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 OXFORD STUDIES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 Oxford Studies in
Political
Philosophy
Volume 5

Edited by
D AV I D S O B E L, PE T E R VA L L E N T Y N E,
A N D S T EV E N WA L L
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 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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 Acknowledgments

Tis is the ffth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Te chapters

assembled here were frst presented as papers at a workshop in Tucson,
Arizona in October 2017. We would like to thank all those who attended
this event, with special thanks to Rosie Johnson, who oversaw most of the
organization. All of the chapters in this volume were reviewed by referees,
most of whom serve on the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Political
Philosophy (see http://www.oxfordstudiespoliticalphilosophy.org). We very
much thank these referees for their eforts in helping to make this ffth
volume a success. Tanks also to the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom
at the University of Arizona for providing funding for the workshop. Finally,
we would like to express our gratitude to Peter Momtchilof for supporting
this series and for his expert guidance.
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Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 Contents

List of Contributors ix

Part I: Power and Legitimacy

1. Power and Equality 3
Daniel Viehof
2. Rescuing Public Justifcation from Public Reason Liberalism 39
Fabian Wendt
3. Injustice, Reparation, and Legitimacy 65
Stephen Galoob and Stephen Winter
4. Justifying Uncivil Disobedience 90
Ten-Herng Lai

Part II: Political, Legal, and Moral Relations

5. Discrimination and Subordination 117
Sophia Moreau
6. Protecting Vulnerable Languages: Te Public Good Argument 147
Alan Patten
7. Localized Restricted Aggregation 171
Victor Tadros
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Index 205

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 List of Contributors

Stephen Galoob is Associate Professor at the University of Tulsa College

of Law.
Ten-Herng Lai is a PhD student in the School of Philosophy at the
Australian National University.
Sophia Moreau is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Alan Patten is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of
Politics at Princeton University.
Victor Tadros is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Teory at the
University of Warwick.
Daniel Viehof is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York
University.
Fabian Wendt is Research Associate at the Smith Institute for Political
Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Stephen Winter is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations
at the University of Auckland.
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Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 PA RT I
P OW E R A N D L E G I T I M A C Y
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Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 1
Power and Equality
Daniel Viehof

A number of democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the

ideal of political equality (that is, the ideal of an equal distribution of political
power) by tying it to the intrinsic value of egalitarian relationships. According
to these “social” or (as I will usually say) “relational egalitarian” arguments
for distributing political power equally, such a distribution is an essential
component of certain intrinsically valuable relationships, and required for
ours to be a “society of equals.”1
Te motivation for adopting such a relational egalitarian account of political
equality is twofold. Te frst is a matter of “ft.” Many citizens of democratic
societies accept that there is distinctive value in democratic decision-
making. Similarly, many citizens accept that there is distinctive authority
associated with democratic decisions. Neither this value nor this authority
seems to be fully accounted for by appeal to procedure-independent outcome
considerations. Instead they appear to depend on the egalitarian character
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of democratic procedures: making decisions as equals is intuitively of

independent moral signifcance. Yet articulating what the signifcance of
egalitarian procedures consists in, in a way that accommodates its (at least
partial) independence from non-procedural considerations, has been difcult.
Relational egalitarian arguments, many of their proponents think, provide
a relatively straightforward explanation of why procedurally egalitarian
decision-making matters.

1 (Schefer 2015), p. 21. Relational (or “social”) egalitarian arguments for democracy or
political equality are suggested in, e.g., (Anderson 1999, 2010, 2012; Kolodny 2014a, 2014b;
Viehof 2014; Schefer 2015). Tough Tomas Christiano’s argument for democracy, in
(Christiano 2008), shares some features with relational egalitarian accounts, it is sufciently
diferent not to be easily subsumed under this header, and so I will set it aside here.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 4 Daniel Viehof

But relational egalitarian accounts do not merely ft existing intuitions

about the importance of political equality. Tey also (and this is the second
reason for adopting them) promise to provide independent support for our
commitment to this ideal. One of the main challenges in defending
procedural egalitarian commitments is to escape the worry that one has
simply restated, in slightly diferent terms, the very democratic intuition
one is trying to justify. Relational egalitarian arguments avoid this concern
by highlighting these commitments’ continuity with other values we care
about outside of politics narrowly conceived. Even those who are not
already wedded to democratic procedures, or who are uncertain of their
democratic commitments, may recognize that equality is an ideal central to
many of our relationships. If that ideal carries over—directly or indirectly—
from these relationships to our political arrangements, and if it requires an
egalitarian distribution of decision-making power, then this could provide
independent support for democratic procedures and the demands they
make on us.
I am sympathetic to the relational egalitarian approach. And yet I have
come to think that vindicating the ideal of political equality on its basis is
more challenging than has often been recognized. To explain what the
challenge consists in is the purpose of this chapter. I begin, in Section 1,
by explaining what the project of vindicating the ideal of political equality
amounts to. Section 2 outlines the basic structure of the relational egalitarian
argument for political equality, and highlights a signifcant ambiguity in it.
Two diferent paradigmatic examples of egalitarian relationships commonly
underpin these arguments for democracy: that of an egalitarian society,
a society in which everyone has equal social status (rather than the kind
of unequal status we associate with hierarchical societies governed by,
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e.g., caste or class structures); and that of egalitarian relationships, such as

friendships or marriages among equals. Tese two examples, though
plausibly related, are not neatly aligned. And, I argue in Sections 3 to 6,
they have diferent implications for the distribution of power, and the
applicability of relational egalitarian intuitions to our political community.
While egalitarian rela­ tionships like friendship do include a positive
requirement of equal power, the ideal of equal status does not. It merely
demands that unequal power be socially justifed in some ways (ways that
are compatible with our basic moral equality) and not others (ways that are
not). And while the ideal of equal status straightforwardly applies to large
political communities, it is open to doubt whether the ideals associated
with friendship do; and even if these doubts can be overcome (or at least
kept in check), the resulting picture makes the value and authority of
democratic institutions much more conditional on the actual attitudes

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 Power and Equality 5

of citizens (historic and contemporary) than defenders of the ideal of political

equality may have hoped for.

1.

Political equality is a matter of how political power is distributed among

the members of a particular group. Political power is constituted by the
opportunity to infuence political decisions, which usually take the form of
laws and other directives that are regularly coercively enforced against, or
widely considered binding for, the group’s members.2 So to have equal political
power is to have an equal opportunity to infuence political decisions that
apply to one’s group.3
What does it take to vindicate the ideal of political equality, by which
I mean, vindicate that political equality is an ideal or value in its own right?
It is not enough to show that egalitarian political institutions (institutions
which distribute political power equally) are in fact valuable, as their value
could derive from considerations that are quite independent of political
equality. As Steven Wall has pointed out, “For the ideal of political equality
to be vindicated, it must be shown to be more than a mere by-product of a
sound justifcation.”4 Tis means, for instance, that a vindication of political
equality cannot rest on purely instrumental defenses of democracy: even if
these defenses could establish that some egalitarian distribution of decision-
making power would best bring about good outcomes (suitably specifed),
the value of the egalitarian distribution would be derived from the value of
the outcomes, which is specifable without reference to political equality.
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2 So not all power is political power, and a commitment to equal political power need
not go hand in hand with a commitment to equal power more generally. But our concern
with equal political power is plausibly not unrelated to a broader concern with equal
power, and an account of political equality and its value should elucidate that relation.
3 Two points are worth fagging. First, the opportunity to infuence, rather than actual
infuence, is what matters here because someone may have equal power yet fail to exercise it.
Second, an opportunity to infuence must be distinguished from an opportunity to
acquire an opportunity to infuence. If I can only vote at time t2 if I register at time t1, then
I have an opportunity at t1 to acquire the opportunity to infuence the decisions at t2.
But this doesn’t mean that I have the power at t1 to infuence the decision. And if I fail to
register at t1, I lack the opportunity to infuence the decision at t2, and thus lack the
relevant power. Tis is a conceptual point about power, separable from the normative
question whether my having, but not using, an (equal) opportunity to register at t1 bears
on whether I can complain that I lack (equal) political power at t2.
4 (Wall 2007), p. 417.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 6 Daniel Viehof

But even among theories that treat political equality as more than a mere
by-product, it is worth drawing a distinction between those that treat political
equality as an ideal in its own right, and those that do not. What would it
be to treat political equality as more than a mere by-product and yet not as
an ideal in its own right? On some views, equality simply sets a moral
baseline from which distributions of political power must start. If there is no
(adequate) reason for distributing power diferently—to move away from
the baseline—then there is reason to distribute it equally. (In Isaiah Berlin’s
words, “equality needs no reasons, only inequality does so . . .”5) But though
equality is (on such views) special because it sets the baseline, and any move
away from it requires justifcation, it is also nothing but a baseline. If there is
a good reason to move away from the baseline—a good reason for an unequal
distribution—then equality does not provide a countervailing reason to
stick (or remain close) to an equal distribution. Putting the point slightly
technically: On the baseline view, the presence of reasons for an unequal
distribution does not simply outweigh the reasons we have to distribute
power equally. Rather, insofar as equality is nothing but a baseline, the
presence of suitable considerations favoring inequality cancels the reason we
would otherwise have had to distribute power equally. Equality, in such
cases, can make a non-instrumental contribution to the realization of some
non-derivatively valuable good; but it is not itself an essential component
of that good, insofar as that good can in principle be realized even under
conditions of inequality.
To make this quite abstract point more concrete, consider an infuential
position in democratic theory with such a “baseline” structure: David Estlund’s
argument for democracy by appeal to a “reasonable acceptability requirement,”
and in particular his proposal that democracy is distinctly acceptable because
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its justifcation can avoid making “invidious comparisons” among citizens.6

As some critics have pointed out, Estlund builds into his account of political
justifcation a basic asymmetry between unequal and equal relations of
rule.7 Tus, when Estlund concludes that a democratic—egalitarian—
distribution of political power is acceptable where a non-egalitarian is
not, the endorsement of political equality is not a mere by-product of a
justifcation that is otherwise unconcerned with an equal distribution of
power. Nonetheless, what Estlund is ultimately concerned with is not whether
power is distributed equally, but whether its distribution can be justifed

5 (Berlin 1999 [1956]), p. 84.

6 (Estlund 2008), p. 37: “[i]nvidious comparisons purport to establish the authority and
legitimate power of some over others in ways that universal sufrage does not, and so
invidious comparisons must meet a burden of justifcation that universal sufrage does not.”
7 See, e.g., (Arneson 2009) and (Kolodny 2014a).

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 Power and Equality 7

to all qualifed points of view. So if an unequal distribution can be justifed

without invidious comparison, and is acceptable to all qualifed points of
view, the fact that the distribution deviates from standards of equality is
not regrettable, because an equal distribution of power is not a value in its
own right.
By contrast, on other views, an equal distribution of political power is
not simply a baseline, nor a mere by-product, but instead an ideal in its own
right. On such views, there are non-instrumental reasons in favor of
distributing power equally; and these reasons survive the presence of reasons
against doing so. Many democratic theorists believe that these reasons in
favor of political equality prevail against most competing reasons in favor of
an unequal distribution of power. For the purposes of clarifying the conceptual
point at issue, however, this is less important than another observation: even
if the reasons for distributing political power unequally prevail, they do not
cancel the reasons favoring political equality. Tey merely outweigh them.
And so there is something to regret where we cannot realize simultaneously
the value that speaks in favor of political equality and the value that speaks
in favor of political inequality. On such a view, equality is either itself a non-
derivatively valuable good, or (more plausibly) an essential component of
such a good. In either case we can sensibly think of it as being an ideal in its
own right, insofar as whatever gives us reason to realize equality can itself
not be understood without it.8
Tis distinction, between views that treat equality as a mere by-product,
a mere baseline, or an ideal in its own right, seems to me of general theoretical
interest for thinking about political equality (and indeed equality more
generally). But, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, the
distinction is relevant because, as I understand them, relational egalitarian
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

arguments for political equality generally aspire to vindicating it as an ideal

in its own right.9 Indeed, it may plausibly be among the main motivations
for relational egalitarian views that they promise to establish something more
than a mere by-product or baseline justifcation of equality (political and
other). I do not purport to show here that this aspiration is worth sharing.
I merely mean to point out that it sets a standard against which to assess the
success of relational egalitarian arguments.

8 So to say that political equality is an ideal in its own right is not to say that it may
not be in some sense derivative of some other good, as long as it is also the case that a
complete specifcation of that other good makes essential reference to political equality.
See (Viehof 2017).
9 I take this aspiration to be present, for instance, in both (Kolodny 2014a) and
(Viehof 2014). More generally, insofar as relational egalitarians are (at least in part)
concerned with establishing democracy’s authority, a mere baseline view will generally be
inadequate, for reasons briefy discussed at the end of Section 4.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 8 Daniel Viehof

2.

