Book Review: Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World, by Michael Goodhart

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Marcus Arvan
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719836186
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(6) 885 –911

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World, by Michael Goodhart. Oxford University

Press, 2018, 296 pp.

Reviewed by: Marcus Arvan, University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591719836186

This is an interesting book well worth reading. It has many virtues but also

many problems. It provides important and original challenges to three domi-

nant approaches to political theory: ideal moral theorizing (IMT), realism,

and “nonideal-theory-only” approaches. On the other hand, it overstates its

critiques at key points, and its overall method—which Goodhart admits

“offers no elaborate moral and philosophical justifications of its key norma-

tive arguments” (12)—may leave readers unconvinced. This is particularly

true of the radical alternative Goodhart proposes for doing political theory: a

“bifocal” approach of interrogating ideologies from within ideology. I found

this alternative even more problematic than the views Goodhart critiques.

Goodhart’s introduction states with admirable frankness that his methods

are unconventional. He writes, “my point in this book is not to argue that oth-

ers should share my concerns; it is rather to argue that, for those who do share

them, we need to do things differently” (13). Although I share Goodhart’s

view that there is a legitimate place for this form of inquiry, as I explain

below, this is nevertheless a real limitation of the book.

Chapter 1 claims to identify “two troubling assumptions” and “three

pathologies” in IMT. The first assumption Goodhart finds troubling is the

idea “that injustice can only be conceived as the absence or opposite of jus-

tice” (27). Although a number of other theorists have challenged this binary

assumption (particularly Amartya Sen1), Goodhart’s case that the assumption

is troubling comes down to citing Judith Shklar’s work in defense of the

following:

Conceiving of injustice as the absence or opposite of justice renders distant,

static, or cerebral something that many people experience as immediate,

dynamic, and visceral . . . Theorizing injustice as an aberration or departure

from ideal justice fundamentally mischaracterizes people’s sense and

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