Abstract
If you identify as a democratic theorist, you must read this book. Didier Zúñiga argues that an inappropriate amount of space is given to a brand of liberalism, and Rawls specifically, in political and, by extension, democratic theory. There are three reasons that make it required reading. The first is that Zúñiga opens with the disclosure that, while we all inhabit one planet, there are many worlds crafted from it—human, nonhuman, and more-than-human.
The second is that this many worlds perspective should, as Zúñiga puts it in one of my favorite passages, “be taken as an opportunity to open up a ‘dialogue of knowledges’ oriented towards the construction of sustainable relations between and among those heterogenous worlds” (168). He is here drawing from two works by Enrique Leff, a reformed environmental economist, which were written in Spanish and published in Mexico City. As we’ll come to see, these details matter.
The third reason is that Zúñiga has reopened the door to relegating Rawls to one among various traditions of liberalist theory. As Zúñiga explains, this was tried in the 1980s by Charles Taylor (suspicious of liberalism’s baggage, communitarian in root) and Alasdair MacIntyre (teleological like Aristotle, moral in root). Yet Rawls continues to occupy an inordinate amount of space in political theory. For example, he figures in some way in 407 articles in this journal—just shy of Rousseau’s 419 and Marx’s 444 mentions. Consequently, I’d say there’s reason for a renewed attempt at displacing Rawls (and also Rousseau and Marx, though that’s for another time). Zúñiga takes up this effort, arguing that neither Taylor nor MacIntyre went far enough to pull Rawls from the center of liberal theory or to disclose, as Zúñiga tries to do, what the “center” of political theory could look like when European thought and its cultural offshoots, like colonial American theory, are provincialized.
These three interventions add up to a powerful argument that liberalism and liberal democracy are not only complicit in imperialism and ecocide—they are drivers for both. As Zúñiga shows, liberalism has left a world-ending legacy that is perpetuated in our disciplinary concerns today. This argument unfolds across the chapters of Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds through a demonstration of how “reasonableness” and capitalist individualism, core concepts for liberalism, have effectively cut from view Indigenous peoples, differently abled peoples, nonhumans, and future generations. By the conclusion, it is clear that mainstream liberal theory and contemporary democratic practice do not engage with knowledges that differ from that which is conventional and hegemonic in our sciences today—a common sense that is of European imperial and notably male descent.
Zúñiga argues that we need not dispense with Rawls altogether—I agree—but should understand that his contributions form a small part of what liberal theory actually is: multilingual, unspoken, embodied, contextual, and fundamentally concerned with the sensitivities and creativities required in, and by, the work of emancipating the oppressed and caring for the vulnerable such as differently abled human and nonhuman animals.
Consider, for example, Zúñiga’s diagnosis that “the problem with liberalism [. . .] is that most of its adherents do not conduct their enquiries in a self-aware fashion, nor do they adopt a critical and reflective understanding of the doctrine they preach” (185). This resonates with Taylor’s concerns that hegemonic conceptions of liberalism trade in ideas that are keenly felt as illiberal to those who are bound to suffer by them. We can see this, for instance, in liberal acceptance of ableist, extractivist, and speciesist dominance structures. The heart of the problem with the kind of liberalism that is prominent in seminars and conventional in graduate schools is that it “effaces [. . .] difference and that no matter how fervently we attempt to unsettle liberalism’s constitution, it will always contain mechanisms of prescription and proscription that assume and enact a single-world ontology” (184).
Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds clarifies how world-destroying this disposition has become because of its uncritical alliance with imperialism and extractive capitalism, which is unconcerned with loss, vulnerability, care, love, stewardship, and joining hands. Yet a look at Rawls’s works makes plain that Rawls in fact uses many of these terms and shows compassion for those who are most disadvantaged in his abstraction of society. 1
It is this abstraction that is the problem. For it assumes that liberalism and liberal democracy are universal goods that should be enjoyed by everyone, and equally so. In this sense, Rawls ignores that these concepts stem from thinkers who are European and male. But ignoring where these concepts come from, why they emanated, and from whom, and failing to anchor liberalism and liberal democracy in cultures, people, and their political contexts, obscures the fact that not everyone gets to be liberal, not everyone can enjoy liberal democracy. 2
Zúñiga leverages the work of Arturo Escobar and Charles Mills, among others, to deconstruct the orientation of liberal (and deliberative) theory regarding race, species, and extraction. His book leans into notions of the pluriverse 3 and Tom Malleson’s articulation of interdependence. 4 It also recalls Santiago Castro-Gómez’s concept of the hubris of the zero point, which occurs when a theorist begins their abstraction without recognizing who they are, where they are from, and who they are speaking to, for, or about, thereby assuming universal applicability for their work. 5 Zero-point hubris is especially apparent when we make recourse to those, like Rawls, who seem like inheritors of the Enlightenment rather than a European strand of the Enlightenment as a global phenomenon.
