This eagerly awaited book calls for a fundamental reorientation of democratic theory’s animating purpose, away from the pursuit of collective self-rule in favor of a project of resisting state capture. The collective self-rule model seeks “equal control over collective decisions” and thus advocates reforms that “aim to make that control more equal or extend it to more decisions” (p. 3; emphases omitted). Bagg believes this model mistakes both the nature of politics and the proper reform agenda. Per The Dispersion of Power, democracy is less a “collaborative process for making decisions” than “a way of organizing competition for public power” (p. 9)—a competition whose playing field is steeply tilted to favor hegemonic elites.

The power at issue is, above all, power over the state. The state remains the central unit of political power and action, able both to “promote human interests on unprecedented scales” and to “pose extremely serious threats to human interests” when captured by powerful social groups. The resulting “predicament of modern politics” (p. 17) is best addressed by democracy, understood as a project of “resisting state capture” as a “deliberately imprecise, negative goal” (p. 7, emphasis Bagg’s). Such resistance entails the “constant mitigation of asymmetries in private power and organizational capacity” and has as its quasi-utopian, never fully achieved goal a “roughly egalitarian balance of social forces” (p. 25, emphasis omitted). Democracy constitutes not a fixed set of procedures but “a complex ecology of diverse practices and institutions, which evolves in response to changing threats” (p. 79).

Part One of the book sets the intellectual and methodological stage. Chapter 1 proposes three basic tasks for democratic theory: “evaluating existing practices of electoral democracy, developing an agenda for policy reform, and setting priorities for civic action and participation” (p. 20). Chapter 2 contains the book’s analysis of democratic procedures, drawing on social choice theory and social identity theory. The former, as in William Riker’s work, argues that no collective choice can fully and properly aggregate individual preferences. The latter, embodied most recently in Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ Democracy for Realists (2016), argues that citizens vote in ways that track not their interests but their group allegiances. Bagg’s “realism,” incidentally, draws on these two skeptical modes of empirical political science. All it shares with the “political realist” school of political theory is a “tragic sensibility” (p. 243), a conviction that “self-interest” and “conflict” are enduring features of politics (pp. 147, 153), and an impatience towards theories that seek “foundational” normative principles rather than “mid-level ideals” that enable “consistent and reliable practical judgments” (p. 16).

What makes Bagg’s argument “critical” as well as realist is its avowed radicalism, portrayed as a necessary supplement to liberalism but not a replacement. Society contains “vast asymmetries in private power” (p. 125). These background asymmetries, unaddressed, will pervert even the best-designed institutions and procedures to serve the interests of the powerful. Against libertarian interpretations of social choice, Bagg argues that agenda-setting power, organizational capacity, and the like are distributed not arbitrarily but in ways that track “social class, cultural capital, and especially material wealth” (p. 40; compare pp. 48, 133f.). Chapter 3 deploys similar arguments to criticize, politely but firmly, current democratic theory’s focus on projects of “participatory inclusion.” Though Bagg judges a few such experiments—especially “oversight juries” in the policy process—well suited to prevent elite capture, he argues that most of them ignore, and some may exacerbate, the power disparities on which democratic theorists must focus.

Part Two contains the heart of Bagg’s positive argument. In Chapter 4, he discusses the hallmarks of capture. These include regulation, corruption, and tyranny; the last is portrayed as a subset of capture (rulers attack civil liberties, the rule of law, and democratic freedoms to cement their own power and their ability to abuse it [pp. 87–88]). They also include “categorical inequalities”: the hoarding of power and opportunity on the basis of race, sex, and so on. Above all, they include the political effects of concentrated wealth, to which Bagg applies Jeffrey Winters’s term “civil oligarchy.” Chapter 5 defends certain liberal institutions and practices as crucial barriers to state capture: Bagg salutes “constitutionalism,” “competition,” and “universalism” (i.e., the insistence that all enjoy the same political and legal rights).

Chapter 6 takes up Bagg’s “radical supplements” to liberalism: anti-monopoly, countervailing power, and systemic redistribution. Bagg calls for “corrective partiality” to attack imbalances of power (while acknowledging in Chapter 7 tensions between such partiality and liberal universality). In particular, he contends that “the central question” facing contemporary democrats is how to further countervailing power involving mass organization by “counter-hegemonic” groups, especially workers and racial minorities (p. 136, emphasis added). Finally, Bagg recommends “massive and continuous wealth transfers” far greater than those envisioned by “even the most generous ‘basic’ income proposals, not to mention traditional welfare states” (p. 141). He considers such transfers both desirable in themselves and a preferred way of undermining the power of the wealthy: whereas other redistributive policies can enable corruption, transfers can be structured to minimize official discretion.

