History with David Rubenstein

(theme music playing) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be in conversation today with Danielle Allen.

Danielle Allen is a university professor at Harvard, also the president of Partners in Democracy, and, author of Justice by Means of Democracy, uh, one of many books she's written and I'd like to talk to you about this book, and some of the other books that you've written.

So why don't we start with your book?

Now, for those people that may not be experts in philosophy or things related to justice, um, can you set the stage, in 1971, a professor at Harvard Law School named John Rawls wrote a book called "A Theory of Justice"... ALLEN: Yep.

RUBENSTEIN: Which was an epic study of what justice is all about.

In a paragraph, can you summarize what this epic book was about?

ALLEN: I will do my best.

Um, so, yes, I mean Rawls' "Theory of Justice" is the single most influential book of political philosophy in the English-speaking world, um, in the late 20th century.

And what he set out to do was he sort of asked the question of, you know, if we all put ourselves behind a veil of ignorance and didn't know who we were, whether we were male or female or Black or White, rich or poor, or whatever.

What principles would we develop to design a just society that we would all wanna live in?

So it's basically a kind of social contract mechanism or experiment to come up with the principles of a just society.

And so then the book lays out those principles and one is the need to protect rights, uh, sort of basic liberties.

And then the second one is what he calls the difference principle, which is the idea that, uh, no decision should be made unless it makes the people who are least well off better off or doesn't leave them worse off than they would otherwise be.

That set of ideas has really structured policymaking for the last 50 years.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So that epic book which influenced so many people over the last 50 years, you have written a book that is a little bit different.

So let me summarize it quickly if I could.

His book more or less is saying, if I got it right, that if everybody has the same income or same wealth that there's some justice to that.

You're saying that isn't enough to create justice, you need to have political engagement, social engagement if people are really gonna have a just society, is that more or less it?

ALLEN: I mean Rawls would not have made that argument about e-egal, you know, equal economic outcomes, but the result of his argument, the, the difference principle that I mentioned about decisions needing to be for, to the advantage of the least well off, um, was to support a real emphasis on economic redistribution as the core policy.

So it doesn't have to come out in equal results, equal outcomes, but that redistribution should be the first thing that you're really thinking about when you're thinking about justice.

And, you know, that's not actually really where Rawls took his own argument, but it's what people did with Rawls' argument.

Um, and my argument is that, in fact, um, the first, uh, need to achieve human flourishing is to support empowerment and that, uh, political equality is actually the thing that you want to focus on first, and the question of how you achieve that.

And then you can answer questions about economic policy, social policy, and the like, uh, with a view to how best to achieve equal political empowerment for all.

Um, and in the very technical language of philosophy, what this means is that, um, the philosophical tradition had a habit of separating negative liberties from positive liberties.

Negative liberties are the freedoms from interference, so like freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, things that the government's not supposed to interfere with.

And then positive liberties are freedoms to do things, freedoms to participate, to vote, to run for office, to be a juror, and the like.

And philosophy has tended to deprioritize the second category of freedoms or liberties.

And so my argument is that both categories, the negative ones where conscience and religion are protected, and the positive ones where participation is protected, are equally valuable and should be equally protected.

And so then you have to ask yourself, like what's the theory of justice that starts from the premise that you're protecting those rights of participation just as strongly as those other rights."

So this was years in the making.

This is a probably 10-year-long project.

And so a lot of workshops with philosophers, lots of Rawlsians, um, and a lot of debate.

And the short of it is that, um, they were initially skeptical of my argument that Rawls made a mistake, um, in particular, that he asserted that he had protected both categories of rights.

And my argument is that he actually failed to protect the second set of rights and people have come to agree with me that he did actually fail to do some of the things he was trying to do.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about some of the books that, uh, I'm very familiar with.

Uh, one of them is on the Declaration of Independence.

Why is the Declaration so relevant today?

I mean it's an, it was a propaganda document, more or less, right?

ALLEN: Uh, no.

I never really... RUBENSTEIN: You don't agree with that?

ALLEN: I'm never willing to agree with you on that.

RUBENSTEIN: I know.

Okay.

ALLEN: You've tried that line on me before, David.

