What a really thought-provoking book - Iris Marion Young rejects the distributive paradigm in justice discourse, arguing that we should really be talking about power dynamics and oppression as a structural concept. Interestingly, for her welfare capitalism represses political difference because it reduces that to a question of distribution - how much to distribute? What technologies to use to distribute? - when we should be asking more fundamental questions about how power works.

I think the most interesting aspect of her book relates to how she seemed to both pre-empt neoliberalism while not fully grasping the entirely damaging effects it has had on democracy, which are clearer twenty-something years after the Reagan era. Her point about welfare capitalism is that all is reduced to a question of distribution; speaking from the point of view of someone reading this in the mid-2010s, I should say that even having a debate about how much to distribute, and saying that we should distribute more, would be in itself a triumph for the plutocracy that America has become.