I come as an interloper in political theory, but I am honoured and excited to have been invited to interlope, and I have already learned so much from Niko Kolodny’s book. I am sure I will stumble into issues with the naivety of an outsider – but I hope that might be of some use.

Kolodny opens the book ambitiously, asking whether we can reconcile the inevitable complexity of Civilization with our desire for Equality. It turns out, though, that this is not the central question of the book, and Kolodny’s answer to it is a resounding ‘maybe’. A second, also less-than-central, question recurs as a leitmotif – in truth, quite a grand motif – throughout the book. It is this: Must our interest in political freedom be understood as an interest in preserving our autonomy or self-determination, or might, instead, our apparent concern with governance by our own will be recast as a concern to avoid rule by a higher ranking will? Might our concern be, as Kolodny puts it in the title of his concluding chapter, ‘not so much liberty as noninferiority’ – that is, might our concern with freedom be accounted for by a much more primitive concern to avoid low standing in a dominance hierarchy?

This second question piqued my interest, because I still recall my horror, as an undergraduate, reading Rousseau. It seemed plain that his appeal to the General Will was at once the right solution to his problem about freedom and would also, in practice, amount to despotism. If the government can claim, for itself, the contents of your will, the game is over, so to speak. Kolodny, it seems, finds Rousseau’s suggestion as creepy as I do. So I wanted to learn more from this kindred spirit. And, in accepting the invitation, I comforted myself with the thought that freedom of the will is a topic on which I am not an interloper.

Working through Kolodny’s book is not a task for the faint hearted. It weighs in at 500 pages, and merely citing the page count dramatically underrepresents its scope and scale. The text operates at an extraordinarily high level of abstraction, which it combines with a great deal of intricacy and a breathtaking range. I certainly have not mastered it.

In fact, I have not yet even told you what the book is most centrally about.

The book’s most central claim is that we will not fully account for a very wide variety of what Kolodny calls ‘commonplace claims’ – a wide variety of near truisms in western liberal political philosophy – by appeal only to what Kolodny calls ‘interests in improvement’, on the one hand, and ‘rights against invasion’, on the other. Interests in improvement are, he thinks, the stuff on which Rawlsian contractualism is built, while rights against invasion are the basic building blocks of Nozickian libertarianism. What is needed, he thinks, in addition to these two, to account for each of the commonplaces, is what he calls ‘claims against inferiority’ – that is, claims against standing in a relation of inferiority to other natural persons. Moreover, he argues, claims against inferiority are distinct from both egalitarian claims to relations of equality and neo-republican or Kantian claims against either domination or dependence on an arbitrary will. Thus Kolodny means to carve out a new position in the existing universe of political philosophy in the analytic tradition.

His argument for the new position unfolds, as he puts it, with the rhythm of a waltz, in triplets: He first presents a commonplace, he then argues that that commonplace cannot be fully accounted for by appeal to interests in improvement and rights against invasion (either separately or jointly), and finally he argues that whatever cannot be accounted for by the former two – the ‘residue’, as he sometimes puts it – will be captured by a claim against inferiority (3). He repeats the triplet about a dozen times over the course of the book. But by far the greatest number of pages are spent on the first example of a commonplace claim, the claim that the state must be justified to its citizens – that the state must satisfy some bar of legitimacy (4).

This announced waltz-like structure might lead you to expect an argument by elimination: not interests in improvement, not rights against invasion, therefore claims against inferiority. But that is not the form of the argument. In fact, given how broadly Kolodny defines both ‘interests in improvement’ and the ‘claims to improvement’ that they generate, I found it very difficult to find a principled way to demarcate claims to improvement from rights against invasion. Interests in improvement include interests in not being made worse off – so that, ‘refraining from physically harming [someone] counts as improving [that person’s] situation’ (16). Thus, it seems to me, an interest in not being harmed might generate claim to improvement that is indistinguishable from a right against invasion.Footnote ¹

But in the end I do not think the difficulty in drawing a principled distinction between these types of claims matters, because I think the argument does not, in the end, depend on the three categories being either exclusive or exhaustive (in the way it would if it were an argument by elimination). It seems to me that the force of Kolodny’s waltz-rhythmed argument is, rather, in the details: in first generating, through a variety of different sorts of arguments, dissatisfaction with the alternatives, and then showing the work that can be done by appeal to a claim against inferiority. The division between improvement and invasion is, I suspect, simply a way for Kolodny to address his interlocutors, in turn – more rhetorical than substantive.

