Responsibility is unavoidable in a world marked by significant differences in access to political representation, unequal distribution of wealth, irreversible climate change, and the near-daily images of human suffering in lands both near and distant. As participants of late-capitalist processes, we find our lives intertwined in terms both planetary and socioeconomic with developments elsewhere. So too, therefore, are our investments—whether shallow or deep—in systems responsible for sustaining injustice. Burdens of Political Responsibility investigates the ways in which our awareness of those investments is both constrained and liberated by the narratives we tell about the world we inhabit with others. Jade Schiff also encourages us to consider how developing richer narratives might further develop our capacity to become responsive. On this view, such responsivity, by moving us beyond willful ignorance but remaining this side of direct action, serves as a necessary via media through which citizens of late-modern societies can address the fearsome responsibility that weighs on us all.

Responsiveness, as Schiff defines it, is “the acknowledgement and experience of connections between our everyday activities and the suffering of others” (p. 34). Her definition of responsiveness accounts for both the cognitive and affective blockages that forestall responsivity to the suffering of others. Narratives can occlude from view our interconnectedness by either narrowing the aperture through which we see ourselves and our capacities or by widening it to encompass the complexity of the world we inhabit with others. A significant portion of the book carefully maps structures that inhibit our responsiveness. The author engages thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Bourdieu to explain how thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition chain our capacity to think about, to act upon, and to recognize our immersion in social and economic practices of late-modern capitalism.

Schiff’s assessment of the role that thoughtlessness plays in our lives is predicated on the Arendtian understanding of thinking as a dialogue between the self and the conscience. Once removed from the plurality of the world, the conscience ceases to speak in anything other than ideological catchphrases. In effect, ideological thoughtlessness lends the sheen of “everydayness” to brutalities and covers the world—following the example of Adolf Eichmann—in a “blanket of complacency with which individuals” shield themselves from their responsibility (p. 69). Generating responsivity requires not only a reimmersion in plural narratives that restore our sense of right and wrong, but also a commitment to thinking itself that critically questions why some narratives have greater purchase in our society than others. Thinking, in Arendt’s words, itself becomes “dangerous.”

Unlike the involuntary slide into thoughtlessness that obscures the nature of reality, bad faith constitutes a choice to deny our own freedom to transform our interactions with the world. Instead of recognizing ourselves as subjects (and therefore, in part, agents) of late-modern societies, we instead choose to perceive ourselves as objects. In this way, we “avoid the freedom to choose ourselves and the responsibility that attends our choices” (p. 95). Even as bad faith protects us from the crushing awareness of our total responsibility to the world, it also acts as an impediment to our capacity to respond to its demands. Becoming responsive to the world requires, therefore, diagnostic narratives that “reveal our choices as choices, thereby undoing the self-deceptions through which we come to see ourselves as passive objects rather than active, responsible subjects” (p. 113).

By turning to Bourdieu’s neglected concept of misrecognition, Schiff develops a third element that obscures our sense of responsibility. Arendt’s and Sartre’s respective accounts are broadly phenomenological and existential. Bourdieu adds an objective structural element by way of his conceptualization of habitus, a term that signifies processes that turn contingent social formations into seemingly inevitable natural products. Misrecognition, then, becomes the “defensive operations of the self as it struggles to recognize” its historical constitution (p. 130) by making the world ahistorical and natural. But habitus also contains an element of improvisation that is necessary for responding to a changing world. Narratives that challenge the natural givenness of the world return to us our awareness of the fragility upon which social structures exist and thus enable us to combat the draw of misrecognition.

Narratives, Schiff notes, draw on our mimetic capacity to abstract away from concrete situations and transpose them into our own world. She examines three moments of the mimetic process through which narratives acquire their power to combat the effects of thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narratives render “visible or invisible our implication in the suffering of others” (p. 154), make palpable the dynamism of plural conceptual structures in which we are embedded, and help us both connect and separate ourselves from others’ experience. Here it is helpful to note that the author’s analysis is laced throughout with an assessment of how disruptive events disclose the need for richer narratives. Crises catalyze the movement away from thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition because they reveal the inadequacy of existing narratives for explaining cataclysmic events. As such, they provide an opening for the mimetic function of narratives to broaden and deepen our understanding of the world. By exploring two novelistic accounts of the success and failure of narratives to restore our sense of responsivity, Schiff closes the book with a call for citizen-storytellers who are “attuned to the affective stances and communicative distortions that always mark political conversations” (p. 193).

The book invites us to ask broader questions about where the work of narratives ought to be situated in relation to the work of political theory/literature and concrete political action. Nevertheless, at several points, Schiff approaches, but leaves aside, the very important question of not only how the need for responsivity comes to be felt at all, but also how it is to be transformed into a concrete political project. The reader is often left with the sense that crises—broadly defined—are supposed to act as an interface that connects the normative development of a theory of responsiveness with political openings for cultivating responsiveness. But this answer feels inadequate. In effect, we are told that those who have a greater sensitivity to the world are the ones likeliest to feel the need for richer narratives. Where, in other words, is the politics of responsibility? Obviously, charting the ways in which an individual ethos of responsivity can connect with politics is beyond the purview of this very good book. And so, I take the book as the author’s invitation to the reader to imagine how a politics of responsive narratives might come into being.

This criticism apart, Burdens of Political Responsibility is exceptionally well written, and as an analysis of the impediments to responsivity, it provides brilliant insights into the multiple strategies through which we fail to acknowledge and feel the weight of our responsibilities. For this, it is a crucial intervention in debates that seek to frame the nature of responsibility in a late-capitalist world. Indeed, it not only stands alongside other contemporary books addressed to such questions but also develops meaningfully upon the important work of Iris Marion Young, from whom Schiff draws considerable inspiration throughout the text.