Book Review: Pragmatist Egalitarianism, by David Rondel

• Date: 01 October 2019
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Author: Jack Knight
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805676
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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3. Heinrich, An Introduction, 23, emphasis added.
4. Ibid., 25.
5. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xii–xiii.
6. As themselves readers of Foucault, it remains unclear why readers of H&N
would mourn the loss of sovereignty in the first place, or why they would not
recognize that modern conceptions of sovereign power are tied to projects of
colonial domination. It is not just political theory but the whole of the discipline
of political science—not to mention wide swaths of the humanities—that has
been saying goodbye to, or putting an end, to sovereignty, for at least a quarter of
a century.
7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/
8. Samuel Chambers, “Undoing Neoliberalism: Homo Œconomicus, Homo
Politicus, and the Zōon Politikon,” Critical Inquiry, 44 (Summer 2018): 706–732.
9. For example, see Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical
Strategies for a Connected World, (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
10. Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2015), 148.
11. This value took the form of money, a point that seems obvious from our perspec-
tive, but that demanded explanation from the perspective of a feudal society
wherein wealth was tied directly to land. H&N devote chapter 11 to money,
seeing it as a reflection of the social order. They consistently fail, however, to
grasp the “moneyness of money,” or to see the unique nature of money (as the
necessary form of value) within capitalism. See Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of
Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). See also Patrick Murray, “The Necessity
of Money,” in Marx’s Method in Capital, ed. Fred Moseley (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 37–61.
12. Their claim that production today is new and different because it is social betrays
the extent to which they have ignored or misunderstood Marx’s analysis of the
logic of capital, since Marx unwaveringly insists that capitalist production is
always social production. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904); Karl
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New
York: Penguin Books, 1990).
Pragmatist Egalitarianism, by David Rondel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018,
240 pp.
Reviewed by: Jack Knight, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805676
In Pragmatist Egalitarianism, David Rondel presents a provocative analysis
of the relationship between pragmatist political philosophy and the concept
of egalitarianism. In doing so, he makes important contributions to various

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topics in contemporary political philosophy: he offers some original insights
into the complex debates over egalitarianism, he provides creative interpreta-
tions of some of the most important pragmatists of the twentieth century, and
he thoughtfully develops and defends an alternative conception of egalitari-
anism that is grounded in these interpretations. While you may find his prag-
matist conception ultimately unpersuasive, you will still reap considerable
benefits from reading his book. I strongly recommend that you do so.
As with any area of political philosophy, pragmatists disagree, even about
the basic tenets of their philosophy. Rondel embraces a particular strain of
pragmatism “which shifts focus away from truth and certainty . . . [a]nd turns
its attention instead to questions that arise about how to...