Power-Sharing Liberalism
In The You On AI Encyclopedia
Allen's framework emerged from sustained engagement with three traditions. From republicanism, she took the concept of non-domination—the insistence that freedom requires not merely the absence of interference but the absence of another's arbitrary power over you. From the capability approach, she took the focus on substantive freedom and the recognition that material conditions determine whether formal rights become lived capacities. From commons governance, she took the institutional imagination to think beyond the state-market binary that has dominated liberal theory for a century.
The AI application is decisive. Most AI governance discourse operates in the register of negative liberty: preventing discrimination, blocking deepfakes, regulating deceptive practices. Allen argues this framing is radically incomplete. It leaves unasked the generative question: what should the technology be for? A framework focused only on preventing harm will never ask whether AI should be used to enhance democratic deliberation, augment human cooperation, or expand the conditions for self-governance.
The framework has direct institutional implications. It justifies public investment in AI infrastructure as a democratic necessity, not merely a competitive policy preference. It grounds the argument for worker participation in AI-driven workplace restructuring. It provides the normative foundation for treating the intelligence commons as a shared resource requiring collective governance rather than a raw material available for private extraction.
Power-sharing liberalism also supplies the standard by which Allen evaluates particular AI governance proposals. The test is whether a proposed institution distributes power broadly or concentrates it, whether it includes affected communities in decisions or relegates them to consumer status, whether it creates conditions for genuine participation or merely provides formal access to systems governed by others.
Origin
Allen developed power-sharing liberalism across a series of publications culminating in Justice by Means of Democracy (2023). The framework applies Aristotelian, republican, and capability-theoretic resources to the contemporary crisis of democratic governance, with direct implications for the technology domain she engages through her GETTING-Plurality research network.
Key Ideas
Positive and negative liberties together. Democratic freedom requires both protection from interference and the substantive capacity to participate in collective life.
Generative governance. Asking what technology is for, not merely how to prevent its harms, is the precondition for governance that serves democratic flourishing.
Non-domination. Freedom means the absence of arbitrary power over you, including the power of private actors who control essential infrastructure.
Material conditions of participation. Citizens without material independence cannot exercise genuine democratic agency; economic empowerment is constitutive of democratic governance, not separate from it.
Beyond state-market binary. Democratic institutions must include commons-based, participatory, and hybrid forms that neither pure markets nor centralized states can provide.
Debates & Critiques
Libertarian critics argue that treating positive liberties as foundational opens the door to expansive state claims that threaten the negative liberties the framework purports to include. Allen's response is that the distinction has always been unstable—negative liberty requires positive institutions (courts, police, property records) that presuppose collective action—and that the serious question is how to design institutions that protect both dimensions of freedom simultaneously.
Further Reading
- Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
- Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997)
- Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government (Princeton, 2017)
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge, 1990)