PPPS: “Making Space for Rosa Parks: Democratic Authorship as Political Autonomy”

Hi.  I’m Paul Gowder, a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Political Science department.  This paper arose out of another paper that I have in progress.  The other paper, a critique of Rawls’s idea of public reason and an attempt to develop a broadly proceduralist alternative that can meet the stability and justification concerns driving the original idea without constraining democratic debate, was foundering on the rocks of my inability to articulate a normative principle to ground the fundamental objection to that kind of constraint.  This paper is my first, preliminary, attempt to make some sense of the intuition behind that objection — the idea of the value of citizen moral advocacy, qua citizen moral advocacy, in a democracy.

In this paper, I’m trying the following general approach: we imagine that certain things (justice, democracy, public welfare) are virtues of states, and we can say that a) a citizen is virtuous as a citizen (as a matter of democratic values, or civic values more generally) to the extent the citizen promotes those state virtues; and b) we ought to support those behaviors that ordinarily make up civic virtue.  By support, I mean that the state ought to permit them (and even encourage them to some extent), and our normative theorizing ought to do the same.  Most of the paper is an argument to the effect that a notion of citizen leadership centered on transformative moral advocacy does have a general tendency to promote the virtues of states, and, thus, is a form of civic virtue.  To get there, I primarily offer a fairly ambitious argument about the role of instability in what we might call the evolution of virtuous states.

All of this is very tentative: the paper should be understood as something like a very early working paper, which is still full of the bad ideas and overlooked problems that characterize papers in this stage of the academic life cycle (much more moth than butterfly).  I’m somewhat (rather) dissatisfied with it as it stands.  In particular, the argument about stability needs a lot more work, and I’m considering it for a full-size standalone research program, or a dissertation, or something like that.  So I’d particularly appreciate thoughts on how that line of thinking (section II.B) can be developed.

With no further ado, the paper is here.   As it’s fairly long, I created an abbreviated version for podcasting purposes, here.  Ben Saunders was kind enough to give the commentary, which is here. (I have some extensive replies to some of his comments, which I’ll be posting in dribs and drabs over the next few days.) To listen to the podcast, you can click below.

My apologies for the rough condition of the draft (missing citations, formatting glitches, etc.)  Thanks to Ben for the comments, and to Simon for organizing this event.

 

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