Introduction

Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) was an American social and political philosopher and feminist theorist. At the time of her death, she was Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, with affiliations with the UC Human Rights program and the Center for Gender Studies. Prior to Chicago, Young taught political theory at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, and philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Miami University, and several visiting positions around the world, including Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Young completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Queens College. She earned her masters and doctorate in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University in 1974. She was married to David Alexander and the couple had one daughter. Young died in 2006 of esophageal cancer.

Young is perhaps best known for her work in political theory on oppression, but she also made substantial contributions in socialist feminism, democratic theory, and global social responsibility.

Oppression

In her seminal book Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a), Young defended an account of social groups. In contrast to contemporary liberal political theory with its focus on individuals, Young argued that oppression is a characteristic of social groups existing in opposition to other groups. In that sense, she offers a relational theory of justice for groups, suggesting that political theory needs to include accounts of oppression and injustice. Her “five faces of oppression” have been used for decades by philosophers and political theorists to think about how structural injustice afflicts groups and inhibits individual participation and flourishing within political systems. Young drew on her background in phenomenology, feminist theory, and socialist theory to articulate the group-based theory of oppression; although not every from of oppression will exhibit all five faces, the five are distinct phenomena affecting groups.

Oppression, according to Young, refers to “systematic institutional processes which prevent some people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings, or institutionalized social processes which inhibit people’s ability to play and communicate with others or to express their feelings and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen” (Young 1990a, 38). The five faces point to different institutional processes. They are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Exploitation refers to the processes whereby the results of the labor of some is appropriated or benefits others; this form of oppression is especially evident in the relations of workers and management or in the unremunerated work of women. Marginalization means the exclusion of a social group or groups from participation in social life; it can include such social phenomena as poverty and genocide. Powerlessness denotes the lack of autonomy or creativity and judgment in the workplace understood broadly. Cultural imperialism points to the way a dominant group holds the power to define the norms of culture and experience. Violence refers to the systematic violence directed at certain social groups or members of certain social groups as well as the social and cultural acceptance of violence as legitimate.

Throughout her work, and especially in developing her work on oppression, Young drew on the tools of phenomenology developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Her accounts of female bodily experience offered a gendered and embodied account of oppression, illustrating how violence, marginalization, and cultural imperialism can be encoded on the body. For instance, Young’s 1980 essay “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” compared the space and movement of men and women in such everyday activities as sitting and throwing a baseball (Young 1990b, 2005). Young illustrated how women are socialized not to take up much space and to perceive their bodies as sexualized objects for the gaze of men. Women’s freedom is situated and constrained by the socialization of their bodies. Young continued her phenomenological approach to women’s oppression in essays on pregnancy and the objectification of breasts (1997, 2005). Together with Alison Jaggar, she edited A Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Blackwell) in 1998.

Democracy and Violence

Young’s commitment to the praxis of politics led her to reflect on democracy and its challenges. In Inclusion and Democracy, she draws on the experience of protests and signature gathering to identify different ways that people who lack official status in a political regime effect change (see also 2001). Young notes how people use different “discursive terrains” to counterbalance their status inequality in a political body. Democratic theory, she argues, ought to account for the variety of commitments and practical measures people use beyond the ballot box, thereby expanding the polity. Describing her belief that “democratic practice is a means promoting justice” (Young 2000, 5), Young argues for an inclusive democracy that does not rely on a single set of procedures or institutions, nor a single conception of the common good, but rather attends to the particularity of different social groups and addresses conflicts from “situated positions” (7). Young is here employing critical theory, understood as a method that takes seriously the social situations and unjust relations or institutions in theorizing for justice. Young sets out to expand the norms of democracy to better accommodate equality and inclusion against other models of democracy in political theory. She offers three modes of communication that help to address or overcome internal exclusion: greeting, rhetoric, and narrative. After a thorough defense of her inclusive democracy, Young addresses more practical issues like integration, identity politics, and global democracy. Her inclusive democracy with an expansive understanding of political discourse, as well as her theory of global social justice, have been the subject of much discussion in political theory (e.g., Vieten 2014; Bellon 2008; Ferguson and Nagel 2009).

Iris Young’s account of deliberative democracy in Inclusion and Democracy often assumes civil, orderly discussions, but Young wants to make room for political communication that is messy, disruptive, and disorderly. Public protest or demonstrations are valuable expressions of opinions, but Young draws the line at violence. Her standard of reasonableness (to persuade and be willing to be persuaded) means that violence is not an appropriate mode of expression (Young 2000, 48). Violence does, however, express even while it would not be appropriate expression in democratic deliberations. In thinking about global democracy, it is perhaps important to attend to the unwelcome messages of violence as well as the interruptions perpetrated through violence. The 2007 collection of essays, Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination, and Responsibility for Justice, brings together much of Young’s thought on violence that is used to secure borders and aid the attacked.

