“All around the world, democracy looks broken.” The first line of Danielle Allen and Rohini Somanathan’s edited volume sets the tone and points to the stakes of the important and rigorous work that will open for the reader over the next 11 chapters. The project of Difference without Domination is manifold, with two main conceptual moves underlying the rich and varied text. First and foremost, this volume presents a clear, well-reasoned set of arguments pointing out that the abstract universalisms that failed to take race, socioeconomic positioning, and dominative relations embedded in social, legal, economic, and institutional frameworks into account explicitly—whatever their merits—are now moribund. Furthermore, the operationalization of equality as “statistical mirroring” in positive social science does not actually provide the kind of data required for the pursuit of more just polities. Second, the volume is a methodological intervention that insists that we move beyond cordoning off ethics and theory from positive science because our global situation is such that our thinking must be as capacious, robust, and intricate as the problems we face. Ultimately, the authors seek to “reground conceptions of justice in an ideal of nondomination and political equality” (p. 4).

The volume, which is a welcome methodological blend of positive social science and political theory, urges a paradigm shift from the concept of equality as nondiscrimination as evidenced by statistical mirroring to nondomination as evidenced by the ability of marginalized and minoritized people to wield power over their lives and over decision-making in the polity. Consequently, Allen argues in the first essay that difference without domination should replace John Rawl’s difference principle because the difference principle is not attentive enough to real power asymmetries in the world as it is. She points out that there is no functional divide between the liberty of the ancients (positive liberty) and the liberty of the moderns (negative liberty) because the former is required for the latter. Allen and the group of authors she and Somanathan have assembled have sought to define a framework in which neither private nor public liberty is sacrificable because human beings require both to ensure that they are able to live with dignity in society. Melvin Rogers helpfully points out that this is not only a matter of law but also a matter of social disposition. As Frederick Douglass observed, one can be free by law (not the slave of any master) while still being “a slave of the community” (that is, regarded as exploitable and disposable and undeserving of dignity). Rogers argues, quite rightly, that there is a through line between African American political thought of the nineteenth century and the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Black political thinkers asked then and continue to ask now, “not merely for a change in laws but also, as a condition for sustaining and underwriting a just society, for a deeper change in who we Americans take ourselves to be” (p. 64).

In some ways, this is an unexpected compilation because it is an assemblage of authors who, on the whole, do not consider themselves revolutionary political thinkers—who are, in fact, quite skeptical of the traditions of revolutionary thought inherited from the twentieth century, but who are nevertheless arguing for a revelatory change in perspective because the world as it is requires it. Such is the depth and urgency of the problems that we face.

Although each chapter approaches a different issue and articulates the principle of difference without domination from the point of view of myriad disciplines and methodologies—from political theory to history, law, psychology, and economics—the bottom line is that people in the world who share polities must come to believe that dignity itself is a political end and learn the ways that we have arranged society that bar some from leading dignified lives. This is not only an ethical imperative, but one that is necessary for the survival of democracy. Democratic politics only helps us meet the challenges that face us in the twenty-first century—from environmental catastrophe to the increasing embrace of fascism —if we can find ways to practice habits of nondomination that can be enacted in social life and built into institutions, thereby training ourselves and each other to value equality as a dynamic substantive good rather than a static formal designation. As Urs Linder helpfully points out in his chapter, paraphrasing Charles Tilly and drawing on the work of Iris Young, inequality is not a matter of distribution along a single hierarchy. It is instead a maze of relations from which dominative forms spring and have their various affects across social strata in differing ways and at differing times. Our task, these authors argue, is to explicitly and straightforwardly develop practices capable of undoing domination in the present moment and to expect to continue to do so as circumstances change and as new sites of domination arise.

Although the careful consideration that each chapter deserves is not possible given the length of this review, I would like to turn the reader’s attention to a few additional contributions. Calvin Lai and Mahzarin Banaji’s chapter is rigorous and careful. They assemble data indicating that implicit bias is a measure of social standing more than one of in-group preference. But ultimately, implicit bias is a measure of individual psychology, and it is hard to decipher what the implications are for society at the meso- or macrolevels. However, they make two points that are not normally foregrounded in the literature on implicit bias and that do create interesting fodder for investigation and action. First, we ought not despair. It is important to remember that human beings can and therefore should change our minds about the necessity of dignity, particularly for marginalized people. It is not impossible, and we know this because although “[t]he brains of humans today…are no different from those of their ancestors…our minds are unrecognizably different” (p. 130). Another important point is that bias based on social standing can be reduced just by making participants in experiments less stressed. This means that creating social structures in which people could flourish might decrease bias on its own, increasing or eclipsing the impact of the modestly effective measures of “blinding” or the promotion of counter-stereotypical associations that the authors recommend. This is an important insight for those considering what makes efficacious public policy. One part of pursuing a world in which nondomination is a social habit must be to create a social and economic framework where people are able to worry less about meeting basic needs and spend more time on self-development and self-determination. Such freedom makes it easier for people to think through whether their actions accord with their principles and would have knock-on effects that have not been taken seriously enough in either political theory or positivist social science.