But what are claims against inferiority? They turn out to be rather intricate. First, the claims in question are moral claims, and Kolodny understands moral claims to be claims on agents to perform actions. More, moral claims are always held by natural persons – where natural persons are only a subset of agents. Thus, collective or artificial agents, which are not natural persons, can be the target of moral claims, but they hold no claims of their own. Holders of claims are only natural persons.

Because claims are always on agents for actions, a ‘claim against inferiority’ is always a claim on some agent to perform some action that would eliminate or temper some relation of inferiority.

What, then, is a relation of inferiority? Here is an illuminating quote: ‘Relations of inferiority are the natural-historical legacy of pecking order in other social animals, albeit irrevocably transformed by symbol and self-consciousness’. (87) They are relations of rank or social status.

Because they are relations of rank, Kolodny argues that natural persons can only stand in relations of inferiority with other natural persons. This is surprising, but Kolodny believes it would be a kind of category mistake to think that relations of rank hold between natural persons and collective agents. He says, ‘What would it even mean for you to have equal, inferior, or superior status with a hurricane?… Similarly, what would it mean to say you have equal, inferior, or superior status with a collective or artificial agent, such as Indonesia, the Roman Catholic Church, or Procter and Gamble?… [W]e can say… that a collective, such as the state, can have greater power over you. But is there a question of the state itself having inferior, superior, or equal status in relation to you? It seems to me a kind of category mistake’ (90). As a natural person, you stand in relations of rank only to other natural persons.

Taken to their extreme, the most egregious examples of relations of inferiority are two: bondage – the extreme version of domination – and caste – the extreme violation of inequality (90–91). Crucially, though, not all relations of inferiority are objectionable, because relations of inferiority can be what Kolodny calls ‘tempered’. When relations of inferiority are tempered, they become less objectionable, and it is possible temper them to the point of being entirely unobjectionable. Kolodny canvasses various possible ‘tempering factors’ that can render relations of inferiority between natural persons acceptable. For example, if difference in rank is limited to a specific context – to the classroom, if you are a teacher, or to the flight, if you are a flight attendant – that limitation tempers the asymmetry. Kolodny insightfully details a handful of others factors that can temper relations of inferiority between natural persons.

I want to highlight: relations of inferiority are not simply relations of power – simply being less powerful than another will not render one inferior to the other. Kolodny imagines his relation with his physically stronger neighbour, Grande. They are on good neighbourly terms, and neither of them really registers the difference in strength. In this case, Kolodny says, it is not that ‘this asymmetry of power is tempered by other factors. The point is deeper: [this] just isn’t an asymmetry that needs tempering to begin with’ (94). According to Kolodny, asymmetrical relations of powerFootnote ² become relations of rank or status under certain (very common) conditions: when the greater power is exercised; when it is endorsed by the more powerful or submitted to by the less powerful; when it affects the parties’ comparative power over others; or when it is constituted by unmerited regard by others.

The account is complex. For our purposes, though, it is enough to bear in mind that relations of inferiority are relations of rank or status between natural persons.

Turning, now, to our relation to the state: In a large chunk of the book, Kolodny means to argue that concerns about the legitimacy of the state can be fully understood only once we recognize our claims against inferiority. But he has also claimed that it is a category mistake to think we stand in relations of inferiority to collective agents, such as the state. So, what gives?

A bit more complexity solves the difficulty: The state is an agent, and, as natural persons, we have a claim against the state to take action to temper or eliminate the relations of inferiority in which we stand to other natural persons. The most glaring examples would be claims that the state take action to eliminate institutions of slavery or caste.

Crucially, though, as natural persons, we can stand in relations of inferiority not only to other citizens, but also to those natural persons who hold offices in the state – to those natural persons ‘whose decisions the state’s decisions are’, as Kolodny puts it (122). Therefore, using Pettit’s terminology, Kolodny introduces a contrast between ‘horizontal’ hierarchical relations, holding between citizens, and ‘vertical’ hierarchical relations, holding between citizens and office-holders. The state must take action to temper both sorts of relations, by instituting both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ tempering factors.

Focus, now, on the vertical factors, which temper citizens’ relation to office holders. These include requiring the office holder to act only on impersonal reasons, requiring that they exercise minimal discretion needed for the official purpose, requiring that they are accountable to those whose lives they influence while those they influence are not accountable to them, and other such constraints. To put it metaphorically, the vertical tempering factors function to strip the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of the office holder from the office, leaving only the office to act.