RUBENSTEIN: All right.

But it was a public relation that had no...

I didn't think it had any legal effect.

You say it did.

ALLEN: Uh, you know, I mean, A, it's a moral document and it has moral significance.

It is certainly also a rhetorical document, but I'm drawing a distinction between rhetorical and propaganda because I think the arguments are sound.

They're sound morally.

They're sound, uh, from a logical point of view.

And then, yes, it did actually also have practical consequence.

It was invoked in the Constitutional Convention, um, as the articulation of the principles that the-you know, operating document of the constitution would, would rely upon.

RUBENSTEIN: At the, um, Second Continental Congress there a decision that they're probably gonna vote to break away from England, and somebody says, "We should have a committee to draft an explanation, later called the Declaration of Independence.

Why was Thomas Jefferson, only 33 years old and relatively new to the, uh, I'd, I'd say that convention?

Why, why was he, uh, asked to draft it?

ALLEN: Well, you know, you already, you named it.

He was, he was a kid, he was young.

He wasn't very busy.

John Adams was on every committee.

Oh, no, really, for real.

Like Adams, he was the really busy one.

Adams, Lee from Virginia, they were really driving events.

They were also driving the intellectual conversation, and when it came time to work on the Declaration of Independence, they needed that committee.

They needed a committee for Articles of Confederation.

They needed a committee to draft treaties for, for France and Spain.

So Adams drafted Jefferson to be the draftsman as they call it, you know, the sort of the lead writer, um, for the committee writing the Declaration.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he had the famous sentence in there that became maybe the most famous sentence in the English language.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

That they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

How could he have written that having owned at that time 300 or 400 slaves and had two slaves with him?

How could he say all men are equal?

What did he mean?

ALLEN: So I'm gonna answer your question, but in order to do that I'm actually gonna have to share with everybody the full sentence.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

That's a longer... ALLEN: Because we do have a habit of stopping where you stopped.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ALLEN: But it's so important to, to remember what the full sentence is.

"So we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, driving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness."

So Adams is the person who is really responsible for that argument about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Okay, those being basic rights and there then being collective responsibility to work together to deliver our collective safety and happiness through the institutions of government.

Adams has for the whole year, prior to the point of the drafting, been arguing that the point of government is this concept of happiness.

And what Adams is doing with that is replacing the conventional language of the time of life, liberty, and property as being how you would talk about the basic rights, which was also language being used as people were working on drafts.

Now why would Adams want to displace that?

By the point in the spring of 1776 that they were trying to articulate their core principles, the concept of the right of property had become already closely tied to the defense of slavery.

This was a result of in the fall when the royal governor in Virginia declared that any enslaved person who escaped and fought for the British would have their freedom.

From that point on the Virginians argued that King George was violating their rights of property.

And so those two ideas became too closely tied together and Adams was against enslavement.

It's really important for folks to remember that.

The founders were not monolithic in their views.

Adams never owned human beings and he always thought enslavement was a bad thing.

And so he and others who already shared that view by that time didn't want a document that would in fact anchor a defense of enslavement.

And so that, that important sentence became baked into the Massachusetts Constitution, which Adams drafted as well and was in the basis for the end of slavery in Massachusetts before the end of the Revolutionary War.

So that's a really important sentence but it's really Adams who gets the credit for a lot of that important architecture.

RUBENSTEIN: But Jefferson said, all men are created equal. ALLEN: Yep.

RUBENSTEIN: Why not all men and women?

ALLEN: So that as, you know, is la-the language of the time.

The 18th-century usage of the word man for universal human, and we know that Jefferson was using the word in that way because, in that original draft, there was also a passage that was cut out that was, in fact, a criticism of the slave trade and in that passage, Jefferson, or the draft, the committee together, but with Jefferson as draftsman, criticizes the selling of men in all caps, you know, that is a violation of basic rights of those people.

Now we know when people were sold, it wasn't just males who were sold.

It was also women, it was adults as well as children, so that universal usage is in evidence there in that passage too, and that's really what that usage is in that phrase all men are created equal.

It's all humanity is created equal.