The problem with liberal theory, in Zúñiga’s frame, is that it has the “capacity to dismiss certain arguments, notably historical ones, and to prioritize others, thus setting the agenda for what we ought to think and argue about” (183). This happens because theorists like Rawls (or, we might add, Habermas) presuppose as the universal subject an able-bodied, rational, communicating human animal who is individualistic, competitive, and good-hearted. This is unreasonable, as many peoples and nonhumans do not fit this picture. Zúñiga is, therefore, right to insist that conventional democracies today are unconcerned with, for instance, differently abled peoples and endangered biomes, for they are seen as unable to produce capital through work and can stand in the way of its production. He terms these marginalized beings “the neglected.”
If there was an aspect of Zúñiga’s book that left me hungry, it was this. It has been well-established for some time that theory of the kind Zúñiga criticizes is painfully entwined with world-destroying ideas, unfairly hegemonic in our profession, and that it reinforces coloniality and racial divisions. While Zúñiga’s use of Latin American and non-Anglophone theorists and his extensive engagement with Jamaican political philosopher Charles Mills enrich how he theorizes the problems of liberalism, the book does not offer a pragmatic vision for what to do to solve them.
Some such visions were articulated, for instance, by Mills. In his Tanner Lectures at the University in Michigan in 2020, the year before he died, he argued for nonideal theory that requires recognizing the “real” sites from which we start our theorizations. Mills also spoke to the whiteness and maleness of political theory, which appear as minor issues to many departments and whose correction requires time- and energy-intensive moral mobilization by concerned faculty members. By and large, the race, gender, disability, and coloniality of our colleagues, ourselves, our universities, and our discipline are seldom central to the work that we do. They are at best HR matters. Yet if we agree with Mills about the importance of nonideal theory, where can we find the literature that starts from this reality? Zúñiga might have done more to show what taking the Anglophone-white-male-ideal theory dominancy to task can look like beyond theoretical problematization. I agree, it’s worlds-destroying and not worlds-nurturing, but then what?
Perhaps the answer to that question would have come if Zúñiga brought himself more fully into the work and embraced Walter Mignolo’s famous rearticulation of Descartes’s dictum: “I am where I think,” 6 and, I might add, to think both who I am and where I am from. Emplacement and embodiment are chronically ignored resources in our practice, and I believe political theorists should take them seriously, as acknowledging them foregrounds pluralism. For example, Zúñiga was raised in Mexico City, is exploring the question of how Mesoamerican metaphysics can find a way past the human-animal divide in knowledge production (perhaps to dispel the false claim that only humans can produce knowledge), and, as suggested by one of his portraits taken in Tenochtitlan, is presumably a Mars Volta fan. All this matters, especially the Mars Volta.
That band was started by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, two Latinos who met in the border town of El Paso, Texas, and spoke in a recent documentary about feeling like perpetual outsiders in the music industry. And yet they made music. In one of their better-known songs, Cicatriz Esp, they offer a thought more of us should use as we enter seminars, deliberative enclaves, and classrooms: We are “shrouded in veils, because these handcuffs hurt too much.” In the documentary, both profess to love “the person who can finish my sentence in art and spirituality.” Rawls, Habermas, and Kant don’t do that for me, and I doubt they do it for Zúñiga either. So . . . who does?
Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds shows how wrong hegemonic, one-world, liberal political theory is today, in our literature, in our departments, and in our profession. Zúñiga explains that we need to take many worlds seriously and that we must attend to ecocide, to the extinction of human cultures, to how our social, political, economic, and legal structures could be remade to include the differently abled and the nonhuman so that we might ease their unjust suffering and free ourselves from continued ruin.