In a chapter focused on the carceral crisis in the United States, Rajiv Sethi argues that disparate rates of offense and victimization are the result of stereotypes that create an incentive-driven cycle of harm. The author finds that most killing—by civilians and police—is preemptive killing carried out because of fear-based assessments of how likely one is to be killed by the other party. In other words, one of the tragic ironies of white-supremacist stereotypes is that they cause people to act as though they are in a racially coded state of nature and, through the acting, are more likely to render this fantasy a fact that is then misunderstood, which leads to ever more harm.

Heather Gerken’s examination and reclamation of the goods of what she calls “second order diversity” (a feature of federated governance that allows national minorities local control) is a clever and necessary intervention. In the chapter, she argues that federated authority can be good for minority communities and that fear of white-supremacist uptake of these tools should not prevent scholars or practitioners from availing themselves of their benefits. These include experience practicing politics—the key, she argues, to the practice of freedom far exceeding “a static, almost apolitical conception of rights” (p. 228)—and wielding decision-making power. She argues convincingly that “decentralization is useful for promoting equality norms because it doesn’t reproduce the same democratic dynamics in every decision-making body, nor does it condemn racial minorities to the permanent status of influencer or dissenter” (p. 244), thereby making room for marginalized people to not only “speak truth to power” but to speak truth with power (p. 227).

In sum, the volume argues that to answer the problem of inequality, ultimately, we must decide that the construction of democratic polities is an ongoing and ethical enterprise that needs to be undergirded—as Somanathan argues in his chapter—by sound, accurate, and refocused empirical observation. Constituting democracies in this way requires a series of actions based on bad habits that we can allow to fester and/or better habits that we can learn to cultivate so that they are in accordance with shared principles and beliefs. These better habits will require innovative thinking that is willing to let go of truisms and conventions that no longer serve us, as Ellen Wu and Claudio López-Guerra’s chapters show. However, the volume does not address the very real prospect that the pursuit of equality might no longer be (if it ever was) a value that is even rhetorically shared, or that there seems to be little agreement on what constitutes justice. If we start from a place where we entertain the possibility that there is no democratic consensus, then a different set of questions might arise. This is a weakness, although an understandable one, given that political theory has taken the aspiration toward democracy’s ideal form as a baseline for more than 100 years. Still, it is something that I wish the authors had confronted. It is something that we all must confront, given the evidence of our age.

With that caveat aside, this book’s greatest contribution is that it urges us to attend with new (or renewed) urgency to that question that echoes from the first section: Who are we? Who should we be? Glenn Loury asks this question, with an earnestness uncharacteristic of those writing in economics, in an essay that he subtitles “a personal plea.” Addressing those who say of Black struggle, “that’s not my country. That’s some third world thing,” he counters, “it’s a lie. Black people in [America] have been [here] for 250 years. They’re not aliens. They’re as American as you can get, as American as anybody can be. That was us down there crawling on the rooftops. That was us huddled in the Superdome. That was us” (p. 184). Although I do not find the out-of-place and counterproductive references to “behavioral problems” and “self-destructive folly” that Loury includes accurate or resonant, the deep and honest adjuration at the heart of the piece is consistent with two and a half centuries of Black political thought that has continually demanded that America take off its blinders and look around. Because this—all of this—is us.

Although this volume suggests a necessary paradigm shift and points the reader’s attention toward modest actions that may help us to begin to inhabit a world where dignity and nondomination are the watchwords of political evaluation, there is also a further set of unsettling but crucial questions lurking unhappily between the lines: What more will we have to give up if we choose the path of domination? What scale of devastation will we have to endure if we continue to kowtow to and reinscribe white supremacy; the unbridled, exploitative acquisition of the rich (both people and countries); the maldistribution of dignity based on gender, gender expression, and sexual identity; the brutal myopia of empire? Will we sacrifice democracy itself on these ill-begotten yet well-tended altars?

The authors of this volume work to provide some guideposts on a path away from such calamity, but they are not all certain that America or the world will choose the high road. Ajume Wingo writes, “What will it take, realistically speaking, to level-up everyone in America?…[D]ignity as a political good is very expensive” (p. 165). Indeed, it is. It is important to be honest with ourselves: what are we willing to invest to save the democratic aspiration? To embark, as Audre Lorde wrote, from the “shoreline” of modernity into a contemporary era in which we not only say we believe, but act as though we matter to ourselves and to one another.