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Normatively then, the Habermasian (or deliberative)4 public sphere refers to the communicative space constituted through rational-critical deliberation over practical problems, deliberation that leads to critically (in)formed public opinion, which in turn enables the democratic scrutiny and guidance of official decision-making processes. The criteria for rational-critical deliberation are understood to involve inclusive, reasoned, reciprocal, reflexive, sincere, and coercion-free argumentation (Habermas, 2005, 2006). Communicative rationality is supported by open information flows (publicity), motivated by the aim of reaching understanding and agreement (public opinion), and moved toward this end by the “forceless force of the better argument” (Habermas, 2005, p. 384). Claims and agreements are here contingent since every claim can be met by a “no” and every deliberatively achieved agreement can be challenged and potentially undone. It is important to note that “public” here refers to the mode, rather than the content or place or medium, of communication. Thus, the public sphere may come into existence, for instance, through face-to-face or technologically mediated argumentation between individuals and within informal groups, or through the more organized discussions found in civil society associations and explicitly political organizations, or through the reflection and debate engendered by the whole range of mass media forms and contents—“news, reports, commentaries, scenes and images, and shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, and entertaining content” (Habermas, 2006, p. 415; see also Habermas, 1996a, pp. 373–374).

Habermas does not see rational-critical deliberation, which he also refers to as “communicative rationality,” as some sort of metaphysical ideal, but rather argues that it can be identified as an idealization implicit in the “inconspicuous daily routines of asking for and giving reasons”: It is “built into communicative action” (Habermas, 2006, p. 413). In other words, the set of public sphere criteria listed above are, and must be, tacitly presupposed by anyone engaging in any practical argument. As such, these criteria are conditions of possibility for such engagement, “constitutive of the game of argumentation” (Habermas, 2005, p. 385). These presupposed criteria, Habermas (1984) argues, can be “rationally reconstructed”—using the “presuppositional analysis” of “formal pragmatics”5—from out of everyday arguments, illuminating a universal public sphere norm that sets out “nonarbitrary standards for the identification of communication pathologies” (Habermas, 2006, p. 416). That is, the implicit idealization provides a critical ideal by which to evaluate the deliberative quality of actual public sphere communication and thereby identify communicative “distortions” or “deviations” and associated “moments of inertia,” the latter resulting from a “scarcity of those functionally necessary resources on which processes of deliberative opinion- and will-formation significantly depend” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 326, drawing on Bernhard Peters' work). Such identification of limits in turn provides the basis for reflection on the cultivation of more rational-critical deliberation. The aim of such reflection is not to set out strict procedures for deliberation, as is required in formal decision-making (on this see Habermas, 1996a, pp. 302–308), but to identify the “functionally necessary” sociopolitical resources (or positive conditions) needed to enhance—in quality and quantity—rational-critical deliberation in everyday practical argumentation (Chambers, 1996; Habermas, 1996a, p. 325). Specific resources will depend on context, but according to Habermas (1996a, 2006; see also Carleheden & Gabriëls, 1996) they will, in general, include: (first) a mass media system regulated in relation to the idealized criteria, (second) a network of autonomous civil society associations supporting communicative reasoning and public opinion formation, the emergence, reproduction, and influence of which depend on (third) “a liberal-egalitarian political culture sensitive to problems affecting society as a whole” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 488), which, in turn, requires (fourth) social rights to the provision of sustainable living conditions, and (fifth) a population accustomed to (universal) freedom and versed in critique.

