Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, this book offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.

About the Author
Lea Ypi is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP, 2012), the co-author of The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White, OUP, 2016), and co-editor of Kant and Colonialism (with Katrin Flikschuh, OUP, 2014), and Migration in Political Theory (with Sarah Fine, OUP, 2016). Her articles have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Philosophy and Public Affairs, The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, and the Journal of Political Philosophy. She co-edits the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Reviews
This book is a terrific contribution to the literature on global justice. In fact, it is one of the most exciting contributions to the field in recent years. Lea Ypi offers a fresh defense of global egalitarianism, embeds that defense in a penetrating discussion of philosophical method and proposes an intriguing account of the connection between political theory and practice. She makes illuminating use of historical material and draws rewarding analogies to debates in the philosophy of science and aesthetics. This book takes political philosophy as the culturally and intellectually interconnected enterprise that it should be. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198798668
Author Lea Ypi
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 231mm * 156mm * 13mm