Te relational egalitarian account of political equality rests on the following

line of thought:
(1) Relational Equality: Certain kinds of egalitarian relationships have
non-derivative value.
(2) Equal Power: A (roughly) equal distribution of (some forms of ) power
among the parties is an essential component of such relationships.
(3) Political Relationships: Our political community should instantiate
relationships of this sort.
(4) Political Equality: So (some forms of ) power should be distributed
equally among the citizens. Where it is, the institution has special value
(Democracy’s Value) and special authority (Democracy’s Authority).
As it stands, this is evidently incomplete. In particular, even if (1), (2), and
(3) are true, it does not yet follow that we should distribute political power
equally because an equal distribution of power, though necessary, may not
be sufcient for the instantiation of non-derivatively valuable egalitarian
relationships. Under what conditions Political Equality does follow will depend
on a more detailed account of egalitarian relationships and their instantiation
conditions. I will briefy return to this toward the end of this chapter. But
before I can get there, I need to discuss in more detail (1), (2), and (3).
Let me begin with Relational Equality. Te starting point of the relational
egalitarian approach is the observation that certain egalitarian relationships
have non-derivative value. Tus Elizabeth Anderson has argued that
egalitarians are fundamentally committed “to creat[ing] a community in which
people stand in relations of equality to others.”10 According to Samuel
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Schefer, “equality is an ideal governing certain kinds of interpersonal

relationships,” and egalitarians should care about “the establishment of a
society of equals, a society whose members relate to one another on a
footing of equality.”11 And the editors of a recent volume on relational (or,
as they say, “social”) equality ofer the following characterization of the
position their book elucidates: “[E]quality is foremost about relationships
between people . . . When we appeal to the value of equality, we mean the
value primarily of egalitarian and nonhierarchical relationships.”12
I am sympathetic to the thought that equality is a constitutive component
of certain non-derivatively valuable relationships, and that societies in which
the relevant form of equality is instantiated realize an ideal of which other
societies, which do not instantiate it, fall short. But these claims, even if

10 (Anderson 1999), p. 289.    11 (Schefer 2015), p. 21.

12 (Fourie, Schuppert et al. 2015), p. 1.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 Power and Equality 9

true, are open to signifcantly diferent interpretations. To see this, consider

the two quite diferent sets of examples from which discussions of relational
equality commonly start.
One case to which relational egalitarians regularly appeal to illustrate the
ideal of relational equality is that of a society not governed by social hierarchies
assigning positions of inferiority or superiority to diferent people. Tus
David Miller invokes the ideal of a society “that is not marked by status
divisions such that one can place diferent people in hierarchically ranked
categories, in diferent classes for instance.”13 Niko Kolodny, when
introducing the idea that “in virtue of how a society is structured, some
people can be . . . ‘above’ and others ‘below’,” ofers some paradigm cases of
problematic social hierarchy: “Te servant is ‘subordinate’ to the lord of the
manor, the slave ‘subordinate’ to the master . . . Te plebian is ‘lower than’
the patrician, the untouchable ‘lower than’ the Brahmin, and so on.”14 At
their most extreme, such caste societies (as I will, for ease of reference, call
societies that paradigmatically violate the ideal of equality Miller, Kolodny,
and others are concerned with) assign a place in the hierarchy based on
parentage or similar features beyond a person’s control.15 But caste societies,
in the sense at issue here, may exist even where someone had control over
the fate that led them to be assigned a lower rank on the social ladder.
(Consider societies permitting peonage, in which people essentially discharge
their debts by selling themselves into temporary slavery, and are viewed
as equivalent to slaves while the peonage relation lasts.) Te contrast to such a
caste society is then a society that assigns equal social status to all citizens,
and disallows inequalities that would be incompatible with it.
Another case often invoked by proponents of relational equality is a well-
functioning friendship or similar relationship.16 Friendship and (at least more
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

recently, and in some societies) marriage are commonly seen as quintessentially

egalitarian relationships.17 We have a reasonably straightforward grasp of
the ideal that friends should be one another’s equals, and we can think of a

13 (Miller 1997), p. 224.

14 (Kolodny 2014b), p. 292. See (Anderson 2012), p. 40, for a more detailed list of
historically signifcant forms of social inequality.
15 Elizabeth Anderson refers to a specifc prohibition on consigning people “to inferior
ofce on the basis of identities or statuses imputed at birth” as “the anticaste principle.”
(Anderson 2012), p. 106. I use the notion of a caste society in a more general fashion.
16 Friendship, marriage, etc. are discussed in some detail by (Schefer 2015), Sect. 1.2,
(Viehof 2014), Part IV. Even those who do not discuss them in detail recognize these
relationships as examples that fall within the general purview of relational equality. See,
e.g., (Kolodny 2014b), p. 304.
17 For a thoughtful discussion of friendship’s egalitarian character (that does, however,
overemphasize the signifcance of consensus among friends), see (Mansbridge 1980),
pp. 8–14.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
 10 Daniel Viehof

variety of ways in which a friendship may fall short of this ideal. Imagine,
for instance, that one friend considers herself entitled to special treatment
that her friend has no claim to (the friend owes it to her to be attentive, or
grateful for her friendship, but she has no reciprocal duty to him), or asserts
power over her friend that her friend lacks or that she denies to him (as
when she insists that she gets to decide where they go on holiday together if
she pays, or that she should pick their destination because she has better
taste). Such a friendship, in which one friend efectively deems herself the
other’s superior (or inferior), would intuitively be defcient because it falls
short of an ideal of how friends should relate to each other—specifcally,
as equals.
I think that relational egalitarian arguments for political equality must
pay attention to diferences between these two examples, and the associated
intuitions underpinning Relational Equality, because they have quite diferent
implications for Equal Power and Political Relationships. In a nutshell: If we
start from the anti-caste intuition to defend relational egalitarianism, we
have an easy time explaining why our fndings apply to political relations in
society at large. After all, caste is an essentially societal phenomenon. But we
have a hard time explaining why relational equality requires equal power:
unequal distributions of political power need not amount to objectionable
social hierarchy of the sort we associate with caste or class structures. On the
other hand, if we start from the example of friendship, we have a relatively
easy time explaining the need for equal power. But we have a hard time
establishing that the relevant norms apply to political society.
Let me conclude this section by contrasting the relational egalitarian
arguments for political equality that are the focus of this chapter with other
arguments with which they may easily be confused. On the relational
Copyright © 2019. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

egalitarian arguments I discuss, equal power is itself an essential component

of a non-derivatively valuable relationship. By contrast, there are other
arguments that also appeal to the non-derivative value of certain relationships
(including, perhaps, relationships we tend to associate with equality), but
grant at best indirect signifcance to equal power. Tus one might, with
Rousseau’s Second Discourse, greatly care about the relational (dis)value of
dependence, and favor political equality because it inhibits dependence
relations.18 Or one might, in line with neo-republican views, take non-
domination to be the central value governing relationships among co-citizens,
and argue that democracy contributes to its realization.19 It would be
unsurprising if someone attracted to the ideal of relational equality also felt
the pull of some of these other relational ideals. Indeed it is natural to think

18 Cf. (Neuhouser 2014). 19 (Pettit 2012).

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that an ideal egalitarian relationship will instantiate not only the ideal of
equality, but also other ideals of roughly the sort just gestured at. Yet the
support for political equality that these other relational ideals provide is
structurally sufciently diferent, and subject to sufciently distinct worries
and objections, that this chapter will limit itself to discussing the more direct
arguments for political equality that ft the schema outlined at the beginning
of this section.

3.

Tis section discusses the anti-caste paradigm of relational equality. Behind

this conception of relational equality lies the following thought: Caste
societies, in which some people are socially “above” and others “below,” are
intuitively morally problematic. Tere is something objectionable about a
society that distinguishes between peasants and lords, plebeians and
patricians, untouchables and Brahmins. And, relational egalitarians propose
more specifcally, what is objectionable about such arrangements are not
merely their instrumental consequences, or the fact that those deemed
“below” are treated in ways that are anyway problematic quite apart from
the fact that others are “above,” or even that those who are below act in
obsequious ways we fnd demeaning. Instead the social hierarchy is
inherently problematic. Someone can say: “Te social arrangements under
which we live treat me as another’s social inferior, and him as my superior,”
and that is meant to be an objection in its own right to these arrangements.
Finally, for those who appeal to this conception of relational equality to
defend political equality, inequality in power is (unless qualifed in certain
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quite specifc ways) itself constitutive of social hierarchy, rather than being
merely a causal antecedent of certain hierarchical social relations.
To assess the plausibility of this position, this section discusses what
precisely social hierarchy of the sort we associate with caste or class amounts
to, and why such “social status hierarchy” (as I will call it) may be deemed
distinctly problematic. Section 4 considers whether the absence of social
status hierarchy requires an equal distribution of political power.
To determine what is morally problematic about social status hierarchies,
we need to understand what they are. Tis is not, in the frst instance, a
moral inquiry but a conceptual one: an attempt to identify, and properly
characterize, core features of a particular social phenomenon. Still, part of
what seems to unify diferent instances of the phenomenon is that we
view them as morally problematic; and we would expect this to matter for
our analysis of the phenomenon’s central features. I treat as paradigmatic

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instances of the phenomenon the kinds of caste or class20 societies mentioned

earlier: societies in which some are peasants and others lords, some
untouchables and others Brahmins, some plebeians and others patricians.
I focus on three characteristics of such societies: they involve status inequality;
the inequality is not a matter of mere diference, but instead establishes a
hierarchy; and the hierarchy structures society as a whole. Clarifying these
characteristics should in turn help us identify what is distinctly morally
problematic about paradigmatic instances of social status inequality.

i. Society as a Whole
Let me consider the last point frst. Te existence of a caste structure (like
the existence of a class hierarchy, a patriarchal structure, etc.) is a feature of
a society as a whole, rather than of a particular relationship. When we think,
for instance, of the sense in which the servant is “below” the lord of the
manor, we do not just mean that, within their particular relationship, the
servant is subordinate. We also mean that their positions as master and servant
generalize, and shape all other social relationships that they have. Te servant,
we may say, it not just his master’s servant. Even if he currently has no
master, he remains a servant, and others will relate to him as such. Similarly,
the master is not just his servant’s master. He will be a master even if he
currently has no servants, and others will relate to him in what they think is
a manner appropriate to his status.
A social hierarchy is properly attributable to society as a whole if it
structures relationships among members of the society in general. Te relevant
notion of generality bears on both the content of social norms and the norms’
existence conditions. First, if you know that I am an untouchable in a caste
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society, you know not only how you should relate to me (in this regard), you
also know the relation in which I stand to all other members of society, since
that relation is itself determined by caste. Social status is, in Hohfeldian
language, a “multital” relation (like property), not a “paucital” relation (like
contract).21 (And like property, the social status associated with caste or
class is insulated from certain forms of detailed attention to individual
peculiarities. I will return to this point below.)

20 So class, as it fgures here, is centrally about social status. Tere are infuential
alternative notions of class, indebted to Marx or Weber, which focus instead on a person’s
relation to the means of production, or capacity to generate income in the market. Class
understood in these latter ways is evidently important in its own right. But the moral
questions it raises are (at least in the frst instance) distinct from relational-egalitarian
concerns about inequality. For discussion, see (Turner 1988).
21 (Hohfeld 2001).

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Second, for our society to be structured by a particular hierarchy, the

norms governing relations among people with diferent status must have
social reality: they must be “systematically sustained by laws, norms, or habits”
that are sufciently widespread to properly count as representative of society
as a whole.22 We may call these “societal norms” for short. A full-blown
account of social status hierarchy (which is beyond the scope of this chapter)
would need to explain under what conditions norms are properly attributed
to society as a whole, rather than refecting the view of just a single person
or a small sub-group. It would, in particular, have to explain how disagreement
among members of a society about which norms properly govern it will
afect the existence of societal norms, norms representative of society as a
whole. Often the legal system will function as a mouthpiece for society’s
view of norms. But not all social norms will be embodied in legal norms.
And sometimes legal norms are in fact in tension with social norms; and
it cannot be taken for granted that in such cases, the former prevail. (Tink
of the long struggle about caste in India after the ofcial legal rejection of
caste structures.)
Let me add three clarifcatory observations. First, we need not assume
that a society is governed by a single social status hierarchy. Instead societies
are usually structured by various intersecting social status hierarchies: gender,
race, class, and so on. To say that a social status relation governs society as a
whole is thus not to say that it governs it exclusively.
Second, the features just highlighted are not unique to status hierarchies,
but apply more generally to social diferentiation that is attributable to
society as a whole. Tus in a society that distinguishes between the status of
child and the status of adult yet does not treat one as superior to the other,
the fact that I am an adult structures all of my relations to everyone else qua
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child or fellow adult, and the norms involved are sustained by society. (Te
distinction between status diferentiation and status hierarchy is discussed
further below.)
Tird, a society in the relevant sense is not limited to a group the size of
a modern political community. For instance, a high school may be a “society”
in the relevant sense, governed by internal norms that structure relations
among all students and are sustained by the students’ attitudes and actions.23
(Tis matters mostly because it expands the range of examples with which
we can work to get a grip on the phenomenon in question.)