After the collapse of metaphysical justifications for universality, we do not have any choice but to admit that the version of universality we conjure into existence – and the a priori norms that support this universality – inevitably arises in a particular context: it is historically and culturally specific even as it strives to transcend this specificity. But – and my point here mirrors the argument I made about rationality above – this does not mean that our universalism is intrinsically worthless; while the loss of metaphysical foundations for our normative systems complicates their claim to universality, it does not automatically invalidate them. This is exactly what Allen is getting at in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: we make a mistake if we assume that our only options are either the delusion of being able to transcend our context into a realm of "pure" universality or a descent into "anything-goes" relativism. More specifically, Allen argues that we can profess the universal validity of some of our principles – such as the principles of equality, reciprocity, or mutual respect – as long as we remain aware that these principles are derived from the historical and cultural resources of Western modernity. In this manner, Allen advocates what she calls "principled contextualism": we may take our norms "to be universal and context transcendent, as long as we recognize that the notions of universalizability and context transcendence are themselves situated in the context of late Western modernity" (PS 180). An important part of this recognition is the admission that "it may turn out from some future vantage point that our normative ideals are themselves, in some ways that we have yet to realize, pernicious and oppressive" (PS 180). That is, we need to be "more historically self-conscious and modest about the status of our normative principles" (PS 180); among other things, we need to be open to the possibility that our principles can be contested. Yet this does not imply that "we are incapable of making normative judgments in light of such principles" (PS 180). Allen is looking for a way out of nihilistic relativism by proposing that our awareness that we must continuously interrogate our ethical principles does not mean that these principles are devoid of all value. Nor does our recognition that our principles cannot be divorced from their context mean that we cannot claim that they are capable of transcending their context; that is, our principles can be context-transcending without being context-neutral. This, as we saw in Chapter 2, is Butler's argument in Parting Ways, even if she ends up backpedaling on the univcrsalist implications of her approach. 14 More important for our present purposes, this is how Allen arrives at the "historical a priori" I have referred to in passing. As Allen explains, "The historical specificity of our a priori categories, their rootedness in historically variable social and linguistic practices and institutions" (PS 31-2) does not cancel the power of these categories to order our existence. However, if we want others to be convinced by our a priori ideals, we need to persuade them through a democratic process. If the Enlightenment resorted to aggression to spread its views, the Habermasian democratic method, according to Allen, relies on more collectively formed public opinions. Allen's point is akin to the one Benhabib makes through her notion of "democratic iterations": rather than the solitary Kantian subject trying to figure out in the abstract what everyone might conceivably agree on, the Habermasian approach offers a model where social agents collaborate with each other to forge a perspective that everyone can agree on. This junction of compatible views, then, becomes the current "historical a priori," the current version of the universal. Any given "historical a priori" can obviously take hegemonic forms. I grant, as does Allen, that we need to remain vigilant about the constitutive exclusions that a priori norms often imply. Yet the merits of a normative system that is brought into being through a continuous democratic process – a process that can accommodate the tensions of rethinking, refinement, and renegotiation – also seem considerable. Borrowing from Fraser, one could say that the historical a priori is always open to reframing. Such reframing happens, for instance, when individuals or groups who have been excluded from a given ethical frame demand admission to it, thereby automatically altering the parameters of the frame. Proposing that "misframing" may be "the defining injustice of a globalizing age," Fraser advocates – echoing Butler's observations about the necessity of revising the frames of perception that eliminate some populations from the status of the fully human – "an enlarged, transnational sense of who counts as one's fellow subjects of justice." 15 This implies that when the frame shifts – say, from a national to a transnational one – so does the historical a priori: an a priori that was formulated in a given national context might not be appropriate for a transnational one. There must thus be a period of readjustment, but this does not imply the neutralization of the a priori – as some cultural relativists might assume – but merely its reconfiguration. Or, to restate the larger argument I have tried to articulate, the concept of the historical a priori requires that we admit that an a priori principle can be normatively meaningful even as it is open to alteration; the a priori – as I noted above – holds until it is deemed somehow flawed or unjust. In Fraser's words, "The result would be a grammar of justice that incorporates an orientation to closure necessary for political argument, but that treats every closure as provisional – subject to question, possible suspension, and thus to reopening" (SJ72). The model Fraser advocates hence treats every ethical closure as provisional. Fraser calls this model "reflexive justice," specifying that it scrambles the opposition between the Habermasian democratic model on the one hand and the more poststructuralist, Marxist, and skeptical model (which she calls "agonistic") – the model that dominates contemporary progressive criticism – on the other. If the first of these is sometimes accused of being excessively normalizing, the second-which is essentially the model I have been analyzing in this book (with the exception of Levinas) – is, as Fraser puts it, "often seen as irresponsibly reveling in abnormality" (SJ73 ). Against this backdrop, the advantage of Fraser's model is the following: Like agonistic models, reflexive justice valorizes the moment of opening, which breaches the exclusions of normal justice, embracing claimants the latter has silenced and disclosing injustices the latter has occluded-all of which it holds essential for contesting injustice. Like discourse ethics, however, reflexive justice also valorizes the moment of closure, which enables political argument, collective decision-making, and public action – all of which it deems indispensable for remedying injustice. (SJ73-4) In this manner, Fraser declares the standard opposition between the Habermasians and the agonists to be a false one, for it is possible to admit the best insights of both by acknowledging the value of both opening (contestation) and closure (binding norms that enable ethical and political decisions). Such an approach rejects relativism, enabling normative judgments and political interventions, but without thereby locking the content of such judgments and interventions into a fixed, immutable definition. All of this of course implies that there is one norm that stands above every other: what Fraser calls "the overarching normative principle of parity of participation" (SJ60). On this view, Fraser explains, "Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction" (SJ 60). In other words, for Fraser's paradigm to function, one needs a base-level faith in the democratic process even as one acknowledges that it is always going to fall short of its own ideals. Like Levinasian justice, which knows that it will never he able to live up to the demands of ethics, concrete democratic formations are invariably guilty, humiliated by their failures, but this cannot, for the Habermasians at least, discourage us to the point that we stop trying to improve them. As Benhabib explains: As with any normative model, one can always point to prevailing conditions of inequality, hierarchy, exploitation and domination, and prove that "this may be true in theory but not so in practice" (Kant). The answer to this ancient conflict between norm and reality is simply to say that if all were as it ought to be in the world, there would be no need to build normative models, either. The fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it, for the need for normativity arises precisely because humans measure the reality they inhabit in the light of principles and promises that transcend this reality. The relevant question therefore is: Does a given normative model enable us to analyze and distill the rational principles of existing practices and institutions in such a fashion that we can then use these rational reconstructions as critical guidelines for measuring really existing democracies? 16 Allen sums up the matter by noting that though imbalances of power are important for Habermasian critical theory to grapple with, the solution to this "can only be more discourse or debate" (PS 18). This continued faith in the perfectibility of the democratic process is what distinguishes the Habermasian feminists I have cited in this chapter from the thinkers – perhaps, again, with the exception of Levinas – I have discussed in earlier chapters of this book. The latter thinkers, as well as those aligned with these thinkers, would in fact ridicule the Habermasian stance for its naive inability to recognize how power corrupts the democratic process, how, for example, neoliberalism and global capitalism have torn democracy into shreds. As Wendy Brown explains, "This is a political condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned, or end- run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically, served as a foil and shield for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere." 17 Indeed, what good can the ideal of participatory parity do in the context of biopolitical and other invisible forces of power that constitute us as compliant subjects well before we understand the basic principles of such parity? If our psychic lives, including our unconscious desires, fantasies, and motivations, are shaped by hegemonic power, then participatory parity seems like a mere stopgap measure – something that makes us feel slightly better about being nothing but the obedient marionettes of power. 5 To some degree I agree with such pessimism about the Habermasian democratic process. But I am not convinced that the alternative approaches I have analyzed in this book necessarily fare any better in terms of being capable of addressing the problem of power. I have already explained my reservations about the ability of Zizek and Badiou to do so. Butler may at first glance seem more competent in this regard, given that the critique of disciplinary power has always been central to her theory. Yet, as I have demonstrated, I am not reassured by her assertion that opposing power is a matter of negotiating with it. Nor am I persuaded by the haphazardness of her understanding of resistance – a haphazardness that arises from her rejection of agency. Take her assertion that the Benjaminian messianic rupture of divine violence – outlined in Chapter 3 – offers the possibility of a political intervention based on distraction: Perhaps we need to be more distracted, as Baudelaire was said to be, in order to be available to the true picture of the past to which Benjamin refers. Perhaps, at some level that has implications for the political point I hope to bring out here, a certain disorientation opens us to the chance to wage a fight for the history of the oppressed.JS Butler here offers disorientation and chance – rather than action, choice, or decision – as a political strategy. As she adds, "We have to be provisional situationists, seizing the chance to fight when it appears" (PW 110). This is not a new problem, for long before Butler's turn to ethics, she wrote, in relation to our tendency to identify with the power structures that subjugate us: "The very categories that arc politically available for identification restrict in advance the play of hegemony, dissonance and rearticulation. It is not simply that a psyche invests in its oppression, but that the very terms that bring the subject into political viability orchestrate the trajectory of identification and become, with luck, the site for a disidentificatory resistance."19 I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the idea that the psyche invariably "invests in its oppression," but in the present instance I want to call attention to Butler's reduction of resistance – here configured as a practice of disidentification – to a kind of lucky break from the generalized background of power. Allen has noted the same problem, arguing that luck is too flimsy a basis for political resistance, and pointing out, furthermore, that Butler's reluctance to theorize the social world as anything but hegemonic makes it difficult for her to envision the possibility of social solidarity, including nonsubordinating, nonstrategic forms of mutual recognition. As Allen asserts: Without a more fully developed and less ambivalent notion of recognition, Butler is left unable to explain the possibility of collective or, ultimately, individual resistance .... Without an account of how the recognition of our commonality provides the basis for political community and collective resistance, Butler is left suggesting that the transformation from identification to disidentification, from signification to resignification, from subjectivation to a critical desubjectivation, is nothing more than a matter of luck. (PS 93) Exactly. As complicated and potentially flawed as the democratic ideal of participatory parity may be, it still seems like a better basis for political action than dumb luck.

