Activist political theory and the question of power

Abstract

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency is, first and foremost, a manifesto for an approach to political philosophy-what Ypi calls 'activist political theory'and can, I think, be best understood as an attempt to disturb analytic political philosophy from its 'dogmatic slumber' and motivate its movement towards the tradition of critical theory. In the first section of this commentary, I will lay out the grounds for this view. Having thus sketched an account of the point and purpose of this text, I will then focus on the relationship of both the methodological and the (illustrative) substantive arguments on global justice to the question of power. At a methodological level, I will argue that Ypi does not take the significance of power sufficiently seriously as an issue for political theory with emancipatory intent. With regard to her substantive arguments concerning global justice and state power, I will argue that she does not adequately address the character of power as a positional good because the analysis does not operate at the fundamentally appropriate institutional level of analysis. © 2013 D. Owen.