A proposed framework for preserving public authority over essential economic arrangements, through prosperity and institutional change.
My illustration entitled: “The Hands Above the Blueprint” – A magnificent futuristic city rises from an architectural blueprint. Many human hands hold pencils, erasers and drafting tools, revising its foundations together.
Introduction: The authority that prosperity cannot purchase
Imagine a regional water institution called Riverlight. It supplies clean water reliably, pays its workers fairly and returns a surplus. Most households approve of its management. Yet residents cannot obtain independent analysis of its contracts, fund competing proposals or initiate a binding reconsideration of its governing purposes. Their satisfaction matters to management; their authority depends on management’s permission.
I regard that difference as philosophically consequential. Benefits answer what an institution delivers. Authorship concerns who can help determine what it exists to do, under which rules and through which structures. Good performance supplies a reason to retain an arrangement. It does not establish an entitlement to determine its beneficiaries’ future permanently.
By an essential economic arrangement, I mean an organised system governing access to conditions necessary for basic life or effective economic participation, where losing access or changing providers carries serious practical costs. Essentiality concerns dependence and consequences, rather than size or ownership alone.
An affected public comprises people substantially dependent on, burdened by or exposed to that arrangement’s decisions. Riverlight’s public includes tenants, workers and downstream communities, not merely account holders. This approach owes something to John Dewey’s account of publics arising around consequential effects of associated activity in The Public and Its Problems (1927). Standing should reflect the issue and degree of affectedness, with reasons and appeals when boundaries are disputed.
By authorship, I mean effective standing to initiate, investigate, deliberate upon and help authorise changes through legitimate procedures. It guarantees neither personal agreement nor unilateral control. Reauthorism proposes sustaining independently governed knowledge, resources and practical capacity for this work, during success and after transformation. Its eight principles must operate together.
I justify this obligation through the authority essential arrangements exercise over other people’s options. When dependence makes ordinary refusal costly, those governing an arrangement owe affected people more than competent service. They owe them conditions for informed reconsideration. This does not make every successful enterprise common property. It makes the depth of dependence relevant to the responsibilities attached to governing it, whatever its ownership form.
1. Continuing Authorship
People’s standing should continue after an institution begins delivering benefits. Otherwise, a founding agreement can become a permanent transfer of authority over purposes that later generations never meaningfully considered. Initial consent deserves respect, but circumstances, dependencies and the composition of the public change.
At Riverlight, continuing authorship would mean accessible proposal procedures, representative deliberation and a defined route to decisions with institutional effect. A satisfaction survey would be insufficient: management could accept praise while ignoring a carefully developed proposal to change ownership or priorities.
This does not require residents to vote on every repair. Delegation makes collective activity possible, and competent operators need room to act. The distinction is between delegating administration and surrendering the ability to reconsider its mandate. People must also remain free not to participate; paid participation time, accessible information and representative institutions should prevent authorship from becoming an obligation only the affluent can fulfil. Continuing authority is therefore inseparable from the capacity to exercise it.
2. Independent Capacity
A right to propose change is fragile when the institution being questioned controls every relevant expert, record and research budget. Independence means that the incumbent cannot withdraw essential support merely because inquiry challenges its position.
Riverlight could support a separately governed public review trust, with protected funding, enforceable access to relevant records, technical staff and resources for credible alternative designs. Its governing body could combine elected representatives with residents selected by lot, alongside conflict-of-interest rules and published accounts. Confidential personal information would remain protected.
Independence does not remove accountability. The trust must explain its decisions, face audit and permit competing analyses. Experts inform public judgment; they do not acquire the public’s final authority. Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance, published in this form in June 2010, provides a relevant predecessor: institutional diversity and arrangements suited to their setting resist a simple choice between central state control and markets. My proposed trust is one possible application, not a model established by her research.