22 (Anderson 2012), p. 42.

23 Perhaps a friendship too counts as a “society” so understood, and the demands of
social status equality also apply to it qua small-scale society. Tis would, I think, be a
feature rather than a bug. More importantly, it would not prevent us from also insisting
that additional norms apply among friends qua friends (rather than qua fellow members
of a small-scale society).

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Tat caste or class is a feature of society as a whole in turn explains why

not all instances of inequality amount to status hierarchy of the sort we
associate with these phenomena. For example, that some people think of
themselves as superior to others (and perhaps even that those particular
others happen to think of themselves as inferior) is compatible with the
absence of castes and classes if the claim to superiority is not sustained by
societal norms. And even if it is recognized that one person has a special claim
on another, and that claim is supported by societal norms, the asymmetry
in claims need not amount to a hierarchy that mars society as a whole if the
socially recognized relation is limited to the two parties, and does not structure
their relations to many other people.24

ii. Status
But even inequalities that are socially recognized, and structure relations
among all members of society, need not create social hierarchies of the sort
we associate with caste or class. To see this, consider the somewhat mundane,
but also relatively tractable, example of a high school. Te school could
be structured by caste hierarchies: the jocks reign supreme, the geeks are
somewhere near the bottom, and so on. But it need not be. And it need not
be even if there are socially recognized inequalities that structure relations
among all students.
Imagine, for instance, that each term the school publishes a complete
ranking of all students’ academic performance. So everyone knows where they
are vis-à-vis anyone else when it comes to academic standing. And imagine
too that there is a social norm in the school that students are expected to care
about, and admire, academic success, and express that admiration toward
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those who do well. Te social life of this high school, though it sustains
inequality, need nonetheless not instantiate status hierarchies. Just imagine
the relation between two students, one ranked close to the top of the class,

24 Consider peonage. Tere is evidently something intrinsically bad about it: the
person who is indebted must work for the other, without (at that moment) adequate
compensation, and without signifcant control about whether to do such work. Tat
alone likely sufces to make peonage objectionable, and deserving of abolition. It may
also follow that the relation between debtor and creditor is one that is importantly
unequal, unequal in a way that undermines certain relations between them. (Friends, for
instance, would have to forgive another’s debt for the friendship to be sustainable.) But
as long as what has changed is only the debtor’s relation to the creditor, and not the
debtor’s relation to others in society, peonage does not introduce the kind of status
hierarchy with which we are currently concerned. Te fact that historically, peonage was
associated with social hierarchy refects in part the fact that peonage existed in societies
where those working for others in various positions were generally deemed to be of lower
status. It is this further association that explains why peonage creates a distinctive problem
of social hierarchy, of the sort we associate with caste or class.

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the other close to the bottom. Tat one has performed better academically,
and is thus worthy of admiration, and that such admiration ought to be
expressed—the more successful student ought to be congratulated, say—
does not, I think, justify the judgment that the higher-ranked student has
superior social status in the school.25
What distinguishes positive judgments, or even rankings, in general, and
judgments of social hierarchy of the sort associated with superior or inferior
status in particular? It is a central feature of status that it attributes to us a
range of rights and duties that are one step removed from the characteristics
on which the attribution of that status seems to rest. Tink of the legal status
of “minor”: It attributes to someone a whole range of legal incidents that are
at least partly mediated by the very idea of “minor,” rather than directly
justifable by appeal to the characteristic that make us one (viz., being below
the age of majority). And this is not a feature of legal status alone. Sociologists
concerned with social status also emphasize in their studies “the prestige
accorded to individuals because of the abstract positions they occupy rather
than because of immediately observable behavior.”26 Even moral status may
plausibly be thought to have this character.27
Generalizing from these observations, I propose that status involves a gap
between what triggers the attribution of a particular status to someone
(their quality) and what response to the bearers of superior status is thought
to be appropriate given that status (their claim). Status, in other words, is a
non-eliminable intermediate step in the justifcation of its bearer’s claim, a
step that makes the claim about something other than simply the underlying
quality (age, behavior, performance).28 Tis explains why we need not think
of the high school as instantiating status inequality: while social norms
require responding in certain ways to other students’ academic performance,
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25 Tis is not to say that the judgment that is being made is normally inert or irrelevant.
A lower-ranked student may envy the higher-ranked student, or resent her for her success,
and yet not take the other to be her social superior.
26 (Gould 2002), p. 1147. See also, e.g., (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004), p. 383: Status
order is “a set of hierarchical relations that express perceived and typically accepted social
superiority, equality or inferiority of a quite generalised kind, attaching not to qualities of
particular individuals but rather to social positions . . . or to certain . . . ascribed attitudes.”
Note that some sociologists discussing status are ultimately interested in the micro-
processes that determine how individuals evaluate others, and how various evaluations
interact in establishing mutual (but not necessarily societal) rankings. See, e.g., (Jasso 2001).
See (Turner 1988) for a general treatment of status in sociology and social theory.
27 See, e.g., the discussion of “range properties” central to moral status in (Waldron 2002),
and of “evaluative abstinence” and “opacity respect” in (Carter 2011).
28 Cf. Kolodny’s discussion of “consideration,” or “those responses that social superiors,
as social superiors, characteristically attract.” (Kolodny 2014b), p. 297. As Kolodny explains,
“although their basis may be some narrow and accidental attribute of the person, the
responses constitutive of consideration are focused on the person and his or her interests,
claims, or imperatives as a whole.” (Kolodny 2014b), p. 298.

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the link between that performance and the appropriate response is sufciently
close that we don’t think of it as involving a more general judgment about
the person that exceeds the specifc quality at issue. (Matters would have been
diferent if, for instance, the higher-ranked students had been entitled not
to receive warm words, but to be obeyed, or to have their belongings carried
around by their fellow students.)

iii. Hierarchy
Tat status comes with a whole bundle of rights and duties in turn explains
why it is worth distinguishing clearly between status diferences and status
hierarchy. Adults and children do not have the same legal status. Nor do
married people and single people. And yet we would not ordinarily think
that with regard to these examples, one group’s legal status is superior to the
other’s. Teir status diferences—the diferent rights and duties they have
qua minors or adults, or qua married or single people—do not involve claims
that we associate with one party’s superiority over the other. Tere is a status
diference here, but no status hierarchy. Or, to use terminology sometimes
adopted by sociologists, there is “diferentiation” but no “stratifcation” of
status. And it is status hierarchy or stratifcation—or, as I will usually
continue to call it, “status inequality”—that really concerns us.
How do we distinguish between social status inequality and a mere
diference in social status? It is tempting to adopt what I will call the simple
approach here: A is B’s social superior, and their relation is thus one of status
inequality, if the relevant societal norms specifcally assign A greater benefts
than they assign to B, or grant her greater rights, or give her greater power.
Let me say, for short, that the norms assign “advantages” to A over B.29 On
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this view, I can identify someone as my social superior by identifying how

our society’s norms distribute advantages between us.
But the simple approach, though tempting, is ultimately inadequate. For
part of our aspiration in developing an account of social status hierarchy is
to make sense of the complaint someone has when he says, “Te social
arrangements under which we live treat me as another’s social inferior, and
him as my superior,” where this is an objection in its own right to these
arrangements. Te sense in which society treats another as my superior
(or inferior) must, in other words, be inherently morally problematic. And

29 How do “advantages” relate to Kolodny’s “consideration”? If “consideration” is meant

to pick out responses to superiors that are not inherently problematic, then “consideration”
and “advantage” may come to the same thing; but then Kolodny still needs to explain
which form of consideration is morally objectionable. If “consideration” is meant to pick
out responses that are inherently morally problematic, then some of the phenomena that
Kolodny is interested in do not amount to “consideration.”

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yet the features highlighted up to now—that society as a whole assigns

certain unequal advantages to A over B, in a way that seems justifcatorily
detached from underlying considerations—are not, jointly or alone,
inherently problematic.
Consider the following example:
Medical Services: A society grants certain people (medical doctors on
duty) a right to park their car in spots where others are not permitted to
park. It also gives them fashlights that they can attach to their cars, and
when they turn them on, others are expected to scramble out of the way
and let the doctor pass.
In some ways—and, crucially, with regard to those features our analysis of
social status inequality has focused on up to now—this case is difcult to
distinguish from another.
Lord’s Carriage: A society grants certain people (Lords) the right to park
their carriage in places where others are not permitted to park. It also gives
Lords certain insignia, and if those are attached to the Lord’s carriage,
others (commoners) are expected to scramble out of the way and let the
Lord’s carriage pass.
On the simple view, the special advantages that doctors have in Medical
Services would establish them as our social superiors, just like the Lord in
Lord’s Carriage. But intuitively it is quite clear that, though the doctor’s
advantages could be that, they need not amount to superior social status (which,
remember, is meant to be inherently objectionable). For these advantages,
despite their unequal distribution, can also intuitively be compatible with
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mere social diferentiation.

Whether the doctors’ advantages amount to diferentiation or hierarchy
depends, I propose, on how they are justifed. And since what matters are the
norms attributable to society, it depends, more specifcally, on how society
takes the advantages to be justifed. (For the sake of simplicity, I will generally
continue to speak of justifcation simpliciter. It is worth keeping in mind
that the issue is the justifcation as viewed by society, or social justifcation.)
If the societal norms granting doctors such advantages are justifed by
appeal to the interests of everyone around here, where all of these interests
are treated as equally signifcant, then possession of these advantages does
not translate into social superiority. I would not, in that case, look at a
doctor who races past me in her car with her fashlight on and think “Society
treats her as my social superior,” the way that a peasant may have looked at
the lord of the manor as he passes by in his carriage. And when I see the
doctor later at a bar, I wouldn’t normally fear that she would take herself to
be my social superior and decline to talk to me. (She might still do so. But if

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she does, this refects her personal views rather than society’s judgment of
our respective status.)
If, by contrast, doctors are given such advantages, not because society
believes them to be suitably instrumentally justifed in light of everyone’s
equally relevant interests, but because doctors are deemed to have more
important interests or claims—to be ultimately more important than we
are—then their advantages do amount to social hierarchy rather than mere
diferentiation. (Similarly, if society takes these advantages to be justifed
instrumentally, but the instrumental justifcation itself rests on assumptions
about the diferential moral importance of diferent persons, then the
advantages mark, though they may not constitute, social status hierarchy.)
With this conceptual analysis of social status hierarchy in place, we can
turn to the normative question why such hierarchy is inherently morally
problematic. Te distinction just drawn, between status hierarchy and status
diferentiation, suggests an initial answer: If we are all moral equals, matter
equally, etc., then social status hierarchy is objectionable because it treats us
as if we were not. Te distribution of advantages associated with social status
hierarchy lacks adequate social justifcation.
Te emphasis on social in the previous sentence is important if the analysis
of social status hierarchy is to capture the distinctiveness of the relational
egalitarian complaint. After all, if the issue were simply that some people are
given objectively unjustifed advantages to the detriment of others, then this
complaint could easily be accommodated by conceptions of equality in
contradistinction to which relational egalitarian positions have usually been
developed.30 What makes the complaint at issue here distinctive is its
concern with social status hierarchy as a social fact: at issue is not simply
whether an unequal distribution is objectively justifed, but whether it can
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be justifed from within the normative commitments of society at large

without presupposing that some people (some people’s interests or claims)
are of greater ultimate moral signifcance than others (their interests or
claims).31 Te attribution of social status hierarchy to a society is thus an
interpretive exercise that requires judgments about the normative basis on
which society endorses particular social norms, most obviously norms that
distribute unequally certain advantages. Where, on the best interpretation

30 See, e.g., (Anderson 1999, 2012).

31 It is compatible with this account that social status inequality exists even though an
objective egalitarian justifcation for the distribution of advantages is in principle
available, if that justifcation is not recognized, or indeed recognizable, by the citizens. So
a concern with social status inequality, as a phenomenon that depends on people’s views
of how inequalities are justifed, may provide support for theories that care about whether
justifcations of social or political arrangements are accessible to, or endorsed by, those
they govern.

