ABSTRACT
Within contemporary political philosophy, two complaints about the democratic deficits of capitalism feature with particular prominence. The first complaint concerns economic production and identifies a lack of democracy at the workplace. The second complaint concerns democratic politics and focuses on the limits that economic actors impose on the state’s ability to put democratic decisions into practice. I shall argue that a neglected institutional vision from the history of ideas succeeds in solving both these problems at once. A suitably modified version of council democracy, associated with the traditions of both council communism and anarcho-syndicalism, in which the autonomy of workers’ councils is constrained by political democracy, and which distributes different incidents of property rights between the dimensions of economic production and political democracy, simultaneously realises the aims of democratising the workplace and re-establishing the effective sovereignty of democratic politics.