For academic readers, our commentary argues for loosening the intellectual grip of ‘innovation studies’, for backing off from the nested, hierarchical multi-level model as the only model in town, and for exploring other social scientific, but also systemic theories of change. The more we think about the politics and practicalities of reflexive transition management, the more complex the process appears: for a policy audience, our words of caution could be read as an invitation to abandon the whole endeavour. If agency, predictability and legitimacy are as limited as we’ve suggested, this might be the only sensible conclusion.However, we are with Rip (2006) in recognising the value, productivity and everyday necessity of an ‘illusion of agency’, and of the working expectation that a difference can be made even in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. The outcomes of actions are unknowable, the system unsteerable and the effects of deliberate intervention inherently unpredictable and, ironically, it is this that sustains concepts of agency and management. As Rip argues ‘illusions are productive because they motivate action and repair work, and thus something (whatever) is achieved’ (Rip 2006: 94). Situated inside the systems they seek to influence, governance actors – and actors of other kinds as well - are part of the dynamics of change: even if they cannot steer from the outside they are necessary to processes within. This is, of course, also true of academic life. Here we are, busy critiquing and analysing transition management in the expectation that somebody somewhere is listening and maybe even taking notice. If we removed that illusion would we bother writing anything at all? Maybe we need such fictions to keep us going, and maybe – fiction or no - somewhere along the line something really does happen, but not in ways that we can anticipate or know.

In short, Newton and Seale found that their ‘hook-up with white radicals did not give [them] access to the white community because they did not guide the white community’ outside the university (Newton and Morrison, 2009: 51), just as they had ‘problems with black students sometimes because they tend to have a detached understanding of the realities in the black community’ off campus (Seale, 1991: 211). Their continual and withering critique of ‘intellectual jivers … who sit in a fucking armchair and try to articulate the revolution while black people are dying in the streets’ at times appears as a standard call by grassroots activists to place the pressing needs of concrete praxis before the leisurely pursuit of abstract theory (Seale, 1991: 119, 33); and, indeed, Newton claims ‘when Bobby and I left Merritt College to organize brothers on the block we did so because the college students were too content to sit around and analyze without acting’ (Newton and Morrison, 2009: 99). However, Newton was far from opposed to even highly speculative theorizing; he would, after all, routinely open talks by asking his audience ‘to assume that an external world exists’ before they could procced (Hilliard and Weise, 2002: 162).4 His disillusionment with academic activists was not due to the complexity or abstraction necessary for theoretical debate; on the contrary, it was grounded in his experience that ‘when I speak on college campuses … I try to lead an audience into rational and logical discussions, but many students are looking for rhetoric and phrasemongering’ instead, which he felt indicated in his audiences not only an evasion of potentially valid, and thus needed, criticism of their own views, but an implicit elitism concerning off-campus participants in political discourse; as he put it, the students ‘either do not want to learn or they do not believe that I can think’ (Newton, 2009: 68).

Of course, Newton agreed with the white mother country radicals that the fight for black liberation was ‘in essence … not at all a race struggle [but a] struggle between the massive proletarian working class and the small, minority ruling class’ (Seale, 1991: 72); simultaneously, because that class remained internally divided by race and racism, he also held that ‘nationalism is recognized by many who think in a revolutionary manner as a distinct and natural stage through which one proceeds’, explaining, among other things, the Party’s anti-integrationist stance (Harrison, 1970: 151). He thus affirmed the necessity of developing a discourse that would ‘not only … make Blacks more proud but … make whites question and even reject concepts they had always unthinkingly accepted’ (Newton, 2009: 175), which required synthesizing race- and class-based theories of the numerous contradictions that structured social life. His experience with campus radicals, however, led him to believe that their goal, by contrast, was to find ‘a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute’ (Newton et al., 2004: 84), which not only deepened the distance between progressive theorists and those most in need of emancipatory thought, but encouraged those in elite positions to instruct, rather than to engage with and listen to, those in whose name they purportedly spoke. For Newton, to ‘attempt to explain phenomena … by taking [them] out of [their concrete] environment, [and] putting them into a category … without understanding everything else related to them’ was to ‘transform’ material, lived realities into reified abstractions that inevitably produced forms of praxis that imposed demands for an impossible ideological purity on a suffering populace living in a nest of economic, biological, psychological, and social contradictions (Hilliard and Weise, 2002: 163). This is why Newton ‘tried not to speak in such absolute … terms’ and emphasized the need for theorists to ‘analyse each instance’, rather than subsuming them under an abstract and rigid model treated as ‘an infallible guide in all cases’ (Newton et al., 2004: 26); as his thinking developed, he increasingly cautioned against theorizing that ‘does not apply to the present set of conditions [because it is] tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma – what we call flunkeyism’ (Hilliard and Weise, 2002: 165).

