On a deeper level, Shapiro seeks to bridge the chasm that often stretches between the philosophical arguments of political theory and the policy debates of real-world politics. The book divides its time between critiques of the likes of Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin, Walzer, and MacIntyre on one hand and specific recommendations in diverse areas of public policy on the other. In doing so, Shapiro demonstrates a knowledgeable respect for the former and an impatience to tie such theorizing to the latter. Consider the following:

The liberal view is flawed also because its proponents tend to think that whether or not our lives should be governed by collective institutions is an intelligible question about politics. Hence Robert Nozick’s remark that the fundamental question of political theory “is whether there should be any state at all.” This view is misleading because the institutions of private property, contract, and public monopoly of coercive force that liberals characteristically favor were created and are sustained by the state and are partly financed by implicit taxes on those who would prefer an alternative system. In the modern world, Nozick’s assertion makes as much sense as would a claim that the fundamental question of astronomy is whether or not there ought to be planets. A characteristic liberal sleight of hand involves trying to naturalize or otherwise obscure liberal institutional arrangements in order to disguise the particular regime of public institutions that they favor. Such subterfuges have received more attention than they deserve in the recent history of political theory; they cannot any longer detain us (32). Encouraged by this impatience and the belief that democratic justice theory can produce concrete policy recommendations, Shapiro structures his argument around the stages of the human life-path, tracing the requirements of democratic justice from childhood through adult domestic life, work, old age, dying and death. In each of four central chapters, Democratic Justice tackles specific policy debates and offers detailed though often highly qualified recommendations. Some of these recommendations are intuitive: “Adult-child hierarchies should not be unnecessarily prolonged or more hierarchical than necessary” (69), while others are less so: “Although governments are not obliged to enact policies geared to expanding the human life span, such policies, once adopted, ought to be difficult to reverse” (209). At times the specificity of argument may daunt the generalist: “If basic interests were not threatened by its operation, we could agree with those who argue for the repeal of section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA, opening the way to new forms of labor-management cooperation and more creative experimentation in firm governance” (188). At other times, the specificity of argumentation overruns the argument itself. In a discussion of national sanctions used internationally to “nudge countries in the direction of embracing global minimum labor standards that reflect basic human interests,” Shapiro notes the removal of Nicaragua, Romania, and Sudan from a list of 33 countries granted U.S. tariff relief as if these removals were all positive exercises of presidential oversight (192). However apt the Reagan administration’s treatment of Romania and Sudan in this regard, surely its treatment of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua must stand as a counterexample to the basic point. But there is no space in this volume for such discriminating distinctions.

This book demonstrates the limitations of our usual sense of argumentative rigor—a virtue that we too often attribute to logically tight though practically insignificant exegeses. John Locke is the intellectual godfather of Democratic Justice insofar as the attractive good sense of The Second Treatise is reproduced and celebrated here, even at the cost of the taut, logical sequences of Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Shapiro, the political comes first in political theory. He labors to make theoretical arguments about democracy and justice yield specific guidance to mundane policy. The attempt is heroic and often persuasive. The failure to persuade, when it occurs, is directly linked to the book’s virtues. This is an ambitious book and worth the reader’s attention.