Fabian Schuppert - Böcker

Is equality valuable? This question dominates many discussions of social justice, which tend to center on whether certain forms of distributive equality are valuable, such as the equal distribution of primary social goods. But these discussions often neglect what is known as social or relational equality. Social equality suggests that equality is foremost about relationships and interactions between people, rather than being primarily about distribution. A number of philosophers have written about the significance of social equality, and it has also played an important role in real-life egalitarian movements, such as feminism and civil rights movements. However, as it has been relatively neglected in comparison to the debates about distributive equality, it requires much more theoretical attention. This volume brings together a collection of ten original essays which present new analyses of social and relational equality in philosophy and political theory. The essays analyze the nature of social equality, as well as its relationship to justice and politics.

Recently, both liberal philosophy of recognition and theories of epistemic injustice have come under attack for failing to reconstruct how marginalized groups find sources of recognition and agency. To understand social struggles well, we need to think of the way in which those within the struggle act towards emancipatory change instead of focusing on the (re)actions of those in power. This volume brings together leading scholars working at the intersection of epistemic injustice theories and recognition theories, setting out to apply insights from this relation to contemporary phenomena and backlashes in the formation and acts of socially struggling emancipators – also considering ideology critique, epistemology of ignorance, standpoint theory, and theories of consciousness raising.

This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory.  It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency.  It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the author argues, republicans should endorse a sufficientarian account of social justice, which focuses on the nature of social relationships and their effects on people's ability to act freely and realize their fundamental interests. On the global level, the book argues for the cosmopolitan extension of the republican principles of non-domination and non-alienation within a multi-level democratic system. In so doing, the book addresses a major gap in the existing literature, presenting an original theory of justice, which combines Hegelian recognition theory and republican ideas of freedom, and applying this hybrid theory to the global domain.