Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives

Bennett, Michael (Ed.); Brouwer, Huub (Ed.); Claassen, Rutger (Ed.) Book Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Provided in Cooperation with: Taylor & Francis Group Suggested Citation: Bennett, Michael (Ed.); Brouwer, Huub (Ed.); Claassen, Rutger (Ed.) (2023) : Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy, ISBN 978-1-000-81233-6, Routledge, New York, NY, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003173632 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/290373 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ WEALTH AND POWER Edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen WEALTH AND POWER PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Wealth and Power Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it. Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism. Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations. Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying. Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in political philosophy, political science, economics, and law. Michael Bennett is a Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, working in the interdisciplinary tradition of politics, philosophy, and economics. His research focuses on the relationship between capitalism and democracy and has been published by journals including the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. He completed his PhD at the University of York in 2017 on epistemic democracy and capitalism. He has since been a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and a visiting researcher at the University of Arizona and the London School of Economics. Huub Brouwer is Assistant Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Tilburg University, where he works at the intersection of economics and political philosophy, in particular on the morality of markets and the design of just systems of taxation. Huub was the editor of the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics in 2018–2019. He obtained his PhD, in which he argues for a comeback of desert in debates about distributive justice, from Tilburg University in January 2020, and has published in journals such as the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University as part of the research project ‘Private Property & Political Power in Liberal-Democratic Societies.’ Huub has been a visiting researcher at Gothenburg University, Oxford University, Pompeu Fabra University, and Yale University. Rutger Claassen is Professor of Political Philosophy and Economic Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Utrecht University. He was the principal investigator of the research project ‘Private Property & Political Power in Liberal- Democratic Societies’ (2017–2022) and currently is the principal investigator of the project ‘The Business Corporation as a Political Actor’, funded by the European Research Council (ERC-Consolidator Grant, 2020-2025). He has published extensively on the moral value of economic institutions such as markets, property, and corporations in journals such as Economics & Philosophy, Law & Philosophy, and Politics, Philosophy & Economics. Rutger is the author of Capabilities in a Just Society: A Theory of Navigational Agency (CUP, 2018). He is the founding Program Director of the BA-program in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) at Utrecht University. Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition Edited by Paul Giladi and Nicola McMillan Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology Edited by Diego E. Machuca The Theory and Practice of Recognition Edited by Onni Hirvonen and Heikki J. Koskinen The Philosophy of Exemplarity Singularity, Particularity, and Self-Reference Jakub Mácha Wealth and Power Philosophical Perspectives Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Unconscious Networks Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence Luca M. Possati Updating the Interpretive Turn New Arguments in Hermeneutics Edited by Michiel Meijer For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720 Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen Wealth and Power Philosophical Perspectives First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen The right of Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, Rutger Claassen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-00319-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00320-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17363-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003173632 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. Author Biographies viii Preface xi 1 Introduction: The Wealth-Power Nexus 1 MICHAEL BENNETT, HUUB BROUWER, AND RUTGER CLAASSEN PART I Theoretical Orientations 23 2 What about Ethos? Republican Institutions, Oligarchic Democracy, and Norms of Political Equality 25 JESSICA KIMPELL JOHNSON 3 Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 47 RICHARD ARNESON 4 Public Choice and Political Equality 67 BRIAN KOGELMANN 5 Private Wealth and Political Domination: A Marxian Approach 85 IGOR SHOIKHEDBROD 6 Anarchism and Redistribution 104 JESSICA FLANIGAN Contents vi Contents PART II Power in the Economic Sphere 125 7 Why Does Worker Participation Matter? Three Considerations in Favour of Worker Participation in Corporate Governance 127 THOMAS CHRISTIANO 8 Taming the Corporate Leviathan: How to Properly Politicise Corporate Purpose? 145 MICHAEL BENNETT AND RUTGER CLAASSEN 9 The Power of Big Tech Corporations as Modern Bigness and a Vocabulary for Shaping Competition Law as Counter-Power 166 ANNA GERBRANDY AND PAULINE PHOA 10 Economic Power and Democratic Forbearance: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility and Philanthropy 186 EMMA SAUNDERS-HASTINGS 11 Independence in the Commons: How Group Ownership Realises Basic Non-Domination 206 YARA AL SALMAN PART III Wealth and Democratic Institutions 227 12 Hidden in Plain Sight: How Lobby Organisations Undermine Democracy 229 PHIL PARVIN 13 No Money, No Party: The Role of Political Parties in Electoral Campaigns 252 CHIARA DESTRI 14 Constitutions against Oligarchy 274 ELLIOT BULMER AND STUART WHITE Contents vii 15 Automation, Desert, and the Case for Capital Grants 295 HUUB BROUWER 16 The Power of Private Creditors and the Need for Reform of the International Financial Architecture 314 ANAHÍ WIEDENBRÜG AND PATRICIO LÓPEZ TURCONI Index 337 2 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen using a business model that takes advantage of government regulations, and moving around the world to avoid taxes. This kind of nexus between wealth and power forms the background against which the chapters of this volume are framed. At its heart lies the question of whether political equality is viable given the unequal private property holdings characteristic of a capitalist economy. This question is becoming increasingly obtrusive in an age of accelerating economic inequality. The volume approaches the relationship between private property and political power from two angles. First, wealth can influence politics, for example through campaign finance and lobbying. Second, power can arise in the supposedly voluntary private sphere, for example through the power of companies over their workers and the unaccountable power of philanthropists and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our contributors also discuss mechanisms and institutions that have attracted less attention from political theorists and philosophers, such as sovereign debt, competition law, and common property regimes (CPRs). The volume moves from broad theoretical perspectives in Part One (‘Theoretical Orientations’) through to detailed analysis of economic and political policy areas an institutions in Parts Two (‘Power in the Economic Sphere’) and Three (‘Wealth and Democratic Institutions’). Our ambition is to connect concrete and topical issues with fundamental debates in political theory and philosophy, engaging with and drawing on other disciplines such as political science, economics, and law in the process. The remainder of this chapter situates our work in the context of the history of political thought and recent work in the social sciences and political philosophy. It then develops a basic conceptual framework to organise the breadth of work on the topic, followed by brief introductions to the chapters in each part of the volume. 1 Background and Contemporary Research 1.1 Historical Background In the premodern world, it was commonplace that wealth and power would go together. This was equally clear to monarchs as it was to republicans. An interesting example of how the rules of property could be adapted for political purposes comes from the Byzantine empire in the tenth century (McGeer 2000). After a series of bad winters, the emperor passed new land laws, forbidding poor peasants from selling their land to wealthy nobles. The emperor described his laws as an attempt to protect the poor from being exploited by the nobles. However, it’s likely that his true motive was to prevent land falling into the hands of aristocrats who might challenge his own power. The emperor was manifesting the common premodern assumption that wealth and political power would Introduction 3 unavoidably combine one way or another. The city republics of ancient Greece and Rome and medieval Italy faced the same issue, and it was widely assumed that the dispersal of political power was only sustainable so long as economic resources were also dispersed along roughly similar lines. Sometimes, cities attempted to deliberately engineer this kind of economic equality through agrarian laws which redistributed land or restricted its transfer. However, most thinkers (including Aristotle and Machiavelli) were relatively pessimistic about the prospects for this kind of deliberate engineering. Instead, there was a tendency to think that cities lucky enough to have the socioeconomic preconditions for constitutional government could enjoy constitutional government, and cities which did not would be governed by other kinds of regimes. European liberal modernity claimed to cut this ancient connection between wealth and power. The historian Rafe Blaufarb (2019) has described the French Revolution and its global influence as effecting a ‘great demarcation’ between property and power, private and public spheres. Modern democracies would far outstrip the ambitions of ancient republics in the scale and diversity of the populations they would seek to govern. The liberal ideal is one in which the public realm of the creation and administration of law would proceed in perfect independence from the inequalities of private life. Of course, this was accompanied by a great deal of worrying that the poor would fail to appreciate the merits of this ideal and would expropriate the rich, justifying, somewhat ironically, the restriction of political rights according to property holdings. As it happened, the later, twentieth-century erosion of property qualifications did not lead to widespread expropriation. However, the triumph of the great demarcation was almost from the beginning accompanied by a socialist critique. For Karl Marx, the separation of political and economic realms was a contradiction which a better society of the future would supersede by subordinating the economy fully to democracy. After the Second World War, the potential contradiction between capitalism and democracy was attenuated by an era of high marginal tax rates on income and relative economic equality in the wealthy nations. The topic fell low on the agenda of political theorists and philosophers. However, after 40 years of renewed growth of inequality in many countries, the old problem is raising its head again. 1.2 Contemporary Social Science Over the last decade, increasing economic inequality has been pushed to prominence in economics and in public debate by Thomas Piketty (2014) and his associates (Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez 2011; Atkinson 2015; Alstadsæter, Johannesen, and Zucman 2018). In particular, they popularised the concept of the U-shaped pattern in inequality in the twentieth 4 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen century, with the income and wealth share of the richest falling in the first half of the century and then rising again since the 1970s. Since then, further studies have confirmed a picture in which inequality is currently on the rise in most countries in the world (Chancel et al. 2021).2 Wealth inequality may be judged from a variety of perspectives (such as its intrinsic unfairness, or its detrimental economic effects on growth). Here, it forms the background for the political question whether democracy is subverted by economic inequality. Political scientists have long been interested in this question and come to various conclusions (Schattschneider 1960; Lindblom 1977; Dahl 2005; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012). However, the topic is inherently difficult to study. Studies of campaign finance in the United States have found it notably difficult to establish a link between campaign donations and electoral success, or of legislators advancing donor’s interests (Levitt 1994; Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003). This runs contrary not only to folk wisdom in general but also to the folk wisdom of politicians themselves, who certainly act as though campaign donations were crucial to their success. A recently prominent approach has attempted to cut the Gordian knot of figuring out the mechanisms by instead looking directly at overall outcomes and asking how far they reflect the preferences of the wealthy versus the rest. In a famous paper, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page used a dataset of 1779 instances in which the public had been surveyed on policy questions appearing before the US Congress (Gilens and Page 2014; see also Bartels 2010; Gilens 2014). They found that the preferences of business interest groups and citizens at the 90th percentile of income had predictive power for what Congress would do. For example, when fewer than one in five members of the wealthy group supported a policy change, it occurred around 18% of the time. But when four in five supported a change, the change had a 45% chance of happening. By contrast, the preferences of citizens at the median level of income had no statistically significant impact on what Congress did. The vast majority of research of this kind focuses on the United States. However, some studies have purported to find similar effects in other countries, such as the Netherlands (Schakel 2021). Other social scientists have tended to approach the topic through a less quantitative route, focusing on the transformation of the party system in European countries, particularly social democratic parties. Peter Mair (2013) wrote about the ‘hollowing out’ of mass parties, leading to a state of what Colin Crouch (2004; 2011) called ‘post-democracy’: politics without any clear ideological alternative to neoliberalism. Wolfgang Streeck (2017) has pursued a similar line, laying the blame on globalisation for pushing countries towards a race to the bottom in competition for investment capital and trade competitiveness. Introduction 5 1.3 Contemporary Political Philosophy The relationship between wealth and power has not been a major topic in recent political philosophy, and it is part of the ambition for this volume to change that. While some of the particular issue areas covered in this volume have been addressed, work on these issues has largely proceeded in isolation from one another. Nonetheless, three particular debates are worth mentioning. First, money in politics has played an important role in interpretations of John Rawls’ (1999; 2001) idea of a property-owning democracy. For Rawls, the first principle of justice requires equal political liberties, and moreover that these rights be given their fair value – equal in substance and not merely in form. Given that this is lexically prior to considerations of distributive justice, it is potentially highly significant for the design of economic as well as political institutions. For Rawls, it is the fair value of political liberties, which requires us to move from a capitalist welfare state to the more robustly redistributive property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. These ideas are explored in detail in a volume edited by Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson (2014). William Edmundson (2017) has argued that the corruption of political equality cannot be prevented so long as the means of production are privately owned, and that Rawls’s theory of justice should therefore properly be understood as endorsing a form of liberal socialism. Others, such as Alan Thomas (2016) have defended the idea that the fair value of political liberties might be realised by property owning democracy. Richard Arneson weighs in on the debate in this volume. The theoretical debate on property-owning democracy has fed through to more applied discussions about campaign finance. This topic (addressed here by Chiara Destri) is the subject of a relatively sizeable literature in political philosophy, albeit one that tends to be rather dominated by the context of US constitutional law (see among others Beitz 1990; J. Cohen 2001; Christiano 2012; Pevnick 2016; Bennett 2020). The second major debate in political theory in which wealth and power has played an important role is the debate within neo-republicanism, addressed in this volume by Jessica Kimpell Johnson. The version of republicanism revived by Phillip Pettit (1999) focused on the principle of non-domination. John McCormick (2011) charged Pettit with advancing an aristocratic version of republicanism, and argued for a plebeian alternative drawing on Machiavelli. This has led to an interesting debate on republicanism’s attitude to democracy and oligarchy and the extent to which capitalism’s influence on democracy is a source of domination (White 2011; Gourevitch 2014; Vergara 2020). McCormick also put on the agenda the idea of class-specific political institutions inspired by the Roman Tribunate, which aristocrats were banned from participating in, an idea which has intrigued many thinkers concerned with problems of oligarchy, including Stuart White and Elliot Bulmer in this volume. 6 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen The third debate worth mentioning is a collection of discussions around the nature and power of corporations. Corporate power has been a locus of broader discontents with the world of growing inequality and the entanglement of wealth and power. Part of the discussion has been about what the corporation is, normatively speaking, with David Ciepley (2013) making an influential argument for viewing corporations as franchises of government rather than the result of the exercise of individual economic liberties. This discussion connects to a somewhat separate line of debate about democracy in the workplace, addressed here by Thomas Christiano (see, among others, McMahon 1994; Ferreras 2017; Singer 2019). Others have raised questions about the political implications of practices of CSR, addressed here by Emma Saunders-Hastings (Scherer and Palazzo 2007; Hussain and Moriarty 2014). Finally, concerns about corporate power have also manifested in a new movement within the world of competition and antitrust law to look at firms’ political impacts beyond their impact on economic welfare, a topic which Gerbrandy and Phoa address here. While some of the chapters in this volume contribute to these debates, others treat topics which have barely registered in political theory and philosophy, such as lobbying (Phil Parvin), CPRs (Yara Al Salman), public choice theory (Brian Kogelmann), and sovereign debt (Anahí Wiedenbrüg and Patricio López Turconi). Our ambition is to bring together these disparate strands in order to get a broader perspective on the general phenomenon of wealth’s relationship to power. To do this, it is useful to have a minimal orienting framework. 2 Conceptual Framework In this section, we set out a general conceptual framework for thinking about the relationship between wealth and power. The framework is intended to be a means through which the various contributions to the volume can be located in relation to one another. It has three elements: first, the idea of liberalism’s public/private divide: a division between a power-wielding state from which wealth should be absent, and a market economy from which power should be absent; second, the two ways the division can be transgressed by the power of the wealthy: by the wealthy subverting the power of the state, and by directly exercising power within the economy; and third, the four different approaches to responding to the transgression, either aiming to reassert the public/ private divide or to move beyond it. 2.1 Liberalism’s Public/Private Divide A core feature of liberalism is the division of social life into two distinct spheres, each with its own norms and characteristics (Walzer 1984; Ciepley 2013). Liberalism’s public/private distinction is complex topic Introduction 7 with important applications to various subjects, particularly religion, gender, and the family. Here, we focus only on public/private in political economy. In this context, we can loosely think of the public sphere as consisting of the government, politicians and political parties, and the activists and media organisations, who make up the ‘informal’ public sphere. By contrast, the private sphere consists of workers, investors, and consumers transacting on the market and organised into firms. The underlying distinction, however, is not between types of organisations but between norms. In their private capacities, people are legitimately oriented towards their private interests. They are free to pursue their own projects in life, dispose of their property as they wish, and contract and co-operate with whomever they want. By contrast, in their public capacities, people should be oriented towards the public interest. Realising normative ideals of justice is the responsibility of the public sphere. A significant part of the public interest consists in the proper ordering and regulation of the private sphere. Liberalism is defined (at least in part) by the sharp distinction it seeks to enforce between these spheres. This entails a view about the legitimate distribution of power. Public institutions need to have political power in order to promote the public interest, especially when this requires regulating the private sphere. Political power is coercive and inescapable for citizens: it sets general rules that all citizens have to obey. Minimally, this implies rule-of-law norms about public authorities treating citizens equally. But it is usually also taken to imply a demand for democratic accountability and political equality: an equal opportunity to determine the laws. Conversely, the private sphere is supposed to be a realm in which (political) power is absent. Were power to be found in the private sphere, it would be subject to the same demand for democratic accountability and would have to become part of the public sphere in order to satisfy this demand. 2.2 Transgressing the Public/Private Divide This book concentrates on the potential of private wealth to generate power, a transgression of the private/public divide. It is useful to distinguish two different ways in which this happens. Both of them lead to the exercise of ‘power’ by ‘wealth’ (i.e., wealthy individuals or organisations). We refer to the first kind of transgression as wealth in the state. This exercise of power is mediated: wealth crosses into the state and captures public policies for private interests. Recall that according to the standard liberal public/private distinction, the public sphere is charged with regulating the private sphere to promote the public interest. This is represented by the downward arrow in Figure 1, showing the exercise of power or influence from the state over the private sphere. This creates an 8 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen opportunity for wealthy private agents to hijack the state’s power. This is represented by the arrows from the wealthy to the non-wealthy via public institutions. The means by which this can occur are various. Sometimes people seek to directly and intentionally use their economic resources to influence state policy. This encompasses a spectrum of motivations, from economic agents engaging instrumentally in politics to further their economic goals (for example, a company lobbying for subsidies), to people using their economic resources to further unrelated political goals (such as a billionaire donating to abortion campaigners). These topics are the subject of the chapters by Phil Parvin and Chiara Destri. Beyond this, there are emergent influences, which arise when economic forces influence political outcomes without anyone directly intending that they do so. This includes the following (non-exhaustively): capital flight (the threat of disinvestment prompting revisions in government policy); sovereign debt financing (on which see the chapter by Anahí Wiedenbrüg and Patricio López-Cantero); and citizens’ differential participation in politics according to socioeconomic class. We turn now to the second type of transgression of the liberal public/ private distinction, which we call power in the economy. This involves wealthy individuals or organisations directly exercising power over less wealthy individuals or organisations within the economy (without the mediation of the state). This is represented in Figure 1 by the arrow connecting the wealthy with the non-wealthy. The scope of this Figure 1 Types of transgressions of the private/public divide. Introduction 9 transgression depends on how exactly one understands power in the economy and its badness, which is a controversial topic. To illustrate, consider three views we can label ‘the libertarian,’ ‘the economic,’ and ‘the radical.’ On a libertarian view, the absence of power from the economy means that in markets, transactions must be consented to, whereas in politics, minorities are coerced into compliance. On this view, power exercised directly in the economy means force or fraud which renders exchanges involuntary (such a view obviously raises questions about the legitimacy of property rights, on which see Chapter 6 by Jessica Flanigan’s). The economic view is encapsulated in models of perfect competition in which no individual has any power to determine prices. Power in the economy on this view is what economists call ‘market power’: the ability of a market agent to influence prices. Other sources of market failures, particularly externalities and information asymmetries, might also count as instances of power on this view; they certainly depart from the ideal of perfect competition. Finally, a radical view would hold that property itself is a kind of power such that inequality in private property holdings entails inequality of power, and a market economy can only claim to be free from unequal power insofar as property holdings are equalised. The two ways of transgressing of the private/public divide (wealth in the state and power in the economy) can coexist in a vicious feedback loop. For example, a company might lobby the government for unfair advantages, which it uses to increase its market power, which it uses to further lobby the government. Walmart’s use of the food stamp programme in the United States, with which this introduction started, is an example of this dynamic. 2.3 Approaches to Transgressions This brings us to the key question of responses to transgressions of the liberal public/private divide. We propose a taxonomy of four ideal-type approaches: insulation, market failure regulation, redistribution, and economic democracy strategies (for an overview, see Figure 2). These each bear a different relation to the private/public distinction, and the two types of transgressions mentioned above. A first distinction is between strategies which attempt to protect the public sphere from economic influences, and all other strategies, which try, one way or the other, to reduce power concentrations in the economy. Strategies of insulation aim to better police the boundary between the public sphere and the private to reduce the influence of the economy over politics. In particular, they try to prevent economic inequality spilling over into political inequality. Insulation is the best understood approach and the traditional centrepiece of discussions about wealth and power. Insulation strategies can be seen most clearly in attempts to 10 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen curb intentional influences such as bribery or unequally funded political speech: anti-corruption laws, political finance laws and policies for the funding of speech in the broader public sphere (see the chapters by Parvin and by Destri). On a more fundamental level, the design of the constitution influences the extent to which public institutions can function without problematic forms of interference (on which see Brian Kogelmann’s chapter). Stretching the metaphor of insulation somewhat, this can extend to constitutional measures intended not merely to frustrate the disproportionate influence of the wealthy but to actively counterbalance it by increasing the political power of the non-wealthy (see the chapter by Stuart White and Elliot Bulmer). These policies and procedures are supplemented by informal social norms around corruption and the use of wealth for political purposes (addressed by Kimpell Johnson and by Richard Arneson). By definition, insulation strategies only address the problem of wealth in the state, and do not attempt to deal with the problem of power in the economy. The other, non-insulation strategies envisage reforms of the private sphere itself to prevent the emergence of concentrated power within the economy. By definition, such strategies directly address the problem of power in the economy. However, they can also indirectly address the problem of wealth in the state by making the private sphere more compatible with the public sphere; rather than reducing economic influences on politics, they reform the private sphere such that the influence of the economy over politics is more benign. Within this set of strategies, we can make a distinction between those strategies which accept the economic domain as a private sphere dominated by markets, and those strategies which import public norms of democracy into the ‘private’ economic realm. Figure 2 Ways of responding to transgressions of the private/public divide. Introduction 11 Let’s first discuss the market-based strategies. These engineer the economy such that the self-seeking norms of the private sphere remain viable. The goal is to realise the ideal of the market as a sphere free from power.3 The key distinction within this category is between strategies of market failure regulation and strategies of redistribution. This distinction tracks the distinction made in the previous section between libertarian, economic, and radical interpretations of the ideal of the power-free market. Strategies for regulating market failures ensure the integrity of the market on the libertarian and economic interpretations. On the libertarian view sketched in the previous section, the prevention of force or fraud is all that is required. On the economic view, the possibilities are much more extensive. Of particular interest is competition/antitrust policy, working to curb market power in the strict sense (on which see Anna Gerbrandy and Pauline Phoa’s chapter). More generally, regulations to keep competition fair by correcting market failures fall into this category. Strategies of redistribution counter power on the more radical interpretation of power in the economy.4 The classical form of this strategy refers to the welfare state, with its social insurance and benefit programmes. More ambitious redistributive agendas aim to realise what James Meade (1964) and Rawls called ‘property-owning democracy’ (O’Neill and Williamson 2014). In practice, this would likely require some kind of heavily progressive taxation funding a universal entitlement, either as a lump-sum grant when people reach adulthood (‘basic capital’) or as an ongoing stream (‘basic income’). Some advocates of basic income explicitly make the connection with allowing people to escape relations of power in the economy (Zwolinski 2012; Widerquist 2013), and Huub Brouwer in his chapter discusses redistributive schemes in the context of automation. Finally, the approach of economic democracy is to deal with the direct exercise of power in the economy by importing norms and associated institutions for dealing with power from the public sphere. Whereas the market-based approaches respond to power in the economy with a demand for independence in the market, the economic democracy approach responds to power in the economy with a demand for democratic accountability. Policies which might form part of an economic democracy approach include worker participation (discussed by Igor Shoikhedbrod and Thomas Christiano in this volume), CPRs (examined by Yara Al Salman), and reforms to increase democratic input in corporate governance (analysed in the chapter by Michael Bennett and Rutger Claassen). Private parties who engage in CSR and philanthropy are often criticised on the basis that these activities should be subject to greater democratic accountability, a topic addressed by Emma Saunders-Hastings’s chapter. What these have in common is that they blur the public/private divide by creating hybrid institutional forms in the economy which are governed by a complex mixture of public and private norms. 18 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen claiming that parties are ideally suited to organise political campaigns in accordance with the democratic ideal of collective self-rule because they can perform epistemic, justificatory, and motivational functions. After outlining the normative debate on campaign finance, she goes on to argue that campaign regulations affect parties’ capacity to discharge these three functions, as well as their internal structure. Destri ends the chapter by arguing that campaign finance regulation should be designed in a way that harnesses internal democracy in parties. This could be done by a two-staged voucher system that gives citizens two vouchers: one to fund their party of choice and one to support internal candidates at party primaries and their local branch delegates that are sent to the party conference. In the next chapter, Elliot Bulmer and Stuart White (Chapter 14) ask how constitutionalism can be used to address the dangers of oligarchy. They start by drawing a distinction between oligarchical capture of the state and oligarchical distortion of public policy. By oligarchical capture, they refer to the undue opportunity for political influence that the wealthy and/or business corporations can come to hold. By oligarchical distortion, they refer to the impact of oligarchic power on public policy, to the way this can skew policy away from the interests of the wider community. They then consider how provisions within a codified and entrenched constitution can serve to limit oligarchical distortion and oligarchic capture. In Chapter 15, Huub Brouwer looks at two prominent proposals for responding to growing wealth inequality: a basic income and a capital grant. He examines the choice between a basic income and a capital grant from the perspective of automation. Automation, Brouwer points out, can lead to technological unemployment if machines carry out similar work at much lower costs than humans. He defends two main claims. First, he argues that a universal and a conditional basic income do not provide a good solution to the problem of technological unemployment. Second, he defends the claim that technological unemployment strengthens the case for a capital grant, supplemented with a generous system of contribution benefits, which is to replace the unemployment benefit scheme. Many of the chapters in the edited volume discuss the wealth-power nexus by focusing on a single country, and most contributors focus on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. In Chapter 16, Anahí Wiedenbrüg and Patricio López Cantero take a different perspective. They focus on the power that private creditors have when dealing with low- and middle-income countries as sovereign debtors. Wiedenbrüg and López Cantero argue that private creditors hold relational and structural power over low- and middle-income countries and describe how this power is exercised in problematic ways at the time of lending, restructuring and Introduction 19 pushing for, or inhibiting, reforms to the international financial architecture. The chapter ends by defending the claim that a quasi-legal, soft-law approach is the best way to address harmful power asymmetries between creditors and debtors. The authors briefly discuss a list of desiderata for the establishment of such multilateral, soft-law regime. 