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 Power and Equality 19

available to those living under these norms, society’s endorsement of these

norms cannot rest on normative and factual premises that treat everyone’s
interests or claims as of fundamental equal importance, these norms embody
society’s implicit (and sometimes explicit) judgment that some people matter
more than others. Social status hierarchies, we may say, embody society’s
judgment that some people are fundamentally more important than others;
and they exist—as a social fact—where those living in a society cannot
reasonably see how the unequal distribution of advantages could be given a
social justifcation compatible with everyone’s equal fundamental moral
signifcance.32 Tis may have various detrimental efects on our capacity to
engage in egalitarian relationships across class- or caste-lines, or on our self-
respect. But it is, crucially, also inherently objectionable: it is a morally
deplorable feature of a society that its norms embody mistaken judgments
of fundamental inequality even if this has no further efect on people’s
attitudes and relationships.

4.

Section 3 ofered a reconstruction of social status hierarchy and its moral

signifcance. In this section I want to explore what social status hierarchy,
so understood, entails for our assessment of political equality. Specifcally,
I argue that, once social status hierarchy is properly understood, it becomes
difcult to defend the ideal of political equality by appeal to the anti-caste
intuition. If the previous account of social status hierarchy is correct, there
need be no complaint based on status hierarchies just because some people have
certain advantages or superior entitlements, including greater power. For as
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long as society justifes these inequalities in a way that does not treat one person
(or her fundamental interests and claims) as more important than another,
the inequalities are compatible with our status as social equals. And because

32 Tere is thus an expressive dimension to social inequality, if by this we mean that

such inequality matters centrally because it is reasonably taken to refect a certain view of
people’s fundamental moral signifcance. Te expressive dimension in turn afects—
constitutively—the possibility of certain kinds of relationships, relationships in which
people see each other as equals. For views that emphasize the expressive dimension of
status inequality, see (Fourie 2012) and (Scanlon 2003). But unlike Scanlon (and perhaps
Fourie), I think that what is required for problematic status inequalities is neither that
certain inequalities “could only be understood as intended to express the view that they
were inferior” ((Scanlon 2003), p. 213, my emphasis) nor that certain inequalities,
though lacking “the aim of expressing inferiority, nonetheless had the efect of giving rise
to feelings of inferiority on the part of most reasonable citizens” (p. 213, second emphasis
added). It sufces that the inequality, though not intended to express any view, in fact is
reasonably taken to express such a view; and when it does, this constitutively undermines
certain valuable relationships, even if no one in fact feels inferior as a result.

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the distribution of political power has signifcant instrumental efects on

many people other than the power-holder, it is often possible to explain, quite
straightforwardly, the beneft of an unequal distribution of power without
appealing to the superior importance of one person’s interests or claims.
To make this suggestion both more concrete and more plausible, consider
an example of unequal political power that, it seems to me, fts this description.
Necessary Representation: An egalitarian tribe, one in which all adults
are generally assumed to have equal status, comes into confict with another
tribe about shared hunting grounds. Some agreement needs to be negotiated.
Te difculty is, however, that both tribes are nomadic, which makes it
difcult to send an emissary. So when one person (call her R) happens to
come upon a member of the other tribe, they take the opportunity to
negotiate a wide-ranging set of rules for hunting that will minimize future
confict. Ten each of them returns home to their own tribe and presents
them with the agreement reached. R delivers the rules to her tribe, and
the tribe expects all of its members to abide by them—not because R was
authorized in advance to make the decision, or because a majority of the
tribe’s members agree with the rules, but because, given the importance of
having rules that coordinate interactions with the other tribe, and the
difculty of negotiating with the other tribe, following R’s rules is the best
way to solve the urgent moral problem posed by the inter-tribal confict.
I think there is no doubt that R has greater political power here than any
other member of the tribe: she decided what rules would bind all of them
with regard to hunting in a certain area. And yet I also think that she need
not therefore be deemed their social superior. In other words: whatever
complaint R’s fellow citizens may have about this arrangement empowering
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R (and I do not deny that they could have justifed complaints), their complaint
cannot reasonably be that, if R is so empowered, then R is granted superior
social status. Tis remains true, it is worth adding, even if the agreement
will be binding for many years into the future, and so R’s decision will afect
how the tribe will live for a long time to come (because, say, a suitable
encounter with a member of the other tribe is sufciently uncommon). And
I think it is also true even if, as the example assumes, the negotiations cover
a wide range of issues, touching on many features of tribal life.
Tis example provides intuitive support for the claim that not all
inequalities in power amount to social status hierarchy. Furthermore, it fts
with the explanation I ofered for why inequalities in advantages (including
inequalities in power) need not undermine equality of social status.
Whether they do depends precisely on why society grants someone special
advantages, including greater power. And given what I said in setting up
the example, we here have an explanation of R’s superior political power

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 Power and Equality 21

that does not depend on any assumption that she is, or is thought by the
other members of the tribe to be, their social superior—as someone who
somehow matters more than they do.
Let me emphasize here the particular dialectic of the argument: my claim
is not that there is nothing problematic about R’s unequal power. My claim
is, rather, that whatever we think is problematic about it (if anything), it
cannot be that R, by dint of her greater power, has become her fellow tribe-
members’ social superior, since that claim is false. So if we are not willing
to give up the thought that R’s greater power is objectionable, or at least
regrettable, then we need to look elsewhere for a justifcation of that judgment.
In light of these observations, let me discuss in more detail Niko Kolodny’s
defense of political equality based on relational egalitarian concerns.33
Kolodny’s paradigmatic examples of relational inequality include, as
I mentioned earlier, servant/lord of the manor, slave/master, plebeian/
patrician, and untouchable/Brahmin. In other words, he is centrally (though
perhaps not exclusively) concerned with what I have called social status
inequality.34 Kolodny also argues that such inequality is instantiated, in a
fairly obvious way, where society gives some people greater power or de facto
authority than others. Even if the society otherwise shows equal concern for
people’s interests, and for their claims to means that enable the pursuit of
their personal life plans, it is nonetheless a presumptively unequal society if
(i) some have “greater relative power (whether formal or legal, or otherwise)
over others, while not being resolutely disposed to refrain from exercising
that greater power as something to which those others are entitled”; or
(ii) some have “greater relative de facto authority (whether formal or legal, or
otherwise) over others, in the sense that their commands or requests are
generally, if not exceptionlessly, complied with (though not necessarily for any
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moral reasons)” and they lack (once again) the right disposition to refrain

33 Elizabeth Anderson, the other prominent relational egalitarian proponent of

democracy, is not open to the worry I raise here, at least on one reading of her argument.
On that reading, Anderson’s relational argument for democracy is quite indirect: Democracy
is not required by relational equality as such. Rather, relational equality requires that
public ofcials act for public ends, public ends are determined by the public interest, and
people should be given a democratic say in determining what the public interest requires
if we are to make sure that everyone’s interests are to count equally. See (Anderson 2010),
p. 107. (On another interpretation, Anderson relies on a story about delegation not
dissimilar to Kolodny’s, and assumes that the public ends whose pursuit is compatible
with relational equality must—as a conceptual matter—be set by the people themselves.
Tis account would be subject to worries similar to the ones discussed here.)
34 Niko Kolodny has suggested to me that he may have had in mind something closer
to a view on which relations of inequality—including asymmetries of power and
authority—are problematic in general, independently of specifc relationships and their
value. But for reasons I briefy discuss in Section 7, I think this is a rather less plausible
position than the one I discuss here.

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 22 Daniel Viehof

from exercising that authority.35 So for Kolodny, inequality of power or

de facto authority as such poses a (presumptive) problem for our social
status equality.
Kolodny is clear that not all social relations that assign diferential power
to people give rise to worries about status inequality. He recognizes, for
instance, that many private associations—churches, employment relations,
families—involve unequal power and may yet avoid worries about relational
inequality. But he thinks he has a straightforward explanation for the special
objection we have to an unequal distribution of political power: Private
relations usually include exit options, or other opportunities to avoid standing
in the unequal power relation.36 As a result, it is within our power to determine
whether others have unequal power over us; and that itself reduces the
impact that the inequality has on our relationships. Political power, by
contrast, usually arises in relations that lack signifcant exit options or other
opportunities to avoid being under another’s power.
I agree that the presence of exit options does indeed explain why we are
often (though not always) much less concerned with inequalities of power
within certain private relations. But though correct, the appeal to exit options
is insufcient to deal with Necessary Representation: just as in any other political
community, membership in the tribe is not easily given up, and so the unequal
power of the tribal emissary R cannot be compensated for by other members’
opportunity to avoid being bound by the outcome of her negotiations.
Te distinction between private and political decisions is not the only
resource Kolodny deploys to explain why sometimes we are relatively
unconcerned with unequal power. He also suggests that unequal power is
unproblematic where the person who has greater power is merely the agent
of those over whom the power is exercised.37 Tis explains, Kolodny
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suggests, why political representation need not pose a threat to our equal
social status: our representatives (and, by extension, someone like R in my
example) may have more power or de facto authority than we do. But they are
nonetheless not our superiors because they have and exercise this power qua
agents of the people, who have merely delegated decision-making power to
the ofce holder.

35 (Kolodny 2014b), p. 295. Kolodny also mentions, as a third possibility, someone’s

having “attributes (for example, race, lineage, wealth, perceived divine favor) that
generally attract greater consideration than the corresponding attributes of others” (p. 296).
I think consideration is indeed more closely tied to issues of caste inequality. But as we just
saw, unequal consideration amounts to caste inequality only if it lacks a suitable social
justifcation. In light of this, and because Kolodny himself is content to forgo appeals to
consideration, and reach democratic conclusions via appeals to the signifcance of unequal
power or de facto authority (p. 298), I set aside this third possibility.
36 (Kolodny 2014), p. 304. 37 (Kolodny 2014b), p. 317.

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 Power and Equality 23

I agree that there need be no problem of social status inequality between

citizens and their representatives. Speaking purely anecdotally, many years
ago I used to know my local MP reasonably well. And though I knew that
he had power that I lacked, I never thought that he was my social superior.38
But is this best explained by the fact that the MP was my (or, rather, my
community’s) agent?
It depends on what the agency relation amounts to. On one understanding
of what delegation amounts to, it may require that the principal has substantive
control over the agent. I doubt, however, that this is strictly necessary to
explain why my MP’s greater power did not make him my social superior.
For it is highly doubtful that citizens do have substantive control over their
MPs. Clearly individual citizens lack such control. And I in fact doubt that
even the community as a whole possesses it. (Just consider the signifcant
divergence between a representative’s voting patterns and her constituents’
preferences that is common in many democracies.) One response to this
would simply be that our democracies fall short of the ideal of delegation,
and thus also of realizing social equality between MPs and ordinary citizens.
But I don’t think this is adequate. For I accept (non-idiosyncratically, I believe)
both that my local MP was subject to neither my control nor the control of
the community, and that he was nonetheless not my social superior.
On another view, the central feature of delegated power is precisely that
it is not justifed by, and exercised for the sake of, the interests of the power-
holding agent, but by, and for, the interests of the principal. Power may thus
count as delegated even if the principal has no control over the agent. (In
practice it may, however, often make sense to introduce such control precisely
to ensure that the agent acts for the principal’s beneft.) Tis, I think, ofers
a more plausible account of why my MP is not my social superior. But it also
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entails that what creates conditions of social inferiority and superiority is not
possession of unequal power or de facto authority as such. Rather, whether
unequal power constitutes relations of social inferiority or superiority depends
on what justifes this inequality.
I thus suggest that relational egalitarian arguments that start from a concern
with caste or class hierarchies do not provide reasons for valuing political
equality as such. Tis follows from the fact that the distribution of power or
de facto authority as such is not an independent constituent of unequal
status relations of the sort we associate with caste and class. Instead political
equality is, on the anti-caste view, nothing more than a baseline: If society’s

38 I leave it again open whether there may be other complaints about our MPs’ greater
power. My sole point here is that, whatever complaints we have about representative
institutions, we cannot plausibly complain that the correlative inequalities in power
constitute relations of social status hierarchy.

