Cécile Laborde

Cécile Laborde holds the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Pluralist Thought and the State (2000), Critical Republicanism (2008) and Liberalism’s Religion (2017), which was published by Harvard UP and won the 2019 Spitz Prize. Her work on republicanism, non-domination, secularism, and religion has appeared in leading international journals of political philosophy.

The project

Title: Equality of Whom? The Philosophical Foundations of Anti-Discrimination Law

« My current research focuses on the philosophical foundations of theories of equality/discrimination and freedom/domination. The overarching research question is: to what extent should members of historically dominant groups (eg. men, white people, Christians, in North Atlantic societies) benefit from a range of equality provisions? The question is particularly acute in the face of complaints, pressed by right-wing and identitarian parties, according to which such citizens are today victim of both discrimination and domination. Attitudes of white resentment, neo-masculinist backlash, and Christian traditionalism are often presented as forms of authoritarian backlash against equality. Yet –paradoxically - they also invoke the discourse of equality. A sound response to these claims, therefore, requires a renewed exploration of the philosophical foundations of equality. How should we conceptualise equality between (historically) dominant groups and dominated groups?. »

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Liberalism’s Religion, Harvard University Press, 2017. (TR. La religion du libéralisme. Hermann, 2023).
• Critical Republicanism. Oxford University Press, 2008. (Tr. Français, encore un effort pour être républicains. Seuil, 2010).
• ‘Structural Inequality and the Protectorate of Discrimination', Politics, Philosophy, Economics. Online Open Access, October 2024.
• 'Being Free, Feeling Free. Race, Gender and Republican Domination', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Summer 2024. 
• 'Minimal Secularism: Lessons for, and from, India', American Political Science Review,  September 2020.