Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, an eminent political philosopher and ethicist, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a former candidate for governor of Massachusetts (the first Black woman to run for statewide office in the Commonwealth). But Allen, who grew up in Southern California as part of a large extended family with a “real divergence of life experience,” says several of her family members traveled down different paths, cut down by societal ills such as gun violence and substance abuse. “I had always been beating my head against the question of how to ensure that democracy can deliver on the promise of democracy,” Allen says. “Over time my work evolved in the direction of public policy, and that was driven always by the need to see real things change in the world.” Allen, who has been at Harvard since 2015, joined the vlog faculty last year to pursue this work. She directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at vlog’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. We caught up with her to ask her about her work, her teaching, and her motivation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How does your research and teaching connect to solutions to pressing problems in the world today?
We love abstract ideals like freedom and equality, but at the end of the day, democracy is not about abstraction. It is supposed to be that when we embrace those ideals it delivers a society that makes it possible for every generation to do a bit better than the previous one. That became my conundrum—a sense that democracy was no longer delivering on the promise of democracy.
Around 2009, I lost my youngest cousin [Ed: he was killed by someone he had been incarcerated with] and started much more actively pursuing a public policy portfolio. I started doing some work in the space of criminal justice reform. But I quickly learned that even where there were commonsense and cross-partisan solutions, you couldn't get them through because of governance dysfunction, especially at the federal level.
In 2013, Congress had an approval rating of 9%. That was my red alert moment. I thought, “If the people approve of Congress, which is supposed to be our own voice, at the rate of 9%, a) that means we're a self-hating people, and then b) it means our democracy's broken.”
So since then, I've been working on what I call democracy renovation, which is this work of trying to understand both how to reconnect people to their civic power, experience, and responsibility, but also how to redesign our institutions so that they are responsive, so that they can actually function to help this big, diverse society and channel disagreement through institutions effectively to find solutions to common problems.
Q: What do you want students to come away with from your teaching?
I am a political philosopher who is also connecting to public policy. So, I'm always trying to figure out both conceptual foundations, in thinking about healthy democracy or human well-being, and then how those conceptual foundations translate into policy. That's what I do and that's what my course, “Justice by Means of Democracy” (DPI-247), is about.
The core of my teaching up till now has been in the Government Department and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The Kennedy School students bring just an incredibly sharp, practical-mindedness to the table, which is what you hope for in a public policy school. It’s really excellent.
They are not afraid of big questions, which is a pleasure, but they also want to bring the big questions back to concrete realities. What does it mean for the kinds of metrics we use in decision making? What does it mean for how we structure an institutional process or a specific set of mechanisms? It is really that combination of big ideas and practicalities that I am most interested in, so it's a really wonderful cohort of students for me to engage with.
“At the end of the day, democracy is not about abstraction. It is supposed to be that when we embrace those ideals it delivers a society that makes it possible for every generation to do a bit better than the previous one.”
Q: What in your research and writing has most surprised you?
A. The core conceptual insight of my book, Justice by Means of Democracy, is that early in the history of liberalism, in the early 19th century, the concept of freedom was split into two halves: what philosophers called negative liberties—freedoms from interference, freedoms of conscience and religion and things like that—and positive liberties—freedoms to participate, to run for office, to vote, to help shape your community. Over the course of the last 200 years, the philosophical tradition, and therefore the policy tradition, has prioritized negative liberties and given short shrift to positive liberties.
My work is focused on this question: if you take both categories of freedom as equally non-sacrificeable, then what changes? If you do have a different standard for the place that participation should have in public policy and institutions, and a different approach to thinking about what healthy institutions are, a lot changes just by virtue of that one small conceptual shift.
Q: What has inspired you in your work?
A. When my cousin Michael died in 2009, I realized my family was living through this experience I call “pulling apart,” where some of us had amazing opportunities and others were trapped in really dark and difficult circumstances. What I realized was that it wasn't just our family. My lifespan coincides with the rise of income inequality, the rise of wealth inequality, the rise of mass incarceration, and the rise of polarization. And, so, I realized that our whole country has been living through this pulling apart. That's just deeply unhealthy for individual people, for families, for society. Changing that dynamic has to be one of the most important things that we do. That's really what inspires me.
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Banner photograph by Stephanie Mitchell; portrait courtesy of Danielle Allen