Defending the Competitive Order: Social Justice and the Challenge of Private Authority

Neoliberal defenses of markets are often said to institutionalize authoritarianism, both through technocratic states and “private governments” in firms, and thus to be incompatible with democracy. This paper asks whether a defense of competitive markets can be reconciled with democratic commitments to social justice and non-domination. Focusing on some neoliberal thinkers (Eucken, Lippmann, Hayek), it offers a rational reconstruction of the “competitive order” as a privilege-free institutional framework whose point is to disperse power and secure individuals’ status as non-dominated equals. On this view, markets and democracy appear as complementary anti-power devices that rely on general, impersonal rules to prevent public and private actors from entrenching arbitrary authority. The paper, first, develops a competition-based conception of social justice, according to which a market order is just when its rules eliminate legal and economic privileges, broadly distribute opportunities, and stabilize democratic support. Second, it confronts the critique of “private government” and argues that neoliberalism can integrate concerns about workplace domination through instruments such as competition policy and robust exit options, without abandoning the competitive order itself. JEL Codes : B15, B25, B31, B41.