What Is the Wrong of Capitalism?

Chiara Cordelli

American Political Science Review, 2025, vol. 119, issue 4, 1806-1821

Abstract: The troubled state of economic life today has prompted a revival of normative critiques of capitalism. According to a prominent critique, radical republicanism, capitalism is defined by its mode of production and the distinctive wrong of capitalism amounts to a structural form of domination. By arguing that radical republicanism fails to provide a satisfactory account of capitalism’s distinctiveness—and of its core wrong—I propose an alternative account focused on the mode of investment. Capitalism’s mode of investment, I assert, entails a loss of collective control over, and involvement in, the valuation and creation of the future. The wrong inhering in this loss is best understood in terms of alienation—an alienated relation between citizens and their sociopolitical order—rather than domination. In turn, socialism should be understood as a project of reconciliation, the point of which is to overcome this form of alienation through the socialization and democratic planning of investment.

Date: 2025
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