PoD readings short summary
Lecture 2
Young: Communication and the other: Beyond deliberative democracy
- Interest-based democracy models
• Expressing preferences and demands → voting about it
• Current practice in Western democracies
- Deliberative democracy model
• Citizens coming together to discuss about collective problems
• Problem: doesn’t make speakers equal, is elitist and exclusive, has agonistic norms
• Assumes unity
- Communicative democracy model
• Some unity needed, but difference also has use: listening across differences of
position and perspectives causes changes in preference
• Needed elements for plurality:
o Greeting → trust, respect, politeness, deference
o (besides rational also) situatedness and link to desire rhetoric → relation to
audience and appealing to attributes or experience of audience
o Storytelling/narratives → understandings across differences
Bennet and Livingston: A Brief History of the Disinformation Age: Information Wars and the
Decline of Institutional Authority
- Growing levels of disinformation → undermine processes of democracy
- Conventional explanations
• Social media
• Confirmation bias: people privilege information aligned with prior beliefs
• State interference: foreign disinformation
- Deeper institutional explanation
• Systematic weakening of authoritative institutions of liberal democracy
o Lying, deception and spin from credible authorities → erodes public
confidence in institutions → less trust in press and elections → people
search for emotionally affirming alternative facts → disinformation becomes
more popular
Lecture 3
Habermas: Religion in the public sphere
- Rawls: religious people can’t use religious arguments in public sphere → bad for
democracy and religious freedom
- Audi: artificial division in mind between religious and secular motivations
- Habermas:
• Religious people don’t have to split their identity into a public and private part when
they enter public discourses
• Religious people try to translate their religious arguments to secular arguments and
non-religious people try to open their minds to those arguments
Mahmood: Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the
Egyptian Islamic Revival
- Feminists: Islamic women are causing their own oppression by teaching Islamic beliefs
, - Mahmood: can’t judge about their desires and actions, if you’re not one of them
- Two kinds of agency
• Agency as the capacity for progressive change (consciousness, responsibility)
• Agency as the capacity to endure, suffer and persist (passive submission but active
engagement)
- Islam teaches Islamic women piety → shyness and modesty
Lecture 4
Anderson: What’s the point of Equality?
- Luck egalitarianism (equality of fortune)
• Equalize resources
• Compensate victims of misfortune
o Bad option luck: bad luck caused by a choice of the person (e.g. gambling,
car crash)
▪ SHOULD NOT be compensated → own responsibility
o Bad brute luck: bad luck caused by external factors (e.g. born with disability)
▪ SHOULD be compensated → relieve suffering, not equalizing it
(pity/envy) → humiliating
- Democratic egalitarianism
• Abolish oppression → relations of equality in society
• Condition of free life is to stand in relations of equality with others
• System of cooperation → people do what jobs they can do
• Only insuring against certain types of goods → personal responsibility
• Only handicaped, not ugly, stupid, untalented people
- Capability egalitarianism (Amartya Sen)
• Functionings: states of being and doing that constitute a person’s well-being (e.g.
being healthy and literate, playing soccer, raising children)
• Capabilities: sets of functionings she can achieve given the personal, material and
social resources available to her → freedom to achieve valued functionings
• Which capabilities does society have an obligation to equalize?
o Negatively: whatever is necessary to escape or avoid oppressive social
relationships
o Positively: whatever is necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in a
democratic state
▪ Functioning as human being (e.g. food, clothing, freedom of thought)
▪ Functioning as participant in a system of cooperative production (e.g.
education, freedom of occupational choice, access to means of
production)
▪ Functioning as a citizen (e.g. freedom of speech, right to vote, access
to public spaces)
Lecture 5
Piketty: Introduction
- Ricardo: scarcity → rising prices, but equilibrium restores it (doesn’t restore inequality)
- Marx: infinite accumulation → capital in hands of ever fewer people
- Kuznets: Income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of
capitalist development → bell curve (first increasing, then decreasing)
- Piketty: rate of return > rate of growth, output, income → inequality
Lecture 2
Young: Communication and the other: Beyond deliberative democracy
- Interest-based democracy models
• Expressing preferences and demands → voting about it
• Current practice in Western democracies
- Deliberative democracy model
• Citizens coming together to discuss about collective problems
• Problem: doesn’t make speakers equal, is elitist and exclusive, has agonistic norms
• Assumes unity
- Communicative democracy model
• Some unity needed, but difference also has use: listening across differences of
position and perspectives causes changes in preference
• Needed elements for plurality:
o Greeting → trust, respect, politeness, deference
o (besides rational also) situatedness and link to desire rhetoric → relation to
audience and appealing to attributes or experience of audience
o Storytelling/narratives → understandings across differences
Bennet and Livingston: A Brief History of the Disinformation Age: Information Wars and the
Decline of Institutional Authority
- Growing levels of disinformation → undermine processes of democracy
- Conventional explanations
• Social media
• Confirmation bias: people privilege information aligned with prior beliefs
• State interference: foreign disinformation
- Deeper institutional explanation
• Systematic weakening of authoritative institutions of liberal democracy
o Lying, deception and spin from credible authorities → erodes public
confidence in institutions → less trust in press and elections → people
search for emotionally affirming alternative facts → disinformation becomes
more popular
Lecture 3
Habermas: Religion in the public sphere
- Rawls: religious people can’t use religious arguments in public sphere → bad for
democracy and religious freedom
- Audi: artificial division in mind between religious and secular motivations
- Habermas:
• Religious people don’t have to split their identity into a public and private part when
they enter public discourses
• Religious people try to translate their religious arguments to secular arguments and
non-religious people try to open their minds to those arguments
Mahmood: Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the
Egyptian Islamic Revival
- Feminists: Islamic women are causing their own oppression by teaching Islamic beliefs
, - Mahmood: can’t judge about their desires and actions, if you’re not one of them
- Two kinds of agency
• Agency as the capacity for progressive change (consciousness, responsibility)
• Agency as the capacity to endure, suffer and persist (passive submission but active
engagement)
- Islam teaches Islamic women piety → shyness and modesty
Lecture 4
Anderson: What’s the point of Equality?
- Luck egalitarianism (equality of fortune)
• Equalize resources
• Compensate victims of misfortune
o Bad option luck: bad luck caused by a choice of the person (e.g. gambling,
car crash)
▪ SHOULD NOT be compensated → own responsibility
o Bad brute luck: bad luck caused by external factors (e.g. born with disability)
▪ SHOULD be compensated → relieve suffering, not equalizing it
(pity/envy) → humiliating
- Democratic egalitarianism
• Abolish oppression → relations of equality in society
• Condition of free life is to stand in relations of equality with others
• System of cooperation → people do what jobs they can do
• Only insuring against certain types of goods → personal responsibility
• Only handicaped, not ugly, stupid, untalented people
- Capability egalitarianism (Amartya Sen)
• Functionings: states of being and doing that constitute a person’s well-being (e.g.
being healthy and literate, playing soccer, raising children)
• Capabilities: sets of functionings she can achieve given the personal, material and
social resources available to her → freedom to achieve valued functionings
• Which capabilities does society have an obligation to equalize?
o Negatively: whatever is necessary to escape or avoid oppressive social
relationships
o Positively: whatever is necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in a
democratic state
▪ Functioning as human being (e.g. food, clothing, freedom of thought)
▪ Functioning as participant in a system of cooperative production (e.g.
education, freedom of occupational choice, access to means of
production)
▪ Functioning as a citizen (e.g. freedom of speech, right to vote, access
to public spaces)
Lecture 5
Piketty: Introduction
- Ricardo: scarcity → rising prices, but equilibrium restores it (doesn’t restore inequality)
- Marx: infinite accumulation → capital in hands of ever fewer people
- Kuznets: Income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of
capitalist development → bell curve (first increasing, then decreasing)
- Piketty: rate of return > rate of growth, output, income → inequality