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 24 Daniel Viehof

justifcation for distributing political power unequally does not rest on an

appeal to the equal interests or claims of the community’s members, then the
unequal distribution gives rise to complaints about social status inequality.
But if society’s justifcation for the inegalitarian distribution of power takes
every member to be of equal signifcance, then political inequality is not
even regrettable insofar as our concern is solely with social status hierarchy.
Let me conclude this section with two brief observations about the
implications of this argument for Democracy’s Value (the claim that democratic
institutions have special value) and Democracy’s Authority (the claim that they
have special authority) respectively. When it comes to Democracy’s Value,
the fact that the anti-caste argument only establishes equal power as a
baseline (rather than vindicate it as an ideal) may, on some views, be of greater
theoretical than practical signifcance. For whether an inegalitarian distribution
of power is compatible with social status equality depends on whether an
adequate social justifcation of such inequality is available. And whether it
is available depends on the conditions under which particular justifcations
can be attributed to society as a whole, a matter about which I have said very
little. Tus someone may respond to the argument ofered here by suggesting
that a justifcation can be attributed to society only if there is a high degree
of consensus among citizens (or reasonable citizens, or . . .) regarding its
content; and that there is no such consensus when it comes to the purported
egalitarian benefts of an inegalitarian distribution of power.39 But then it
might turn out that the anti-caste argument is sufcient, in practice, to
establish democracy’s distinctive egalitarian value. I in fact believe that the
conditions under which we can plausibly attribute a particular justifcation
to society are (in some ways) less demanding, so that it is rather easier for a
society to satisfy the requirements of social status equality while distributing
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political power unequally. But since I cannot solve this matter here, I simply
fag its importance.
And in any case, even on the most generous interpretation of the conditions
under which we attribute a justifcation to society, the anti-caste argument
cannot establish Democracy’s Authority. Kolodny suggests that, “If I were to
disregard the democratic decision, then I would be depriving others of equal
opportunity to infuence this very decision. For infuence over the decision,
in the sense relevant in this context, is not simply infuence over what gets
engraved on tablets or printed in registers; it is infuence over what is
actually done. Insofar as relations of social equality are partly constituted by
precisely that equal opportunity for infuence, I would be, by depriving

39 Tis suggestion is evidently modelled on Estlund’s argument briefy mentioned in

Section 2.

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 Power and Equality 25

others of that infuence, relating to them as a social superior, at least in

that instance.”40
But if equal power (or “equal opportunity for infuence”) is not a constituent
component of equal social status, then this argument runs into trouble.41
Unequal power may be compatible with social equality if it is suitably
justifed. If one thinks that acting contrary to unjust legal demands is an
adequate justifcation for claiming special power, then justifed resistance or
disobedience need not give rise to a complaint about social status inequality.
If I thought I could disobey because I was special, superior to my fellow
citizens, then there would indeed be a problem. But if I thought instead
that anyone who found himself in my situation—anyone confronted with
this unjust law, and able to disobey—would have reason, and permission, to
act as I do, then I would not be taking myself to be anyone’s social superior,
and my disobedience would not have to be incompatible with our equal
social status.

5.

Let me turn next to the friendship conception of relational equality, which

takes as its starting point paradigmatically egalitarian relationships like
friendship or marriage. Tough perhaps not wholly independent of the
anti-caste version of relational equality, it is clearly not neatly aligned with it.
Tere is no neat alignment, because in a society that is deeply structured
by social hierarchies like caste, people are capable of having egalitarian
friendships or marriages, if not across caste- or class-lines, then at least with
people who share their status. (Two servants can realize an ideal of egalitarian
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friendship among themselves even though they are both “below” their master.)
But neither is there complete independence, because in a society governed
by class hierarchies it is difcult for a master and a servant to have a
friendship among equals. Even if they both try as hard as they can to ignore
the inegalitarian norms, the fact that these norms are socially enforced will
make it difcult to escape the societally imposed inequalities, and avoid
having them foisted upon their own interpersonal relationship.42
Te following discussion of the friendship conception of relational equality
will focus on two points in particular. First, equal power is, I think, a constituent

40 (Kolodny 2014b), p. 315.

41 I set aside here the further problem that my disobedience need not be authorized by
any norm attributable to society, which would seem a precondition for social status hierarchy.
42 Indeed, some sociologists use density of friendship relations as an indicator of class
structure (understood in the sense discussed in Section 3): (Chan and Goldthorpe 2004).

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 26 Daniel Viehof

component of egalitarian friendship. Tus an appeal to this conception of

relational equality will avoid many of the problems we encountered in the
previous sections. But, second, we must ask whether the ideal of friendship
can plausibly be thought to govern our political relations—or, rather,
which features of friendship are essential for triggering the demand for
equal power, and whether these features plausibly have a counterpart in the
political domain.
Consider a friendship, marriage, or similar relationship. I assume that
participants in such relationships have special concern for one another, and
thus take the other person’s interests to make demands on them that are
greater than those made by the interests of outsiders. But special concern is
not enough for friendship. Tere must also be a commitment to equal
concern. Friends take the demands made by their friends’ interests to be
symmetrical to those that their own interests make on their friends.43 More
specifcally, they each accept in principle that “the other person’s equally
important interests . . . should play an equally signifcant role in infuencing
decisions made within the context of the relationship” and they each have
“a normally efective disposition to treat the other’s interests accordingly” in
their deliberation, “constraining [their] decisions and infuencing what
[they] will do.”44
But even special concern and equal concern together do not exhaust
our ideal of friendship. Tere is also a requirement of equal power over
the relationship. And this requirement is not a mere by-product, but a
constituent component of our egalitarian ideal of friendship. Friends should
have equal power—understood as equal opportunity for infuence—over
the character of their relationship and the norms governing it; and failure to
distribute power over the relationship equally means that the relationship
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falls short of its egalitarian ideal.

Consider an example: Imagine spouses who each accept that the other’s
interests are as important as their own in determining how they should
relate to each other, and who each have the disposition to act accordingly.
Nonetheless they may end up disagreeing about the character and norms of
their relationship, or how they should interact or act together. Tey may
disagree because equal concern underdetermines what they should do; or
because they difer as to what equal concern exactly requires, whether because
they diverge on what interests properly count as part of their marriage, or
because they disagree about how weighty various interests are. To make the

43 I don’t want to exclude the possibility that there may be other relationships that give
rise to special obligations and yet lack that symmetrical character. But these would not be
relationships of friendship, and would lack the distinctive value that friendships have.
44 (Schefer 2015), p. 25.

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 Power and Equality 27

example more concrete: Spouses in an egalitarian marriage may disagree

about whether they owe it to their neighbor to invite her to a party they are
holding, even though they both would be happier if the neighbor didn’t
come. (So their interests are aligned, but their judgments about what to do
in light of these interests are not.) If one of them unilaterally goes ahead and
invites the neighbor even though he knows that his spouse thinks they ought
not to, then this is, I think, a presumptive problem for their relationship. As
a one-of event, it may be relatively minor: what ultimately matters is equal
power over the relationship as a whole, rather than any one-of decision.45
So if there will be future opportunities for the other spouse to decide
how they proceed in the face of disagreement, the current decision to issue
an invitation unilaterally may not seem especially problematic. But if
something like this happens frequently, and isn’t balanced across the parties
to the relationship, then it would, it seems to me, threaten their egalitarian
relationship, simply because the person extending the invitation exercises
(and, in recognizing that he does, implicitly asserts a right to) unequal power
over the relationship. (Similarly, if the decision at issue, though one-of, is
sufciently important to seriously change the shape of the relationship, and
if the other party foreseeably won’t have an opportunity to equally shape the
relationship in the future, then there is a problem.)
Someone might accept the example but insist that it does not show that
equal power plays the particular role in our ideal of friendship that I have
proposed. I will consider two versions of this response. First, someone might
argue that friendship requires consensus among the friends about the character
of their relationship and the norms governing it.46 Te problem with the
example mentioned is not that one partner exercises unequal power by
issuing the invitation; it is, rather, that the spouses do not agree on how
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to proceed as a couple. (So in a sense, equal power over the relationship is

important. But this is only because friends must agree, and so may be thought
to have—equal—veto power over actions undertaken qua friends. What
ultimately matters is that the parties reach a consensus, not that they have
equal power.)

45 Not all forms of power are equally problematic from the perspective of friendship.
Persuading me of the wisdom of a course of action, though it involves a form of power, does
not pose the same problem as authoritative directives, threats, or even ofers. Why? For
friends to relate to each other as friends, they must see each other and themselves as possessing
certain agential capacities. Among these is the capacity to appropriately respond to reasons
central to the friendship, including reasons about how best to understand its character and
norms. So a friend (qua friend) should properly treat her rational convictions regarding the
proper character of the friendship as her own, rather than attribute them to another, even if
that other played a role in bringing the conviction about by rational argument.
46 See, e.g., (Mansbridge 1980), pp. 9–10.

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 28 Daniel Viehof

But this seems to me to be a mistaken view of friendship. As friends, we

do have reason to coordinate, or settle, on a common understanding of the
norms governing our relationship. Tis partly refects the instrumental value
of shared norms, and partly the importance of reciprocity (and perhaps
especially reciprocity visible to the parties) in relationships among friends.
But such coordination can be achieved not just by consensus, but also by
taking turns in deciding contested decisions, deferring to an impartial third
party, or adopting some other egalitarian decision procedure that we accept
as binding. If my spouse and I disagree about certain important matters—
how to treat our neighbor, raise our kids, etc.—then this might put a strain
on us because we might fnd ourselves torn between the demands of the
relationship and the duties we have to others (the neighbor, our children, etc.).
But this does not make the relationship any less successful qua friendship
or marriage than it would be if we had simply been in agreement about
these matters.47
Second, someone might agree that the distribution and exercise of power
matters in a friendship (and not just because friendship is committed to
consensus), but suggest that the real problem with, say, unilaterally issuing
an invitation to the neighbor is that it amounts to making use of an arbitrary
power advantage to settle how the couple will proceed in the face of
disagreement. What makes these power advantages arbitrary is that they are
unjustifed: there is no good reason why the partner who prefers extending
the invitation should be able to settle the matter the way he did. More
generally, one may think that friendship is incompatible with unjustifed
power advantages, but not with justifed ones—and so equal power is, even
in relations among friends, a baseline but not an ideal in its own right. But
then the friendship conception of relational equality would fare no better
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than the social status conception when it comes to vindicating the ideal of
political equality.
Yet this view too seems to me mistaken, because even (otherwise) justifed
power advantages may be problematic from the point of view of egalitarian
friendship. One way to see this is to recognize that, in the examples mentioned,
the party’s use of power need not be unjustifed—except insofar as there is
a distinct requirement of equal power. For if it were indeed morally wrong
not to invite the neighbor, and the spouse extends the invitation because he
recognizes this, then it would seem that he has a justifcation for doing what
he did. Now perhaps the thought is that, though his use of the power was

47 Tis is compatible with recognizing that certain kinds of disagreements may make
our relationship impossible: if we disagree so deeply that we cannot even see each other’s
actions and attitudes as governed by a commitment to equal concern, say, then this will
make it difcult for us to sustain our relationship over time.

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 Power and Equality 29

justifed, the fact that he had the power was not. But what could explain that
his possession of the power was unjustifed except that, in possessing the
power, he was able to bypass his partner’s disagreement and thus exercise
unequal power over the relationship? I don’t see any plausible answer, and
thus conclude that our assessment of the situation does presuppose a genuine
commitment to equal power among the spouses, not just as a baseline, but
as a requirement in its own right.
Another way of making this point is to highlight cases where an unequal
distribution of power is perhaps even more obviously justifed. If one partner
is much more reliable in judging what course of action would be best, but
usually cannot persuade the other within the time frame in which a decision
has to be made, then an instrumental concern with outcomes would reasonably
justify empowering the more reliable partner to make decisions when the
conditions just sketched are met. And even if this includes pretty much all
of the relevant decisions that have to be made together, on a mere baseline
view this would not be regrettable. Yet I think a friendship that would have
this shape would be decidedly lopsided, and worse as a friendship. Tis is
so even if, all things considered, the instrumental benefts of the unequal
distribution would make up for the resulting loss in the value of the
relationship. In other words, even if the reasons for political equality are
defeated by the reasons against, the inegalitarian distribution of power is
regrettable—and so equal power is an ideal in its own right, rather than a
mere baseline.

6.
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I take away from Section 5 that friendship and similar relationships involve
a genuine commitment to an ideal of equal power: friends ideally have
(roughly) equal opportunity to infuence the character of their relationship
and the norms governing it. Tus relational egalitarian arguments that start
from the intrinsic good of friendship, rather than the paradigmatic evil of
caste or class societies, can relatively straightforwardly vindicate an ideal
of equal power in certain relationships. Tey face, however, a distinctive
challenge: they must explain how the ideal of friendship can plausibly be
extended beyond the relatively small, face-to-face relationships in which it
is usually at home, to cover a much larger political community of the sort
governed by modern democratic institutions. How do we justify applying
the demands of friendship to an entire polity?
One strategy would be to accept that the requirement of equal power
applies, in the frst instance, to small-scale interpersonal relationships; but
to then argue that the laws that govern our community at large themselves

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5, edited by David Sobel, et al., Oxford University Press USA -
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Je me dis tout cela… Et parce que je ne sens plus son amour
m’envelopper étroitement, mon âme est glacée… Un être dépouillé
du vêtement qui lui tenait chaud !

19 août.

