Micropolitical Engagement for Social Justice in the Political Economy

Micropolitical Engagement for Social Justice in the Political Economy By Christopher Tallent B.A., The Johns Hopkins University, 2004 A.M., Brown University, 2011 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2014 © Copyright 2013 by Christopher Tallent This dissertation by Christopher Tallent is accepted in its present form by the Department of Political Science as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date________________ _____________________________________ Sharon Krause, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date________________ _____________________________________ Mark Blyth, Reader Date________________ _____________________________________ James Morone, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date________________ _____________________________________ Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITAE Christopher Tallent was born in Norman, Oklahoma on June 25, 1981. He completed his B.A. in Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 2004. As a graduate student, Christopher presented his work at regional and national conferences including The Midwest Political Science Association, The New School for Social Research Conference on Radical Democracy, and numerous others. He was funded by a Brown University Graduate Fellowship. In addition to his doctoral work, he has other collaborative research projects on topics related to community organizing, public policy, the history of architecture, and politics as it relates to the built environment. iv PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and assistance of numerous individuals and I would like to express my deepest gratitude for their help along the way. First and foremost I have been exceptionally fortunate to be able to work with Sharon Krause as the chair of my committee. Her thoughtful and incisive comments and suggestions throughout every stage of my project have been central to further developing my ideas in political theory and completing the dissertation. Most of all, her willingness to listen and exchange ideas about political theory has enlivened this project and kept it going when it would have otherwise been impossible. I cannot thank her enough. I have been additionally fortunate to work with my other committee members, Mark Blyth and James Morone. Mark’s support gave me the confidence to cross intellectual boundaries and draw on sources of inspiration that would otherwise simply not have been possible. He has always been a key interlocutor for me and I am deeply indebted to all his assistance along the way. Without James I simply would not have had the full committee to even defend a dissertation and I am deeply grateful for his willingness to engage with me about my work at a later stage in the process. Yet, even at that stage, his criticisms and comments proved invaluable. Moreover, his welcoming spirit gave me an incredible boost to keep working. Additionally, I want to thank all the activists and organizers I engaged and talked with at different points during this project. My sincere appreciation goes out to groups as diverse as the Tea Party Patriots of Cecil County Maryland, Occupy Wall Street, and especially Occupy Providence and Mark Simmons in particular. There is a lot of interesting and inspiring political action happening out there in the world. Jason Judd was a key interlocutor with regard to Saul Alinsky organizing and community organizing in general. Finally, I have been fortunate to have incredible support and friendships here at Brown and further afield. I would like to especially thank Sean Dinces and Sarah Matthiesen here at Brown. Additionally, I would like to thank the participants at the 2013 New School For Social Research Radical Democracy Conference for an exceptional intellectual experience. William Connolly inspired me to study political theory back when I took his introductory course as an undergraduate student, and he continues to be an underlying source of inspiration in all my work. Suzanne Brough provided critical administrative support at all stages of my time at Brown. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support of Stacy Cardin, and especially not without the support of my parents, Larry and Pauline Tallent, and my sister Elizabeth Tallent. My parents and sister give me the most inspiration of all. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2: The Need to Displace Resentment with Motivation in Liberal Consent….…26 Chapter 3: Adjusting and Supplementing the Terms of Validity in Discourse Theory to Solve a Problem for Motivation around Norms………………………………………….76 Chapter 4: Economic Justice and Micropolitics………………………………………..134 Chapter 5: Towards a Bricoleur’s Ethos for Justice in the Political Economy…………196 Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….….247 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………254 vi Chapter 1: Introduction Making a Place for Citizen Action in Justice Anyone who spends any time working in politics gets used to hanging out with the same people most of the time, and in the most direct sense the contradiction of this expectation is what made Occupy so unusual at first for so many hardened political activists. This was not your usual phonebanking crowd of retirees and interns looking for college credit. It was something else entirely. On a chilly, nearly rainy and drizzly day in early October in Providence, dozens of folks started showing up in a public park in the center of the city known mainly for its needles and homeless population. They had all heard about something called Occupy Wall Street, and through various different means of social media, word of mouth, or happenstance, found themselves coming together at sundown in a public park with a group of strangers. It was the kind of setting most people would avoid with determination under normal circumstances, not to mention that the park was technically “closed” anyway. And yet, here were the young, the old, the middle aged, the nuns, the college kids, the “crusty” punks, the Afghan war vets, homeless folks, skateboarders, middle aged families with kids and even high schoolers (practically a non- existent population for any conventionally-practiced politics). Moreover, it was also a mix of races, black, white, indian, others, and as we would learn after many conversations, also a mix of genders, sexual orientations, and even political viewpoints. Perhaps the most important general point is that these were decidedly not the people who 1 tended to show up at the weekly phonebank group around town. Rather, any hardened political activist would tell you that this was essentially a group that was truly unusual. There was little to gain from coming out together in a supposedly “dangerous” park with a group of strangers. No one was getting paid to be there or even to organize it. Rather, these were folks who were coming together for the sake of a cause that had shaken them from their normal lives and inspired them to action. This leads to a question of what kind of inspiration would bring people together like this, and what would be the effect for that cause, for justice. I will argue in this dissertation that this kind of citizen action, replicated in other ways by more conservative, and other groups as well, was not only good for justice, but crucial. Yet, to argue that citizen action of this kind is crucial for justice is not an uncontroversial point. On the one hand, activists around Occupy or The Tea Party or other amorphously affiliated groups or actions would find themselves constantly trying to weather a barrage of criticism that they were simply unorganized rabble-rousers with very little idea of what they were doing. So you want to get together and organize for yourselves? That’s cute, these critics might say, but let’s leave the real decision-making to the adults thank you. And I would argue that this sentiment was expressed not only in popular media and by our political “leaders,” but is grounded also in a tradition of political theory that supports a more abstract conception of what justice is supposed to be. These two strains came together in an opinion piece in the New York Times that was truly laughable to any actual activist engaged in the hard work of cooperating together with strangers to build common understandings, in which a professor argued that perhaps this might be the moment when people would finally come together and debate Rawls’ 2 difference principle, realizing the virtue of that landmark theory of justice.1 That’s right, a professor of theory who likely spent little if any time at all participating in the general assemblies of decision-making, straining to understand different and new folks, listening hard into the night instead of watching tv, shopping, or just sleeping and getting some rest, thought that this might all be summed up neatly into Rawls’ theory, and wouldn’t that be just great! I will argue that both the popular idea that politics should be left to the experts and professionals and the theory idea that justice really is a finely-tuned abstract ideal, not only is less well-grounded in theory than those theorists like to believe, at least in the economy, but also that it tends to buttress and combine with that popular ideal that politics is not for “the rest of us,” in ways that promote ultimately illegitimate policies for the political economy. In order to make that argument I will need to look at the political theory debate about social justice, as well as considering the real world effects of these theories in our politics. In doing so, I hope to give fair consideration to the important ways that theories of justice should direct our thinking in politics, but also consider the effects of those directions in the real world.

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