4 Conclusion This volume brings together a wide range of topics that are all aspects of the wealth-power nexus. We hope that the volume will stimulate debate on these matters in political theory and adjacent fields. Although the volume does cover a wide range of topics, it is also limited in one important respect. As mentioned at various places in this introduction, the social science literature on wealth and democracy is overwhelmingly based on research in Western countries, particularly the United States, and our political philosophy tradition (from ancient debates on oligarchy to modern ones on property-owning democracy) is Western as well. At the same time, the question about wealth and its relation to power and political influence is universal. Anthropologists have worked to draw on both Western and non-Western societies to gain more generalised lessons about hierarchy and egalitarianism, but such anthropological work remains disconnected from the political economy themes of this volume (Boehm 2001; Anderson 2017). Most of the chapters in this volume assume a background of advanced capitalism and established democracy, and some adjustments will need to be made to apply these analyses to developing economies and less established democracies. The contributors to this volume were mainly based in the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, with others based in Argentina, Canada, and France. While we hope that our insights can be valuable for thinking about capitalism and democracy in general, we wish to acknowledge our geographical biases and limitations. Notes 1 In 2015, the American Coalition for Tax Fairness estimated that Walmart receives $6.2 billion worth of subsidies each year (Americans for Tax Fairness 2015). 2 Blanchet, Saez, and Zucman recently launched a website called ‘realtime inequality,’ which tracks income and wealth inequality in the United States every quarter. They have data available from January 1979 onward. 3 Such strategies are basically equivalent to Taylor’s idea of ‘marketanti-power’ (Taylor 2013). 4 Libertarians may object that redistribution fundamentally violates the ideal of the market (and of freedom from power). We take no stance on this question here. 20 Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen References Alstadsæter, Annette, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman. 2018. ‘Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens? Macro Evidence and Implications for Global Inequality’. Journal of Public Economics 162 (June): 89–100. https://doi.org/10/gdzcvg. Americans for Tax Fairness. 2015. ‘Walmart on Tax Day: How Taxpayers Subsidize America’s Biggest Employer and Richest Family.’ Retrieved on 22 February 2022 from https://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax- Day-Americans-for-Tax-Fairness-1.pdf. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘The Problem of Equality from a Political Economy Perspective: The Long View of History’. 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Machin, Dean J. 2012. ‘Political Inequality and the “Super-Rich”: Their Money or (Some of) Their Political Rights’. Res Publica 19 (2): 121–39. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11158-012-9200-8. Mair, Peter. 2013. Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso. McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. McGeer, Eric. 2000. The Land Legislation of the Macedonian Emperors. Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. McMahon, Christopher. 1994. Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meade, J. E. 1964. Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property. London: Allen & Unwin. O’Connor, Clare. 2014. ‘Report: Walmart’s Billionaire Waltons Give Almost None of Own Cash to Foundation.’ Forbes. 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Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. ——. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Schakel, Wouter. 2021. ‘Unequal Policy Responsiveness in the Netherlands’. Socio-Economic Review 19 (1): 37–57. https://doi.org/10/gf7q62. Schattschneider, E. E. 1960. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Scherer, Andreas Georg, and Guido Palazzo. 2007. ‘Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility: Business and Society Seen from a Habermasian Perspective’. The Academy of Management Review 32 (4): 1096–120. https:// doi.org/10.2307/20159358. Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Singer, Abraham. 2019. The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation. Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2017. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Second edition. London: Verso. Taylor, Robert S. 2013. ‘Market Freedom as Antipower’. The American Political Science Review 107 (3): 593–602. https://doi.org/10/gg5fsp. Thomas, Alan. 2016. Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Vergara, Camila. 2020. Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti- Oligarchic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walmart. 2021. ‘Annual Report.’ Retrieved on 21 February 2022 from https:// corporate.walmart.com/media-library/document/2021-annual-report/_proxy- Document?id=00000178-f54f-db6f-adfe-fdcf018d0000. Walzer, Michael. 1984. ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’. Political Theory 12 (3): 315–30. White, Stuart. 2011. ‘The Republican Critique of Capitalism’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 14 (5): 561–79. Widerquist, K. 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Zwolinski, Matt. 2012. ‘Classical Liberalism and the Basic Income’. Basic Income Studies 6 (2): 1–14. PART I Theoretical Orientations DOI: 10.4324/9781003173632-3 In response to months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, former U.S. President Donald J. Trump said in the fall of 2019, ‘I stand with freedom,’ adding ‘but we are also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history [with China]’ (Lynch 2019). The comment came as the president suggested that to secure better trading terms with China, he might veto unanimously passed legislation by the U.S. Congress aimed at protecting the rights of the democracy protestors. The tension between democracy and capitalism was apparent, as one end seemingly needed to bend to the other. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, this relationship has come under increasing scrutiny, with concerns that capitalism is deepening and entrenching steep inequality sharpened by widespread recognition that Western democracies are oligarchic. In the United States, this concern was reinforced by the coronavirus pandemic that laid bare longstanding structural inequalities and inequities. Those already most vulnerable were hit hardest by the pandemicrelated economic contraction, while the wealthy benefited the most from the recovery (Federal Reserve 2021). Months before the pandemic, the Pew Research Center found that economic inequality in the United States, whether measured by income or wealth, ‘continues to widen.’ Income growth was most rapid for the top 5% of families, the wealth gap between upper-income and middle-and lower-income families was widening, and the richest families were ‘getting richer faster,’ also being the only group to have gained wealth since the Great Recession (2020). While these and other examples in this chapter draw from the United States, the trends they embody are likely to have wider relevance and resonance. In this chapter, I examine the tension between democratic political equality and wealth inequality in capitalist societies from the republican perspective. The republican tradition has a long lineage of connecting citizens’ material conditions with their capacity for the exercise of political power and their security against subjection to the arbitrary will of another. Thus, it is fitting that contemporary thinkers interested in securing freedom as non-domination – understood What about Ethos? Republican Institutions, Oligarchic Democracy, and Norms of Political Equality Jessica Kimpell Johnson 2 26 Jessica Kimpell Johnson as freedom from arbitrary interference (Pettit 1997, 2012) – are increasingly focused on the interconnection between the political and economic spheres and the ways in which socioeconomic inequality enables political inequality.1 Many republican thinkers, old and new, consider steep inequality in resources as a threat to freedom. If socioeconomic elites disproportionately influence and direct laws in their favour, they undermine the republican ideal of equal access and influence (Pettit 2012), and thereby subject others to the exercise of arbitrary power. The predominant character of the republican response in the last few decades2 to the problem of the influence of wealth, however, is largely constitutional and institutional in nature. Most proposals by contemporary republicans use institutions and laws as tools to counteract the lopsided influence of the wealthy. This can take the form of proposals to curb extremes through pre-distribution or redistribution or to establish and structure institutions to create ‘plebeian’ channels or veto points, with the goal of producing laws that reflect the views of the socioeconomic many not just the few (see Bulmer and White 2022, for discussion). This constitutional-institutional thrust of the literature is in keeping with the compromises that modern republicanism made when confronted with the problem of how to secure freedom from arbitrary political power amid the inequality and self-interested motivations of commercial society. Setting aside whether this combination is ultimately reconcilable, the moderns’ solution was to make institutions do the work of resolving the conflicting interests and motivations of democratic commercial societies. If institutions could be designed to manage and facilitate clashes between groups, the output would be, as Madison said, justice and liberty (2008). The modern solution of relying on institutions to secure freedom amid commercialism and inequality is increasingly in doubt. Institutions often reflect rather than manage or correct for asymmetries in power that resource inequality has produced. Moreover, this framework – the origins of which are identifiable in Harrington’s work, culminate with the Federalists and inform John McCormick’s and Philip Pettit’s contributions – neglects crucial features of the classical republican concern about norms. That perspective warns that the functioning of institutions is dependent on systems of norms and the character of political culture. Developing a supportive civic culture of political equality among citizens must be integral to the contemporary programme for republican freedom – as laws and institutions alone, even if aimed at political equality, will neither be stable nor sufficient. On that theme, the chapter ends by briefly engaging with the possibility that Tocqueville’s ideal of the free citizen coupled with ‘localism’ could suggest grounds for developing norms of equal access and influence. What about Ethos? 27 1 Oligarchical Democracy and the Constitutional- Institutional Correctives Republicans today argue that freedom requires equal political access and influence. If one were to measure political power concretely in terms of access to decision makers and influence over policy outcomes, again the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the disproportionate power possessed by those with wealth from access to testing, protective equipment, medical treatments, and vaccinations to the shaping of government responses and actions of political leaders. During the early phase of the pandemic in March 2020, President Trump boasted of fielding phone calls from corporate executives and celebrities; in one anecdote, it seems a call from celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck about the financial suffering of his restaurant business during the public health crisis prompted Trump to instruct the Treasury and Labor secretaries to look into restoring the tax deductibility of meals and entertainment costs for corporations, ‘something the hospitality industry’s lobbyists have pursued for years’ (Hohmann 2020). About ten months later, the U.S. government’s $900 billion pandemic relief package included tax breaks for corporate meal expenses – derisively known as the ‘three-martini lunch’ – estimated to cost $6 billion in lost tax revenue (Editorial Board 2020). The republican tradition presents two broad options to the political problem of inequality: either reduce the power that wealth brings to bear in politics by (1) reducing inequality among citizens – thereby overtly tending not only to the political but also the economic sphere – or by (2) insulating the political process through institutional design and other measures from the imbalance such discrepancies in resources could bring to bear. In the contemporary literature, the first approach is reflected in proposals arguing that non-domination requires political and economic reform, from supporting basic income, establishing democratic forms of economic governance, dismantling central features of a capitalist economy, and instantiating ‘socialist republicanism’ (White 2011; Gourevitch 2013; Casassas and De Wispelaere 2016; Muldoon 2019). In keeping with the second approach, socioeconomic inequality produced by capitalist societies could be consistent with securing freedom insofar as class-based institutions and mechanisms ‘empower’ the many (McCormick 2011; Hamilton 2014; Vergara 2020) or sufficient protections ‘safeguard’ citizens’ political power in light of discrepancies in wealth (Pettit 2012). Two exemplars of this second approach are John McCormick and Philip Pettit. I focus on their work because it has significantly influenced the character of contemporary republican thought and, in particular, the related literature from both approaches described above on resource inequality and freedom. The concern about the threat to freedom by inequality in resources is central to McCormick’s work. ‘Economic inequality is perhaps the 34 Jessica Kimpell Johnson rejects, namely that the clash between the many and the few is an essential feature of the republic and necessary for liberty. For Harrington, inequality was a foundational source of corruption: the Roman Republic was ‘crooked in her birth’ because founder Romulus had ‘planted the commonwealth upon two contrary interests or roots,’ causing ‘a perpetual feud and enmity between the senate and the people, even to the death’ (2008, 160, 155). Harrington argues that the Roman tribunate failed to protect the people against the elites, so the very institution praised by McCormick was unable to thwart the increasing consolidation of property by the few to stave off domination and the collapse of the republic. In Harrington’s view, when Rome’s agrarian law became ‘obsolete,’ the few ‘came to eat up the people,’ and ‘battening themselves in luxury’ brought ‘so mighty a commonwealth, so huge a glory, unto so deplorable an end’ (162). Harrington departs from Machiavelli not because he lacks concern about the elites, but because the solution – the tribunate – did not work. Harrington’s commitment to an agrarian law also shows how far he is from McCormick’s other aristocratic republican, Cicero, who viewed the Gracchi brothers’ attempts to (re)introduce an agrarian law as deeply unjust and ignominious. McCormick acknowledges that the tribunate ‘was a necessary, but ultimately insufficient institutional means of protecting Rome’s liberty.’ Yet, in corrupt conditions marked by a concentration of wealth, he argues for implementing class-based institutions that take inspiration from the tribunate, which even Machiavelli indicates ‘could not definitively solve the problem of economic inequality’ (2018, 66). The Federalists, McCormick and Pettit inherit Harrington’s emphasis on constitutional and institutional design as solutions for securing freedom without adopting Harrington’s redistributive components. Harrington’s account would support the contemporary approach that requires substantial resource pre-distribution and/or redistribution rather than managing the effects of inequality through institutionalising class conflict or through political and juridical channels of contestation.7 At the same time, however, Harrington’s work does not transmit the lesson from the tradition also passed on to him by Machiavelli: fundamentally, norms shape and sustain (or subvert) institutions, providing the context in which they function (or not). 3 Freedom’s Norms, Political Equality, and the Free Citizen Concern about the decline of democracy pervaded the first decades of the twenty-first century,8 and the central tenet of classical republicanism became familiar to many: norms are essential supports for laws and institutions, and their erosion is destabilising. In the United States, What about Ethos? 35 democratic norms that constrain the transfer of power were violated, as lawmakers weakened the powers of a gubernatorial office after their party’s member was not re-elected (Associated Press 2018), and those who lost fair elections in 2020 used rhetoric and futile lawsuits to undermine belief in the legitimacy of elections. The importance of norms for political stability, in particular for constraining elite behaviour, is captured by Levitsky and Ziblatt: ‘Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be’ (2018, 7). Political culture, composed of attitudes, beliefs, and values, helps form the ethos of a political community. The sources in republican thought from which the ‘mixed constitution’ tradition derives, from Aristotle and Polybius to Montesquieu, all offer accounts of institutions whose functioning and stability is intertwined with norms. The same is true of Cicero, Machiavelli, and Rousseau as representatives of aristocratic, democratic, and communitarian lines in the republican tradition identified by contemporary thinkers. These ‘laws’ of ‘mores, customs, especially of opinion’ are such that the ‘success’ of all else depends on them, Rousseau argues, adding: they are ‘the true constitution of the state’ (2011, III.1.191).9 McCormick provides an institutionalist reading of Machiavelli, yet Machiavelli’s description of Roman institutions demonstrates that they were enmeshed in norms. Machiavelli attends to the emergence and role of the tribunate in the Roman Republic and a number of other institutions that channelled conflicts, from formal means to indict political figures to prosecuting calumnies (2003, I.7–8). But he shares a sense among classical republican thinkers of the limited power of institutions compared to political culture, arguing that ‘free institutions’ are unstable when imposed on a ‘servile’ people, and un-free institutions could not be long-imposed on a ‘free people’ (I.16–18; I.49). Machiavelli warns that the functioning of institutions, including those McCormick highlights, depends on civic norms – and that institutions do not work in the ways intended in the absence of the right political culture. In praising the conflict between the few and the many as critical to securing freedom, Machiavelli argues that ‘when the material is not corrupt, tumults and other troubles do no harm, but, when it is corrupt, good legislation is of no avail … until such time as the material has become good’ (I.17.159). He explains that while Roman institutions and procedures – such as the appointment of consular and other high-level offices or practice of citizen-initiated law – remained constant, as the moral and political culture changed, they no longer functioned as they had in the past or as intended. ‘Institutions and laws made in the early days of a republic when men were good,’ Machiavelli argues, ‘no longer serve their purpose when men have become bad.’ In a state of corruption, those who had more ‘power’ offered themselves for appointment 36 Jessica Kimpell Johnson whereas ‘virtuous citizens’ refrained. Similarly, rather than ‘a tribune or any other citizen’ proposing laws because of a desire ‘to serve the public’ – in time, ‘only the powerful proposed laws, and this for the sake, not of their common liberties, but to augment their own power.’ He observes, ‘This institution was good so long as the citizens were good’ (I.18.161–2). Likewise, the Roman censorship, he notes, functioned only when norms were already ‘healthy’ (I.49.230). Finally, Machiavelli’s example of Cincinnatus demonstrates that the dictatorship in the Roman Republic depended on prevailing Roman attitudes and values (I.4.114; III.25.475– 6). Rousseau likewise explains that in the ‘beginning days of the republic,’ frequent use was made of the dictatorship: ‘there was no fear either that a dictator would abuse his authority or that he would try to hold on to it beyond his term of office.’ It was ‘toward the end of the republic,’ when marked by moral decay that the same institution was occupied by Sulla and Caesar (2011, IV.6.240). The few contemporary accounts that propose institutions to address the problem of freedom and economic inequality and appeal to norms routinely gesture towards the norms needed but fail to explain how they develop. Muldoon’s socialist republicanism proposes a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment, and ‘a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness’ (2019, 49). He recognises that the ‘problem could not be addressed by simply establishing new political and economic institutions,’ and the solution requires ‘a corresponding shift in the political culture of its citizens.’ Yet, no explanation is provided for how to go from a political culture of ‘egoism, individualism and competition’ towards ‘solidarity, public spiritedness and self-discipline,’ or how to get ‘social instincts in the place of egotistical ones.’ He acknowledges that he does not outline a ‘political strategy’ on how this could be achieved (64–65). But the problem is deeper. There is scarce attention in this body of institutionalconstitutional republican thought to transitions, including addressing how such institutions would function in the corrupt conditions they are meant to ameliorate.10 This transition problem glossed over by contemporary thinkers is related precisely to the tight interdependence in the republican tradition between institutions and norms for securing freedom as non-domination.11 Rousseau speaks to the conundrum this creates: to establish the right laws and institutions, ‘the effect would have to become the cause.’ The ‘social spirit’ that is the ‘work of the constitution would have to preside over the writing of the constitution itself. And men would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of the laws’ (2011, II.7.182). Contemporary accounts that do appeal to norms tend to propose laws and institutions that presuppose commitments and behaviours that those laws and institutions are supposed to create. The problem What about Ethos? 37 of this approach is captured powerfully by W.E.B. Du Bois’ sense that a main failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau was that it presupposed the ‘good-will’ it needed to foster (1994, 22). Pettit’s account inherits the interconnection between institutions and norms, as he argues that ‘civic virtue’ and ‘civility’ must support laws and institutions, otherwise they will be ‘dead, mechanical devices.’ He surmises: ‘[I]f the laws of the state are to be truly effective, those laws will have to work in synergy with norms’ (1997, 241). Recently McCormick has attended to Machiavelli’s description of the decay of ‘mores, customs, and morality’ in the decline of the Roman Republic. But McCormick argues that Machiavelli views its collapse as due less to the decay in civic norms and more ‘to deeper structural causes,’ namely ‘socioeconomic causes’ (2018, 46–47; see also, Maher 2016). Competing interpretations of Machiavelli’s position exist, including that norms had to have been corrupted for certain socioeconomic factors to be at play such that elites could act through political means to, as McCormick says, ‘amass ever greater wealth’ (2018, 47). Nevertheless, even accepting McCormick’s account, one cannot avoid the centrality of norms. On this Machiavelli is clear, Pettit says: ‘there is no hope of enforcing a republic of laws in a society that is not already characterized by [good customs].’ Pettit cites Machiavelli’s advice that ‘good morals’ need laws and laws need ‘good morals’ (1997, 242; 2012, 84). For Pettit, freedom requires both the establishment of an institutionalised system of influence and control (‘contestatory’ sites) and the presence of a ‘contestatory citizenry’ (2012, 260–261; 225–226). Such a citizenry is shaped and constrained by norms, which ‘are regularities of behaviour in a society’ and that ‘as a matter of shared awareness most members conform to them, most expect others to approve of conformity or disapprove of non-conformity, and most are reinforced in this pattern of behaviour by that expectation’ (128). In his account, citizens must be ‘willing to live on equal terms with others’ and committed to the value of equal access and influence (280, see also 242). These commitments help constitute the ‘contestatory culture’ that underpins Pettit’s institutions (225). But how do these fundamental commitments on the part of citizens arise? What generates norms of equal access and influence that shape and constrain their political behaviour, including the behaviour of those who could dominate because of their resources? On the one hand, Pettit says that contestatory institutions will themselves generate norms among the citizenry of ‘equally accessible influence’ or ‘equal respect in collective decision-making.’ There are ‘norms we might expect to develop,’ he argues, in a society ‘with a system of popular influence that is designed to be individualised, unconditioned and efficacious’ (emphasis added, 2012, 262, 264). Such norms will ‘emerge and crystalize at each site where contestation is brought or heard, answered or adjudicated,’ with ‘sites of opposition and contestation envisaged in 38 Jessica Kimpell Johnson the system of influence,’ being ‘electoral campaigns and debates, judicial and cognate hearings, parliamentary discussions, exchanges between branches of government, public justifications of policy …’ (261). It is not obvious, however, that Pettit’s contestatory institutions will generate the necessary norms. His account largely tracks liberal constitutionalism (Bellamy 2007; Celikates 2013), and liberal constitutionalist institutions have not generated norms grounded on a widespread commitment to equality of access and influence. On the other hand, Pettit’s institutions require that certain norms and commitments exist prior to the institutions designed to foster them. For the institutions and laws associated with his conception of republican democracy and social justice to be implemented in a non-arbitrary manner, one must assume that the commitment to equal access and influence is already widespread. Citizens must see the implementation of these institutions as consistent with a commitment they already collectively share. In some cases, it seems citizens’ commitment to equal access and influence gives rise to those very institutions: ‘A dispensation for ensuring a suitable degree of popular influence has to assume institutional form at some point,’ and as such institutions ‘emerge and stabilize, they are bound to gain acceptance and to license associated norms of argument’ (2012, 263). Additionally, for Pettit’s contestatory channels to function as intended – to facilitate the equal democratic control necessary for freedom – contestation itself must already be marked by the right kind of character. Citizens must have already internalised a commitment to equal access and influence; for as they engage, they must give reasons that appeal to the shared value of living on equal terms and justify their contestation by reference to the shared value of equal access and influence, expecting that others will do likewise (2012, 262). A ‘contestatory culture’ is marked by ‘a civic vigilance’ that ‘appeals to a public standard like the idea of equal influence’ (225, 227). That ‘contestatory spirit’ he says, ‘counts as a form of civic virtue’ and ‘consists in a willingness to challenge public proposals and policies’ when they do not treat ‘all members as equals’ (228). Such commitment must be assumed by Pettit’s contestatory institutions because mere contestation – in the absence of a shift in norms and attitudes towards equal access and influence – is unlikely to generate those very norms and regularities of behaviour to facilitate the equal control necessary for non-arbitrary law. Despite trying to distance his conception from the classical notion of a virtuous citizen, Pettit’s contestatory citizen must be disposed to appeal to shared values in political deliberation and action and be committed to ‘a regime of equally shared influence’ (262). McCormick argues that Pettit’s institutional design aligns with the Federalists’ (2011), and yet Pettit’s conception of contestation is more demanding than the behaviour assumed in their clash-of-interests model. What about Ethos? 39 This argument – that the functioning of Pettit’s contestatory institutions requires the pre-existence of norms that constrain citizens’ engagement – shares commonalities with Bagg’s criticism of Vergara’s plebeian assemblies. Bagg argues that for plebeian institutions to function as oligarchical constraints, they must presume a shared class-based identity or solidarity that does not yet exist. ‘Class-based solidarity and mass-elite tension must be created rather than presumed’ (2022, 11). McCormick suggests that once in place, class-based institutions would ‘raise the class consciousness of common citizens’ to reinforce those institutions (2011, 16). It is unclear in the absence of existing or explicit class-based identity or conflict, however, what constituency implements class-based constitutional change, or if implemented, that plebeian institutions would function as intended in the absence of the identity and ideology they are meant to eventually create.12 Similarly, Lawrence Hamilton says, ‘given the right climate – the political will, ideology, and institutional configuration,’ political representatives could regulate the economy, exercising ‘control’ over economic policy and its implementation (2014, 190–191). But, how is this ‘right climate’ generated? Those using a republican notion of freedom to restructure political and economic institutions must engage with features of political culture, including the extent to which contrary norms exist encouraging the socioeconomic inequality their proposals are meant to address. For example, as Phil Parvin (2022) argues, the power of lobbyists, who largely reflect elite interests, resides in their ‘capture’ of institutions and ‘background norms and ideas implicit in the political culture’ of today’s democracies. In short, the problem of ensuring non-domination amid inequality is also cultural (e.g., Thatcherism), not merely that ‘existing political institutions have allowed the shift towards oligarchy’ (White 2019, 257). This harks to a long-standing tension in the republican tradition between virtue and commerce (Hont and Ignatieff 1983), understood as representing competing sets of values, attitudes, motivations, and incentives. Our contemporary context is marked by a key tension: republican democracy requires political power be distributed equally, while a capitalist economy distributes property and income unequally. This context is also one of contrasting cultures of capitalism and political equality: an ethos of competition, profit, and maximisation of self-interest versus an ethos of cooperation, public goods, and a shared commitment to equal access and influence. Thinkers cannot simply assume the norms that their proposed institutions need to function or downplay (or ignore) whether such institutions would be insulated from continued or new forms of elite capture. Socioeconomic elites neither act as if they are constrained by a commitment to equal influence nor are penalised for it. There are norms that exist that prevent people from jumping a queue, but no norms of political equality that discouraged a billionaire in 2020 from running for the 40 Jessica Kimpell Johnson U.S. presidency by spending $57 million of his personal money in his campaign’s first weeks and nearly $1 billion in just over three months. Moreover, a basic commitment to ensure equality of access and influence through voting does not exist. U.S. lawmakers from the Republican Party have enacted or proposed hundreds of new election restrictions, ‘potentially amount[ing] to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction’ (Gardner 2021). This decay is not solely attributable to inequality between elites and the many, but to elite infighting and partisanship. Yet, it impacts the viability of non-domination inspired institutional proposals. Elite accountability is a core issue for democratic governance, and proposals offering political and economic institutions aimed at reducing the power differentials associated with inequalities in income and wealth are merited. The argument in this chapter is analogous to Casassas and De Wispelaere’s that ‘an economic floor really only promotes republican freedom in conjunction with a wider set of public policies’ (2016, 289): namely, such policies and institutions really only promote republican freedom and reduce the imbalance in power in conjunction with a wider civic culture that embraces the ideas and values motivating those policies and institutions. Republican thought might be well-served in thinking about norm generation by engaging with political sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology to identify practices conducive for building egalitarian political norms. Moreover, as the republican literature has taken a constitutional-institutional turn, it has focused on the application of non-domination to the nation-state, supra-national institutions and the global order. Work remains to be done below nation-states and supranational institutions, even when these do not fully reflect freedom. As Melvin Rogers (2020) has shown, African American thinkers in the nineteenth century advocated for a civic virtue of racial solidarity in the absence of constitutional protections to secure freedom. They viewed freedom as requiring not only reform of law and institutions but also a transformation in public sentiment and the system of cultural value. To help produce a civic culture involving norms of equal access and influence, engaging with the grounded practices of citizens – which dovetails with Tocqueville’s thought – could be fruitful. Tocqueville argues that institutions have limitations and that freedom depends on the development of certain civic habits and norms: ‘What is more powerless than institutions, when ideas and mores do not nourish them all!’ (2002, 340). In Democracy in America, he explains, ‘One must seek the causes of the mildness of government in circumstances and mores rather than in the laws’ (2000, 242). Alexander Jech argues that ‘the great aim of democratic statecraft’ for Tocqueville was to provide conditions that would allow citizens to practice what Tocqueville calls, ‘the art of being free’ (2017, 10). States undermine the conditions What about Ethos? 41 necessary for developing a ‘democratic character’ when ‘the most important affairs’ do not belong to them, being ‘brought under the authority of some specially appointed group within society’ (18). By contrast, a ‘democratic spirit’ is fostered by entrusting citizens with matters of importance and through combined action, they come to regard themselves as responsible for such action (29). Jech’s account underscores critiques of the participatory freedom deficit in Pettit’s account (Urbinati 2012). Pettit is not sensitive to ‘the importance of the objects lying within the citizen’s domain,’ Jech argues. ‘It is not enough to expand the range of choices available to someone, if the most important matters remain up to someone else, even if these matters are decided upon in a non-domi- nating fashion’ (2017, 32). Republican thought ought to embrace a form of localism that embodies Tocqueville’s ideal of the free citizen – conceiving, initiating and joining in combined action on important rather than residual affairs. The local is not Tocqueville’s quaint New England town or merely a political ward of a larger state. ‘For generations, the locus and nature of power seemed settled, reflecting the vertical lines of political authority,’ as Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak explain, ‘[n]ational and state government sat at the apex, writing laws, promulgating rules, distributing resources, and running the country,’ whereas localities ‘resided at the bottom, acting as administrative arms of higher levels of government more than as agents in charge of their own future.’ This picture no longer exists, they argue, as the ‘location of power is shifting as a result of profound demographic, economic and social forces’ (2017, 1). Localities are ‘generators and recipients of an unprecedented flow of goods, people, capital and ideas across national and continental borders, all facilitated by new ubiquitous technologies’ (40). Localism is not reducible to local government but refers to networks of civic, private, and public actors. The nature of this power is horizontal rather than vertical, appealing to the ways citizens co-govern themselves (224). Community wealth building and ‘new localism’ involve ‘reimagining power’ in these ways; relatedly, Yara Al Salman’s (2022) notion of ‘group ownership,’ developing common property regimes with democratic control, suggests how the organisation of property could allow for combined action while affirming equal access and influence. These approaches offer more frequent and deeper opportunities for participation in problem-solving, decision-making, and coordinated action than ‘vigilant’ moments of contestation. The stakes in dealing with economic, social, and environmental challenges are no less than in national politics, but in localities, the barriers to entry are lower and opportunities for economic inclusion and regular engagement of diverse constituencies are higher. Given this, Vergara’s local plebeian institutions are more compelling for possibly generating norms of equal access and influence among citizens than others that focus on large-scale 42 Jessica Kimpell Johnson institutions. Yet, the opportunities for meaningful participation remain infrequent, narrowly political, and are part of an institutionalised structure of vertical power – the concerns and energies of the many are channelled up to the nation-state to express a popular will, not necessarily into the immediacy of those communities. The sketch of republican localism in this section connects with White’s notion of ‘prefigurative republican politics as political action itself that embodies republican democratic values in its internal practices.’ Yet it would cast the effort involving ‘networked horizontalism’ not just as a means to exert pressure towards institutional and constitutional change but also as a set of practices that are norm generating (2019, 253). The local presents opportunities for practices that could foster commitments to political equality out of the lived experience of citizens. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson’s university and of white supremacist violence in 2017, local actors and community stakeholders are challenging Lost Cause mythology, reclaiming built environments and democratising memory and public spaces. In so doing, they are creating and affirming an inclusive civic identity. In this case, the local is the site of challenge to norms of inequality and the development of a culture of equal access and influence. Institutions are neither the only reason for nor the only solution to discrepancies in political power due to socioeconomic inequality. Proposals for institutional and constitutional reform to remediate the imbalance cannot robustly do so without a political culture that also demands it. Notes 1 Bryan (2021) argues that economic crises endemic to capitalism suggest its incompatibility with non-domination. 2 In the 1990s and early 2000s republican contributions regularly invoked civic virtue, see Viroli (2002), Maynor (2003), Pettit (1997), and Skinner (1993). See Kimpell (2015) for a critique of these approaches to political order, freedom, and virtue. 3 See Balot and Trochimchuk (2012) for a critique of McCormick’s interpretation of the ‘democratic’ nature and sanguine reading of the people in Machiavelli’s thought. 4 See Nadeau (2012), Aitchison (2016), Hoye (2017), Daily (2019), Watkins (2015), Lazar (2019), Celikates (2013), Bellamy (2007, 2019), and Vergara (2020). 5 See Campos Boralevi (2011). 6 Pocock calls this ‘Harrington’s method of mechanizing virtue.’ Harrington draws on Venice for this insight: ‘men [were] fed into processes which made their behavior … distinterested whether they so intended it or not’ (2003, 393–394). 7 Another division between class-based versus non-class-based accounts is possible, in which Harrington would align with Rousseau. Neither McCormick (2018) nor Pettit, however, find Rousseau helpful to their projects. 8 See Freedom House (2021). What about Ethos? 43 9 See also Dahl (1956, 143). 10 An exception is White (2019, 248). 11 See also Kimpell (2009). 12 Maher claims Machiavelli argues that civic virtue emerges from social conflict facilitated by class-based institutions. But the argument rests on an unusual notion of civic virtue, namely, ‘self-interested’ motives can underpin virtuous political activity (2016, 1011), insofar as self- or class-interest is expressed through political procedures rather than patronage systems. It is unclear how the account differs from the Federalists’ clash-of-interests model and relatedly why a ‘class-based form of social discord’ develops virtue, whereas other self-interested or factional discord, likewise expressed through political procedures, would not. References Aitchison, Guy. 2016. “Three Models of Republican Rights, Juridical, Parliamentary and Populist.” Political Studies 65(2): 339–355. Al Salman, Yara. 2022. “Independence in the Commons: How Group Ownership Realises Basic Non-Domination.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Associated Press. 2018. “Wisconsin Republicans Approve Bill to Weaken Incoming Democratic Governor.” The Guardian, December 5, 2018. Bagg, Samuel. 2022. “Do We Need an Anti-oligarchic Constitution?” European Journal of Political Theory 21(2): 399–411. Balot, Ryan, and Stephen Trochimchuk. 2012. “The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli’s ‘Democratic Moment.’” The Review of Politics 74: 559–588. Bellamy, Richard. 2007. Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defense of the Constitutionality of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2019. A Republican Europe of States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryan, Alexander. 2021. “The Dominating Effects of Economic Crisis.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 24(6): 884–908. Bulmer, Elliot, and Stuart White. 2022. “Constitutions Against Oligarchy.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Campos Boralevi, Lea. 2011. “James Harrington’s ‘Machiavellian’ anti- Machiavellism.” History of European Ideas 37(2): 113–119. Casassas, David, and Jurgen De Wispelaere. 2016. “Republicanism and the Political Economy of Democracy.” European Journal of Social Theory 19(2): 283–300. Celikates, Robin. 2013. “Freedom as Non-Arbitrariness or as Democratic Self-Rule? A Critique of Contemporary Republicanism.” In To Be Unfree: Republicanism and Unfreedom in History, Literature, and Philosophy, edited by Christian Dahl and Tue Anderson Nexo, 37–54. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Coffee, Alan M.S.J. 2015. “Two Spheres of Domination: Republican Theory, Social Norms and the Insufficiency of Negative Freedom.” Contemporary Political Theory 14: 45–62. Dahl, Robert. 1956. Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 50 Richard Arneson (Shoikedbrod 2022).1 (7) Wealth can help wealthy individuals who seek to be politically well informed succeed in this aim more than the nonwealthy with similar aims; plausibly, being informed enhances one’s opportunity for political influence (Kogelmann 2022). If morality requires us to reduce or extinguish unequal opportunity for political influence, there are two broad strategies available: insulate and eliminate. The insulation strategy tolerates inequality of wealth but pursues ways of keeping possession of greater than average wealth from conferring above-average opportunity for political influence. A well-known example is campaign finance reform (Ackerman and Ayres 2002). The elimination strategy pursues ways of reducing power concentrations in the private sphere (Bennett, Brouwer, and Claassen 2022). The most obvious way of doing this is to compress the distribution of wealth across individual citizens through redistribution. Insulation and elimination might be pursued in tandem, or only one might be embraced. 2 The Welfarist Egalitarian Perspective on Wealth and Power The welfarist egalitarian holds that justice requires boosting the well-be- ing of all persons who shall ever live, while giving some priority to achieving gains for those who would otherwise be very badly off, or worse off than others. There’s an intramural disagreement here. Prioritarians hold that it is morally more valuable to achieve a welfare gain for a person the worse-off in absolute terms she would otherwise be over the course of her life, regardless of how her condition compares to that of others (Parfit 1995; Adler 2012). Egalitarians by contrast hold that how well off one person is compared to others matters for its own sake, and that justice requires increasing the total of people’s well-being and also equalising people’s well-being (Temkin 1993; Otsuka and Voorhoeve 2018). The intramural dispute between upholding equality or priority is nontrivial (Adler and Holtug 2019), but the two views share enough in common so that grouping them together makes sense for purposes of clarifying welfarist and relational egalitarianism. Welfarist egalitarianism could be upheld as one among several social justice values. Here we interpret this doctrine as the sole fundamental justice value, or at least as ruling the roost, taking priority over any other such values there might be. On such a view, political and social arrangements should be set so that over the long run they bring about the greatest reachable equality/priority-adjusted total sum of individual well-being. The alert reader might well surmise that the implications of welfarist egalitarianism regarding wealth and power will be hopelessly indeterminate in the absence of some understanding of what individual welfare really is. The issue can be restated: what in itself makes a person’s Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 51 life go better for her rather than worse? Or in still other words, what is it a person seeks for its own sake, insofar as she is being rationally prudent? A first response is that it is not really the case that welfarist egalitarianism has no implications for wealth and power public policy without specifying some particular conception of welfare. In some circumstances, on any non-crazy conception of welfare, steps to prevent wealth inequality from having an impact on the political process, whether by an insulation or an elimination strategy, will clearly be required by welfarist egalitarian justice. In other circumstances, the reverse will be clearly be true. What rises and falls with the conception of well-being that completes the welfarist ideal? Perhaps the crucial divide is between the idea that welfare consists in gaining objectively valuable goods and the view that it is subjective, bottoming out in people’s desires. For the purposes of the wealth and power issue, one consideration is that on the former view, beyond some modest point, wealth increases are as likely to distract one from making welfare enhancing choices as boost one’s prospects. With a small income, Arneson drinks beer and lives well, and with a large income, he uses cocaine and lives less well, or comes vastly to overvalue the improvement in his welfare that a fancy yacht will afford him, compared to a canoe. This amplifies the tilt of welfarist egalitarianism towards channelling wealth towards those who have little. And this dampens the likelihood that more political power in the hands of the rich will bring about justice gains. The contrast here is with desire fulfilment views. Abstracting from the contrasts between egalitarianism and prioritarianism and between objective list and desire-fulfilment accounts of welfare, we can set out the basic response of welfarist egalitarianism to the wealth and power issue. This social justice doctrine seeks to reduce the impact of unequal wealth holdings on political decision-making when, only when, and to the degree that doing so is part of the best strategy for maximising equality-weighted welfare summed across persons over the long run. Social justice is here conceived mainly as the standard for assessing institutions and social practices as they combine to affect people’s welfare prospects. The causal linkages that determine what welfarist egalitarianism implies for wealth and power in given circumstances are complex. Reducing the impact of wealth inequality on the political process might enhance its democratic character, and thereby the good functioning of democracy, and thereby generate greater well-being more fairly distributed. But the opposite might be the case in some circumstances: wealth inequality can be a countervailing force against majority tyranny, the ability of elected officials to entrench their power and subvert democracy, or the entrenched power of officials in state bureaucracies to 52 Richard Arneson manipulate the political process against democratically elected officials and the will of the majority (see Kogelmann 2022). And when the impact of wealth on political power enhances democracy, the upshot might be good or bad from the welfarist egalitarian perspective. The will of the democratic majority might be to redistribute advantages from worse-off citizens to a majority coalition of better offs. The will of the democratic majority might be to enact policies that are good for growth and prosperity in the short term but prosperity-dampening in the long run, in a complex world of climate change and conflicts over access to water, food, and habitable shelter (Cowen 2018). Alternatively, the will of the majority might over the long haul tend towards prosperity and sensible policies that tame and complement prosperity, boosting the actual quality of people’s lives and tilting towards improving the lives of those who would otherwise be badly-off and worse-off. While the relationship between welfarist egalitarianism and wealth and power is ultimately contingent, three examples can help to further illustrate the likely tilt of welfare egalitarianism when it comes to wealth and power in contemporary liberal democracies. 1 Welfarist egalitarianism tends to favour egalitarian redistribution of wealth and income and related pro-poor policies, and insofar as the influence of the rich and even more the super-rich on politics puts the brakes on instituting such policies, welfarist egalitarianism stoutly supports squashing the (here) excessive political influence of the rich and super rich. 2 The more it is the case that a stable majority of voters in a democracy is disposed to solidarity with all members of society and is disinclined to see itself as ‘us’ versus a ‘them’ composed of other members of society whose welfare interests somehow count for less, welfarist egalitarianism favours measures that facilitate control of political decision-making by majority rule. 3 Unequal wealth’s impact on the political process may extend beyond affecting the quality of political decision-making and of the laws and other public policies. The outsize influence of the wealthy on the political process can have indirect effects that register in a welfarist egalitarian accounting. These effects could be positive or negative. Beyond some point, the disproportionate control of political decision-making by the wealthy might discourage constructive engagement in the process by non-wealthy citizens, resulting in their missing opportunities to widen their outlook beyond their private concerns. Mill (1861, ch. 3) speculates the structure and operation of the political system likely has effects on citizen virtue. A widespread perception that politics is a rigged game might reach a tipping point past which social trust and cooperation between social groups in everyday interactions diminish. Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 53 3 Relational Egalitarianism and the Anti-Hierarchy Perspective on Wealth and Power This section and the next explore the relational egalitarian ideal and its implications for the problem of wealth and power. This ideal can be variously interpreted, and some advocates see it as one component of a theory of justice, not its entirety (for discussion, see Lippert-Rasmussen 2018). The discussion in this chapter treats relational egalitarianism as a proposed complete theory of justice for assessing institutions and social practices. So viewed, it is a full-fledged rival to welfarist egalitarianism. In this treatment, the ideas of John Rawls loom large. Rawls’s view is that justice requires, as a first priority, achieving political democracy in a form that liberates us from social hierarchy, the avoidance of which is the core of relating as equals. Relational egalitarianism thus yields a basis for a stringent and uncompromising rejection of significant inequality of wealth precisely for its adverse impact on political democracy. The upshot is stiff opposition to the impact of wealth on political decision-making, very different from the highly contingent opposition to inequality of wealth as undermining political democracy that welfarist egalitarianism delivers. In this perspective, relational egalitarianism is stalwart and firm in its stance against social hierarchy, whereas the stance of welfarist egalitarianism is wishy-washy. The issue of wealth and power shines a bright light on the contrast between these two versions of liberal egalitarianism. That’s the big picture. But the details turn out to be important, and they complicate the comparison. I shall try to show that depending on circumstances, the relational egalitarian view will retract its opposition to inequalities of wealth that in some respects undermine the degree to which the democratic ideal can be achieved, and the welfarist will condemn inequalities of wealth that undermine democracy in some circumstances in which the relational egalitarian will not. The two approaches can pull together, but sometimes one will zig where the other zags. So, becoming clear which approach if either should attract our allegiance will be an important factor in arriving at a reasonable view on the wealth and power issue. 3.1 Rawls John Rawls, the most prominent political philosopher of the twentieth century, provides an account of social justice that gives content to the idea of relating as equals (Rawls 1996, 1999a, 2001). On this view, we live together on just terms when we cooperate with others to build and sustain institutions that protect equal basic liberties for all citizens, as a first priority. These protected civil rights establish a status of inviolability for all. We are morally bound to refrain from sacrificing the basic liberties of some, or even of everybody, to gain greater prosperity or greater opportunities for competitive success. None of these liberties 54 Richard Arneson may permissibly be curtailed except to protect the overall set of them for all over the long run. As a second priority, just institutions must be arranged to fulfil a strong equality of opportunity principle: all those with the same ambition and same native talent potential must have the same chances of success in competitions for social positions and roles that confer advantages and authority greater than others enjoy. This principle requires a fair provision of schooling and socialisation to all, entirely offsetting deficits in the ability and willingness of one’s parents or guardians to provide one a fair start in life that develops one’s potential to attain superior positions. Finally, as a third priority, institutions must combine in their effects so that any inequalities in basic resources across persons that obtain make those with least resources as well off as possible in resource holdings. Not all freedoms to do what one wants qualify as basic liberties meriting special priority. Traffic laws massively restrict our freedom to drive vehicles and walk on public roads just as we like. But intuitively, it seems, sensible traffic laws that facilitate everyone’s opportunity to travel wherever they want to go with reasonable speed and safety are not violating basic liberties. Rawls proposes that basic liberties are those that are especially needed for the development and exercise of our capacity to comply with fair terms of cooperation (play fair with others) and our capacity to choose and revise our life aims and pursue them. In other words, the basic liberties are those needed by free persons to develop and exercise their capacities (1) to behave morally and (2) to be rationally prudent by looking out for their own self-chosen interests. Let’s take stock. The Rawlsian account of justice has two striking features that differentiate it sharply from any welfarist egalitarianism. One is that within the constraint of respecting basic liberties, justice requires real freedom for all to pursue self-chosen aims, with fair shares of general-purpose resources, not maximal fair attainment of good quality life, individual fulfilment.2 As Rawls puts it, in the justice as fairness doctrine he advances, the right is prior to the good. The second striking feature comes into view only when we understand the stringency of Rawls’s idea that the equal basic liberties have priority over the other justice values (and that within this lower-ranked set, attaining strong equal opportunity has strict priority over making the worst-off best off). Rawls writes, ‘Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override’ (1999a, 3). And not only welfare. The inviolability to which Rawls here alludes comes to this: the three components of Rawls’s principles are rank-ordered absolutely and exceptionlessly. The first-priority equal basic liberties must be fulfilled to the greatest extent we can attain, and no trade-offs at all are allowed that would countenance slightly lesser basic liberty in exchange for greater fulfilment of the lesser ranked equal opportunity and resource distribution norms. Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 55 Rawls specifies the equal basic liberties by a list: ‘freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, the political liberties and freedom of association, as well as the freedoms specified by the liberty and integrity of the person; and finally, the rights and liberties covered by the rule of law’ (Rawls 1996, 291). The political liberties centrally include the right to a democratic say – the right to an equal vote in majority rule elections that determine directly or indirectly the content of laws and public policies. Moreover, the right to a democratic say is fulfilled only when the right is more than formal: each person with the same political ambition and political talent has the same chance of being politically influential. Rawls supposes the strict priority attached to the equal basic liberties is a nonbinding constraint, in that we will be able to fully protect the equal basic liberties as best we can and still have lots of resources and administrative capacity remaining to boost fulfilment of the lesser ranked principles. But he is assuming that his principles are a realistic utopia: in modern times, they can be implemented, and when implemented, people will become motivated fully to comply with them – enforcement is needed only to assure each person that others will be complying. However, in actual circumstances of the modern world, this ‘realistic utopia’ is a utopia plain and simple. Short of genetic manipulation of human psychology that could not be guaranteed to work out well, human psychological nature brings it about that some of us will seek our own good at the expense of others, or fanatically oppress others in the service of oddball aims or worse. We tend to divide people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and such moral inclinations as we have get harnessed to boosting the advantages of us over them. Rawls supposes the basic liberties can be secured in a fully adequate manner, but just consider police protection to uphold the rule of law. There is no upper limit to what resources we might devote to enforcement: even a police officer at everyone’s elbow always would not suffice, unless the reliable compliance of police themselves with rule of law values could somehow be secured. Greater resources devoted to socialisation might keep paying off just a little in greater compliance, no matter what budget we have now. And given strict priority of basic liberties, the protection of even one individual’s right, and even a small basic liberty right at that, takes strict priority over any gains we might achieve by deploying resources towards fulfilment of equality of opportunity and doing the best we can for the worst off. Even if one were to figure out a way to relax this conclusion a bit, it will remain the case that Rawls’s position comes close to the affirmation that each person’s right to a democratic say (interpreted to require EOPI) must be upheld whatever the consequences. The only clear exception obtains when upholding the set of basic liberties in dire circumstances is best achieved by accepting lesser fulfilment of one or another liberty in the set. Then justice requires a trade-off between basic liberties. As one component of the equal basic liberties, the right to a democratic say 56 Richard Arneson might be subject to that sort of trade-off. The upshot is that there is very little room in the Rawls version of relational/democratic egalitarianism for compromising with the top priority justice requirement, that each member of society has a right to a democratic say. 3.2 Kolodny As stated so far, the Rawlsian view of relational egalitarianism might seem insufficient to capture the social equality ideal of justice as nonhierarchy. We can imagine a society that fully protects the Rawlsian basic liberties yet is heavily larded with social hierarchy in many institutions and practices. Bosses might dominate employees, for example (Dahl 1985; Anderson 2017; Christiano 2022). A natural starting point is the thought that inequalities of power and authority are opposed to relational equality. But as Samuel Scheffler (2003) has commented, inequalities of power and authority are ubiquitous in modern society, and not all seem intuitively, on their face, objectionable. So evidently, we need an account of objectionable hierarchy. Niko Kolodny (2014) provides orientation. He proposes there are three prima facie problematic relations of inequality: (1) some have asymmetric power over others (without being firmly disposed to refrain from exercising it for the reason that doing so would wrong those others), (2) some have greater authority than others, in the sense of being able to issue commands that others obey (without being firmly disposed to refrain from exercising it for the reasons just given), and (3) some are esteemed and revered more than others for having traits that either morally ought to attract no such response or that are the traits that make one a person and should attract the same esteem and reverence for each and every person). A society that achieves the ideal of social equality lacks (1)–(3), except that (1) and (2) can be rendered unobjectionable, or at least very much less objectionable, to the degree that they are (a) continuously avoidable, on the part of those who are getting the short end of the stick, by taking acceptable available exit options, or alternatively (b) are regulated by a democratic government in which all have EOPI. Apart from its capacity to take away the badness of hierarchy it regulates, the democratic state is a crucial component of a society of equals. The state massively coerces its citizens, and in most circumstances, for most people, exit from the state is unfeasible or at least very onerous. So, if a subgroup of citizens dominates the state, there exists a pervasive social hierarchy. (It does not follow that an authoritarian or monarchical state cannot in any circumstances be bringing about the greatest fulfilments of the society of equals ideal that can be achieved. Imagine a ruler with unchecked political power who sets in place rules and policies that bring about a flat non-hierarchical society whose members all relate only as equals – except that all are under the thumb of the unchecked ruler. Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 57 But this is an outlier possibility.) In expectable situations a nonhierarchical government would be a crucial component of the closest approximation to the non-hierarchical society that we can bring about. Kolodny (2014) is discussing the justification of democracy, not presenting a theory of justice. But (here I follow Kolodny forthcoming) I submit that his ideas fit Rawls’ theory of justice hand to glove. In particular, they explain how protecting the equal basic liberties eliminates objectionable social hierarchy in all institutions and social practices. When the Rawlsian equal basic liberties are fully secured, any social hierarchies such as bossworker or doctor-patient are regulated by a democratic government in which all have EOPI. (Even if there is zero regulation in place, this is the level of regulation democratic government enacts.) Kolodny social equality is also consistent with the existence of inequalities of power and authority that are continuously avoidable by those who are getting the short end of the stick. Having genuine exit options takes the sting of evil from inequalities of power and authority. Even if EOPI fails to fully obtain, genuine exit options make such non-political inequalities acceptable. Genuine exit options to a relation of inequality obtain only if one has viable alternatives. The project of sustaining viable alternatives centrally involves having adequate resources: if I can’t meet my basic needs unless I continue to submit to lesser power and authority in employment and marriage, for example, I don’t have the viable option of exiting these relations of inequality. This ‘continuously avoidable’ component of the ideal of social equality puts pressure on Rawls’s strict priority for equal basic liberties over the lesser-ranked norms regulating inequalities in people’s access to social and economic resources. After all, fulfilment of these norms is arguably just the ticket to ensure that relations of inequality are continuously avoidable, thus helping to ensure we are relating as equals, living in a society free from objectionable social hierarchy. So, let’s drop the strict, absolute priority relations among the components of Rawls’s theory of justice. Equal basic liberties are the jewel in the crown of this ideal, but this jewel, though very important, can be sacrificed sometimes to enhance other features of the crown. Henceforth in this essay we shall consider relational/democratic egalitarianism as plausibly exemplified in the amalgam Kolodny- Rawls theory of justice for institutions and social practices. 3.3 The Implications of Relational Egalitarianism for Wealth and Power Inequality of wealth is inherently menacing to the goal of sustaining a society in which people relate as equals. The problem is that inequality of wealth threatens this fundamental condition of EOPI. Either wealth inequality must be squashed or it must somehow be insulated from the political process, so it does not deprive some citizens of EOPI. 58 Richard Arneson This implication of relational egalitarian justice for the wealth and power problem is obvious, and obviously practically important, but should not be overstated. Complete fulfilment of relational egalitarian justice would obtain only if each member of society enjoys a right to a democratic say incorporating EOPI. But other social conditions besides the impact of wealth inequality can and do block the fulfilment of this right to a democratic say. More importantly, it can also happen that inequality of wealth, and wealth’s influence on political decision-making, counteracts these other impediments to guaranteeing for all the right to a democratic say – or more specifically, its EOPI component. In possible and likely circumstances, when we are not able to achieve complete fulfilment of relational egalitarian justice no matter what we do, the closest we can come to achieving this ideal will involve tolerating unequal wealth and wealth’s impact on politics because seeking to reduce them would exacerbate other conditions that are inimical to relational egalitarianism. Here’s one example illustrating this abstract possibility: suppose that attempts to reduce the political influence of the wealthy would strengthen the political power of a majority coalition of voters bent on pursuing their interest, so that this majority becomes rigidly stable over time and turns into majority tyranny (see Section 4 for elaboration). Here’s another example: compression of holdings of wealth beyond some point brings about increased opportunity to influence political outcomes accruing to the political class in society, comprising especially incumbents in office who can use winning office to gain electoral advantages for themselves and the network of advisors and collaborators they cultivate. At an extreme, a group of incumbents and their cronies might succeed in giving such electoral advantages to themselves that even though democratic elections continue to be held, in practice none but the de facto authoritarian rulers have any chance of being re-elected, and re-elected again, forming a dynasty that endures in the long-run (Levitsky and Way 2010). Or by this process even the forms of democracy might eventually be discarded. Another possible scenario involves a party in power that espouses a social justice agenda in which equalising ownership of wealth looms large, firmly opposes the wealthy as enemies of social justice, but ends up tightening its grip on power independently of whether or not the wealth equalisation agenda is stably advanced (Corrales and Penfold 2015). Another scenario involves increased power accruing to an entrenched state bureaucracy. For example, imagine a regime in which the top military leaders have great leverage. Their implicit threat is: ‘don’t mess with us or there will be a coup.’ Yet another example involves not the formation of a permanent stable majority that rules, but shifting majority coalitions, from which some voters regarded as pariahs by the rest are always excluded. The pariahs might be a despised racial or ethnic group or adherents of an unpopular religion. Two Liberal Egalitarian Perspectives on Wealth and Power 59 4 Equal Opportunity for Political Influence The idea of EOPI stands in need of clarification (see also Kogelmann 2022). Picture a democratic society in which a stable majority of voting citizens votes for its own interests and persistently wins. This problem case is often described as the problem of permanent minorities. Suppose wide freedom of speech and freedom of organisation prevails. Each adult citizen has an equal democratic say in the form of a vote that counts the same as anyone else’s in free elections. But the same individuals form a majority coalition, over and over again. The voters who are not part of this coalition never have any chance of being part of a winning coalition that is able to enact laws to its liking. Given this characterisation of the circumstances, does equality of political influence prevail here? Rawls formulates EOPI (which he refers to as the fair value of the political liberties) in ways that seem to identify it with equal chances to exert control over the content of political decisions among those equally ambitious to gain such control and equally politically talented. When the fair value of the political liberties obtains, ‘citizens similarly gifted and motivated have roughly an equal chance of influencing the government’s policy and of attaining positions of authority irrespective of their economic and social class’ (Rawls 1996: 358; also Rawls 2001: 149). But a gifted and motivated agent seeking to have political influence might have far less of it than others over the long run simply because her views are unpopular. Not having the same chance as others of getting one’s way does not intuitively make it the case that one has unequal opportunity for influence. Kolodny accordingly interprets EOPI as requiring that the equally politically talented and ambitious would have had the same chances of being decisive in controlling political decisions if any pattern of political opinion among voters were as likely as any other. Or we might say that EOPI requires that one should have the same chance of making an impact on the choice of laws and policies as anyone else with comparable levels of political ambition and talent, and whose political views are (at the outset) exactly as popular among voters as one’s own. However, so formulated, EOPI could obtain even in the scenario in which a stable majority just votes its interests and exploits a stable convergence of interests to get its way. Consider again a stereotypical example of tyranny of the majority. A stable majority of voters recognises that they have common interests and uses the power of the ballot to promote their interests by winning elections over and over and over. Oddly, Kolodny EOPI might be satisfied in this situation. There are two stylised possibilities. In one, no voters are open to being influenced by others, and everyone has the same opportunity for political influence: zero. In another possible situation, members of the stable majority might be open to influence from others in a degenerate sense: anyone who raises 66 Richard Arneson Goodin, Robert. 2007. “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (1) (Winter): 40–68. Kenworthy, Lane. 2020. Social Democratic Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. Forthcoming. Would Socialism Be Better? (June 2020 draft). Kimpell Johnson, Jessica. 2022. “What About Ethos? Republican Institutions, Oligarchic Democracy and Norms of Political Equality.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Kogelmann, Brian. 2022. “Public Choice and Political Equality.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Kolodny, Niko. 2014. “Rule Over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 42 (4) (Fall): 287–336. ——. Forthcoming. The Pecking Order: Social Hierarchy as a Philosophical Problem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper. 2018. Relational Egalitarianism: Living as Equals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1861. Considerations on Representative Government. Edited by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. https://www.gutenberg. org/ebooks/5669. Otsuka, Michael, and Alexander Voorhoeve. 2018. “Equality versus Priority.” In The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, edited by Serena Olsaretti, 65–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parfit, Derek. 1995. Equality or Priority? The Lindley Lecture. Lawrence: University of Kansas. Parvin, Phil. 2022. “Hidden in Plain Sight: How Lobby Organisations Undermine Democracy.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia Press. ——. 1999a. A Theory of Justice, Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. 1999b. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheffler, Samuel. 2003. “What Is Egalitarianism?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31(1): 5–39. Shoikedbrod, Igor. 2022. “Private Wealth and Political Domination: A Marxian Approach.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Temkin, Larry. 1993. Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldron, Jeremy. 2006. “The Core of the Case against Judicial Review.” Yale Law Journal 115 (6) (April), 1346–1406. Wiedenbrüg, Anahí, and Patricio López Turconi. 2022. “The Power of Private Creditors and the Need for Reform of the International Financial Architecture.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003173632-5 Public choice theory is a branch of economics that analyses political institutions using the tools and methods of economics. Before the public choice revolution (starting in the late 1950s with Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy and Duncan Black’s The Theory of Committees and Elections), most economists focused their attention on markets while largely ignoring politics. Much economic analysis consisted of identifying market failures – cases where markets fail to deliver optimal distributions of goods – and then proposing ways governments could remedy these failures. There was never much thought as to whether governments could or would follow the economist’s advice. Public choice theory changed the conversation. By carefully applying the economic way of thinking to political institutions, public choice theorists recognised that just as markets fail, so too do governments. Governments might improve the functioning of markets, but they might also make them worse. As such, it is no surprise that libertarians and classical liberals have embraced public choice economics as an ineliminable tool in the analysis of public policy and politics more generally (Boettke and Piano 2019). This chapter is about what public choice theory can teach us about political inequality.1 Given that libertarians and classical liberals tend to embrace public choice economics, one might think that public choice has little to say about political inequality, a topic that is typically of concern to those on the political left. This is false. Fundamental to public choice analysis is the idea of rent seeking. While public choice theorists are often concerned about the negative economic consequences of rent seeking, rent seeking is also a major driver of political inequality as well, or at least so shall I argue.2 This relationship between rent seeking and political inequality is important, as it offers a fresh perspective on political inequality, one that political philosophers can learn much from. In particular, public choice theory teaches us that rent seeking is sometimes driven by inequalities in wealth, but is at other times driven by other, more subtle factors. Thus, even if we lived in a society where wealth was distributed in a perfectly Public Choice and Political Equality Brian Kogelmann 4 68 Brian Kogelmann equal manner, political inequality would still be a significant problem. Beyond teaching us about some of the root causes of political inequality, public choice theorists have also offered novel proposals for how to remedy this problem. Thus, political philosophers can gain new insights about how to fight a pervasive problem confronting the body politic. One important point to flag before beginning. This paper engages with much work from the social sciences. Most of the work discussed analyses the political institutions of the United States of America. There are two reasons for this. First, public choice theory was initially developed in the United States, so it is unsurprising that much of the analysis is parochial in this way. Second, I am a citizen of the United States, so it is the country I know best. Though the US-centric focus of this paper is, in some sense, limiting, public choice theory itself is by no means a parochial discipline. In fact, a core insight of public choice theory is that it is institutions, not people, that drive outcomes. Examining the diversity of political institutions that scatter the globe is essential, from a public choice perspective, to better understand how government can be improved so we can all live better together. 1 On Political Equality The purpose of this chapter is to examine what public choice theory can teach us about some of the sources of and remedies for political inequality. But before beginning this investigation, we need an understanding of what political equality is. Many philosophers embrace political equality as a governing value that democratic societies ought to realise (e.g., Dahl 1989; Brighouse 1996; Christiano 1996; Knight and Johnson 1997; Dworkin 2000; Cohen 2001). Political equality is typically defined as an equal capacity or ability among citizens to influence political decisions. Political inequality, then, occurs when some have a greater capacity to influence political decisions than others. This is not a good way of understanding what political equality is. The reason why is that not every instance of an unequal capacity to influence political decisions is normatively problematic, in the sense that not every instance of unequal capacity to influence political decisions runs afoul of our intuitions (Dworkin 2000, 364). For instance, those who have good arguments for their positions have a greater capacity to influence political decisions than those who have poor arguments; not only does this not seem problematic, but it also seems to be justified. Expert pundits, journalist, and political analysts have a greater capacity to influence political decisions than the average citizen who isn’t on CNN every night. Once again, this is not terribly concerning. For this reason, I do not think it is helpful to define political equality in terms of an equal capacity to influence political decisions. Very often, there will be an unequal capacity to influence political decisions. Public Choice and Political Equality 69 Sometimes this is regrettable, other times it is desirable. Instead of focusing on an equal capacity to influence political decisions, we should define political equality in terms of the kinds of influence on political decisions that are normatively acceptable (in that they do not run afoul of our intuitions) and the kinds of influence that are normatively problematic (in that they do run afoul of our intuitions). Political equality is achieved when all sources of normatively problematic influence are absent from the democratic process. Political equality is consistent with an unequal capacity to influence political decisions so long as all this unequal influence is of the acceptable kind. This is the approach David Estlund takes when he defines political equality. He defines political equality as ‘the insulation of political influence from differential wealth or social rank’ (Estlund 2000, 133). Here, Estlund highlights two sorts of unacceptable political influence. First, there is something wrong with Althea having more influence than Bertha if this unequal influence is grounded in Althea’s superior wealth. Second, there is something wrong with Althea having more influence than Bertha if this unequal influence is grounded in Althea’s superior social status. There is nothing wrong, according to Estlund’s definition of political equality, with an unequal capacity to influence political decisions so long as the sources of this unequal influence are not differential wealth or differential social rank. Estlund’s definition is a good start, but it does not go far enough. For there are other examples of unequal political influence that do not result from differential wealth or social rank, that also strike us as normatively suspect. Consider an example: Cassidy and Dupree share the same representative in the legislature. Cassidy and Dupree have similar jobs, make a similar income, and occupy the same social rank in their society. Cassidy is childless and has a lot of time on her hands; she spends most of that time consuming political news. Dupree has two children and is a single parent; as such, he has no time to keep up with current events, so he is deeply uninformed about politics. Due to this information asymmetry, the representative is more likely to respond to Cassidy’s interests than Dupree’s. For, if the representative votes against Cassidy’s interests, then Cassidy will know this and sanction her at the ballot box. But if the representative votes against Dupree’s interests, then Dupree will likely never know and is thus unlikely to ever hold the representative accountable. This will strike many as an unacceptable case of unequal political influence, but one that stems from differences in political knowledge, not differences in wealth or social rank. Of course, many times differences in political knowledge will arise from differences in wealth or social rank. Someone who works one job is better able to inform herself about politics than someone who must work two. Yet, it would be a mistake to claim that all instances of differential political knowledge are the result of differential wealth or social 70 Brian Kogelmann rank. As the case above illustrates, it is possible for there to be differences in political knowledge that result in unequal influence that are not grounded in differential wealth or social rank. As another example, someone with a college degree might be better able to inform themselves about politics than someone who went to trade school, but the college-educated is not necessarily wealthier or of a higher social status than the tradesman (many of whom make considerable salaries and occupy important positions in their communities). If this differential knowledge translates into unequal influence, then once again we have what seems like a problematic case of unequal influence, but one that is not grounded in differential wealth or social rank. With these brief remarks, let me now propose a definition of political equality (building on Estlund’s) that accounts for the cases I have just run through. Political equality is achieved when political decisions are insulated from influence grounded in (i) differential wealth, (ii) differential social rank, and (iii) differential political knowledge.3 Adding clause (iii) to Estlund’s definition allows us to account for the sorts of cases I just ran through. We now have a working definition of political equality. Our guiding questions now are: What does public choice theory teach us about the causes of political inequality? And, moreover, what does public choice theory teach us about how to eliminate political inequality? Before answering these questions, we need an overview of the public choice approach to economic inquiry, which I offer in the next section. 2 The Public Choice Paradigm Public choice theory is most simply defined as application of the tools and methods of economics to the study of politics (Buchanan and Tullock 2004, xxi). By ‘tools and methods of economics’ I mean the rational choice paradigm that has embedded itself into the very heart of the economics discipline. Hence, public choice theory applies rational choice theory to the study of politics. This is typically done through the use of formal models. The pioneers of the field were John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Duncan Black, Kenneth J. Arrow, Anthony Downs, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, William H. Riker, and Mancur Olson (Amadae 2003, 11).4 Though public choice theory relies heavily on formal models, there is also much work in the field that seeks to verify these models empirically (e.g., Mueller 2003, Part IV). Public choice theory applies the rational choice paradigm to the study of politics. At its base, rational choice theory says that all persons have preferences, and, when confronted with options, choose the option most Public Choice and Political Equality 71 likely to satisfy their preferences. When formalised in a model, there are further refinements made. For instance, rational persons all have preferences possessing a certain structure. Preferences are reflexive (option a is always at least as good as itself), complete (either a is at least as good as b or b is at least as good as a), and transitive (if a is at least as good as b and b at least as good as c, then a is at least as good as c). Moreover, rational persons are presumed to choose not just an option that satisfies their goals, but rather the option that best satisfies their goals. There is nothing about the rational choice paradigm as such that says persons are selfish. They just choose their most choice-worthy option, given their preferences. If one has preferences to help the poor, then choosing one’s most choice-worthy option will often involve behaviour many deem altruistic. In order to generate substantive predictions, though, rational choice theorists must give content to persons’ preferences. And when they model political actors – such as voters, politicians, bureaucrats – public choice theorists typically assume what many would deem (but are not necessarily) selfish preferences. For instance, Buchanan and Tullock write: ‘we must assume that individuals will, on average, choose “more” rather than “less” when confronted with the opportunity for choice in a political process, with “more” and “less” being defined in terms of measurable economic position’ (Buchanan and Tullock 2004, 28). In other words, political actors seek wealth.5 This has led to the characterisation that public choice theory is the study of ‘politics without romance’ (Buchanan 1999b). Overall, it has led to quite a pessimistic picture of government and politics. As mentioned in the introduction, before the public choice revolution, economists mostly focused on market failures, but after the revolution they began focusing on government failures. As Buchanan writes in a foundational paper, the goal of public choice is to show that ‘any attempt to replace or to modify an existing market situation, admitted to be characterised by serious externalities, will produce solutions that embody externalities which are different, but precisely analogous, to those previously existing’ (Buchanan 1999a: 63). To put it another way, remedying market failures through the state will often result in government failures, which in some (but not all) cases may be more serious than the market failures they were meant to resolve, in that the externality produced by government failure is larger than the one produced by the initial market failure. Public choice theory has become a wide-ranging field of scholarly inquiry, examining electoral systems, voting rules, bureaucratic agencies and even non-democratic forms of government. One key aspect of public choice theory is the study of rent seeking (e.g., Tollison 1982; Tullock 2005; Lindsey and Teles 2019). Having nothing to do with landlords, the term ‘rent’ means payment to an owner of a resource over and above that which the resource could command in any alternative use. Those who seek rents are thus seeking extranormal returns on their productive resources. 72 Brian Kogelmann Rent seeking is ubiquitous and all around us. Indeed, firms trying to maximise profits are, technically, seeking rents (Buchanan 1999c, 103). Though rent-seeking behaviour is ubiquitous, public choice theorists note that it is especially pernicious in politics. This is so for a few reasons. First, it destroys resources (Tullock 2005, 103–121). To acquire rents from the government, one must typically lobby, which is expensive. Many persons or firms will lobby for rents (for instance, an exclusive government contract), but only one firm will get it. Everyone who does not acquire the rents has destroyed wealth for no gain. Indeed, rent seeking in politics is akin to an auction where all persons lose their bids regardless of whether their bid is the highest and they win the prize. In these cases, it is clear that the total sum of the bids will often be greater than the prize everyone was initially bidding for. Beyond this, rent seeking is usually done to create special privileges in the marketplace, which leads to economic inefficiency. Markets work best when firms are constantly challenged by competitors, but firms often seek rents by asking the government to regulate away their competition. Those who braid hair for a living like licensing requirements; it means less competition for them. But, all things equal, the price of hair-braiding services would be reduced and the quality of the service higher if there was open market access and hence greater competition. Olson (1982) saw the economic inefficiency that follows from rent seeking as such a huge problem that he deemed it the major cause of the ‘decline’ of prosperous nations such as Great Britain and the United States. Rent seeking is pervasive in democratic societies and causes significant economic harm. But is it a threat to political equality? That depends on the characteristics of those who successfully capture rents. If those who capture rents are the most meritorious, or have the most compelling arguments, then rent seeking is not a threat to political equality. Yet, if successful rent seekers are those with (i) differential wealth, (ii) differential social rank, or (iii) differential political knowledge, then rent seeking is a threat to political equality. In the next section I show that (i) and (iii) largely determine who is able to effectively seek rents.6 Hence, rent seeking is a significant threat to political equality. To do this, I outline two central (but not the only) causes of rent seeking highlighted by public choice economists: campaign contributions and interest group monitoring. 3 Sources of Political Inequality 3.1 Campaign Contributions and Legislative Favours At the heart of public choice economics is the idea that politics is just another way for persons to engage in exchange with one another (Buchanan 1999b, 50). How does exchange occur in politics? One way Public Choice and Political Equality 73 is logrolling in a legislature. Politician A might have a bill she likes, which politician B dislikes. Politician B has her own favoured bill, but politician A is not a fan. Here, politician A can vote for B’s favoured bill and B can vote for A’s favoured bill so both get something they want.7 Logrolling is not the only example of exchange in politics. Exchange can also occur between citizens and politicians. This is largely accomplished through campaign contributions (Munger and Denzau 1986; Hinich and Munger 1989; Buchanan and Tullock 2004, 273; Tullock 2005, 36; Holcombe 2018, ch. 4). More specifically, citizens donating to political campaigns is ‘a straightforward quid pro quo of money for services: campaign contributions resemble bribes, although provision of services may be perfectly legal’ (Morton and Cameron 1992, 88). The idea here is simple. Individuals and firms want rents from the government: tax breaks, favourable regulations, government contracts, and so on. To get these, they make donations to politicians’ election or reelection campaigns. In return for the donation, politicians legislate favourably for their patrons. Some are sceptical that campaign contributions really do effectively buy political influence. In particular, some empirical work suggests that there is little connection between campaign contributions and legislative outcomes (e.g., Ansolabehere et al. 2003; Dawood 2015, 340–342). Other empirical work points in the opposite direction (e.g., Stratmann 2005; Gilens 2012, 239; Gilens 2021). However, it is important to note how limited these studies are. They often look at whether donations effect how politicians vote on final bills. Yet, there are subtler ways influence can manifest that are not easily measured. Instead of purchasing votes on final bills, campaign contributions may purchase goods like: making sure that a bill one supports is prioritised on the agenda; making sure that a bill one opposes never reaches the floor for a vote; inserting an amendment or earmark; making sure that a bill one opposes but will inevitably be passed is a bit more palatable and so on. Assuming that campaign contributions do buy influence, we must now ask: is this a case of normatively problematic political inequality? Recall, the ideal of political equality demands that political influence be insulated from (i) differential wealth, (ii) differential social rank, and (iii) differential political knowledge. The ability to buy political influence through campaign contributions is clearly only available to the wealthy. Indeed, it should be no surprise that donations to political campaigns are highly stratified by income bracket (Schlozman et al. 2018, 212–214). So, rent seeking via campaign contributions violates political equality. It is a way of exerting unequal political influence that is fundamentally grounded in differential wealth, which is prohibited by our definition of political equality. 74 Brian Kogelmann 3.2 Asymmetric Information and Interest Groups Contributing to political campaigns is not the only way one can seek rents. Also relevant are interest groups. Although interest groups sometimes make contributions to political candidates, that is not the main way they exert influence. Rather, they engage in pressure campaigns in hopes of influencing legislators to vote a certain way. For instance, if a corn subsidy bill is up for vote, members of an interest group dedicated to corn farmers will call and email their legislators in hopes of pressuring them to support the bill, so they can obtain the subsidy. This is sometimes called grassroots lobbying (Schlozman et al. 2012, 404; Schlozman et al. 2018, 171–172).8 This method of rent seeking is not obviously at odds with the ideal of political equality, so I will walk through it a bit slower. First, let us look at how interest groups exert influence on politicians through pressure campaigns. Susanne Lohmann (1998) builds an instructive model. To begin, we know that it is costly to acquire political information and, moreover, persons often have an incentive to not acquire political information and thus be rationally ignorant (Downs 1957). Interest groups acquire costly political information and then disperse this information for their members to consume. Since members of the interest group are more informed than the public at large on a specific legislative issue, representatives have an incentive to vote on that issue according to the wishes of the interest group, even if doing so is at the expense of the larger public. In short: ‘Because special interests are better able to monitor the quality of their political representation, incumbents have electoral incentives to bias policy towards special interests’ (Lohmann 1998, 812). As an example of this, an interest group for corn farmers acquires information about legislation pertaining to corn subsidies, and then provides this information to its members. On legislative issues that involve corn subsidies specifically, the corn farmers will be far better informed compared to members of the general public. When it comes time to vote for corn subsidies, it is no surprise that legislators do the bidding of corn farmers, even when subsidies harm the majority. If the legislator votes against the corn farmers, they are informed enough to hold her accountable at the ballot box; if the legislator votes against the general public, they will probably never know. This is a violation of political equality. The corn farmers (who are in the minority) exert more influence on this particular issue than the general public (who are in the majority), and this is because the corn farmers are better informed (through their interest group) than the general public. Hence, clause (iii) of our definition of political equality is violated. This case could be avoided if the general public also had their own interest group that informed them about the relevant legislation. Then, both sides would be equally informed, so there would be no knowledge Public Choice and Political Equality 75 differential. Politics does not work out this way in practice, though, and it is worth spending some time to understand why. Relevant here is Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action (1971). Olson begins by noting that it is a mystery why any interest groups form in the first place. Interest groups attain collective benefits for members of the relevant group. Returning to our example, an interest group for corn farmers seeks and acquires rents for all corn farmers. Since all corn farmers benefit from the interest group’s activity, the rational action for any individual corn farmer is not join the group, but reap the benefits anyways. Given this logic, it is surprising there are any interest groups at all. And yet, there are interest groups, so something must explain this. Olson argues that some groups form because they are better able to resolve this collective action problem when compared to others. There are several factors that determine whether a group of individuals will be able to successfully resolve this collective action problem. If a group is small, monitoring other members may be possible (Olson 1971, 43), individuals may feel a stronger sense of duty to contribute (Hardin 1982, 40) and the transaction as well as monetary costs associated with group formation will be lower (Olson 1971, 46). The key factor, though, is whether interest groups are able to offer selective benefits for their members (Olson 1971, 133). An interest group for corn farmers can offer selective benefits that, plausibly, all corn farmers want: crop insurance, reduced prices on combine equipment, special weather advisories, discounts at Cabela’s and more. To attain these selective benefits, corn farmers must join the group. It is unlikely that an interest group opposed to corn subsidies will be able to do this. The group of persons opposed to corn subsidies is large and heterogeneous. There is not one package of selective benefits all such persons want. The point here is that there are structural reasons why only some interest groups are capable of successfully forming. As such, we will never live in a world where all interests have a corresponding interest group that can monitor the legislative process for them and pass this information along to its members. Some groups – those who can offer selective benefits to their members – will always be more informed on certain issues than others, and thereby exert more influence. This, though, is a violation of political equality. Clause (iii) of our definition of political equality says that unequal influence may not stem from differential political knowledge, but interest groups allow for precisely that. 4 Eliminating Political Inequality Rent seeking causes great economic harm. The last section showed that it is also a threat to political equality. Those who are able to successfully seek and acquire rents are the wealthy, and those who are more informed due to their capacity to form interest groups. This is fundamentally at 82 Brian Kogelmann 12 I propose this in Kogelmann (2021b: ch. 2). For a more general discussion of secrecy and transparency as applied to questions in political philosophy, see Kogelmann (2021a). 13 There are several objections to this proposal: given membership in political parties, won’t we be able to guess how representatives voted? Won’t representatives declare how they voted? What about accountability? I address these objections in Kogelmann (2021b: ch. 2). 14 A similar position is also taken by public choice economist Holcombe (2018). References Amadae, S.M. 2003. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ansolabehere, Stephen, John M. Figueiredo, and James M. Snyder. 2003. “Why Is There so Little Money in U.S. Politics?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (1): 105–130. Boettke, Peter J. and Ennio E. Piano. 2019. “Public Choice and Libertarianism.” In Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, Vol. 1, edited by Roger D. Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt, 814–830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brennan, Geoffrey and James M. Buchanan. 2000. The Reason of Rules. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Brighouse, Harry. 1996. “Egalitarianism and Equal Availability of Political Influence.” Journal of Political Philosophy 4 (2): 118–141. Buchanan, James M. 1999a. “Politics, Policy, and the Pigovian Margins.” In The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 1, 60–74. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. ——. 1999b. “Politics without Romance: A Sketch of Positive Public Choice Theory and Its Normative Implications.” In The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 1, 45–59. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. ——. 1999c. “Rent Seeking and Profit Seeking.” In The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 1, 103–115. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. ——. 1999d. “The Domain of Constitutional Economics.” In The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 1, 377–395. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Buchanan, James M. and Roger D. Congleton. 2003. Politics by Principle, Not by Interest. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Buchanan, James M. and Gordon Tullock. 2004. The Calculus of Consent. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Bulmer, Elliot, and Stuart White. 2022. “Constitutions Against Oligarchy.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Christiano, Thomas. 1996. The Rule of the Many. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Cohen, Joshua. 2001. “Money, Politics, and Political Equality.” In Fact and Value, edited by Alex Byrne, Robert Stalnaker, and Ralph Wedgwood, 47–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dawood, Yasmin. 2015. “Campaign Finance and American Democracy.” Annual Review of Political Science 18: 329–348. Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen, 274–294. London: Routledge. Public Choice and Political Equality 83 Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Estlund, David. 2000. “Political Quality.” Social Philosophy & Policy 17 (1): 127–160. Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——. 2021. “Campaign Finance Regulations and Public Policy.” American Political Science Review 115 (3): 1074–1081. Hall, Richard L. and Alan V. Deardorff. 2006. “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy.” American Political Science Review 100 (1): 69–84. Hardin, Russell. 1982. Collective Action. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hinich, Melvin J. and Michael C. Munger. 1989. “Political Investment, Voter Perceptions, and Candidate Strategy: An Equilibrium Spatial Analysis.” In Models of Strategic Choice in Politics, edited by Peter C. Ordeshook, 49–68. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Holcombe, Randall G. 2018. Political Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lohmann, Susanne. 1998. “An Information Rationale for the Power of Special Interests.” American Political Science Review 92 (4): 809–827. Kimpell Johnson, Jessica. 2022. “What About Ethos? Constitutions, Oligarchic Democracy and Norms of Political Equality.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Knight, Jack and James Johnson. 1997. “What Sort of Political Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?” In Deliberative Democracy, edited by James Bohman and William Rehg, 279–320. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kogelmann, Brian. 2015. “Modeling the Individual for Constitutional Choice.” Constitutional Political Economy 26: 455–474. ——. 2018a. “Buchanan and Arrow on Democracy, Impossibility, and Market.” In Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of James M. Buchanan, edited by Paul Aligica, Christopher J. Coyne, and Stefanie Haeffele, 123–141. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ——. 2018b. “Rawls, Buchanan, and the Search for a Better Social Contract.” In Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of James M. Buchanan, edited by Paul Aligica, Christopher J. Coyne, and Stefanie Haeffele, 17–38. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ——. 2021a. “Secrecy and Transparency in Political Philosophy.” Philosophy Compass 16: e12733. ——. 2021b. Secret Government: The Pathologies of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindsey, Brink and Steven M. Teles. 2019. The Captured Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lockard, Alan A. 2003. “Decision by Sortition: a Means to Reduce Rent-Seeking.” Public Choice 116 (3/4): 435–451. Morton, Rebecca and Charles Cameron. 1992. “Elections and the Theory of Campaign Contributions.” Economics and Politics 4 (1): 79–108. Rutger Claassen, 25–46. London: Routledge. 84 Brian Kogelmann Mueller, Dennis C. 2003. Public Choice III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munger, Michael C., and Arthur T. Denzau. 1986. “Legislators and Interest Groups: How Unorganized Interests Get Represented.” American Political Science Review 80 (1): 89–106. Munger, Michael C., and Mario Villarreal-Diaz. 2019. “The Road to Crony Capitalism.” The Independent Review 23 (3): 331–334. North, Douglass C. 1993. “Institutions and Credible Commitment.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 149 (1): 11–23. Olson, Mancur. 1971. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Parvin, Phil. 2022. “Hidden in Plain Sight: How Lobby Organizations Undermine Democracy.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Routledge. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1987. On the Social Contract. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Henry E. Brady, and Sidney Verba. 2018. Unequal and Unrepresented. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 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London: DOI: 10.4324/9781003173632-6 This chapter elaborates a Marxian approach to grappling with the contradictory relationship between private wealth and political domination in contemporary capitalist societies. It begins by offering a theoretical diagnosis of the normative issues generated by the relationship between private wealth (a manifestation of private power) and political domination, and concludes by briefly outlining a range of preliminary proposals for democratically transforming this relationship. The chapter opens by tracing Karl Marx’s earliest engagement with issues of private wealth and political domination back to his early journalistic reflections concerning ‘The Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.’ In these journalistic reflections, Marx describes how a customary practice of gathering fallen forest wood was criminalised by the Prussian state as an instance of property theft. Marx demonstrates the extent to which wealthy landowners were able to bend the scales of justice to their pecuniary interests by transforming the state into the servant of private power. The consequence of such a transformation, according to Marx, is not only the perversion of state functions but the corruption of the law over and against the interests of the poor. I argue that Marx’s formative essay sets the context for his subsequent writings on the tension between civil society and the state, which later paved the way for his analysis of capitalist accumulation, concentration, and domination. The second section of the chapter considers the contradictions of capital and its resultant forms of domination by drawing on Marx’s discussion of the contradiction between a socialised process of production and a distinctly private form of appropriation. This section seeks to draw out the political implications of Marx’s insights, focusing on the ways in which capital, qua private wealth and power, limits the scope for democratic self-determination. The section also elaborates a specifically Marxian account of political domination in contrast to liberal egalitarian and neo-republican versions, and briefly looks at how Marx’s insights have been reconstructed by a range of contemporary Marxian commentators. Private Wealth and Political Domination A Marxian Approach Igor Shoikhedbrod 5 86 Igor Shoikhedbrod The final section offers a range of preliminary proposals for democratically transforming the relationship between private wealth and political domination in the context of contemporary financialised capitalism. These proposals include worker-owned and managed cooperatives and democratic control over investment. Far from being obsolete, the Marxian approach is shown to offer valuable lessons for liberal democratic societies that continue to struggle with the normative issues generated by private wealth and political domination. 1 Degrading the State in the Service of Private Power Marx’s early journalistic writings for the Rheinische Zeitung have been mostly neglected if not altogether dismissed as the idealistic expressions of a youthful liberal humanist (for recent exceptions, see Bensaïd 2021; Shoikhedbrod 2019; Carver 2018, 269). The rationale for this interpretation can be explained by the canonisation of various Marxist texts at the expense of others, even if some of these texts by Marx and Engels (e.g., The German Ideology) were never published as complete monographs, let alone intended as exhaustive treatments by their authors (Carver 2010). While Marx’s journalistic writings during this period (1842–1844) are among his earliest reflections on the state, politics and law, they proved integral to the development of his mature work, including his life work, Capital. It is no accident that Marx refers in passing to these writings in the 1859 Preface to his A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, noting the extent to which these writings betrayed his ‘embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests’ (Marx [1859] 1978d, 3). We also learn that he intended to have these early articles republished in 1851, at the peak of reactionary restoration across Europe (Carver 2018, 269; Leopold 2007, 2). The discussion of Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung articles that follows will be confined to his reflections on the ‘Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood,’ where one can observe Marx’s earliest and arguably most piercing analysis of the relationship between private wealth and political domination. Recent years have seen a considerable uptake in scholarship on private power and domination among liberal egalitarian theorists, whether conceived through the lens of ‘private government’ or through the more general framework of ‘privatisation.’1 Such scholarship represents an important step for normative political theory, since it goes some way in problematising the rigid bifurcation of public and private power that is still central to many versions of liberal thought, including liberal egalitarianism. While such scholarly interventions have made important theoretical headways, they nevertheless sidestep important contradictions that Marx and subsequent Marxian thinkers have identified vis-à-vis private wealth and political domination, which will be explored in more detail in the sections that follow. Private Wealth and Political Domination 87 Marx’s earliest discussion of private wealth and political domination is developed in his reflections concerning the ‘Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood.’ While the debates of the Rhineland Provincial Assembly of Estates retained their notorious secrecy, Marx’s journalism provided a rare occasion to critically dissect the proposed wood theft law. At the time, Rhenish legislators were considering the adoption of a law that would criminalise the collection of fallen forest wood. Historically, Rhenish peasants were allowed to collect fallen wood and other ‘indeterminate’ forms of property such as alms. The imposition of the Napoleonic Code in the Rhineland region after Prussia’s defeat brought forth a series of modern reforms, in public law as well as in private law. Changes in the domain of private law were accompanied by the expansion of private property rights, specifically in connection with the ownership of forest land. Marx’s article examines the political ramifications of this important change. He writes: [Legal] understanding therefore abolished the hybrid, indeterminate forms of property by applying to them existing categories of abstract civil law, the model for which was available in Roman law. The legislative mind considered it was the more justified in abolishing the obligations of this indeterminate property towards the class of the very poor, because it also abolished the state of privileges of property. It forgot, however, that even from the standpoint of civil law a twofold private right was present here: a private right of the owner and a private right of the non-owner. (Marx [1842] 1971, 233)2 On the basis of these remarks, one can discern a peculiar change that had begun to take place in the domain of property law. More specifically, Marx observes that far from abolishing the privileges associated with private property, private property was largely depoliticised and given a distinctly private or civil character (Marx [1842] 1971, 233). In other words, private property took the juridical form of a purely private power, but the precondition for the exercise of this private power (i.e., the legally recognised ownership of private wealth) became a basis for political domination. This critical insight is made more forcefully by Marx in On the Jewish Question: The political suppression of private property not only does not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence. The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty. […] But the state 88 Igor Shoikhedbrod none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature. (Marx [1844] 1978e, 33) While the new statutory law recognised landlords as the rightful owners of forest land, it did not recognise the customary use rights of peasants to gather fallen wood. Similarly, though there remained an essential difference between ripping branches from a living tree and collecting fallen wood, both came to be regarded as theft and were equally punishable by law (Marx [1842] 1971, 227). In Marx’s view, such a transformation in the law had normatively pernicious effects for at least two reasons. First, the new law violated an older customary right by criminalising what amounted to a right of necessity. Second, and more perversely, the wood theft law confirmed the extent to which the political state was being transformed into the servant of the forest owners, while its legislation became increasingly servile to the interests of their private powers. In summary, the wood theft law represented the degradation of the state and the corruption of its laws. While the law punished the customary rights of the poor, it bent the scales of justice in favour of the pecuniary interests of the forest owners, who would profit directly from the mandatory labour and fines that could then be exacted from poor peasants. However, when a law-governed state (Rechtsstaat) becomes subservient to the narrow interests of private power, its essence and claims to universality (public interest) are invalidated, leading Marx to insist: If the state, even in a single respect, stoops so low as to act in the manner of private property instead of in its own way, the immediate consequence is that it has to adapt itself in the form of its means to the narrow limits of private property. […] As a result of this, apart from the complete degradation of the state, we have the reverse effect that the most irrational and illegal means are put into operation against the accused [i.e., the poor]; for supreme concern for the interests of limited private property necessarily turns into unlimited lack of concern for the interests of the accused. (Marx [1842] 1971, 241) In response to the above predicament, Marx proposes a customary right for the poor of all countries in opposition to the traditional privileges of the landlords, as well as the newfound proprietary privileges of the forest owners (Marx [1842] 1971, 230). As a vociferous critic of the Historical School of Law in Germany,3 Marx was perfectly aware that appeals to custom often masked entrenched hierarchies and betrayed a broader desire by the wealthy to re-establish the status quo by other means (Bensaïd 2021, 19). Consequently, Marx appeals in the end to the Private Wealth and Political Domination 89 normative standards of ‘rational right,’ which should have demonstrated to the alleged criminal (the wood pilferer) that the law is just and immortal, whereas the proposed wood theft law taught the very opposite. At its core, Marx’s discussion of the wood theft law stands as a powerful case study of how legally recognised private wealth (a manifestation of private power) can transform into political domination by reducing the state to the servant of private power over and against the interests of the poor.4 It is important to acknowledge that Marx’s critical reflections on the wood theft law were written during his ‘pre-communist’ period, which goes some way in explaining why he insists upon a ‘customary right for the poor of all countries’ rather than the abolition of capitalist private property. To be sure, Marx’s thinking underwent considerable change between 1842 and 1867, a period spanning his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the revolutions of 1848, the reactionary restoration that paved the way for Louis Bonaparte’s coup in France, and the publication of the first volume of Capital. The period immediately following Marx’s resignation from the Rheinische Zeitung was marked by his critical engagement with Hegel’s theory of the modern state. The results of Marx’s critical study were twofold. First, he recognised that the peculiar nature of the Prussian state (as distinct from Hegel’s conception of the modern state) could not be grasped with reference to the abstract idea of rational right. Instead, the truth of that historically specific form of the state and its laws was to be sought in what Marx, following Hegel, called ‘civil society,’ while the constitution of civil society was to be grasped through a critical study of political economy (see Marx [1859] 1978d, 4). Second, whereas Marx’s early journalistic writings appealed to rational right as a standard of normative evaluation, his subsequent writings – from On the Jewish Question through the Grundrisse – focus on the contradictions between civil society and the state, in particular the extent to which civil society and its market imperatives constrain the constitution of the modern state. However, far from mechanically reducing legal relations to economic relations, Marx emphasised the organic link between concrete forms of production and legal relations. This organic link is expressed most forcefully in the Grundrisse, where Marx insists that ‘every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc. In bringing things which are organically related into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection, they [bourgeois economists] display their crudity and lack of conceptual understanding’ (Marx [1857] 1978c, 226). In the same work, Marx went on to analyse different historical forms of production and the legal relations to which they give rise, including the nascent capitalist mode of production and the liberal constitutional state, characterised as it still is by generalised commodity production with the underlying aim of capital accumulation. 90 Igor Shoikhedbrod 2 The Contradictions of Capital and the ‘Faces’ of Political Domination While Marx’s Capital has traditionally been viewed as a work of economics – or more precisely, a critique of political economy – there have been several important scholarly interventions in recent years that approach it as a work of political theory, abounding with insights for normative political theory more broadly (Roberts 2016; Smith 2019; Shoikhedbrod 2019). When Capital is approached in this way, it is easier to discern how Marx’s discussion of private wealth and political domination is given a firmer theoretical basis through his analysis of capital’s inner dynamics. Incisive as Marx’s article on the wood theft law was, it lacked the systematicity and historicity of Capital, which remains, among other things, one of the most rigorous attempts to explicate the origins and systemic dynamics of capitalist accumulation. If Marx’s formative reflections on the liberal constitutional state brought to bear the persistence of economic inequality in civil society, then the first volume of Capital would reveal ‘the secret of profitmaking,’ and the ways in which capital dominates labour in the ‘hidden abode of production,’ all against a background of equal rights. Capitalism, for Marx, is a political-economic system in which ownership of the means of production and control over the social surplus becomes concentrated in a few hands. Aside from its systemic tendency towards monopoly and periodic crises, capitalism also produces a reserve army of unemployed labourers and a class structure in which most individuals do not have sufficient access to, or control over, productive property. The formal character of liberal justice abstracts from asymmetries of class power and ignores how these asymmetries translate into political domination in liberal constitutional democracies. Whereas pre-capitalist political-economic formations were characterised primarily by personal or direct forms of domination, Marx theorised that capitalist production is informed by exchange relations between commodity owners who are not legally bound to the arbitrary will of other individuals. In this sense, Marx recognised that capitalist markets emancipate individuals from ascribed status hierarchies and direct forms of domination that were common in feudal or medieval societies. Capitalism’s historical abolition of ascribed hierarchies also gives rise to generalised dependence on impersonal market forces that escape conscious human direction and democratic control. This form of dependence goes hand in hand with a system of class domination in which the owners of private capital dominate non-owners, albeit without recourse to the direct or personal forms of domination that prevailed in pre-capitalist formations. The foregoing reference to impersonal domination does not rule out that individual workers remain de facto (as opposed to de jure) dependent on individual capitalists. Private Wealth and Political Domination 91 Retuning to Capital provides a renewed opportunity to discern insights that are lacking even in the most sophisticated versions of liberal egalitarianism. The starting point of Marx’s analysis in Capital is arguably the commodity, while the broader trajectory is the self-valori- sation of capital. Both presuppose the necessary buying and selling of a special commodity (i.e., labour power) in the market, founded upon juridical equality between buyer and seller but resulting in de facto inequality and domination in the sphere of production. The question that concerns Marx throughout his inquiry is the social reproduction of capital. Capitalist production, whether it takes the form of industrial capital that was common in his time or the financialised capital of our time, is distinguished by several defining features (in non-chron- ological order). One feature, as we have seen, is the presupposition of juridical equality among rights bearers – workers as much as capitalists. The second involves a socialised form of production that is accompanied by a distinctly private form of appropriation. The third feature, closely connected to the second, yields what Marx termed the ‘centralization of existing capital and the concentration of new capital’ (Marx [1867] 1976a, 777), which not only reproduces a specific class structure but also helps fuel the business cycle and its reoccurring crises (see Day 2018, 88). The fourth feature of capitalist production is capital’s self-valorisation, a process whereby all social and political life is rendered subordinate to the dictates of capital accumulation, primarily as a consequence of the abstract character of labour that prevails in capitalist societies. This process subjugates both owners and non-owners of capital, though obviously not to the same degree, and appears to cement capital’s status as ‘self-determining subject.’5 One can thus discern at least two related but distinct mechanisms of domination that flow from the private appropriation of socially generated wealth. The first and most familiar mechanism is that of class domination, whereby the owners of private capital (the class exercising private power through the ownership of private wealth) dominate non-owners in virtue of their status as non-owners, as well as both classes’ respective places in the production process. While the origin of this domination is rooted in the process of production, its consequences are thoroughly political. Marx elaborates on this point in Capital: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct 98 Igor Shoikhedbrod For Wright, worker-owned and democratically managed cooperatives are just one in a range of institutions and social practices that reinforce a ‘democratic-conforming market.’ On Wright’s definition, a ‘democratic-conforming’ market is one that is ‘effectively subordinate to the exercise of democratic power’ (2019, 70). Although Wright’s analysis needs further elaboration and defence, which would go beyond the scope of the present chapter, it captures an integral dimension of the socialist project that has been largely neglected in recent years (Shoikhedbrod 2021b). Practices of worker self-management within cooperatives, as well as broader processes of democratic control over investment, are structured according to values that are very different from those of capitalist firms. These are values that honour freedom, equality, and community. Wright’s work lends itself constructively to broader proposals for economic democracy, such as those theorised by David Schweickart (2011) and Paul Adler (2019), which combine worker self-management, democratic control over investment, and principles of egalitarian solidarity (see Christiano 2022 in this volume on worker co-operatives, and Al Salman 2022 and Bennett and Claassen 2022 on some other institutions for democratic control of the economy). To be clear, I am not claiming that worker-owned and democratically managed cooperatives would be a panacea, especially under the existing constraints of global financial capitalism; they will continually be subject to pressures that are unavoidable under capitalism. However, worker-owned and managed cooperatives remain important first steps towards any version of associated production that might confront the contradictions of private wealth and political domination. More broadly, such proposals help wrest from capital its status as a ‘self-determining subject’ and transfer this power back to the democratic control of associated producers and the political community more broadly. The politically salient point here is that individuals should be able to exercise democratic control over their economic affairs, which will of course remain a matter of degree and will be subject to considerations of scale. Consequently, rather than abolishing markets in toto and replacing them with authoritarian varieties of central planning, the solution to the problem of capital, and of the private power and political domination resulting from it, is to render markets subordinate to democratically determined human ends and needs (Smith 2019, 346; cf. Polanyi [1944] 2001). After all, markets predate capitalism and should not be immediately conflated with either the concept of capital or of capitalism. The goal of subordinating markets to democratic control, including the long-term abolition of capital and its value form, remains an ongoing political project. 4 Conclusion This chapter has offered a distinctly Marxian approach to the contradictory relationship between private wealth and political domination under contemporary financialised capitalism. I began by providing an Private Wealth and Political Domination 99 overview of Marx’s early journalistic reflections on the subservience of the political state to private wealth, which was shown to result in the corruption of the state’s laws and in the domination of the poor. Marx’s formative reflections helped pave the way for his mature understanding of capital and the specific forms of domination to which it gives rise. Focusing on Marx’s original conception of capital, as well the contributions of subsequent Marxian thinkers, I outlined the ways in which the Marxian understanding of domination has several advantages over liberal egalitarian and neo-republican accounts. After discussing the relative advantages of the Marxian approach, I concluded by offering a preliminary Marxian-inspired strategy for confronting the contradictory relationship between private wealth and political domination today, that is, by making markets subservient to democratically determined human ends and needs with the broader aim of abolishing capital. Notes 1 Among classical liberal thinkers, the idea that private power and interest can occasionally undermine public power and public interest was most clearly articulated by Adam Smith (see Smith [1776] 2008, 232). For recent contributions along liberal egalitarian lines, see Cordelli (2020) and Anderson (2017). In this volume, see Richard Arneson’s contribution. 2 It is helpful to compare Marx’s insights about the wood theft law with E.P. Thompson’s parallel treatment of the notorious Black Act of 1723. In both cases, something that was initially regarded (particularly by the poor) as common property for public use was transformed into the object of private property, with its associated rights of exclusion and threats of penal sanction (capital punishment in the case of the Black Act). See Thompson (1975); for a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Shoikhedbrod (2021a). 3 The Historical School of Law was a school of jurisprudence that came to prominence in Germany in the late eighteenth century under the influence of Gustav Hugo and Karl von Savigny. 4 The absence of a sustained engagement with Marx’s work has led Katherina Pistor to infer, in an otherwise incisive work, that rational choice theorists and Marxists alike ‘ignore the central role of law in in the making of capital and its protection as private wealth. […] The key to understanding the basis of power and the resulting distribution of wealth lies instead in the process of bestowing legal protection on select assets and to do so as a matter of private, not public, choice’ (Pistor 2019, 208). Marx’s formative article on the wood theft law sheds valuable light on precisely the problem identified by Pistor, that is, the ways in which private law helps facilitate the accumulation and consolidation of private wealth (in the form of capital). 5 See especially Postone (1993). While Postone develops an innovative reinterpretation of ‘social domination’ against traditional Marxism, which sheds valuable light on the ubiquity of abstract labour and abstract time under capitalism, his account has the unfortunate tendency of diminishing the relative importance of class domination and underemphasising the role of political agency in counteracting social domination. For a recent intervention that emphasises the importance of class and its implications for grasping contemporary forms of domination and the possibility of collective self-determination, see Cicerchia (2021). 100 Igor Shoikhedbrod 6 One should also consider Engels’s extended treatment of the historical origins of the state, including its anticipated ‘withering away’ under conditions of developed communism in ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’ (Engels [1884] 1990a). 7 For a well-researched account of the characteristic separation of the political and the economic under capitalism that elaborates on this insight, see Ellen Meiksins Wood (2016, 19–47). Drawing partly on Wood’s earlier work, Nancy Fraser (2014) has elaborated on the specific character of financialised capitalism as an administrative political order. 8 For a more detailed examination of this debate and its contemporary relevance, see Clark (1991). For a desired convergence between the best features of welfare liberal and Marxist theories of the state, see Macpherson (2013). 9 See Shoikhedbrod (2019, 141–50). For a favourable interpretation of Rawls’s ‘reticent’ orientation towards liberal socialism, see Edmundson (2017). 10 There are nonetheless innovative scholarly efforts at combining the best of Rawlsian and Marxian insights, such as Reiman (2012). Reiman’s earlier work (1987) took as its point of departure the structural coercion that is specific to capitalism. 11 For an original and bold attempt at outlining the institutional nuts and bolts of an anti-oligarchic republic that draws upon the plebeian tradition (including its diverse expression in the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci), see Vergara (2020; for discussion, see also Bulmer and White 2022). 12 For a recent critique of Honneth’s attempted renewal of socialism, see Shoikhedbrod (2021c). References Adler, Paul S. 2019. The 99 Percent Economy: How Democratic Socialism Can Overcome the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al Salman, Yara. 2022. “Independence in the Commons: How Group Ownership Realises Basic Non-Domination.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Michael and Rutger Claassen. 2022. “Taming the Corporate Leviathan: How to Properly Politicize Corporate Purpose?” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2021. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bulmer, Elliot, and Stuart White. 2022. “Constitutions Against Oligarchy.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Carver, Terrell. 2010. “The German Ideology Never Happened.” History of Political Thought 31, no. 1: 107–27. Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen, 274–294. London: Routledge. Private Wealth and Political Domination 101 ——. 2018. Marx. Cambridge: Polity. Christiano, Thomas. 2022. “Why Does Worker Participation Matter? Three Considerations in Favor of Worker Participation in Corporate Governance.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Cicerchia, Lillian. 2021. ‘Why Does Class Matter?’ Social Theory and Practice. Online First: September 18, 2021. Clark, Simon, ed. 1991. The State Debate. London: Macmillan. Cordelli, Chiara. 2020. The Privatized State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Day, Richard. 2018. “Why Does Marx Matter?” In Responses to Marx’s Capital, edited by Richard Day and Daniel Gaido, 1–39. Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Edmundson, William. 2017. Rawls: Reticent Socialist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engels, Friedrich. [1845] 1975. “The Condition of the Working-Class in England.” In MECW 4, 295–596. New York, NY: International Publishers. ——. [1884] 1990a. “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” In MECW 26, 129–276. New York, NY: International Publishers. ——. [1892] 1990b. “Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio.” In MECW 27, 270–72. New York, NY: International Publishers. Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism.” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2: 157–89. Habermas, Jürgen. 2015. The Lure of Technocracy. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity. Honneth, Axel. 2017. The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal. Translated by Joseph Ganahl. Cambridge: Polity. Hudis, Peter. 2012. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Kimpell Johnson, Jessica. 2022. “What About Ethos? Republican Institutions, Oligarchic Democracy and Norms of Political Equality.” In Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen. London: Routledge. Lawler, James, Bertell Ollman, David Schweickart, and Hillel Titcktin. 1998. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists. New York, NY: Routledge. Leipold, Bruno. 2022. “Chains and Invisible Threads: Liberty and Domination in Marx’s Account of Wage-Slavery.” In Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism, edited by Annelien de Dijn and Hannah Dawson, 194–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leopold, David. 2007. The Young Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macpherson, C.B. 2013. “Do We Need a Theory of the State?” In The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Essays, 55–75. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl. [1842] 1971. “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.” In MECW 1, 224–63. New York, NY: International Publishers. ——. [1867] 1976a. Capital Volume I. New York, NY: International Publishers. ——. [1894] 1976b. Capital Volume III. New York, NY: International Publishers. ——. [1843] 1978a. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” In Tucker 1978, 16–25. ——. [1852] 1978b. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In Tucker 1978, 606–18. 102 Igor Shoikhedbrod ——. [1857] 1978c. “Grundrisse.” In Tucker 1978, 221–93. ——. [1859] 1978d. “On the History of His Opinions.” In Tucker 1978, 3–6. ——. [1844] 1978e. “On the Jewish Question.” In Tucker 1978, 26–52. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 1978. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Tucker 1978, 469–500. Miliband, Ralph. 1970. “The Capitalist State: Reply to Nicos Poulantzas.” New Left Review 59: 53–60. O’Neill, Martin and Thad Williamson, eds. 2012. Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Pettit, Philip. 2006. “Freedom in the Market.” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 5, no. 2: 131–49. Pistor, Katherina. 2019. The Code of Capital. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Polanyi, Karl. [1944] 2001. The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1969. “The Problem of the Capitalist State.” New Left Review 58: 67–78. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Reiman, Jeffrey. 1987. “Exploitation, Force, and Moral Assessment: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 16, no. 1: 3–41. ——. 2012. As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Roberts, William Clare. 2016. Marx’s Inferno. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schweickart, David. 2011. After Capitalism. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Shoikhedbrod, Igor. 2019. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ——. 2021a. “Beyond Fetishism and Instrumentalism: Rethinking Marxism and Law under Neoliberalism.” In Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, edited by Paul O’Connell and Umut Ozsu, 496–510. Cheltenham: Elgar. ——. 