Freedom isn't what we think it is.
I've spent years reading about liberty, democracy, and power from this wheelchair in Tirana. And I've come to realise something uncomfortable: the version of freedom we've been sold is incomplete. It's a half-built house with no roof, and we're all getting rained on.
Most people today assume politics works on a simple axis. You're either for the market or for the state. You want less government or more government. Capitalism or socialism. Pick your team.
But there's a forgotten tradition that rejected this entire framing. It saw both the boss and the bureaucrat as potential tyrants. It demanded freedom not just in the voting booth but in the workplace, the bank, the landlord's office. This tradition has a name: economic republicanism.
The Slave with a Kind Master Is Still a Slave
Here's the core idea, simplified for clarity: republican thinkers defined freedom as the absence of domination. Not just the absence of interference, but the absence of arbitrary power over your life.
Think about that distinction. It's subtle but explosive.
A slave with a benevolent master who never beats them, never restricts their movement, never denies them food—that slave is still unfree. Why? Because their wellbeing depends entirely on another person's goodwill. The master could change their mind tomorrow. The structure of domination remains intact, even if it's never exercised.
Now apply that logic to modern life.
You work for a company. Your boss is lovely. But they could fire you at will. Your landlord is reasonable. But they could raise your rent or refuse to renew your lease. Your bank approves your loan. But they set the terms, and you have no say in them.
In each case, you're dependent on someone else's arbitrary decision. You're not a slave in the historical sense. But you're not fully free either.
This is what the 19th-century economic republicans understood. They looked at the new industrial economies of the West and saw domination everywhere—not from kings, but from factory owners, monopolists, creditors, and large landholders.
Two Types of Tyranny
The republican tradition distinguished between two forms of arbitrary power. The first was imperium: arbitrary public power. This is the tyranny of kings, ministers, and governments acting without the consent of the governed.
The second was dominium: arbitrary private power. This is the authority that owners, employers, landlords, and creditors wield over those dependent on them .
Classical liberals fought hard against imperium. They demanded constitutional limits on government, separation of powers, bills of rights. They won many of those battles.
But they often left dominium untouched.
In fact, many early republicans were "elitist defenders of liberty in the state but of hierarchy in society" . Landowners and merchants demanded limits on royal authority while defending their own private domination. Their liberty rested on the unfreedom of others.
This is the uncomfortable truth about classical liberalism. It challenged one form of tyranny while ignoring another. It gave us political freedom while leaving economic domination intact.
The Unfinished Republic
The economic republicans of the 19th century saw this contradiction clearly. If dependence on another's will makes a person unfree, then private dependence is just as corrosive as public dependence.
A worker who can be dismissed at will. A tenant without security. A debtor bound to a creditor. Each lives under a structure of subordination similar to that of subject to prince.
Their conclusion was radical: a constitutional republic that left economic domination untouched was an unfinished republic.
I find this framing incredibly useful. It explains why so many people in democratic societies feel powerless despite having the right to vote. They can choose their government, but they can't choose the terms of their employment. They can petition their representatives, but they can't influence the algorithms that shape their digital lives.
The ballot box gives them a voice in public affairs. But in the economic sphere—where they spend most of their waking hours—they remain subjects, not citizens.
A Parade of Forgotten Radicals
The essay I'm drawing from introduces several thinkers who carried this tradition forward. Let me walk you through a few of them, because their stories are genuinely fascinating.
Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) was a former Royal Navy officer who became one of the first to identify that a new ruling class had emerged. He called them "capitalists" and argued that the struggle for freedom was no longer against kings but against employers.
Here's the twist: Hodgskin was a disciple of Adam Smith. He believed in markets. But he thought genuine competition—free from monopoly and privilege—would enable workers to cooperate as independent producers. A free economy, properly constituted, would resemble a network of self-governing associations rather than a hierarchy of masters and servants.
John Francis Bray (1809-97) proposed a "Republic of Labour": a federation of cooperative workshops linked by local councils. Each worker would own personal property but pool resources into joint-stock associations, coordinating production through democratic planning.
For Bray, economic coordination wasn't a technical problem to be solved by experts. It was an act of citizenship—people governing their common life together.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), the anarchist printer and philosopher, argued that a political revolution without an economic one was hollow. In 1848, he proposed a Bank of the People that would provide interest-free credit to workers' associations. His aim was to "republicanise specie"—to make finance itself an instrument of economic self-rule.
Jeanne Deroin (1805-94), a seamstress, teacher, and journalist, took republicanism in a feminist direction. She envisioned a proto-syndicalist commonwealth uniting producers and consumers in a single democratic federation. Freedom, she insisted, required the inclusion of all who contributed to social life: women, children, the sick, and the elderly.
Proudhon, despite inspiring her, met Deroin only with contempt. Her insistence on women's equality offended his deeply held misogyny. Some heroes are complicated.
Henry George (1839-97) wrote Progress and Poverty, which sold millions of copies and made him the most widely read economist of the 19th century. He argued that the private monopoly of land was the root of social domination: "To say that the land of a country shall be owned by a small class is to say that that class shall rule it; … republicanism is impossible" .
