Título: SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION. CONSTITUTIONAL IDEAS FOR AN ANTI-OLIGARCHIC REPUBLIC
Autor: VERGARA GONZALEZ, CAMILA
Año: 2020
Género: TEORÍA POLÍTICA
Formato: PDF
This book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. The book argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. The book provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. The book explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, the book rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. The book demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government. The book proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few.
Camila Vergara is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Cambridge working on a longue durée analysis of the rights of the common people from antiquity to the present. By focusing on the relation between inequality, corruption, and domination, her work is an economically engaged legal political theory that examines issues of political legitimacy and authority within different conceptions of liberty and the organizations of power and ethical structures they promote. Dr Vergara holds a PhD in Political Theory with specialization in Constitutional Law from Columbia University, an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research, and an MA in Latin American Politics from New York University. Before coming to Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in civil and political rights at Columbia Law School.
She is the author of «Systemic Corruption. Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic», which theorizes the crisis of democracy from a structural point of view, arguing that representative governments suffer from a form of political decay connected to a constitutional deficit: the lack of popular institutions of accountability and the resulting unchecked oligarchization of power. Transcending critique, the book also proposed both a materialist constitutional method to study structural domination and a set of anti-oligarchic institutions.
Dr Vergara's work on corruption, populism, republicanism, and constitutional theory has been featured in leading international journals such as Philosophy & Social Criticism, the Journal of Political Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and REVUS Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law.
In addition to her work in academia, Dr Vergara is an advisor to international and grassroots organizations on civil and political rights, and on procedures and institutions for direct deliberative democracy. As a global public intellectual, her articles and interviews have been featured in mass media outlets such as New Left Review, Jacobin, Politico, Revista Plebeya, Il Manifesto Inret y Setenta e Quatro.
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