Power, Inequality, and Politics

Some essays, a book, and a challenge I'm still working through

Over at Liberalism.org I’ve been working on a series of essays making the case that classical liberals and modern liberals have more in common than either camp tends to admit, and ought to be working together rather than past each other. The first piece draws on the great Chicago School theorist Henry Simons to argue that for liberalism the great enemy is concentrated power, whether public or private. The second extends this line of thought by making the case that classical liberals should care about wealth inequality. Not for the usual reasons modern liberals care about it, but because of its easy conversion to political power. Once private wealth becomes large enough to capture the institutions that are supposed to constrain it, the classical liberal commitment to limited government has nothing left to push against.

The most challenging response so far has come from Eric Schliesser, in a Substack post titled “Against the Generality Principle and Pro Politics; Or why I am a Machiavellian and not a Classical Liberal.” Schliesser objects to the move I make through Buchanan and Congleton’s generality principle — the idea that constitutional rules should apply non-discriminatorily so as to collapse the returns on lobbying. His worry is that this kind of impartiality is the wrong virtue for political life, that politics is not a domain that can be neutralized in the way classical liberals (and economists) want to neutralize it, and that the very norms classical liberals try to install above politics function in practice as elite bargaining mechanisms — which is to say, as politics by another name.

I am, I should say, very sympathetic to a lot of this. There is a recurring tendency among philosophers, libertarians very much included, to treat the political as something to be ruled out, contained, or routed around — to design our way out of contestation rather than to think clearly about what contestation requires of us. Schliesser is pressing on a real weakness in classical liberal habits of mind, and a weakness I am not sure I have entirely escaped. He is also too deep a thinker to be answered quickly or casually, and I am not going to try here. There will be more to say in future essays.

After the wealth piece was published, Samuel Bagg reached out on Bluesky and pointed me to his book The Dispersion of Power. I’ve since been reading it more or less straight through, and it has already substantially shaped how I think about the next set of essays in the series — about countervailing power, state capture, and what democracy actually has to do to function. If you have any interest in these questions, the book is worth your time.

I’ll also flag a thoughtful response thread from Paul Crider of Liberal Currents — another voice working through some of the same terrain, and worth following on Bluesky for anyone who wants to see this conversation continue in close to real time.

More soon.