Freedom, Power, and the Global Economic Order

This article develops arguments found in chapter six of Freedom Is Power: Liberty through Political Representation, concerning how Hamilton’s account of freedom might inform our thinking about global justice. Hamilton’s work grapples with the problem of domination and freedom in a postapartheid and postcolonial world order. While we find important statements of this theme in some of the canonical texts of the tradition, Hamilton’s treatment of the theme hints at a further reaching, more demanding engagement with “real modern freedom”—freedom in the vast shadow of economic, political, and cultural domination. This contribution seeks to place his work within debates in normative international political theory and to compare his position (and its implications) with those arguing for normative and institutional change in world politics including questions of distributive justice and global economic governance.