The Good Life and the Bad: Dialectics of Solidarity

Abstract

This essay asks four questions about the good life. First, what place has recognition of exclusion in the politics of redistribution? Second, can we imagine a public good life without also paying attention to the private and how does the private leach into the public imagination of a good life? Third, what obligations of justice are necessary to ensure our shared good lives? Finally, can we imagine new ways of thinking about resistance and change through alliances of the excluded? I argue that the imagination of a good life needs to be contextual, it is gendered and it is solidaristic.