Presumption of Guilt (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Ilana Redstone | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

What makes democracy robust and what makes it vulnerable attract more analysis, more defense, and more urgent prescription than almost any other subject in political life. And yet an essential condition for its survival has gone almost entirely unrecognized: democratic institutions must not settle contested moral questions, no matter how much pressure there is to do otherwise. In Presumption of Guilt, sociologist Ilana Redstone argues that this requirement has been quietly violated. Beginning in the late 1960s, American institutions resolved a contested moral claim—that inequality is inherently unjust—and embedded it into law, education, and professional practice as established fact. That single settlement didn't stay contained. It cascaded, recoding how institutions and the political left think about harm, power, identity, and intent—transforming a vast range of legitimate disagreements into evidence of moral deficiency. What followed was not simply polarization but a legitimacy collapse. Policy disagreements became proof of bigotry. Conservative positions were delegitimized rather than debated. The shared foundation that makes opposition legitimate—rather than merely wrong—eroded beneath us. Drawing on her four-category framework that ensures space for disagreement and tracing how impact-based discrimination law spread, Redstone shows that repairing what's broken can’t be done without acknowledging what was improperly settled in the first place. Presumption of Guilt is a reminder that defending democracy and foreclosing the disagreements it depends on are incompatible projects.