Studying social movements to achieve equality spills over into reality

The second sense in which Anderson is concerned about the actual realization of equality relates simply to her many attempts to specify through elaborate, highly informed discussions, how the fundamental principle of relational equality is to be applied on specific policy issues. She has consistently sought to bridge the gap between pure, normative political philosophy, policy, and real politics. For example, her seminal 1999 paper on ‘the point of equality’ entails precise discussions of the policy implications of her relational conception of autonomy for the compensation owed to people with disabilities or support for people who choose to have children. In several articles (2016a; 2016b), she has made the case for social insurance policies, retracing the historical origins and the normative force of these proposals. She also studied the implications of relational equality for the issue of ‘market risks’ in contemporary society, that is, what kinds of constraints should be placed upon markets so that unjust outcomes are mitigated (2008). In her recent work on workplace democracy, she has shown the implications of her critical view of the capitalist firm as a space of governance for management and economic policy (2015a). Finally, a third sense in which Anderson is concerned with equality becoming ‘real’ relates to methodology. She contrasts her approach with those of moral and political philosophers who develop ideal proposals independent of the historical and sociological facts about human societies (2015b). In contrast, Anderson has sought to anchor her normative claims in thick descriptions of human societies, drawing on economic theory, to discuss technical aspects of distributive justice. She refers to the history of social movements to show how her conceptual model formalizes the actual claims made by individuals and groups seeking justice (Anderson 2014a), and she uses history and sociology to defend her original, republican theory of the firm (2017). Anderson describes this approach to political philosophy as a form of pragmatism (2014a, 2015b). Crucially, the pragmatist method is consistent with the definition of ‘real equality’ and republican political theory. On the pragmatist account also, it is only if equality is conceived as the outcome of free, inter-personal interactions, based notably on the exchange of justifications, that it has a chance of being actually realized. In the 2014 Amherst Lectures Anderson closes the circle by arguing that it is precisely by studying how real social movements have enforced more equality that we can learn how equality can become real (2014a). This is a powerful, performative gesture since it relies on a realist, historical account of actual implementation of equality through activities of contestation (and not just moral argumentation), on the basis of which it can be argued what equality as relational entails.