Is the privatization of state functions always, and only intrinsically, wrong? On Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211038725 |
| Author | Lisa Herzog |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
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Is the privatization of
state functions always,
and only intrinsically,
wrong? On Chiara
Cordelli’s The
Privatized State
Lisa Herzog
University of Groningen, Netherlands
Abstract
The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but
also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private compa-
nies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original
argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omni-
lateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral
will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important
dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to
realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative
problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem norma-
tively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion
invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better
understand what an ideal civil service would look like.
Keywords
Authority, civil servants, delegation, Kantian political philosophy, privatization,
representation
Corresponding author:
Lisa Herzog, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat52, Groningen, 9712 GL,
Netherlands.
Email: l.m.herzog@rug.nl
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14748851211038725
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2023, Vol. 22(4) 657–665
Chiara Cordelli, The Privatized State, Princeton, NJ
346 pp (Hardback). ISBN: 9780691205755.
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020,
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