Politics against Domination . B y I an S hapiro

Who is in favour of domination? Surely some people have a strong interest in preserving it, but as this is not publicly confessable and people enjoy picturing themselves as moral, everyone will officially support a non-domination programme. What is more, Ian Shapiro suggests, in circumstances where ‘you cannot be confident of your ability to dominate others’, it is in your interest ‘to create a world that no one can dominate’ (pp. 5 and 6). These two aspects probably account for the wide appeal of non-domination approaches in recent political theory: they have the potential to stay clear from the never-ending conflicts about the appropriate currency of distributive justice. And this, from the pragmatic and democratic perspective endorsed by Shapiro, is a crucial feature of a relevant political theory. Of course, definitions of domination vary from one author to another. Shapiro, in his coalition-building perspective, works with the general idea that it is unjust when someone’s freedom is (or is likely to be) compromised by someone’s illegitimate use of power when this could be avoided. There are nonetheless two alternative understandings of domination that he must reject. First, he denies Foucault’s claim that domination is ubiquitous and thus inescapable, arguing that power can be exercised without domination. This is why he endorses politics as the instrument of resistance against domination. Secondly, he rejects Pettit’s suggestion that the mere capacity to interfere arbitrarily in the lives of others counts as domination, hypothesis which accounts, according to him, for Pettit and other republicans’ ‘schizoid attitude toward the state’ (Shapiro 2012: 321, n. 71). Republicans, he argues, are so concerned with vertical domination (exercised by the state) and majority tyranny that the (counter-majoritarian) institutions they favour are likely to hamstring governments, give veto power to powerful minorities, and thus prove inefficient in fighting horizontal domination (exercised by citizens). Shapiro, for his part, believes that a combination of majority rule with multiple cleavages, low stakes (no conflict over indivisible goods such as religion or ethnicity) and uncertainty of outcomes is the best bet against both kinds of