Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Capital Flight and Domination by Diffuse Collectives” Politics, Philosophy & Economics (2025)
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.
“Exploitation as Domination? A Response to Bryan and Kouris” Res Publica (2024)
Recent work by republican theorists has suggested that exploitation, understood as a form of unequal exchange enabled by a relationship of domination, should be a central normative category of republican economic thought. In this article, I argue against this claim. I contend that exploitative relations of domination should not be seen as any more intrinsically unjust than non-exploitative ones. Instead, the only reasons republicans have for paying special attention to exploitative forms of domination are instrumental: exploitative forms of domination are likely more effective at reproducing and extending themselves over time.
“Colonial Slavery, the Lord-Bondsman Dialectic, and the St Louis Hegelians” Hegel Bulletin 45 (1):43-64 (2024)
Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians. 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. 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. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed its connection to 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. 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. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of American slavery.
Works in Progress
Paper on republican constitutional thought (title redacted for review)
In this article, I consider questions of republican constitutional design and their relation to popular debates concerning oligarchy and the U.S. Constitution. Many contemporary republicans argue that a free republic ought to institute a “mixed constitution” similar to that of the U.S. — a constitution that places certain restrictions on the power of bare majorities to legislate through countermajoritarian checks and balances. In this paper, I reconstruct and defend two anti-oligarchic critiques of mixed constitutionalism presented by American radical republicans. The first critique, presented by 18th-century republican critics of the U.S. Constitution, takes issue with the complexity of mixed constitutions. The second, posed by 19th-century American socialists and labor republicans, attacks the status-quo bias inherent to countermajoritarian institutions. I argue that contemporary republicans should take each of these critiques of mixed constitutionalism to heart, and especially in the American context, temper their enthusiasm for countermajoritarian institutions.
What’s So Special About the Working Class? (draft available on request)
In this article, I present a novel answer to an old question for socialist and social democratic thinkers. I reject the influential idea that the working class’s importance is due to their being victims of a unique wrong: labor exploitation. Instead, I posit that the central role of the working class in progressive politics is justified by concerns that are purely strategic. Equipped with the power to strike, the working class is capable of disrupting the process of accumulation; and as victims of domination at the hands of capitalists, they have a material self-interest to use this capacity to counterbalance capitalist power. These facts are sufficient to justify the central importance of the working class for progressive politics.
Experiments in Economic Living: Keynes Against Capital Flight (draft in progress)
I further explore the problem of domination by investors in another article focused more closely on the history of economic thought. In it, I reconstruct and defend John Maynard Keynes’ argument against the free international movement of capital. What makes Keynes’ argument distinctive is that it appeals not just to the value of national autonomy, but also to the epistemic value of allowing countries to freely pursue distinct economic policies without fear of triggering capital flight. In this way, Keynes points to another reason to oppose investor domination: since the threat of capital flight acts as a homogenizing force on economic policy across jurisdictions, it suppresses the kind of knowledge we could all gain from a global system that encouraged innovation and experimentation in economic policy.
Public Debt, Private Power: Domination in the Bond Market (draft in progress)
In a fourth article, I focus more specifically on the dominating potential of the bond market. I argue that the actions of “bond vigilantes,” which have in recent years brought down governments and forced others to retreat from certain economic policies, can also be understood as a case of domination by a diffuse collective. A general upshot of this argument is that republicans should, other things being equal, generally favor funding government spending with higher taxes rather than public debt, since high levels of public debt create conditions where bond vigilantes wield dominating power over the state.
Other Publications
Short response piece commissioned for a conference to Kurt Stemhagen and Kathy Hytten’s article “Pragmatism, Antiracism, and New Democratic Possibilities” Philosophy of Education 78(3):134-148.