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Assembling the Plebeian Republic Assembling the Plebeian Republic Popular Institutions against Systemic Corruption & Oligarchic Domination Camila Vergara Gonzalez Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Camila Vergara Gonzalez All rights reserved ABSTRACT Assembling the Plebeian Republic Popular Institutions against Systemic Corruption & Oligarchic Domination Camila Vergara Gonzalez Democracy seems to be in crisis and scholars have started to consider the possibility that “the only game in town” might be rigged. This dissertation theorizes the crisis of democracy from a structural point of view, arguing that liberal representative governments suffer from systemic corruption, a form of political decay that should be understood as the oligarchization of society, and proposes an anti-oligarchic institutional solution based on a radical interpretation of republican constitutional thought. If one agrees that the minimal normative expectation of liberal democracies is that governments should advance the welfare of the majority within constitutional safeguards, increasing income inequality and the relative immiseration of the majority of citizens would be in itself a deviation from good rule, a sign of corruption. As a way to understand how we could revert the current patterns of political corruption, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the institutional, procedural, and normative innovations to protect political liberty proposed by Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt. Because their ideas to institutionalize popular power have consistently been misunderstood, instrumentalized, demonized, or neglected, part of what this project wants to accomplish is to offer a serious engagement with their proposals through a plebeian interpretative lens that renders them as part of the same intellectual tradition. In this way, the book assembles a “B side” of constitutional thought composed of the apparent misfits in a tradition that has been dominated by the impulse to suppress conflict instead of harnessing its liberty-producing properties. As a way to effectively deal with systemic corruption and oligarchic domination, the book proposes to follow this plebeian constitutionalism and instituionalize popular collective power. A proposed plebeian branch would be autonomous and aimed not at achieving self-government or direct democracy, but rather at an effort to both judge and censor elites who rule. The plebeian branch would consist of two institutions: a decentralized network of radically inclusive local assemblies, empowered to initiate and veto legislation as well as to exercise periodic constituent power, and a delegate, surveillance office able to enforce decisions and impeach public officials. The establishment of primary assemblies at the local level would not only allow ordinary people to push back against oligarchic domination through the political system but also inaugurate an institutional conception of the people as the many assembled locally: a political collective agent operating as a network of political judgment in permanent flow. The people as network would be a political subject with as many brains as assemblies, in which collective learning, reaction against domination, and social change would occur organically and independently from representative government and political parties. Table of Contents List of Figures ii Introduction 1 Part I. SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION & THE MIXED CONSTITUTION Chapter 1. Corruption as Political Decay 10 Chapter 2. Elitist Interpretations of the Republic 43 Chapter 3. On Material Constitutional Thought 107 Part II. PLEBEIAN CONSTITUTIONAL THOUGHT Chapter 4. Machiavelli and the Plebeian Power to Create and Punish 130 Chapter 5. Condorcet and Institutional Popular Power 150 Chapter 6. Luxemburg and Popular Emancipation 176 Chapter 7. Arendt and the Republic of Parties and Councils 194 Part III. THE MIXED CONSTITUTION RELOADED. PROPOSALS FOR A PLEBEIAN REPUBLIC Chapter 8. Contemporary Plebeian Thought 231 Chapter 9. Constitutionalizing the Power of Those Who Do Not Rule 254 Bibliography 276 i List of Figures 1.1 Systemic Corruption, Inequality and Rights 42 2.1 Republican Interpretations of the Mixed Constitution 46 2.2 Constitution of Rome 4th Century BC 52 2.3 Roman Republic, 2nd Century BC 52 2.4 Constitution of England 17th Century —Mixed Monarchy 58 2.5 Constitution of England —The Protectorate (1653–1659) 60 2.6 Constitution of Venice, 15th Century 64 2.7 Harrington’s Constitution of Oceana, 1656 65 2.8 Montesquieu’s Commercial Republic, 1748 76 2.9 Constitution of England, 18th Century 77 2.10 Constitution of the United States, 1803 93 2.11 Republican Elitist Thought 106 4.1 Machiavelli’s Roman Republic 136 4.2 Machiavelli’s Republic of Florence, 1520 139 5.1 Condorcet’s Constitution for France, 1793 171 6.1 Luxemburg’s Workers’ Council Republic, 1919 192 7.1 Arendt’s Republic of Parties & Councils, 1963 229 8.1 McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy 247 8.2 Hamilton’s Plebeian Representative Republic 253 9.1 The Plebeian Republic 275 ii Introduction Even if only a decade ago, when Barack Obama had just been elected President of the United States, and there was still hope that, with the right leadership, the political system could work for the many instead of the few, today the idea that democracy is in crisis has become ubiquitous. The project I present here, which offers a hypothesis for the crisis of our political systems and analyzes structural solutions, is not the result of academic opportunism, but rather of a deep-seated constitutional skepticism1 that begun taking institutional form, against the current, in the years of Obama cool. Even if it was only after Donald Trump was elected President that the “crisis of democracy” narrative went mainstream, this particular cycle of political decay in our constitutional regimes appears to have begun in the 1970s and 80s with the first neoliberal experiments led by Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Ronald Reagan in the United States.2 Increasing income inequality and immiseration of the working classes was effectively de-politicized and naturalized to the point that today it is considered legitimate that three individuals in the U.S. own more wealth than the bottom 50% —while their wealth grew 6,000% since 1982, median household wealth went down 3% over the same period, and now one out of five children lives in poverty in the richest 1 Rooted in the experience of having lived under an illegitimate constitution in Chile. 2 For a historical account of neoliberalism see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists. the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). Slobodian misses the illiberal origins of neoliberalism, first implemented in Chile under Pinochet with the help of the so-called Chicago Boys, trained in the US in the 1960s. 1 country in the world.3 Because patterns of accumulation and dispossession are far from natural, part of what I want to accomplish here is to extend the horizon of analysis so we can better appreciate our political regime as an experiment in need of review, an artificial political infrastructure that we have designed for ourselves, and that the same as it was first established, it can be overhauled. It has been done before, and there is no reason to believe it cannot be done again. This dissertation theorizes the crisis of democracy from a structural point of view, arguing that liberal representative governments suffer from systemic corruption, a form of political decay that should be understood as the oligarchization of society, and proposes a plebeian institutional solution based on a radical interpretation of republican constitutional thought.4 If one agrees that the minimal normative expectation of liberal democracies is that governments should advance the welfare of the majority within constitutional safeguards, increasing income inequality and the relative immiseration of the majority of citizens would be in itself a deviation from good rule, a sign of corruption. Through an in-depth analysis of the institutional, procedural, and normative innovations proposed by modern and contemporary plebeian thinkers, I propose to constitutionalize popular collective power to establish a mixed constitution as the most effective way to deal with systemic corruption and oligarchic domination. Since the mixed constitution necessarily entails the opposing institutional powers of the few and the many, this project takes as a premise that representative democracies are not mixed orders but monocratic regimes with separation of functions,5 a form of government in which the democratic element does not have a collective institutional form, but in which it is atomized, and its power has been reduced to selecting representatives and proposing and voting referenda through the aggregation of individual 3 Chuck Collins “The wealth of America's three richest families grew by 6,000% since 1982” The Guardian October 31, 2018 < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/us-wealthiest-families- dynasties-governed-by-rich> 4 I approach the decay of constitutional democracies and possible institutional solutions from the perspective of radical republican thought, and therefore I will not engage with other diagnoses and solutions offered from within democratic theory —most prominently coming out of participatory and deliberative democratic
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