Bellon 2007

This review summarizes a book about globalizing democracy and human rights. The author makes several contributions, including elaborating her social ontology theory and revising relationships between individuals and states. She also develops the idea of relational subjects and the concept of solidarity. The review provides analysis of the book's strengths and single weakness.

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Bellon 2007

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206 Hypatia

dramatize the space and practice of freedom, the power of beginning, and new
modes of human association”(711. That is, the “abyssal structure”of freedom as
Arendt also understood it-in Zerilli’s words, “not given in advance in the form
of potentiality ...
not made necessary by something in the relations of oppres-
..
sion, and. not legitimated by anything outside itself” (71)-called Wittig to
imagine what we cannot know so that we can act to initiate something new.
Thus, along with her aptly chosen thinking friends (importantly also
Castoriadis, whom she finds interestingly compatible with Arendt), Zerilli
philosophically clears the ground so we may see just how much it matters
that we get on with creating our freedom by imagining what we cannot know;
acknowledging what and whom we care about; and acting with others to begin
what, in freedom, beginning itself can justify.

GlobalizingDemocracy and Human Rights. By CAROL GOULD. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Christina M.Bellon

In Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Carol Gould continues the project
she began in Rethinking Democracy (1988) to forge a coherent theory of global
democracy from the best of contemporary justice theorizing, feminist philoso-
phy and practice, and democratic theorizing and practice. Along the way, she
eloquently and thoroughly maps the rough relationship between democratic
theory and democratic practice, and its effect on addressing the challenges to
both that globalization presents. Gould’s recent book is richly complex and
she intricately weaves theory together with practice, traditional concepts with
critical re-visions, which will reward the reader with a deeper and more subtle
appreciationof the utility of democraticand human rights theories and of their
limitations. It is well worth the read.
Gould makes at least three significant contributions to the political philo-
sophic literature on democracy, human rights, and global justice in Globalizing
Democracy. First, she elaborates and applies the social ontology she began in
Marx’s Social Ontology (1978) and applied in Rethinking Dmocracy (1988).
Here, Gould refines the account by demonstrating its application to human
rights theory. It is possible, she contends, to conceive of human rights as foun-
dational to an adequate conception of international justice and to a concep-
tion of democracy adequate to meet the challenges presented by globalization,
without resorting to essentialism or succumbing to the worryingly relativistic
social constructivismfound in much postmodern theorizingon the subject. Her
claim that we ought to understand democracy as framed by an ontologically
Book Reviews 207

contextualized conception of human rights is a thought-provoking and

challenging refinement.
The second significantcontribution this book makes to political philosophy
is Gould’s refreshing complex re-vision of the relationship between individual
and state (somethingshe tackled earlier but refines here) and, with it, a re-vision
of the relationships among individuals within and across national borders. In
this era of increasingly global trade, production and consumption of goods and
services, and expansion of the means of economic production and develop-
ment, combined with the decreasing power of the nation-state to direct these
economic forces toward the public good, it is time to reconsider the proper or
just relationship between individuals and nation states. This demands a recon-
sideration of (1) which individualsbelong with which nation states (a question
of citizenship), (2) what our obligations are to each other, regardless of nation
states (a question of solidarity within and across geopolitical borders), and (3)
who the stakeholdersare in any given political decision or action (a question
of community and democratic control). After finishing Gould‘s book, readers
will no longer be satisfied with rigid and formulaic conceptions of the relation-
ship between the individual and nation state characteristicof much traditional
political philosophy. Readers will demand more not only from democratic and
human rights theories but also from theories of justice, in their domestic and
international guises, as the boundaries between ‘domestic’and ‘international’
increasingly blur under current globalization trends. Gould’s book is worth
reading if for no other reason than to appreciate her refusal to subsume the
complexities that result under the tired and ill-fitting conceptual apparatus of
traditional democratic and human rights theories.
Gould does not reject all traditional conceptions and theories. Rather, she
makes impressive use of C. B. Macpherson’swork on liberal democracy, Isaiah
Berlin’s conception of positive liberty, and a Hegelian conception of reciproc-
ity through mutual recognition, to refashion the theoretical and practical
relationship of democracy and human rights. Gould does not limit her critical
insights,however, to traditional realms of normative political theory; rather, she
examines the ethical implicationsof a robust democratic theory on relationships
among stakeholders in a variety of economic, social,and personal contexts. She
also draws effectively on now-classic feminist theorizing about embodiment
to refashion a conception of the relational subject who is taken both as the
subject and agent of globalizationand as the best possible standard of successful
globalization-a globalization that bridges differencesthrough care, strengthens
shared bonds of struggle through solidarity,and seizes the democraticpotential
of human rights. We must understand this relational subject, however, in and
through adequate social ontology, political theory, and social practice.
Gould’s particular conception of the relational subject is one of the most
important developmentsof GlobaliringDemocracy and Humn Rights,culminating
208 Hypatia