His solution was a single tax on unearned land values—returning the rents of nature to the community while allowing individuals to hold land .
The Great Forgetting
So what happened to this tradition? Why did we forget it?
The essay offers a sobering explanation. By the 20th century, the social-democratic Left—the direct heir of economic republicanism—"exchanged its commitment to liberty and self-rule for the pursuit of equality".
This wasn't necessarily a bad trade. The welfare state, public education, national health systems, strong trade unions—these delivered significant material progress for working people .
But something was lost.
Citizens gained security but not agency. The structures that delivered prosperity often deepened their sense of powerlessness. You could receive benefits from the state, but you couldn't govern the institutions that shaped your life.
By the 1970s, frustrations long contained by growth broke into the open. Movements for worker self-management and cooperative ownership briefly revived the republican spirit.
But social-democratic parties were unwilling to reclaim their founding radicalism. And the political Right seized the language of autonomy for itself, recasting the demand for popular power as "popular individualism".
This was the transformation that paved the way for neoliberalism.
The Present Moment
Here's where I get personal.
Living in Albania, I've watched Western democracies from a particular vantage point. We're often told to aspire to their model—free markets, free elections, liberal institutions. And there's much to admire.
But I've also watched the growing sense of powerlessness that pervades these societies. The feeling that governments rise and fall, but the power to shape daily life flows elsewhere—through markets, corporations, and data systems untouched by democratic oversight .
A recent international survey found that in almost every major country, most people believe the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful . Many say their societies are "broken."
This discontent has fueled a turn toward authoritarian politics. Strongmen promise control while entrenching new forms of oligarchic rule .
And one reason the authoritarians are winning, the essay suggests, is because "liberals and progressives have a deep unease with power" .
I think that's right. Liberalism, as it's currently practiced, is uncomfortable talking about power. It prefers to talk about rights, procedures, and individual choice. It assumes that if you remove government interference, people will be free.
But freedom requires more than the absence of government coercion. It requires the absence of domination—public and private.
A Fusion of Tyrannies
The essay makes a chilling observation about our current moment. On the public side, expanding security states and unaccountable bureaucracies exercise power with little democratic constraint. On the private side, workplace protections are rolled back, gig-economy precarity spreads, and platform firms manipulate millions through opaque algorithms.
These public and private forms of domination don't stand apart. They act in alliance—a fusion of imperium and dominium.
Think about that. The two forms of arbitrary power that republicans have always feared are now working together. The state and the corporation, the bureaucrat and the boss, reinforcing each other's control.
This is what makes our situation feel so suffocating. There's no escape route. You can't flee the state into the market, because the market is dominated by concentrated private power. You can't flee the market into the state, because the state is increasingly captured by those same private interests.
What Would Economic Republicanism Look Like Today?
The essay offers a few suggestions for what a 21st-century economic republicanism might involve. I'm summarising them here, not as a blueprint, but as a starting point for imagination.
Democratic firms where workers and communities share ownership and decision-making . This isn't a fantasy—worker cooperatives already exist, and some perform remarkably well. The question is whether we can create conditions that allow them to flourish at scale.
Public and cooperative finance that treats credit as a civic resource rather than a private monopoly . Proudhon's Bank of the People was ahead of its time, but the principle remains relevant. Who controls the flow of money controls much of social life.
Transparent digital infrastructures governed as public utilities and open to democratic oversight . The algorithms that shape our attention, our information, our opportunities—these are too important to be left in private hands, accountable to no one but shareholders.
None of this can be achieved in a single leap. But every reform that moves us toward shared control over the basic structures of economic life is a step toward freedom.
Beyond the Binary
What strikes me most about economic republicanism is its refusal of the state-versus-market binary.
We've been trained to think in these terms. If you criticise corporations, you must want more government. If you criticise the government, you must want more markets. There's no third option.
But the economic republicans saw both as potential sources of domination. They wanted popular power—the capacity of ordinary people to govern the conditions of their own lives. Sometimes that meant markets free from monopoly. Sometimes that meant collective institutions free from bureaucratic control. The form mattered less than the function: preventing arbitrary power from accumulating in anyone's hands.
This is a genuinely liberating framework. It allows you to support competition in some domains and coordination in others. It lets you criticise both the overreaching state and the predatory corporation without contradiction. It focuses on the outcome—freedom from domination—rather than the mechanism.
The Task Ahead
I'll end where the essay ends, with a call to action.
Reversing oligarchy and resisting authoritarianism will require building a new democratic economic order. The 19th-century economic republicans can guide us, but the task is not to resurrect their programme. It's to craft an economic republicanism fit for our own age .
We must reject the binary of "state" and "market" and find combinations of competition and coordination that work for us.
This is the unfinished business of democracy. We've built political republics—imperfect, contested, but real. Now we need to complete them with economic self-rule.
Freedom isn't just about choosing your government. It's about not living at the mercy of another's will. It's about having a meaningful part to play in governing the institutions that shape your life.
That's the freedom we forgot to fight for. And it's the freedom we need to reclaim.
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