Research

In recent entries in the democratic theory literature, the ideal of collective self-rule is criticised for resting on a notion of shared agency which does not properly capture the diversity and complexity of social life. Scholars such as Samuel Bagg instead offer a different normative standard according to which democracies should aspire to disperse political power in order to resist the capture of public institutions by elites. I argue that these recent critiques should consider the following disjunction: either the dispersion of power helps to resist the elite centralization of power and to counteract elite capture, or dispersion unduly weakens public power. Different forms of power and different political institutions will need to be measured against these possibilities on a case-by-case basis. On the “optimistic” first arm of the disjunction, the dispersion of power contributes to democratic legitimacy as intended by undermining the power of elites and creates diverse and multilayered venues for democratic participation. On the alternative “pessimistic” reading, the dispersion of power creates conditions in which public, centralized political power is rendered so ineffective that many desirable goals of social justice – which may require a strong centralized state power – are left unfulfilled. In other words, what is intended to be a democratically enriching normative standard ends up resembling libertarianism, which I argue has very weak democratic credentials. I close by arguing that, while there are many benefits to the dispersion of power, the case of monetary authority exercised by the state is one crucial exception. Monetary authority, if dispersed, would create conditions of instability and distributive regressivity which would be more likely to enrich elites than to disempower them. I conclude that the ideal co-authorship cannot be fully abandoned due to the importance of state monetary power.

I argue that normative political theory ought to be informed by a social theory explaining the chronic instability and tendency to crisis in global financial markets. Karl Polanyi, the Austro-Hungary political economists of the early 20th Century, offers a promising theory of this kind by positioning the commodifying force of the market in a tendentious “double movement” with society. I argue that Polanyi’s theory of the double movement is a promising candidate for such a social theory by exploring three main considerations at the heart of his thought: embeddedness, fictitious commodities and a typology of institutional forms. For normative theorists, Polanyian countermovements better capture how the forms of social cooperation to which normative critique is typically addressed are shaped and reconstituted by a dynamic conflictual process, not a stably reproduced pattern of cooperation. These three social theoretic insights can be brought into dialogue with normative scholarship on justice, demonstrating a need for normative theorizing more oriented towards the destabilizing nature of the market and its political consequences. I suggest that this justifies a more radical democratization of economic institutions.

Political theorists disagree about the fundamental wrong of capitalism. Domination-centred theories struggle to square the structural, impersonal nature of capitalism with the seemingly agential nature of domination. In response, Chiara Cordelli has renewed the case for alienation as an alternative candidate. An alienation-centred critique has the benefit of avoiding the structural/agential problem, since alienation does not presuppose an agent culprit. However, this shift involves a controversial move that positions money and investment as alienated goods, potentially sidelining existing concerns about the domination of labour. Critics respond that money itself is better thought of as a symptom of capitalist domination. I argue that a deeper view of money’s ontology, its various functions, and specifically its role in tokenizing debt obligations, supports its conceptual separation from other economic institutions plausibly associated with capitalism, such as markets. This shores up the alienation approach and refocuses critique of capitalism on its most crisis-prone lever of reproduction, namely the financial system.