The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship

by Stacy Clifford Simplican

In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today.

Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma.
Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

Genres: Nonfiction, Disability, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Academic, Academia

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2015

About the author

Stacy Clifford Simplican is a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University and the DOCTRID Research Institute, which focuses on improving the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities.

Reviews

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

It feels wrong to criticise what is largely an academic text for being too academic, but that was a real problem I had with this book. I went into it expecting maybe a little more political theory or something, so that is on me, but the bulk of this book was actually textual analysis of 17th century philosophy and that sort of stuff. It was a weird one though, with what I would call wildly fluctuating readability.

The introduction briefly discusses a meeting of a disability rights self-advocacy group of the sort which will return in the final chapter, although it then spends a long time telling you what it is about to tell you (something I found annoying throughout the book actually, although again maybe that is an academic element I am unfamiliar with). Either way, that set the tone for the book in a thoroughly misleading way because then it switched into a tedious analysis of the work of John Locke and his definition of idiocy.

The second chapter - Manufacturing Anxiety - was significantly more accessible, in part I think because it cycled through discussion of the works of Itard, Goddard, Down, and their contemporaries, seeking to draw a sort of narrative thread between these instead of deep diving into one person's work like the Locke chapter.

The third - The Disavowal of Disability in Contemporary Contract Theory - again focused on a number of cases, although I frankly found it less engaging again anyway.

Up until this point, I was essentially slogging through the book because I had built it up in my head for a long time before I bought it and didn't want to abandon it. I was getting through an average of a little under two pages a day (although to be fair I am normally slow with non-fiction as I tend to read several fiction books during the course of each non-fiction to give me time to digest and keep motivation up).

And then in the final two chapters - one about repurposing the work of Hannah Arendt to discuss self-advocacy for intellectually disabled people and one more anecdotal chapter about the author's experiences with the self-advocacy movement - it suddenly became more engaging again. I don't know if part of this was snowballing momentum as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but frankly I walked away from it thinking that the first section of the introduction and these two chapters comprised the book Simplican really wanted to write, but to avoid it being a pamphlet she decided to throw in effectively a review of the literature to pad it out.

At least putting the good bits right at the beginning and end was probably a wise structural decision for leaving people with fonder memories.

One for the scholars, I think.

[Eoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging on a number of levels but excellent.

[Tim Hannifin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested to hear her explore more the ways in which abled anxiety harms people with disabilities. Unfortunately, for me at least, this seemed pretty muddled, there were some examples and nods to its existence but little to no analysis.

I thought humor and dance were interesting suggestions as ways to potentially address this. I did like the novelty of this approach. When I read in the introduction she was referencing dance I wasn't sure where she was going but in my rather limited experience with such things it does seem to be quite powerful as a force for connection across many otherwise difficult to cross barriers.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very excellent work that identifies the connection between capacity and the opportunity to participate in the larger social contract. In many ways, this dimension of access is the one most impacted by the West's "medical model" of disability.
Simplican's book should be read, but it should also force you to ask fundamental questions once you reach its conclusion: What is it, then, that grants full citizenship and access to persons? On what basis can we determine that someone ought to be afforded access, and by "inalienable" right is this access granted?

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read that clearly demonstrates how the way we typically think about politics excludes those with intellectual disabilities, and how those with intellectual disabilities are participating in politics.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, I tore through it, will expand later. Needs more laughter and dance. ;)

[Shaan Amin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting discussion of the history of social contract thought vis-a-vis intellectual disability, where intellectual disability is at first explicitly, and then implicitly, used to demarcate the bounds of political engagement and with that citizenship

In place of the domination contract, which structures a hierarchy based on capacity---and, as Simplican points out briefly---a capacity that is largely fictive and illusory for *most* people, Simplican advocates to replace it with a solidarity contract, which I think of as a Sontag-esque understanding of social insurance. We all recognize that we did not always have cognitive capacity, and may not have it again in the future, and so we strive to create a system that recognizes that shared vulnerability and insures against when we might fall below whatever threshold the "domination contract" insists is necessary for political participation.


Fruitful, thought-provoking components in this book are many. For one, the note of madness being the temporary (and thus, theoretically recoverable) loss of cognitive faculty, while other terms ("idiocy", "changeling") referred to some permanent limitation that therefore, in Locke's mind and the minds of early scientific professionals in medicine and psych, barred them from full citizenship or even full humanity, as the term "changeling" makes painfully explicit.

For another, the ways in which marginalized groups have sought to distance themselves from inaccurate stereotypes of them being more intellectually disabled than white men, and in part how their movements were built on separating themselves from (and above) the intellectually disabled.

Third, the movement history of the intellectually disabled: scientific practitioners -> addition of parents/family members -> addition of self-advocates.

Fourth, the debates and considerations for "public health" and the learning well-being and vocational capacity of intellectually disabled children that led to their segregation and incarceration during the early 20th century.

Fifth, of course, the expressive types of political engagement she discusses, including humor and dance. Excellent book that I'm sure I will return to in coming years