Stone Inequality Book Talk: Jeffrey A. Winters

In the second installment of the Stone Program's mini-series on inequality and democracy, political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters will discuss his new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.

About the book: An urgent and shocking examination of how the ultra-rich dominate democracies, hoard political power, and maintain inequality—and how we might chart another path. The wealthy and powerful few have dominated the many throughout most of human history. This is now more starkly visible than ever—a time when, with politicians bought and paid for across the political spectrum, the gulf between oligarchs and average citizens is larger than any gap that existed during European feudalism or the slave society of Imperial Rome. One thing is clear: the world is heading into an even deeper state of inequality, one that oligarchs of past eras could only have dreamed of. The strange thing is, for the first time in history, this domination is accomplished through democracy. Yet we aren’t in open revolt against the system. In fact, we seemingly keep voting to prop it up. Why? In The Blind Spot, political scientist Jeffrey Winters delivers a timely, incisive account of how we reached this era of in-your-face oligarchy. Tracing the evolution of wealth power through the modern democratic era, he demonstrates how domination by oligarchs isn’t just a flaw in our democracy, but a foundational feature—allowing the wealthy to limit the agenda, control the marketplace of ideas, and rewire the law to defend, hide, and increase their money and power. Now, in an extraordinary paradox, we exist in a state of “participatory inequality,” a world in which the 99.99 percent of us participate openly, freely, and democratically in our own ongoing exclusion and exploitation. But The Blind Spot ultimately sounds a clarion call for change, arming us not only with a vital lens through which we can understand just how bad our political reality has become, but also with bold ideas for how we might shift the balance of power. While powerful oligarchs do not cede power willingly, this period of shocking inequality is nevertheless an opportunity for change.

Jeffrey A. Winters is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and the Director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies Program at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Winters specializes on oligarchs and elites in the United States from independence to the present, as well as in contemporary Southeast Asia, medieval Europe, and ancient Athens and Rome. His forthcoming book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Democracy (Penguin Random House and Scribners) focuses on the impact of wealth power and wealth defense on American democracy. His 2011 book Oligarchy (Cambridge) won APSA’s 2012 Gregory M. Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics. It has been translated into Spanish, Czech, Indonesian and Chinese. His research, publications, and teaching focus on comparative politics and political economy. In addition to oligarchy, important themes in his work include economic inequality, wealth concentration, the rule of law, authoritarianism, and democracy in the U.S. as well as in post-colonial states. He is a specialist on the region of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. His book, Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State (Cornell 1996), explores the structural power of those who supply and withhold a society’s investment resources. With Jonathan Pincus, he co-edited Reinventing the World Bank (Cornell 2002), a wide-ranging critique of the Bank’s structure and operation. Both books were translated into Indonesian and published in Jakarta. He has also published two other books written in Indonesian: in 1999, Dosa-Dosa Politik Orde Baru [Political Sins of Suharto’s New Order], the best-selling book in Indonesia that year, and, in 2004, Orba Jatuh, Orba Bertahan? [Indonesia’s “New Order” Falls or Endures?]. He was one of three scholars invited in 2014 by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy to write on the topic of “wealth,” to be published in their journal NOMOS.