In Democratic Responsibility, Nora Hanagan explores the challenges of assessing, assigning, and taking responsibility in a democratic society. The book is primarily concerned with the work of four disparate American thinkers: Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Audre Lorde. The book is a worthwhile contribution to the field of democratic theory but also leaves plenty of room for further research to strengthen some of the ideas and fill some of the holes left behind.

Hanagan’s central question has to do with the “many hands” problem: the difficulty of identifying responsibility when many individuals are involved in some way. This involves what I see as a paradox. As a system becomes more democratic (more people become engaged), responsibility becomes more diffuse, and it becomes harder to hold anyone accountable for injustice. Three kinds of problems are identified at various points in the book: injustices associated with race, gender, class, and other markers of social difference; socioeconomic harm associated with the functioning of capitalist markets; and climate change. That Hanagan makes no attempt to distinguish between these—or consider how they may be connected—is one of the book’s shortcomings.

Chapters on Thoreau, Addams, King, and Lorde are bookended by an introduction and a conclusion. Thoreau contributes a kind of democratic individualism, based on the idea of democracy as a way of life rooted in the concept of self-rule. He is important here for his insistence that a member of a democratic society may be complicit in causing injustice even if he or she does no harm directly. Hanagan is critical of Thoreau, however, because he is dismissive of collective action and even though he recognizes that many social problems are the product of social institutions, he fails to accept that not everyone can isolate themselves from social structures that impede their ability to ensure that every action and every consequence of every action are completely consistent with their values. A key element of Thoreau’s individualism involves a refusal to accept the will of the majority simply because it is the majority’s will. This reflects a second paradox of democratic responsibility (but one not recognized as such by Hanagan): deference to the will of the majority is a democratic value, but as Thoreau and others make clear, individuals who accede to the majority’s will are not thereby free of culpability. To think about this as a paradox would have been fruitful, in particular in engagement with John Stuart Mill’s arguments in On Liberty, but no such discussion is offered.

Like Thoreau, Addams recognizes that many social problems are the product of social institutions, and she emphasizes self-rule and democratic equality. But because she is more attuned than Thoreau to the realities of urban, industrial society and is skeptical of modern individualism, Addams also recognizes a need for collective action and calls for a sense of shared responsibility. Democracy is a “rule of living” (p. 63) premised on equality and dignity that expand the circle of care. Democratic citizenship entails an obligation to address shared problems, and “those who fail to do so deserve blame” for consequences that arise due to their failure to engage with others in addressing these problems (p. 71). Hanagan’s discussion of Addams’s idea of democratic citizenship, referring to it at one point as a way of life that is “not necessarily political” (p. 71), is one example of a lack of clarity throughout the work in defining just what “democracy” really is. She offers various definitions of democracy, usually emphasizing equality and self-rule, but at many points this reader was left wondering just what Hanagan means by the term. To say that democracy is a way of life is fine, but one must provide a bit more substance to explain what that means and how it relates to the political system we generally associate with the term.

With respect to King’s work, democratic responsibility comes into play in several ways. King insists that oppressed people need to take an active role in winning their freedom. There are two elements to this imperative. First, one cannot expect those who enjoy the benefits of power and privilege to give them up without a demand. Second, people must take an active role in the fight for justice because self-rule requires action. In a sense, there are differential responsibilities depending on one’s position within the social structure: those who are culpable for injustice recognize that they are responsible for the harm they have caused and work to address it, whereas those who are victims of injustice must take responsibility for challenging systems of oppression and working to improve their condition. This idea of the different sorts of responsibility held by elites and by the oppressed, although brief, is one of the most valuable parts of the book. However, in this chapter I was once again left wondering why the author chose to include an extended discussion of King’s notion of “creative extremism,” which is not clearly relevant to the question of taking responsibility and raises more questions than it answers. For example, why should we accept that marches and demonstrations are “extreme”? And, do not all extremists for justice think their actions are justified? On what basis might we say they are not justified?

Like King, Lorde emphasizes the importance of oppressed people taking action against injustice as a form of self-rule, although as Hanagan points out she is somewhat less demanding than King. Rather than asking them to put their lives on the line through protest, she calls for “expressive action” through storytelling and art as a means for liberation. Lorde is, however, more demanding than King in saying that victims of injustice who do not speak out may themselves be complicit in their oppression. Although it may be, in Hanagan’s eyes, “unfair” that the victims of oppression must labor to fix problems caused by elites, the democratic value of self-rule and the disdain for paternalistic solutions offered by elites require that they do so. Like Addams and King, Lorde emphasizes the importance of collective action, but unlike them she also stresses the importance of solidarity, even when it requires working with those with whom one may not feel entirely comfortable because of fundamental differences in values and beliefs.

According to Hanagan, democratic responsibility refers to the need to take responsibility for harms in which members of a democratic society are implicated. It resists paternalistic approaches, emphasizes self-rule, and attempts to address factors that discourage the recognition of and response to injustice. She argues that as democratic citizens we must acknowledge complicity for harm even if we cannot take action to address it, and we must take advantage of opportunities to act when they are presented to us. Elites, in particular, must work to lift up marginalized voices and avoid imposing solutions. Democratic responsibility cannot be delegated to the state, because individuals themselves must be engaged in a practice of self-rule: Hanagan tells us in her conclusion that “the most crucial component of democratic responsibility is building and strengthening institutions that enable citizens to solve problems together” such as unions and community-based organizations (p. 160). But is that not the point of government? Do we even live in a democratic society? Hanagan seems to suggest throughout that people can be divided into those who are victims and those who are complicit in causing injustice; yet, are not the people who are victimized by injustice often also complicit in producing it, like all of us who drive yet are still affected by climate change? Hanagan’s Democratic Responsibility ultimately brings some interesting voices into the conversation about the topic but leaves much to be said.