Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• Legitimacy is a special status that a state might have or fail to have. Precisely what it involves varies from conception to conception. But in general it neutralises certain kinds of complaint that the kind of thing states get up to—in particular, making and enforcing laws that they take subjects to be morally bound to follow—would otherwise prompt. Thus:
  • Some conceptions take legitimacy centrally to consist in a Hohfeldian moral privilege to use force, correlative with a Hohfeldian no-claim on the part of subjects who would otherwise have a claim-right against it (and protected by a Hohfeldian moral claim-right against interference with uses of force).
  • Some conceptions take legitimacy centrally to consist in a Hohfeldian moral power to create new duties, claim-rights, privileges, no-claims and other Hohfeldian relations on the part of subjects via the imposition of law, correlative with a Hohfeldian liability on the part of subjects to have such Hohfeldian relations imposed on one. (Some conceptions of legitimacy of this sort focus solely on the authority to impose duties specifically.)
  • Some conceptions take legitimacy centrally to consist in a claim-right to obedience from subjects, who owe the state a correlative duty to obey—rather as you would owe such a duty to someone you’d promised to obey.
  • In addition, legitimacy typically gives a state rights against external interference with its internal affairs, although we won’t be focusing on this aspect of legitimacy this week.
• As the foregoing makes clear, you should make sure you have a grasp of the Hohfeldian analysis of rights (brief introduction here, more philosophical discussion here), which provides you with an essential tool in the analysis of the state’s relation with its citizens.
• We don’t generally think that any adult is naturally any other adult’s ruler, so it does seem that states have a case to answer, and that is what theories of state authority or legitimacy offer.
• Lockeans (such as Locke himself and A. John Simmons and Robert Nozick) think that we have natural rights that relations of rule presumptively violate, and so some explanation must be given as to how we lose those rights in the case of a legitimate state; the gold standard explanation, on this view, is that we waived or transferred our rights via consent.
• One important challenge for theorists of legitimacy is the ‘particularity problem’—the problem of explaining why we have duties to obey our own state’s laws but not those of other states or usurpers of our own states. Lockeans have an easy time of this, but on the other hand Lockeans typically have trouble explaining how any actual state could be legitimate, given the absence of actual consent by most subjects.
• Kant and some Kantians (including Anna Stilz and Japa Pallikkathayil) turn the Lockean view on its head, arguing that we cannot have property and some other ‘acquired’ rights without the state, because a system of acquired rights would otherwise have to be imposed by a private individual, and that wouldn’t be compatible with our innate equality.
• Contemporary liberals such as Joseph Raz and John Rawls argue that submission to the authority of a reasonably just state is a way to discharge our natural duties of justice (this is the Rawlsian approach, also pursued by Jonathan Quong) or conform to reasons we independently have (this is the Razian approach), and take this to be the basis of state legitimacy.
• Some philosophers are sceptical that political rule really has the case to answer that many of accounts implicitly take it to have—of reconciling relations of rule with natural individual freedom. In different ways Rosalind Hursthouse and Niko Kolodny both defend scepticism of this sort.

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• A. John Simmons, ‘Justification and Legitimacy’, in Justification and Legitimacy (Cambridge, 2000)
  Simmons argues that justifying the state is not the same as legitimising its rule, issuing a challenge to contemporary political philosophers who have, in his view, blurred the distinction.
• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon, 1986), chapters 2–4
  Raz sets out his influential 'service conception' of justified authority and then applies it to the case of state authority. Raz's view is in part a direct response to the anarchist challenge from Wolff (see the further reading).
• Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty (Princeton, 2009), chapters 1–2
  In these beautifully clear chapters, Stilz sets out a Kantian defence of state authority, casting Lockean anarchists such as A. John Simmons as her opponents.
• Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford, 2010), chapter 4, sections 4.4–4.5 (pp. 126–35)
  Quong offers a clear defence of the 'natural duty of justice' account of political authority, presenting it as a modification of Raz's account. Quong's account and Wellman's (see further reading) have some similarities, but they appear to yield very different conclusions about the scope of legitimate state action.
• Amanda Greene, ‘Legitimacy without Liberalism: A Defense of Max Weber’s Standard of Political Legitimacy’, Analyse & Kritik 39 (2017)
  Greene defends a Weberian conception of political legitimacy as not merely a descriptive standard—as many political philosophers assume—but also a normative standard. The Weberian standard, she argues, has the virtue of being more clearly universally acceptable, more obviously a system-level property, and helpfully distinct from standards of justice. Greene’s ‘Is Political Legitimacy Worth Promoting?’ (Nomos 61 [2019]) usefully elaborates some of these claims further.)
• Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘After Hume’s Justice’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 91 (1990–1991)
  Hursthouse takes inspiration from Hume in attacking the Lockean idea of a natural right as ‘naturally unintelligible’, making sense only as the child of convention. But this does not condemn us to thinking that justice and rights are whatever local laws say they are, she argues, for we can instead say that the explanatorily basic concept is that of a properly functioning society from which the standards for the conventions determining rights are derived.
• Niko Kolodny, ‘Political Rule and Its Discontents’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 2 (Oxford, 2016)
  Kolodny argues that the presumption against state rule as a prima facie infringement of individual freedom, which drives a great deal of writing on state authority, is mistaken. Instead, he suggests, if there's any problem with relations of rule at all, has to do with worries about relations of equality.
• Extracts from work by the great social contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries
  The seven pages linked here include extracts from work by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, whose arguments continue to set the terms for thinking about political legitimacy today. The extracts are too short to give you a full picture, but they do give you a sense of the kind of argument each makes, and of some of the differences between them. (Do follow up by reading more from any that seems intriguing to you.) Many of the contemporary political philosophers represented below are social contract theorists inspired, directly or indirectly, by these texts.

