My dissertation recovers a neglected tradition of Dutch democratic republicanism through the work of Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden, and Baruch Spinoza. I show how democratic republicanism emerged in the mid-seventeenth century in response to transformations of socio-material relations under mercantile capitalism that older republican theories could not adequately address. Based on extensive archival research and my own translation of primary sources, I demonstrate that these thinkers developed an egalitarian conception of popular government that sought to enhance both the political and economic freedom of ordinary people. Yet the emergence of this egalitarian conception of popular government was deeply entangled with forms of domination, including colonial dispossession and unfree wage labor.

My dissertation intervenes in the republican revival by recovering the Dutch tradition of democratic republicanism as a major source of radical egalitarian thought. It also demonstrates the importance of political economy in shaping democratic ideas, showing how capitalist market expansion influenced early modern republican thought. Finally, by examining the entanglement of democratic egalitarianism with colonial dispossession and unfree wage labor, the project challenges accounts that treat these forms of domination as unfortunate blind spots separable from the development of democratic ideas. 

Related to the project, I have two papers in preparation. The first argues that the De la Courts developed a distinctive democratic theory in which Hobbesian self-love provides the normative foundation of democratic politics. Their defense of democracy rests on what I call the inversion thesis: the advancement of each person’s self-love is an expression of the common good. In a second, I examine the relationship between settler colonialism and democracy in the work of Van den Enden, arguing that settler colonialism was constitutive of his democratic theory.

Recent evidence suggests that oligarchs hold disproportionate influence over electoral representative institutions and limit people’s participation in both formal and informal spaces of democratic politics. Drawing on phenomenology, I develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue to describe the political exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchic domination. Oligarchic fatigue materializes through two analytically distinct mechanisms: people experience fatigue either (1) when they actively participate within formal political spaces, but their options for participation are constrained due to oligarchic control over political institutions; or (2) when their political participation is deemed illegitimate and functionally denied by oligarchy. The corrective to oligarchic fatigue, I contend, is a renewed focus on political freedom as a constitutive element of democratic innovations and anti-oligarchic institutional design.