RUBENSTEIN: So when the document was agreed to on July the 4th, um, a copy was printed on July the 5th and sent to George Washington to read to the troops, to King George to get his point of view, I guess, and other people.

Um, what was the impact, and did people in England laugh at it because we, we said in the United States, we wanted to make sure everybody was treated equal and we had slaves?

Did people in England laugh at this and did King George ever respond?

ALLEN: No.

I mean it's a, it's a great question and there's a terrific young scholar, Emily Sneff, who has traced all of the broad kind of global traveling of the document in those early years and it's really a fascinating story.

The document was, um, for some revolutionaries a talisman.

I mean, you know, it literally traveled, so Lafayette wanted a copy in golden letters that then hung in his cabinet.

And in Britain, uh, there was a, a peer, an aristocrat, the third Duke of Richmond, who was an avid supporter of the Americans.

And in fact, acquired probably from Thomas Paine, you know, the, the only other large ceremonial parchment.

There's one in the National Archives, and then the Duke of Richmond had the other one.

And the language was invoked by British radicals who worked very hard actually to achieve universal manhood suffrage in England in the early 1780s, that didn't happen for another 80 years.

So there was a real impact.

Now how King George responded is a different matter altogether.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, I'll tell you a, a story that's maybe apocryphal, um, but I heard from some people, I don't know if it was David McCullough, that what happened was, um, Thomas Jefferson initially wasn't happy with the document as it was edited by the, uh, Congress, so he didn't take credit for, for a while.

And, uh, he, actually was many years later before he admitted he had been the principal author of it.

Um, and then John Adams thought the most important thing was not the document, but it was the vote to be independent on July the 2nd.

ALLEN: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: So they were gonna celebrate the next year the vote to be independent, but they were so busy that on July the 2nd they forgot.

So they reminded themselves at the end of July the 2nd, we forgot to celebrate.

Let's celebrate.

Let's get ready we'll celebrate in the 4th.

ALLEN: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: And subsequently we celebrate in the 4th and that was a source where Adam said, "No.

We should be celebrating what I did on the 2nd, not what Jefferson did on the 4th?"

Is there any truth to that?

ALLEN: Well, I mean it's certainly the case that John Adams wrote to Abigail that, or vice versa.

I don't remember which wrote to the other but about the importance of July 2nd.

So in the Adams family, it is definitely true that July 2nd was the date that mattered.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So why do we really celebrate the Declaration?

A final question about this, um, the Constitution is the document we live under now, more or less, and that's the operating laws of this country.

Why don't we really celebrate as our anniversary at the beginning of the country when the Constitution went into effect, not when the Declaration was, uh, signed?

ALLEN: Well, the good news is we don't have to choose, we can celebrate both, right?

And in fact, we do celebrate, you know, we celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as well as the bicentennial of the country... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

ALLEN: ... and the Declaration, and it's important to celebrate both, and it's important to recognize the complementary roles the two texts have.

Those roles are captured by the last clause of that long sentence I recited.

So the clause that tells us what our duty as citizens is, it's that duty to make judgments about when the structure is not actually protecting our rights.

And then to alter it, right?

You know where it says to alter or to abolish and to lay the foundation on such principle and to organize the powers of government in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.

So that's giving us a kind of two-part job as citizens.

We've got to lay the foundation on principle, and then organize the powers of government.

So the Declaration is that laying of the foundation on principle, and then the Constitution is just the organization of the powers.

It's like the bylaws, right?

So you've got your, your statement of values and you've got your bylaws and that's how those two documents live and belong together and why they're both worthy of celebration.

RUBENSTEIN: So as an academic and one of the best-known academics in our country, um, you surprised some people by writing a book about a cousin of yours.

ALLEN: Hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: And the book is called Cuz. ALLEN: Cuz, mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: And, um, you know, we think of academics as dealing with subjects that are like the ones we just talked about, but can you talk about what that book was about and what propelled you to write that book?

ALLEN: Sure.

So Cuz, um, is a book about my cousin, my baby cousin, Michael, Michael Allen.

We grew up together, we used to run around in the streets playing football together.

And he was probably the first baby I ever held, because, you know, I was, uh, eight years older when he was born.

Um, so, uh, we were very close and our lives went in completely different directions.