In chapters 8–10, Bagg discusses democratic institutions and practices, applying his mid-level theories and heuristics to contemporary conditions rather than proposing blueprints for all time. Challenging “collective self-rule” theorists who idealize elections as more legitimate than they are or as a more perfect form of “popular authorization” than they could possibly be, Bagg still finds even power-distorted elections valuable, given their inherently uncertain outcomes. As he puts it—here channeling Riker—“they prevent those at the top from ensuring they remain at the top” (p. 192, emphasis added). Meritocratic and epistocratic alternatives to electoralism, in contrast, could be easily gamed by elites to propagate their own power. Chapter 9 takes up policy design; Bagg advocates principles of “simplicity, transparency, and adversarialism” (p. 202), recommending bright-line rules over administrative discretion. Chapter 10, finally, homes in on one form of counter-hegemonic countervailing power: what Jane McAlevey calls “organizing for power.” Bagg ably canvasses an extensive literature on labor, race-based, and community organizing. These represent, he believes, one of the few possible reasons for democratic hope since all alternative sources of mass power, including political parties, are themselves likely vectors of elite capture.

The Dispersion of Power is ambitious, original, and searching, unafraid to swim against the tide. It displays a tremendous scholarly range and deploys forceful, often pithy prose. It will be universally assigned and widely admired. Its central negative point is compelling: most democratic theory, with its unlikely ideal of collective self-rule and its agenda of deliberative and participatory experiments, fails to address democracy’s central problems, which involve not unwise or insufficiently participatory institutional design but the ways social inequality and the power that attends it distort all democratic institutions.

However, this book still has substantial flaws. First, it shoehorns too much into the category of state capture. Bagg insists that most, perhaps all, liberal values are also democratic, so that no tradeoffs exist; and he attempts to redescribe almost all forms of social inequality or domination as instances of, or at least as implicating, state capture. However, though some instances of tyranny involve an elite restricting civil or democratic rights to maintain itself in power, this is far from always the case; the powerful may also oppress those who pose little threat. And though Bagg’s attempt to broaden a theory of state capture essentially aimed against “wealthy elites” or “a narrow elite” to also cover inequality and oppression based on race, gender, and so forth is well-intentioned, few of his analyses and prescriptions really apply when the “group” said to have captured the state is as broad as, say, whites (a clear majority in the U.S.) or men (a near-majority). Finally, in refusing to define “the public interest and related concepts such as welfare, freedom, and equality” (p. 19) as anything but the relative absence of state capture, Bagg leaves a gap at his theory’s center. He apparently believes that if we ever achieved rough equality of group power, we would basically agree about, and achieve, the public interest—and that this “public interest” would never compete with welfare, freedom, or equality. That seems unlikely.

Second, Bagg’s relentless focus on preventing state capture slights the tension between that and other goals, many of which he explicitly favors: overall prosperity, individual opportunity, a high absolute level of welfare provision, and climate mitigation. In particular, while “massive and continuous wealth transfers” might effectively kneecap oligarchs’ power, perhaps existing social democracies have avoided them because they might also undermine investment and growth. Just as state capture is not the only threat to democracy and equality, democracy and equality are not the only worthwhile social and political ends.

Nor are all ends political. Despite its pervasive concern for the democratic power of “ordinary people,” Bagg’s scheme may not offer enough to that large subset of ordinary people who care less about power than about their personal security and their scope of private choice. Rather than justifying the priority of democracy to private purposes, Bagg seems not even to consider that some may prioritize the latter. To be sure, Bagg is right that state capture is itself a threat to individuals’ liberties and prosperity. But it is far from the only such threat that matters.

To repeat: this is an excellent book. It will be eagerly read by a generation of scholars for its invaluable lessons: that the domination of the state by powerful elites is a major threat to democratic aspirations, and that democratic theory must change substantially so as to acknowledge this. One need not share Bagg’s convictions that “state capture” encompasses all serious threats to democracy and that democracy encompasses all political values that matter, to salute with gratitude the teaching of those lessons.