3. Proportionate Funding
Independent capacity consumes real resources. Its justification cannot be that every expenditure bearing the word “democratic” is automatically worthwhile. Funding must be sufficient for credible inquiry, predictable enough to prevent retaliation and proportionate to the dependence and complexity involved.
For Riverlight, an openly justified formula could combine a protected institutional contribution with wider public funding where benefits extend beyond customers. Its incidence matters: a seemingly modest charge can burden poor households or indirectly reduce workers’ pay. Affordability protections and transparent distribution are part of the principle.
The formula should undergo periodic independent review against demonstrated needs. A permanent percentage without justification could enrich a review bureaucracy; an annual managerial grant could silence it. Independence therefore constrains funding discretion, while proportionality constrains the independent body’s claims. Protecting revision capacity must not exhaust maintenance budgets or displace basic services. When resources are scarce, the public deserves an explicit account of what minimum credible capacity can be sustained and what support must come from elsewhere.
4. Revision Before Crisis
People should not have to demonstrate collapse before asking whether an arrangement still deserves their authorisation. Riverlight’s reliability does not settle whether its ownership, investment priorities or service boundaries remain appropriate.
Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) distinguished leaving an organisation from seeking change within it, examining their interaction under deterioration. Charles Sabel and William Simon’s account of destabilization rights (2004) examined opening persistently failing institutions to experimentalist reform. These predecessors illuminate voice and revisability. The obligation I propose does not depend on establishing deterioration or institutional failure.
A serious objection follows: permanent opportunities for challenge may undermine investment and reward factions that repeatedly reopen settled questions. I accept the risk. Riverlight should have scheduled review windows, reasonable petition thresholds, disclosed costs and limits on immediately repeating an unchanged proposal. Urgent rights violations need separate remedies. Such rules should discipline reconsideration without making review depend on incumbent approval. Opening an inquiry must also remain distinct from authorising implementation.
There is a cost even when a challenge fails: attention, staff time and uncertainty cannot be recovered completely. I would therefore require substantial proposals to identify their intended benefit and likely investigation costs. The threshold should establish seriousness, however, rather than demand that an under-resourced public prove its entire case before receiving the means to investigate it.
5. Freedom to Reconsider Purposes
Institutional participation remains narrow if people may discuss only how efficiently existing goals are achieved. A public can reasonably ask whether those goals are still the right ones. Efficiency compares means against purposes; it cannot determine every purpose worth pursuing.
Riverlight might efficiently maximise distributable surplus while residents prefer greater drought resilience, broader access or restoration of the watershed. These choices involve values and opportunity costs. Reauthorism would preserve the ability to formulate and assess them, rather than treating the founding mission as beyond discussion.
Public preferences will conflict. Workers may prioritise employment security, tenants affordable bills and downstream residents ecological protection. No invocation of “the public” dissolves these differences. Deliberation must disclose trade-offs, hear less powerful groups and produce reasoned decisions through authorised procedures. Independent analysis should compare feasible alternatives, including retaining the current mission. Freedom to reconsider purposes grants standing to contest them; it supplies no presumption that every proposed purpose is legitimate or affordable.
Nor should the review trust control the agenda so completely that it becomes a second incumbent. Minority groups need routes to place alternatives before the public, and the selection of options must itself be contestable. Some disagreements will remain after a fair decision. Authorship requires fair standing within that disagreement, rather than an invented consensus.
6. Continuity Through Transition
A decision to change Riverlight’s structure must account for people who cannot suspend their dependence while a political experiment proceeds. A family needs water during a transfer of ownership. Vulnerable users may face consequences that more affluent residents can privately escape.
A credible proposal therefore needs a funded transition plan: operational responsibilities, staff retention or training, maintenance reserves, accessible complaints procedures and arrangements for unexpected failure. Independent technical assessment should test these provisions, and affected users should help define acceptable service protections.
