Billionaires in world politics: clarifications and refinements

ABSTRACT

This is a response to the comments by Filipe Campello, Julian Culp, Klaus Dingwerth and Julian Eckl, Indira Latorre, and Uchenna Okeja within the present book symposium discussing my book Billionaires in World Politics. While disagreeing with some critiques, I welcome most of the comments as invitations for theoretical refinement and further research. I start with questions about conceptual delineations and the structural background, arguing that ‘political modernity’ is a concept that is too broad to capture the specific context that allows billionaires to exercise power on the world stage. Then I address questions of agency, which are about the relationships between individual billionaires and collective actors, and the associated issue of legitimacy. The connection between billionaires and their corporations receives special attention, and is discussed in relation to legal innovations that establish individual accountability. I end with thoughts about neo-feudalism, a concept that I reject, because the political agency of billionaires remains wedded to capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• agency
• billionaires
• corporations
• legitimacy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I thank Julian Culp and Eric Palmer for careful comments on my first draft of this article, which helped me to clarify several points.

2 In the past, Soros has been sitting on some of HRW’s regional advisory committees, e.g., those on Europe and the Americas.

3 Some states have started to prosecute, within their national legal system, corporations for committing international crimes, cf. Riello and Furtwengler 2021.

4 Pettit has argued that Isaiah Berlin’s conception of the free person as being one’s own master is actually very close to the neorepublican ideal of non-domination (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Hägel

Peter Hägel is an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Politics within the History & Politics department of the American University of Paris, where he is coordinating the Philosophy, Politics & Economics program. He studied Political Science and International Relations at Free University Berlin, Columbia University, and obtained his PhD in Political Science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His scholarly work is situated within transnational relations and global political economy, and his latest research project focuses on the political consequences of rising inequalities, the outcomes of which have been published as Billionaires in World Politics with Oxford University Press in 2020.