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• Amanda Greene, ‘Consent and Political Legitimacy’, in Sobel, Wall, and Vallentyne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 2 (Oxford, 2016)
  Beginning from the idea that legitimacy requires the consent of the governed in some sense, Greene criticises both contractualist (here her target includes John Rawls and Rawlsians such as Quong) and voluntarist attempts to spell out conditions of legitimacy before presenting her own ‘sovereignty conception’, according to which a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves “actual quality consent” to rule based on positive governance assessments. Greene argues that the sovereignty conception makes better sense of the value of legitimacy than its rivals.
• David Copp, ‘The Idea of a Legitimate State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 1 (1999)
  Copp argues for the authority of the state via the idea of 'societal basic needs', which are, he argues, best furthered by means of a system of law, whose effectiveness in turn calls for the moral powers associated with legitimacy.
• R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (1970), Part I
  Wolff argues on Kantian grounds that authority relations are always objectionable. Aim to figure out which premisses are doing what work in his argument, and think about how plausible each is.
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), Parts I–II
  In Part I, Nozick tries to show (via an 'invisible hand' explanation) that a 'libertarian' minimal state could come into existence without violating the very strong rights of individual self-ownership that he defends. In Part II, he argues that anything more than the minimal state would violate individual rights and would, therefore, be illegitimate.
• David Schmidtz, ‘Justifying the State’, Ethics vol. 101, no. 1 (1990)
  Schmidtz distinguishes and assesses a number of different methods of justifying the state that, he claims, are often conflated.
• Christopher Heath Wellman, ‘Toward a Liberal Theory of Political Obligation’, Ethics vol. 111, no. 4 (2001)
  Wellman defends what he calls a 'samaritan' account of political legitimacy as a step towards his account of political obligation. The basic idea is that it's permissible to coerce some at reasonable cost in order to get them to save others from desperate peril, and that's what's going on in the case of (legitimate) state coercion. Since our interest this week is only in state authority, you can stop reading after p. 747.
• Arthur Isak Applbaum, ‘Legitimacy without the Duty to Obey’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38, no. 3 (2010)
  Applbaum elaborates the interesting idea that legitimacy consists in a Hohfeldian moral power, not to impose moral duties to do as the law says, but to alter the normative standing of subjects in other ways—e.g. by altering the configuration of their Hohfeldian privileges and claims against each other.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• The essay question effectively asks you to articulate and defend the best understanding of egalitarianism. Although a few decades ago the main debates within egalitarianism were about the ‘currency’ of egalitarian justice (resources? welfare? opportunities for either of these? capabilities?), the central question of contemporary egalitarian political philosophy is about whether egalitarianism should be regarded as fundamentally a distributive ideal or as fundamentally a relational ideal.
• The view standardly associated with distributivists is luck egalitarianism. Luck egalitarians think that distributions of whatever the relevant currency is are unjust to the extent that some are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own. Strictly speaking this a standard for egalitarian justice rather than an account of the nature of the egalitarian ideal. Distributivists could perfectly well endorse a standard of equal outcomes, or sufficientarianism, or prioritarianism. What makes it distributivist (when it is) is that the fundamental explanation of the problem with unjust distributions is something to do with the distributions in themselves (e.g. that they’re unfair).
• There are lots of standard objections to luck egalitarianism (e.g. that it’s too harsh to the profligate or reckless; that it’s insensitive to the social value of e.g. caretaking work; that it subjects people to intrusive judgments; that it treats disabilities as warranting pity and compensation; and that it’s incoherent), and lots of responses to these objections. It’s important to know your way around these. But be careful to distinguish between objections that target luck egalitarianism’s distributivism from objections that target other aspects of it.
• One way of representing the luck egalitarian position is to say that according to it if two people make the same choices they should end up with the same pay-offs. Note that this leaves it open what the pay-offs should be. This is key to the analyses offered by Serena Olsaretti and Zofia Stemplowska in their articles in the further reading.
• Relational egalitarians hold that what’s wrong with unjust inequality is fundamentally a matter of the relations it puts people in. Distributions matter, but they matter derivatively. Different relational egalitarians elaborate this idea in different ways. Many relational egalitarians take inequalities of power and status as paradigm cases of egalitarian injustice and argue that these are fundamentally about our standing with respect to one another rather than distributions. Others egalitarians analyse egalitarian personal relationships such as friendships in order to identify the necessary conditions for egalitarian relations more generally.
• The leading objections to relational egalitarianism are probably that it can’t account for any injustice in an unequal distribution of goods between people who lack any kind of relation to each other, as in Parfit’s ‘Divided World’ examples, and (relatedly) that it doesn’t account for the distinctiveness of a concern with distributive equality apart from its effect on relations.
• Both distributive egalitarians (in particular, luck egalitarians) and relational egalitarians sometimes claim a Rawlsian pedigree. Luck egalitarians highlight his comments on the arbitrariness of (e.g.) natural and social endowments from a moral point of view; relational egalitarians highlight the contractualist underpinnings of Rawlsian ‘democratic equality’. It’s valuable to know what Rawls says about equality and the content of Rawl’s egalitarian view, but the essay question does not invite you to spend much time talking about it in the essay!

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• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), sections 11–17
  In these sections, Rawls argues for what he calls 'democratic equality', which comprises the 'difference principle' and the principle of 'fair equality of opportunity'. He defends democratic equality against some competing interpretations of the general idea that if there are to be any inequalities, they must work to everyone's advantage, which he takes to be justified by the contractualist approach. Rawls's arguments here have been hugely influential, as you’ll see.
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Luck Egalitarianism (Bloomsbury, 2016), chapter 1
  Lippert-Rasmussen summarises the core commitments of the luck egalitarian view and traces its development from some aspects of Rawls's argument via three of the philosophers most prominently associated with the view.
• Samuel Scheffler, ‘What is Egalitarianism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 1 (2003)
  Scheffler raises doubts about the importance and moral implications of the distinction between luck and choice that luck egalitarians place such weight upon, and sketches the relational egalitarian ideal as an alternative. He concludes with an analysis of Rawls's relationship to luck egalitarianism and some responses to objections. Scheffler elaborates these ideas further in ‘Choice, Circumstance, and the Value of Equality’ (Politics, Philosophy & Economics vol. 4, no. 1 [2005]) and ‘The Practice of Equality’, in Fourie, Schuppert, and Wallimann-Helmer (eds.), Social Equality (Oxford, 2015).
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘The Fundamental Disagreement between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary volume 36 (2010)
  Anderson, whose earlier paper ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ (see further reading) exploded mainstream thinking egalitarianism in Anglophone political philosophy, ties the relational egalitarian view of justice to contractualist ideas about interpersonal justification in ways that, according to her, make egalitarian evaluations of states of affairs derivative—in contrast to what she sees as the luck egalitarian approach.
• Zoltan Miklosi, ‘Varieties of Relational Egalitarianism’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 4
  Miklosi surveys various conceptions of relational egalitarianism and asks whether they really entail a rejection of the ‘distributive’ approach to justice. He argues that most don't entail such a rejection, and that the only conceptions that do are implausible.
• Chiara Cordelli, ‘Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 23, no. 1 (2015)
  Cordelli argues that certain interpersonal relationships, such as friendship, can be regarded as productive resources that are appropriately regarded as subject to principles of distributive justice. In this way, she seeks to show that distribution-focused conceptions of egalitarianism nevertheless offer reasons of justice for caring about how people relate to one another.
• Zofia Stemplowska, ‘Responsibility and Respect: Reconciling Two Egalitarian Visions’, in Knight and Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and Distributive Justice (Oxford, 2014)
  Stemplowska reviews three different interpretations of luck egalitarianism's central idea, defending one that reads it as an articulation of the requirements of respect for others as moral equals. She goes on to argue that on this interpretation, there is no real conflict between luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism, and that luck egalitarianism is in one sense more fundamental.