One review of Táíwò’s book has accused it of suggesting that “bad decisions and choices on the part of individuals are to blame” for elite capture. This is odd, when Táíwò writes, over and over again, that “to blame the problems of elite capture entirely on [elites’] moral success and failures is to confuse effect for cause.” This misreading is demonstrative of the way systematicity has become a leftist bogeyman, summoned to scare straight naïve radicals itching to do something about the world (and inadvertently convincing them that there’s nothing they can do). In such a misreading, the necessary cohesion of systematic analysis and individual action is erased by a rewired, now fatalistic, causal story. The work of world-building becomes a theoretical null space. Táíwò’s book, if attended to, is an opportunity for modern leftists to unlearn this entrenched pessimism, with what the philosopher William Paris might call a hope beyond optimism: a hope built not on scientific predictions or heaven-sent faith, but on a dogged persistence in the relentless, everyday work of getting shit done.

To be sure, this kind of hope lacks the sweeping grandiosity of leftist dogma. Very well. Grandiosity, Táíwò would remind us, is not the litmus test of a political strategy. Its usefulness is what matters.

Hegel’s dialectical thinking powerfully exploits the idea of negation. It is a central feature of spirit and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This […] is the magical power that converts it into being.”102 The tarrying with the negative is part of what Hegel calls the “labour of the negative”103. In a loose reference to this Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits. We must go through the “labor of the negative” to have trust in our deliberative processes.104

This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for such groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”.

We assume that the future is not perfectly knowable by any political faction—and that political beliefs are better framed as continuous probabilities than as off-on, dogmatic certainties. Although this assumption sounds uncontroversial, it is widely ignored in the heat of political controversies. Content-analytic studies of election campaigns and of debates in elite legislative bodies have found a widespread tendency to express political opinions in sharply dichotomous fashions (Hopkins and King, 2010, Tetlock, 1981, Tetlock et al., 1984). Good-bad, categorical rhetoric is common, and nuanced probability judgments are rare. Americans are more polarized now than at any time in decades (Pew Research Center, 2014, Pew Research Center, 2017). Many of us appear to be Manichaean thinkers to whom probabilistic thinking does not come naturally (Kahneman, 2011). All of which raises a question that is part descriptive and part normative: How feasible is it to induce people to treat their political beliefs as testable probabilistic propositions open to revision in response to dissonant as well as consonant evidence and arguments?

A survey of the psychological literature suggests the grounds for pessimism out-number those for optimism. People are often too quick to jump to conclusions from fragmentary evidence (Fiske and Taylor, 1991, Ross, 1977), too slow to update their views in the wake of disconfirming evidence (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), too tempted to apply weak “can-I-believe-this?” tests to agreeable claims and tough “must-I-believe-this?” tests to dissonant claims (Belsky & Gilovich, 2010), too prone to over-confidence (Moore & Healy, 2008; Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982) and over-estimation of how much others share their views (Mullen et al., 1985, Ross et al., 1976), and too fond of seeking out the company of like-minded others (Sunstein, 2004) and, once in their company, of embracing increasingly extreme views (Myers and Lamm, 1976, Sunstein, 2007). Whether working individually or in groups, people are often susceptible to self-justifying cycles of reasoning that make them progressively more self-righteous and contemptuous of the competence and morality of the other side (Haidt, 2012). In this gloomy view of citizen reasoning, we are “naïve realists” (Ross, in press) who are fated to be “prisoners of our preconceptions” (Tetlock, 2005).