So Michael was arrested in Southern California in 1995 on a first arrest for an attempted carjacking.

Um, this is obviously a terrible thing to have done, it also happened, like he did this, in just the period of time when California had brought in its most punitive policies.

So it was just after the passage of the three strikes, you're out law.

It was just after California had been routinely reducing the age at which somebody counted as an adult.

Um, and this combination of factors meant that Michael found himself facing a potential sentence of 25 years to life on a first arrest for an attempted carjacking, so he didn't even like succeed and he was the one person who got injured in the event, um, nonetheless, so he plead guilty, and received a sentence of, of 12 years and eight months, um, and served most of that.

And I spent a lot of time working on him with his, on his education while he was inside.

And then when he was released, I was there to try to help with re-entry and he had about two years of freedom, um, at the point in 2009 when he was shot and killed by somebody he had met while he was in prison.

So that is my baby cousin, Michael, and why did I write a book about his life?

Um, there are many reasons.

One was simply that Skip Gates, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., at Harvard.

So I was not at the time at Harvard, I was at the Institute I think at the time, had invited me to give the Du Bois Lectures at Harvard.

And the Du Bois Lectures were named after WEB Du Bois, great early 20th-century political thinker, and sociologist.

And I said, yes, of course, it's an honor to give these lectures.

And then Skip would write me and ask for the title for my lectures.

Like, I don't know.

I don't know what I'm gonna write about.

And I would keep giving him very abstract titles like, you know, Race and Justice in the 21st Century or African-Americans and Equality in the 21st Century.

And then the date for the lectures would come and I would cancel, and I did this repeatedly, which I, is not characteristic of me, you know, for the most part I meet my obligations, but this was the case I found myself unable to meet my obligations.

And finally, I realized this was because I couldn't possibly pretend to talk in an abstract way about issues of race and justice and opportunity and equality without coming to understand, coming to grips with my cousin's story and what had happened to Michael.

So I gave what I think were probably the strangest lectures in Harvard's history.

They're four lectures that were the story of my cousin's life.

I wept every single lecture, every lecture.

Um, so that's really how the book came to be.

The last thing I'll say there, it mattered that Michael was a brilliant writer.

He was super talented, loved to write.

He loved literature and I had this box of his letters that were just like a kind of beaming, beating thing in my closet, this box of Michael's letters, and I really wanted his voice to get out of the box.

And so the book is also as, you know, full of his letters, um, and it was also that way for me really a way of just making sure his voice was there to tell his own story.

RUBENSTEIN: And your book about him really is a book about the prison system in our country to some extent.

ALLEN: As well.

Yep.

RUBENSTEIN: So your conclusion was the prison system really doesn't do much in rehabilitation?

ALLEN: Yes.

That was definitely one conclusion.

It, it does not.

I mean here and there we're getting better at that.

I mean I think people have come to grips with the fact that we should have a second chance system.

We don't have a second chance system.

We are seeing res-restoration of education in prisons, for example.

So in the '90s, when I was doing this with Michael, walking this with him.

California had also stripped all education other than vocational things out of the prisons.

It was just all gone.

You couldn't access anything.

So everything was mail courses and you had to, you know, you couldn't send in hardback books, you could only send paperbacks.

So at any rate, the point is just that we have seen a turning of the corner, I would say.

I think people do understand that re-entry goes much better when people have had the chance of education when they've been able to maintain healthy connections to family members, and things like that.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, let's talk about civics education for a moment.

There's been a view in this country that younger people and maybe older people like me, uh, don't know as much about our government as we should.

Is it apocryphal that people don't know as much or do you think, uh, we are really falling down in teaching people more about our civics and our country's history?

And if we are falling down, why is that a problem?

ALLEN: So, yes.

We have declined in how much time our kids have, um, in civic learning.

I mean just in terms of the time in classrooms on civic learning, so compared to the 1950s.

So it's a big arc of time that you can see a decline.

Um, we have started to reverse that trend.

Um, but why is it a problem?

At the end of the day, participating in a democracy, um, is an intellectual activity.

There's no way to avoid that.

Democracy is an abstract concept.

