Review of Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. New York: Oxford University Press.

A wise society, if there ever was one, might prefer to organize itself in ways that minimize harm. To do that collectively, we must address questions about processes of decision-making, determine who has a say in those decisions, define the extent of governance, and our willingness to safeguard the rights of individuals. In Iris Marion Young’s book, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), she provides a thorough critique of conceptions of justice in the public sphere at the time and offers alternatives for consideration and experimentation. Additionally, she identifies specific types of oppression and violence, challenges the ideal of impartiality, and offers suggestions for how society might make its institutions and individuals’ lives more equitable.

Published in 1990, this book reflects a decade following the implementation of Reaganomics. Reaganomics concentrated on reducing corporate taxes, deregulating businesses, increasing the use of private contractors in government, and cutting spending on social services. As a result of cutting government services during this period, social movements like the women’s movement organized themselves into nonprofits to provide services no longer provided by the state. This meant a shift away from grassroots organizing and advocacy. (INCITE, 2007, p. 11). Movements that once heavily influenced public discourse were depoliticized as service providers.

Young engages with the work of several theorists from previous decades with significant reference to German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas and American moral and political philosopher, John Rawls. She also relies on the work of several postmodern writers, including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Young herself was a radical American political theorist and feminist whose interests included examining structural injustice, social difference, democracy, and embodied phenomenology. Her work challenged and expanded upon popular liberal and Marxist ideas.

Young begins with a critique of the limits of conceptions of social justice at the time which focused solely on the possession and distribution of material goods and social positions, known as the distributive paradigm. She says that while distributive justice has its place, society’s understanding of justice should be extended to include analyses of broader social structures and institutional conditions, specifically decision-making, the social division of labor, and culture.

In explaining social structures, Young claims that society is organized in a web of interdependent social relations among social groups. She says that people join social groups based on the similarities those groups have to the individual’s identity and draws the conclusion that groups do not exist separately from an individual’s identity. She takes issue with individualist conceptions of groups that claim group identification causes those groups to be oppressed. Instead, she argues that oppression can be mitigated if groups are supported in affirming their differences. As part of this support, Young argues that special treatment of specific groups may sometimes be required. She points to the Red Power movement as an example of when Indigenous people fought to maintain control of resources on reservations, to remain as self-governing bodies, and to assert their land rights — protecting their interests from those of the U.S. government (i.e. “special treatment”).

Young’s analysis of institutional conditions leads her to claim that welfare capitalist society and interest-group pluralism depoliticize public life. She says that most theorizing about justice occurs in the context of a welfare capitalist society, where most discussions of justice are dominated by distributive issues in the policy arena. Young argues that this discursive limitation results in a failure to assess the context in which distribution occurs as well as relations of power and culture. Further, interest groups compete for resources to represent their interests with no differentiation between selfish interests and normative claims to justice. These important distinctions are not made, partially because public deliberation on these issues is avoided.

According to Young, oppression is a condition of groups. It is structural and systematically reproduced through society’s economic, political, and cultural institutions. She suggests that oppression is a broad term for particular concepts and conditions and therefore divides different types of oppression into five categories: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. She asserts that exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness are all related to the social division of labor, which creates unequal or coercive relations of power and oppression in different ways. Cultural imperialism exists when a group’s lived experience is erased while at the same time, it is stereotyped and labeled as different from the dominant culture. Young explains that violence is an oppressive social practice. It is not acts of violence themselves that make them oppressive but instead, the social context surrounding those acts. She says that a distributive understanding of justice is not equipped to assess violence as oppression and suggests that this may be why violence is rarely mentioned in conversations about justice. Articulating these five faces of oppression, as Young calls them, allows for an analysis of oppression that does not over-simplify the injustices groups face or assume that one type of oppression is more central or universal than another.

Young explains that the ideal of impartiality was central to moral and justice theory at the time. Impartiality asserts that all situations should be dealt with in the same way and with the same rules. It also asserts the popular views of society and adopts the perspectives of those with privilege as universally true as opposed to understanding the nuance of differences among people. She challenges the idea that bureaucrats and experts can be impartial and claims that the presumption that they are impartial legitimates authoritarian hierarchy.

Young discusses how cultural logic hierarchizes bodies based on the normative gaze of the dominant culture. She investigates the implications of unconscious fears and aversions toward groups seen as having bodies despised by the dominant culture and characterizes such treatment as cultural imperialism. Young suggests that justice should include remedies for these types of cultural oppression, offering consciousness-raising activities and cultural decision-making structures as potential remedies. From Young’s perspective, groups can confront cultural imperialism by challenging dominant ideas of beauty, redefining a positive image of themselves, and demanding recognition of their specificity.

Efforts toward collective liberation should affirm group differences and foster the participation of all groups, Young argues. To understand and undermine oppression, differences must be assessed. Young cites the women’s liberation movement, bilingual education, and the Red Power struggles as examples of groups who have done this to varying degrees. She contends that political decision-making should happen through procedures that ensure institutional group representation.

