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The growing movement seeking to revive an aggressive, "neo-Brandeisian" approach to antitrust policy sees it partly as a way of protecting democracy against concentrated economic power. Yet on closer inspection, prevailing theories of democracy as collective decision making offer weak support, at best, for a neo-Brandeisian approach. Rather than abandoning the insight that an aggressive approach to antitrust can help protect democracy, however, this essay argues that we should adjust our theories of democracy to accommodate it. I first show why prevailing accounts are ill suited to explaining the democratic virtues of a neo-Brandeisian approach. I then outline an alternative ideal of democracy—defended in greater detail elsewhere—and draw out its implications for antitrust. While vindicating the intuition that aggressive antitrust policy serves democratic goals, my account also incorporates genuine worries about such an approach, and thus enables neo-Brandeisians to reformulate their democratic ambitions in more precise and promising terms.

AbstractRandom selection for political office—or "sortition"—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open‐endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition‐based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks.

AbstractContemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized means. This article seeks to synthesize these concerns, understanding them as reflecting the same underlying danger of state capture. It then articulates a set of heuristics for the design of public and administrative institutions, which aim at minimizing the risks of capture from both public and private sources. By following these heuristics, it claims, we can successfully employ the administrative state as a weapon against concentrated private power, rather than allowing it to serve as a tool of dominant groups.

Camila Vergara's Systemic Corruption is an extraordinarily rich, provocative and original work of political theory, which makes several compelling interventions in the normative literature. It develops a forceful critique of overly narrow definitions of corruption, insisting that a more 'systemic' conception is required in order to grasp the scale of oligarchic domination in contemporary democracies. It also points out the limitations of the 'proceduralist' model of contestation adopted by neo-republicans, and outlines a persuasive conception of the people as a partisan actor with specific interests to defend. Yet Vergara's alternative vision of how popular power might be institutionalized is less convincing. Though she rightly insists on the importance of organized countervailing power and plebeian solidarity, the system of nested local assemblies that she proposes is not well-suited to foster the development of either.

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the "wisdom of the multitude." As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracycanbe defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense ofelectoraldemocracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception ofdemocracy, writ large.

Reading Foucault's work on power and subjectivity alongside "developmentalist" approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against both groups, I argue that Foucault's poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy.

This article considers Jeremy Waldron's recent contribution to a growing conversation about how to make political theory and philosophy more responsive to real politics— Political Political Theory—in light of his broader body of work, especially Law and Disagreement. I argue that rather than providing a genuine alternative to the idealization and abstraction characteristic of what Waldron labels the "justice industry," he uses the concept of what counts as properly "political" to grant nearly absolute priority to a certain class of concerns over others. This strategy places him in the company of a long line of liberal theorists, but it does not necessarily make his theory more political than its rivals. His alternative simply focuses its idealization and abstraction on the ideal of legitimacy rather than justice.