 structure/agency divide, 7, 97

subjectivity. See personal identity subordination of women: exercising public authority and, 137; in hip hop culture, 122; in-­group conversation that sup­ ports, 108; oppression coexisting with domination in, 150; Pettit’s theory of domination and, 142, 144; in Saudi Arabia, 180–­81. See also sexism suffragists, American nineteenth-­century, 98, 115 suicide missions by terrorists, 53 sweatshops, social connection model of responsibility and, 92, 93, 214n63 Taylor, Charles, 211n23 terrorism, 53 Texas shantytown movement. See colonias Thompson, Dennis, 188 Thurston, Baratunde, 210n10 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 140 Touré, 198n31, 210n10 tragedy, 24, 25 transformation of self and society, 17, 99; American freedom in need of, 190–­91; bodily experiences and, 107; by collec­ tive world-­making, 160–­61, 164, 192; by hidden transcript bursting onto public stage, 120–­21; by love, 106–­7. See also personal transformation; social transformation transvestites. See drag queens of Casa Susanna Turner, Jack, 198n26, 201n16 value pluralism, 165, 166, 167, 168–­70, 223n4 Vanderheiden, Steve, 212n46 veiling among Muslim women, 171, 174–­ 76, 177 victim blaming. See blaming victims Villa, Dana, 203n46, 203n51, 204n79, 222n75 violence, 53; collective action ending in, 160 volitional control, Pettit on, 77 Voting Rights Act, 124, 126 Wacquant, Loïc, 7, 122 wage gap, gender-­based, 5 Waldron, Jeremy, 222n75 Walker, Corey, 104–­5, 117, 119, 121–­22 Walker, Margaret, 213n57

Index / 249 Warner, Michael, 107, 112, 215n6 West, Cornel, 215n8 white supremacist, 131, 153, 176, 190, 204n61 white working-­class solidarity, 123 will: Berlin’s concept of negative liberty and, 136, 138; identity distinguished from, 26–­27; individual initiative and, 116; Pettit’s theory of freedom and, 80, 81, 82, 140; reflexive self not reducible to, 48, 49; socially distributed nature of agency and, 4; sovereigntist view of agency and, 2–­3, 4

Williams, Bernard, 15, 22, 23, 24–­25, 200n11 women’s mosque movement, 28, 105–­6, 163, 201n17 wounded attachments, 65, 70, 71 Wretched of the Earth, The. See Fanon, Frantz Young, Iris, 82, 83–­84; on domination vs. oppression, 221n56; social connection model of responsibility, 84, 90–­91, 214n63 Zerilli, Linda, 12