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January 29 - July 19, 2025
Since the 1980s and 1990s, governing elites carried out a neoliberal globalization project that brought massive gains for those at the top but job loss and stagnant wages for most working people. The proponents argued that the gains to the winners could be used to compensate globalization’s losers. But the compensation never arrived. The winners used their bounty to buy influence in high places and consolidate their winnings.
Government ceased to be a counterweight to concentrated economic power. Democrats and Republicans joined in deregulating Wall Street, reaping handsome campaign contributions. When the financial crisis of 2008 brought the system to the brink, they spent billions to bail out the banks but left ordinary homeowners to fend for themselves.
Brexit and the border wall both symbolized a backlash against a market-driven, technocratic mode of governing that had produced job loss, wage stagnation, rising inequality, and the galling sense among working people that elites looked down on them. The votes for Brexit and for Trump were anguished attempts to reassert national sovereignty and pride.
Self-government requires that political institutions hold economic power to democratic account. It also requires that citizens identify sufficiently with one another to consider themselves engaged in a common project. Today, both conditions are in doubt.
These two aspects of our predicament—unaccountable economic power and entrenched polarization—are connected. Both disempower democratic politics.
To revitalize American democracy, we need to debate two questions that the technocratic politics of recent decades has obscured: How can we reconfigure the economy to make it amenable to democratic control? And how can we reconstruct our social life to ease the polarization and enable Americans to become effective democratic citizens?
Unwinding the oligarchic capture of democratic institutions depends on empowering citizens to think of themselves as participants in a shared public life.
As citizens we have a stake in creating an economy hospitable to the project of self-government. This means that economic power must be subject to democratic control. It also requires that everyone be able to earn a decent living under dignified conditions, have a voice in the workplace and in public affairs, and have access to a broadly diffused civic education that equips them to deliberate about the common good.
These two fears—for the loss of self-government and the erosion of community—together define the anxiety of the age.
The inability of contemporary American politics to speak convincingly about self-government and community has something to do with the public philosophy by which we live.
The political philosophy by which we live is a certain version of liberal political theory. Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse.
to deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose one’s ends and to respect others’ rights to do the same. It requires a knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.
republican politics cannot be neutral toward the values and ends its citizens espouse. The republican conception of freedom, unlike the liberal conception, requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires.
According to the republican tradition, an economy is not only for the sake of consumption but also for the sake of self-government. If freedom depends on our capacity to share in self-rule, the economy should equip us to be citizens, not just consumers. This matters for the way we debate economic policies and arrangements.
despite its appeal, the liberal vision of freedom lacks the civic resources to sustain self-government. This defect ill-equips it to address the sense of disempowerment that afflicts our public life. The public philosophy by which we live cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires.
During the age of globalization, a rising faith in markets and a growing role for finance all but extinguished the civic strand of economic argument. And yet, public frustration with the hollow, technocratic terms of public discourse suggests that the aspiration for self-government endures.
for all its episodes of darkness, the republican tradition, with its emphasis on community and self-government, may offer a corrective to our impoverished civic life.
In contemporary American politics, most of our economic arguments revolve around two considerations: prosperity and fairness.
Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty requires self-government, which depends in turn on civic virtue.
If liberty cannot survive without virtue, and if virtue tends always to corruption, then the challenge for republican politics is to form or reform the moral character of citizens, to strengthen their attachment to the common good. The public life of a republic must serve a formative role, aimed at cultivating citizens of a certain kind.
Prompted though it was by fear for the loss of civic virtue, the Constitution did not seek to elevate the moral character of the people, at least not directly. Instead, it sought institutional devices that would save republican government by making it less dependent on the virtue of the people.
For Hamilton, the national government depended for its success on its capacity to shape the habits of the people, to interest their sensations, to win their affection, to “[circulate] through those channels and currents, in which the passions of mankind naturally flow.”
Unlike Democrats since the time of the New Deal, Andrew Jackson considered government the enemy, not the instrument of justice for the common man. This conviction stemmed partly from his view of government, and partly from his conception of justice. When government intervened in the economy, Jackson maintained, it was bound to favor the rich and the powerful. In any case, justice did not require that government redress the unequal talents and abilities by which some get more and others less.
According to Jackson, the problem was not how to use government to promote an equality of condition, but how to prevent the rich and the powerful from using government to secure privileges, subsidies, and special advantages.
While Jacksonians feared centralized economic power, the Whigs feared centralized executive power. As Whigs saw it, the threat that power posed to liberty was not to be found in the forces of industry, banking, and commerce, but instead in Jackson’s conception of the presidency.
Like their English namesakes, Clay and the American Whigs saw the greatest threat to republican government in the abuse of executive power.
The Whigs’ emphasis on balanced government and fear of executive tyranny fit firmly within the republican tradition that echoed from classical and Renaissance thought to the “country party” opposition of eighteenth-century English politics.
