Abstract
The claim that much contemporary theory has become overly abstract and distant from real world politics is frequently made, from a range of different perspectives. The lead essay of David Miller’s recent book Justice for Earthlings levels a variant of this charge from within what is sometimes seen as the “analytical” camp; more critical still are realists such as Raymond Geuss who lambast theorists in the Rawlsian mode for a moralized focus on the ideal which they deem to be at best irrelevant to practical politics, and at worst potentially dangerous. The fairness and significance of this critique has been much disputed. It is not hard to paint a picture of contemporary political theory as a divided discipline where there is not only methodological plurality but deep disagreement, which is sometimes openly hostile and antagonistic, concerning the appropriate ways of theorising about politics.
One of the many virtues of Lea Ypi’s rich and provocative book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency is that it provides a possible framework for bringing together different strands of contemporary theory. As well as putting forward her own substantive account of global justice, Ypi advances a particular methodological perspective, which she terms “activist political theory,” which combines both ideal and nonideal theory in avowedly dialectical fashion. She begins her methodological construction by looking at the historical roots of today’s global justice debate in the Enlightenment, and, in particular, in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant is often plugged into contemporary writing on global justice by theorists keen to find some kind of founding father of egalitarian cosmopolitanism, but Kant’s own cosmopolitanism was limited in comparison to many of today’s accounts, placing primary emphasis on the idea of hospitality to strangers, rather than far-reaching redistribution as an element of distributive justice. Instead, Ypi writes, his real contribution was to “go beyond the moral optimism of his cosmopolitan predecessors and the political pessimism of their statist adversaries” (p. 33): combining cosmopolitan principles with a state-based conception of agency. The point here is that Kant’s emphasis on the role of existing statist institutions was not, Ypi argues, simply a result of scepticism as to the possibility of a global authority which could coercively enforce cosmopolitan principles, but stemmed from a “deeper critique to the limits of any political theory that detaches abstract reflection on normative principles from an analysis of the political circumstances in which they can be realised” (p. 33).
This emphasis on the agency by which political change is to be realised is key to Ypi’s theory. Too much work on global justice, she argues, has focussed on questions of principles, with insufficient attention being paid to the agency by which change to the status quo is to be brought about. Of course, any number of political theorists have argued that there is something potentially other-worldly about a cosmopolitanism which calls for global egalitarian redistribution in a world where national identity and state sovereignty, though probably in decline, still seem deeply significant, but Ypi’s methodology seeks to go beyond the calls of some non-ideal theorists to ground accounts of global justice in the politically feasible. Instead, she advocates a dialectical approach which, at its simplest, seeks to reconcile the ideal and the non-ideal by looking backwards and learning from trial, failure, and success, while deriving a forward-looking perspective from political agents seeking to change the world. Activist political theory “forms part of a collective enterprise, informed by the practice of other agents in society, drawing from a common pool of conceptual resources, building and improving on the efforts of predecessors, and reacting or learning from their errors” (pp. 2–3). This means that political theory should not be solely theoretical, “developed or rejected in purely theoretical space,” but rather must rely upon the interpretations of existing institutions of the “avant-garde political agents” referred to in the book’s title, those agents “whose position in society renders them politically suited and morally motivated to bring about changes compatible with their ideal requirements” (p. 43). The big questions, then, concern which agents and which interpretations we should favour in this dialectical process, and Ypi offers three ways in which we might discriminate between them: in terms of their “diagnostic” ability to assess a particular conflict at the appropriate level of analysis; their success at the “innovating task” of outperforming their rivals at formulating principles that preserve their predecessors’ normative benefits while avoiding their failures; and their “heuristic potential” to anticipate and deal with new and unforeseen questions and challenges (p. 44). So the approach advocated starts not from intuitive reasoning or idealized reflection but from general assumptions shared by participants in particular political cultures. However the radical edge to Ypi’s theory now comes from the input of the avant-garde: her dialectical method looks not for agreement but disagreement within a shared political culture, to “moments of challenge rather than agreement surrounding these shared assumptions” (p. 65). The focus on the avant-garde political agent, then, allows the development of a theoretical approach which is rooted in particular political conflicts, and addresses problems that have been identified by existing actors, but which does not reify or simply reflect back the status quo.