in her account of solidarity, which is the third significantcontribution to politi-

cal philosophy she makes in the book. The ease with which Gould accomplishes
the move between traditional political theory to constructive critical assess-
ment, from political to personal practices, and from local to global domains of
action, is achieved by the astute way she combines justice with care, human
rights with democracy, and the personal with the global. Traditionally, each of
these marks out one side or the other in an irresolvable dichotomy. Eschewing
any lingering essentialism this might entail, Gould takes these dichotomies
head on, realizing that effective resolution of one requires resolution of the
others as well. Her analytic acumen is tested, and she succeeds convincingly,
in her examination of global terrorism, the subject with which she closes this
book. Framing terrorism within a feminist conception of empathy and care,
Gould argues that terrorism can be a means neither to obtainingjustice locally
nor to settling even well-documented and nearly unanimously acknowledged
global injustices.
The principal weakness of the work lies in the wide swath Gould casts
whenever she addresses a new subject. Each chapter addresses an important
conceptual or practical problem, and Gould sweeps readers up in a torrential
review of the current literature, major figures, and standard approaches on the
subject, ever narrowing her attention until she finally offers a positive construc-
tion of the concept or relationship at hand. This sweeping style of ground laying
has benefits, but its overuse in the book actually detracts from the important
theoretical and practical contributionsGould offers. One wonders,for example,
why Gould thought that yet another review of the Rawls-Habermas distinc-
tions on justice would be more useful or interesting to the reader than a fuller
development of her own version of a contextual conception of rights. 1 found
myself frustrated, wading through what turn out to be theoretically marginal
synopses to find the juicy titbits that really demand further development. This
criticism may seem more stylistic than substantive, but when one recalls her
project and this work's place in her developing political theory, one wishes
she would have dropped all those pages of review and synopsis and put them
to better use in conveying instead the refinement and complexity of her own
conceptual and theoretical framework.
Throughout the book, Gould's goal is to ensure the day-to-day relevance of
theorizing about justice and democracy.Without attention to the details of the
practical implications of theory and the theoretical implications of practice,
we run the risk of developing beautiful but useless theory and of being mute on
issues that demand a voice. When we read this book in conjunction with her
previous two works on social ontology and democratic theory, Gould comes
quite close to achieving her ambitious goal.
Book Reviews 209

REFERENCES

Gould,Carol C. 1978.Marx’ssocialontology: lndioiduality and community in Marx’s theory

of social reality. Cambridge: MIT Press.
. 1988. Rethinking democracy: Freedom and social cooperation in politics, economy,
and society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.
By PATRICIA HILL COLLINS. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Emily Grosholz

Patricia Hill Collins explores the way in which race, class, and gender orga-
nize our national social life via two related themes in the Black Sexual Politics:
African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. On the one hand, she makes
the case for a new strain of racism that is pervasive but harder to recognize
than the old kind, which declared itself in slavery statutes and Jim Crow laws.
Now that legalized racism is behind us, she argues, more subtle forms of racism
remain as its legacy, both externally imposed upon and internally recreated
by Black communities. She uses as evidence not only the statistical findings
of social science (the high proportion of incarcerated young Black men, the
dwindling resources of inner city schools) but also the ambiguous testimony of
film and television, which reflects us back to ourselves while at the same time
expressing ruling interests that distort the common good. On the other hand,
she notes a tendency in Black political theory to abstract from issues of gender
and sexuality, a striking example of which is the hostility of African American
churches to homosexuality. The presences of Black LGBT people have been
very hard to discern in public discussion and in the media, and gay Black men
have been driven to lead double lives, a silence and omission implicated in
the rise of HIVlAIDS among African Americans. A more inclusive political
awareness that grants a place to varieties of eros and committed love, she,argues,
might be more effective.
In the first chapter, Collins asserts that “the new racism” is framed by new
forms of global capitalism, which disenfranchise voters and drive politics by
economic influence. The inability of national governments, organized labor,
environmental activists, and various interest groups to negotiate with an
increasingly unified international corporate structure has been well analyzed
in Transnational Corporations: Fragmentation amidst Integration by Grazia Ietto-
Gillies (2002), another recent book from Routledge and just out in paperback.
Collins’s findings specify those of Ietto-Gillies: poverty in the Black community