Judging Politically: Symposium on Linda M. G. Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Judgment, University of Chicago Press, 2016
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591718762347 |
| Author | Davide Panagia,Linda M. G. Zerilli,Hélène Landemore |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Review Symposium |
book-review2018
Review Symposium
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(4) 611 –642
Judging Politically:
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762347
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M. G. Zerilli’s A
Democratic Theory of
Judgment, University of
Chicago Press, 2016
Political Epistemology in an
Age of Alternative Facts:
On World-Building, Truth-
Tracking, and Arendtian
Vacillations in Linda M. G.
Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory
of Judgment
Hélène Landemore
Department of Political Science, Yale University
Introduction
Can there be more to democratic politics than adjudication of conflicting
interests and incommensurable values? Can democratic politics be governed
by norms of objectivity that render possible universally valid judgments? Are
truth and objectivity, in other words, relevant political categories? These are
the central questions at the heart of Linda M. G. Zerilli’s opus A Democratic
Theory of Judgment, a timely investigation of a problem that has haunted
political philosophy since Plato.
Zerilli once followed Hannah Arendt, who in her famous essay on “Truth
and Politics” denounced the oppressive potential of truth-claims and insisted
on separating the realm of politics and that of science. To the latter belonged
truth and truth-claims, to the former mere “opinion.” Similar to Zerrilli, most
mainstream interpretations agreed that Arendt was justified in dismissing
“the question of truth and objectivity as irrelevant to politics” (xiii).
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Political Theory 46(4)
With this new book, Linda M. G. Zerilli aims to revisit her past interpre-
tations of Arendt and defend a novel reading of her work, one that credits
Arendt with a concern for objectivity. Judging, Zerilli now tells us, “cannot
wholly evade the question of what counts as real or objective, perhaps as
true, even if that question cannot be answered adequately in the manner of
validity thinkers” (xiii, my emphasis). Unlike what Zerilli calls the “tradi-
tional” philosophical notion (by which she means Plato’s), Arendtian objec-
tivity is deeply connected to democratic politics, that is, politics characterized
by the public exchange of opinions among equal and free citizens. Zerilli’s
claim is particularly bold: she argues that Hannah Arendt should be read as
the first political philosopher to have offered a theory of democratic judg-
ment, namely the “strikingly original view” that “the capacity to judge
should be expected from each and every citizen.” Or, as she also puts it, “It
is Hannah Arendt herself who first discovers judgment as a political capacity
of ordinary democratic citizens” as opposed to the capacity of “elites with
special knowledge or abilities” (xi).
One should be rightly skeptical given that Arendt’s book “On Judgment”
was never written, and other political philosophers appear to have pre-dated
Arendt’s account of judgment. Even if we do not return to the Greeks, what
of Descartes’s and Hume’s defense of common sense? How should we under-
stand Rousseau’s argument for the innate ability of all citizens to intuit the
general will? And what should we say of Kant’s defense of every man’s
capacity for autonomy? Do these not count as earlier formulations of a theory
of democratic judgment?
The compelling character of the book, however, does not ultimately
depend on this interpretative claim. The true contribution of Zerilli’s book
lies elsewhere: not so much in its reinterpretation of Arendt per se, and more
in Zerilli’s own inventive and bold attempt to carve a unique path between
anti- or non-epistemic approaches to politics and epistemic ones. Arendt is
just the entry way to this method of thinking, which also owes a lot to the
thinking of Hume and Kant on the validity of aesthetic judgments, rooted in
subjectivity and yet with a claim to universal validity.
In the rest of the essay, I reconstruct Zerilli’s attempt to defend democratic
“world-building” as a unique form of political judgment that straddles the
objective–subjective divide and contextualize it with respect to the current
“epistemic turn” in deliberative democracy and political philosophy more
broadly. I argue that Zerilli too, like many of the people she criticizes, oscil-
lates between objectivism and subjectivism. Rather than stretch Arendt past
her breaking point, I suggest Zerilli should jump ship and join the
Habermasians, as well as Deweyans and other pragmatist and epistemic dem-
ocrats, who, like her, believe in the necessity and desirability of democratic
Review Symposium
613
judgment; like her, favor non-universal, culturally sensitive notions of objec-
tivity and truth; and with whom, eventually, her disagreement seems more
semantic than substantive.
