Book Review: Sharing Democracy, by Michaele L. Ferguson
| Author | Danielle Allen |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591715606882 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
book-review2015
Book Reviews
Political Theory
2015, Vol. 43(6) 850 –868
Book Reviews
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Sharing Democracy, by Michaele L. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press,
2012.
Reviewed by: Danielle Allen, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606882
Michaele Ferguson’s admirable book, Sharing Democracy (Oxford, 2012)
lays out a democratic theory that “prioritizes the active practice of sharing a
life together with plural others” (163); the goal is to supplant theories that
seek or promote some objective commonality binding democratic citizens to
one another. Key to this theory is an argument that the goal of politics (under-
stood as its telos, more than as its outcome) is political freedom. This political
freedom is achieved through and felt in experiences of “democratic inter-
agency,” collective action in which we each contribute our distinctive voices
and visions to the cacophonous, unpredictable, and unsteerable processes by
which groups shape the world together.
Ferguson’s paradigm of the mode of politics she advocates is the protest;
Occupy Wall Street is her emblematic example. An Arendtian, Ferguson dis-
tinguishes herself from Sheldon Wolin, who sees true democracy as episodic
or rare. She hopes, in contrast, for a state of affairs in which something like
Occupy is a continuous, not occasional activity. Ferguson provides a power-
ful account of the freedom to be experienced in Arendtian action, and its
human value, and richly plots the conceptual architecture necessary to sustain
a commitment to being political in this way. Nonetheless, I disagree with
some key points in the democratic theory that she builds from the Arendtian
idea. Before I turn to those disagreements, let me lay out the structure of her
argument.
Ferguson begins (chapter 1) by explaining why the idea of “commonality”
has such a powerful hold on democratic theorists (she includes me here).
Many theorists, she argues, take the concept as necessary to the production of
a shared identity for a demos, to the emergence of affective ties within the
demos, and to the possibility of a form of collective agency grounded in the
idea that the “will of the people” is our own will. Then, she argues that an
Book Reviews
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“objective picture of sharing,” which is also a “passive” view of sharing
where it is possible to “have some objective thing in common,” often lies
beneath the move to rely on an idea of commonality. Building on Arendt, she
next argues that we should instead embrace an...
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