Capitalism and democracy are in turmoil. Mutually-constitutive economic and institutional crises are the indelible marks of our age: surging inequality, widespread precarity, withering democratic institutions—the list goes on. Following the consolidation of neoliberal statecraft and the neoclassical orthodoxy that vindicated it for nearly a half-century, our present scenario is the legacy of relentless, unjust economic doctrines and policies. And although efforts to critique and explain the ongoing upheaval in capitalist societies abound, few studies have confronted the monumental endeavor of rectifying it. Yet, this is precisely the task set by A Political Economy of Justice, an ambitious and timely collection of multidisciplinary chapters edited by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson, and Josh Simons.
Acknowledging the salient ties between neoliberalism and systemic injustice, the chapters chart a path for economic justice that not only critiques and departs from the conventional ideas and policies of the last four decades, but also develops new ones by rethinking the basic rules and principles that govern political economy—including what it should be, who it should serve, and how it should function. The contributors sustain this undertaking through a unified commitment to theory and practice. The book’s thorough reformulation of the values underpinning political economy, for instance, is informed by rich accounts of social realities and economic life, whereas the prescriptions and action strategies it advances perform the work of translating the normative foundations and ideals of a just political economy into positive institutional reforms. The book also considers the types of institutions and governance regimes that are best suited to implement the economic vision it articulates. Many of the chapters propose innovative and compelling approaches to institutional experimentation across the public and private sectors that emphasize accountability, democratic organizational structures, and popular participation.
The book’s first part focuses on the principles and goals of a just political economy, from questions of production and employment to well-being and growth. The opening chapter by Yochai Benkler sets the tone for the following ones through a forceful critique of neoliberalism’s epistemology, political morality, and institutional program while also shifting concerns for economic justice from distribution to production. By placing power and material context at the center of his analysis, Benkler claims that, as a demand of justice, a post-neoliberal political economy must embed its production systems within social relations of cooperation and mutual solidarity. Also on the theme of production, Dani Rodrik and Charles Sable argue that, in a just economy, the labor process cannot be left to the discretion of private firms. Their plan for a “good jobs economy” rests on direct interventions in the sphere of production through a collaboration between the public and private sectors.
Bridging theory and practice, Glen Weyl sets out to reconcile the ongoing tension between markets and democracy. Weyl channels his aspirations for a renewed capitalist society through the RadicalxChange movement, which aims to build a political economy able to secure increasing returns for the good of humankind while promoting social and technological innovation. Much like Benkler, Deva Woodly sees neoliberalism’s atomized social ontology as a catalyst for misery and precarity. To recognize and ameliorate systemic oppression and domination, she argues that a political economy of flourishing—understood as a function of both material welfare and well-being—must confront the structural asymmetries of power that make up an individual’s material context. To this end, Woodly’s “liberatory paradigm” focuses not only on what social goods and capacities individuals possess, but also on what they are able and allowed to do with these possessions.
Given the evidence tying inequality to growth, Julie Rose asks whether the pursuit of sustained economic growth should be abandoned. To answer this question, she develops a theory of “just agrowth” by combining original readings of Mill, Keynes, and Rawls with contemporary liberal principles of justice. Rose’s reconstruction of Rawls’s difference principle—and its commitment to making the most disadvantaged members of society better off—upholds Mill’s and Keynes’s misgivings about growth while, at the same time, replacing their perfectionist judgments about the good life with broader principles of justice rooted in a liberal egalitarian commitment to effective freedom and pluralism. Rose’s just agrowth position suggests that societies should neither pursue nor abandon economic growth but treat it as a subsidiary aim of justice.
The second part of the volume offers approaches for realigning the aspirations of economic institutions with principles of justice. Tommie Shelby begins this line of inquiry with respect to the privatization of prisons. For Shelby, the central problem with private prisons is not privatization in general, but their quest for profit in particular, which [on his account] creates immoral incentives to expand the carceral sphere and promote criminalization. He maintains that eliminating the profit motive would allow private organizations to run prisons in a morally permissible way that reconciles abolitionist critiques of the prison-industrial complex and the goals of justice within the constraints of a nonideal capitalist society. Like other contributions that emphasize new synergies between the public and private sectors, Shelby’s proposal turns on a collaboration between corporations—which would be responsible for the integrity of facilities and the welfare of prisoners—and the state, which would remain in charge of using force to ensure safety, order, and discipline.
Shelby’s chapter raises questions that other contributions help to answer. First, would eliminating profit succeed in purging all pernicious financial incentives from private firms? As Malcolm Salter notes in his following chapter, one of the key ethical banes of the corporate form stems from the maximization of shareholder value, which can yield perverse outcomes regardless of profit. That is, to maximize shareholder value, a company might cut costs, drive competitors out of the market, and scale its operations while running at a loss or breaking even. Salter’s alternative guideline for corporate purpose based on “ethical reciprocity” is a potentially fruitful complement to Shelby’s critique of profit: it suggests replacing shareholder value maximization with the principle of equivalent or proportional returns from mutual exchange. The second question raised by Shelby’s proposal concerns what type of organizational structure would make nonprofit private prisons compatible with the goals of justice. A cooperative structure to which formerly and currently incarcerated individuals are a central party, for instance, could help ensure that the administration of prisons is shaped by and accountable to those whose lives it affects the most. Juliet Schor and Samantha Eddy’s chapter provides compelling insights into such a model of shared ownership and governance, which has the potential to improve working conditions, democratize the workplace, and foster opportunities for self-determination.
