Ian Shapiro

“A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.”

“An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.”

“The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.”

“Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....”

“No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.”

“Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.”

“Wealthy people used to find democracy frightening. The reason was simple: the poor, once enfranchised, should be expected to soak the rich. This fear bred elite resistance to expanding the franchise, particularly beyond the propertied classes. Nor did this fear, and the reasoning behind it, go unnoticed on the political left.”