2021b. “G.A. Cohen, the Neglect of Democratic Self-Management, and the Future of Democratic Socialism.” Journal of Social Philosophy. First View: August 23, 2021. ——. 2021c. “Market Morality, Socialism, and the Realization of Social Freedom: A Critique of Honneth’s Normative Reconstruction.” Critical Horizons 22, no. 4: 335–50. ——. 2022. “Marx and the Democratic Struggle over the Constitution in 1848–49.” History of Political Thought. Smith, Adam. [1776] 2008. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition, edited by Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Tony. 2019. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Thompson, E.P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. Tucker, Robert, ed. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York, NY: Norton. Private Wealth and Political Domination 103 Vergara, Camila. 2020. Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti- Oligarchic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York, NY: Basic Books. Wolff, Richard. 2012. Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2016. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. London: Verso. Wright, Erik Olin. 2019. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. DOI: 10.4324/9781003173632-7 Anarchists believe that the best society would be a stateless society. Alas, most people do not live in a stateless society. How should anarchists view law enforcement by agents of the state? Of course, anarchists should view most law enforcement as a form of unjustified violence against people because most of the laws that public officials enforce target people who are not liable to be coerced. This means that any laws that go beyond protecting people’s enforceable rights are an impermissible exercise of state power.1 But we anarchists who find ourselves situated in states can say more about state power beyond ‘I’m against it.’ In this essay, I argue that anarchists should favour policies that minimise people’s exposure to the burdens of state power. Perhaps surprisingly then, anarchists should not necessarily favour policies that aim to lower taxes, nor should they oppose redistribution on principle. In practice, given that existing states uphold and enforce some property conventions, anarchists should be sympathetic to some redistributive policies. This argument is pitched at the level of non-ideal theory. In the world as it is, where wealth and political power is very unevenly distributed within and between states, it would be a mistake for anarchists to complacently accept the current distribution of material resources for the sake of opposing further acts of governmental interference. My argument for this claim assumes that public officials should not enforce any policies that violate people’s natural entitlements.2 That is, I am assuming that anarchists are correct in claiming that officials lack the authority to enforce most of the laws that they enforce, and that people have no duty to obey most of the laws that are enforced. From that background assumption, I then argue: 1 Public officials will continue to enforce unjust policies. 2 In a system where officials persist in enforcing unjust policies that violate people’s natural entitlements, they should structure those policies in ways that reduce the burdensomeness of these rights violations. Anarchism and Redistribution Jessica Flanigan 6 Anarchism and Redistribution 105 3 Redistributive policies can reduce the burdensomeness of state action, relative to the absence of redistributive policies. 4 When public officials enforce unjust policies, they should redistribute resources. In addition to this argument, we might also add the following argument in favour of redistribution: 5 If a public official enforces an unjust policy, they should compensate the victims of unjust enforcement. 6 Everyone subject to an unjust policy is a victim of unjust enforcement. 7 Officials should compensate the victims of unjust enforcement by structuring the unjust policy (e.g., a property system) in a way that distributes some resources to everyone. 8 When public officials enforce unjust policies, they should do it in a way that distributes some resources to everyone. In referring to unjust policies, I’m referring to policies that violate people’s natural entitlements. These include paternalistic policies, land-use policies, borders, and many property conventions. Of course, it would be best if officials didn’t enforce these policies. But, given that they do enforce unjust policies, not all unjust policies are equally as bad. On my view, it is better if officials enforce laws in ways that redistribute resources to poorer citizens than if they enforce laws that protect the current property distribution and prevent poorer citizens from accessing resources. For this reason, it is better for officials to tax people who are advantaged by the property system in order to redistribute resources to those who are disadvantaged, even if we also grant that officials also don’t have the authority to enforce most, if any, of these property conventions in the first place. In making the anarchist case for a redistribution of resources, I am arguing against anarchists who oppose existing redistributive policies on the grounds that they expand the size of government or increase instances of governmental coercion (Mack 2006; 2018; Friedman 2013; Huemer 2013). On my view, these arguments are mistaken. I grant that lower taxes and less welfare spending would seemingly reduce the size of government and reduce governmental coercion in this narrow sense, thereby bringing a society closer to the anarchist ideal. Yet these policies might nevertheless exacerbate the injustices associated with whatever governmental institutions are left. In the rest of this essay, I will follow the structure of the preceding arguments. In Section 1, I describe and defend anarchism. There, I argue that public officials unjustly violate people’s natural rights when they enforce all sorts of laws, including paternalistic policies, land-use policies, borders, and property conventions. In Section 2, I make the case 106 Jessica Flanigan that, in non-ideal contexts, public officials should try to make it so that whatever unjust policies they do enforce reduce the burdensomeness of these rights violations. In Section 3, I then argue that some redistribution can achieve this goal. In Section 4, I consider a non-instrumental anarchist case for redistribution – compensation. In contrast to the instrumental argument for redistribution, this argument does not make redistribution empirically contingent on its liberatory effects. On the other hand, it is empirically contingent in that it holds that the beneficiaries of redistributive policies will reliably align with the people who are entitled to compensation for unjust policies. I view these two strands of argument as complementary considerations in favour of a presumption of some redistributive policies. In Section 5, I consider the claim that redistribution may unfairly burden people who benefit from the status quo. In response, I argue that this objection assumes that people are entitled to the benefits of the status quo. There, I also note that too much redistribution can backfire. This case for redistribution is purely instrumental, and to the extent that it would not, in practice, have the liberatory effect that I envision, then officials should not redistribute. In Section 6, I consider the best form these policies could take, in light of anarchist values. There, I offer some arguments in support of a basic income programme. 1 Property and Rights Anarchists believe that public officials do not have the authority to use coercion in ways that violate people’s natural rights. Some kinds of law enforcement are not coercive in this way. For example, enforcing a law that prevents people from assaulting or killing other people wouldn’t violate anyone’s natural rights because people don’t have a right to assault or kill others. The same goes for laws against fraud and deception, and laws that uphold contracts, at least on some accounts (Flanigan 2017). In these cases, it’s not that anarchists think that public officials have any kind of morally distinctive authority to threaten people with violence, imprisonment or some other policy. It’s rather that anyone has the authority to interfere with wrongdoers in the service of defending or upholding another person’s rights (Brennan 2020). So, some laws are permissibly enforced. But most laws aren’t like this. That’s why anarchists oppose the enforcement of most laws. Most of the time, law enforcement involves threatening a person with imprisonment or some other penalty in a way that violates her rights against interference. That’s why most instances of law enforcement are unjust. For example, if a migrant crosses a border, which is an invisible line between two countries, she is not liable to be shot or captured in virtue of that fact because walking across an invisible line doesn’t violate anyone else’s natural rights. When border guards shoot at migrants, they violate migrants’ rights against being shot (Huemer 2010; Hidalgo 2018). Anarchism and Redistribution 107 Anarchists also think that people have no duty to obey a law simply because it is a law (Wolff 1998). Suppose there is nothing morally wrong with selling a drug that that public officials have prohibited. Then, the mere fact it has been prohibited gives a seller no duty to comply with the prohibition. As I am using the term, anarchism consists in the denial of the moral specialness of the state (Brennan 2020). This is a compelling vision of how people should live together. Public officials don’t have any permissions or obligations that private citizens lack (Hasnas 2008). All people are equal with respect to their entitlements to be protected from interference and their entitlements to enforce moral requirements. Though anarchists agree that a stateless society would be morally best and that the aforementioned laws are unjust, they disagree about other political questions. For the most part, anarchists are sceptical that political processes such as democratic elections or representative government could ever make political power legitimate, but they vary in the degree that they endorse democratic processes for decision-making more generally.3 Anarchists disagree in their reasons for opposing coercive state policies too. Some argue from a religious tradition (Underwood and Vallier 2020). Some emphasise the importance of social equality. Others think that a system where officials are not permitted to violate people’s rights against interference is best because it would promote well-being on balance (Brennan 2018). Anarchists disagree about how feasible a stateless society is too (e.g., Newhard 2016). And they disagree about whether people should try to promote justice through deregulation and anti-statist policy (Simmons 1999; Carson 2018). It is not my goal in this essay to provide a taxonomy of different kinds of anarchists or to say what all anarchists should believe. Instead, I want to focus on the points of agreement among anarchists, all of whom are advocates for a radical vision of a fully voluntary cooperative society. Though they disagree, anarchist thinkers have collectively developed a broadly coherent theoretical framework that challenges the prevailing view of political authority, and that is the sense of anarchism that interests me here. With that minimal conception of anarchism in hand, perhaps the greatest area of disagreement among anarchists arises in response to the question of whether people’s enforceable natural rights include rights to private property, meaning property rights beyond people’s rights to bodily integrity or personal autonomy. On this point, anarchists also disagree about what form property rights might take. Some anarchists argue that people have rights to acquire and transfer property and this fact implies that public officials generally do not have the authority to use force or threats of force to limit people’s ability to acquire and transfer property (D. Friedman 1994; 2013; Mack 2006; Huemer 2017). Others think that a stateless society would allow people to acquire and transfer property via markets, but they’re sceptical about whether people can 114 Jessica Flanigan the rights of A and B. So, it’s not even the case that S’s theft on day one amounts to coercing B to help A and then coercing A to help B on day two. It’s that A and B are both coerced on each day by S’s enforcement of unjust laws that determine the property distribution. So given that S is doing this, the number of instances of unjust law enforcement is the same whether S redistributes or not. In that context, S should at least make it so that the consequences of S’s unjust actions are not excessively burdensome to those who are subject to S. And even if redistribution does involve more instances of unjust law enforcement, it’s not clear that’s a bad thing. Consider another analogy: Thief 2: S is a thief who randomly steals from people and who cannot be stopped. S will either steal a little from A-Y (A and 24 other people), once a day, every day. Or S will steal everything Z owns and prevent Z from ever owning anything ever again. In this case, S will either choose to steal more often by stealing from 25 people, or S will steal less often but the burdens of S’s theft will be much greater. The first option will minimise instances of unjust interference and the second will minimise the burdens of unjust interference. Both approaches are, in a sense, consequentialist. They view unjust interference as something to be minimised, rather than as a constraint on action (Smith 2009). Ideally, S would comply with the moral prohibition on violating people’s rights. But when S is unwilling to respect people’s rights, anarchists have some moral reasons to hope that S’s rights violations at least have good consequences.8 The question here is whether it’s better to favour fewer violations or less burdensome violations, when there is a trade-off between the two. On my view, given that people’s rights are being violated either way, it would be better to favour less burdensome violations, because Z has a stronger claim against being interfered with than A-Y do (Scanlon 2000, 235). Or if we are not to consider the pairwise comparison of people’s claims, we may also note that the first option would unfairly fail to assign the disproportionately burdened person more moral consideration, but there are moral reasons to give extra consideration to people in Z’s position (Kamm 1998). A consequentialist has reason to worry about the first option, to the extent that the cost to Z could be so significant that it could outweigh marginal costs to A-Y. In wrapping up this argument, I should reiterate that this case for redistribution is empirically contingent. Following Nozick (2013, 198–231), we can imagine a society where public officials continuously redistribute resources for the sake of maintaining an equal distribution. Imagine, for example, that S stole from people continuously, so that no one else could reliably make plans that involved their property because Anarchism and Redistribution 115 they couldn’t anticipate when S would intervene. In such a system, people would not use their property productively out of fear that S would redistribute whatever they gained from it. In this kind of society, S’s redistribution would not reduce the burdensomeness of being subjected to unjust law enforcement, it would exacerbate it. The initial Thief example established that public officials could use redistribution to reduce the burdensomeness of law enforcement. It did not establish that all redistribution would have this effect. Redistribution can backfire if public officials enforce redistributive policies in a way that involves further surveillance and threats of force. This case for redistribution is instrumental to the goal of limiting the burdens of law enforcement. To the extent that redistributing resources would not, on balance, liberate people from the burdens of living under the state, officials should not redistribute. 4 A Non-Instrumental Case for Redistribution The foregoing case for redistribution appeals to on an empirical assumption that redistributing resources within an existing society can reduce the burdensomeness of being subject to governmental coercion. But it’s possible that that’s not true. It could be that any redistribution involves so much surveillance and enforcement and paperwork that it’s more burdensome to people, on balance, than the state-backed enforcement of a property system that doesn’t involve redistribution. That is the trouble with instrumentalist arguments for polices. It could turn out that the policy doesn’t actually promote the desired end. In this section, I defend a second, non-instrumental anarchist argument in favour of redistribution in non-ideal contexts. Namely, even if a redistributive policy doesn’t effectively reduce the overall burdensomeness of being subject to law enforcement, public officials can still have reason to redistribute resources, in some circumstances, as a way of compensating people for the injustice of being subject to law enforcement. This is a non-instrumental argument for redistribution in the sense that redistribution is not justified as instrumental to some other value, rather, it is good to do for its own sake, as a matter of right. As above, this argument is somewhat contingent. It could be that redistributing resources as a way of compensating people is good for its own sake, but that other moral considerations outweigh this value of providing compensation. Nevertheless, this argument provides further support to the case for redistribution in cases where it’s unclear whether redistributing resources would in fact reduce the burdensomeness of an enforced property system on balance, by establishing a presumptive case for effectively redistributing some property to disadvantaged people anyway. 116 Jessica Flanigan Like the instrumental argument for redistribution, the non-instru- mental case for redistribution begins with the observation that no existing property systems are justly enforced and that officials also act unjustly when they enforce paternalistic policies and other polices that are enforced with threats and violence against non-liable people. The next premise is that people should be compensated for the fact that they are subject to law enforcement, including the enforcement of a property system or other unjust policies. Everyone subject to these unjust laws is a victim of unjust enforcement. So, officials should compensate everyone affected by law enforcement. In principle, officials can partly provide compensation through the redistribution of resources. So, when this is practically feasible and there are not sufficient countervailing moral reasons against it, officials should redistribute.9 The key premise here is that those who enforce unjust policies should provide some form of compensation for the people who are subject to them in the form of redistribution.10 This compensation can be understood as a rebate, funded from all the gains that the system brings. Ideally, compensation would not require redistributive taxation. One alternative is that officials could distribute the economic gains from natural resources to citizens. Officials do not have a right to claim a monopoly on natural resources and to exclude people from cultivating and using the resources. But given that they do, they could use the gains from those resources to compensate citizens, not only for the violation that excluding them from accessing natural resources entails, but for all the other rights violations that law enforcement involves too. But compensation can also take the form of redistributive taxation, following a similar logic as the Thief case. As I argued in previous sections, unjust law enforcement violates everyone’s rights. Some people are comparatively advantaged by the overall pattern of law enforcement, but they are not entitled to retain the benefits of unjust instances of law enforcement. If this is true, then redistributive taxation as a form of compensation can finance a rebate for everyone who is subject to unjust law enforcement, including the taxpayers, without necessarily violating the property rights of taxpayers.11 Another objection to this argument for redistribution is that the property system has been so beneficial to people that additional compensation isn’t required beyond the benefits that they’ve already received (Friedman 2015). But although state-backed property systems provide material benefits to people, it provides these benefits by violating their natural rights to do as they please with their own bodies and (potentially) their rights to use natural resources. Redistributive policies should therefore aim to enable each person to meet their basic needs without being subject to the burdens of coercive property rules (Widerquist 2013). Anarchism and Redistribution 117 In this way, a property system could come close to restoring people to the state of freedom where ‘every individual was free to work with resources as they pleased, and virtually everyone chose not to have bosses and not to have hierarchies, either political or economic’ (Widerquist and McCall 2017, 244). It would achieve this not by eliminating bosses and hierarchies, but by giving people the ability to opt out of participating in them. Moreover, the case for redistribution as a form of compensation can succeed even if a property system promotes well-being on balance, and even if such a system means that fewer people are subjected to hierarchical bosses or violent threats on balance. After all, officials cannot justify subjecting non-liable people to the enforcement of any law merely on the grounds that such a law promotes overall well-being or safety.12 When officials do enforce laws that violate the rights of non-liable people, they owe those people compensation not solely because compensation will make them better off, but because denying compensation exacerbates the disrespect that unjust enforcement entails (Flanigan and Freiman 2020). This is why the non-instrumental, compensation-based argument for redistribution complements the instrumental argument for redistribution. We can make this case on either non-consequentialist or consequentialist grounds. Still, even the non-instrumentalist case for redistribution may be limited. If the only way to effectively compensate people for being unjustly subject to law enforcement would be to seriously violate the rights of non-liable people, then compensation is not warranted in these cases. Knowing where to draw the line here is a general problem for any compensation-based argument. If the only feasible way to appropriately compensate the victims of an unjust police shooting is to take money from legitimate public safety efforts, it could be the case that public officials should not aim to appropriately compensate shooting victims. In claiming that officials should redistribute in order to provide compensation to everyone who is subject to unjust law enforcement, I have been assuming that it is possible to enforce a redistributive policy in a way that does not amount to an unacceptable injustice against non-liable people. The assumption that redistribution may not amount to an unacceptable injustice against property holders is grounded in the idea that people are not entitled to the full value of their current property holdings in the first place. If so, then redistributing the status quo distribution would not necessarily violate people’s entitlements. In the next section, I will further argue for this point. 5 Objection: Redistribution Violates Property Rights Some readers may have the intuition that the enforcement of redistributive policies is an unacceptable injustice against property holders for the following reason: even if property holders are not entitled to their existing 118 Jessica Flanigan property, the property holders who benefit from the unjust enforcement of a property system nevertheless aren’t liable to be interfered with.13 For example, maybe natural resources are initially unowned, and when public officials create and enforce a system of entitlements over resources, they are merely providing a benefit to an undeserving few, but not violating the rights of others. I’m sceptical that law enforcement can ever be characterised as a pure benefit, rather than as a rights violation.14 Yet even granting, for the sake of argument, that some kinds of law enforcement solely bestow undeserved benefits on citizens, this argument would not weigh against redistribution. Rather, if an advantaged group is receiving an undeserved benefit while others are disadvantaged and experience burdens associated with being disadvantaged, officials have compelling reasons to change course and switch their provision of undeserved benefits to the disadvantaged group to reduce their burdens. This shows that the case for redistribution doesn’t require the premise that law enforcement unjustly coerces people. Rather, if law enforcement is unjustly coercive, then officials have reason to redistribute to minimise the burdens of coercion and to compensate people for injustice. If law enforcement is simply a benefit, then officials have reason to distribute the benefits of law enforcement in ways that minimise the burdens of being disadvantaged in the distribution of benefits. In response to this argument, a critic of redistributive policies could reply that public officials who redistribute resources don’t just fail to provide the benefits that they previously provided to the advantaged. Rather, they enforce redistributive policies by threatening people with incarceration. Here, our imagined critic of redistribution may grant that public officials should find a way to provide benefits and compensation to those who are undeservedly harmed by the enforcement of a property system. But they may then argue that this unfortunate fact does not authorise officials to further interfere with the people who benefit from the existing system. But this version of the objection builds in the assumption that law enforcement is only violating the rights of the people who are subject to redistribution from the status quo. It overlooks that the status quo also violates the rights of all people who are subject to the initial enforcement of a property system. A critic of redistribution should not assume that the initial enforcement of a property system, which is coercively enforced, violates no one’s rights, while also assuming that the coercive enforcement of a more redistributive property system would violate rights. Suppose we characterise both property enforcement and redistribution as rights violations, granting that the enforcement of an initial distribution is also unjust. Then, subsequent redistribution is merely unjust in the same way. It is not clearly worse than continuing to enforce the initial distribution. Anarchism and Redistribution 119 6 Capitalism, Basic Income, and Borders So far, I’ve argued that, to the extent that the enforcement of any property system violates people’s natural rights, public officials have moral reasons to prefer the enforcement of property systems that are minimally burdensome to those who are subject to them, and which compensate people for the injustices associated with law enforcement. In this section, I address what this means for public policy. First, this argument weighs in favour of enforcing a broadly capitalist property system. As far as state-backed property systems go, capitalism is at least especially efficient and capable of generating wealth, which could be diverted to benefit those who are unjustly subject to unjust laws and which could compensate people for unjust law enforcement. A market economy is also less invasive and burdensome than other, more planned property systems. So these are moral reasons to support a broadly capitalist system of property for now, even though the enforcement of these property rules violates people’s rights.15 Turning to the form that redistribution should take, people who are forced to live within a property system should receive a basic income, just as people who are harmed by the unjust enforcement of other laws that violate their natural rights are entitled to cash compensation. Compensation in the form of a cash transfer or a basic income has several advantages over other redistributive policies (see also Widerquist 2013, 66–70). First, cash is a remarkably efficient way to distribute compensation. And because cash can be used on a wide variety of things, it is more likely to promote the well-being of its recipients, in contrast to in kind benefit programmes which may not give people what they would choose for themselves. Providing compensation in the form of a basic income also limits victims’ interaction with the public officials who violate their natural rights via the enforcement of the property system. Another benefit of a basic income is that it pays compensation to the victims of property rule enforcement in the same coin as the violation. That is, since the injury is the coercive imposition of a currency and natural resource distribution system, then people should be compensated for that with access to currency and resources. In this way, the basic income satisfies the moral desideratum of reciprocity. It aims to restore the relations of equality between the victims and the perpetrators of an unjust property system by imposing a liability on the perpetrators that takes the same form as their injury against the victim (Flanigan 2019a, 2019b). In contrast, a more paternalistic ‘in kind’ form of compensation would fail to satisfy this desideratum because it would compensate people for the general coercive imposition of property norms with more specific goods. It’s also worth noting that the justifications for redistributive policies I have advanced are not limited to domestic redistributive efforts. Some 120 Jessica Flanigan of the people who are most harmed by the unjust enforcement of laws are those whose rights are violated at a political community’s border. To the extent that public officials will continue to enforce immigration restrictions that unjustly exclude people from migrating to their country, the foregoing case for redistribution is also a case for distributing cash assistance to foreigners as compensation for the rights-violation that immigration restrictions involve and to reduce the burdensomeness of being subject to immigration restrictions. That said, redistributing resources beyond a state’s borders is probably less feasible than proposals for more liberal immigration policies. In contrast, proposals to continue enforcing redistributive policies domestically are likely more politically feasible than proposals to stop enforcing all of the aforementioned coercive policies. Yet in both cases, the principle is the same. Given that public officials are unlikely to stop treating people unjustly when they enforce the law, anarchists have reason to support whatever second best or nth best policy that would reduce the burdensomeness of law enforcement and compensate those who are unjustly subject to it. 7 Conclusion In some ways, the foregoing analysis of property rights and enforcement is similar to the ‘myth of ownership’ view, which states that property rights are largely conventional (Murphy and Nagel 2004). Like proponents of this view, I have argued that the property distribution is at least partly determined by public officials’ decisions about which claims to resources or money they will enforce. The distribution of property also depends on officials’ decisions about which natural rights they will violate by enforcing unjust laws. And like proponents of the myth of ownership, I agree that public officials should use property rules to bring about a normatively better distribution of resources. I reject the myth of ownership view, however, because I deny that public officials have the authority to enforce property conventions in the way they do. All state-backed property systems are unjust, in virtue of the fact that they all violate people’s rights. Given that people will continue to live under state-backed enforcement regimes, anarchists should still hope officials change their approach to enforcement in ways that reduce instances of injustice and make the injustices they commit less burdensome to people. And officials should enforce conventions that compensate people, to an extent, for the injustices associated with law enforcement. Yet we should not mistake these reforms for justice. Though redistributive policies can morally improve the unjust status quo, any state-backed system of enforcement will nevertheless remain unjust. Anarchism and Redistribution 121 Notes 1 Throughout this essay, I’m sure that some anarchists will disagree with my characterisation of anarchism. And I will sometimes refer to writers who are not always identified as anarchists but who are fellow travellers, as anarchists. For example, I talk about Nozick in this way. But for my purposes I’m less interested in asking ‘what is anarchism’ and ‘who is an anarchist?’ Rather, my goal here is to argue that people who reject the claim that public officials have political authority and people who also seemingly view a stateless society as morally preferable (all else equal), should nevertheless be open to redistributive policies. In Flanigan (2019a, 2019b), I develop similar arguments, from a different angle. 2 As I will note going forward, this account is relatively open to competing theories of what people’s natural rights are. For those anarchists who are sceptical about ‘natural rights,’ the argument is still broadly applicable even if anarchism just consists in denying the state’s authority to coercively enforce many of the laws that states currently enforce. 3 For an overview of anarchist thought on this topic see Massimino et al. (2020). 4 And as Naomi Zack (1999) points out, monetary systems are presumptively illegitimate to the extent that they are imposed on people who do not consent to them. 5 We can imagine, for example, a system of money that is set apart from central banking, such as free banking (Dowd 1996) or cryptocurrencies. 6 Though see Cwik (2014). 7 Michael Huemer (2013) suggests this when he argues that anarchists should favour broadly libertarian public policies. 8 Here I am following Thomson (1986) in suggesting that people have moral reasons to promote well-being even when they are not morally required to do so as a matter of right (171). 9 Karl Widerquist develops a similar argument in favour of redistribution in the form of a basic income. Widerquist (2013) writes: ‘Recipients [of a basic income] are being compensated for not being able to have all the access to resources they might be able to use (alone or in a group of their choosing), for living under rules not entirely of their choice, and for rules that give greater advantages to others’ (178). Widerquist is primarily concerned with the fact that the property system ‘puts individuals in the position where they are effectively forced to enter the marketplace and serve others’ (13), whereas my account is grounded more in the injustice of subjecting someone to violent threats via law enforcement. Still, I view these two accounts as largely complimentary, despite their differing moral foundations. 10 Though he is generally read as a critic of redistribution, even Nozick (2013) is sympathetic to this narrow justification (230–231). 11 Though as Gary Chartier (2013) argues, ending the system where economic and political elites use law enforcement to maintain their existing privilege would be a preferable form of redistribution. On the other hand, Chartier nevertheless supports redistribution in the form of a basic income for other reasons, related to the value of independence (164–167). 