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• Serena Olsaretti, ‘Responsibility and the Consequences of Choice’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 109, part 2 (2009)
  Olsaretti focuses on the key distinction between accepting choice-sensitivity and accepting what we might think of as the 'natural' consequences of choice.
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics vol. 109, no. 2 (1999)
  In this hugely influential article, Anderson attacks luck egalitarianism as a betrayal of egalitarian aims, and defends a version of what came to be known as relational egalitarianism instead. Addressing the objections she raises immediately became a necessary condition of a defensible luck egalitarianism.
• T. M. Scanlon, ‘The diversity of objections to inequality’, in his The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge, 2003)
  Scanlon surveys a number of different reasons for objecting to inequality, and offers some analysis of the ways in which these feature in Rawls's arguments. He ends with some reflections on the nature of one of the reasons he identifies, that it is an evil for people to be treated as or made to feel inferior.
• Zofia Stemplowska, ‘Making Justice Sensitive to Responsibility’, Political Studies vol. 57, no. 2 (2009)
  Stemplowska defends the inclusion of responsibility-sensitivity in the standards of egalitarian justice against the critiques of relational egalitarians, pointing out that luck egalitarians can advocate implementation of responsibility-sensitive equality within a framework of prior rights and duties, and making the crucial point that the payoffs associated with choices should not be viewed simply as a given.
• Hugh Lazenby, ‘One Kiss Too Many? Giving, Luck Egalitarianism and Other-affecting Choice’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 18, no. 3 (2010)
  Lazenby explores a central instance of the problem of 'other-affecting choice' for luck egalitarianism, arguing that the problem highlights tensions between the value of equality as luck egalitarians conceive it and a range of other important values, and that the luck egalitarian position must be very carefully worked out if it is to avoid devastating objection. Lazenby's is one of a number of articles criticising luck egalitarianism not so much for its unpalatable intuitive implications or for its core commitments so much as for the tensions or incoherences that are immanent within it.
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘(Luck and relational) egalitarians of the world, unite!’, presented at the 2016 workshop for Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Available here.
  Lippert-Rasmussen attempts to transcend the dispute between luck and relational egalitarians by formulating a view that purports to incorporate insights from both views, and argues that this 'ecumenical view' is most naturally motivated by luck egalitarian motives.
• Derek Parfit, ‘Equality or Priority?’, given as The Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1991)
  Parfit's seminal lecture describes and defends 'the priority view', one of the two leading rivals (alongside sufficientarianism) to strictly egalitarian accounts of broadly egalitarian political commitments. Parfit motivates the priority view in large part by appeal to the 'levelling down objection' to egalitarianism. Both the priority view and the levelling down objection have since played large roles in debates about distributive justice and the value of equality. There is now an large literature on the priority view and its plausibility as an alternative to equality.
• Robert Huseby, ‘Sufficiency: Restated and Defended;, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 18, no. 2 (2010)
  Huseby describes and defends 'sufficientarianism', the other of the two leading rivals (alongside prioritarianism) to strictly egalitarian accounts of broadly egalitarian political commitments. Huseby describes a distinctive 'two-threshold' sufficientarianism and defends it from several of the objections that sufficientarianism has attracted. Huseby's is one of a number of articles on sufficientarianism, inspired primarily by an article by Harry Frankfurt (‘Equality as a Moral ideal’, Ethics vol. 98, no. 1 [1987]).
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapter 7, section I (Basic Books, 1974)
  Nozick criticises 'end-state' theories of distributive justice, which must, he argues, "forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults", as well as operating a scheme of taxation—something that he suggests is "on a par with forced labour". Instead, Nozick argues, the correct theory of distributive justice is an historical 'entitlement theory'.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• The main divide in democratic theory is between instrumentalists and non-instrumentalists about the value of democracy. Instrumentalists think that the (key) value of democracy—the value in virtue of which democracies are uniquely legitmiate or special—lies in the outcomes it tends to promote, such as justice or consensus. Non-instrumentalists think that the (key) value of democracy lies in features intrinsic to democratic procedures, such as their fairness or the equality they enshrine.
• It’s absolutely crucial to keep in mind that a defence of democracy must explain not only how democratic procedures realise values we should care about (equality, or justice, or whatever) but also why that confers legitimacy on democratic decision-makers and their decisions. So you can’t give an adequate answer to this essay question without some reflection on what legitimacy amounts to—the question you engaged with two weeks ago. (Compare the particularity problem that you encountered then.) Daniel Viehoff makes this point central to his critique of some rival theories. Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift use it to raise doubts about the legitimacy of unjust democratic decisions.
• Instrumentalists differ in their accounts of the standard of correctness that they take democracy to be better at meeting and in their accounts of the reasons that it does this. Some instrumentalists think that democracy produces outcomes of greater justice because it is more responsive to the interests of those subject to the relevant political decisions, and justice requires that the interests of all be advanced. Others think that it produces better outcomes because, as we know from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, under certain conditions votes by large groups are more likely to get the right answer.
• Evidently the degree to which democracy realises the relevant value will depend on what its procedures are. For example, deliberative democrats take an ideal of deliberation to set the template for democratic procedures, and take the value of democracy to lie in what’s good about deliberation under the ideal conditions, such as consensus or correctness of decision. Democratic procedures that stray far enough from the ideal accordingly fail to realise the value. There are non-deliberative accounts of democracy, such as Estlund’s and Landemore’s, that also appeal to its epistemic value on the basis of independent theses such as the Jury Theorem. So, similarly, on this kind of view, democratic procedures that stray far enough from the conditions under which Jury Theorem applies will fail to realise democracy’s value.
• The main challenge to instrumentalists is that the defence of democracy looks too contingent on its ability to promote the relevant outcomes. If another system were more likely to promote those outcomes, then instrumentalists would have nothing to say to explain why democracy should nevertheless be preferred. The example of a benevolent dictator is standardly used to make this point.
• Non-instrumentalists differ in their accounts of the value that democratic procedures uniquely or especially value and that confers on democracy its special status. But almost all of them appeal, unsurprisingly, to some idea of equality (or egalitarian justice) or fairness. Thomas Christiano appeals to a principle of public realisation of equality; Daniel Viehoff appeals to a relational egalitarian ideal; Laura Valentini appeals to a requirement of equal respect under conditions of disagreement.
• Non-instrumentalist accounts of democracy face two key objections. The first is just the opposite of the objection to instrumentalism: surely democracy can’t be defended if it leads to disastrous outcomes. The second is the objection that the value of equality that many non-instrumentalists appeal to may just as well be realised by sortition or coin-flips.

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• Richard Arneson ‘Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy’, Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (2003), pp. 122–132
  Arneson briefly sets out his instrumentalist defence of democracy, which appeals only to the fact that it gives rise to the best results over the long run (where ‘best results’ is understood in terms of fulfilment of fundamental rights) and then offers some clarifications and replies to objections.
• Thomas Christiano, ‘The Authority of Democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004), pp. 266–290.
  Christiano argues that democracy's authority is justified by a principle of justice that calls for public realisation of equal advancement of interests. He argues against instrumentalism on the grounds that it ignores the justice specified by this principle and against consent theory on the grounds that it concedes too much to injustice in another way. He concludes with reflections on the limits of democratic authority that can be derived from the same fundamental principle.
• Daniel Viehoff, ‘Democratic equality and political authority’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014), pp. 337–375
  Democrats believe that the egalitarian character of democratic procedures explains the authority of democratic decisions. Rejecting arguments for democracy’s authority from fairness and the value of public equal respect, Viehoff appeals instead to the value of relational equality and the resultant need to secure “coordination without subjection”.
• Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Matravers and Pike (eds), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2002)
  Identifying three attractive democratic conditions, Cohen argues that Rawl’s appeal to fairness provides an unsatisfying justification for them. Instead, he suggests, they are best justified by reference to an ideal deliberative procedure, for which he sets out formal and substantive conditions. He goes on to answer four objections, from sectarianism, incoherence, injustice, and irrelevance.
• Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford, 2002), chapter 1
  After briefly criticising what she calls the ‘aggregative model’ of democracy, Young turns her attention in this framing introductory chapter to the ‘deliberative model’, identifying core conditions of the democratic process on that model. She argues that this model accounts better for the connection many take there to be between democracy and justice and of the esteem in which democracy is held, because democratic deliberation under the core conditions will tend to produce just decisions. She goes on to argue that the objection that democratic deliberation produces just decisions only when justice already prevails can be addressed by deliberative democrats, but only if they avoid certain pitfalls in their conception of the deliberative model.
• David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, 2007)
  Starting from the assumption that there are correct answers about what, politically, ought to be done (which assumption, Estlund argues, favours democracy over other fair procedures such as flipping a coin), Estlund defends democracy against the challenge from ‘epistocracy’ (rule by the knowers) that this assumption would seem to justify. The key premiss is a ‘qualified acceptability requirement’, which, Estlund contends, only democracy passes.
• Laura Valentini, ‘Justice, Disagreement, and Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science 43 (2013), pp. 177–199
  Valentini argues that democracy is at best an instrumental requirement of equal respect for persons under circumstances of what she calls ‘thin reasonable disagreement’, but it is an intrinsic requirement of equal respect for persons under circumstances of ‘thick reasonable disagreement’.
• Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift, ‘Dethroning Democratic Legitimacy’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2018)
  Stemplowska and Swift defend a ‘balancing view’ of the respective claims of justice and legitimacy in determining the permissibility of enforcing a decision. They oppose this to what they call the ‘conventional view’—that the democratic pedigree of a decision makes it permissibly enforceable, except if it is gravely unjust—which they subject to a barrage of objections.
• Sor-hoon Tan, ‘Why Equality and Which Inequalities? A Modern Confucian Approach to Democracy’, Philosophy East and West 66 (2016), pp. 488–514
  Tan argues that rather than insisting on an abstract ideal of equality as an uncontroversial foundation for democracy, we would do better to focus on what is problematic about particular inequalities and defend democracy as a remedy. This, she argues, clears the way to a possible instrumentalist Confucian defence of democracy as necessary under certain conditions for good government despite Confucianism’s rejection of equality as an abstract value.

