Thesis
Liberal democracy, competition, and the institutional limits of markets
- Abstract:
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This thesis addresses a particular class of problems affecting liberal democracies worldwide, namely, that some of their most central institutions—the electoral system, the legal system, and the free press—are undermined by their partial or complete subordination to the market. I provide a comprehensive normative analysis of this class of problems and answer the following questions: is it justifiable to place limits on markets in certain institutional goods (e.g., legal representation and the reporting of news), and if so, what should those limits be?
Arguments for limiting markets are not novel. In recent decades, a shared fear of market expansionism has developed into a vast normative literature, the ‘Moral Limits of Markets’. This body of scholarship introduced new normative questions about markets and brought to the fore markets that have been hitherto underexplored.
Yet, as I argue in the first part of the thesis, despite its richness and importance, this literature suffers from a significant weakness: it fails to properly analyse normative issues arising from the clash between markets and liberal democratic institutions. In response, I develop a novel institutional account of the limits of markets in liberal democracies.
An intermission between the first and second parts of the thesis is devoted to the concept of competition. Competition is the key element in the institutional infrastructure of modern liberal democracies. Thus, a proper account of competition is necessary to assess the normative foundations of present-day institutional designs. I offer such an account, arguing that there are two concepts of competition, each leading to different normative requirements for institutional design. Only one is compatible with markets.
Finally, in the second part, I apply my account to markets within two key political institutions in liberal democracies—the legal system and the media—and provide normative guidelines concerning their proper limits.
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Authors
Contributors
- Institution:
- University of Oxford
- Division:
- HUMS
- Department:
- Philosophy Faculty
- Role:
- Supervisor
- Institution:
- University of Oxford
- Role:
- Supervisor
- Programme:
- DPIR Studentship
- Type of award:
- DPhil
- Level of award:
- Doctoral
- Awarding institution:
- University of Oxford
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Deposit date:
-
2023-04-05
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Agmon, S
- Copyright date:
- 2023
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