I’ve written the first in a series of six posts that will be coming out with the Streit Council, on the problem of economic integration without political integration. There’s no paywall. You can read it here:
https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-the-problem-that-needs-to-be-solved
I have two new essay out for Isonomia. The first, “On Whether Various Economic Schemes Can Improve Citizens’ Political Capabilities,” reflects on the different strategies liberal theorists employ to ensure democratic citizens have the capabilities necessary to participate effectively. I argue that all these strategies fall short, because there is a reluctance on the part of liberal theorists to grapple with the cost of creating citizens who really can perform the necessary political work. It was a ton of fun to write, and you can read it here:
The second, “Federations and Foreign Policy: The Quest for Koinon,” explores why political federations like the United States stop expanding. Instead of continuing to incorporate more states as co-members, these federations begin building military bases in foreign states and compelling those states to become clients. I argue that federations have historically been based rather heavily around security and this has made it difficult to use them to reform the global economic system. While elites are willing to pay the cost of integrating territory when this is necessary for their own survival, they become more resistant when this integration is no longer strictly necessary. You can read it here:
I’ve published a piece in Cosmos + Taxis about some of the tensions between nationalism and liberalism. Cosmos + Taxis‘ readership skews libertarian, and many of its readers are frustrated with the constraints nationalism imposes upon liberalism. There’s a lot of right libertarian interest in republicanism and federalism. I make the case that republicanism can only compete with nationalism insofar as republics offer citizens more extensive sets of rights–including economic rights–than they can have through nationalism. In this way, I pitch the libertarians on adopting more conventionally left-wing economic positions. It’s a sincere effort to make an argument that might be appealing to someone with a rather different set of starting points from my own. You can read the whole thing here.
All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In the United States, the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. The European states are bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to defect, they will tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity. They’ll tell you the rich Republicans are greedy and the poor Republicans are stupid. But this policy was never a good fit for either the American or European political systems. To work, it needed a lot of economic support from regional authorities, and it never got that support.
Continue reading “The Quarantine is Failing because Our Institutions Weren’t Built For It”
One of the things I find odd about the American discourse about slavery is how rarely Americans think about slavery as an institution which existed outside America. Not only did slavery exist in the ancient world in a pre-racialised way–in which many slaves were white, and many masters were people of colour–but it also existed in many other places during the period in which it existed in America. In many of these places, slavery was abolished not by violence but by ordinary politics. Yet this is rarely acknowledged or discussed, and it is increasingly common for Americans to frame our history largely in terms of the slavery question. We don’t often ask why slavery was more contentious in the United States than in other places. That’s what I want to think about with you today.
Benjamin Studebaker 