PLEBRIGHTS · Plebeian Rights: Theory and Praxis

Plebeian Rights: Theory and Praxis

Political power is today de facto oligarchic. In almost all representative democracies, the people who get to decide on policy, law, and the degree of protection of individual rights are part of the richest 10%, and therefore tend to have the same interests and worldview of the powerful few who benefit most from the status quo. Even in Europe, where there is a robust middle class, the richest 10% concentrates about 58% of the wealth while the bottom 50% only 4%. At the other extreme is Latin America, where the richest 10% controls 77% of the wealth and the bottom 50% less than 1%. Because patterns of accumulation of wealth at the top are enabled by existing rules and institutions, it is necessary to question not only our political regimes as experiments that have led to acute inequality and a dangerous oligarchisation of power, but also our methodological approach to the study of constitutions —as the juridical framework that ultimately allows for inequality to be validated and reproduced. As a response to this political diagnosis, in which the crisis of democracy is due to an overgrowth of oligarchic power allowed and enabled by the juridical order, in my book Systemic Corruption (Princeton University Press 2020) I proposed adopting a material constitutional lens to rethink the republic from a structural perspective. Material constitutionalism aims at going beyond the constraints imposed by formal equality and the anti-majoritarian organisation of power that has yielded societies with billionaires, opulence, and waste alongside growing ranks of oppressed groups living in precarity, by proposing to intervene the basic structure to incorporate new socioeconomic rights and institutions. To further develop this framework and enhance our understanding of systemic corruption and its effects on the freedom of individuals, my research project had as a general objective to develop a plebeian theory of rights, in which rights do not originate in natural law but in power relations and the juridical protections resulting from the conflict between the powerful few and the many. The project had three specific goals: 1) to break new theoretical ground in the study of rights; 2) to influence the making of constitutional law and constitutional amendments to incorporate socioeconomic rights as well as new institutions to guarantee them; and 3) to socialise this new material way of thinking about the constitution and basic rights amongst the general public. I am happy to report that I have achieved all of them to a satisfactory degree.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union