Let us begin with improving the quality of collective decisions. A long tradition of thought, including, in particular, the reflections of John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper, has highlighted what we can call the epistemic virtues of criticism. Several arguments have shown that to submit an idea to criticism constitutes one of the best means of testing its validity. This holds for practical ideas. A decision is more likely to be of a high quality – whether in factual and technical terms, or in terms of values – if the proposals for action have been submitted to criticism beforehand. Criticism permits the elimination, or at least the reduction, of proposals involving false factual beliefs, logical errors, or objectionable moral choices. We do not need to repeat here the arguments establishing the epistemic merits of criticism. No one today would deny that criticism is one of the best means at our disposal to test the quality, technical and moral, of practical proposals. Nevertheless, the conclusion that we generally draw from these arguments is that it is enough simply to establish the freedom to express criticism to produce its benefits. This is without doubt how Mill reasoned. We find an even more striking expression of this position in the famous free-speech dissent of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Men, he wrote, will eventually realize “that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”7 Yet the conclusion that the free exchange of ideas is a sufficient guarantee is not justified. Freedom of speech on its own does not ensure that the right to criticize will be exercised. Furthermore, as we shall see, the fact that criticisms are put forward does not guarantee that they will receive proper consideration. Several mechanisms can prevent the ability to criticize freely from leading to its exercise. I group these together here under the label of conformism. Social psychology has long told us (with elaboration in Rousseau) that people want to be liked. Being esteemed and approved of by others also provides a gratifying image of one's self. It follows that when people perceive that, in a given social environment, others' opinions lean in a certain direction, they tend to bend their own expressions in the same direction to gain the approval of their peers. They avoid expressing dissenting or critical views, reinforcing the mechanism of the “spiral of silence.”8 Even in the context of discussion, we observe the disposition to conform to what is perceived as the norm within the group. This phenomenon is at the heart of what has been named, since the works of psychologist Serge Moscovici, the polarizing effect of group discussions.9 Thus, even if criticism is formally free, a powerful social force works to marginalize, or even to stifle, its expression. Contrary to what liberal theorists often affirm, social or cultural diversity within a group does not suffice to assure a confrontation of opinions critically opposed to one another. Suppose, for example, a deliberating body whose members, while being diverse with regard to social position, education, and beliefs, also share a fear of some danger. Let us imagine, furthermore, that this assembly discusses a measure that would contribute to the reduction of this danger; for example, strengthening the powers of the police. In this context, it is unlikely that collective deliberation will bring forth many arguments against the adoption of this measure, however much social or cultural diversity there may be in the group. Rather, the discussion will produce an accumulation of reasons in favor of increased police power, with various members finding, from within their own particular perspectives, diverse reasons for adopting this course of action that others, differently situated, may not have seen on their own. Yet even if increasing the prerogatives of the police did, in fact, contribute to the realization of the desired end, the measure might also present undesirable effects or features in other ways. Collective deliberation should precisely bring to light these potential negative effects and weigh them in the balance against the benefits of the measure. But in our case, the assembly will systematically underestimate these possible negative features even though members of the assembly have the liberty to oppose the measure and criticize one another. It appears, then, that if one wants to obtain from political deliberation the favorable epistemic effects of criticism, the expression of opposing opinions must be encouraged, not merely permitted. But there is another reason to ensure that the participants in a deliberation are actually confronted with opposing points of view; it concerns the reception of arguments, rather than their production. Studies in social and cognitive psychology show that, confronted with new information or evidence, people have a systematic propensity to see in it a confirmation of their previous beliefs. In a now-classic experiment, psychologists presented the same ensemble of documents and studies concerning the death penalty and its effects to two groups of subjects selected on the basis of their antecedent opinions: one group composed of subjects favorable to the death penalty, the other subjects who are rather hostile to it. After being confronted with these documents, the group that was favorable to the death penalty became more favorable to it, and the group hostile to it became still more hostile.10 This phenomenon is particularly marked when the documents presented to the subjects were ambiguous and called for interpretation. The propensity to find support for one's antecedent beliefs is known as “confirmation bias.”11 Research has also shown that group discussion reinforces the effects of confirmation bias. Groups interpret information with more bias than do individuals; and they privilege information that supports their antecedent beliefs to an even greater degree than do individuals.12 Two mechanisms explain this tendency. First, as noted earlier, group settings accentuate tendencies that predominate among individuals. If privileging information supportive of prior beliefs is already the dominant tendency among individuals, it is not surprising that this tendency should be amplified in group discussion. But a second, and more surprising, mechanism is also at work. It seems that groups tend to discuss principally the information that was already known to all the members before the beginning of the discussion. Within groups, it turns out, discussion turns essentially on shared knowledge. Members of the group are reluctant to discuss those bits of information that are known only to one or a few other members prior to the discussion.13 Shared information appears to have more weight in the eyes of the group members, and has a greater chance of being mentioned during the discussion, and thus remembered later.14 Finally, information supporting the position preferred by the greatest number of group members has a greater likelihood of becoming the object of discussion than information supporting the contrary position.15 Collective discussion thus tends to produce a disproportionate volume of information and arguments in favor of the already-dominant belief in the group. If one wishes to check the effects of confirmation bias – a phenomenon to which groups are particularly vulnerable – one must take proactive measures. One can, for example, call special attention to arguments contrary to prior beliefs by highlighting them (literally) or by making them cognitively more salient. Not only is the free expression of a multiplicity of voices not sufficient to assure the confrontation of opposing views, but the mere expression of contrary arguments is not sufficient for others to understand those arguments or consider them objectively. In the absence of measures that actively induce individuals to pay particular attention to evidence and points of view opposed to their own, collective deliberation will have the greatest likelihood of simply reinforcing antecedent opinions. In a political deliberation, in short, we cannot expect that the gathering of diverse points of view will spontaneously produce a clash of arguments pro and contra, nor that it will bring about a balanced consideration of views. Mill was wrong to assume that, in a society or an assembly composed of diverse members, opposing opinions would already be there, waiting to be set against one another once they were allowed to be uttered. Mill wrote: “The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a ‘devil's advocate.'”16 He failed to see that the presence of a devil's advocate was required, not merely admitted. And through the requirement, the Church secured that objections to the canonization of a given person were aired and considered, even if no individual would otherwise have spontaneously offered them.17 The confrontation of opposing opinions also has merit beyond eliciting unshared perspectives. It unifies the field in which opinions are formed and expressed, counteracting the fragmentation of the public sphere. In order to be opposed to an opinion and to contest it, it is necessary that one be cognizant of that opinion and take it into consideration. In a society in which points of view are objectively diverse, the open and explicit clash of opposing ideas is neither the natural state nor the sole possible condition. Another configuration is just as likely: mutual ignorance. The German sociologist Georg Simmel therefore argued that conflict between social groups paradoxically served the cause of social integration: first, by placing the conflicting groups into a relationship with one another and, second, by exerting a pressure for unity among the secondary divisions within each group. We can advance a similar argument in matters of opinion. The clash of opinions unifies the field in which beliefs confront one another, creating a space in which those beliefs are addressed to and respond to one another. This task of mutual addressing is harder when the space of opinions is fragmented into a multitude of islets, homogenous within themselves but formed in conditions of little communication with outsiders. Several factors – some older, some of more recent origin – now trend in the direction of this sort of fragmentation. First, we have long known that people are selective in their choice of contacts and social relations. They tend disproportionately to be in contact with people who share their political opinions.18 Psychologically, many fear the face-to-face expression of political disagreement and want to avoid it as much as possible. More recent factors also work in the direction of fragmentation: the development of cable television and its thematic stations, the spread of the Internet, and finally the movement toward residential and territorial segregation. Although the effects of these transformations are still difficult to estimate, they all present an analogous structure: people are now offered, in multiple ways, greater opportunities for communicating and coming into contact only with other individuals like themselves. Cable television and the rise of opinion-based television stations (a phenomenon currently more pronounced in the United States than in Europe) provide viewers with the possibility of receiving a high proportion of their information only from a channel to which they feel ideologically close. Worse still, cable TV allows individuals with little interest in politics to avoid political news altogether and watch only entertainment programs.19 For its part, the Internet has dramatically