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• Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, 2004)
• Niko Kolodny, ‘Rule Over None’ Part I and Part II, Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014), pp. 195–229 and 287–336
• Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality (Oxford, 2008)
• Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000)
• Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), chapter 5
  Honig claims that Rawlsian justice ‘closes down political spaces’ in assuming that justice as fairness and its assumptions can be made to fit those upon whom it is imposed “without remainder” and then treating symptoms of a lack of such fit as loci for punishment rather than politics. Inclusive, democratic commitments are better served, she argues, by institutions that “shift and proliferate the sites of politics.”
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), especially section 194
• Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (Cambridge, 2012)
• Daniel Viehoff, ‘Procedure and Outcome in the Justification of Democracy’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 19, no. 2 (2011)

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• What unites liberals as liberals is a commitment to liberal institutions, rather than any particular set of values that justify those institutions. So you need to start with a clear picture of what a commitment to liberal institutions amounts to. On any account, liberal institutions are institutions that secure characteristic liberal freedoms, including the individual freedoms of expression, association, and belief and religion, and perhaps also some private property. Liberals are also typically committed to the equality of citizens, at least in the sense that each citizen is equal before the law and consequently equally entitled to enjoy the liberal freedoms, and perhaps also to the rule of law.
• But philosophical divisions open up when we come to ask what justifies these commitments. Almost every liberal will appeal to the values of freedom and equality, but there are very big differences in different liberal theorists’ conceptions of those values.
• Natural rights liberals such as Robert Nozick think of those values as enshrined in pre-political natural rights that constrain the form that political society can take—any state that violates the natural rights is ipso facto illegitimate and unjust. So liberalism is justified by the moral constraint that natural rights impose. Natural rights liberals are typically libertarians, who prioritise individual property rights, but they’re not always hostile to egalitarian policies: left-libertarians such as Michael Otsuka argue that the correct specification of the natural property rights themselves implies egalitarian redistributive policies.
• Rawls and Rawlsians don’t start out from an account of the rights we’d have in the ‘state of nature’, as natural rights theorists do, but from an ideal of the just society as a fair system of cooperation for mutual advantage between free and equal citizens. Rawls’s commitment to liberal institutions (enshrined in the lexical priority that his first principle of justice, the liberty principle, has over the others) arises as a result of the way he models that ideal in the procedure of the ‘original position’ in which the principles of justice are selected. In particular, the parties in the original position who select the principles are modelled as free in a couple of senses: their interests are not conceived as advanced by the advancement of others’ interests as such, and they are conceived as having a highest-order interest in forming, pursuing, and revising a conception of the good.
• Where Rawls starts in effect from a picture of individual freedom derived from a model of the relations between people in a fair cooperative system, autonomy-minded liberals such as Raz start from an account of individual autonomy that they take it to be the purpose of a just society to promote. Raz has a very influential account of autonomy that involves both capacities and conditions. On his view, autonomy matters not in itself but because of the value of a life lived in the autonomous pursuit of value (which is what he takes well-being to amount to at least in autonomy-minded societies). Our duties of well-being towards one another are as a result the foundation of liberal political morality.
• There are also broadly utilitarian defences of liberalism, such as Mill’s and Hayek’s. Mill’s emphasises the utilitarian value of some of the key liberal freedoms (e.g. of expression and of ‘experiments in living’); Hayek is more focused on the utilitarian value of markets that he takes as a foundation for the market freedoms associated with liberalism.
• And there are ‘liberals of fear’, too, such as Judith Shklar and Bernard Williams. Liberals of fear focus on the threats to individuals that come with political power, even as they recognise that political power is itself necessary to avert the threat of a Hobbesian war of all against all. Liberalism as they conceive it is primarily to be justified as a bulwark against the abuse of political power, rather than by more exalted political ideals of freedom and equality that may themselves end up being taken to justify political oppression.
• Unsurprisingly, differences in justifications for liberal institutions yield differences in the particular liberal institutions justified. You can’t be a liberal and not be committed to some degree of freedom of speech, for instance, but some liberals will think freedom of speech may be constrained (e.g. by hate speech laws) while others think it may not be. Likewise for market freedoms and all the other characteristic liberal freedoms. Because liberalism is compatible with these differences, you get quite contrasting views within the liberal family, from fairly absolutist, anti-egalitarian libertarians such as Nozick via classical liberals such as Mill to strongly egalitarian liberals such as Rawls.
• In later weeks we’ll also look at republicans and political liberals, both of whom share the commitment to liberal institutions, but for now we’ll focus on the accounts of liberalism above.

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• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), sections 2–4, 24, 26, 39
  In these sections of his masterpiece, Rawls sets out the main ideas of his theory of 'justice as fairness' and explains how the contractualist apparatus of the 'original position' yields the liberal priority of the basic liberties. All of chapters I, III, and IV are relevant, but these sections will give you the basics.
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), pp. 26–35, 48–51, 150–174
  Nozick defends libertarianism on Kantian deontological grounds, arguing from an account of individuals as bearers of stringent self-ownership rights against others' interference (in the first two extracts) to the view that "taxation of earnings from labour is on a par with forced labour" (in the third extract). The book is written in lively, engaging prose, and is perhaps the most influential treatise in contemporary Anglophone academic political philosophy after Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon, 1986), chapters 14–15
  In these final chapters of Raz's influential Millian defence of liberalism, Raz describes an ideal of individual autonomy and its relation to value, and then explains how it underpins liberal institutions, including a version of J.S. Mill's famous Harm Principle.
• Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Douglass, Mara, and Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good (Routledge, 1990)
  Nussbaum defends a liberal democratic political theory on the basis of a 'vague thick' account of the good for humans. Nussbaum's Aristotelian perfectionist liberalism puts her somewhere between Rawls and Raz.
• Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Harvard, 1989)
  Shklar argues for a conception of liberalism that founds it on the principle that above all else, the weak are to be protected from the cruelty of the powerful. Although she eschews seemingly more exalted defences, her account nevertheless has interesting points of contact with ‘public reason liberalism’, republicanism, conservativism, and democratic theory.
• F.A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge, 2006), chapters 1–3
  Hayek is one of the intellectual founders of contemporary free-market conservatism (although see The Constitution of Liberty's Postscript). In these chapters he argues for the individual liberties associated with capitalism on the basis that the market activities of individuals exercising these liberties produces enormous material, cultural, and intellectual benefits that it is beyond the capacity of any central organiser to produce.
• Thomas Nagel, ‘Rawls on Justice’, The Philosophical Review vol. 82, no. 2 (1973)
  This early review of A Theory of Justice puts pressure on Rawls’s exclusion of conceptions of the good from the original position and on the conditions of the original position that allow derivation of the difference principle.
• Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford, 2010), chapters 2–3
  Quong attacks Raz’s perfectionist liberalism on the grounds that it fails to secure an adequately robust defence of liberal freedoms and that it allows anti-liberal state activity. He then argues against perfectionism in general that it is objectionably paternalistic.
• G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge, 1995), chapter 10
  This chapter, part of a book-length attack on the arguments of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, focuses on the foundational Nozickean thesis of self-ownership. Cohen has already argued in earlier chapters that self-ownership does not straightforwardly generate inegalitarian conclusions; here he focuses on undermining the appeal of self-ownership by distinguishing it from nearby ideas with which it might be conflated.