12 As Narveson (2008) writes: ‘This all comes back once again to the basic idea, the libertarian principle. This rather simple idea is that nobody gets to inflict uncompensated harm or damage on anybody else; and so, only those who have done that are eligible for treatment of the kind proscribed for all others’ (106) 122 Jessica Flanigan 13 I am thankful to Jason Brennan for raising this objection. 14 Even if officials do not violate anyone’s rights simply by enforcing public safety services that protect people’s natural rights, they probably do when they coercively collect taxes to provide these services. Even if no one has an entitlement to natural resources, the enforcement of property rights in natural resources violates people’s entitlements to not be threatened with violence and incarceration when they trespass or use resources. 15 Charles Johnson (2008) distinguishes between free market capitalism and corporate state capitalism. In ideal theory, free market capitalism has a lot going for it. Corporate state capitalism is a form of government intervention in the marketplace to uphold an economic order that favours businesses and corporations. Johnson argues that the two cannot coexist, since the free market is defined as an economic order that is free of governmental intervention. But I think we can instead think of these systems on a continuum. Though corporate state capitalism is clearly morally deficient, it can still provide some of the benefits of the gains from trade, in contrast to a more centrally planned economy. In this way, anarchists who hold free market capitalism to be a morally ideal economic order have reason to reluctantly existing instantiations of capitalism, at least relative to alternative governmental arrangements that are even more hostile to free markets. 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Independently published. 130 Thomas Christiano One key remedy to this inequality of power is worker participation. Collective bargaining greatly increases the bargaining power of workers under conditions of partial monopsony, enabling workers to achieve better wages and working conditions and capture some of the rents of the firm. Unions with collective bargaining rights give voice to workers who are abused, achieving something like the rule of law in the workplace. They aggregate information about the workplace so that the presence of abuse or the violation of health and safety requirements is made amply clear. They make sure that the interests of workers in being in non-abu- sive, safe, and healthy environments are advanced (Donado and Walde 2012). Furthermore, there is evidence that workers are more productive in workplaces regulated by unions. This seems to be caused by an increase in commitment to the organisation and lower worker turnover (Freeman and Medoff 1984). One persistent question is whether unions slow down the rates of innovation and capital investment in a society. Here the evidence is clearly mixed. In the United States, it is thought that it does diminish both innovation and capital investment to some degree. This may be due to the element of monopolistic supply that unions realise (Metcalf 2003; Hirsch 2017). At the same time, in Germany, with its mix of union presence and worker participation in election of boards and works councils, there is evidence that unions may enhance the rate of innovation and capital investment in firms (Addison et al. 2017). In what is the most extensive meta-analysis of studies of the effects of unions on productivity, however, the loss in productivity due to lower capital investment and innovation is significantly offset by the gains in productivity from increased worker commitment and lower turnover (Doucouliagos, Freeman, and Laroche 2017). Finally, there is substantial evidence that unions tend strongly to diminish the overall level of inequality of income in a society. Their decline has been held partly responsible for the great increase in inequality in the United States and other countries (Stansbury and Summers 2020; Freeman 2007; Rosenfeld 2014). This seems to be the result of the most significant effects of unions on firms, i.e., an increase in wages (Card, Lemieux, and Riddell 2003) and a lower level of profitability (Metcalf 2003). Also, as noted above, unions contribute to the welfares of workers by ensuring that workplace health and safety are protected, and other basic rights are respected. The joint surplus, and its growth, seems to be similar between unionised and non-unionised firms but there is a different distribution of that surplus in favour of workers. On average, unions seem to have a small effect on overall productivity but significant effects on distribution (Doucouliagos, Freeman, and Laroche 2017). So even if there is some hit to overall productivity, it is plausible to say that it is justified in an egalitarian way by the gains in welfare and income among the lower half of the distribution. Why Does Worker Participation Matter? 131 It should be noted that the effects noted above are averages over many societies. The effects of unions vary to some extent between different countries with different legal regimes for protecting unions. For example, one study found that in firms with unions in which bargaining takes place at different tiers (national and firm level for instance), capital investment may be higher compared to ordinary firms with only lower tier bargaining (Cardullo, Conti, and Sulis 2020). Hence, this is an area for experimentation with different forms of institutional design. The effects of worker cooperatives have been less studied, and they are much less prevalent in modern economies than unions. Worker cooperatives are owned and run by the workers (or some very large percentage of them). One major disagreement on worker cooperatives concerns the ‘objective function’ of these firms, i.e., what exactly they are trying to maximise. Earlier work argued that the objective function of a worker cooperative was to maximise the income per worker of the firm (Ward 1958). A more recent account argues that the objective function is some mix of income and employment (Pencavel, Pistaferri, and Schivardi 2006), while still others argue that worker cooperatives can or do maximise profits (Dow 2003). To be sure, different institutional design can produce different objective functions. The standard view of the worker cooperative with an objective function of maximising income per worker predicts that the firm will decrease supply when the price for its product goes up (Ward 1958). This would imply a deep inefficiency in worker cooperatives since it suggests that increased demand leads to decreased supply. But this negatively sloped supply curve has not been observed in empirical studies (Bonin, Jones, and Putterman 1993; Dow 2003). There is some tendency towards a more sluggish supply response to increases in product prices (Pencavel, Pistaferri, and Schivardi 2006). On the other hand, cooperatives tend to retain employment in downturns while reducing wages temporarily. This is a major advantage for cooperatives over ordinary capitalist firms. They are more capable of persuading workers to reduce wages during difficult times than capitalist firms; workers trust managers less in capitalist firms than in worker-controlled firms. As a consequence, they don’t see nearly as much inefficiencies due to firing workers and then hiring new workers (Burdin and Dean 2009). Many observe greater productivity or at least no loss in productivity in worker cooperatives (Dow 2003). They give incentives to workers to work harder, and they radically reduce conflict between labour and management. They do, however, tend to invest less in capital (Bonin, Jones, and Putterman 1993). There may be some institutional fixes to the problem of raising capital. For instance, the Mondragon cooperatives have a cooperative bank that ensures a steady supply of capital. This may help with increasing the supply response to increased demand. But it may be that worker cooperatives are better suited to labour intensive firms. 132 Thomas Christiano The big question with worker cooperatives is why there are so few of them. The puzzle increases when we observe that worker cooperatives tend to fail no more than other capitalist firms and many say that the failure rate is smaller. Furthermore, there is little reason to believe that they generally degenerate into capitalist firms (Burdin and Dean 2009; Dow 2003). Yet there are not many of them. The main reason seems to be that it is harder for a group of workers collectively to decide on creating such a firm given the heterogeneity of workers and given that they have little capital to start with and are highly risk averse with the little wealth that they possess. Furthermore, Dow has argued that entrepreneurs who have created start-up companies are more likely to be worried about capturing the benefits of the company if it goes to a worker cooperative (Dow 2003). It is worth considering at this point what may be the most successful effort at worker participation in the firm, which is co-determina- tion. Co-determination occurs to varying degrees throughout much of Europe, but the most commonly studied variants are in Germany and Scandinavia. This is a complex system of worker participation so it can only be very briefly sketched here. The basic system is a combination of collective bargaining and worker participation in electing the members of the board of a corporation. In Germany, in corporations employing between 500 and 2000 workers, the workers elect one third of the members of the supervisory board of the corporation. In corporations with 2000 or more workers, the workers elect 50% of the board, but the owners have control over a tie breaking vote. Only in the coal, steel, and iron industries do workers have full parity with shareholders (Addison 2009). The boards do not determine the basic wage rates; they are determined by industry-wide collective bargaining with unions. But they do participate in choosing the managers, the basic workplace conditions and sometimes the basic investment strategy of the firm. And the unions play a significant role in the running of the board aside from the fact that many of the workers are union members. The key to co-determination is that it is mandated by law so a firm cannot escape the regime except by moving abroad. It is not a product of the market and it is not merely facilitated by law. Another feature of co-determination is that it includes workers and shareholders as participants in running the firm. This enhances its ability to raise capital above that of worker cooperatives. As a general rule the assessment of co-determination has been fairly positive. It is reasonably popular in Germany though not as much with shareholders and managers. The initial assessment of co-determina- tion was that it would undermine the value of the firm because workers would ‘hold up’ capital and ‘eat up the firm’ (Jensen and Meckling 1979). But subsequent research has found that co-determination is associated with modest gains in productivity in firms (Addison 2009). It is Why Does Worker Participation Matter? 133 associated with modest improvements in working conditions (Jager, Noy, and Schoefer 2021). It dramatically reduces the conflict between labour and capital; it increases information and therefore trust among workers and managers (Freeman and Lazear 1995). And it has a mechanism for the raising of capital. The collective bargaining part has played a role in limiting income inequality through wage compression. So, if we are thinking in terms of efficiency and equality, co-determination seems to be desirable. But it is a complex system rooted in the experiences of German and Nordic societies so we must be careful in thinking about how it can translate to other countries. 2 Equality of Power in the Market The second basic standard for evaluating markets is the idea of persons participating as equals in the market. This is a procedural view and is analogous to the democratic idea that persons ought to be able to participate as equals in collective decision-making. This section lays out and defends the fundamental ideal of equality of power in the market. Then it shows how that ideal is breached in most ordinary labour markets. It argues that worker participation in firm governance is the main remedy for the failure of labour markets to achieve equality of power. It justification is remedial on the account offered here. Just as democratic decision-making provides a public realisation of equality against the background of disagreement about interests and justice, so equal power in markets provides a public realisation of equality. Persons are given the capacities to stand up for their own interests and values in the context of economic cooperation where there is substantial conflict of interests. The underlying idea behind the democratic principle is that persons have fundamental interests in being able to shape the social world they live in. They have these fundamental interests because they live in a world where there is a lot of disagreement about how best to shape that world, there is substantial uncertainty about the interests people have and there is serious conflict of interest among them. One treats persons publicly as equals in this context by giving them equal power over the process of collective decision-making. They can then work out their disagreements and decide on a set of institutions in a way that treats each other publicly as equals (Christiano 2008). Now I am assuming here that there is reason for decentralised decision-making in various spheres of social life, so that not all decision-making ought to, or even can, be made collectively. Decentralised decision-making is desirable because it is a highly productive way of putting resources to their best uses and it is a way of expressing individuality in the process of advancing one’s interests. 134 Thomas Christiano Nevertheless, there is an important analogy between participation in collective decision-making and participation in economic life. One enters agreements with others to advance one’s interests in the social world one lives in. One attempts to shape that social world by recasting one’s rights and duties with others and by structuring the division of labour. The sum of one’s agreements gives shape to the local world in which one lives. Thus, one advances, in a more localised way, one’s morally legitimate interests and idiosyncratic aims. Moreover, there is a great deal of conflict of interest in negotiating the terms of agreements in the market. For example, each participant in exchange wants to pay less and receive more from the others. And there is unresolved disagreement about the nature of the interests involved. For example, some participate in firms because they value the work and the cooperation while others may simply value the wage. So, persons have rights to participate in this activity as they see fit. But we do not take the interests sufficiently seriously if we are content merely to distribute rights. Persons must have power to advance their interests in this decentralised system of decision-making because of the serious conflict of interest in the making of agreements. We can see this in the case of highly exploitative agreements where persons’ rights may be respected but their interests in shaping the world around them are severely hampered by their inferior power and they are treated publicly in a way that is inferior to those of the exploiter. The ideal of markets among equals involves structuring markets so that persons have equal power to participate in markets. The notion of equal power is not easy to define in the contexts of markets. There are two main elements. One element is equality in the cognitive conditions for participating in the market. I have in mind here equal access to education and training. These conditions are necessary for a person to realise their interests in a complex society. The second element is equality of opportunity, i.e., a robustly equal ability to advance one’s interests in a system of social and economic cooperation. The prime determinant of power in economic life is the ability to exit. The amount of opportunity to decline participation in particular agreements is the principal measure of power. When two persons engage in an agreement and one person has very bad alternative options while the other has very good alternative options, the person with the good alternatives will have more power over the agreement-making. The principle of equal opportunity is meant to equalise this distribution of power (Christiano 2018). The kind of power I am trying to get at here is to be distinguished from ‘collaborative power,’ which is power one has because one is able to satisfy a desire or need of another. One’s power derives from the desires or needs of others. Someone who has a great deal of talent, which means ability to satisfy others’ desires, may have more power in this sense. In Why Does Worker Participation Matter? 135 contrast to that, I am trying to get at ‘conflictual power.’ This is the power of some to get things at the expense of others, as in monopolistic power and monopsonistic power. Each of these depends not merely on what one has to offer but on whether there are others who offer it or whether one’s counterparty has access to the others who offer it. A difference in conflictual power between parties can also involve a lack of power of some due to their lack of ability to enter into agreements, which can occur in cases of great inequality of background resources and asymmetries of information. It is hard for poor people to get credit or insurance in markets because the price of the credit or insurance is driven up by the fact that the lender or insurer doesn’t know how serious the risk of default or bad action is and the poor person does not have collateral. Credit and insurance are essential steps to participating fully in markets for production; they give people opportunities to advance their interests and thus empower them in relation to others. Hence, the power of poor people is severely curtailed in economic life. Though the distinction is intuitive, I still do not have a complete definition with which to distinguish these two notions of power. But three remarks may help. First, this notion of equality of opportunity is very close to Rawls’ fair equality of opportunity in which only talent and willingness to put out effort make a difference to what social positions of power one has access to. (Here it is important to be careful and not to confuse the possession of talent with monopolistically held talent.) Second, this idea is analogous to democratic equality. People often speak of equality of opportunity for influence in democracy, especially with regard to equal participation in processes of discussion and debate. But strictly speaking they do not have complete equality of opportunity for influence. People usually distinguish between one’s capacity to participate and one’s ability to persuade. The democratic principle permits that some have more influence than others when they are able to make arguments that are more persuasive. In some sense, those with more talent at making good arguments have more power. But this is not an unjust inequality of power. The reason is that the power is a kind of collaborative power, which depends on people accepting the arguments. Third, one indicator of inequality of power in the sense I am interested in is market power, that is power to mark up the price of one’s goods. A natural worry concerning the distinction between collaborative and conflictual power is that both are functions of limited supply. In one case, the supply is relatively small and in the other it is reduced to one or a few colluding suppliers. But here we can make use of the theory of perfect markets as a kind of benchmark. In a perfect market, the supplier is a price-taker, while in monopolistic markets, the supplier is a price-maker and actually restricts supply. The latter is a strong indicator that we are dealing with power in the conflictual sense. The presence of market power seems to me to point to the distinction, though I have not given 136 Thomas Christiano a rigorous definition of these two notions. Another kind of indicator are inabilities to access markets because of low endowments and asymmetries of information. In contrast, complete and perfect markets with an egalitarian distribution of initial endowments will equalise power in this sense even though some may have some more collaborative power than others because they have more to offer. Market imperfections will create inequalities of power in many cases, that can only be rectified by institutional design. Here concerns of efficiency and equality dovetail since the same problems give rise to problems of both efficiency and equality. It is important to distinguish collaborative and conflictual power because we do not want to restrict collaborative power but we do want to restrict conflictual power. To restrict collaborative power would in effect be to restrict the ability to satisfy needs and desires. We want those who are most talented to be in the right places in the division of labour since this works to everyone’s advantage. I want to add one more element to the discussion of equality of opportunity. We should distinguish ‘competitive’ equality of opportunity from ‘constructive’ equality of opportunity. Competitive equality of opportunity obtains when persons compete for a particular position or set of positions in the division of labour. There is equality when they have the same chances to succeed at achieving these positions given the same talents and willingness to put out effort (Rawls 1971). This kind of equality of opportunity assumes as fixed the division of labour and the criteria for being a good occupant of the positions in the division of labour. A deeper, constructive conception of equality of opportunity will include not only the ability to compete for positions but also the ability to shape the division of labour itself. This means the ability to play a role in determining what kind of organisation one wants and the criteria of selection for the different positions in that organisation. This is an essential part of a market among equals (Young 1990; Fishkin 2014): people have choices regarding what kind of organisation they want to be a part of and how it works. Possession of merely equal competitive opportunities is compatible with a deeply inegalitarian society. To have equal competitive opportunities merely to occupy roles in deeply hierarchical organisations implies a severe limit to the capacity to shape the social world one lives in, both because the menu of organisations is limited and because one’s capacities are limited in the lower parts of the hierarchy. This allows us now to put together the idea of equality in the market. Equality in the market implies equal power in the market, in the sense of equal conflictual power. This requires that persons have equal access to the cognitive conditions for succeeding well in the market and fair equality of opportunity in the market, in both the competitive and constructive senses outlined above. I think we can say that perfectly competitive and complete markets with an egalitarian distribution of initial endowments Why Does Worker Participation Matter? 137 will satisfy this principle. Perfectly competitive and complete markets are free markets and are a complete realisation of this idea of equality in the market (as long as endowments are equal), because there are no problems of monopoly or monopsony and information is complete, so there are no problems of credit or insurance and thus no barriers to full participation in the market. Regulation of markets beyond enforcement of contract and property is unnecessary. Just to illustrate this idea we can invoke the neoclassical equivalence theorems regarding ownership of the firm. In perfectly competitive and complete markets whether capital rents labour or labour rents capital is a matter of no significance. They are both equally efficient, there are no barriers to either of these (Dreze 1989). Here equality of power in the multidimensional sense I outlined above is fully realised. And, it should be noted, there is no reason for the society to intervene. But, of course, these conditions of perfection and completeness do not obtain in most labour markets. Economic theorists since Adam Smith have recognised and deplored the massive inequality of power in the labour market between owners of firms and workers (Smith 1776). And they recognise that the terms of agreement between labour and capitalist are heavily determined in favour of the capitalist as a result. Hence, in this case, equality in the market is not achieved. There are two ways in which they are not achieved. The first is that workers have unequal power in the market relative to capital and firms. The second is that firms tend rigidly to be structured as hierarchical entities (Christiano 2022). This is not merely a fact about the outcomes of the market but about the market processes themselves. The toolkit of collective bargaining, worker cooperatives, works councils, and co-determination, as well as combinations of these, are all potential remedies to this kind of inequality of power. They counter the unequal power of the monopsonist and the economic weakness of the poor person with little access to credit or insurance with an institutional design that is meant to remedy the inequality. They substitute one kind of power that is inaccessible to the worker with another kind that is accessible. To see the importance of the idea of worker participation as a remedy for lack of power, it is worth contrasting low skilled workers with very high skilled workers. The latter have a great deal of bargaining power in the market and are able to structure their relations with others more in accordance with their concerns. They usually have worker participation in some form or other, but the legal system does not need to insist on worker participation for them because they already have sufficient power. But worker participation is not necessarily to be expected in markets where there is a lot of inequality of power. Indeed, some markets may be rigidly biased against this kind of remedy. Monopsony and great inequality of wealth are background conditions that can rigidly bias the 138 Thomas Christiano labour market against these tools. The very institution that is meant to remedy inequality of power in markets is precluded by those markets where the remedy is necessary. And so, there must be some kind of legal design of markets that includes one or another of these tools to remedy the inequality that normally arises in the market. To be sure, there are other things a society can do to help remedy inequalities of power. For instance, it can introduce a powerful welfare state, including income support, healthcare provision and social security, to protect people against losses of income. But these are usually not sufficient to counter the inequality of power in the markets that arise from monopsony and inequality of wealth. Economists measure significant markdowns in wages in the United States, e.g., despite its powerful welfare state (Manning 2021). Another set of provisions are occupational health and safety requirements and a minimum wage. But these are also not substitutes for worker participation. Rather, there is complementarity between worker participation and occupational health and safety concerns, since the laws requiring these protections are often ignored by firms that do not have worker participation (Donado and Walde 2012). 3 Participation and Political Equality The third consideration in favour of worker participation in firms is its contribution to political equality. Here I want to defend what I call the complementarity of participation in firms and political participation. The participation of workers in firms tends greatly to enhance the political participation of those workers and increases its effectiveness. Versions of this thesis have been defended before (Pateman 1970; Cohen and Rogers 1995; O’Neill and White 2019). Carole Pateman argues that worker participation in firms gives workers increased efficacy in politics. Workers learn to engage in argument and debate in the participatory workplace and are then able to think about politics in a more open and receptive way. To be sure, one can get this kind of education from participation in other associations. But work is distinctive, because there is a lot at stake in workplace discussions and also because work occupies more time and energy by far than any other associative activity one can engage with. I want to add another set of arguments. A number of recent studies have shown two things that would seem to support a very strong role for worker participation. These studies mostly concern unions, so there is a need to draw inferences from these studies for other forms of participation. First, members of unions are very significantly better informed about politics than are other persons in the same jobs but who are not in unions (Kim and Margalit 2017; MacDonald 2021). Second, politicians in legislative districts in the United States that have high union density are substantially more responsive to working-class and lower middle-class interests than are other politicians (Becher and Stegmuller 2021). Why Does Worker Participation Matter? 139 Let me explain what I take to be the implications of these two statistical claims. I will start with the second one. Larry Bartels, Martin Gilens, and others have argued that representatives in the United States are highly responsive to the opinions of the upper tercile of the income distribution, only a little responsive to the middle tercile and not at all to the bottom tercile (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012; for a contrasting view, see Elkjaer 2020). Responsiveness of politicians to the opinions of constituents is the principal mechanism by which political power is secured for people. High levels of responsiveness imply that those constituents have a lot of power. No responsiveness implies that the constituents have no power. Hence these very stark differences of responsiveness imply stark differences in political power. There is a great deal of inequality of power in American democracy. The one thing that bucks this trend is responsiveness to union members in districts with high union density. These are people in the top half of the lower tercile and the bottom half of the middle tercile. If we look at the larger trends in society, we see that declining unions since the 1970s in the United States are associated with the declining fortunes of the bottom half of the income distribution. And we see that part of the decline occurs because Congress has been less and less friendly to workers. Minimum wage has declined, protection of union organisation has declined, and enforcement and updating of laws protecting workers has declined. A significant part of the increase in inequality is due to the fact that there are far fewer strong organisations promoting the interests of workers in politics (Rosenfeld 2014; Freeman 2007). Unions played a very large role in building and supporting the welfare state in northern Europe (Streeck and Hassel 2003). How is this connected with the informedness of workers? Democracy, when basic rights are protected (such as the rights to vote, to compete for office, to express one’s views and associate freely with others, and to contest free and fair elections) is essentially an information system. It enables the transmission of information and the ability to understand it, synthesise it, and know how to act on it. Politicians pay attention to those who pay attention to them. The more a group of persons knows about politicians, policies, and parties, the more the politicians will pay attention to their distinctive concerns (Downs 1957). Of course, people who are not well informed can still vote on the basis of party identification or personality, but these are fuzzy signals and give politicians a lot of wiggle room in which to make choices. What we see is that the better-off members of society are better educated and better informed about politics. They tend to vote in higher numbers. They also tend to favour programmes that advance their interests. When informed, they tend to disfavour redistribution. The worse-off parts of the population are less well educated and less informed about politics. They tend to turn out less. They tend to favour more redistribution when they are informed. But politicians don’t pay much attention to them except perhaps to the 242 Phil Parvin expertise as well as sectoral interests, in practice it often leads to deadlock, stalemate, and – consequently – watered-down policies which favour the status quo. So, liberal egalitarians criticise lobbying for undermining democracy while classical liberals and libertarians criticise it as an inevitable byproduct of democracy. But both are united in understanding lobbying as a negative consequence of broken capitalism. It enables certain organisations, and businesses in particular, to secure favourable treatment from elected governments to stifle market competition and get exemption from laws which apply to everyone else. Furthermore, the need for lobbying grows according to an internal logic of crony capitalism. As more organisations secure their profitability and success through lobbying, it is only rational for more and more organisations to engage in more and more of it. And as more businesses engage in it, the more it is necessary for organisations representing other interests – consumers, workers, etc. – to engage in it too. The imbalances of power characteristic of the contemporary disaggregated state are exacerbated by the internal logic of crony capitalism to expand the role of lobbying and are left untouched by this expansion. Lobbying begets lobbying. The only hope for less powerful organisations to make an impact, is to play the lobbyists at their own game: a game in which elite organisations enjoy an overwhelming structural advantage. 