Once we have tempered our relations of inferiority both to other citizens and to those natural persons who hold office, Kolodny contends, we then will have, finally, satisfied the residue of concern about the legitimacy the state. Thus concludes of the first argumentative waltz-triplet.

Then, in subsequent chapter after chapter, Kolodny shows how appeal to this same slate of tempering factors is needed to explain commonplace after commonplace: to explain the details of our claims against corruption, our claim to rule of law, to equal treatment, to equality of opportunity, and others. None of these claims, he argues, will be fully satisfied simply by ensuring that our interests in improvement are satisfied and our rights against invasion are respected. Rather, in each case, we need to bring in some tempering factors before we are satisfied that the commonplace is explained. The work done here, throughout the vast middle of the book, is truly impressive.

Scanning over that work, it is plain that the waltz-rhythmed argument is not an argument by elimination, but rather takes the form I just outlined: First, consider some commonplace political concern. Next, argue that the concern will not be fully addressed until some tempering factors are in place – even if the political system otherwise assures us that our interests in improvement are met and our rights against invasion are respected. Finally, since what the tempering factors temper is relations of inferiority, conclude that a claim against standing in relations of inferiority stands, together with claims to improvement and rights against invasion, at the foundations of political thought.

Again, the work Kolodny does with his tempering factors is extraordinary. The argument is in the details, and the details deserve extended attention. Yet, I am not going to attend to them. I am instead going to question the final step of the argument: the move from the need for tempering factors to the conclusion that a concern with rank is among our foundational political concerns. That final step would not follow, if the tempering factors did more than temper relations of rank between natural persons. I suspect they do – I suspect they also function to protect individuals from the power of the state, given that the state, the individuals, and culture itself are all sure to change over time. In that case, what would be needed is not a claim against relations of inferiority, but something to address our concern about state (or other collective) power.

To introduce this suggestion, I am going to return to Kolodny’s treatment of our concern about state legitimacy and our shared sense that Rousseau issued an invitation to despotism.

In his concluding chapter, Kolodny suggests that we replace Rousseau’s desire for autonomy – the desire to avoid being governed by an alien will – with a desire to avoid being governed by a superior will. As Kolodny notes, the second desire is easier to satisfy. To satisfy the first, you must ensure that the governing will is somehow your own, while, to satisfy the second, you need only to ensure that the governing will is not superior. Autonomy, Kolodny thus suggests, is overkill: it is enough to avoid rule by a superior will. And, we avoid rule by a superior will if the decision of the state is, as he sometimes puts it, ‘the decision of no one’ – or, as he puts it when being more careful, ‘no more the [decision] of any other individual’ than it is your own. And the decisions of the state are no more anyone else’s than your own when ‘we all have equal opportunity to influence the outcome’ (405).

Again, Kolodny appeals to the work done by a tempering factor – here, the work done by ensuring equal opportunity to influence outcomes – to argue that our concern about state legitimacy is ‘not so much [about] liberty as non inferiority’ – that is, not so much about self-governance as about rank or status.

I want to make Kolodny’s claim stark. The word ‘inferiority’ tempts one to think about power, but, again, inferiority is about rank. And thus, for Kolodny, the will of the state, however powerful, is the wrong kind of thing to be superior to your will. To avoid being subject to the will of a superior, while governed by the state, you need only to avoid being subject to the will of some natural person holding office. Of course, in the face of an all-powerful state, we should also be concerned about our well-being and our rights. But, Kolodny argues, once we ensure that our wellbeing is protected and our rights are respected, any remaining concern with benevolent despotism is a concern about the despot. That is to say, the remaining problem is that there is a natural person above us in rank – an untempered alpha male.

This seems off to me. My concern about even benevolent despotism is not, I think, a concern about a natural person above me in rank. My concern is not so very (second-)personal. It is, instead, I think, a concern about the power of state as in institution – an institution that is unlikely to remain benevolent for very long, and, in any case, that may be unresponsive to my changing sense of my own interests. Thus, my remaining concern, about even the benevolent dictator, is to ensurei both that my basic needs continue to be met and also – crucially – that I am able to pursue my own conception of the good as a free thinker, even as culture and history unfold and so even as my conception might change. If there is a form of freedom at issue, here, it is, I think, freedom of conscience.