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• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), chapters 1–5, 7–11 (For more accessible but still scholarly revision, see here.)
  Locke's liberalism is founded on an account of natural rights, which give the end of government—to secure them in a way that is unlikely in the state of nature—and set its limits. Locke is the grandfather of one important strand of contemporary libertarianism.
• J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 2–4
  Mill's On Liberty is one of the great defences of liberalism. Mill argues for some of the central liberal freedoms on several grounds, including: that self-direction and self-development according to one's own ideas is intrinsically valuable; that it is also the best route to well-being, since no one way of life is best for everyone; and that the conditions of freedom of speech and way of life are necessary for truths to be discovered and false orthodoxies challenged.
• Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in his A Matter of Principle (Harvard, 1985)
  Dworkin defends liberalism (which, in the contemporary US tradition, he contrasts with conservatism) on the basis of an interpretation of the principle of 'equal concern and respect' that takes it to require neutrality on questions of the good life.
• Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford, 2003), chapter 1
  Drawing on the work of G.A. Cohen and Robert Nozick, Otsuka argues that a libertarian commitment to self-ownership does not have the inegalitarian consequences usually associated with it, thanks to the distinction between self-ownership and world-ownership and the plausibility of applying egalitarian principles to the latter.
• Jeremy Waldron, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 37, no. 147 (1987)
  Waldron argues that liberalism is essentially a view about enforcement of a political order legitimate, and that its fundamental commitment is to the idea that the social order should be capable of being made acceptable to every individual member of it.
• John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, 2012), chapters 1–2
  Tomasi sketches an engaging, intentionally tendentious account of the development of liberalism, contrasting the classical liberalism of Locke and (later) Hayek with the contemporary 'high liberalism' of Rawls and Dworkin. His purpose is to motivate his own hybrid view, 'market democracy', but for now you can treat these chapters simply as a readable overview of some central conflicts within liberalism.
• Henry Rosemont, Jr., ‘Whose Democracy? Which Rights? A Confucian Critique of Modern Western Liberalism’, in Shun and Wong (eds.), Confucian Ethics (Cambridge, 2004)
  Rosemont argues that Confucianism provides insight into the possibility of a universalistic but non-liberal theory of rights and democracy. This theory deprioritises the notions of autonomy and individualism as it is construed within liberal theory, together with the associated 'first-generation' negative rights (including rights of economic freedom) stressed by liberalism—at the cost, Rosemont argues, of social and economic well being. Instead, the Confucian account emphasises the socially constituted aspects of the self and their accompanying responsibilities of care, and accordingly prioritises positive social and economic rights. Rosemont also sees the value of self-government as potentially better realised within a Confucian system than under Western liberal democratic institutions.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• The problem of pluralism receives its best known response in Rawls’s turn to ‘political liberalism’, as contrasted with ‘comprehensive liberalism’. (Political liberalism is also sometimes known as ‘public reason liberalism’.) There are disagreements about just what the problem of pluralism is that prompted Rawls’s political turn, but there is no doubt that it starts from Rawls’s recognition of the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’, namely that the development of a diversity of incompatible views about the good and the right is inevitable in a free (liberal) society. In response to this fact, Rawls’s political liberalism, like all political liberalisms, endorses a ‘public justification principle’ (PJP) according to which political principles or polices are legitimate only if they are acceptable or justifiable from the point of view of every reasonable citizen, where what that requires is some sort of compatibility or non-dissonance with the citizen’s own views.
• Many political liberals think that the PJP is bound to rule out perfectionist principles and policies as illegitimate. Perfectionist principles and policies promote, or are designed to promote, particular conceptions of the good. For example, a drugs policy might be intended to stop people wasting their lives; a Sunday closing policy might be intended to give people the freedom to respect the Sabbath. Anti-perfectionism is the view that the state may not use its power to force or encourage people to live their lives (or not to live their lives) in accordance with a particular conception of the good. So many political liberals are also anti-perfectionists. (Jonathan Quong is particularly associated with this position.) But there are a few philosophers (most recently Collis Tahzib) who have defended ‘political perfectionism’, which combines acceptance of the PJP in some form with endorsement of perfectionism.
• Perfectionism and anti-perfectionism can come in stronger and weaker forms, depending on whether they apply only to constitutions or to all state action, and whether they apply to all uses of state power or only the use of coercive power, for instance.
• So-called ‘comprehensive liberals’ reject the PJP. Raz is perhaps the best-known comprehensive liberal. As we saw last week, his defence of liberalism is founded on an conception of well-being as involving the autonomous pursuit of value. This is a ‘comprehensive’ conception of the good life—the sort of thing that would not be acceptable from the point of view of every reasonable citizen. Accordingly, if Raz’s account of the foundations of liberalism is correct, then liberalism is not justifiable to every reasonable citizen. Naturally, political liberals take this to be an important objection; comprehensive liberals, for their part, attack the arguments that political liberals make in defence of the PLP.
• Unsurprisingly, then, a lot turns on the arguments that can be made for the PJP. There are several different such arguments. Rawls and Rawlsians such as Quong offer it as an answer to a problem about the stability of liberal institutions: that liberalism satisfies the PJP shows that it is not condemned to fail or become oppressive. Charles Larmore founds it in a basic principle of respect for the autonomy of others. Kyla Ebels-Duggan and Andrew Lister, among others, found it in an ideal of ‘civic friendship’. Gerald Gaus founds it in conditions for the appropriateness of holding people to account via the reactive attitudes. Colin Bird founds it in conditions for co-authorship of legislation.
• As well as political anti-perfectionist liberalism (the standard political liberal view), political perfectionist liberalism (the non-standard hybrid defended by Tahzib), and comprehensive perfectionist liberalism (the standard Razian view), there is also comprehensive anti-perfectionist liberalism. As the name suggests, this is a liberalism that rejects state promotion of any particular conception of the good and right even though it accepts and is founded on precisely such a conception. One variety of this view is due to Steven Wall, who finds Razian reasons for neutrality in policy between competing conceptions of the good. Another is the Kantian view as elaborated by Japa Pallikkathayil, who argues for antiperfectionism on the basis of a comprehensive Kantian morality.

