This article argues that the existence of financial institutions considered ‘too big to fail’ (TBTF) represents a systemic injustice requiring fundamental reform of the existing financial system. Drawing on and extending recent work on structural domination in republican political theory, the article develops the concept of ‘systemic institutional domination’ to capture the distinctive form of unfreedom that TBTF engenders. Systemic institutional domination is a reflexive form of domination, where the democratic state is subjected to uncontrolled power vested in identifiable financial institutions but grounded in the norms, rules and regulations of the financial system that the state itself enacts and upholds. Because the dominated public institution is at once the constitutive author of the system and the only agent capable of reforming it, TBTF confronts republican theory with a case of second-order domination: domination of the institution charged with securing nondomination. The article identifies four dimensions of systemic domination: effective compulsion to bail out failing megabanks; de facto legal impunity; the systematic subversion of tax enforcement; and background consolidatory pressure on public finances. The article concludes by discussing the democratic paradox involved in abolishing TBTF: namely, that the dominated institution – the democratic state – is the only institution that could reform the dominating system.
David Lay Williams's The Greatest of All Plagues is a pathbreaking contribution to political theory. Spanning seven canonical thinkers, from Plato to Marx, the book maintains remarkable cohesiveness, showing that, despite their ideological differences, these thinkers converged in a set of common concerns about inequality. In this commentary, I argue that Williams risks obscuring two connected, but distinct phenomena: “inequality” and “oligarchy.” Without discounting the latter, Williams’ genealogy focuses primarily on the former. This focus on “inequality” over “oligarchy” has important implications for the critical insights he derives from his historical archive. Because oligarchy, as a political problem, is not reducible to ethical critiques of inequality, then a critical theory of oligarchy must push farther, beyond the range of Williams’ important book.
What is Hobbes's attitude toward economic inequality, and should his sovereign pursue radical redistribution? In The Greatest of All Plagues, David Lay Williams argues that the Hobbesian sovereign must widely disperse wealth, since preserving peace under the laws of nature requires it, and concentrated wealth threatens that peace. This essay challenges that claim. First, drawing on Hobbes's distinction between just and good laws, I argue redistribution is not a duty of justice for the sovereign, only something a prudent sovereign would choose to do. Second, given the acquisitive character of Hobbesian felicity, and given that wealth is merely one form of social power among several, stability and peace may not always be best secured through radical redistribution. Finally, I reflect on the limits of using Hobbes to critique modern inequality, suggesting a paradox: the more extreme inequality becomes, the weaker the Hobbesian case for having a sovereign is in the first place.
In recent years, amidst the rise of authoritarianism and other injustices, political theorists are reevaluating the normative boundaries of political disobedience. This review compares and evaluates two recent contributions to this effort from Avia Pasternak and William E. Scheuerman. It identifies shared features such as the importance of democratic equality and the instrumental value of disobedience before explaining how they disagree about the concept and permissibility of violence. The review concludes that ultimately the fundamental divide between the authors is not whether citizens may ever use violence in defense of their basic rights and interests, but where and when the conditions obtain for permissibly doing so.
This essay is a response to David Lay Williams’ reading of Plato’s political thought, in his book The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx . The review essay asks three questions: Does Williams see among practitioners of contemporary political thinking any sign of a return to the deeper moral and philosophical aspects of political theory and any sign of a move toward expanding on the safer statistical approaches he himself diagnoses as insufficient? Of the two modes of responding to radical inequality, the imposition of practical impediments to acquiring massive wealth versus the re-education of the population toward an attitude that does not value the excessive accumulation of wealth, does Williams see across the canon of thinkers he treats here any general preference for one over the other? And lastly, in response to Plato’s apparent observation of a tendency in human life to lose sight of the whole of the political community one exists in and to focus on smaller horizons of concern, are there any strategies in Plato or in the other thinkers he treats, that Williams would suggest are valuable in combatting this tendency?
