Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
matters of justice. And whenever questions of justice are on the
table, they are approached in the context of a particular community’s
concerns. A political community addressing an issue of immigration
is simultaneously struggling to integrate its desire to stand for
openness and freedom with the exigencies, whether real or felt, of
limited resources. Communities that are deliberating about how to
“treat minorities and marginal groups” are very much involved in
questions of justice while at the same time struggling with forging
their own self-understanding. What I or we stand for is very much
a part of who I or we are. Questions of justice weigh on the community’s
struggle to define itself. In such cases, deliberations turn
on how to forge a particular community that upholds values that
all might be proud of upholding. Our own self-understanding is
tempered by what we think others will think of us, and most of us
want to be seen as member of a moral order. So deliberation aimed
at forging collective purposes is always already wrapped up with
questions of more universal morality.
Moreover, it is these very deliberations aimed at deciding
what kind of community we want to be that turn a people into a
public, a public that might also take up questions of justice. Unless
a public makes itself in the public work of deciding what it ought
to do on matters of common concern, there will be no public to adjudicate
questions of justice.
Michael Sandel made a similar point in his rejoinder to John
Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Like Habermas, and also following Kant,
Rawls prioritizes the right over the good, universal principles of
justice over particular concerns of a given community. Sandel argues
that questions of justice are posed somewhere, in some particular
context, among some particular people. The public work that makes
a people a public is as vital as the public work of deciding matters
of justice, and probably prior to it as well.
I asked earlier about this work that makes people a public; what
kind of work is it? Derrida in his writing on public judgment said
it was a judgment, a yes or no, not a knowledge. Likewise, Aristotle
long ago noted that choice and deliberation in politics are about
matters that have no certain answer. We deliberate about what we
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