Corporate power and billionaire agency in world politics

ABSTRACT

In Billionaires in World Politics Peter Hägel considers how the experience of wealth accumulation shapes billionaires’ political agency. To understand the agentic power billionaires exercise in world politics, he proposes that we should examine (1) personality traits that dispose people to participate in politics and (2) connections between capacity and intentions. In this paper, I argue that Hägel’s account of billionaires’ agency in world politics depends on two assumptions. The first is an implied meaning of world politics and the second is the imagination that billionaires have equal access to social and cultural goods that guarantee meaningful engagement in world politics. I analyze these assumptions to argue that Hägel’s account of billionaire agency fails to take adequate notice of the dialectical relationship between corporate power and billionaire agency. A robust account of the agency of billionaires in world politics, I argue, must take this dialectical relationship as its foundation.

KEYWORDS:

• Billionaires
• world politics
• agency
• corporate power
• social and cultural goods

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Uchenna Okeja

Uchenna Okeja is Professor and Chair of philosophy at Rhodes University. He is also a research associate at Nelson Mandela University and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, University of Chicago, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg, Justitia Amplificata Center for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and University of British Columbia. He is the director of Emengini Institute for Comparative Global Studies based in Worcester, Massachusetts. His most recent publication is Deliberative Agency: A Study in Modern African Political Philosophy (Indiana University Press 2022).