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The frontispiece of an anonymous 1641 pamphlet circulated in London, which bashed Aldermen William Abell and Richard Kilvert for their monopoly patent on wine. British Library Thomason E.156[16], p. 1.
Publications
Publications
"Levelling Monsters: Monopoly, Rights, and Public Authority," Modern Intellectual History (Forthcoming)
The Levellers have long been recognized as ardent anti-monopolists, but their interpreters have yet to connect their objections to private monopolies with the emergence of their political theory of legitimate public authority. This article argues that the Leveller leaders constructed their arguments for a supreme and unitary Parliament, authorized by and accountable to the sovereign people, against the backdrop of monopolies’ endangering citizens’ natural rights—and that an understudied 1645 treatise offers an early articulation of this argument that warrants assimilation into the Leveller canon. In contrast with contemporaneous arguments that litigated institutions’ service of the public good, the Levellers used the language of natural rights to transform material grievances against monopolies into constitutional principles for popular legitimation.
"Corporation as Oligarch, Monopoly as Mechanism," Political Theory (Revise & Resubmit)
In both the Gilded Age and today, the monopolistic corporation is one of modern oligarchy’s central agents. Where extant theories tend to imagine oligarchs as wealthy natural individuals or as an amorphous wealthy class, I here offer a structural theory of oligarchy wherein the corporation organizes the banal political-economic interactions that allow oligarchic power to be generated, maintained, and exercised. Corporations are oligarchic when they collude or combine to acquire and protect monopoly power. By recovering a lost nineteenth-century populist conception of the monopolistic corporation as an intentional oligarchic agent, we can repurpose the corporate veil to reveal, rather than obfuscate, oligarchy’s nodes and structures. When we recognize the corporation as a potentially oligarchic agent, and monopoly power as its mechanism of rule, we consequently see that the structural breakup of monopoly corporations is an indispensable legal and political tool for any anti-oligarchy agenda.
"Monopoly," Political Concepts (Revise & Resubmit)
Though the term ‘monopoly’ has come to be used primarily as a technical economic and legal category, ‘monopoly’ has a storied history as a multifaceted concept with political, social, and moral meaning. From its first use, monopoly has been associated with a power over price. However, it has also been imagined as a moral failing, a threat to the public good, a danger to individual liberty and rights, an obstacle for sovereignty, and as an inevitable feature of competitive markets. By offering a brief survey of the different logics with which monopoly power has been contemplated, I here wish to shed light on those facets of the concept’s meaning that have perhaps been dulled or forgotten over time.
Works In Progress
Works In Progress
A paper that identifies connective tissue between early Americans’ and seventeenth century English radicals’ conceptions of common law juries as popular legislators.
A paper situating the university’s corporate structure at the nexus between feudal guild and modern corporation.
A paper investigating medieval and early modern conceptions of predatory pricing, price discrimination, and equality on the market.
A paper on monopolies in the poetry of George Wither, whom the Levellers often reprinted and recommended.
A paper synthesizing the role of commerce, contracts, corporations, and merchants across Kant’s writings.
© The Trustees of the British MuseumA 520 BC amphora depicting the olive harvest in Attica, attributed to the Antimenes Painter. The first recorded use of the term 'monopoly,' in Aristotle's Politics, describes how Thales of Miletus wielded a monopoly on olive presses after having predicted an abundant olive harvest that season.
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