Framed in the abstract, this is plausible-sounding and likely to strike a chord with those who decry the lack of practical application of some contemporary theory. At the same time, it is a little hard to get to grips with in places, and a suspicion lingers that pretty much any reasonably practically-focussed theoretical approach could be re-described in these terms. We get a clearer sense of how the approach is meant to work in practice when Ypi turns her attention to substantive questions of global justice. Ypi identifies a range of contemporary agents who might be described in terms of the “cosmopolitan avant-garde,” including institutional and political actors, ordinary citizens, and social movements within global civil society who have reacted critically to the contemporary era of globalization; so, for example, seeking to rectify the negative effects of global interdependence on citizens and foreigners, campaigning against global inequalities, defending the rights of migrants, and so on (pp. 167–68). It is in the context of these varied forms of opposition to neo-liberal globalization that Ypi develops her account of “statist cosmopolitanism.” This approach seeks to break the stand-off between cosmopolitans, who deny the ethical significance of state boundaries and often call for some form of global egalitarian redistribution, and statists, who affirm the importance of state sovereignty and often only advocate redistribution up to a sufficientarian threshold, whereby non-nationals are only entitled to some minimally decent level of provision. Ypi contends that an understanding of global justice appropriately rooted in real political struggle reveals that this sufficientarian ambition cannot be realised in a world of global inequality. Such an approach misunderstands the nature of global positional goods: absolute deprivation and relative deprivation cannot be separated in the way that the statist sufficientarian account suggests, and instead Ypi argues that absolute deprivation can only in fact be countered by eliminating relative deprivation. Significant inequalities of power between states will always, she contends, condemn the citizens of less powerful states “to a position of subordination threatening absolute deprivation” (p. 126). Equality, then, is not an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, sufficiency. If this is right, then a great deal of contemporary theoretical discourse aimed at settling the precise nature of global distributive justice is essentially meaningless. In particular, Ypi suggests that there is no need to ground cosmopolitan principles in deeply controversial claims about the morally arbitrary characteristics of political membership, whereby one’s national identity is seen as simply one contingent characteristic amongst others, along with race, gender, and social class. Such idealized premises, Ypi argues, are unnecessary and unhelpful from an activist cosmopolitan perspective, which relies upon, rather than seeking to dissolve, existing associative relations between fellow nationals. States and some variant of statism are necessary if egalitarian political and institutional reforms are to be brought about in a way which is “both politically feasible and motivationally sustainable.”
It is not unusual in the global justice literature for authors to suggest that there is more common ground between apparent opponents than might be immediately obvious. Thomas Nagel began his 2005 article “The Problem of Global Justice” by commenting, “We do not live in a just world. This may be the least controversial claim one could make in political theory,” and a number of writers have argued that the first moves of both a global egalitarian and a global sufficientarian are likely to be the same—divergence, it is suggested, is likely to come further down the road, and both camps should be able to agree on what is necessary in the short term to address the most pressing problems of poverty and disadvantage. Ypi’s work is distinctive, however, in the extent to which she maintains that the common ground between the positions might be much more extensive than this initial modus vivendi would imply. The workings of the real world, and in particular the nature of power as a global positional good, mean that she concludes both that “on matters of principle, even if we start as statists we might end up as cosmopolitans,” and also that “on matters of agency, even if we start as cosmopolitans, we might end up as statists” (p. 175). There is obviously a sense in which this all seems very convenient, and one might ask whether Ypi’s cosmopolitan statism is sufficiently cosmopolitan for those who affirm global equality at the level of principle but do not fully share Ypi’s empirical beliefs relating to the necessary connection between relative and absolute deprivation. Even if we do share Ypi’s view of the link between the two, it is not hard to imagine avant-garde agents making rhetorical use of some of the idealized cosmopolitan arguments that she dismisses as unhelpful, such as the idea that national membership appears to be arbitrary from a moral point of view. Such claims have indeed been made within real world debates over the fair allocation of the costs of adaptation, mitigation, and compensation stemming from anthropogenic climate change, for example. Regardless, this is a strikingly original and rich work of political theory that reaches across the discipline in innovative fashion. In an academic context where too often small groups of scholars speak only to themselves, there is something here for everyone.