Arguing against the presumed legitimacy of a right to use violence by states, Young argued that the authority to enforce law does not automatically grant authority to use violence. Both domestically and globally, the use of violence, she held, must be independently justified (Young 2007, 102–103). Her argument is premised both on the prima facie wrongness of killing and because routine uses of violence, especially when state sanctioned violence becomes widespread, imperils power, “the capacity for collective action” (Young 2007, 84). Young’s concern is that the use of violence, either by rulers or by resistance actors, often leads to distrust and retreat rather than inspiring cooperation of others. Power as collective action is much more effective for ruling and resisting than the use of violence. State use of violence domestically creates a framework of domination rather than endorsing or exercising authority.

Young took a similarly strong stance against the use of violence for armed humanitarian intervention. Intervening militarily, she argued, creates positions of domination and subordination globally that feed resentment. This is not to say that Young embraced principled nonviolence; on the contrary, her point was both that political authority ought to be based on the power of the people rather than on the ability of the administration to wield violence, and that political authority does not grant a right to wield violence. This does not mean, however, that states do not have the responsibility to use their power to come to the assistance of a people under attack if necessary. Young’s position is demonstrated in her opposition to the 1999 NATO actions in Kosovo. She argues for the defense of human rights norms in the form of forceful (as opposed to violent) humanitarian intervention in order to protect citizens from massive violence when their state is unable to offer such protection or when the state is the author of the human rights violations. The key to understanding her position is the Arendtian-inspired shift from “legitimation” to “justification” and the distinction between “violence” and “power.” “Violence must be justified by arguing that it is the only means available to do good, that it does more good than harm, and that it is effective without having undesirable long-term consequences” (2007, 103; see Bar-On 2009; Scholz 2017).

Social Connection Model

Young’s final projects addressed the questions of responsibility for global structural injustice. In particular, her social connection model of responsibility, meant to augment the standard liability model, conceived of responsibility for long-term and far-removed structural injustice, such as sweatshop labor practices. Young argued that while it is possible to attribute blame for the harm of some practices to particular people or corporations, the collective past actions and interactions of persons positioned at a distance from the injustice actually carry current and future effects that exceed the intentions of any particular actor. In other words, “structures are produced and reproduced by large numbers of people acting according to normally accepted rules and practices, and it is in the nature of such structural processes that their potentially harmful effects cannot be traced directly to any particular contributors to the process” (Young 2011, 100).

The social connection model of responsibility is a forward-looking approach; rather than seeking to lay blame, the social connection model looks at the disbursed relationship of many people to injustice and assigns widespread responsibility for ameliorating injustice and building justice. Young describes the social connection model as “a shared responsibility that all members of a society have to redress structural injustice by dint of the fact that they contribute by their actions to its production and reproduction. This model of responsibility does not assign blame or fault, but rather enjoins a political responsibility to organize collective action for change” (Young 2011, 173). Using the example of sweatshops and the low price of consumer goods in wealthy Western nations, Young implicates consumers in the structural injustice of labor conditions across the globe. Participation in interdependent relations of exchange forms the basis of shared responsibility for injustice. Emphasizing its forward-looking feature, together with global interdependence, the social connection model of responsibility obviates the tendency of individuals and corporations to skirt liability. Young directs attention in political philosophy to structures, beyond the causal actions of any individual or corporation, and to mundane participation in them. This opens the way for thinking about justice outside of standard distributive models.

The social connection model of responsibility involves five features: “it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward-looking than backward-looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action” (Young 2006, 103). Some critics are reluctant to move accounts of justice away from distribution of public goods and others argue that social groups and social structures are nothing but the isolatable actions of individuals. Young’s account, however, is not meant as a stand-alone account of responsibility for injustice; it is presented alongside of liability models of responsibility that isolate and identify blameworthy actors.

Conclusion

Young’s commitment to combatting social injustice took many forms. She recognized the limitations of accounts of distributive justice, offering grounded, layered, relational accounts of social justice. By understanding the lived experience of oppression through engagement in political activism, political theorists might better craft the tools for analyzing and addressing it. As her writings evince, Young was herself committed to advocating for social justice locally and globally.

Whether through her phenomenological account of women’s embodiment, her articulation of the five faces of oppression, her proposal for inclusive democracy, or her analysis of global justice and the social connection model of responsibility, Iris Marion Young had a huge impact on social and political philosophy. Her work is read around the world and serves as a source of inspiration for activists as well as political theorists.

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