The Pecking Order : Social Hierarchy as a Philosophical Problem / Niko Kolodny.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kolodny, Niko, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy and social sciences.

Political science--Philosophy.

Political science.

Social stratification--Philosophy.

Social stratification.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (432 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A trenchant case for a novel philosophical position: that our political thinking is driven less by commitments to freedom or fairness than by an aversion to hierarchy.Niko Kolodny argues that, to a far greater extent than we recognize, our political thinking is driven by a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. In order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse—the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption—we cannot merely appeal to freedom, as libertarians do, or to distributive fairness, as liberals do. We must instead appeal directly to claims against inferiority—to the conviction that no one should stand above or below.The problem of justifying the state, for example, is often billed as the problem of reconciling the state with the freedom of the individual. Yet, Kolodny argues, once we press hard enough on worries about the state’s encroachment on the individual, we end up in opposition not to unfreedom but to social hierarchy. To make his case, Kolodny takes inspiration from two recent trends in philosophical thought: on the one hand, the revival of the republican and Kantian traditions, with their focus on domination and dependence; on the other, relational egalitarianism, with its focus on the effects of the distribution of income and wealth on our social relations.The Pecking Order offers a detailed account of relations of inferiority in terms of objectionable asymmetries of power, authority, and regard. Breaking new ground, Kolodny looks ahead to specific kinds of democratic institutions that could safeguard against such relations.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: A Negative Observation and a Positive Conjecture

I A First Instance of the Negative Observation: Justifying the State

1 The Received Materials: Improvement and Invasion

2 Is the Claim against the State’s Force?

3 Is the Claim against the State’s Threats?

4 Last Attempts

II The Positive Conjecture: Claims against Inferiority

5 Relations of Inferiority

6 Disparities of Regard

7 Reductive Gambits

8 The State and the Secondary Tempering Factors

9 The State and the Firm

10 Collective Inferiority

III Further Instances

11 Claims against Corruption: The Negative Observation

12 Claims against Corruption: The Positive Conjecture

13 Claims against Discrimination

14 Claims to Equal Treatment

15 Claims to the Rule of Law

16 Claims to Equal Liberty

17 Claims to Equality of Opportunity

18 Claims against Poverty, Relative and Absolute

19 Claims against Illiberal Interventions: The Negative Observation

20 Claims against Illiberal Interventions: The Positive Conjecture

IV Contrasts

21 Being No Worse Off

22 Relations of Equality

23 Nondomination

V A Last Instance: Democracy

24 Preliminaries

25 The Negative Observation: Correspondence

26 The Negative Observation: Influence

27 The Positive Conjecture: Equal Influence

VI A Democracy Too Lenient and Too Demanding?

28 Pathologies of American Democracy

29 The Permissiveness of Formal Equality

30 Gerrymandering: A Case Study of Permissiveness

31 The Demandingness of Informal Equality

32 Arbitrary Voting

Conclusion: Not So Much Liberty As Noninferiority

Notes

References

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 27. Jan 2023)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780674292826

0674292820

9780674292819

0674292812

OCLC:

1366102316