Quotable 1 - Nancy Fraser on justice

Work lately has meant I haven’t found the time to write and post any of the things I really wanted to share. To remediate this, I’ve decided to post quotes from books and articles I want to share and shortly discuss key concepts, authors, or manuscripts.

For my first quote I’m choosing an important female political theorist who has made significant contributions to how we understand social justice, Nancy Fraser.

‘As soon as we admit multiple genres of injustice, we need a way to bring them under a common measure. Thus, we need a normative principle that overarches them all.’
Nancy Fraser (2008) Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Polity Press, Cambridge, p. 60

Fraser is a brilliant third-wave feminist and critical theorist. She differs from more ‘militant’ third-wave feminists in that she’s part of a group that define feminism as the fight against all forms of domination (which is nearly identical to certain definitions of anarchism and political ecology). Her work therefore attempts to understand social movements in liberal democracies from a wider perspective, that of the concept of justice.

Her starting point is that the integration of identity politics into the political arena has brought with it competing claims from a variety of groups which current conceptions of justice, based around the nation-state, are unable to respond to adequately.

The novelty of her work in Scales of Justice lies in understanding social justice not only along the traditional representative (political) and distributive (economic) lines, but to also integrate the cultural dimension of recognition. This move aims to provide additional criteria for defining competing claims and weighing their value.

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It also provides a framework for first of all defining what counts as an injustice and at what level it should be handled. Claims to justice by groups therefore should undergo a preliminary ‘meta-ruling’ before they can be properly assessed. The title of the book therefore refers to both the notion of scale as measuring device and as geographic concept.

I love Fraser because she rests on both German and Anglo-Saxon traditions of thought. The former sets her strong commitment to emancipation, while the latter frames her pluralist social ontology. Both are visible in the quote I have chosen. On top of this, she has an anarchist streak, as seen in her definition of feminism and promotion of post-Westphalian politics.

Why read Fraser? By integrating cultural recognition to the resolution of claims to justice, she makes a significant contribution to grasping injustice in a truly intersectional manner. At the same time, she provides a way for ruling out what claims are not injustices, an idea much needed at a time when men’s right activists, feminists, right/left militants, and other social groups are challenging each other.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scales-Justice-Reimagining-Political-Globalizing/dp/0745644872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1515797800&sr=8-1&keywords=nancy+fraser+scales+of+justice
This is a link to the Amazon page for the book so you can have a look, I am not promoting its sale or suggesting you buy it.