Marinette ne s’est doutée de rien. Tous les grelots qui tintent

joyeusement dans sa jeune vie font, autour d’elle, trop de bruit pour
ne pas la distraire. Et puis, à mon égard, elle n’est plus guère, ma
petite enfant d’autrefois, qu’une fugitive visiteuse qui s’arrête avec
des mots affectueux — souvent bien quelconques — quand elle sent
le besoin de retrouver ma tendresse… O mon petit papillon chéri,
vous ne soupçonnez donc jamais tout le bien que vous pourriez faire
au cœur de votre « grande » ?
Ce matin, elle est entrée dans ma chambre avec une dépêche
décachetée, m’a chaudement embrassée, s’est prise à fourrager
parmi mes bibelots, sur la table à écrire. Puis son délicieux visage
très rose, elle m’a confié, et ses yeux m’observaient, un peu
chercheurs :
— Je viens de recevoir des nouvelles de Bob. Il a dicté une lettre
à sa garde, me dit-il. Nous allons l’avoir. Son bras se remet. Il est
bien soigné.
— Par la Danaïde…
— Il ne le dit pas… Mais je pense qu’elle vient le voir… c’est bien
le moins ! Tu ne trouves pas ?… Puisque c’est par sa faute qu’il a
été blessé…
— Évidemment, elle lui doit bien cela !
Ma voix est paisible. Pourtant un choc m’avait atteinte quand
Marinette avait prononcé le nom de Robert. Brutalement, je
retrouvais la chaîne, un moment oubliée. C’est pourtant vrai qu’aux
yeux du monde, j’ai un mari… Et je me considérais comme une
fiancée ! Un peu d’ironie avait dû se glisser dans mon accent, car
Marinette qui joue avec des bagues, coule vers moi un coup d’œil
semi-inquiet.
— Tu lui en veux beaucoup, à ce pauvre Robert ?
— Non, je ne lui en veux pas du tout !
Elle ne peut savoir à quel point je dis vrai ! Lui en vouloir, parce
qu’il m’a donné le courage de recouvrer mon indépendance ? Oh !
non, je ne lui en veux pas !
Un instant de silence. Mes yeux suivent les frissons de l’eau
verte, sous ma fenêtre.
Marinette s’est levée et, devant la glace, tourmente les cheveux
fous qui moussent autour de son front. Puis elle revient vers moi,
petit tourbillon parfumé, et me jette ses bras autour du cou. Les
lèvres fraîches caressent mon visage de baisers légers.
— Tu es un amour, Viva. Ah ! si tu voulais, comme tu
empêcherais bien Bob d’aller attraper des coups de pistolet…
bêtement ! pour défendre ou garder une Danaïde !
Encore une minute de silence. Par delà le lac étincelant, mes
yeux, ceux de l’âme, aperçoivent les cimes de la Maloja…
— Oui… Mais je ne le veux pas… Je ne le veux plus. J’ai essayé
autrefois ! Il y a longtemps… longtemps ! La Viva qui l’a tenté en ces
jours lointains n’existe plus du tout. Celle d’aujourd’hui, petite
Marinette, ne désire plus que sa liberté, sa liberté complète !
Encore un coup d’œil, un brin embarrassé, de Marinette. Puis,
bien innocemment, j’en jugerais, elle s’exclame :
— Tu vas t’ennuyer sans Meillane. Vous étiez si amis ! Paul, le
sage Paul, prétend que ça vaut mieux qu’il soit parti, car tu aurais fini
par être compromise. Il m’a bien amusée avec sa réflexion !
Ici, je juge prudent d’entraîner Marinette hors de ce délicat
terrain ; et j’interroge, sûre du succès de ma diversion :
— As-tu des nouvelles de ton amie Valprince ?
L’effet est instantané.
— Oui, ce matin même. Une lettre délicieuse !
 Robert, sa fâcheuse aventure, Meillane, moi, nous nous
évaporons littéralement du cerveau de Marinette. Et malgré mes
dénégations, il me faut entendre différents passages de ladite lettre.
— Tu vois quelle femme exquise elle est !… Comme toi !
— Plus que moi, certes !
— Autrement, voilà tout…
Je n’insiste pas et bientôt Marinette me quitte pour une petite
flânerie avant le déjeuner.
Je reste à songer. Devant ma fenêtre, j’entends jouer les enfants
sous la garde d’Agnès ; et jusqu’à moi montent la voix d’oiselet
d’Hélène, le timbre plus masculin de Guy.
Pourquoi Marinette m’a-t-elle si bien rappelé que je suis toujours
en puissance de mari ? Que de mois vont passer avant que je sois
délivrée ! Et d’autres mois encore, avant que je puisse être
emportée, devenue son bien, par l’être qui m’a conquise sur moi-
même !
Le divorce, je l’obtiendrai… Mais quand ? Attendre, il faut
attendre… Et l’avenir, c’est la colline de sable qui s’écroule quand on
croit l’avoir gravie.

21 août.

Lui présent, j’ai pu m’enclore dans le monde enchanté qu’il

m’avait ouvert.
Mais maintenant qu’il est loin, je regarde hors de l’éden ; et tout
de suite, le vol troublant de mes pensées recommence ; leurs
ombres glissent sur mon ciel.
Hélas ! il n’est plus là pour les écarter !
Quand je lis sa chère causerie quotidienne, si vivante qu’elle
m’apporte — quelques minutes… — l’illusion de présence, alors la
confiance m’apaise, et j’espère… Mais après !… Après, je réfléchis.
Ce matin, il m’écrit :
 « Sitôt votre retour à Paris, vous commencerez, n’est-ce pas,
mon cher amour, les démarches qui vous libéreront et vous
donneront à moi, afin que je puisse enfin vous montrer ce que c’est,
une femme adorée. »
Me libérer !… oui.
Et ensuite ?… Ensuite, un jour, il m’emmènera devant un
monsieur qui, en vertu des conventions sociales, me conférera le
droit de vivre en épouse, légalement, auprès de l’homme que j’aime.
Et puis ce sera tout. Cérémonie si puérile et absurde, que je me
demande pourquoi m’y prêter et attendre, pour être à lui, la vaine
permission octroyée par la loi…
La lecture de sa lettre achevée, il m’arrive de fermer les yeux afin
de le mieux voir en mon âme… Est-ce bien moi la moqueuse, la
désenchantée, la sceptique qui, avide, recueille ainsi l’onde du
bonheur venue jusqu’à elle !
Que de chemin parcouru depuis le soir où il est entré dans ma
loge, visiteur inconnu, posant sur moi son vif regard ; où je l’ai
accueilli indifférente, sans nulle intuition que c’était ma destinée qui
entrait…
Maintenant, j’ai presque peine à retrouver son visage de nos
premières rencontres ; un peu froid, un peu impérieux, son allure de
clubman très correct, l’ironie gamine et gaie de son sourire, l’éclat de
ses yeux, alors sans caresses.
Ce Meillane-là, c’est celui de tout le monde. Non pas celui que je
connais maintenant… Celui de la Maloja !…
Oh ! la Maloja !… Entrerai-je jamais dans le paradis qu’il m’a
montré ce jour-là ?… Tant de mois doivent passer encore, avant qu’il
ait le droit de m’y emporter ! Et dans cinq semaines, il sera parti…
Il ne sera pas là pour me soutenir dans les heures mauvaises qui
vont venir, où il me faudra lutter ; et pour vaincre, dévoiler ma misère
d’épouse, revivre les jours torturés d’autrefois…
Quelle femme serai-je après cette épreuve ?
 Aurai-je la force de recommencer ma vie, avec un cœur
nouveau, oubliant l’amoureuse que je fus jadis pour un autre qui m’a
laissé la terreur et le dégoût de l’amour ?…
Oh ! le triste don que je vous accorderai, mon ami, en me
confiant à vous, toute meurtrie du mal que l’autre m’a fait !
Que j’ai peur de moi !… Que j’ai peur pour vous !
Là-bas, quand vous serez bien loin, soustrait à l’enchantement
par votre nouvelle existence, si vous alliez regretter votre généreuse
folie ?
Oui, folie !… Oui, généreuse, oh ! combien !… Ne protestez pas,
mon chéri. Car ce n’est pas l’égoïste recherche de votre plaisir qui
vous a rendu… ce que vous avez été pour moi, depuis qu’une
volonté inconnue nous a rapprochés.
Telle je suis, c’est vrai, je vous ai plu. Mais vous n’avez pas imité
tous ceux qui rôdaient autour de mon isolement… Votre promesse
d’être seulement « mon ami », vous l’avez bien tenue ! Plus qu’à
vous-même, vous avez pensé à moi, ayant pitié de la détresse de
mon cœur que vous aviez devinée et essayiez de consoler…
Et pour un homme épris comme, peu à peu, vous le deveniez,
c’était très difficile ce rôle que vous acceptiez, justement parce que
votre amie vous était très chère — plus que vous-même.
O mon bien-aimé, comment vous remercierai-je assez d’une telle
preuve de votre tendresse ! Vous ne soupçonnez pas à quel point je
suis fière que vous soyez ainsi. Grâce à vous, je sais maintenant
combien il est délicieux d’estimer autant qu’on aime. C’est une joie
que je ne connaissais pas !
Mais qu’ai-je à vous offrir pour tout ce que je reçois de vous ?
Mon cœur, mes caresses — et mon cruel passé de femme.

24 août.

Hier soir, je pensais à nous, incapable de m’endormir. Une

étrange idée, tout à coup, a déchiré le sombre tissu de ma rêverie.
Une idée qui m’a secouée d’un sursaut de révolte. Une idée sortie
de quelles profondeurs ? « Justement parce que j’aime mon ami du
meilleur de mon âme, je devrais me refuser à lui, car je vais lui
apporter difficultés et tourments de toute sorte… »
Cela est si évident que ma révolte s’est brisée… Je ne
m’illusionne pas ; il lui faudra renverser combien d’obstacles pour
faire accepter aux siens, à sa mère, son mariage avec une femme
divorcée qui, même pour sa carrière, peut devenir une entrave !
Dans le monde auquel j’appartiens, le divorce est un acte très
simple, naturel et logique. Mais dans le sien, fidèle aux principes
d’antan, ce n’est qu’un mot. Pour ces gens d’autre race, aucune
puissance humaine ne peut délier la femme du serment conjugal.
Ma mystique maman aurait pensé ainsi…
Peut-être, moins difficilement, ils admettraient que je devienne sa
maîtresse ; la faute alors n’est pas irréparable.
Sûrement, — et je le conçois !… — sa mère a rêvé pour lui une
épouse d’autre sorte qu’une femme déflorée par la vie. Certes, je
suis ce que l’on appelle couramment une honnête femme. Mais de
cette honnêteté, je n’ai pas le droit de me faire gloire ! Si je me suis
farouchement gardée depuis notre séparation avec Robert, ce n’est
pas souci de la vertu, comme disent les gens sages ; c’est que mes
souvenirs suffisaient à écarter l’ombre même de la tentation. Le
mariage, tel que je l’ai connu, m’a donné un culte de nonne pour la
chasteté. J’en suis sortie avec une soif éperdue de pureté pour mon
corps, autant que pour mon cœur. Et ma solitude a été vraiment une
eau lustrale, si bienfaisante que, dès lors, d’instinct, j’ai fui tout ce
qui ressemblait même à l’ombre d’une souillure…
Mais ce n’est pas de la vertu, cela, puisqu’il n’y a eu dans ma
sagesse, ni effort, ni lutte, ni tentation. Je le sais bien que j’ai refusé
mon corps, mes lèvres même, simplement parce que les livrer
m’aurait fait horreur. Et l’impression est si vivace en moi que, même
de lui, jusqu’alors… j’aime par-dessus tout la caresse des mots…
Et puis encore, sa mère, il l’a dit devant moi, est une chrétienne
fervente. Alors comment, dans sa conscience de catholique,
acceptera-t-elle que son fils, son unique fils, vive pour l’amour d’une
femme en rébellion avec la loi formelle de sa religion ?… A cause de
moi, ils se feront souffrir l’un l’autre, eux en ce moment si unis… Car
elle ne sait rien encore, sur ma prière… A quoi bon parler
maintenant d’un avenir trop lointain ?
Chez lui, les croyances ont été emportées par le flot. Et puis, il
me veut si fort que, pour aller à moi, il les écarterait comme un fétu
de paille. Mais… mais ne garde-t-il pas, peut-être à son insu,
l’empreinte des enseignements auxquels nos mères ont cru, dociles,
et n’éprouvera-t-il pas, je ne sais quel subtil regret d’être contraint de
les transgresser ?
Est-ce que moi-même qui me jugeais une affranchie, je ne
découvre pas ceci, dont je suis stupéfaite : ce sera pour moi une
barrière à franchir, ce divorce qui me sépare de l’Église, à laquelle,
pourtant, je me croyais devenue étrangère.
Oh ! le voile noir sur mon ciel ! Jacques, il faudrait votre présence
pour l’écarter…

25 août.

