Does Non‐Idealism Entail Particularism?

In recent years, social metaphysicians have developed an interest in “non-ideal” approaches to social categories (Burman 2023). Non-ideal social theory aims to demystify our social world, to look beyond the ways in which prevailing institutions, relations, and practices present themselves, and to uncover the ways in which things really work. A non-idealist metaphysics of social categories thus casts a critical eye on common sense about categories like race or gender, and advances self-consciously revisionist theories that aspire to capture the ways in which these categories actually shape people's activities and relationships. While an idealist theory of social categories would describe the ways in which these categories should operate, or in which they would operate in idealized social conditions, non-ideal theory focuses on the ways in which these categories do operate, identifying the concrete (and often harmful) effects that these categories have on people, and the (often unjust) ways in which these categories bear on the distribution of power.1 In her book Categories We Live By, Ásta advances a novel argument that non-idealism about social categories entails what I will call particularism about social categories.2 We might have thought that people become members of social categories because they satisfy the general criteria for membership in the category. These criteria might refer, for example, to facts about a person's anatomy or ancestry, to the languages they speak, to the degrees they hold, and so on; on what I will call a generalist approach, the fact that someone satisfies these criteria constitutes them as a member of the relevant category, and this in turn explains certain aspects of their relationships and interactions with the other members of their communities. In contrast, on a particularist analysis, only facts about the ways in which people treat or represent someone in particular can constitute them as a member of a social category. On these accounts, the fact that someone satisfies any other apparent criteria for membership in a social category plays only a causal or predictive role in explaining someone's membership in a social category. It might help to explain why people treat them as a member of the relevant category. But it is this latter treatment alone that actually constitutes them as a member of the category.3 Sally Haslanger's early formulations of her ameliorative conceptions of gender and race were particularist in this sense. On this account of gender, someone is a woman if they are “regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female's biological role in reproduction,” and if this observation “marks” them for subordinate social positions, and so “plays a role in [their] systematic subordination.” (Haslanger 2012, 234) That is, you are not a woman simply because you have the relevant bodily features, and because your community generally marks people with those bodily features for subordinate roles. Rather, you only become a woman once people observe or imagine you, in particular, to have those bodily features, and mark you for subordinate roles on that basis. Similarly, Haslanger argues that the members of racial groups are those “who are observed or imagined to have certain bodily features presumed… to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical region (or regions),” and who are marked for privileged or subordinate roles on that basis (Haslanger 2012, 236; see also Haslanger 2019). Again, what matters is not that one has bodily features generally associated with membership in particular racial groups, but that others observe or imagine one to have those features, and so mark one for privileged or subordinate roles on that basis. Why should non-idealism about social categories entail particularism? Ásta argues that if we are to theorize the categories to which people actually belong, and not the categories to which they should belong, then we must focus on the ways in which social categorization actually affects their lives; and (Ásta argues) this requires that we look to the categories that others confer onto them as particular subjects—not the categories whose membership criteria they satisfy. After all (the thought goes), whether or not someone satisfies these criteria will be socially inert until people do something with this fact. Against Ásta, I argue that particularist approaches to social categories are not viable. To do so, I highlight the structural similarities between Ásta's non-idealist particularism and Jerome Frank's brand of “legal realism.” In this context, realism is not a metaphysical position that contrasts with anti-realism about the law. Rather, realism is an orientation that contrasts with idealism, and that insists on locating law in the real world. Frank argued that if we are to study law, not as an object of abstract theory, but as an institutional structure with the power to shape legal subjects' lives, then we must reject the familiar assumption that law consists in general legal rules which the courts apply. Only the courts' on the particular that them actually legal subjects' lives; so, Frank the law consists only in those themselves, not in the general rules that to to these a to legal realism entails a to particularism about the law. 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