Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts argues that capitalism limits our freedom to decide how to value the nonhuman world. Politics, as the domain in which we choose the terms of our collective life, has a special role to play in moving beyond these limitations. But what is Battistoni’s conception of politics, and how big is the effective space that the turn to politics opens up for such choice?

In the United States, homeowners’ associations are often a symbol of petty authoritarianism or suburban conformity. Yet in China these same organizations have become laboratories of democracy for millions of people. Jed Britton-Purdy interviews Shitong Qiao about how these associations form, why the Chinese government tolerates them, and whether they vindicate modernization theory.

The current constitutional crisis offers a new picture of what legitimate government looks like: rule by the boss, where professional civil servants become at-will employees, the threat of prosecution is just another bargaining chip, and statutory, constitutional, and ethical restraints are treated as tokens in a sucker’s game.

What use is the rule of law in assessing the Trump administration’s assertions of executive power? To answer this question, we need to clarify our understanding of its value — and more specifically, how this value relates to democracy and constitutionalism.

Sam Moyn has recently suggested that the LPE movement should embrace an underlying account of what law does — and by extension, an account of capitalism and the state. But no single theoretical perspective, however self-consistent and well fortified, can match the complexity of our world. If we are to acknowledge this reality without falling into social-theoretic nihilism, we must take seriously the practice of theoretical pluralism.

In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production". This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.