increased the number and types of people with whom one can enter into contact. But studies on the usage of the Web suggest that contacts and links are established primarily through personal affinities, and in particular through ideological affinities within the political domain. Progressive blogs and forums link to other progressive sites but not to conservative sites, and vice versa. From these islets and networks of like-minded individuals we can expect the increased effects of reinforcement and polarization, because, in general, interacting with people of similar beliefs pushes one more toward the extreme positions of the views common to the group.20 Finally, the movement toward residential segregation, which has already progressed in the United States and is at work today in Europe, further contributes to the fragmentation of the public space of communication. If it is true that opinions are strongly correlated with sociocultural and ethnic factors, then in a neighborhood whose inhabitants share the same sociocultural or ethnic profile, each person is likely, for the most part, to encounter neighbors who share the same opinions. A selective exposure to similar opinions emerges de facto. Faced with these forces of fragmentation, only intentional collective action can be expected to produce a degree of unification of the public political sphere. This second justification for the deliberate encouragement of adversarial political debates is particularly salient today. True, adversarial debate is by nature reductive. Faced with some political problem, the polity usually has a multitude of possible courses of action, not all of which will be mutually exclusive. Yet the reductive character of the adversarial method is also one of its merits. It simplifies complexity, making the choices easier to grasp. There is no doubt, for example, that the current economic situation in Europe and the United States calls for a range of measures that are more or less intermingled and complementary to one another. To obtain a synoptic view of these measures and their relations and to choose among them would require considerable cognitive effort. There are cognitive advantages to presenting the policy response as a choice between reducing public deficits now and maintaining or increasing these deficits in the short term to prevent further decline until the economy has regained its normal growth rate. As democrats, we cannot discount the value of such cognitive simplicity. Groups of experts may be able to deliberate without using the adversarial method. But if we want ordinary (or even well-informed) citizens to participate ably in collective deliberation, the simplification achieved by the adversary system is an almost indispensable instrument. The fourth principle in support of the adversarial method is the value of treating the minority with respect. No matter how conscientiously citizens deliberate, it is likely that disagreement will remain at the end of the process. Decisions will therefore be taken by the majority. The majority of people will get to live with the decision they desired; a minority of people will have to live under a decision they did not support. To be sure, the decision itself formed the minority: it did not exist per se before the vote. But the manner of conducting the deliberation before the vote entails consequences for the treatment of those who, after the vote, will make up the minority. If the deliberation has been conducted as a debate between opposed positions, with each camp presenting its reasons in favor of its position and criticizing those advanced by the opposition, two consequences follow. After a vote has been taken, the minority must obey the decision, but at least the reasons aiming to justify this decision will have been formulated and made public. The minority might still refuse to listen to these reasons seriously and in good faith, but it was given the chance to consider them. The minority members were therefore treated with the respect owed to autonomous beings. Once children have reached the age of autonomy, parents must justify the orders they give them. When they are not yet autonomous, children must obey orders simply because they are orders. So, too, if the minority members have not had the possibility of hearing the reasons for the decision they must obey against their wishes, they are placed in a situation of having to obey the order simply because it is an order, or simply because it obtained the most votes. I do not mean to imply that the members of the minority will consequently be more disposed to obey the decision. Sometimes justifications exacerbate the opposition. But justifying orders shows greater respect for the autonomy of those receiving them. On the flip side, the reasons for not taking the decision that ultimately triumphed would also have been put forward. These criticisms and objections did not prevail, but they were at least articulated and made public. From the majority's perspective, because it won, it will naturally think that it was right; but in the process, it had to listen to the opposition explaining their justification. The members of the majority were at minimum forced to see that there were reasons supporting the other side. It seems reasonable to think that, as a result, the majority will be less inclined to consider the minority as unintelligent or ill-intentioned. Before I proceed to the practical consequences that we can draw from my argument, I must first respond to an objection: that rendering obligatory the presentation of opposing points of view in the public sphere would require constraints on public discourse and encroachments on freedom of speech. In response to this objection I would first suggest turning to an institution that in the relatively recent past followed just this path: the fairness doctrine in effect in the United States from 1927 to 1987. The fairness doctrine, implemented by the Federal Communications Commission, made it obligatory for radio and television stations to give an evenly balanced presentation of “opposing viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance.” The fairness doctrine not only imposed equality in airtime; it also required the presentation of viewpoints opposed to one another. The doctrine did not apply to airtime during electoral campaigns, which was regulated on other terms. It applied instead to any question that became the object of public controversy outside of electoral periods. The constitutionality of this doctrine was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous 1969 decision of Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC.21 The central argument that the Court invoked in support of the constitutionality of the fairness doctrine was that, in regard to liberty of expression on the airwaves, it is “the right of the viewing and listening public, and not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.” The Court thus held that listeners and viewers had the right to hear conflicting viewpoints in order to make up their mind on the issues: “Speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government.”22 The fairness doctrine was abandoned for two reasons. First, the doctrine led radio and television stations to avoid controversial subjects for the sake of not exposing themselves to lawsuits claiming they had violated the law. Second, the question of what exactly constituted the opposition of one point of view against another became the subject of repeated litigation, and the fcc proved unable to reduce the insecurity and juridical uncertainty that arose on this front. Despite its eventual abandonment, however, the Red Lion decision shows that the obligation for the media to present conflicting viewpoints is compatible with a certain interpretation of freedom of speech in the public sphere, an interpretation that focuses on the rights of the receiving public. That the U.S. Supreme Court has since rejected this interpretation does not mean that the arguments advanced in Red Lion were objectively weak. They are, in any case, consistent with the claims of this essay. What, then, should we do in practice to foster the confrontation of opposing arguments in today's democracies? Without claiming to provide a complete and detailed response to this question, I will conclude by suggesting two concrete means for promoting the adversarial principle in politics. The first is a practice yet to be invented, which would be implemented outside of electoral periods. The second consists of reinforcing a practice already used in electoral campaigns. First, my suggestion for the future. Outside of electoral periods, civil-society actors (such as foundations or think tanks) could organize adversarial debates on subjects of public interest. These debates would not be regularly scheduled, but would be organized only when a question sparked significant interest from the public (as with such topics as nuclear energy, assisted suicide, or, in certain countries, the wearing of the hijab) or when a large number of citizens mobilized in favor of a cause. More generally, these public debates would not aim to replace any existing democratic practices (such as electoral campaigns or parliamentary debates), but would complement them. Neither the exposition of conflicting viewpoints nor communication across ideological divides can be made mandatory. This does not mean that it is useless to try to facilitate them. Indeed, the probability of being confronted with opposing points of view matters: it tends to make one's thoughts more anticipatory, careful, and subtle.23 In contemporary circumstances, this probability tends to diminish. The active promotion of adversarial debates aims to counteract this pernicious tendency. Given that the goal of these debates would be to further the formulation and diffusion of arguments for and against a given public decision, they should be guided by the following principle: speakers should defend or criticize a given policy or position only with reference to its own merits, and not in response to reasons external to the policy or position. The arguments advanced in these debates should concern the advantages or disadvantages – whether technical or moral – inherent in the decision. I call this the principle of relevant reasons. This principle has two implications: the first concerns simplifying the debate to one issue; the second concerns choosing the right participants. In order to encourage citizens to take account of and weigh the reasons for and against a given decision, each question that can be defined objectively and independent from other questions should be debated separately. Multidimensionality and the bundling of different questions undermine the coherence of the arguments. To be sure, at election time, the voter will vote for a candidate or party that has bundled questions without an objective connection between them. Such grouping may be desirable, because it permits negotiations between different strands of the party. Nevertheless, to understand the bundling and negotiation well enough to cast an informed vote, the voter needs to have thought through the different issues separately, aided by adversarial debate. It is probably too difficult to completely exclude nonrelevant reasons – that is, reasons not substantively linked to the policy in question – at the moment of organizing a deliberative debate. But the principle remains valid: nonrelevant arguments should be sidelined as much as possible. As a consequence, each debate should focus on a specific theme, rather than on platforms comprising multiple dimensions.

