Abstract
Donald Trump’s presidency has given new force to rhetorical and political attacks on oppressed populations. In her timely, thoughtful, and innovative book, Mara Marin adds to our “conceptual vocabulary” for addressing “our responsibility to transform oppressive structures” (1). She argues that our efforts at transformation are short-circuited by the “circle of powerlessness and denial” (ibid). We feel powerless to transform oppressive structures because they are the results of “uncoordinated laws, policies and individual actions, unconscious assumptions and patterns of response, unquestioned norms, conceptions of merit, value, and taste … rather than being a matter of belief systems or explicit stereotyping” (ibid). Although I don’t think oppression is unconnected to beliefs and stereotyping as Marin suggests (with “rather than”), I agree that those other, deeper sources of oppression better explain its endurance. The seeming impossibility of transformation leads to denial: since “the whole of injustice cannot be traced to any individual action, it cannot be our responsibility to transform the structures that contribute to injustice” (2). Marin overgeneralizes the object of denial here—we typically confront not “the whole of injustice,” but rather certain aspects of it (racial injustice, gender injustice, and so on)—but these can certainly be overwhelming in their own right. These problems, Marin argues, reinforce each other: The sense of powerlessness to transform structures leads to a sense that we have no obligation to do so; this limits our imagination and increases our sense of powerlessness (2).
To meet these challenges, Marin conceives of justice and injustice in social-structural terms and argues that the basis of obligation is found in commitments. In Chapter 1 she analyzes interpersonal commitments and distills from them five features that describe how they come into being, and what “full-formed commitments” should entail (18). All are grounded in the idea of “open-ended responsive action”: commitments come about through a process and so we cannot know what our obligations are in advance (18). The first feature of commitments is that they are not given, but made (19). Second, they are formed over time through responsive action (ibid). Third, they are endorsed by undertaking “enough” responsive actions (ibid). Fourth, they are “governed by norms and expectations” (ibid). Finally, they constitute open-ended obligations (ibid).
In Chapter 2, Marin makes an analogy between interpersonal commitments and social structures to offer a social-structural theory of obligation. Like personal commitments, social structures are generated and sustained through action. Social structures have three features, which Marin distills from the example of parenthood: they are “constituted by [related] positions,” each position is governed by norms and rules that are “experienced … as objective requirements,” and structures themselves “exist only in action” (47). “Agents whose actions reproduce a structure stand in a relationship of obligation to each other” (45). Marin sees three advantages to viewing structural relationships as commitments: it makes the abstract notion of structure familiar (50); our experiences of change in interpersonal relationships can guide us toward broader structural change (52); and seeing others’ actions as responses facilitates their normative evaluation (53). According to this model of political obligation, oppression signifies “failed commitments.” Our obligations “are violated when actions continue to support the norms that constitute unjust structures” (63). In the next three chapters Marin applies this model to detailed and provocative analyses of law and the problem of judgment (Ch. 3), care in the context of marriage as commitment (Ch.4), and labor relations as entailing a politics of commitment (Ch. 5).
This book has many virtues. Marin provides a novel theory of obligation to transform oppressive structures, and she examines several such structures in impressive detail, attending not just to how they are organized, but also to how they operate. Her conceptual work is careful and methodical, and she combines this analytical rigor with passionate arguments, blending the personal and the political in ways that ring true. However, her notion of commitment raises several pressing conceptual and political questions that limit, and sometimes undermine, the force of her argument.
While Iris Young clearly casts a long shadow over the book, Marin engages surprisingly sparingly with Young’s work on responsibility—especially her “social connection model.” Marin has more in common with Young’s approach than the ones she criticizes at some length. As a result, Marin understates the significance of her own argument. Young argued that people share responsibility for structural injustice because they “[belong] together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which [they] seek benefits and aim to realize projects” (Young 2006: 119). For Young, “all the persons who participate … in the ongoing schemes of cooperation that constitute these structures are responsible for them in the sense that they are part of the process that causes them” (Young 2006: 114). Marin’s argument is different—she seems less interested in cooperation, competition, and the ultimate ends we pursue. Yet her notion of open-ended responsive action has affinities with Young’s description of interdependent action; she agrees with Young that structures are constituted by action; and she sees the basis of obligation in the actions that constitute those structures. Marin’s critical intervention is that she gives meaning to Young’s very vague notion of “connection” through the concept of commitment as a kind of connection. This development of Young’s theory suggests fruitful avenues to pursue in thinking about species of connection beyond commitment.