Continuity, however, cannot become a permanent veto. An incumbent can always identify uncertainty in an alternative while treating its own risks as normal. Claimed transition dangers must be evidenced, compared with the risks of continuation and assessed by a body able to require mitigation and set deadlines. Where delay is necessary, reasons and conditions for proceeding should be public. Continuity sets obligations for the path of change; it must not predetermine that only the incumbent may provide the service.
My illustration “The Hands Above the Blueprint” work-in-progress. The art represents that receiving a place in society should include having a hand in its design.
7. The Successor Duty
Suppose Riverlight becomes a cooperative after an informed public decision. The cooperative cannot claim that its democratic origin completes the work of authorship. Its members may later entrench themselves, exclude new users or control information as tightly as the previous management.
The successor duty requires the replacement arrangement to preserve adequate independent knowledge, resources and routes to future revision. A merger, sale or restructuring must allocate these responsibilities explicitly. Where functions are divided, responsibility should follow the relevant assets, services and dependencies, with coordination preventing obligations from disappearing between entities.
This is a proposed institutional requirement, not a claim that existing law already imposes it universally. It would need appropriate legal and constitutional expression. Nor does it demand preserving the same review trust forever. A successor may redesign the machinery if equivalent practical capacity survives under accountable scrutiny. The present public’s success in changing an institution cannot justify denying a later public the same standing. Reauthorism must apply its own criticism to the institutions created in its name.
8. Reciprocal Rights
Public authorship is legitimate only within a framework that recognises persons as more than instruments of collective preference. A majority at Riverlight cannot make access conditional on political loyalty, expose private household records or silence a minority seeking another review.
Reciprocity requires individual rights, minority representation, fair notice, opportunities to answer adverse claims, impartial review and respect for legitimate commitments. Contracts, workers’ pensions and property interests cannot simply disappear because a new coalition calls its programme democratic. Where change justifiably alters commitments, lawful procedures and fair allocation of resulting burdens matter.
Equally, commitments must not be designed to extinguish future authorship indefinitely. An outgoing board should not purchase permanent immunity through avoidable penalties or an effectively unreviewable contract. Distinguishing a legitimate reliance interest from deliberate entrenchment requires independent judgment and reasons. The public must respect those affected by its decisions, just as management must respect the public. This principle binds the review trust, the incumbent and every successor.
Conclusion: Preserving the capacity to choose again
I present Reauthorism as a proposed synthesis within democratic political economy. Democratic theory already examines collective self-government; economic democracy already contests the concentration of economic control. Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Economic Democracy, first published in 1985, defended extending democratic principles into enterprises, particularly through worker ownership and control. Institutional reform and experimentalist governance likewise have substantial traditions of participation and continuing revision.
The emphasis here is a connected obligation: essential arrangements should sustain independently governed revision capacity through successful operation and across succession. This is a specification to debate and test, not proof of an unprecedented philosophical discovery. It neither dictates one ownership model nor supplies a complete theory of democracy.
At Riverlight, the principles form a demanding balance. Continuing authorship requires independent capacity; funding disciplines its costs. Review before crisis opens questions about purposes; continuity protects people during implementation. Successors inherit the duty, and reciprocal rights constrain everyone exercising it.
A public may consider the evidence and retain Riverlight’s existing arrangements. That can be an exercise of authorship when realistic alternatives were available and later reconsideration remains possible. My objection is to prosperity becoming a title to permanent rule. An institution should help people live well while preserving their practical authority to decide, together and within just limits, how they will live next.
Sources and historical publication dates
- John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. First published 1927. Linked transcription released 20 June 2023.
- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press, 1970.
- Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy. University of California Press, 1985; the linked publisher page in the article describes the August 1986 paperback.
- Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon, “Destabilization Rights: How Public Law Litigation Succeeds.” Harvard Law Review, volume 117, pages 1015–1101, February 2004.
- Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” American Economic Review, volume 100, issue 3, pages 641–672, June 2010. Revised from her Nobel lecture delivered 8 December 2009.