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Democracy against domination: Contesting economic power in progressive and neorepublican political theory

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Abstract

This article argues that current economic upheaval should be understood as a problem of domination, in two respects: the ‘dyadic’ domination of one actor by another (such as in the case of corporations over workers), and the ‘structural’ domination of individuals by a diffuse, decentralized, but nevertheless human-made system (such as the ‘market’ itself). Such domination should be contested through specifically democratic political mobilization, through institutions and practices that expand the political agency of citizens themselves. The article advances this argument by synthesizing two traditions of political thought. It reconstructs radical democratic theory from the Progressive Era (1880–1920). These thinkers in turn help to reinforce contemporary debates in neorepublican thought, resolving disputes over the scope of domination and the relationship between domination and democracy. This synthesis offers a novel normative framework for diagnosing and responding to the current combination of economic upheaval and political dysfunction.

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Notes

  1. In this, I share the methodology of combining intellectual history and contemporary political theory modeled by Gourevitch’s (2014) recent work.

  2. In this it is worth noting that the term domination shifts our view away from a narrow view of freedom as non-interference. It also helps move past debates about how to diagnose the fact of coercion, relative to different normative baselines. Not every form of interference is necessarily freedom-reducing (see, for example, Pettit, 1999; Carr, 1988).

  3. This approach to mobilization and representation aligns well with recent moves in the theory of representation (see, for example, Disch, 2011; Urbinati and Warren, 2008). It is worth noting that Pettit himself has inched in this direction more recently (see, for example, Pettit, 2012, pp. 202, 226).

  4. It is telling that the modern heirs of legal realism have all seemed paradoxically limited in their constructive normative vision, especially in context of private power and the market economy. Horwitz identifies three successors to the legal realist critique, each of which has at times dominated contemporary legal thought: a focus on legal process, the ‘critical legal studies’ movement, and the turn to law and economics (see Horwitz, 1992, pp. 269–272).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Prithvi Datta, Adam Lebovitz, Willy Forbath, Jed Purdy, Bill Novak, and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments and support.

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  1. Brooklyn Law School, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA

    K Sabeel Rahman

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Rahman, K. Democracy against domination: Contesting economic power in progressive and neorepublican political theory. Contemp Polit Theory 16, 41–64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2016.12

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