In an investigation of affirmative action, Young states that she supports such policies as a way to undermine oppression that results from aversions caused by normative gaze. However, she is critical of such policies because they deal with justice in terms of the distribution of positions of high reward. Such positions are distributed based on merit criteria and the hierarchical division of labor. Instead of a distributive method, Young suggests that injustices in educational and professional institutions would be better resolved by the democratic division of labor which could eliminate the existence of positions of high reward by removing hierarchy.

Young closes with an exploration of how city life and societal organization could be reimagined to be more equitable and inclusive of group differences. She starts with a critique of the ideal of community, often touted by critics of liberalism and welfare bureaucracy, as an alternative vision of social life. She claims that such an ideal suppresses differences among subjects and that the associated ideal of autonomy refers mainly to privacy. Instead, Young suggests that city life be organized through metropolitan regional governments, responsible for empowering citizens through the establishment of democratic and representative institutions such as neighborhood assemblies.

Young’s critique that conceptions of justice should be extended beyond the distributive paradigm to include issues of decision-making, the social division of labor, and culture is a broadening of how we see justice considered in the modern civic public. Young provides several examples across a variety of issues that prove general applicability to a wide range of public matters. Similarly, Young’s articulation of the five faces of oppression is specific and offers a nuanced framework for identifying types of oppression. The five faces of oppression specify particular characteristics of oppression that span across issues and social groups. Young’s emphasis on affirming group difference as the solution to uncovering oppression is less straightforwardly generalizable though it seems likely that the principle could be easily applied to most groups. What this looks like in practice may be more nuanced and specific than the principle itself.

Young offers ideas about social groups, power, and justice that build on many ideas already circulated in discourse about public policy at that time. For example, in David B. Truman’s Group Politics and Representative Democracy (1971), he recognizes that groups establish patterns of continuous interactions and that these interactions all involve power. He claims that the institutions of government are sites where interest-group power steers many public policy decisions. He states:

“The total pattern of government over some time thus presents a protean complex of crisscrossing relationships that change in strength and direction with alterations in the power and standing of interests, organized and unorganized.” (Truman, 1971, p. 46).

This closely resembles Young’s understanding of groups in that she sees them as expressions of social relations. She doesn’t provide much of an analysis of how power within groups works but does assert that society is organized in a web of interdependence. Similar to Truman’s explanation of how government institutions are centers of interest-based power (Truman, 1971, p. 45), Young asserts that welfare-capitalist society’s process of interest-group pluralism acts as the primary vehicle for resolving public policy conflicts related to distribution (Young, 1990, p. 103). Interest groups compete for their share of public resources primarily by organizing themselves and pressuring legislators to support their interests.

In The Semisovereign People, E. Schattschneider (1975) makes the argument that special interest groups are only able to represent the interests of small groups. If all perspectives on an interest could be mobilized then no progress would be made (Schattschneider, 1975, p. 115). Young says that this sort of thinking assumes group differences imply natural conflicts of interest. She argues that robust public discussion about how each group will be affected by a given decision allows for the uncovering of structurally supported privilege and oppression. Young asserts that even if this path results in stalled decision-making, it is just (Young, 1990, p. 220).

Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965) challenges a common belief in political science which says that groups will organize and act in their common interest because individuals are logical and understand that they will benefit individually if the larger collective benefits from achieving its objective. However, Olson argues that large groups will not advance common objectives without coercion or a separate incentive (Olson, 1965, p. 105). In Young’s analysis of impartiality, she claims that people are not strictly self-regarding, they can consider another’s perspective (Young, 1965, p. 145). She does not speak directly about whether or not groups take action because they follow the logic that they will benefit from collective action. Instead, her work seeks to remove coercive behavior from decision-making processes by ensuring that group difference is considered.

Andrew S. McFarland’s piece, Neopluralism (2007), critiques and expands upon Robert A. Dahl’s pluralist theory of power from his 1961 piece Who Governs? What results is McFarland’s identification of new pluralism as a research sequence that works as a process for discovering political power structures? McFarland observed some outstanding problems with Dahl’s pluralist theory, including what he calls “multiple-elite theory” (McFarland, 2007, p. 51). With consideration of Mancur Olson’s (1965) theory of collective action, neopluralists observed that “a proliferation of groups did not imply a fair representative policy-making process in some issue domains” (McFarland, 2007, p. 53). McFarland provides an example of environmentalist groups that successfully influenced public interest through lobbying efforts (McFarland, 2007, p. 53–54). This best represents Young’s explanation of interest groups, which she describes as distinctly different from the principle of group difference she pushes for in her work. According to Young, and reflected here in McFarland’s piece, interest groups operate to bargain on behalf of their interests, a process that Young says results in depoliticization. The principle of group difference is less about groups organizing around their specific interests. It is more about ensuring that the articulation of group differences is supported in institutional decision-making structures to ensure a fairer process.

