Book Review: Democratic Equality, by James Lindley Wilson

• Author: Samuel Bagg
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720968768
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 517

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy is an

interesting book worthy of careful consideration. Its fresh readings of an

impressively wide range of ancient texts have much to offer political scien-

tists, classicists, and historians. And its effort to recover an important strain

of ancient political thought, and to reconnect it with some of the most press-

ing questions in our contemporary democracies, is surely laudable and timely.

Notes

1. Mogens H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes

(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 22.

2. See, e.g., Mark Gifford, “Dramatic Dialectic in Republic Book 1,” in Oxford

Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2001), XX:35–106; and Gabriel Danzig, “Plato’s Charmides as a Political

Act: Apologetics and the Promotion of Ideology,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine

Studies 53 (2013), 486–519.

Democratic Equality, by James Lindley Wilson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press, 2019, 307 pp.

Reviewed by: Samuel Bagg, Nuffield College and Department of Politics and

International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720968768

Democratic theory is a highly diverse field, ranging across history, philoso-

phy, critical theory, comparative politics, and law. Nevertheless, democratic

theorists typically share an overlapping set of questions. What is the value of

competitive elections and other key democratic institutions? How might our

democratic ambitions stretch beyond such basic procedures? And what do

we do when these democratic demands seem to conflict? James Wilson’s

Democratic Equality aims to address these questions through a novel concep-

tion of political equality in terms of “appropriate consideration” of the views

of all citizens.

Planted firmly in the tradition of analytic political philosophy, Wilson’s

arguments reflect the influence of several of the most prominent trends that

have shaped that field over the last several decades. One is the turn toward

relational egalitarianism, which has only accelerated since Elizabeth