Now if you try to teach a kid what a monarchy is, you like point to a picture of King Charles and you say like, "That guy makes the rules and he's got a military to enforce them."

Kids get that.

The democracy ruled by the people, you know, what, who, how, what is this people exactly?

How does 330 million people kind of convert into having like a will, like that rules?

What on Earth does this thing mean?

It's actually a very complicated idea.

Then you add to the fact that the only way for the people to rule is through pretty complicated institutions.

And then there's a whole another thing that you have to learn.

Like if you're gonna actually participate and play a role, you have to know what district you live in, and oh, my goodness like my state senate district doesn't actually overlap with my state representative district because of redistricting and how that works.

Like, who actually represents me?

Like, how do I even figure out how to talk to them?

It's very complicated.

So if we want people to experience empowerment, to be responsible in their participation, there are layers of knowledge that they need.

Um, so that's why it matters.

RUBENSTEIN: So uh, in our country historically, not that many people relatively speaking vote in a presidential election.

ALLEN: Yeah... RUBENSTEIN: In a mayoral election or, or a local city councilman election, you might have 10% voting.

Is that a big problem for our democracy or we shouldn't worry about that?

ALLEN: I think it is a big problem and I think we should worry about it.

So self-governance is a learned capacity.

You have to practice it, when you practice it, it is extremely rewarding.

You know, the, the experience of actually playing a role of having some influence feels good, just literally at an intrinsic level.

And so once people start doing it, you find that they will stay doing it, but we have a real problem right now with the on-ramp.

And the reason it's a problem is because if we don't have people participating, we don't have accountability.

We don't have the right kind of competition in elections.

And if you don't have accountability, you have corruption.

It's just very straightforward, um, and this is particularly evident at the local level where if you, there's data that shows that the increase of news deserts, it correlates to an increase of corruption in local governance.

RUBENSTEIN: So as you look out on our country today, many people are pessimistic about the country's future, some are optimistic, of course, um, or do you think our political system is a bit in disarray and why do you think it is?

ALLEN: So, I do think that we are in a very challenging moment, um, as a society, one can point to all kinds of red alerts.

Um, for me, the most significant one, the one that I've been sort of obsessed with for I guess at this point like eight years, um, is the data point about young people and their disconnection from our democracy.

So some of you may have read this.

Some political scientists, um, Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa, um, re-released data that showed that for people born before World War II, in that generational cohort, about 70% consider it essential to live in a democracy, in contrast, for millennials and younger, so folks low 40s and below, not quite.

30% consider it essential to live in a democracy.

And, you know, it's kind of straightforward.

You can't have a democracy if people don't want a democracy, so for me, that's been the key thing and sort of the focus on reversing that dynamic.

The question of, what does it take to reconnect rising generations to the project of constitutional democracy?

That has become my just sort of like single most obsessive question.

RUBENSTEIN: So, and if you had a chance to interview Thomas Jefferson with one question... ALLEN: Oof... RUBENSTEIN: ...you only have one question, what would you like to ask this man who you've studied and you've written a lot about what he's written?

What would you like to ask him?

ALLEN: Yeah.

It's funny.

Um, I'm such a John Adams fan.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ALLEN: I'm not a Thomas Jefferson fan.

RUBENSTEIN: Oh, so you would rather... what would you like to ask John Adams?

ALLEN: Yeah.

I think for Adams, I would want to ask him a question about whether he thought he'd gotten as far as he intended with his goals about abolishing enslavement.

Did he think he had succeeded with his goals or fallen short?

And for Jefferson, gosh, you know, um, I think I just wanna shake him, to be honest.

I'll be honest.

Like that's what I would actually...

If I had a chance to meet Thomas Jefferson, I just wanna shake him.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

Well, um, you've had a very distinguished career and, um, I would say, uh, the country is better off for the work you have written... ALLEN: Oh, that's sweet... RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, your teaching in, uh, Harvard and other places.

So I wanna thank you for a very interesting conversation about your new book, Justice by Means of Democracy. We've been coming to you, uh, from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium New York Historical Society.

Thank you, Danielle Allen.

ALLEN: My pleasure.

Thank you, David.

A pleasure.

Thank you.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you.

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