The Whigs’ formative project had two aspects. One was to deepen the bonds of union and cultivate a shared national identity. The other was to elevate the morality of the people, to strengthen their respect for order and their capacity for self-control. Whigs sought to realize these aims through a policy of national economic development and through various public institutions, from schools to reformatories to asylums, designed to improve the moral character of the people.
Of all the Whig projects of moral and civic improvement, their most ambitious instrument of republican soulcraft was the public school.
The question whether human beings are capable of self-government admits only a conditional answer; they are capable insofar as they possess the intelligence and goodness and breadth of view to govern on behalf of the public good.
for Jackson, governing in accordance with the public good did not require an enlightened elite of disinterested statesmen; it simply required preventing the powerful few from dominating government and turning it to their selfish ends.
The Whigs were no less hostile to a politics of self-interest, but they doubted that any class of people possessed by nature the wisdom or virtue to identify the public good.
THE VOLUNTARIST CONCEPTION of freedom that emerged in the debate over wage labor came gradually to inform other aspects of American politics and law. In the course of the twentieth century, the notion that government should shape the moral and civic character of its citizens gave way to the notion that government should be neutral toward the values its citizens espouse and respect each person’s capacity to choose his or her own ends.
Despite its achievements, however, the public life informed by the voluntarist self-image was unable to fulfill the aspiration to self-government. Despite the expansion of individual rights and entitlements in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that their control over the forces that govern their lives is receding rather than increasing.
Even as the liberal self-image deepens its hold on American political and constitutional practice, there is a widespread sense that we are caught in the grip of impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control. The triumph of the voluntarist conception of freedom has coincided, paradoxically, with a growing sense of disempowerment.
The republican tradition taught that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good.
the absence of a common life at the level of the nation motivates the drift to the procedural republic. If we cannot agree on morality or religion or ultimate ends, argue contemporary liberals, perhaps we can agree to disagree on terms that respect people’s rights to choose their ends for themselves. The procedural republic thus seeks to realize the voluntarist conception of freedom and also to detach politics and law from substantive moral controversy.
The sense of disempowerment that afflicts citizens of the procedural republic may reflect the loss of agency that results when liberty is detached from self-government and located in the will of an independent self, unencumbered by moral or communal ties it has not chosen. Such a self, liberated though it be from the burden of identities it has not chosen, entitled though it be to the range of rights assured by the welfare state, may nonetheless find itself overwhelmed as it turns to face the world on its own resources.
Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagination a picture of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereignty making the state.” But this too concealed a deeper, harder reality. The “spectacle of ‘free men’ going to the polls to determine by their personal volitions the political forms under which they should live” was an illusion. For the very technological and industrial forces that dissolved the hold of traditional communities formed a structure of power that governed people’s lives in ways beyond the reach of individual choice or acts of consent.
the lack of fit between the way people conceived their identities and the way economic life was actually organized gave rise to fears for the prospect of self-government.
The threat to self-government took two forms. One was the concentration of power amassed by giant corporations; the other was the erosion of traditional forms of authority and community that had governed the lives of most Americans through the first century of the republic. Taken together, these developments undermined the conditions that had made self-government possible.
With the loss of community came an acute sense of dislocation. In an impersonal world, men and women groped for bearings. As Americans “ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment.” Their failure to do so fueled a mood of anxiety and frustration.
the social reformer Jane Addams observed, “Theoretically, ‘the division of labor’ makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose.” But whether this unity of purpose is achieved depends on whether the participants take pride in their common project and regard it as their own; “the mere mechanical fact of interdependence amounts to nothing.”
in virtue of its scale, the modern industrial system actually undermines the common identity of those whose activities it coordinates. “The workman, the man of business, the farmer and the lawyer are contributors to the whole, but being morally isolated by the very magnitude of the system, the whole does not commonly live in their thought.”
The growing gap between the scale of economic life and the terms of collective identity led social thinkers of the day to emphasize the distinction between cooperation and community. The industrial system was a cooperative scheme in the sense that it coordinated the efforts of many individuals; but unless the individuals took an interest in the whole and regarded its activity as an expression of their identity, it did not constitute a genuine community.
modern industry and technology bound men together in an impersonal form of collective action that dismantled traditional communities without replacing them:
For Dewey, the loss of community was not simply the loss of communal sentiments, such as fraternity and fellow feeling. It was also the loss of the common identity and shared public life necessary to self-government.
A politics based on consumer identities, by contrast, changes the question. Instead of asking how to elevate or improve or restrain people’s preferences, it asks how best—most fully, or fairly, or efficiently—to satisfy them. The shift to consumer-based reform in the twentieth century was thus a shift away from the formative ambition of the republican tradition, away from the political economy of citizenship.
By detaching the Progressive cause from its formative ambition and basing it instead on fair treatment for the citizen-consumer, Weyl gestured toward a political economy of growth and distributive justice that, later in the century, would set the terms of political debate.
To be sure, both the civic and the consumer-oriented objections to monopoly were present from the start. Americans opposed economic concentration out of concern for self-government, and also out of fear of the high prices monopolies could extract from consumers.