Thinking about obligation in terms of commitment has another important virtue: unlike the theories of natural duty and complicity that Marin rightly criticizes, the idea of commitment highlights the way that obligations arise not just because of our relationships to others, but also because of the stakes we have in those relationships. This is clearest in the example of care and marriage: we have a stake in caring for our partners because of the value we place on intimate relationships. On the other hand, the intimacy of commitment also highlights the limits of Marin’s argument that interpersonal commitment helps us understand political obligation. We can see this by returning to a comparison with Young, whose notion of connection, while vague, is relatively concrete: what connects us is our joint participation, in structures that sustain oppression through ordinary, everyday activities like buying sweatshop merchandise (one of Young’s paradigmatic examples). Marin’s notion is deliberately abstract. She expresses this in various ways, referring to commitment as a “model” (17), as the basis of an “analogy” (45), and as a “metaphor” (169). Models, analogies, and metaphors are different, and so ultimately the function of her account of personal commitments is unclear. I am also left wondering, if structural relations are not a kind of commitment, rather than simply being like them, how useful is the idea of commitment ultimately for helping us understand and respond to oppressive structures?
Setting this question aside, even as a model, analogy, or metaphor, Marin’s notion of obligation as commitment is questionable because political obligations lack what is fundamental to personal ones: intimacy. Structures may be like personal commitments, but they are unlike commitments in this crucial way. The three related advantages Marin finds in this analogy—making the notion of structure familiar, making change seem more possible, and opening others’ actions to normative evaluation—may actually be disadvantages because making structures familiar on these terms distorts them (structural relations lack intimacy). This distortion in turn may cause us to misapprehend conditions and possibilities for change (because those differ immensely between personal and political relations); and the scope of our normative evaluations may be limited because, while we can certainly evaluate both personal and structural relations, the manner and kind of evaluation is very different. Evaluating interpersonal relations means asking: “What am I doing that is contributing to an oppressive relationship between us? What is the other doing?” As Young has noted (2006), this is the wrong kind of question to ask about oppression and structural injustice because they are not matters of harmful individual action, but of uncoordinated joint action within accepted norms. While interpersonal relations are certainly shaped by, and sustain, structural ones, changing the former is not analogous to changing the latter because interpersonal relationships—the intimacy of which is a product of personal and relational histories and habits—are much denser and deeper than social-structural ones, and our personal investments in them are correspondingly much greater.
Marin, perhaps inadvertently, highlights limits to the normative evaluation of structures made possible in interpersonal relations because of her own stated and unstated commitments about what such relationships entail, and what kinds of relationships are, can be, and perhaps even should be, characterized by commitment. From one point of view, Marin seeks to describe commitments “as fully-formed relationships” (32). What does that mean? Who gets to decide what counts as a fully formed relationship? This is not just a theoretical question but also one with both political and legal ramifications. Furthermore, can relationships ever be “fully formed” if they are based on commitments built on open-ended, responsive actions? Marin must have some idea of what “fully formed” means that rules out certain kinds of relations as commitments, but it’s hard to see how any such idea could be consistent with the open-endedness required by “commitment” as she understands the term. And yet some normative conception of a relationship seems outside of the realm of critical evaluation.
Something similar happens in Marin’s analysis of care, where she refers repeatedly to “good care.” What does “good” mean? In the context of her discussion of doctors and nurses (137–148), the answer might be: care that makes the patient healthy and conforms to accepted medical standards of treatment. But outside of professional standards—which themselves are not settled, but rather frequent subjects of debate—the question is murkier. For instance, Marin says that “good caregiving requires flexibility” and that “good caregivers” need “‘skills of flexibility.’” These include an “ability and willingness to focus outside oneself,” an “attitude of constant attentiveness and readiness to take on unpredictable demands,” and an ability “to switch between different roles” (97, emphases in original). On this understanding of care it’s not hard to imagine caregivers suffering “burn-out,” which is a well-recognized problem. But the bigger issue, from the perspective of commitment, is that it makes care too much a one-sided affair. Except in extreme cases where a person cannot care for themselves in ways necessary to sustain life—and especially a life that’s meaningful to them—care is a relationship between caregiver and dependent, and one that can take many forms. Perhaps the person I care for is deeply concerned that I also attend to myself, such that he or she encourages me not to focus too much on them; perhaps they experience “constant attentiveness” as overbearing or even disempowering; perhaps I am not well-equipped, for whatever reason, to switch between many different roles, or perhaps my partner is not comfortable with me performing all of these roles. Is the care I provide not “good?” Or, rather, is it a kind of care that works and is meaningful as an exercise in reciprocity between us? Marin’s discussion of care rests on a normative evaluation of what it entails that seems beyond contestation.
There are more such examples in the book, but I think these are enough to point to my central concern with the argument as a whole. I think one could read Marin’s understanding of commitment as a provocative, critical response to the depoliticization wrought by liberalism: the moves from contract and promise to commitment and obligation, from the sovereign individual to one entangled in open-ended, unpredictable relationships, and from individual to social-structural theorizing all serve to remind us that liberal disavowals of politics only conceal them but never erase them. On the other hand, by seemingly ruling out contestation over what counts as commitment and what committed relationships should look like, Marin engages in a different kind of depoliticization. To borrow what Leo Strauss said of Carl Schmitt, Marin’s “critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism.” That horizon blunts the force of her thoughtful critique.