Jill Locke’s powerful Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance could not be more timely. As accusations of shameful behavior resound in the corridors of political, corporate, and cultural power, we should reflect on the role of shame and shaming in democratic politics and society, writ large. Locke urges us to reconsider historical and contemporary uses of the discourse of shame and their often pernicious effects. Rejecting the view that shame has any ontological basis that might make it a guide to action (p. 128), instead she argues persuasively that a particular discourse of shame—what she calls “The Lament That Shame Is Dead” (Chapter 1)—functions as a “brake” (p. 6) against social disturbance, one that disciplines and restrains political actors whom she calls “unashamed citizens” (p. 12).

Locke makes this argument through careful, novel, and provocative interpretations of diverse thinkers and their historical contexts. In Chapter 1, she defines shame as “a felt ethic of obligation and regulation that involves an actual or internalized audience that judges one’s thoughts and acts” according to “norms or standards” that we “share (or are expected to share) with others” (p. 19, emphasis original). Those who are shameless “operate with an unfettered and unregulated desire to fulfill their own needs” without regard for others (ibid). “The Lament That Shame Is Dead” tells “a nostalgic story of an imagined past that represents a longing for a mythical time and place when shame secured and regulated social life” (p. 18). In a brilliant conceptual, rhetorical, and political move, Locke refigures those named “shameless” as “unashamed citizens” who challenge “the terms of shame and shaming, dethrone the arbiters of what counts as officially political, claim space for themselves in the world by any means available, and fight for a reconstituted social order that gives real meaning to democratic commitments” (p. 12).

Locke then shows how the Lament has been deployed and resisted through engagements with a wide range of thinkers and their contexts. In Chapter 2 she addresses Plato’s own lament and Diogenes’ unapologetic “shamelessness.” Challenging readings of Diogenes by cosmopolitans, Socratic democrats, and postmodern Kynics, Locke presents him as an exemplary unashamed citizen who flouts social norms in the name of democratic equality. In Chapter 3 she argues that Rousseau’s appreciation for authenticity contains the seeds of an unashamed politics, but that “pudeur”—his parallel insistence on feminine modesty—reflects the Lament both in France and in Rousseau’s thought. In Chapter 4 she addresses the strategic deployment of the Lament in attacks on Andrew Jackson and his wife, and also argues that criticism of Jackson’s odious policy of “Indian removal” obscured the Lament’s operation. In chapter 5 Locke addresses Arendt’s notorious critique of school desegregation in “Reflections on Little Rock,” an iteration of the Lament that targets “audacity” and “hubris” (p. 136). However well intentioned, she argues, that criticism not only could not protect black children as Arendt had argued the NAACP failed to do; but it also aligned with segregationist arguments and white supremacy. Arendt’s philosophical and political insistence on maintaining the public/private distinction polices the boundaries of the political in ways that expunged integrationist concerns from the public realm and cast integration activists as “shameless” subjects for bringing what is properly “private” into its light.

In her conclusion, Locke turns toward the question that I had—and, I suspect, many readers may have—throughout the book: Despite the perils of the Lament, is shame still valuable and necessary? Her answer seems to be yes and no. She argues that diagnosing political problems as failures of shame “plays into a fantasy about shame’s regulative power,” “reads inequalities and injustices as moral failings,” “obscures the contexts” that produce inequality and injustice (p. 169), and “indulges in . . . antiegalitarian nostalgia” (p. 170). In that sense, shame is neither necessary nor desirable. On the other hand, she notes, unashamed citizens “are not simply trying to . . . live in a perfect, ideal state where no one ever has a bad feeling or negative emotion about themselves. They do not look to erase the ethical antennae that shame provides” (p. 171). So despite the perils of the Lament, shame has some value in democratic politics.

Democracy and The Death of Shame represents political theory at its finest and most effective: Locke combines provocative textual and historical interpretation with incisive and sometimes searing political critique. Her analysis also leaves me with several questions.

First, is “The Lament That Shame Is Dead” in the first instance a lament about shame? Or has something else died, and the discourse of shame mobilized to resurrect it? There are some hints of this throughout the book. Plato’s identification of Diogenes as a “Socrates gone mad” evokes the death not of shame but of reason, and it is reason that ought to tame Diogenes’ unruly spirit. Elsewhere, Locke links shame with humility (p. 6, p. 9). This suggests that what has been lost is not necessarily shame, but a sense of something larger than ourselves to which we owe, if not fealty, then a kind of reverence. That something could be God or gods, reason or Reason, ideals or an Ideal. In Arendt’s case it might be the public realm, which we both create and depend upon, and is the site of what she tellingly refers to as the “miracle” of action. From this perspective the unruly appear to have rebelled against their own frail humanity in a quasi-Nietzschean attempt at self-overcoming, offending against a quasi-divine order and threatening those whose power that order authorizes. The discourse of shame, then, seeks to enforce humility through humiliation, restoring rule to the unruly by amplifying the smallness of their stature and simultaneously protecting the powerful whose position is authorized by what the unruly threaten.

Second, what is ultimately the political status of shame? On the one hand, for Locke the deployment of the Lament is problematic; on the other, an idea of shame orients our “ethical antennae.” To the extent that it does this, Locke overstates her case when she says that it is mere “fantasy” that shame serves as a “moral guide” (p. 168). What counts as shameful may be historically contingent rather than natural, universal, or transhistorical, but in any given time or place ideas about shame do guide us, if imperfectly. This tension might stem from a conflation of the claim about shame as a moral guide with another—which I think is exactly right—that shame “lacks an ontology that secures any normative politics” (p. 74). This conflation reflects a broader tendency among scholars engaging in what we might call “ontology critique” to move from the persuasive claim that politics lacks firm ontological ground, to the questionable one that a particular practice lacks any guides at all. Locke risks disposing of what value shame has, despite its perils.

Finally, while Locke persuasively demonstrates how the Lament seeks to discipline “unashamed citizens” and thus contain struggles for justice and equality, might shaming function the same way within the very political movements animated by unashamed citizenship? Shame seems to be an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary struggles for justice and equality, one that threatens to reproduce the Lament’s disciplinary effects: Disputes over strategy become shaming accusations that one is not committed, or properly committed, to the cause, as if any given cause is singular and uniform and admits of only one sort of commitment, while a movement’s supporters are frequently shamed for being “bad allies.” Such disciplining of supporters may foreclose possibilities for engagement that those not directly involved in or impacted by a movement might be better—or at least differently—positioned to see. Such intra-movement shaming splinters and threatens to derail the struggles that unashamed citizens wage.

Democracy and The Death of Shame is a very important book. It should be read widely, by students of the history of political thought and by those driven by the urgency of contemporary struggles for justice and equality.