Other chapters in this part, such as those by Rebecca Henderson and F. Christopher Eaglin, consider the implications of corporations as political actors. Henderson contends that purpose-driven firms can play a significant role in the struggle for a more just and sustainable world, especially because public institutions have consistently failed to nurture such a world on their own. In his chapter, Eaglin argues that political actions by corporations should be restrained through external and internal reforms aimed at aligning their participation in politics with the ideals of deliberative democracy. Although I welcome Henderson’s efforts to expand our resources for justice beyond the state, I worry that placing too much of our hopes for justice and sustainability on purpose-driven entrepreneurs might relieve democratic institutions and elected officials of these responsibilities. Moreover, because her defense of corporate purpose relies on subjective and volatile criteria, such as the “implicit promise to ‘do good’” (p. 202) or “credible commitments to behaving ‘well’” (p. 201), it is vulnerable to misrepresentations. Concrete principles and public oversight would be useful in establishing industry-wide standards for corporate purpose and ensuring that it corresponds with the aspirations of justice, democracy, and the public good. But because corporations will invariably participate in politics, purposefully or not, we must also develop enforceable mechanisms to set their political endeavors on a democratic footing. This is precisely the impetus of Eaglin’s call for simultaneous reforms in government regulation and the democratization of corporate structures. Such a systemic approach to regulating businesses seems more likely to yield just and democratic outcomes across the board than those that rely on private companies and market forces to reward firms that “behave well” and punish those that misbehave.
The third part of the book focuses on democratic governance. Marc Stears stresses the important role of political movements in galvanizing efforts to transform the economy. He counsels groups invested in macrolevel economic change to shift their attention from large-scale questions to those concerning the ordinary politics of everyday life. Stears notes that, if part of the widespread contemporary feeling of despair can be attributed to the neoliberal rupture of elite and quotidian politics, then part of the solution lies in bridging the gap between these spheres. In the following chapter, K. Sabeel Rahman suggests that overcoming systemic exclusion, injustice, and inequality demands replacing the institutions and ideas of neoliberalism with new, inclusive, and emancipatory ones. Drawing on the lessons of progressive institutional design from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he traces fruitful directions for a democratic statecraft bolstered by administrative institutions that enable citizens to participate in political and economic governance.
Leah Downey furthers Rahman’s goal of democratizing the administrative state through a persuasive proposal for reforming the Federal Reserve. As she rightly discerns, the impermeability and ossification of administrative institutions such as the Fed are at odds with the basic foundations of democratic government. As a means of subjecting macroeconomic governance to democratic rule, Downey proposes a regular rechartering of the Fed in a way that would make it subservient to legislative power. Congress would thus play an important role in aligning monetary policy with democratic values by, for instance, reallocating credit on a more equal and just basis. Although skeptics may reasonably question whether Congress is the most democratic conduit of popular power today, this worry can be circumvented by expanding board membership and voting rights at regional state investment banks to an independent collective unit made up of ordinary citizens, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, and other representatives of public interest.
In the final chapter, Danielle Allen veers to a vital question of economic justice: immigration. To secure human flourishing on the basis of nondomination and political equality, she advances a new conceptualization of political membership beyond national institutions. Her proposed membership policy seeks to extend the protections of political equality to migrants while sustaining the liberalization of labor markets and maximizing their value. But rather than working through a nationalist framework restricted by citizenship, Allen adopts “polypolitanism” as a model of membership, which foregrounds the multiple organizations within the state that migrants might join to access political power, express political voice, protect their interests, and secure political equality. For Allen, the flexible and diverse opportunities for political equality and empowerment purveyed by a polypolitan approach to membership would allow connected societies to live up to the principle of difference without domination.
One limitation of the book concerns its operating analytic frame, which is confined to the nation-state and advanced Western economies. This constraint is especially puzzling given that, more than ever before, political economy transcends national borders. And if this global facet of capitalism, riddled with long-held patterns of intercontinental inequality, was the bedrock of neoliberal doctrine, then addressing the injustices it spawned requires an understanding of capitalism as a historical world system. From multinational corporations exercising quasi-governmental functions and “dark sites” of labor rights across the Global South to neocolonial foreign trade agreements and extractive supply chains of electronic goods spanning cobalt mines in the Congo and Foxconn factories in China, the social realities of contemporary capitalism make it clear that a political economy committed to justice, nondomination, and sustainability cannot be bound by the modern state.
However, as a whole, A Political Economy of Justice succeeds in developing a novel and coherent account of political economy by placing a commitment to vital principles of justice at the heart of economic thought and practice. The result is a set of imaginative and pressing calls for reorienting economic ideas and policies toward a just path. By reenvisioning political economy in terms of justice, the volume makes a crucial and urgent contribution to established accounts of the relationship between politics and the economy.
