Ian Shapiro Quotes

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. In democratic theory, he has argued that democracy's value comes primarily from its potential to limit domination rather than, as is conventionally assumed, from its operation as a system of participation, representation, or preference aggregation. In debates about social scientific methods, he is chiefly known for rejecting prevalent theory-driven and method-driven approaches in favor of starting with a problem and then devising suitable methods to study it. Wikipedia

✵ 29. September 1956

Ian Shapiro: 10 quotes 0 likes

Famous Ian Shapiro Quotes

“First let me persuade you of my metaphysics and epistemology, then my theory of science, then my ethics and social theory, and then having done all that, I will convince you of my political theory. Over the past two decades, I have become convinced that this is a mug’s game… The reason Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, and Rawls (many others could be named) garner widespread attention as political theorists has much more to do with their destinations than with their starting points.”

Ian Shapiro

Shapiro, Ian. 2011. The Real World of Democratic Theory. Princeton University Press. p. 254; As cited in: Michael A. Fotos. Vincent Ostrom’s Revolutionary Science of Association http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia/materials/papers/Fotos_VO's%20RevolutionaryScienceOfAssociation_15Mar2013.pdf, Lecturer in Political Science, Ethics, Politics, and Economics Yale University, New Haven CT : About Vincent Ostrom.

“Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.”

Ian Shapiro

The Flight from Realityin the Human Science (2005), Chapter 4. Gross Concepts in Political Argument.

“Wealthy people used to find democracy frightening. The reason was simple: the poor, once enfranchised, should be expected to soak the rich. This fear bred elite resistance to expanding the franchise, particularly beyond the propertied classes. Nor did this fear, and the reasoning behind it, go unnoticed on the political left.”

Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro, Peter A. Swenson, and Daniela Donno, "Introduction" in Divide and deal : the politics of distribution in democracies (2008) edited by Ian Shapiro, Peter A. Swenson, and Daniela Donno.

“So Sen is right that democracy can be pressed into the service of reducing injustice. Indeed this can happen against expectations. Had there been neoclassical economists around in the late eighteenth century, they would have scoffed at the possibility of abolishing the slave trade. In the absence of a system of multilateral enforcement, Britain had to bear the enormous expense unilaterally—over several decades—without any obvious prospect of a return. whether democracy fosters or hinders economic growth.”

Ian Shapiro

Review of The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen, Journal of Economic Literature (December 2011).

“Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government….”

Ian Shapiro

"Democratic Justice" in The Democracy Sourcebook (2003) edited by Robert Dahl, Ian Shapiro, and José Antonio Cheibub.

“No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.”

Ian Shapiro

The State of Democratic Theory (2003), Chapter 5. Democracy and Distribution.

Ian Shapiro Quotes

“The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.”

Ian Shapiro

"The State of Democratic Theory" in The Democracy Sourcebook (2003) edited by Robert Dahl, Ian Shapiro, and José Antonio Cheibub.

Learning

“The principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, and it is hard to imagine that there is a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and its attainment seems typically to be followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It might be widely accepted that democracy is a good thing, yet it is equally apparent that democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. Of course, it is far easier to perceive the need for reform than to prescribe specific proposals.”

Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo, "Introduction" in Designing democratic institutions (2000) edited by Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo.

Democracy , Imagination

“An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.”

Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, "Outer edges and inner edges" in Democracy's Edges (1999) edited by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon.

Question

“A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.”

Ian Shapiro

"Three ways to Be a democrat" (1994), reprinted in Democracy's Place (1996).

Way , Democracy , Appearance

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