Miikka Jaarte

When progressive governments attempt to redistribute wealth, nationalize major industries, or empower unions, they are often faced with the threat of capital flight. Some republican theorists have suggested that this phenomenon might be a source of domination. However, the prominent neo-republican account of domination presented by Philip Pettit cannot justify this claim, since the class of investors is not usually an agent. In this article, I present a novel theory of domination by diffuse collectives that can justify the intuition that the threat of capital flight is a source of domination.

In a recent article, Alexander Bryan and Ioannis Kouris argue that the concept of exploitation should be a “central preoccupation” of republican economic thought. While I concur that republicans should be interested in exploitation, I will argue that they should only do so because of the instrumental harms of exploitation. I will argue that contrary to those theorists who see exploitation as inherently wrongful because exploiters steal something that should rightfully belong to the exploited, republicans should see exploitative relations of domination as objectionable only because dominators who exploit will usually be able to reproduce and extend their power more effectively than dominators who do not. When analyzing the instrumental harms produced by exploitation, however, I argue that republicans should not focus on individual relationships of exploitation, but on relationships where dominators successfully extract an aggregate surplus from the collective of people they dominate. If I am right, exploitation should not be a central normative concept of republican economic analysis, though it should still play an important role in explaining how relations of domination persist and spread.

When progressive governments attempt to redistribute wealth, nationalize major industries, or empower unions, they are often faced with the threat of capital flight. Some republican theorists have suggested that this phenomenon might be a source of domination. However, the prominent neo-republican account of domination presented by Philip Pettit cannot justify this claim, since the class of investors is not usually an agent. In this article, I present a novel theory of domination by diffuse collectives that can justify the intuition that the threat of capital flight is a source of domination.

Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery.