Material Constitutionalism and the Politics of Anti-Oligarchy
Against the background of the strong tendencies of liberal democracies to degenerate into oligarchic plutocracies, my thesis defends that the socialist tradition provides distinctively valuable resources for conceptualizing and realizing the egalitarian aspirations underlying these constitutional orders. In particular, I argue that, in the process of transitioning to more meaningfully democratic political systems, we should push for constitutionalizing authoritative political institutions of exclusive access to economically disempowered classes – and argue that such an institutional arrangement is, for several reasons, normatively appealing.