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The Work of Politics advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as "worldly mediators," or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, this book challenges us to rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state.

Within democratic theory, electoral competition is typically associated with minimalist and realist views of democracy. In contrast, this article argues for a reinterpretation of electoral competition as an important element of an egalitarian theory of democracy. Current relational egalitarian theories, in focusing on the equalization of individual power-over, present electoral institutions as in tension with equality. Against this view, the article contends that electoral competition can foster equality by incentivizing the equalization of cooperative power. The article develops the normative category of equal opportunity to access cooperative power and shows how it can generate an egalitarian defense of electoral competition. Yet this ideal is not an affirmation of the status quo. Rather, it points to the need to reform electoral systems to make them more competitive and so more likely to foster cooperative power, as well as reforms to provide direct support to associations like unions that equalize cooperative power.

While most of Political Theory's 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations.

Karl Polanyi's critique of the ideal of the self-adjusting market is increasingly invoked to challenge the negative effects of European integration on national social welfare systems. However, these debates have been caught in an unhelpful opposition between European market openness and national social closure. Challenging common interpretations of Polanyi, this article shows that he develops a theory of the relationship between democratic reciprocity and what the article calls "nonmarket modes of economic coordination." The problem is not reconciling openness with closure but navigating the dilemmas of democratic capitalism. The article then uses this framework to critique the one-sided nature of European law as well as recent calls for a "social Europe." The article criticizes these efforts, arguing that the fate of social Europe is bound to the economic and political dynamics unleashed by the project of monetary integration.

AbstractProminent republican theorists invoke anonymous orders such as the market as mechanisms that secure freedom as non‐domination. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's account of fictitious commodities and demonstration of the impossibility of a just and rational market society, this article critically scrutinizes neo‐republican assumptions regarding the market, develops an alternate social theory within which to situate the ideal of non‐domination, and illustrates the importance of this reconfiguration for the kind of collective agents and political strategies that can be expected to advance republican freedom in the economy.