A Democratic Theory of Judgment by Linda M. G. Zerilli

by Linda M. G. Zerilli

In this sweeping look at political and philosophical history, Linda M. G. Zerilli unpacks the tightly woven core of Hannah Arendt’s unfinished work on a tenacious modern how to judge critically in the wake of the collapse of inherited criteria of judgment. Engaging a remarkable breadth of thinkers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglas, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and many others, Zerilli clears a hopeful path between an untenable universalism and a cultural relativism that forever defers the possibility of judging at all. Zerilli deftly outlines the limitations of existing debates, both those that concern themselves with the impossibility of judging across cultures and those that try to find transcendental, rational values to anchor judgement. Looking at Kant through the lens of Arendt, Zerilli develops the notion of a public conception of truth, and from there she explores relativism, historicism, and universalism as they shape feminist approaches to judgment. Following Arendt even further, Zerilli arrives at a hopeful new pathway—seeing the collapse of philosophical criteria for judgment not as a problem but a way to practice judgment anew as a world-building activity of democratic citizens. The result is an astonishing theoretical argument that travels through—and goes beyond—some of the most important political thought of the modern period.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

Paperback

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a poignant image related by the novelist Mary McCarthy in her postface to Hannah Arendt's last and famously unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, McCarthy writes of how 'After [Arednt's] death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading 'Judging" and two epigraphs. Some time between the Saturday of finishing "Willing" [the book's penultimate division] and the Thursday of her death, she must have sat down to confront the final section". That Arendt never carried out that confrontation has been rightly recognised as perhaps among the greatest loses of political philosophy in the twentieth century. With the appearance of Linda Zerilli's magnificent new work however - the aptly titled A Democratic Theory of Judgement - the intellectual deficit which has plagued our contemporary milieu might finally be given some measure of settlement.

What, then, is the big deal? Why judgement? And why a 'democratic theory' of it? Well for one thing, for Arendt as for Zerilli, judgement simply is the human political faculty par excellence: to come down on one side or the other of a dispute, to judge a cultural practice acceptable or not, and even - or especially - to critically reflect on our own criteria of judgement, to cultivate new objects of judgement, and in turn, new worlds in which judgement takes place - this is politics. And a 'democratic theory'? Well, if the work of judgement marks the work of politics, then how do we accommodate the differing - and often competing - ways in which democratic citizens and institutions approach their own practices of judging? It's these questions - asked not only by Zerilli but by the entire tradition of democratic thought - that are here taken up, in ways both strikingly original and brilliantly conceived.

Indeed, it's through her confrontation with just that tradition that Zerilli goes about establishing her position, one perched almost exactly half-way between the seemingly intractable divide between universalism and relativism. That is, faced with the choice of demanding universal, context-invariant criteria of judgement on the one hand, and entirely 'local', culturally specific criteria on the other, Zerilli's book opens up a middle path, one sensitive to both time and place without, for all that, giving up the claim to critical judgement. In fact, this ability to 'mediate' between otherwise well entrenched theoretical oppositions more or less defines Zerilli's exquisite practice as a philosopher, with almost every chapter here taking on and reorienting entire fields of debate for the sake of 'a democratic theory of judgement': from the question of historicism in the work of Leo Strauss, to the liberal feminism Susan Moller Okin, the debates over 'aesthetic judgement' in both Hume and Kant, along with the merits of 'ordinary language philosophy' in Wittgenstein and Cavell - all of these and more are subject to Zerilli's encyclopaedic grasp and pioneering reading.

And to get personal for a moment, this is, in truth, the kind of book I've been looking for ever since I've started reading political theory. A disbeliever in any kind of God-given or absolutist conceptions of political rule, and allergic to the charge of relativist infirmity, to be graced by the power and insight of Zerilli's arguments against both, and in favour of a real, positively articulated alternative, marks this as simply one of the most edifying reading experiences I've had in a long time. Coupled too, with reflections on some of my favourite philosophers ever - Arendt, Wittgenstein, and the vastly under-appreciated William Connolly - A Democratic Theory of Judgement will undoubtedly coast its way into that pantheon of books I've come to know as my favourites. So if you only ever read one book of political philosophy this year, make it this one.

[Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Let us remain unmoved by the philosophers who chide us about the "queer" status of that claim. Let us put forward substantive public visions of what we hold to be right and just and debate these without the aid of the newfangled democratic criteria created in the academic laboratories of ideal theory. Finally, let us trust that what we seek when we judge politically is, as Wittgenstein put it, "already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.' (From the Book)