Ce matin, Marinette est arrivée dans ma chambre, tandis que, les

épaules nues, je finissais de m’habiller, ayant changé de blouse. Et
elle s’est exclamée :
— Oh ! Viva, tu es de plus en plus mince ! Sûrement, tu as maigri
Est-ce que tu es souffrante ?
— Non, pas du tout, chérie.
— Et puis, tu n’as plus la belle mine de la semaine dernière !
J’ai eu peur de quelque rapprochement avec le séjour de
Meillane. Je l’ai embrassée et l’ai distraite par une question ; ce qui
n’a pas été difficile. Elle est habituée à ce que, dans nos causeries,
nous parlions toujours d’elle, jamais de moi.
Ce que j’ai ?… sans doute, je réfléchis trop !
 Elle s’est mise à me raconter, avec une gaminerie spirituelle,
toute sorte de menus propos sur les uns et les autres. Je l’écoutais
vaguement, indifférente à ces petites histoires qui l’occupaient très
fort. Mais ce m’était un bien de respirer sa jeunesse, ainsi qu’un
bouquet de roses toutes fraîches.
Elle était dans ses jours de câlinerie tendre. Et elle a prié, au
moment de partir :
— Viva, tu vas être gentille, ne pas faire la sauvage, et tu
viendras, avec nous, goûter tantôt. Tous te réclament.
Et j’ai promis, pour échapper à ma pensée. Mes souvenirs me
brisent.
Maintenant, j’ai peur des longues courses solitaires que j’adorais.
Autant que je puis, je reste avec mes deux petits, me laissant
accaparer par leur naïve tendresse qui m’apaise. Mais j’en suis
venue à compter les jours qui me restent à passer avant celui où je
pourrai me réfugier auprès de lui !

29 août.

Tantôt, une découverte dont je demeure bouleversée.

Je m’habillais. J’ai voulu rattacher le ruban qui serrait les
dentelles sur ma poitrine. Il avait glissé contre la peau. Comme je
cherchais à en saisir l’extrémité, mes doigts ont frôlé ma gorge
nue… Et brusquement, j’ai oublié ruban, dentelle, tout… tout ce qui
n’était pas un point, une invisible grosseur que ma main venait de
rencontrer pour la première fois.
Le cœur soudain battant très vite, j’ai palpé… Sous la peau, qui a
toujours sa pâleur nacrée, il y avait, certainement, quelque chose
d’étrange, de mystérieux, — non point douloureux.
Devant la glace, dans la pleine lumière, j’ai observé mes deux
seins. Ils sont pareils, fermes, ronds… La chair rosée à peine, sur le
réseau léger des veines…
 Qu’est-ce que j’ai ?… Quel mal inconnu dont l’œuvre jusqu’ici
aurait été de me rendre plus mince encore ?…
Des secondes, des minutes, que sais-je ? ont coulé tandis que,
obstinément, je considérais ma chair dévoilée, cherchant à en
découvrir le secret. Comme la vie y circulait, ardente ! Mes doigts la
trouvaient tiède, toute parfumée dans la dentelle ; comme jadis, aux
heures où des lèvres gourmandes la brûlaient de caresses…
Alors… quoi ?
Le claquement sec de mon store, battu par la brise, m’a fait
relever la tête.
Dans la glace, je me suis aperçue avec un visage de cire, des
lèvres graves, de grands yeux de créature épouvantée. Et j’ai eu
l’impression d’avoir entrevu un abîme.
A Paris, immédiatement, j’aurais recouru à mon docteur, afin
d’avoir une explication… Ici, je ne puis qu’attendre mon très
prochain retour en France, et écrire à quelque spécialiste sûr, pour
demander un rendez-vous.
Devant cette évidence, je me suis raidie contre mon affolement,
bien résolue à en garder le secret.

30 août.

Donc, je n’ai rien dit à Marinette qui s’agiterait de ma révélation,

sans m’apporter aucune assistance, physique ou morale. Et puisque
je ne peux rien savoir avant quelques jours, j’emploie toute ma
volonté à oublier l’inquiétude qui s’est attachée à moi, rude comme
un cilice.
Peut-être, après tout, n’ai-je rien qui justifie mon anxiété ? Que
de fois, j’ai entendu raconter des histoires analogues à la mienne ;
des diagnostics faux de médecins, des erreurs de femmes
désemparées qui, pour un bobo, se croyaient perdues !
 31 août.

J’ai écrit, afin de m’informer si le spécialiste qui a soigné

plusieurs femmes que je connais pourrait me recevoir à mon
passage à Paris, demandant que la réponse me soit envoyée chez
moi, au Cours-la-Reine.
Car, dans quatre jours, je pars. Les Abriès me précèdent. Ils
reviennent des lacs italiens et voulaient m’y entraîner. Ils ignorent le
double aimant qui m’attire à Paris.
Marinette exulte ; parce que, à Lugano, elle va retrouver son
âme-sœur. Les Valprince y séjournent, en effet, pour quelques
semaines ; et Paul, bien entendu, s’est empressé de satisfaire au
désir de Marinette de les aller rejoindre un moment. Ma petite sœur
en éprouve une allégresse qui, s’unissant à la liquidation de ses flirts
à Saint-Moritz, l’absorbe bien trop pour que j’aie à faire grand effort
afin de lui dissimuler ma préoccupation. Il lui suffit pour le moment
de trouver en moi la fidèle confidente, à qui elle peut tout dire, et elle
m’en témoigne son plaisir avec des mots tendres de petite fille dont
je connais maintenant la valeur et qui, cependant, me sont encore
doux à entendre.
O Marinette chérie, tu ne sais pas ton bonheur de pouvoir n’être
qu’un délicieux papillon, voletant dans la joie !

1er septembre.

Demain, je pars.
Tous ces jours-ci, j’ai fait le pèlerinage des endroits que j’ai le
plus aimés. Mais je ne suis retournée ni à Samaden, ni à la Maloja
que je veux conserver, en mon souvenir, comme des visions d’un
séjour enchanté où je ne rentrerai qu’avec lui… Si j’y rentre jamais…
Je prends congé des êtres dont l’existence a côtoyé la mienne
pendant les semaines qui s’achèvent et que, pour la plupart, je ne
reverrai jamais… « Partir, c’est mourir un peu… »
Voici le dernier soir où je regarde, sous la lune étincelante, à
travers les vitres, car il fait froid, le beau paysage qui m’est devenu
un ami, tant j’ai songé, mon regard errant sur ses lointains, aussi
bien dans l’éveil rose du matin que sous le bleu crépuscule.
Que de fois, aussi, j’entendrai la houle du vent à travers les
sapins, le bruit frais de l’eau ; l’éclat des jeunes voix, au tennis ; le
rire de mes « petits » quand ils venaient jouer sous ma fenêtre…
Et avec quelle mélancolie je regretterai cette musique des sons
qui me furent doux…
Ah ! que je supporte donc mal les départs !
Petit pays, perché comme une aire au creux de vos montagnes,
par combien de fibres je vous demeurerai attachée !… Cela me fait
grand’peine de vous dire adieu…
Oh ! oui, partir, c’est mourir un peu…

2 septembre.

Le train file. Une course vertigineuse d’express. Paris,

maintenant, est bien proche… Et je m’aperçois que je ne voudrais
pas encore arriver !… J’ai peur de ce que je vais y trouver… Peur de
la révélation qui m’attend peut-être. Peur — l’aurais-je jamais cru ?
— peur de le revoir, mon ami chéri. Si lui, si moi, nous allions être
autres… Si l’enchantement n’était plus…
Alors, pour me dérober à trop de questions inquiètes, je me suis
mise à écrire, lasse de la nuit passée sans parvenir à sombrer dans
la bienfaisante mort du sommeil. Pourtant, bien résolue à dormir, je
m’étais allongée sur ma couchette ; ayant pu être seule dans ma
cellule de voyageuse, ma femme de chambre installée dans un
compartiment voisin.
Mais, en vain, je suis demeurée immobile ainsi qu’une enfant très
sage, m’appliquant à ne pas penser ni à écouter le bruit du train
trépidant. Le repos n’est pas venu. J’ai dû subir ce silence de la nuit
où l’esprit acquiert une terrible clairvoyance.
Enfin l’aube s’est montrée ! Mes yeux qui songeaient, larges
ouverts, l’ont vue apparaître ; laiteuse tout d’abord, puis grise sous la
brume de chaleur que le soleil ne pouvait vaincre.
Alors, les fantômes ont reculé. Mais ils m’avaient brisée. Passive,
j’ai regardé fuir les villages où la vie se réveillait ; où dans les
chemins, déserts encore, marchait parfois, toute menue, la
silhouette d’un travailleur matinal. Sous les arbres jaunissants, des
cours d’eau paisibles luisaient. Dans les prairies, des vaches
paissaient déjà, leurs têtes lourdes relevées un instant au bruyant
éclair du train. Par la vitre abaissée, je sentais venir sur mon visage
un souffle tiède, un peu humide, qui soulevait mes cheveux ; et
quand je renversais à demi la tête je ne voyais plus que l’infini gris
de ce ciel de septembre, doucement mélancolique.
Et puis, tout à coup, un choc du train m’a fait heurter ma poitrine,
du côté où est l’invisible mal. Je me suis souvenue…
Et pour fuir la hantise ravivée, j’ai sauté hors de ma couchette ;
et, activement, je me suis appliquée à réparer de mon mieux les
traces de cette nuit d’insomnie. L’eau froide m’a été bienfaisante ; a
ramené une onde presque rose sur la peau pâlie, effacé un peu le
cerne des yeux. Mes cheveux lissés, tordus sous ma toque
soigneusement remise, mon voile ombrant le tout, j’ai constaté que
je pourrais affronter le regard de mon ami… s’il me faisait cette
surprise de venir m’accueillir à la descente du train, quoique je me
sois bien gardée de lui indiquer l’heure de mon arrivée.
Mais mon stupide cœur, trop sensible à toutes les nuances,
voudrait qu’il se fût informé et qu’il fût là.
Est-ce ridicule, s’il n’y est pas, une bouffée de froid, je le sens,
me gèlera un instant ? Je sais si bien qu’il me trouverait, moi,
l’attendant.

2 septembre, 4 heures.
 Il y était.
Quand tout à coup, dans la foule des visages tendus vers les
assistants, j’ai aperçu sa tête brune, des larmes de plaisir me sont
montées aux yeux. Je suis si nerveuse en ce moment !
Malgré la cohue, tout de suite, il avait découvert ma personne
menue.
J’ai surpris dans ses yeux un éclair qui m’a fait tressaillir toute.
Sa main m’a saisie et attirée hors de la foule, et j’ai attendu les mots
dont j’avais soif :
— Ma chérie, ma chérie, ma précieuse petite… Enfin vous
voilà !… Mon amour, c’est exquis de vous retrouver !
Oui, c’était exquis… Même au milieu de ces étrangers, même
dans ce vilain décor, banal et bruyant ! Vraiment, quelques
secondes, nous avons été aussi seuls qu’à la Maloja, devant les
montagnes géantes…
Heureusement pour « ma considération » j’ai repris conscience,
— grâce au passage d’un chariot de malles ! — que Céline, ma
camériste, m’attendait à quelques pas, discrète et curieuse, flanquée
de mon sac de voyage.
Bien vite, j’ai pris, pour tantôt, rendez-vous avec mon ami, afin
que nous dînions ensemble. Et je l’ai congédié sagement. D’autant
que, tout de même, j’avais peur de n’être pas très bonne à voir…
Aussi, revenue dans mon gîte, ravie de me sentir at home, je me
suis jetée sur mon lit, derrière mes persiennes closes.
Et, cette fois, vaincue par la fatigue, les nerfs détendus par la joie
de l’avoir revu, j’ai dormi plusieurs heures, de ce sommeil sans rêve
qui est un baume.
Quand, à la fin de l’après-midi, je vais sortir de chez moi,
rafraîchie par le bain, reposée par la longue sieste, habillée avec un
soin… d’amoureuse, je serai plus tranquille que ce matin pour
rencontrer les yeux de mon ami…
 3 septembre.

