Book Review: Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, by Deva R. Woodly

Abstract

Deva Woodly’s Reckoning is a deep and illuminating dive into the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)1 and the shifts in worldview philosophy and future visioning it promotes. It is a difficult book to review because Woodly has done such a masterful job at examining and analyzing the movement itself, its contribution to American Politics specifically, and democracy broadly. But try I will. The big-picture contribution of the book is outlined within the subtitle. At base, Woodly’s argument is that social movements are a necessary and recurring condition of democracy, and an essential part of the democratic apparatus. They are democratic institutions in their own right, and thus it is impossible to offer a full theorization of democracy that does not account for them. In this understanding, movements offer three principal functions— antidote, imagination, and re/politicization. First, the antidote. Movements make apparent the inaccuracies of the interest group pluralism model, and join the extensive set of entities that underscore the point that the powers of voice, inclusion, and representation are not enough. Importantly, they do not accept the fact of systemic inequities as unchangeable status quo, but rather see these as problems in need of intervention on a spectrum ranging from reform to excision. In doing so, movements push back on the lens of despair through which modern politics is commonly viewed, and raise new notions of what public life should look like. This is the imaginative component, and 1165686 PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231165686Political TheoryBook Reviews book-review2023