Jill Locke's Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance arrives at a moment when American politics seems awash in shamelessness and increasingly short on equality. With political leadership demonstrating that shamelessness can masquerade as a lack of concern for political correctness and the admirable trait of speaking truth to power, the reader might be justified in asking why we need a defense of unashamed citizenship. Locke's work gives us the resources to grapple with our current condition, at the same time that it offers a new genealogy of the role(s) of shame in political thought. The dual emphases of this book—the historical and the contemporary—render it essential reading for understanding this particular political moment.
Because of the ways in which Locke nuances our understanding of shame, the book often feels marked with a profound ambivalence toward its subject. Yet it also offers new means of navigating both rejections of, and calls for, shame in contemporary politics. In the first chapter, Locke introduces what she calls “The Lament That Shame Is Dead” (stylized throughout as The Lament), which is advanced by forces within a given society as a means of critiquing the confessional, or therapeutic, turn in political life. In Locke's telling, The Lament's advocates treat shame as a useful regulatory heuristic for governing which issues and emotions are worthy of public airing. There is thus a strong sense of nostalgia associated with The Lament, with proponents bemoaning the loss of what is variously characterized as civility, decency, propriety, or prudence.
There is also an antidemocratic flavor to The Lament. Locke aligns the “shameless” or “unashamed” citizen with the political outsider, the marginalized, and the pariah—figures who appeal to ideals of authenticity and self-realization as the highest good as a means of justifying their demands for inclusion. Shamelessness is thus the domain of those abused, neglected, or altogether excluded from political life, those who “empty their more intimate life stories into the public and undress their bodies before potentially hostile audiences in order to make political demands” (25). To elaborate on an example that Locke draws from Thomas Nagel, the Lamenters liken such figures to party crashers, turning a civilized cocktail party into a rave. Yet the party crashers’ demand is one that any democrat should have trouble denying: the right to full political participation. The four central chapters of Locke's book offer a “genealogy” of shameless claims to political inclusion that stretches back to Diogenes the Cynic, turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Olympe de Gouges, then pivots, in the book's most rewarding chapter, to Andrew Jackson's troubling shamelessness, and closes with an examination of Hannah Arendt's controversial writings on school integration.
Locke's central claim is that these frequent invocations of shame point not to its death but rather to its political versatility. Ultimately, however, it tends to produce negative consequences for both its defenders and its would-be vanquishers, and she demonstrates these multifaced effects through her interpretations of Diogenes, Rousseau, Jackson, and Arendt. For the Lamenters, “much of the fear about shame's death and the desire to restore or recuperate its regulative characteristics reflects a fear about ordinary, nonelite democratic citizens fashioning themselves and the world without regard for the anchoring and governing traditions and institutions of the past” (11). But even those “theorists and citizens largely committed to democratic practices and principles take up versions of The Lament as they, too, seek to quell the social disturbance that meaningful democratic ideals of equality and self-fashioning necessarily bring about” (23). As for the shameless, “efforts by dispossessed peoples to shame those who exploit them do not typically deliver the moral correction they desire” (102).
There are two issues I wish had been attended to in greater detail in Locke's book. The first is the nature of shame, which receives scant attention (19–20) compared with the discussion of its effects. Locke often depicts shame as an emotion experienced by an individual, incapable of producing political change. For instance, the notion that shame might be employed productively is described as a “fantasy” that is “tied to a highly individualistic account of moral agency as a lever for changing collective social dynamics. It reads inequalities and injustices as moral failings of people with bad hearts who need to be shamed into proper moral and political action” (169). Yet it is not clear why shame cannot be experienced by groups and thus why it cannot lead to reform. Particularly in light of Locke's attention to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More as examples of unashamed citizenship, the characterization of shame as individualistic rankles. Nor does it seem consistent with attention paid elsewhere in the text to the Lamenters’ exclusion of entire groups that “take things too far” (see, e.g., 22, 25, 54, 65, 92). If gay liberation groups, the Senate Judiciary Committee, ancient Cynics, and the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters have all been accused of shamelessness, why cannot they also experience shame as collective entities?
The second issue follows from the first: there is relatively little attention paid to the relationship, and difference, between guilt and shame. Jennifer Jacquet recently highlighted a distinction between the two in Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool (Reference Jacquet2014), arguing that shame requires a public, or audience, whereas guilt is an internal quality often associated with the conscience (one has a guilty conscience, after all, not a shamed conscience). Locke's insistence that a reliance on shame “erases the larger forces in motion”—for instance, facing issues such as “environmental devastation and police brutality”—does not quite explain why that must be the case. Likewise, Locke's hypothetical police officer worried about brutality does not seem to internalize shame, as Locke argues, but guilt (169).
These quibbles aside, Locke's book is a beautifully written contribution to contemporary democratic thought, feminist theory, and burgeoning literatures on the emotions. Its argument is counterintuitive, its case studies are unexpected and well chosen, and it offers new theoretical resources for increasing equality in democratic communities. Anyone with interests in the these literatures, or contemporary theory in general, will profit from reading it.