Peut-être le jour qui commence me tient en réserve une épreuve

nouvelle, — à trois heures et demie, j’ai rendez-vous avec le
docteur… Mais, du moins, hier m’a donné une soirée de rêve.
Je l’ai retrouvé, lui, à l’extrémité du Cours-la-Reine, comme nous
l’avions convenu. Et une auto nous a emportés, d’une allure de vol,
vers le petit pays peu fréquenté, sur le bord de la Seine, où nous
avions chance de n’être importunés par aucune fâcheuse rencontre.
C’était un peu fou, tout de même… mais tant pis… C’était si bon !…
Comme là-bas, à Saint-Moritz, l’inoubliable jour, le couchant était
d’or empourpré. Mais sa lumière ne ruisselait plus sur la montagne.
Elle errait sur nos douces plaines de l’Ile-de-France, sur l’ondulation
paisible de ses collines que voilait la brume, sur l’eau couleur de
jade.
Et puis surtout, c’était lui près de moi, si follement heureux, que
tout ce qui n’était pas son amour, scrupules, inquiétudes, terreur de
demain, tout s’est évanoui de mon cerveau… Pleinement, j’ai voulu
jouir de mon trésor… Peut-être pour le dernier soir…
Il faisait nuit, quand nous avons pensé à venir croquer le dîner
commandé. Ainsi qu’à la Maloja, nous étions seuls, sur une petite
terrasse où la brise détachait des feuilles jaunies qui tombaient avec
un bruit de soie froissée. Mon ami s’est excusé de l’insuffisance
possible de la cuisine. Je me rappelle que je me suis mise à rire de
ses craintes.
Je suis si peu gourmande !… Et puis, je ne pensais guère à ce
qu’il voulait me faire grignoter… Nous avions tant à dire, depuis
quinze jours que nous étions séparés…
Et, tellement j’étais prise par le sortilège de l’heure présente que,
sans effort, j’oubliais mon mal et son départ si prochain…
Après le dîner, un moment, nous avons marché le long du fleuve.
Puis nous avons pris une route qui montait entre les arbres, vers le
haut du coteau. Mon bras était glissé sous le sien et nous avancions
lentement, très lentement… De me sentir ainsi toute seule dans la
nuit avec lui, la notion du réel m’échappait ! J’allais, bercée par les
noms qu’il aime à donner : « Viva chérie… Petite mienne adorée…
Mon amour »…
La route a tourné. Nous étions en haut de la côte. Un souffle plus
frais a frôlé ma figure. A nos pieds, dans le creux de la vallée, le
sombre ruban de l’eau fuyait, veiné par des sillons de clarté.
Et par delà, c’était la plaine, les silhouettes d’arbres, le lointain
confus des bois sous un immense ciel, paisible infiniment.
Vague, le souvenir m’a effleurée de la Maloja éblouissante dans
la splendeur de midi. N’était-ce pas meilleur, cette ombre qui nous
rapprochait plus encore ?
J’étais serrée contre lui, ma tête sur sa poitrine ; ses baisers
caressaient mes cheveux, mes paupières, mais aussi ils brûlaient
ma bouche qui s’entr’ouvrait, devenue avide :
Tout bas, son visage penché sur le mien, je l’ai entendu me
murmurer :
— Viva, mon amour, je voudrais t’avoir toute à moi…
Haletante, je suis restée silencieuse. Une bizarre image
surgissait soudain en mon cerveau, montée de quelle mystérieuse
profondeur ? Robert, là-bas, au delà de l’Océan… La Danaïde entre
ses bras, comme moi dans ceux de Jacques… Cette femme et moi,
toutes deux, nous appartenons, de fait ou de désir, à l’homme qui
nous est cher. Et je la jugeais de si haut…
— Viva j’ai faim de toi !…
Quelle prière dans l’accent, d’ordinaire si ferme !… Cette voix
basse, brisée, où le désir jette éperdument son appel, je la
reconnaissais… Jadis, tant de fois, je l’ai entendue… et écoutée.
Est-ce pour cela qu’en cette minute quelque chose en moi a dit
« Non »… Quelque chose me retenait qui m’a fait murmurer :
— Oh ! pas maintenant !… Pas encore, bien-aimé.
 J’ai senti se desserrer l’étreinte qui m’enveloppait ; et la voix
sourde a dit :
— Alors, chérie, ne me tentez pas ainsi !… Je vous aime trop
pour être sûr de ma sagesse…
Mais je ne voulais pas m’éloigner de lui… J’étais si bien dans ses
bras, blottie dans son amour. Et, à mon tour, j’ai supplié :
— Jacques, ne me repoussez pas !… Je suis tellement à vous,
mon ami chéri… Votre petite chose… Ce soir, laissez-moi être
seulement votre enfant… Gardez-moi entre vos bras.
L’étreinte a recommencé forte, douce, tendre. Mes prunelles,
alors ont cherché, à travers la nuit, les siennes qui me contemplaient
avec le regard que toute mon âme appelait… Mes lèvres
tremblantes ont murmuré passionnément :
— Je vous adore, Jacques, mon Jacques !
Des secondes… — ou des minutes… — ont coulé, d’une
mortelle douceur. Immobile sur sa poitrine, son bras serrant mes
épaules, sa bouche sur mon visage, je sentais, insouciante, monter
la vague formidable où sombre toute conscience des êtres, des
devoirs, des lois, des choses… Lointaine, pareille à une lueur qui
s’éteint, errait à peine encore dans mon souvenir, la pensée que le
flot allait m’emporter et je m’abandonnais ainsi… Mais je n’avais plus
la force de tenter même l’ébauche d’un mouvement pour échapper…
Quel sursaut suprême de ma volonté qui défaillait m’a tout à
coup violemment arrachée de ses bras ?… Comment ?…
Pourquoi ?… Je ne sais pas… Mais vite, vite, je me suis enfuie,
descendant la route.
J’ai entendu son appel frémissant :
— Viva ! Viva ! Pourquoi partez-vous ?
Je ne me suis pas arrêtée…
Seulement, en quelques minutes, il m’avait rejointe. Ses mains
ont saisi mes poignets d’un geste de maître, vif à me les briser.
— Oh ! Viva, Viva, pourquoi vous enfuir ainsi ?… Me croyez-vous
un voleur, qui prendrait de force ce qu’on lui refuse ?…
 Ses yeux étincelaient. Une révolte indignée martelait ses paroles.
Je l’ai regardée avec toute mon âme :
— J’avais peur de nous, mon bien-aimé !… Je ne veux pas être
votre maîtresse… Je ne veux pas ! Oh ! je ne veux pas !…
Sa main a cessé d’être rude sur mes poignets. Il a répété tout
bas :
— Non, je ne vous aurais pas prise malgré vous, mon amour…
Mais devant la tentation, vous dites vrai, qui peut être sûr de sa
volonté… Je me croyais très fort… Et je suis aussi faible que le
premier venu… Bien-aimée, pardonnez-moi !
Et de nouveau, j’ai dit :
— Je vous adore, Jacques… C’est pour cela que je me suis
enfuie…
Il a caché son visage dans mes mains. Peut-être alors, il a senti
qu’elles brûlaient, tant il les avait serrées. Il a relevé la tête, une
ondée de sang sur sa figure pâlie.
— Je vous ai blessée, chérie. Quelle brute j’ai été !… Venez,
allons vite retrouver le monde, qui nous gardera contre nous-
mêmes… Ah ! je vous aime trop !…
Nous sommes redescendus sans un mot de plus, jusqu’au petit
hôtel où la voiture attendait. Et elle nous a ramenés à travers la belle
nuit divinement calme, qui apaisait notre fièvre. Oh ! le cher retour,
où, même en nos silences, nous étions unis comme jamais
davantage nous ne pourrons l’être de cœur…; ma main si
étroitement dans la sienne que je sentais le rythme du sang dans
ses artères.
Avant d’arriver au Cours-la-Reine, il m’a quittée, avec ce souci de
ma réputation dont je riais, jadis, insouciante de l’opinion du monde
et que je recueille maintenant comme une délicate preuve de son
amour.
Il m’avait demandé de lui donner encore mon après-midi tantôt…
J’ai prétexté beaucoup de courses à faire, puisque demain je pars
pour l’Hersandrie, où père m’attend. Il est convenu qu’il viendra me
dire adieu à l’heure du thé.
A cette heure-là, je saurai si je dois, ou non, m’inquiéter de
l’avenir pour ma fragile petite guenille. J’aurai vu le docteur. En
rentrant, hier soir, grisée des heures que je venais de passer, j’ai
trouvé la lettre qui me fixait l’heure du rendez-vous. Ç’a été le brutal
réveil !…
Mon Dieu, je voudrais tant que cet homme me donnât la certitude
que je n’ai rien qui puisse m’inquiéter !…
Et pourquoi non ?… Pourquoi cette folle crainte qui me hante ?…

3 septembre, 9 heures du soir.

Comme hier, la nuit est d’une merveilleuse sérénité.

Comme hier, je suis une femme aimée, une femme qui aime…
Pourtant, j’ai l’affreuse sensation de me mouvoir dans un
cauchemar !…
Je l’ai vu ce docteur ; et ce qu’il n’a pas consenti à me révéler, je
le devine à son silence même ; et j’en suis écrasée !
A trois heures et demie, comme il était convenu, j’entrais dans le
salon où je devais attendre quelques minutes. Pour fuir l’anxiété qui
me crispait les nerfs, je me suis appliquée à l’examen de cette pièce
étrangère. Elle était souriante sous ses tentures d’été, des voiles de
Gênes qui recouvraient les panneaux. Sur la cheminée, une nymphe
de marbre avait un joli corps très jeune ; et à ses pieds, un peu plus
loin, un cadre enserrait un portrait de femme, un portrait de parade,
aigrette dans les cheveux, épaules nues, visage quelconque.
Qu’ai-je encore remarqué en ces instants où tout mon esprit se
tendait vers les choses extérieures ?… Un exquis pastel d’enfant
que soutenait un chevalet, sur le piano à queue… Le coloris chaud
des glaïeuls qui dressaient leurs tiges sur une table chargée de
journaux et de revues. Quelques fils brisés dans le filet du coussin
où s’appuyait ma main. Les rayures du store que gonflait la brise
brûlante.
Mais, brusquement, j’ai cessé mon étude machinale. Devant moi,
une porte venait de s’ouvrir. Sous la portière soulevée, apparaissait
mon juge. Il avait une longue figure froide, des yeux très clairs qui
devaient impitoyablement démêler la vérité. Leur regard donnait une
sensation d’acier et a éveillé en moi un mouvement rétractile.
Cependant, je me suis levée et j’ai fait quelques pas vers lui,
tandis qu’il me saluait, demandant :
— Madame Doraines ?…
— Oui, docteur, c’est moi.
J’ai eu l’intuition d’une surprise en lui, parce que j’étais seule…
C’est vrai, en pareille circonstance, rarement une femme vient
seule ! Elle a d’ordinaire, pour l’accompagner, un mari, une mère ou
quelque amie. Je n’y avais pas même songé, habituée maintenant à
ne compter que sur moi.
Sans une parole, d’ailleurs, il a écarté la portière, s’effaçant pour
me laisser passer ; et je suis entrée dans son cabinet, austère
surtout au sortir du salon, si gai dans le décor des voiles de Gênes.
Pourtant, dans ce cabinet, la lumière entrait largement, les stores
relevés.
Il m’a indiqué un fauteuil. Ses yeux ont questionné.
Alors, un peu vite d’abord, j’ai dit ce qui m’amenait ; et j’entendais
ma voix très ferme, à peine assourdie par l’angoisse qui m’étreignait
le cœur.
Dans les minutes décisives, la sensibilité s’abolit en moi. Je ne
suis plus qu’une créature d’action.
Immobile, les deux mains appuyées sur les bras de son fauteuil,
le docteur écoutait, sans m’interrompre. Mais ses yeux ne quittaient
point mon visage, où je sentais monter une petite flamme, car mon
sang courait vite…
Quand je me suis tue, il m’a simplement répondu :
 — Il faut que je vous voie. Voulez-vous, madame, prendre la
peine d’enlever votre corsage ?
De nouveau, la sensation rétractile a secoué mes nerfs. Et, de
nouveau, je me suis raidie.
J’ai enlevé mes gants, détaché les agrafes, dénoué les rubans,
écarté les dentelles.
Debout devant son bureau, où il feuilletait des papiers, le docteur
attendait.
Dans un vieux miroir étroit et haut, je me suis aperçue, les
épaules nues comme pour le bal. Leur ligne était souple encore,
sans angles, ni duretés, malgré leur amaigrissement qui
m’apparaissait plus évident encore, sous la clarté crue du grand jour.
La chair avait toujours le même nacré sous le filet des veines…
J’ai appelé…
— Docteur, je suis à vous.
Il s’est rapproché. Il a commencé l’examen…
Moi aussi, je l’observais, le cerveau vide ; ma curiosité même,
disparue dans le sentiment de la certitude proche. De toute ma
volonté, je m’appliquais à dompter les sursauts fous de mon cœur.
Je regardais le visage que l’impassibilité masquait et dont,
cependant, mon esprit surexcité semblait soulever le masque.
Étaient-ce mes nerfs tendus à l’excès qui me donnaient cette
prescience ?
Enfin ! il a relevé la tête et ramené la dentelle sur le sein malade.
— Eh bien ? docteur.
Un imperceptible silence que ma pensée a noté.
— Eh bien, madame, il faudrait vous faire enlever ce bobo qui
devrait être déjà opéré.
Une seconde, j’ai eu la sensation que mon cœur cessait de
battre. Puis je me suis prise à rattacher ma blouse.
— Docteur, il y a trois semaines, j’ignorais complètement
l’existence de ce mal.
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