Levelling Power: Non-consequentialist Criticism of ‘Economic’ Monopoly

• In Event: The Politics of Levelling: History and Theory

Abstract

Private economic monopoly power has long been overlooked by the political theorist as a politically relevant subject of analysis. This is largely because it has been treated as a uniquely ‘economic’ phenomenon and thus contemplated in a distinctly consequentialist language (i.e., concerns about price, efficiency, productivity, welfare, innovation, etc.). But of course, monopoly power is first about power pooled in too few hands. If the locus of power in democratic society is to be an empty place, then monopoly power sits in logical opposition to the promise of democratic society. It becomes clear why monopoly is relevant for the student of democracy.

In the Levellers’ thought, we find one mode of contemplating monopoly as a political concept. Their objections to monopoly were no doubt about economic consequences (a logic which survives into our own time and is familiar to the contemporary legal, economic, or antimonopoly scholar), but also about natural individual rights and the primacy of common over particular interests. I argue that by focusing on the Levellers’ non-consequentialist objections to ‘economic’ monopolies (i.e., trade, patent, and guild monopolies), we discover a uniquely political logic that both was and can be used to address private economic monopoly power.

I argue that the Levellers used two non-consequentialist logics to object to economic monopolies. First, monopolies, by excluding most from a given market, violated an individual’s right to labour, thus violating the proto-democratic egalitarianism undergirding the Levellers’ political thought. Secondly, monopolies caused Parliament to violate its responsibilities as body representative of the people. Monopolists inevitably entered into “conspiracies to destroy and overthrow the lawes and liberties of England” with the parliamentary elite. Insofar as it succumbed to the “negative voice” of particular interests and failed to act in the common interest, Parliament remained an arbitrary power over the sovereign people. Furthermore, charged “to protect, safeguard, and defend [the people] from all such unnatural monsters, vipers, and pests,” Parliament was obliged to dismantle monopoly power which created and enforced private law over ‘free-born’ citizens. Insofar as Parliament allowed for economic monopolies to function as private governments, the Levellers viewed Parliament as ineligible to govern as the legitimate body representative of the sovereign people.

In these non-consequentialist criticisms of private economic monopoly power, we find a variety of levelling that pertains to the redistribution of economic power in 17th century English society. We are left first with a clearer appreciation for the interconnectedness of the Levellers’ ‘economic’ and proto-democratic thought, and secondly with a theoretical instantiation of how the contemporary democratic and egalitarian theorist might understand and address arbitrary powers which have long been removed from the domain of the political.

Author

• Kaarish K. Maniar, Columbia University