Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency

by Lea Ypi

Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Lea Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene
politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2011

About the author

Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at London School of Economics, and adjunct associate professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, with expertise in Marxism and critical theory. A native of Albania, she has degrees in philosophy and in literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a Ph.D. from the European University Institute and was a post-doctoral prize research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her latest book, a philosophical memoir entitled “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” published by Penguin Press in the UK and W. W. Norton & Company in North America, won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize. She lives and works in London.

Reviews

[Bay Long · Rating 2 out of 5]

Painfully repetitive with endless preliminaries. No doubt the worst (at least the most boring) book I've read in months.