4 The Scale of the Problem: Norm Capture and the Structural Barriers to Reform How, then, do we lessen the disproportionate power held by lobby groups for elite and corporate interests? While libertarians and egalitarians agree that the cause of the problem is the lived practice of capitalism, they propose different solutions. Classical liberals and libertarians, after all, seek to minimise the role of lobbying in democracy by restricting the scope of democracy and reducing the size of the state. Egalitarians, on the other hand, generally seek to expand the scope of democracy and increase the size of the state. Libertarians seek to remove the problem at source, avoiding the need to increase state regulation and rules which serve to stifle the operation of free markets. Egalitarians seek to constrain the activities of lobbyists and markets more generally through democratically enacted laws. That is, libertarians and classical liberals see democracy as an unjust constraint on markets which enables monopolies to translate wealth into power, while egalitarians see democracy as a just constraint on markets which can, if structured correctly, impose limits on the activities of lobbyists and corporate interests, as well as secure greater equality through various state initiatives aimed at redistributing wealth. Hidden in Plain Sight 243 For libertarians, the solution is a radical reconfiguration of political institutions and a dramatic reduction in the size and scope of the state. Abolishing as much regulation as possible and ensuring that limited states are kept out of as much of the economy as possible would ensure that lobbyists for corporate interests would become redundant: profitability would no longer depend on securing links with government and the state, and so the need for lobbying and lobbyists would dry up (Badhwar 2020; Mitchell 2012). Corporations would need to stand on their own two-feet: they would know that they would not be bailed out in times of crisis and that their profitability would depend on innovation, not government favouritism (Munger and Villarreal-Diaz 2019). The solution for egalitarians is actually less radical, as it involves the augmentation of existing democratic institutions (rather than their abolition or replacement) and legislative measures aimed at tightening lobbying rules. Egalitarians believe that passing laws which ensure transparency, limit spending, regulate fairly and firmly, ensure strict penalties for groups which break the rules and impose steeper taxes on corporations with a view to alleviating inequalities and creating a more level playing field would, if done correctly, strike a balance between ensuring the democratic right of all to lobby elected politicians and state bodies on the one hand, and ensuring that lobby groups representing elite interests do not have disproportionate influence on the other. I do not want to evaluate either approach here. Instead, I want to make a different, deeper point: that both libertarians and egalitarians face the same fundamental challenges in resolving the problem. I have written elsewhere of the obstacles which stand in the way of legislative or institutional reform: changes to laws and regulations, as well as institutional reforms, are hampered by the fact that they would first need to pass through institutions and processes which have already been ‘captured’ by powerful lobby groups (Parvin 2021). In order for change to be actioned, it would need to be agreed by lobby groups who would stand to lose out from the changes. Lobby groups have generally proven unwilling to relinquish any of their power, leading to ineffective regulation as in, for example, the UK 2014 Lobbying Act, or no regulation at all: of all the world’s ‘major states’ (including ‘all OECD countries, plus major democracies in Europe, Asia and Latin America’) only 17 political systems had lobbying laws in place in 2017, a figure which remains the same today (Chari et al. 2019). The fact that legislative and institutional reform must be proposed within, and must withstand scrutiny from, democratic institutions can be seen to be a huge obstacle to reform once the nature and scope of those institutions, and their composition, is fully understood. In Section 1, 244 Phil Parvin I described how unelected bodies and organisations are central to policy formation and delivery in contemporary democracies, and wield significant power. In Section 3, I then discussed some of the ways in which this policy making process is dominated by, and disproportionately composed of, organisations which lobby for the interests of wealthy elites. Lobbying is, in the words of Baumgartner et al., a process of ‘mobilising bias’ that exists within mainstream democratic politics, its institutions, and its discourse (2009). The lobbying community is dominated by large, well-resourced organisations – businesses, think tanks, trade associations, industry groups – which argue for private interests. The structure of the modern state thus works in the favour of those groups who possess the resources and human capital to establish strong networks across the different sources of power and responsibility to be found within it. This is not to say that businesses always get what they want. Environmental groups, consumer groups, and other non-corporate organisations have had some success in shifting the agenda and holding corporations to account, but examples of such are notable because they are rare. Smaller groups representing the concerns of non-elites and minorities are constantly faced with having to push against the weight of the in-built bias in the system in ways that elite lobby groups do not. While it is true that many different organisations and bodies lobby the state, those representing wealthy elites find that they do so more easily than other groups and have greater success in securing or halting policy change (Bartels 2017; Baumgartner et al. 2009). But the problem is not merely institutional. The deeper problem is that, over the long term, lobby groups representing elite interests have – through their dominance in the lobbying community and in wider processes of policy-making and decision-making – been able to ‘capture’ the political culture, and to help shape the norms and values of citizens in democratic societies in ways which foreground and entrench elite interests (and the political initiatives necessary to advance them) as mainstream, natural and feasible, and cast the interests of non-elite citizens (and their associated political programmes) as radical, impracticable, and often dangerous. Social norms are important subjects of analysis for political philosophers. Their importance is most obviously emphasised by theorists working in the Marxist and Hegelian traditions, but they are also central to communitarian, liberal, feminist, and other traditions too. Norms provide the background context in which we understand ourselves and the world. We choose and act and live our lives situated in dense networks of values and ideas which are not always visible, but which provide structure to our lives and to the wider society: through generations of socialisation, individuals absorb the values of the society in which they live, they learn the rules and find their place, and, in doing so, reinforce these values and ensure their survival (Bourdieu 1990; Okin 1989). Hidden in Plain Sight 245 Prevailing ideas and established norms also determine the limits of what is possible, both for individuals in their life-choices and also for a society. They determine the limits of what is seen as politically feasible and define which ideas are mainstream and which are radical. In the UK, arguments in favour of universal healthcare, which is free at point of use, are entirely mainstream. In the USA, they are radical. In the USA, arguments in favour of gun ownership are mainstream. In the UK, they are radical. The capacity for a society to change is not constrained merely by formal laws and institutions, but also the imagination of the people and the values which constitute the political culture. Neither an individual nor a society can alter its course unless they or it believe that altering its course is possible. Activists throughout history have known all too well the stifling energy of widespread assumptions about what is ‘true’ or ‘normal’ or ‘inevitable’ in politics. A central task facing any movement for political change is causing a disruption in the public culture, to encourage people to ‘think different,’ to step outside of the social and normative context in which they live, and to challenge normalised beliefs and patterns of behaviour. We can see this in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to reveal that many supposed ‘facts’ about women and society which were seen at the time as natural (and therefore, immutable) were actually socially constructed (and therefore, changeable) (e.g., Friedan 1963). The result was a dramatic shift in the rights and status of women, but also in the political culture more widely: a situation that was viewed by the political mainstream as ‘naturally’ or ‘obviously’ true and correct was revealed by the radical periphery to be untrue. Where change was seen as impossible and unneeded, it became seen as possible and necessary. Similarly, the civil rights movement succeeded in shifting generations of settled attitudes about the ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ inferiority of people of colour and expanded people’s horizons about what in US society was possible or feasible. The women’s movement and the civil rights movement provided a point of perspective from outside the dominant normative structure from which to observe overarching norms and values. They showed that, despite appearances to the contrary, other ways were possible and necessary. Social norms and values are extremely important, therefore. They have the power to define people, and to constrain or liberate them, by presenting them with the world in which they live and act and choose. Sexist values reified and entrenched through ongoing patterns of behaviour can constrain the lives and the aspirations of women, shape men’s attitudes to women, and cultivate in both men and women the ‘knowledge’ that these ‘facts’ are unchangeable (Mackinnon 1989). Racist norms can oppress people of colour by holding them in place and teaching them that the place in which they are held is immutable and natural. The radical 246 Phil Parvin shifts in political culture ushered in by activists for civil rights and gender equality show that change is possible but that it is difficult, involving sacrifice and bravery and imagination. Change has to begin with a radical claim that seems, in the context of wider entrenched social norms and prevailing values, wrong, impossible, and perhaps nonsensical. In democracies around the world, including the UK and the USA, lobby groups representing elite interests have not only engaged in the elite capture of state institutions and the broader policy making process, they have also engaged in what I call ‘norm capture’: they have, over many years, gradually but systematically helped to shape the values and ideals of the political culture in ways which establish elite interests as mainstream and natural and feasible and rule contrary interests off the table as infeasible, inadmissible and dangerous. They have not done so deliberately, or at least my claim does not rest on the fact that they did. The problem is structural. Arguments which favour elite interests by concentrating wealth and privilege among an ever-diminishing number of high-net-worth individuals, and, by foregrounding the interests of businesses and their owners over workers, become assimilated into the background culture such that their function in entrenching and perpetuating inequality becomes lost. Ideological or partial statements become absorbed into the mainstream culture and reframed as non-ideological and impartial declarations of facts. Language matters, and the language of mainstream political discourse – the way we come to describe and understand political challenges and even identify them – has been shaped at least partly by organisations like the Institute for Economic Affairs and business interests in the UK, and the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks and interest groups in the USA, which have been instrumental in mainstreaming crony capitalist ideology in those countries since the 1980s and establishing it as the de facto natural standard for economic and political success (Medvetz 2012). Organisations which champion elite interests have had particular success in the USA, largely through their ability to leverage the founding mythology of that country (as one grounded in meritocracy, the claim that American markets distribute wealth fairly on the basis of hard work and talent, rather than – as egalitarians argue – unfairly on the basis of luck). Against such a background, but also in the context of demographic shifts put in motion by Thatcherism in the UK, elite groups have been able to establish crony capitalism as a natural consequence of a commitment to freedom and responsibility, in which the wealthy are held to be deserving of their wealth, which was achieved through hard work and talent, and the poor are seen as deserving of their poverty. In a context in which the norms of crony capitalism have been widely internalised and are taken as given, in which it is widely seen as inevitable that we should prioritise the freedom of businesses to pursue their Hidden in Plain Sight 247 economic interests, to maximise their profits, and in which the profit motive is seen as a central and reasonable engine of wealth creation and freedom, arguments that question these things, or which suggest that a different way is possible or necessary, are often seen as radical or bizarre, or harmful. Initiatives designed to alleviate inequalities become reframed as expensive insurance schemes, or as disincentives to work, or even as unpatriotic (Thomas 2016). Increases in corporation tax on multibillion dollar companies are criticised for their negative impact on entrepreneurialism and innovation. Companies and their lobbyists meet calls for greater fairness with threats. They will be forced relocate to different countries, they say, or to lay off workers or reduce production. Increasing businesses taxes will, with regret, mean fewer vaccines, fewer cars, more expensive food and medicine and clothes. In the USA, arguments in favour of extending free healthcare provision are met by the argument from insurance companies, private health providers and Republican politicians that doing so would be too costly, too soft on the poor or too un-American. In the USA (and less so in the UK) labour unions are seen as a threat to democracy and economic growth. In the UK and the USA economic success is increasingly measured narrowly in terms of the success of the stock market, even though the majority of stocks and shares are overwhelmingly owned by the wealthiest in society. In 2021, 51% of all directly held stocks in the US stock market were owned by the top 1% by net-worth, while the bottom 50% owned none. The US government’s $1.5 trillion injection into the stock market in 2020 represented one of the single largest upward redistributions of wealth from public to private hands in history. Between March 23rd and April 20th 2020, $7 trillion was added to the capital wealth of US stockholders. In the same month, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs. The problem is not simply that states like the UK and the USA are, with the help of elite lobby organisations, designing policies and making decisions which satisfy the interests of the wealthy. It is that these trajectories of worsening inequality are considered by so many to be normal, inevitable or immutable. Crucially, they are seen as such by the people who have the most to lose: the poor. Data gathered by political scientists over the past half-century show clearly how citizens of low socioeconomic status act and form political preferences in response to wider social norms which harm their wider interests (e.g., Achen and Bartels 2017; Bartels 2017). In the USA, for example, the poorest have historically voted against measures like the extension of Medicaid, social security, and legislation aimed at strengthening labour unions. In states like Kentucky, which have become increasingly dependent on federal funding for their economic stability, citizens have increasingly voted for conservative policies which would roll back federal funding, decimating the very services they have come to rely on (Mettler 2018). In the UK, low socioeconomic groups have consistently rejected tax increases and 248 Phil Parvin other measures aimed at alleviating economic inequalities. Crony capitalist norms shape the values and expectations of citizens, even to the point of convincing them to act in ways which are harmful to them. The real challenge posed by lobbying is the role it plays in entrenching and shaping these wider norms and ideals about politics, what is feasible and what is not, what is radical and what is not, in ways which shape citizens’ choices, expectations, and sense of self. Lobby groups help shape and reify the prevailing form of broken capitalism which fits neither libertarian nor egalitarian politics, but which characterises capitalist states across the world, a form of capitalism which harnesses the power of the state (distributed across its numerous majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions and shared in complex ways with non-state organisations of numerous kinds) to entrench patterns of behaviour across the political culture and encourage citizens to believe that crony capitalism is the best, or the most natural, or the inevitable way to organise a society. 5 Conclusion The challenge posed by lobbying is thus bigger than lobbying itself, and concerns the norms, ideals and values which provide the context in which lobbying operates and makes sense. It is to reveal the non-natural, non-immutable nature of these values, to reveal that they can be changed and to convince those at the bottom with the most to lose that the world with which they are presented is not the only one or the natural one. This, I suggest, is a central task of democratic theory and practice: to roll back the prevailing background values that support and justify a form of democracy and a form of capitalism which work to entrench power and wealth at the top and allow wealthy elites, through the organisations that represent them, to control the political culture. It is difficult to know how such a thing might be possible. It may be impossible. At the very least, the large and complex nature of the problem suggests the need for a similarly large and complex solution: there will be no quick fixes through mere legal or regulatory reform of lobbying. If caps on campaign spending were introduced in the USA tomorrow, for example, or if tighter lobbying rules had been introduced in the UK in the wake of the recent government inquiry into lobbying, the disproportionate influence of wealthy elites would remain (Allegretti 2021). It would be found in the centrality of elite organisations in the democratic system, and in the broader values of the public culture in which they are mainstream. The dominance of lobby groups representing elite interests, and the background values and norms which explain these elites and see them endure, has been built over the long term, and lobby groups themselves have been involved in this process: leveraging their wealth to establish disproportionately strong and close networks with states, publicly espousing the virtues of crony capitalism from Hidden in Plain Sight 249 positions of disproportionate prominence, harnessing the energies of the disaggregated state for their own purposes. 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If this electioneering style is adopted by important competitors, it may end up poisoning the entire electoral debate, to the disadvantage of voters that campaigns are meant to inform. According to a deliberative and public-reason-driven reading (Muirhead and Rosenblum 2006; White and Ypi 2016; Bonotti 2017), one may think that partisanship is at odds with campaigns’ nondeliberative environment. This is not the case, though. While deliberation may develop among fellow partisans (Wolkenstein 2016; 2020), a partisan conception of agency does not require citizens to examine political issues in an impartial and detached way all the time, as deliberative accounts do (Muirhead 2010; Biale 2018). The entire point of partisanship is that partisans are free to be partial towards their own viewpoints, so long as they recognise others’ viewpoints as legitimate, though not as equally valid (Biale 2018, 137). Naturally, this still means that partisans should avoid factionalism, in the sense of a staunch defence of purely sectoral interests in a biased and fact-insensitive manner, as this would be incompatible with their acceptance of pluralism. Yet this requirement does not translate into an obligation to assume an impartial perspective on political issues. Independents who listen to partisans’ debates may assess facts impartially, but partisans typically do not. When they conform to these normative expectations, parties satisfy the three functions of campaigns in that they are particularly well positioned to inform citizens, offer them reasons, and mobilise them. In so doing, parties contribute to preparing citizens for the exercise of their agency at elections. The extent to which parties satisfy these functions depends on three aspects: the inter-party system, parties’ internal structure, and parties’ financial resources. As a matter of fact, the time in which each citizen could simply stand up in the agora and offer to run for an elected office by declaring his willingness to do so is long gone if it was ever there at all. In contemporary mass democracies, no candidate can hope to inform, persuade, and motivate her prospective voters without having money to reach them. Financial resources pay for advertising, printing flyers, buying airtime on national radio and TV broadcasts7 and of course organising events (to raise more money). As Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign bid shows, throwing money at campaigns does not guarantee electoral success (Amorós and Puy 2010). Nevertheless, a minimal financial endowment is necessary and even seems to affect a candidate’s chances of winning (Alexander 2005). Parties pool resources from different sources, like membership dues, private donations and public funds (van Biezen and Kopecký 2017), and use them to support their candidates’ bid for office. In so doing, they offer a structure for political competition that does not simply reproduce citizens’ economic inequalities in the political sphere.8 And yet No Money, No Party 259 normative theorists working on parties do not interact with normative theorists working on campaign finance. To remedy this lack of communication, the next section outlines the scholarly debate over campaign finance, while the fourth explains what party and campaign scholars can learn from each other. 3 Campaign Finance While often making the headlines of many countries’ political debate, campaign finance has rarely been scrutinised by democratic theorists. Most scholars who examine it have the US Supreme Court’s rulings in mind and tend to overlook other countries’ funding schemes. Since in the US parties are best understood as ‘loose alliances’ rather than proper organisations (Katz and Kolodny 1994, 24), the normative literature on campaign finance has failed to properly consider them. This exclusive focus on the US, furthermore, is partly explained by the fact that campaign finance is at the same time a very sensitive issue in American public discourse and highly contextual, connected as it is to the broader set of circumstances in which campaigns take place. Campaign finance situates itself in a middle ground position between the institutions of the electoral system and campaign ethics, which govern political actors’ electioneering conduct. Offering a normative account of campaign finance that is justifiable across various electoral systems is therefore difficult. And yet the problem of private money skewing the democratic process sadly characterises various democracies around the globe (Cagé 2020). This chapter follows the blueprint laid out by US scholars, but also makes reference to other Western European countries.9 According to Dennis Thompson (2002, 105), regulations of campaign finance involve three related questions: (1) the object of regulation (contributions, expenditures, or both); (2) the subject whose contribution is regulated (wealthy individuals, parties, unions, interest groups); and (3) the objective of regulation (fighting inequity, corruption, lack of competitiveness, etc.). Before moving on to the third question, which constitutes the normative core of the debate about campaign finance, a few terminological clarifications are needed. The use of private money in campaigns can be divided into two broad categories: contributions (the money that individuals and legal entities donate to candidates) and expenditures (the money candidates spend on their campaign). Although clearly connected, these have been traditionally kept separate in the US public debate (Issacharoff and Karlan 1999), because of a US Supreme Court’s ruling that banned limits on expenditures but not on contributions (Buckley v. Valeo). According to the court’s reasoning, both limits on expenditures and contributions constitute infringements on the First Amendment rights of free speech 260 Chiara Destri and association. However, while limits on contributions are justified because they prevent corruption or its appearance, limits on expenditures lack such a strong justification and are therefore unacceptable (Sunstein 1994; Dawood 2015, 333). Clearly, this position is not universally shared, as European countries such as France, the UK, and Italy feature limits on candidates’ spending and countries such as Spain, the UK, and Italy also limit political parties’ expenditures.10 To give an example of how consequential expenditure limits can be, compare the US, on the one hand, where no limits apply, and France and the UK, on the other, where they do. The average candidate for the US House of Representatives spent about 1.7 million dollars in 2018 (Sides et al. 2019, 85), whereas in France and the UK the average parliamentary candidate contented herself with spending around 18,000 euros in 2012 and 4,000 euros in 2015, respectively (Cagé 2020, 22). Even accounting for population differences, the spending difference is significant. This chapter focuses on direct contributions, called hard money in the US, which are campaign-related funds given directly to a candidate or party. Indirect contributions, by contrast, are funds given to political parties for nonpartisan goals, such as encouraging people to vote, and funds given to third parties for influencing public opinion (Sides et al. 2019). Among third parties we count interest groups, faith-based organisations, charities and, in the US context, political action committees (PACs) and ‘independent expenditure committees’ (known as Super PACs).11 The lack of restrictions on third-party spending is an increasingly serious problem for democratic campaigns, as other spending limits can be eluded by rerouting money through third-party channels (Issacharoff and Karlan 1999). In Citizens United v. FEC, the US Supreme Court, for instance, maintained the limit on third parties’ direct contributions but lifted the one on indirect ones (Dawood 2015, 333). Yet the issue also concerns many other democratic countries, as third parties are rarely banned from spending on campaign activities (only 13.3% of all states reported in the International IDEA database ban them) and 42.8% of reported countries have no limitation on thirdparty spending at all, including Germany, France, and Italy.12 The distinction between direct and indirect contributions maps onto Christiano’s salient distinction between ‘gatekeeping’ money and money as ‘influence on public opinion’ (2012, 244ff).13 Money acts as a gatekeeper when paying individuals or legal entities can set the agenda by funding their preferred candidates (what happens with direct contributions). By financing certain candidates, wealthy individuals and interest groups obtain protection of their interests at the decision-making level (Gilens 2012; Bartels 2016). In contrast, money influences public opinion when paying individuals or legal entities can broadcast their opinions to the public more extensively. This is what happens with indirect contributions and related expenditures, which sway public opinion No Money, No Party 261 in one way or another by making wealthy actors’ interests and their conception of justice more pervasive in public debate (Christiano 2012, 247). Naturally, the two phenomena are intertwined: just as donations to candidates can end up influencing the public sphere through candidates’ speeches, so can indirect expenditures affect candidates’ electoral chances by swaying public opinion. Since contributions affect elections in intertwined ways, a thorough normative account of campaign finance ought to consider both money as gatekeeper and money as influence. However, as Pevnick (2016a; 2016b) observes, all three most important rationales that have been invoked to regulate campaign finance may either threaten citizens’ right to free speech (if they require a strict cap on both gatekeeping and influence money), or end up being ineffective (if they only apply to money as gatekeeping). The justification of a system of floors, i.e., public funding, takes then precedence over justifying a system of ceilings (Thompson 2002, 113). This chapter does the same for three reasons. First, gatekeeping money is what is primarily at stake when political parties are involved. Second, all three main rationales for campaign finance regulations support public funding.14 Finally, the case of European countries, most of which bestow generous public provisions on parties, show that when state subsidies are predominant, ‘other sources of income tend to be relatively insignificant’ (van Biezen and Kopecký 2017, 88). The first and virtually undisputed concern in campaign finance debates is the threat of corruption. At the basic level corruption involves public power used to realise private gains (Thompson 2005) and so-called quid pro quo corruption happens when donors use hard money with the aim of getting specific favours in return (Sunstein 1994). Quid pro quo corruption, or its appearance, plays a central role in US Supreme Court’s decisions (Dawood 2015, 334) as it is considered the only valid reason to limit wealthy donors’ right of free speech by imposing limits on their contributions (Pevnick 2016a, 1185). Interestingly though, such a limit on natural persons’ direct contributions, while present in countries such as Canada, France, and Belgium (the limit applies also to legal persons in Italy and Ireland), is missing in other European democracies such as Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and most Scandinavian countries.15 Since the crux of this argument depends on the conception of corruption one endorses (Dawood 2015, 335), Thompson (1995) draws a distinction between individual corruption, concerning personal gains and institutional corruption, which takes place when the institutional setting provides the wrong incentives to players, thereby damaging the integrity of the democratic process (see also Warren 2004). The problem then becomes distinguishing between legitimate responsiveness to citizens’ interests and wrongful dependence on a subset of wealthy donors. To this end, Lessig proposes to look at what he calls ‘dependence 262 Chiara Destri corruption’ (2011, 17). When candidates need a certain amount of financial support from their donors to be considered viable, it is difficult to see how they can be relied upon to govern in ways that are not disproportionately favourable to those donors (Sides et al. 2019, 119). Hence, instead of depending ‘on the people alone,’ Congress becomes dependent on wealthy contributors. Avoiding corruption is not the only admissible goal. Unlike the US Supreme Court, the German constitutional court has regularly struck down political finance laws when they violated explicit constitutional guarantees of (relatively) equal opportunities for political influence for citizens (Scarrow 2018, 104). The German constitutional court’s preoccupation is with a different goal: protecting citizens’ political equality. Dominant in campaign finance discussions in political theory (Dawood 2015), the principle of political equality requires that citizens enjoy equal opportunity to exercise their political influence (Beitz 1989; Sunstein 1994; Christiano 1996; Dworkin 1996; 2002; Cohen 2001; Rawls 2005). Accordingly, political equality cannot be limited to equal voting rights, but must also include equal broader influence over political affairs (Brighouse 1996).16 As Ronald Dworkin (1996) succinctly puts it, ‘Each citizen must have a fair and reasonably equal opportunity not only to hear the views of others as these are published or broadcast, but to command attention for his own views’ (19–24). The last rationale for campaign finance regulations rests on the principle of fair competition (Pevnick 2016a; 2019). At first, this goal may seem indistinguishable from the previous one. After all, as Joshua Cohen (2001) emphasises, egalitarians hold that ‘in a democracy, citizens are also agents, participants, speakers, who may aim to reshape both the terms of political debate and its results, by running for office or seeking to influence the views of candidates, the outcomes of elections and the inter-election conduct of politics’ (72, my italics). Nonetheless, equality-based arguments concern lay citizens’ opportunity for political influence in their role as participants in the public deliberation around viable candidates. By contrast, competition-based arguments look at the opportunities citizens have to become viable candidates, if they so intend, and aim at levelling the playing field (Beitz 1989, 200; Pevnick 2016a).17 As said, all these three rationales justify a system of floors aimed at limiting the import of private money in politics by ensuring public support for candidates and parties. Interestingly however, they may support significantly different schemes of public subsidies, because their goals (reducing corruption, enhancing political equality and ensuring fair competition) do not overlap completely (Pevnick 2016a; pace Lessig 2011). Any public system works for corruption scholars, as long as it is effective at limiting officeholders’ undue dependence on private donors (Pevnick 2016a, 1187). This can be realised successfully without also equalising citizens’ political influence, which is instead required by egalitarians (Beitz 1989; Christiano No Money, No Party 263 1996; Cohen 2001; Dworkin 2002; Thompson 2002). Similarly, the type of public funding that advocates of fair competition favour is one that gives all competitors equal resources, rather than giving all citizens equal opportunities to determine the results (Brighouse 1996). The voucher system acts as a litmus test because it shows how these three rationales have conflicting implications concerning the type of public funding they support. This system, proposed by Hasen (1996) and supported also by other scholars (Ackerman and Ayres 2002; Cagé 2020), allows citizens to finance their preferred candidate by employing state-funded vouchers that are equally distributed. If all direct contributions to campaigns were given exclusively through these vouchers, citizens would enjoy equal opportunity to select candidates for elections, thereby equalising gatekeeping money. This system is different from the ways most European democracies implement some form of public funding, since European parties often must pass a certain threshold of support, quantified in terms of antecedent votes or seats in parliament, to qualify for public resources (Cagé 2020).18 Accordingly, parties are proportionally reimbursed for their expenses based on the level of support they receive at prior elections. This not only favours the status quo, but also prevents citizens from discriminating between the party they want to subsidise and the one they intend to vote for. However, vouchers too may end up disproportionally benefiting candidates who enjoy widespread support at new contestants’ expense. As such, they are strongly favoured by egalitarians, possibly favoured but not required by corruption scholars and clearly opposed by advocated of fair competition (Pevnick 2016a). In fact, levelling the playing field would require distributing public funds in an equal way across candidates, regardless of the share of votes and seats allocated in previous elections (Christiano 1996).19 Despite their differences, there is one further feature that these three normative approaches share. They conceive of campaign finance regulations as an institutional setting of incentives for individual political actors. Approaches based on corruption and fair competition look at candidates and how they can enjoy equal chances to win without the support of a handful of wealthy donors. Equality-based views concentrate on citizens’ opportunities to be part of the election process, either as selectors of candidates, through their use of gatekeeping money, or as participants in the public deliberation around that process, through influence money. As a result, all three perspectives fail to properly consider the role of political parties. 4 Parties and Campaign Finance While political scientists have extensively written about party finance, normative theorists have largely ignored it. On the one hand, those coming from party studies have focused on parties’ internal structure, [Document text truncated for crawler view.]