Speaking for Others

A very impressive achievement. Salkin has opened up exciting new territory for investigation and will have to be cited in all future work about informal political representation. -- Elizabeth Anderson, author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back
When we seek justice, freedom, or equality, we rely on others to speak for us. This original study is about the benefits, dangers, and ethics of informal political representation. The combination of conceptual analysis with cross-disciplinary insight, and the ethical prescriptions it provides, makes it a must-read for political theorists as well as everyone represented by others and representing others. -- Derrick Darby, author of A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight
A thorough and carefully crafted investigation of an original and intriguing topic. Salkin identifies a consequential yet undertheorized social role, the informal political representative, that is ripe for more philosophical attention, and she works out many of the central conceptual and normative questions that it raises. Her analysis deserves to be influential, and I expect that it will be. -- David Estlund, author of Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy
Original and compelling. Speaking for Others is likely to have a profound impact in a range of theoretical, as well as real-world contexts. I strongly recommend it to philosophers, legal theorists, and political scientists. -- Michele Moody-Adams, author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy
Wendy Salkin gets it. Informal political representation occurs every day in all of our lives but has never been dissected this carefully or understood this deeply. What are our obligations to those whom we informally represent? Can we have such obligations even when we do not even realize that we are representing others (we're 'unwitting') or have never asked to be a representative and do not want to be one (we're 'unwilling')? What are the obligations of the audiences that confer the status of informal political representative? Salkin's brilliant analysis of these questions and their implications will guide our thinking about them for a long time. -- Jane Mansbridge, author of Beyond Adversary Democracy