Deciding between competing understandings of the same issue through reasoning necessitates a good deal of common understanding. This common ground is partly epistemological—an (implicit or explicit) consensus on what counts as good reasons, valid arguments, and so forth—and partly in the form of some overlap in conceptual horizons: the fundamental categories through which the issue is understood.

Philosophers have used different terms for this conceptual horizon, such as “background” (Searle 1995, chap. 6), “paradigm” (Kuhn 2012, chap. 2), “inescapable framework” (Taylor 1989, chap. 2), or “world view” (Weber 2004, 103). Regardless of the particular term one prefers, the main point—now ubiquitous in modern philosophy—is that we human beings inescapably relate to the world, to ourselves, and to others through conceptual lenses of which we might be more or less conscious.

In order for a practice to be courageous there needs to be some kind of goal, and, furthermore, some kind of connection between the goal and the practice. This is admittedly still pretty vague. Insofar as we define courage as a challenging practice in which we risk our lives in order to reasonably further some kind of goal, we have reached a definition with elements (‘risk’, ‘lives’, ‘reasonably’ ‘further’, ‘some kind of goal’) that are very open to differing views.

On the one hand, this is certainly as it has to be. If we are to articulate a positive supplement to the negative definitions of the freedom of expression, it must be very open, because it should be open to the improvisational and disruptive impulses of courage. As soon as we start to define the goals and the ways of reaching them too strictly, these very definitions might themselves become objects of challenge through the aporias of courage.

Whether evidenced by the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency, the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the Women’s Marches, or advocacy on behalf of stricter gun laws in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, FL, there appears to be a clamoring, on the right and the left, for social change.1 Many of these efforts are organized at the grassroots, organically, and some are orchestrated by wealthy donors.2 Whether organic or orchestrated, many participating in such efforts are dissatisfied with the status quo and seek social change, regardless of their political perspective. 3 When people seek social change, they often see a problem before them that they want solved, whether it is to end gender-based, work-place harassment and sexual violence,4 or relieving corporations of what are perceived as burdensome, “job-killing” regulations.5 In what Gillian Hadfield calls a “law-thick world,”6 in order to address such problems, the solutions often involve some change to the legal infrastructure that addresses the social issue advocates seek to affect when they pursue social change. 7 And in order to affect such social change, creativity in finding solutions is often a critical feature of any effort to change that legal or regulatory infrastructure. In addition to the conscious efforts of individuals, groups, and corporations to effectuate social change, through legal and policy advocacy, campaign donations, and community mobilization, social change is also happening, whether it is driven by forces that may have humans at the center of them, like commercial ventures that produce technological change,8 or occurring despite the best efforts by some to curtail them, like climate change as a product of human activity that sets natural forces and responses in motion.9 Whether humans cause such problems directly, and with intention, or only indirectly, and unintentionally, human agency is central to address the range of problems the world faces at present.10 Given the complexity of such problems, creativity is needed to craft solutions.11 What is more, the curation of legal, policy, and regulatory solutions to these problems will likely be at the center of efforts to address them, whether they involve building up and increasing, or taking away and reducing, the size and scope of the legal, policy, and regulatory infrastructure that addresses such problems. If creative problem solving is a necessary element of social change now and in the future, and a core element of such problem solving will require legal, policy, and regulatory responses to these problems, lawyers will be at the center of social change for the foreseeable future.12 Given the complexity of the problems and the need for creative solutions to address them, it will not be just any lawyers at the center of this change, but, rather, creative ones. If this is the case, can we identify the elements of creative lawyering for social change so that we might understand what it will take to prepare and train lawyers to assume their proper role in efforts to bring about such change? This Article is an attempt to identify these elements by a review of three moments in American social and political history when lawyers played a critical role in crafting creative solutions to thorny social problems.

The lawyers I will choose to highlight in this review include several lawyers involved in the effort to end slavery in the United States, those engaged in the legal fight to dismantle the Jim Crow system in the South in the mid-20th century, and the recent effort to bring about marriage equality for the LGBTQ community. While the lawyers in these moments were not the sole actors in the social change effort that unfolded in these particular points in history, nor were they even the main drivers of the campaign to end slavery, nevertheless, in all three examples, the lawyers I will highlight played key roles in helping to craft not just our understanding of these problems but also creative responses to them.13 In at least the last two examples, the creative lawyers I will highlight helped to lead the legal struggle to reconstruct an edifice of inclusion and equality and solve dramatic legal inequalities with an ultimate goal of rectifying broader, societal inequalities. The hope is that this review can help unearth lessons from past instances when lawyers used creativity to advance social change, particularly social change that had a legal component at its center, to help inform efforts in the present and future to effect similar social change.