While Young is thorough in identifying the specifics of the five faces of oppression, she lacks a critique of the power dynamics that exist within the context of representative democracy. In G. William Domhoff’s Who Benefits, Who Governs, and Who Wins? (2010), Domhoff identifies three empirical indicators of power which include analyzing 1) who benefits, 2) who governs, and 3) who wins in any given context. When considering who governs, Domhoff discusses representative decision-making and the proportion of groups on decision-making bodies compared to their actual representative percentage of the general population (Domhoff, 2010, p. 81). There is a problem with the concept of representative democracy through neighborhood assemblies that Young advocates for in her suggestions for how city life might be made more equal. Our current culture remains reliant on meritocracy to determine who gets representative decision-making positions, even if decided democratically. Further, Young does not discuss the makeup of these representative decision-making bodies in much detail. It would be beneficial to dig into how the articulation and representation of group differences in institutions could ensure that one group does not garner power that exceeds its actual proportion of the population or the degree to which it will be affected by the decision. Further, Domhoff reveals opportunities vested interests might take to downplay their goals:

“Aspects of a decision process may remain hidden, some informants may exaggerate or downplay their roles, and people’s memories about who did what often become cloudy shortly after the event. Worse, the key concerns of the corporate community may never arise as issues on the political agenda because it has the power to keep them in the realm of non-issues (i.e., most people know there is a problem, but it is never addressed in the political arena)…” (Domhoff, 2010, p. 82).

I found Young’s critique of distributive justice to help understand how current discourse and policy fall short of uncovering the impact public issues have on marginalized and oppressed groups. I support her argument that justice should be expanded to include analyses of decision-making processes, the social division of labor, and culture.

Young’s work defining the five faces of oppression offers clear and specific criteria for analyzing oppression in any given context. Her work explaining the oppressive nature of violence existing, not in the acts themselves, but in the context of those acts is powerful. In my experience as a volunteer group discussion facilitator, I have found that people often struggle in conflict when there is a lack of contextual understanding of the issue at hand. Reading Young’s explanation clarifies that certain acts, including violence, are not always random or isolated and that they are often carried out to exert control.

Young’s analysis of impartiality, meritocracy, and normative gaze are useful for contextualizing the cultural beliefs that shape societal order. They’re also useful in identifying invisible hierarchies that materialize as a result of these beliefs and behaviors. I agree with her conclusion that impartiality legitimates authoritarian hierarchy by asserting the views of those with the most privilege as universal. Similarly, the myth of meritocracy explains how those without apparent privilege are excluded from accessing positions of high reward. Additionally, Young’s explanation of how the normative gaze harms those with bodies labeled as ugly or other legitimates another type of social hierarchy and causes harm. Like Young, I believe that a way to end the oppression that occurs as a result of these cultural beliefs and behaviors is through the deconstruction of the hierarchies described here.

Finally, I find Young’s arguments in favor of a positive assertion of group difference as a way to foster a more equitable society to be compelling. I agree with Young’s assertion that expectations of assimilation prevalent in social beliefs and behaviors are responsible for much of the inequality we face. I also agree that democratization is what can resolve issues of domination, alienation, and powerlessness. However, I am not as convinced as Young that representative decision-making on behalf of groups will work, even if they exist in neighborhood assemblies within regional bodies, as she suggests. Instead, I suggest using deliberative and direct forms of democracy over-representation because they offer the opportunity to expose real or potential harm, in the same spirit as Young’s goal.

References

Domhoff, W. G. (2010). Who benefits, who governs, who wins? In Theodoulou, S. Z. & Cahn, M. A. (Eds.), Public policy: The essential readings (2nd Ed.) (p. 78–83). London, U.K.: Pearson Education, Inc.

INCITE. (2007). The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex. Cambridge, Mass: South End Press.

McFarland, A. S. (2007). Neopluralism. In Theodoulou, S. Z. & Cahn, M. A. (Eds.), Public policy: The essential readings (2nd Ed.) (p. 47–60). London, U.K.: Pearson Education, Inc.

Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. In Theodoulou, S. Z. & Cahn, M. A. (Eds.), Public policy: The essential readings (2nd Ed.) (p. 104–105). London, U.K.: Pearson Education, Inc.

Schattschneider, E. E. (1975). The semisovereign people. In Theodoulou, S. Z. & Cahn, M. A. (Eds.), Public policy: The essential readings (2nd Ed.) (p. 115–116). London, U.K.: Pearson Education, Inc.

Truman, D. B. (1971). Group politics and representative democracy. In Theodoulou, S. Z. & Cahn, M. A. (Eds.), Public policy: The essential readings (2nd Ed.) (p. 42–46). London, U.K.: Pearson Education, Inc.