Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, this book offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.

This book is a terrific contribution to the literature on global justice. In fact, it is one of the most exciting contributions to the field in recent years. Lea Ypi offers a fresh defense of global egalitarianism, embeds that defense in a penetrating discussion of philosophical method and proposes an intriguing account of the connection between political theory and practice. She makes illuminating use of historical material and draws rewarding analogies to debates in the philosophy of science and aesthetics. This book takes political philosophy as the culturally and intellectually interconnected enterprise that it should be. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Lea Ypi is interested in theories of justice, citizenship, the philosophy of the Enlightenment (especially Kant), and the intellectual history of the Balkans. Her work has appeared in, among others, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and American Political Science Review. From September 2011 she will be a Lecturer in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Department of Government. She is a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.