Justice and the Politics of Difference

Description

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice. The starting point for her critique is the experience and concerns of the new social movements that were created by marginal and excluded groups, including women, African Americans, and American Indians, as well as gays and lesbians. Young argues that by assuming a homogeneous public, democratic theorists fail to consider institutional arrangements for including people not culturally identified with white European male norms. Consequently, theorists do not adequately address the problem of an inclusive participatory framework. Basing her vision of the good society on the culturally plural networks of contemporary urban life, Young makes the case that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group differences. Danielle Allen's new foreword contextualizes Young's work and explains how debates surrounding social justice have changed since — and been transformed by — the original publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference. Copyright Contents Foreword to the 2011 Edition Acknowledgments 1. Displacing the Distributive Paradigm The Distributive Paradigm The Distributive Paradigm Presupposes and Obscures Institutional Context Overextending the Concept of Distribution Problems with Talks of Distributing Power Defining Injustice as Domination and Oppression 2. Five Faces of Oppression Oppression as a Structural Concept The Concept of a Social Group The Faces of Oppression Exploitation Marginalizaion Powerlessness Cultural Imperialism Violence Applying the Criteria 3. Insurgency and the Welfare Capitalist Society Normative Principles of Welfare Capitalist Society The Depoliticization of Welfare Capitalist Society The Ideological Fuction of the Distributive Paradigm The Administered Society and New Forms of Domination 4. The Ideal of Imperiality and the Civic Public Postmodernist Critique of the Logic of Identity The Ideal of Impartiality as Denying Difference The Impossibility of Impartiality The Logic of Identity in the Ideal of the Civic Public Ideological Functions of the Ideal of Impartiality Participatory Democracy and the Idea of a Heterogeneous 5. The Scaling of Bodies and the Politics of Identity The Scaling of Bodies in Modern Discourse Conscious Acceptance, Unconscious Aversion Behavioral Norms of Respectability Xenophobia and Abjection Moral Responsibility and Unintended Action Justice and Cutural Revolution 6. Social Movements and the Politics of Difference Competing Paradigms of Liberation Emancipation Through the Politics of Difference Reclaiming the Meaning of Difference Respecting Difference in Policy The Heterogeneous Public and Group Representation 7. Affirmative Action and the Myth of Merit Affirmative Action and the Principle of Nondiscrimination Affirmative Action Discussion and the Distributive The Myth of Merit Education and Testing as Performance Proxies 8. City Life and Difference The Opposition between Individualism and Community The Rousseauist Dream Privileging Face-to-Face Relations Undesirable Political Consequences of the I deal of Community City Life as a Normative Ideal Cities and Social Injustice Empowerment without Autonomy Epilogue: International Justice References Index