This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope is a remarkable book. It is best conceived as an extended meditation on the various issues instantiated in the social movements that are (and, for that matter, have always been) such an important reality of our polity. These include the comparative importance of rigorous appeals to reason—a traditional domain of philosophers—as against appeals based on “rhetoric” and “emotion” (often disdained by philosophers); the importance therefore of language in all of its forms, including art, in generating new perspectives; the willingness to compromise one’s just demands in the name of constructing a “beloved community” that necessarily has to include one’s opponents and perhaps former enemies; and the comparative importance of “hope” versus “despair” in energizing constructive movements. She seeks no “algorithms” (p. 258) to resolve any of the tensions that she identifies. Instead the book models what she most supports: a genuinely respectful attempt to generate conversation and reflection about the most important topics of mutual concern even when the interlocutors may have radical differences of perspective about the causes, and therefore, their possible rectifications. She focuses on “progressive” movements oriented toward achieving what she (and, presumably, most of her likely readers) would define as “social justice.” But she is fully aware that there are distinctly “non-progressive” social movements whose reality must be recognized and addressed. Are they simply the Schmittian “enemy”; or, on the contrary, should we envision them as fellow human beings, with their own suffering, to be engaged in as part of a grand effort toward “reconciliation”?