In Democracy and the Death of Shame, Jill Locke explores punctuated historical moments of ethical and political dispute and its accompanying philosophical critique which she calls “the Lament that Shame is Dead.” This Lament is a mythological longing or nostalgic belief that shame once protected personal and collective relationships by restraining self-interest and securing moral principles. It is used both politically and philosophically against those vying for a more egalitarian democracy and authentic life by labeling their political and social claims that question social boundaries “shameless” and dangerous for the ethical and social health of the political system. Thus her work is not a sustained theoretical account of shame (to which she devotes a short introductory chapter), but an analysis of four historical moments of the Lament: the cosmopolitan political thought of the Cynic Diogenes, coupled with Plato's corresponding Lament; the French Revolution and Rousseau's problematic simultaneous call to authenticity and invocation of the Lament through reinforcement of female pudeur (modesty); the populism of the Jacksonian presidency and the Eaton Affair, together with Tocqueville's Lament for stabilizing social mores; and school desegregation in the 1960s, with Arendt's Lament that it blurred the distinction between public and private and forced children into an adult political space. Shame, in Locke's analysis, proves ultimately problematic, as it is employed in the critique found both in philosophical argumentation and political rhetoric (more salient in the latter two cases which have more historical documentation) against unashamed citizens who “take things too far” (172) in public activity and speech.

Locke's critique of shame contributes to contemporary debates on political emotions by challenging the argument that a “good” form of shame can support democratic values of diversity and equality when those who pathologize and marginalize the vulnerable are shamed. Locke agrees that shame may support democratic ethics in this way, but as the Lament has and continues to undermine the work of the unashamed citizen, she rejects the claim that shame is necessary for morality (a claim she argues is a form of the Lament) or is a reliable guide to politics because it cannot guarantee or provide automatic egalitarian outcomes.

The most valuable contribution of Locke's argument is her tracing through time the way in which the Lament manifests in the philosophy and rhetorical moments of the political crises under examination. Her analysis of Rousseau, for example, reveals how his philosophy provoked the Lament because it challenged boundaries in its unashamed call for authenticity or authorship of one's own life; yet, since he denied such authenticity to women (although some women like de Gouges rejected this inconsistency) by invoking pudeur, he simultaneously invoked the Lament to ensure that women kept proper modesty in their “nature” as wife and mother. Rousseau's thought thus both challenges and incorporates the Lament. Similarly, in her analysis of Jacksonian democracy, Locke traces Jackson's rise to power to an unashamed anti-intellectual and anti-establishment populism against the “enlightened classes” who invoked the Lament in support of his opponent, the insider John Quincy Adams. Yet for all of Jackson's unashamed support for both his wife (an object of scandal for challenging proper female behavior) and Margaret Eaton (the equally scandalous wife of his secretary of war) as a challenge to the Lament, in the process he delegitimized the voices of women (even if they were proto slut-shamers: 117); and more damagingly, he was equally shameless in his immoral policy of the Indian Removal. In this case, Locke argues, Jackson's “shamelessness is inhumane” (121) and antidemocratic as it invoked imperialistic discourse. In other words, shamelessness or unashamed citizenship also proves to be no guarantee of democratic values. Interestingly, Locke's Jacksonian analysis echoes in the current political landscape, with our climate of anti-intellectualism and a president who, like Jackson, is criticized as crass, unmannered, and “unfit” to lead. If Locke's analysis is correct, the current democratic crisis is unmasking other voices that have been pathologized and marginalized; and the answer to this crisis cannot be the Lament that Shame is Dead.

Thus, Locke's analysis of the Lament reveals it to be a kind of warning or canary in a coal mine. It is invoked in moments of challenge to the norms and boundaries that protect inequalities, but not all excess or shamelessness supports democratic character. In part, this difficulty of determining what is or is not democratic unashamed citizenship is also found in Locke's analysis of Arendt, whose critique of placing children at the frontlines of desegregation does, as Locke points out, contain echoes of the Lament as invoked by white segregationists. Yet, these echoes do not negate the fact that Arendt may have a point that it is problematic to collapse all distinction between public and private, or to subject all social life to public scrutiny and political machinations. As Locke points out in the case of Jackson's Indian Removal, there are still political goals that might be considered “beyond the pale,” even if the “pale” is now defined as equalitarianism. The value of identifying the Lament in a particular case is that invokes the need for more discussion and understanding of the norms being challenged, as well as what an expanded common boundary ought to be.

That shame is as irrelevant to this process as Locke suggests is less clear. She challenges the perspective that shame can aid democratic values because it is unreliable without clear and automatic outcomes or guarantees of egalitarian moral behavior. Yet this expectation appears disingenuous since neither shame nor any other emotion, including shamelessness or (as Locke prefers) unashamed citizenship, guarantees outcomes. Her rejection of shame's relationship to moral behavior may be due to the undertheorizing of shame in her analysis. In a historical perspective, for example, can shame be assumed to be synonymous with the Greek aidōs? Is “shamelessness” distinct from “unashamed”? Could the desire to live free of shame be a new kind of mythological longing? Locke's exposing of the role of the Lament in undermining equalitarian action is engaging, but more work on understanding shame's relationship to the moral high ground, which she does claim for radical democratic values, is required before one can reject shame as unnecessary or irrelevant for human moral action.