| dc.description.abstract | Leftist political theory in Amerika has struggled to understand the two most
important issues facing us today: sovereignty and neoliberalism. In their efforts to
understand neoliberalism, most scholars rely on either neo-Marxist or poststructuralist
(Foucault) approaches, and in their efforts to understand sovereignty, scholars
commonly turn to Carl Schmitt’s legalistic notion of sovereignty. Unfortunately, these
approaches cannot produce a sufficiently descriptive account of sovereignty in neoliberal Amerika, which is why I turn to the sociological political theory of C. Wright Mills, articulating a power elite theory of neoliberalism that provides a ground for identifying the aristocratic structure of sovereignty in our historical period.
First, I provide an empirically-supported account of the development of the
Amerikan power elite from the 1950s to today. Rather than consisting of three
directorates as Mills observed in the 1950s – political, economic, and military – the
power elite today rules from only two directorates: the Corporate-Juridical Directorate
and the Military-Juridical Directorate. Second, I turn to early modern political theory to
identify two modes of sovereignty: legislative sovereignty and executive sovereignty, the
latter of which consists of two principles, executive enforcement (of law) and executive
prerogative. Third, I argue that, in neoliberal Amerika, the Corporate-Juridical
Directorate wields legislative sovereignty and the Military-Juridical Directorate wields
executive sovereignty. Ultimately, the Left should abandon its reliance on pluralistic and
legalistic notions in order to understand the aristocratic sovereignty of the power elite. | en |