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• John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard, 2001), Parts I and V
  In this overview of his version of public reason liberalism, Rawls sets out the main ideas he employs in building a political conception of justice, and explains how the conception can be the focus of an 'overlapping consensus' of conflicting reasonable moral views. Rawls argues in more detail for the public reason liberalism summarised in these sections in Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1996), and elaborates his account of public reason in particular in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in The Law of Peoples (Harvard, 1999).
• Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford, 2010), chapter 1
  Quong offers a helpful survey of the various positions available in debates between public reason liberals (or ‘political liberals’) and ‘comprehensive liberals’.
• Charles Larmore, ‘Political Liberalism’, Political Theory vol. 18, no. 3 (1990)
  In an early defence of public reason liberalism, Larmore appeals to a Kantian ideal of equal respect for persons as a basis for liberal neutrality. The basic idea is that equal respect demands that the coercive institutions of a state must be justifiable from the point of view of each person, because otherwise they are a matter of mere coercion, which treats others as mere means, not ends. In this way, Larmore hopes to find a moral basis for the traditional liberal separation of church and state that avoids appealing merely to pragmatic considerations, or to scepticism about religious claims, or to controversial conceptions of individual autonomy.
• Christopher Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (Cambridge, 2002), chapters 4–5
  Eberle argues that respect for her fellow citizens does not, contrary to the claims of Rawlsian public reason liberals, require a person to refuse to support coercive laws for which she can offer no public justification.
• Martha Nussbaum, ‘Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 39, no. 1 (2011)
  Nussbaum defends public reason liberalism against the criticisms of comprehensive liberals such as Joseph Raz. Helpfully, she devotes special attention to the difficult question of what distinguishes a 'reasonable' view according to public reason liberals, who argue that political institutions must be justifiable from all reasonable points of view, but need not be from unreasonable points of view.
• David Enoch, ‘Against Public Reason’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2015)
  Enoch trenchantly criticises public reason liberalism in general, arguing that although its proponents are motivated by powerful concerns about authority and liberty, they misunderstand these, and cannot address them adequately within their favoured framework.
• Japa Pallikkathayil, ‘Neither Perfectionism nor Political Liberalism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 3 (2016)
  Pallikkathayil defends a ‘comprehensive anti-perfectionist’ Kantian approach to the kinds of problems that are the focus of the debate between perfectionists and political liberals. She argues that this approach avoids certain objections to political liberalism and at the same time does a better job than political liberalism of explaining what‘s wrong with perfectionist liberalism and policies.
• Collis Tahzib, ‘Perfectionism: Political not Metaphysical’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 47, no. 2 (2019)
  Tahzib argues that liberal perfectionism can be defended on political liberal foundations, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of the debate between political liberals and perfectionists.

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• Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (Basic Books, 1989)
  This influential critique of twentieth-century liberal theorising about social justice argues that the impression of inclusivity and gender equality conceals a fatal neglect of questions about gender roles and injustice within the family.
• Sri Aurobindo, ‘The Right of Association’, in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1997), vol. 8, pp. 67–83
  In the course of a defence of the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti pro-independence organisation, Aurobindo casts liberal freedoms as necessary preconditions for the achievement of moksha (Hindu spiritual liberation), and so provides a religious justification for liberalism and some support for Rawls's claims. The idea that Eastern ideas of spiritual freedom and Western ideas of external freedom are complementary is a theme of Aurobindo's political writings; see also his Complete Works, vol. 13.
• Hamid Hadji Haidar, Liberalism and Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 187–192 ('Conclusion')
  Haidar's book considers the compatibility of Shiite Islam and the liberalisms of, first, J.S. Mill and, second, John Rawls. Haidar finds Shiite Islam theoretically incompatible with Millian liberalism and partially compatible with Rawlsian liberalism, although neither is justifiable from the Shiite point of view. At the practical level, Haidar draws the interesting conclusion that there is no practical incompatibility between Shiite Muslim citizens' commitments and fully liberal institutions within a pluralistic society, but there is such an incompatibility within a Muslim society. This extract summarises these conclusions.
• Joseph Raz, ‘Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 19, no. 1 (1990)
  Rawls's public reason liberalism is officially committed to 'epistemic abstinence' (taking no stand on the truth claims about the good and the right), 'shallow foundations' (working from certain values that are already present in public political culture), and the 'autonomy' of the political view from wider moral questions. Raz objects to all these features of public reason liberalism, and concludes that Rawls's approach is to be rejected. You need not read beyond page 31.
• Gerald F. Gaus and Kevin Vallier, ‘The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity;, Philosophy & Social Criticism vol. 35, no. 1–2 (2009)
  Gaus and Vallier argue for a 'convergence' conception of public reason liberalism that is, they suggest, less hostile to religious reasons in the justification of laws and policies than 'consensus' conceptions, such as Rawls's, are.

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• Marilyn Frye, ‘Oppression’, in Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, and Daniel I O'Neill (eds.), Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, Ninth Edition (Routledge, 2016). Text also available online here. (9pp)
  Frye defends an account of oppression as subjection to a certain structure of freedom-restriction on the basis of group membership and in order to further the interests of other groups, and distinguishes oppression so understood from various other forms of unfreedom and disadvantage. She is particularly concerned to debunk the reply to claims that women are oppressed that consists in arguing that men are too.
• Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), chapters 1–2
  This is a classic of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against the 'distributive paradigm' of theorising about justice, according to which justice is always a matter of who gets what. Young argues that justice is also a matter of culture, political decisionmaking, and division of labour. In the second chapter, she analyses the notion of oppression, which she takes to be essential for identifying non-distributive injustices, and distinguishes five ways in which oppression is manifested.
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1997), chapters 1–2
  A ferocious, coruscating critique of contemporary liberal theory and politics. Mills argues powerfully that liberalism developed within the historical frame of a 'racial contract' that violently excluded and exploited non-whites, and that its central commitments continue to reflect the oppressive and exploitative features of that contract.
• Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford, 2011), chapter 4
  Distinguishing responsibility as liability from a forward-looking concept of responsibility, Young argues for a model of responsibility for addressing structural injustice of the latter kind.
• Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1999), chapter 2
  Nussbaum defends liberalism against a variety of feminist criticisms, arguing that feminists should embrace liberalism's core commitments and press for liberal practice to be made more consistent with them, rather than abandoned.
• Anca Gheaus, ‘Gender Justice’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy vol. 6, no. 2 (2012)
  Gheaus defends a novel principle of 'gender justice' designed to capture the nature of a wide range of gender-based injustices, founding it on core liberal ideas of autonomy and freedom. The flagship claim is that a society is unjust if a gender-neutral lifestyle is more costly than a gendered lifestyle.
• Dorothea Gadëke, ‘Who should fight domination? Individual responsibility and structural injustice’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics vol. 20, no. 2 (2021)
  Drawing on her analysis of domination as a structural phemonenon, Gadëke argues against outcome-based, capacity-based, and Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility for fighting injustice in favour of a kind of hybrid view that she thinks avoids problems with the others.
• David Estlund, ‘What’s Unjust about Structural Injustice?’, Ethics vol. 134, no. 3 (2024)
  Estlund presses what he calls the “reach/grievance” puzzle for anyone who thinks there can be structural injustice: either structural injustices involve wrongdoing, but in that case fewer cases are aptly described as cases of structural injustices than is typically supposed; or structural justices don’t need to involve wrongdoing, in which case ‘grievance attitudes’ such as anger and resentment are out of place as reactions to them. His intention is not to reject the possibility of structural injustice, but to present a challenge for those attracted to analysis in terms of it. You can find philosophers including Sally Haslanger discussing this article at the Pea Soup blog.

