Capitalism, Alienation, and the Rule of None

Speaker: Chiara Cordelli, Professor of Political Science (University of Chicago)

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of Philosophy of Law (UCL Laws)

About the Seminar:

Recently, political philosophy has witnessed a revival of debates about the wrong of capitalism and the point of socialism. Some argue that capitalism is unjustly exploitative, but only contingently on unjust distributions. The point of socialism is thus to achieve distributive justice. Others have objected that capitalism is intrinsically unjust, because dominating, regardless of the presence of distributive injustice. The point of socialism is to overcome the injustice of domination through workers’ collective control of the labor process. Professor Cordelli argues that both views provide an insufficient critique of capitalism, with regards to their site of analysis, as well as their account of the distinctive wrong of capitalism, the point of socialism, and its institutional demands. She proposes a normative critique of capitalism that (i) focuses on capitalism’s mode of investment and valuation, beyond the labor process, as its core site of analysis, (ii) reconceptualizes capitalism’s distinctive ill as one of social alienation, rather than exploitation or domination, and its wrong as a matter of legitimacy rather than justice, (iii) understands the point of socialism, beyond redistribution and nondomination, as one of reconciliation and, (iv) argues for a broader account of economic democracy, which includes the democratic planning of investment.

About the Speaker:

Chiara Cordelli is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in Philosophy. Since 2025, she is also senior research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Sciences Po. Beyond her published articles, she is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR Political Theory Prize for best first book in political theory, as well as the editor of NOMOS. Cordelli has held visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Photo by Paul Fiedler on Unsplash