By the time I started organizing so much that it felt like a full-time job, it was the spring of 2016, and I had plenty of company. Around the country there were high-profile efforts to organize magazines, fast-food places, and nursing homes. Erstwhile Occupiers became involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign and joined the exploding Democratic Socialists of America, whose members receive shabby business cards proclaiming them an “official socialist organizer.” Today’s organizers — not activists, thank you — make clear that they are not black bloc participants brawling with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of professional revolutionaries, by Lenin’s exhortation that “unless the masses are organized, the proletariat is nothing. Organized — it is everything.” Organizing, in other words, is unembarrassed about power. It recognizes that to wield it you need to persuade untold numbers of people to join a cause, and to begin organizing themselves. Organizing means being in it to win.

But how do you win? Historical materialism holds that crises of capitalism spark revolts, perhaps even revolutions, as witnessed in the eruption of Occupy and Black Lives Matter; uprisings in Spain, Greece, and Egypt; and the British student movement against tuition fees. But there’s no guide for what happens in the long aftermath, as the left has often learned the hard way.

Andreotti: When I talk about humility, it is about sitting at the edge, understanding the limits of knowing, not only of our own knowledge, the limits of knowing itself, the limits of making sense of the world — understanding that it’s possible to reason with other senses. Although we see ourselves as individuated or as individuals, we are interwoven with everything else. If we are going to engage with the world in change-making, it would be important to both understand the contradictions and paradoxes of our own ways of knowing, but also to sit at the edge of the way of being that engendered this way of knowing so that we can engage with the world without trying to project our delusions onto the world itself, without trying to over-determine both the direction and how the relationship should happen. So, starting from a place of not knowing and engaging with the world as if we are not individuals, as we inhibit each other in multiple temporalities, and taking responsibility for this form of engagement, I think, for me, is what humility entails.

If we are able to be humble and accept that we exist as a part of a much larger society and ecosystem, how do we then go about creating systems change?

My recent book, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of [End Page 281] a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent—and in some versions, even celebratory—attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society.

One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos—specifically, an appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers—was used to exemplify an alternative to the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the author.)

The present redistributive policy focus is on a particular type of government redistribution that may be called direct fiscal redistribution to the poor (hereafter DFRP). Fiscal redistribution refers here to redistribution of money and in-kind income among strata of households by means of both government spending and taxing (i.e., fiscal) activities. For example, increased generosity in public assistance payment levels and reliance upon progressive income as opposed to regressive sales taxes can provide positive fiscal redistribution. Direct fiscal redistribution refers to that part of such redistribution that can be accounted for in terms of government's relatively direct and immediate give-and-take of expenditures and taxes to and from income strata of households. Current evidence suggests that such redistribution is considerable in advanced capitalist political democracies, especially vis-à-vis the poor (e.g., Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977; Hicks and Swank, 1984b). During the 1970s DFRP apparently augmented the "pre-fisc" income share of poor households in the U.S. by over 100 percent (see Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977: 74 on the U.S.; and Hicks and Swank, 1984b on advanced capitalism).

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

The US economy "has proven more resilient" than anticipated despite recession forecasts, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is due to say Friday, expressing hope the country can lower inflation while maintaining labor market strength. Her comments come shortly after revised economic data showed the world's biggest economy expanded significantly more than estimated in the first quarter, supported by consumer spending. Meanwhile, inflation has been cooling on an annual basis. "I continue to believe that there is a path to reducing inflation while maintaining a healthy labor market," Yellen said, in prepared remarks to be delivered at an event in New Orleans. "Without downplaying the significant risks ahead, the evidence that we've seen so far suggests that we are on that path," she added. Business leaders have also "increasingly voiced confidence" in the US economy, according to her remarks. Labor market strength and strong household and business balance sheets, she added, should help support the economy going forward even if activity eases as inflation comes down. "While there are parts of our economy that are slowing down, households are spending at a robust pace and businesses continue to invest," Yellen said. With data signaling the US economy has been stronger than expected, analysts said some are now questioning if a recession is inevitable for the country or if a "soft landing" is possible. This refers to a scenario where inflation comes back down to policymakers' two percent target without a major downturn. In her prepared speech, Yellen also lauded the achievements of President Joe Biden's administration, including efforts to boost infrastructure investment and the country's semiconductor sector. The president's agenda, dubbed Bidenomics, comes as he seeks re-election in 2024.

A recent analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) claims that expanding Social Security benefits along the lines of Rep. John Larson’s (D-Conn.) Social Security Act of 2100 (“the Act”) would slow economic growth. The model warrants a closer look, not just because it casts doubt on Social Security expansion, but because some of its dubious assumptions can be used against almost any policy that raises progressive taxes to pay for programs tilted in favor of low- and moderate-income Americans.

The Act, which has over 200 cosponsors, would increase payroll tax revenues to pay for expanded benefits while eliminating or greatly reducing Social Security’s long-term deficit. Among other things, the act would subject earnings above $400,000 to the Social Security payroll tax (earnings above $132,900 are not currently taxed); gradually raise the payroll tax rate; increase benefits in a progressive fashion;1 and change the consumer price index used for the cost-of-living adjustment to better match the higher inflation faced by seniors.

The idea that a Universal Basic Income fuels inflation makes no economic sense. We live in an age of crisis. The Global Financial Crisis, austerity measures, climate change, Covid-19 and war have all reduced people's standard of living, wellbeing and even predicted lifespan. It's a dire outlook, made worse by a fast-evolving cost of living crisis.

Second, the global economy is more interconnected than Hickel implies. When Covid-19 hit, poor countries were devastated not just by the virus but by the .

There’s some genuine appeal to the idea of an end to “consumerism,” but the pandemic offered a taste of how a sudden drop in rich-world consumption would actually affect the developing world. Covid-19 . The consequences in poor countries were devastating. Hunger rose, and child mortality followed.