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• Catharine McKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard, 1989), chapter 8
  McKinnon argues that the liberal state's law reflects and entrenches women's subordination by assuming the kind of social equality that obtains only among men, even in areas where it would seem to be progressive in this respect.
• Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State, 2008)
  Chambers makes a distinction between first-order and second-order autonomy and argues that attention to the distinction reveals certain kinds of injustice that core liberal commitments should make them willing to legislate against, despite the apparent illiberalism of such legislation.
• Anita Silvers, ‘No Talent? Beyond the Worst Off! A Diverse Theory of Justice for Disability’, in Brownlee and Cureton (eds.), Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford, 2009)
  Silver argues that traditional social contract theories of justice deal badly with cases of 'outliers', who don't conform to the paradigm of normality that the theories assume. She defends an approach that prioritises cultivating the trust required for cooperation, and argues that this approach allows the embracing of difference in a way that the traditional approaches do not.
• Sally Haslanger, ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?’, Noûs vol. 34, no. 1 (2000)
  Haslanger proposes analyses of gender and race for the purposes of critical feminist and antiracist politics, setting aside attempts to find some biological or other naturalistic basis for gender or race terms and attempts to capture everyday understandings implicit in the use of those terms.
• Lawrence Blum, "I'm not a Racist, But..." The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell, 2002), chapter 8
  Earlier in this book, Blum argues that there is no scientific underpinning for the concept of race and that it provides a morally troubling way of thinking about people even when not accompanied by racism. In this chapter he claims that we must nevertheless recognise the way in which certain groups of people have shared experiences of oppression as a result of the fact that they have been treated as if they were members of a single race, and proposes referring to such groups as ‘racialised’ rather than ‘races’ as a way to do this.
• K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections’, in Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, 1996)
  Appiah traces some of the history of the concept of race and argues that there is no clear set of criteria or underlying biological basis that will do the job of discriminating between the people the concept is used to discriminate between. He goes on to propose an account of racial identity that makes central a history of association with presumed racial essence, but remains sceptical about the value of such identities.
• Naomi Zack, ‘Can Third Wave Feminism Be Inclusive? Intersectionality, its Problems and New Directions’, in Alcoff and Kittay (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007)
  Zack describes, first, the critique of feminism that it has excluded the experience of non-white women, and, second, the emergence of the ideas of 'intersectionality' and anti-essentialism in response. She expresses doubts about the response, and proposes a relational definition of 'woman' that addresses the doubts without falling foul of the original critique.
• Robin Zheng, ‘What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 21 (2018)
  Zheng argues for a model of responsibility for structural injustice according to which role-bearers are responsible for addressing structural injustice in virtue of occupying those roles, in contrast to Iris Marion Young's ‘social connections model’.

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• Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (Cambridge, 2012), chapters 1–2
  Pettit has been defending and developing a republican political theory over the past two decades. In this recent statement of his view, he makes it clear that the characteristic republican emphasis on freedom as non-domination provides a moral basis for key political commitments.
• Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford 2008), chapter 7
  
• Arthur Ripstein, ‘Authority and Coercion’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 32, no. 1 (2004)
  
• Marilyn Friedman, ‘Pettit's Civic Republicanism and Male Domination’, in Laborde and Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory (Wiley, 2008)
  Friedman argues that Pettit’s conception of domination is overinclusive, since capacities to interfere arbitrarily in others’ choices are ubiquitous—indeed, they are valuable in the case of people who are dependent on caretakers—and Pettit thinks vulnerability to domination can come with group membership alone. Pettit’s approach, Friedman suggests, demonstrates an insensitivity to the important role of dependence on others in human life generally. She goes on to spell out a more qualified, individualistic account of domination than Pettit’s.
• Ian Carter, ‘How are Power and Unfreedom Related?’, in Laborde and Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory (Wiley, 2008)
  Carter argues that the ‘negative’ conception of freedom that liberals treat as fundamental can make sense of the judgments about unfreedom that motivate republicans to reject it in favour of an account of freedom as non-domination or non-subjection, and is, moreover, preferable to such republican accounts because of the justificatory role it can play in political theory.
• Niko Kolodny, ‘Being Under the Power of Others’, in Elazar and Rousselière (eds.), Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge, 2019)
  Kolodny argues that the republican argument for state legitimacy that appeals to domination fails insofar as it can’t explain why the state doesn’t objectionably dominate its citizens, or why a state of nature couldn’t be sufficiently free of domination if the state could. He proposes that what’s really at the root of republicanism is “a broader anxiety about standing in relations of social inferiority” with other individuals.
• Dorothea Gadëke, ‘Does a Mugger Dominate? Episodic Power and the Structural Dimension of Domination’, Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 28, no. 2 (2020)
  Using the title's question to pose a dilemma for republican accounts of domination, Gadëke argues that domination is a structurally constituted rather than ‘mere interactional’ form of power, and that thinking of it this way helps to rescue domination-focused accounts from various problems as well as to suit them for critical social analysis. She also makes a valuable distinction between interpersonal and systemic domination.
• Christian List and Laura Valentini, ‘Freedom as Independence’, Ethics vol. 126, no. 4 (2016)
  After analysing the logical space in which different negative conceptions of freedom can be located, List and Valentini defend a conception of freedom as independence that differs from liberal freedom in that it incorporates a robustness condition and from republican freedom in that it is non-moralised.
• Sharon R. Krause, ‘Beyond non-domination: Agency, inequality and the meaning of freedom’, Philosophy & Social Criticism vol. 39, no. 2 (2013)
  Krause argues that republican non-domination is too narrow an account of freedom to capture important aspects of the unfreedom of subordinate groups, because social constraints on these groups do not always involve intention or control on the part of others. Krause goes on to argue that the problem lies in the relatively unsophisticated picture of agency implicit in standard republican analyses of freedom.
• Melvin L. Rogers, ‘Race, Domination, and Republicanism‘, in Allen and Somanathan (eds.), Difference without domination: pursuing justice in diverse democracies (Chicago, 2020)
  Rogers argues that attention to African American political thought reveals lessons for republicanism, particularly on the need for more subtle and contextually-sensitive accounts of republican civic virtue, for analyses of the reversibility of domination and of culturally encoded domination alongside the more familiar analyses of domination by other agents.
• Lori Watson, ‘On Domination’, in Chang and Srinivasan (eds.), Conversations in Philosophy, Law, and Politics (Oxford, 2024)
  Watson draws a contrast between the republican analysis of domination and the analyses found within the feminist tradition, which she defends as capable of capturing a wider range of domination than the republican analysis. Watson also offers helpful remarks on the relations between domination, subordination, and oppression.

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• Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (Oxford, 2010), chapters 2–4
  
• Christopher McCammon, ‘Domination: A Rethinking’, Ethics vol. 125, no. 4 (2015)
• Robert E. Goodin and Frank Jackson, ‘Freedom from Fear’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 35, no. 3 (2007)
  
• Philip Pettit, ‘Republican Freedom: Three Axioms, Four Theorems’, in Laborde and Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory (Wiley, 2008)
  Pettit sets out in clear terms the republican account of freedom that he favours before responding critically to attempts to capture the republican idea of freedom in negative libertarian terms (see e.g. the Carter chapter in the priority reading list).
• Thomas W. Simpson, ‘The Impossibility of Republican Freedom’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 45, no. 1 (2017)
  
• Philip Pettit, ‘Freedom and Probability: A Comment on Goodin and Jackson’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 36, no. 2 (2008)
  
• Frank Lovett and Philip Pettit, ‘Preserving Republican Freedom: A Reply to Simpson’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 46, no. 4 (2018)
  
• Thomas W. Simpson, ‘Freedom and Trust: A Rejoinder to Lovett and Pettit’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 47, no. 4 (2019)
  

