Modesty is supposed to be a virtue. Freeriding is an expression of vice. So how could modesty lead to freeriding? Well, suppose you have bloggers so modest that they refuse to advertise their own publications. Then it’s left to me to do it for them.

With that preface: PoT blogger and freerider John Davenport has a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy. First paragraph:

This magnum opus synthesizes themes from over two decades of Danielle Allen’s theoretical and applied work. It is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on sociopolitical justice. Written in an engaging style, Allen’s explanations are carefully reasoned, poised, always clear, and reassuringly balanced throughout—as might be expected of a scholar expert in classical thought, the American founders, and contemporary theories of justice and society. While Allen’s egalitarian conception of justice has some radical implications for constitutional and social reform, her arguments never descend into ideological cant. Readers who initially resist aspects of her account will be earnestly engaged and challenged to answer her illuminating conceptual taxonomies and the empirical evidence on which she draws. One feels throughout a confident force of reason that comes from grappling with a wide variety of approaches within political philosophy, along with many contextualized applications and examples.

John’s review dovetails nicely with the discussion we’ve been having here since March of Philip Pettit’s Republicanism. For whatever it’s worth, I’m currently working on a five or six part series of posts on Pettit’s book, focusing on the contrast he draws between republicanism and liberalism, and on his discussion of employment-at-will as a form of domination. I’m guessing I’ll post that sometime in late August or early September.

Also from the “For Whatever It’s Worth” Department: by a strange coincidence, Danielle and I were college classmates in the late 80s and early 90s, and both wrote for The Princeton Tory, the campus conservative magazine founded by Zionist ethno-nationalist Yoram Hazony. Though neither Danielle nor I were ever particularly conservative–she was a centrist moderate, and I was a self-consciously centrist libertarian–it’s striking how far we’ve drifted from anything congenial to The Princeton Tory (whether The Tory of then or now). I could not have imagined the Danielle Allen of 1990 defending “quasi-Rawlsian welfarism” three decades in the future, and could not have anticipated where my own thinking would take me. That said, just about anyone could have predicted where Hazony would end up.

It’s amusing to wonder how likely it is that any of the three of us would be published in The Tory today. Hazony? 100% Allen? Unclear. Me? 0. Not that it’s an experiment the principals are likely to run. But still amusing to think about.