Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the
theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to
political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the
weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound and equally useless.
Brokering a resolution to this "judgment paradox," Albena Azmanova
advances a "critical consensus model" of judgment that serves the
normative ideals of a just society without the help of ideal theory.
Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political
philosophy--critical theory and philosophical liberalism--and the way
they confront the judgment paradox, Azmanova critiques prevailing models
of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over
political applicability. Instead, she replaces the reliance on normative
models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment
produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Hannah
Arendt's study of judgment with Pierre Bourdieu's social critique of
power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology
from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Max Weber, and American
philosophical pragmatism, Azmanova centers her inquiry on the way
participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of
injustice. She then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model
of critical deliberative judgment she forges and its capacity to guide
policy making.
This model's critical force yields from its capacity to disclose the
common structural sources of injustice behind conflicting claims to
justice. Moving beyond the conflict between universalist and pluralist
positions, Azmanova grounds the question of "what is justice?" in the
empirical reality of "who suffers?" in order to discern attainable
possibilities for a less unjust world.