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• Bernard Williams, ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’ and ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, 2005)
  Williams argues against political theorising that treats it as merely applied moral philosophy, and for understanding political philosophy instead primarily in terms of the “first political question” of securing the conditions of cooperation and meeting the associated ‘basic legitimation demand’. He defends a ‘liberalism of fear’ within this frame, as uniquely flexible and aware of the nature of the political.
• Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, 2008)
  Geuss defends a realist approach to political theory that views politics through the lens of questions about power, historical feasibility, and prevailing mechanisms of legitimation. He identifies five tasks for political philosophy based upon this approach, and then critiques the approach of contemporary ‘analytic’ political philosophy, focusing on the case of Rawls.
• Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge, 2005), chapter 2
  Mouffe argues that antagonism is an eradicable condition of political association, and therefore that the aim of democratic politics is not the establishment of rational consensus, contrary to what Mouffe sees as the dominant liberal theoretical approach, but of ‘agonistic relations’: a way of taming destructive enmity through adversarial political institutions.
• David Owen, ‘Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, Political Theory, and the Critique of Morality’, in Matt Sleat (ed.), Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice (Columbia, 2018)
  Owen offers helpful contextualisation and interpretation of William’s political realism.
• Paul Sagar, ‘Legitimacy and Domination’, in Matt Sleat (ed.), Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice (Columbia, 2018)
  Sagar discusses the prospects for ‘internalist’ accounts of legitimacy according to which legitimacy is a function of the beliefs of those subject to power. He argues that internalists can rebut ‘happy slaves’-type objections more easily than might be supposed, and defends a way of going beyond Williams’s ‘critical theory principle’ test for appeals to subjects’ legitimating beliefs that is indebted to Haslanger’s work on ideology.
• Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), chapter 5
  Finlayson criticises the realist and non-ideal theory trends in contemporary political philosophy on the grounds that they preclude “deep dissent” by placing limits “on the extent to which deviation from dominant modes of political philosophy is even thinkable”. This, she says, effectively forces a false choice between utopian criticism of the status quo or realistic acceptance of it.
• Ilaria Cozzaglio and Amanda R. Greene, ‘Can power be self-legitimating? Political realism in Hobbes, Weber, and Williams’, European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2019)
  Cozzaglio and Greene examine Williams’s reasons for departing from the forms of political realism found in Hobbes and Weber, arguing that in fact the Weberian form is superior to Williams’s, which must either turn out to be moralistic or else collapse into Hobbes’s position, which cannot distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate domination. The article offers interesting and illuminating analysis of the authors it discusses as well as of the conditions of political society that give rise to demands for legitimacy in the first place.
• Enzo Rossi, ‘Being realistic and demanding the impossible’, Constellations vol. 26 (2019)
  After a brief characterisation of the general tenets of political realism, Rossi distinguishes three sub-types of realism each prioritising a different political problem. Rossi goes on to describe the sub-type he calls ‘radical realism’ in more detail, arguing that it can have more radical implications than its critics claim, even as it avoids the objectionable kind of utopianism realists associate with political moralism.
• Philip Pettit, ‘Political realism meets civic republicanism’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (2017)
  Pettit argues that republicanism meets key desiderata identified by political realists, and so escapes their critiques of moralist political theorising.

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• John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard, 2001), section 1.
  Rawls distinguishes four roles for political philosophy: to identify a basis for agreement to underpin social cooperation on a footing of mutual respect; to enable us to understand ourselves as members of a political community; to reconcile us to our social world; and to probe the limits of practical political possibility. Rawls focuses in particular on these roles in the context of the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’.
• Mark Philp, ‘Realism without Illusions’, Political Theory vol. 40, no. 5 (2012)
• Matt Sleat, ‘Realism, Liberalism and Non-ideal Theory Or, Are there Two Ways to do Realistic Political Theory?’, Political Studies 64, no. 1 (2016)
  Sleat clarifies the distinction between political realism and non-ideal theorising in contemporary political philosophy, arguing that only the former represents a fundamental challenge to contemporary liberal theorising.
• Jeremy Waldron, ‘Political Political Theory’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 21, no. 1 (2013)
  Waldron argues for greater emphasis on the study of institutions and political processes as opposed to the great political ends (justice, liberty, equality, etc.), and in particular on the question how to choose between various political institutional possibilities, as for example when thinking about devolution in the UK—a question about which “the 57 different varieties of luck-egalitarianism” studied in Oxford have nothing to say.
• Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (Routledge, 2002), chapter 2
  Bellamy argues that Rawls fails to appreciate the way in which citizens' religious affiliations may be in tension with liberal political principles as well as tensions within those political principles (e.g. between different liberties) that cannot be resolved philosophically. He claims that this analysis reveals the way in which the Rawlsian model fails to see how the political sphere itself is contested, and argues that this demonstrates a need to make the ‘real politics’ of negotiation and compromise central if the public sphere is not to be delegitimised. Bellamy offers a similar analysis of two other seemingly contrasting theorists, Hayek and Walzer, in chapters 1 and 3 respectively.
• Charles W. Mills, ‘“Ideal Theory” as Ideology’, Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (2005)
  Mills argues that various abstractions and idealisations employed by Rawls and others in their ‘ideal theorising’ are not innocent; on the contrary, they are ideological, in the sense that they reflect dominant groups' privilege and serve to perpetuate it at the expense of the oppressed, whose oppression-relevant characteristics are ignored as a result of the abstractions and idealisations.
• William A. Galston, ‘Realism in political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 4 (2010)
  Galston surveys the various strands of realist critique of ideal theorising, identifying a focus on avoiding evils, confining one's ends to the feasible, and a conception of the political as involving ineliminable conflict as the basic elements. He endorses much of the realist critique, but highlights several ways in which it is, he thinks, nevertheless lacking.
• Alice Baderin, ‘Two forms of realism in political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory vol. 13, no. 2 (2014)
  Baderin distinguishes two strands in realist critiques: the “detachment” strand, which argues that political philosophy is too abstract and infeasible, and the “displacement” strand, which argues that political philosophy threatens or disregards real politics. She analyses and identifies tensions between the two strands.
• Simon Hope, ‘Political Philosophy as Practical Philosophy: A Response to “Political Realism”’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 28, no. 4 (2020)
  Hope argues that political realists tend to characterise politics too narrowly and in too theoretical (as opposed to practical) a way by what should be realist lights themselves. He goes on to suggest, in Kantian spirit, that once realists take the appropriate practical perspective on politics, the source of the normativity of political judgments will turn out to lie in the nature of practical thought itself.
• Janosch Prinz and Enzo Rossi, ‘Political realism as ideology critique’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy vol. 20, no. 3 (2017)
• Matt Sleat (ed.), Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice (Columbia, 2018)
• Jonathan Leader Maynard, ‘Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?’, Ethics vol. 128, no. 4 (2018)
  Leader Maynard and Worsnip review and reject five realist arguments for the claim that there is a distinctively political type of normativity, a claim that they take to be definitive of political realism.
• Robert Jubb ‘On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is’, Political Studies Review vol. 17, no. 4 (2019)
  Jubb responds to Leader Maynard and Worsnip's arguments before suggesting that realism isn’t best understood in terms claims about types of normativity at all, and offering his own characterisation of realist concerns and method.
• Jonathan Leader Maynard, ‘Political Realism as Methods not Metaethics’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2021)
• Edward Hall, ‘Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand: A Defence’, Political Studies vol. 63, no. 2 (2015)
  Hall gives an account of Williams‘s ’Basic Legitimation Demand’ before defending it from the objections that it ultimately relies on moral claims in just the way that realists say political moralism mistakenly relies on such claims, that it makes legitimacy dependent on unrealistic consensus, and that it is idealistic in its conception of the constitutive conditions of politics.

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