Tempering Political Inferiority: How Does Representation Matter?

Abstract

Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking Order includes a ‘book-length treatment’ of the idea of an ‘equal say’ (6) that is ubiquitous in commonplace talk and philosophical reflection about democracy.1 In this commentary I concentrate on the account of political representation that forms a main part of the ‘treatment’. That account places democratic representative institutions within a larger framework animated by the thought – a ‘positive conjecture’ – that we have non-derivative claims against being placed in ‘untempered relations of inferiority’ (126) with individuals who wield the power and authority of the state. The principal challenge is to identify conditions under which we might regard these relations as sufficiently tempered to be unobjectionable. Kolodny’s book offers a doctrine of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary tempering factors’ whose satisfaction is claimed to render hierarchical social relations like those that constitute political representation acceptable, or as much so as we might reasonably expect.