According to Rainer Forst, a critical theory of power must break with the tendency of political theorists to conceive of power in opposition to normativity. Appropriately, Forst proposes a noumenal definition according to which power is normative: It works through recognition of reasons and is thereby open to critical assessment. In this discussion note, I first clarify the normativity of power in Forst’s noumenal theory by means of Donald Davidson’s theory of action and then explain how theory of action leads (...) to a different understanding of force and violence from Forst’s noumenal theory. In doing this, I find reason to endorse a non-normative definition of power on the lines proposed by Robert Dahl and endorsed by most authors in analytical political theory. This definition nevertheless remains faithful to Forst’s methodological guideline that a theory of power must keep in view the relations between power and normativity. (shrink)

What is domination? According to a leading strand of republican political philosophy, a person is dominated when under the unconstrained power of another. Call this the dyadic conception of domination, because it involves a two‐person relation. I argue that domination is better understood structurally. Structural domination is domination by institutions. Rather than a master dominating a slave and a boss dominating a worker (as in dyadic domination), structural domination holds that the institution of slavery dominates the slave and labor law (...) dominates the worker. Without the structural conception, I contend, one misdescribes the power dynamics of paradigm cases of domination. (shrink)

Most politically minded Kurds agree that their people need liberty. Moreover, they agree they need liberation from the domination they suffer from the four states that divide them: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. What is less certain is the precise nature of this liberty. A key debate that characterizes Kurdish political discourse is over whether the liberty they seek requires the existence of an independent Kurdish nation-state. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed intellectual leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has argued that (...) Kurdish liberty can only be achieved through liberation from the nation-state model itself. Instead of founding an independent Kurdistan, Öcalan proposes regional autonomy for the Kurds through a strictly egalitarian and directly democratic confederalism reminiscent of Murray Bookchin’s anarchist-inspired libertarian municipalism. We argue, in response to Öcalan’s approach, that employing an anarchist rejection of the state is largely mistaken. We diagnose certain historical and conceptual problems with the anarchist understanding of the state and develop the admission made in passing by certain anarchists, including Öcalan, that anarchist liberty could only be achieved after a long period of statist existence. Mostly counter to the anarchist model of non-domination, we propose a republican model of liberty and liberation, also as non-domination, that necessitates the formation of an independent state, at least in this historical period, for Kurds and hence any dominated people to count as truly free. We conclude by attempting to combine certain elements of the anarchist and republican conceptions and offer a synthetic communitarian view that could serve as a better foundation for Kurdish aspirations for liberty. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 8, Page 1174-1196, October 2022. Most politically minded Kurds agree that their people need liberty. Moreover, they agree they need liberation from the domination they suffer from the four states that divide them: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. What is less certain is the precise nature of this liberty. A key debate that characterizes Kurdish political discourse is over whether the liberty they seek requires the existence of an independent Kurdish nation-state. Abdullah Öcalan, (...) the jailed intellectual leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has argued that Kurdish liberty can only be achieved through liberation from the nation-state model itself. Instead of founding an independent Kurdistan, Öcalan proposes regional autonomy for the Kurds through a strictly egalitarian and directly democratic confederalism reminiscent of Murray Bookchin’s anarchist-inspired libertarian municipalism. We argue, in response to Öcalan’s approach, that employing an anarchist rejection of the state is largely mistaken. We diagnose certain historical and conceptual problems with the anarchist understanding of the state and develop the admission made in passing by certain anarchists, including Öcalan, that anarchist liberty could only be achieved after a long period of statist existence. Mostly counter to the anarchist model of non-domination, we propose a republican model of liberty and liberation, also as non-domination, that necessitates the formation of an independent state, at least in this historical period, for Kurds and hence any dominated people to count as truly free. We conclude by attempting to combine certain elements of the anarchist and republican conceptions and offer a synthetic communitarian view that could serve as a better foundation for Kurdish aspirations for liberty. (shrink)

An oversized reliance on big data-driven algorithmic decision-making systems, coupled with a lack of critical inquiry regarding such systems, combine to create the paradoxical “black box” at work. The “black box” simultaneously demands a higher level of transparency from the worker in regard to data collection, while shrouding the decision-making in secrecy, making employer decisions even more opaque to the worker. To access employment, the worker is commanded to divulge highly personal information, and when hired, must submit further still to (...) algorithmic processes of evaluations which will make authoritative claims as to the workers’ productivity. Furthermore, in and out of the workplace, the worker is governed by an invisible data-created leash deploying wearable technology to collect intimate worker data. At all stages, the worker is confronted with a lack of transparency, accountability, or explanation as to the inner workings or even the logic of the “black box” at work. This data revolution of the workplace is alarming for several reasons: the “black box at work” not only serves to conceal disparities in hiring, but could also allow for a level of “data-laundering” that beggars any notion of equal opportunity in employment and there exists, the danger of a “mission creep” attitude to data collection that allows for pervasive surveillance, contributing to the erosion of both the personhood and autonomy of workers. Thus, the “black box at work” not only enables worker domination in the workplace, it deprives the worker of Rawlsian justice. (shrink)

Theories of domination are primarily attempts to understand the value of justice, freedom, and equality by examining cases where they are absent. Such theories seek to clarify and systematize our judgments about what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength, i.e., about what it is to be vulnerable, degraded, and defenseless against unrestrained power. -/- Much contemporary disagreement about domination involves competing answers to three questions: (1) Who, or what, can dominate? (2) Is it possible to dominate merely by (...) having power with a certain structure, or is domination an exercise or an abuse of power? (3) Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power is domination? The remainder of this entry will address each of these questions in turn, then conclude with a survey of how the idea of domination has been used in recent applied ethical theory. It will become clear as we examine competing answers to these three questions that different theorists have very different ideas of why, exactly, we need a theory of domination. There may be wide agreement that we need the idea of domination to make sense of unjust power relations, but unjust power relations are wildly varied, and theorists of domination disagree not only about which varieties most need to be understood, but about how theorizing domination helps us to understand them. (shrink)