2024.08.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy, University of Chicago Press, 2023, 282pp., $27.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780226777092.
Reviewed by John J. Davenport, Fordham University
This magnum opus synthesizes themes from over two decades of Danielle Allen’s theoretical and applied work. It is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on sociopolitical justice. Written in an engaging style, Allen’s explanations are carefully reasoned, poised, always clear, and reassuringly balanced throughout—as might be expected of a scholar expert in classical thought, the American founders, and contemporary theories of justice and society. While Allen’s egalitarian conception of justice has some radical implications for constitutional and social reform, her arguments never descend into ideological cant. Readers who initially resist aspects of her account will be earnestly engaged and challenged to answer her illuminating conceptual taxonomies and the empirical evidence on which she draws. One feels throughout a confident force of reason that comes…
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