Democratic Judgment Between Subjectivity and
Objectivity
Zerilli’s problem is this: How can we account in constructive critical ways
for practices seen as intolerable or problematic in a Western, liberal, and
democratic context, in terms that are neither morally relativist and thus too
permissive and, yet, at the same time not overly universalizing and thus
insensitive to cultural pluralism? This dilemma recurs throughout the book
in the form of the same rhetorical question: is it possible, in politics, to pass
a judgment with a claim to objective validity, without however positing
something like the truth?
The conundrum is brought to life in a very few but vivid examples of
feminist issues. Whereas Seyla Benhabib and Martha Nussbaum have no
qualms passing a negative judgment about female genital mutilation, forced
marriage of young girls, and full veiling of the female body in certain
Muslim communities, Zerilli blames them for excessive universalism and
agonizes over how to hold a more nuanced and yet moral view on the
matter.
After showing the problems with various relativist stances—from Leo
Strauss’s critique of historicism to the moral relativism of Peter Winch—and
the problems with “validity thinkers”—including Habermas and universalist
feminists—the book explores a number of seemingly promising solutions
that all turn out to be dead-end streets: Hume’s subjectivism, Kant’s theory of
aesthetic judgment, and Rawls’s method of avoidance. Zerilli’s solution is,
ultimately, found in Hannah Arendt’s reconstructed theory of “democratic
judgment.”
In Zerilli’s definition, political judgments are “evaluative judgments, the
kind of judgments we make when calling something ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘just’ or
‘unjust,’ ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’” (xiii). Affirming with Arendt that such judg-
ments are more than expressions of subjective preferences, Zerilli wants to be
able “to speak of better or worse evaluative judgments” in the context of “dem-
ocratic societies characterized by widespread value pluralism.” In other words,
Zerilli now reads Arendt as a proponent of a form of political cognitivism.
Zerilli, however, does not want to express such judgments as truth-claims,
that is, claims whose objectivity lies in some universal standard of correct-
ness. This is why Zerilli uses the concept of “democratic judgment,” a term
not found in Arendt per se but the idea of which she credits to her,
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Political Theory 46(4)
as a practice of “world-building” whereby the standard of objectivity is
endogenously generated rather than externally posited or assumed.
Democratic judgment is not about truth as much as it is about “freedom” and,
specifically, “a world-building practice of freedom rooted in the plurality of
perspectives that alone facilitates our capacity to count as real, as part of the
common world, what is real” (xv). At the same time, she insists, “[democratic
judgment as world-building] is clearly not a practice of endless liberal toler-
ance” (279). “Judging is a practice through which citizens can enlarge their
sense of what belongs in the common world” (279) and some things do not,
or should not, belong.
In order to credit Arendt with this theory of democratic judgment, Zerilli
needs her to have a concept of objectivity. Against her previous interpreta-
tions, Zerilli now identifies in Arendt’s writings an epistemically modest and,
one might say, “democratized” version of objectivity and even truth. Zerilli
thus writes that “far from being hostile to the supposedly antipolitical con-
cepts of objectivity and truth, Arendt takes them to be ordinary concepts sus-
tained through quotidian public acts of speaking among citizens.” She further
quotes Arendt saying that the problem with these ordinary concepts arises
“when we seek [exclusively as it were] a meaning beyond the political realm”
because “at that point, truth and objectivity become Truth and Objectivity,
metaphysical ideals” (Arendt cited in Zerilli, 33).
According to Zerilli, Arendt can welcome objectivity and even truth in
politics, provided they are defined in a different way than the lineage associ-
ated with Plato’s theory of truth. Far from excluding truth from politics,
Arendt “calls into question the idea that proof is our sole access to truth in the
political realm” and recognizes the “distinctive character of truth claims in
politics and their entanglement in opinion” (120). This interpretation is a
major divergence from the received wisdom of Arendt. In distancing Arendt
from Plato, Zerilli thinks it is possible to distill an “alternative notion of
...
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