Crucially, though, I grant that implementing the tempering factors will assuage my worries. I doubt only that my ease is the result of depersonalizing the office holder, so to speak. Rather, I think I am put at ease because the tempering factors temper the power of the state itself – they temper the office. In doing so, they reduce the possibility that such power will be used unjustly.

So, again, I doubt what I am calling the last step of Kolodny’s argument, the move from the fact that tempering factors solve our problem to the conclusion that the problem was a relation in rank that needed tempering. The tempering factors, I suspect, solve other problems, too.

Importantly, I have not carefully considered whether all of Kolodny’s many arguments are open to this kind of doubt about the argument’s final step. I here simply raise it for your consideration.

In doing so, I will note a third role one might see the tempering factors playing, in addition to tempering relations of inferiority or protecting freedom of conscience against state power. The tempering factors might be seen to play a third role by someone who feels that what is wrong with benevolent despotism is not that we stand in a relation of inferiority to the despot, but rather that we have no say in what happens to us. Such a person could agree with Kolodny that autonomy, strictly understood, is overkill. But the ‘self’ in ‘self-determination’, they might say, is ambiguous between the first-person singular and the first-person plural – between determination by me and determination by us. What is needed is for the will of the state to be neither alien, nor my own, but rather ours. And, behold, by implementing Kolodny’s tempering factors, we secure collective self-determination. Thus, our concern is with liberty, not non inferiority, after all.

I myself find little comfort in appeal to collective self-determination. After all, insofar as it differs from individual self-determination, it is cold comfort to those who find themselves on the losing side of the darker gap that lies between one’s own will and the will of the collective. Addressing that darker gap was, I believe, Rousseau’s worry: how are we to avoid the apparent tyranny of majority rule and instead find unanimous agreement of individuals? But his solution is the one that creeped me out.

So I agree with Kolodny, not only that autonomy is overkill, but also in setting aside even collective self-determination. I think, instead, that our worries about the would-be despot are well assuaged by entangling him in enough institutional restrictions – in enough red tape, so to speak – to ensure that the despot cannot act as a private person. But the fact that red tape is the solution does not show that our worry was about being outranked by a natural person. I would, after all, have the same worries, assuaged in just the same way, about a powerful collective, to whom I cannot stand in an inferior relation of social rank: I would have the same worries about the actions of the mob, the family, the church, or the party, should such a collective hold office collectively.Footnote ³

Now, in Kolodny’s defence, it should be noted that tempering the horizontal relations of inferiority between citizens will very likely also eliminate the possibility of mob rule. Insofar as the state acts to temper or mitigate relations of inferiority between citizens, it will be difficult for a collective of some subset of citizens – the party, the church, or the mob – to gain power over or within the state.

However, appealing to this effect on horizontal relations between citizens seems an oddly indirect way to address our concern about mob rule within the state. It addresses our concern about being dominated by some mob-that-has-taken-power by pointing out that we have very general claims against any form of caste. But it seems to me that what you might most want, in the face of the threat of mob rule, is not the absence of caste, but, more directly, restrictions on the state that ensure that the interests and rights of each natural person are given symmetric standing in the decisions of the state, understood as an agent but not necessarily a natural person. But ensuring that the interests and rights of each natural person are given symmetric standing in the decisions of the state, as an agent, is, in fact, among the jobs done by Kolodny’s tempering factors.

In sum, it seems to me that there are a number of different residues of concern one might have when considering the benevolent despot, each of which will be addressed by Kolodny’s tempering factors. Kolodny draws attention to the despot, himself – to the relation of inferiority we would stand in to the despot, as a natural person. Someone else might be concerned that, under the rule of the benevolent despot, what happens is not up to us, either individually or even collectively. In contrast, I am most concerned about the power of the despot – whether collective or individual. That is to say, I am concerned, not that the dictator is a natural person in the alpha position, but rather that he – or a collectivity in that same role – will, given time, fail to respect the rights and interests of individuals, either because the state will change or because those interests will change as free thinking people alter their ideals and conceptions of the good life. And so the most important function of the tempering factors, it seems to me, is not to temper relations of rank, nor even to allow for collective self determination, but rather to ensure that the powerful state continues to treat the interests of each natural person symmetrically and adequately well – even if the state ceases to be benevolent and even if the individuals’ own understanding of those interests changes over time, given the freedom of her conscience.

Or so it seems to this interloper.Footnote ⁴