(Neo)Classical Liberalism and Polycentricity

Very short summary: This essay discusses the recent surge of interest in the concept of polycentricity in liberal thought. I clarify that polycentricity is different from a stateless or anarchistic governance system, though the liberal account differs from the Ostromian one. I suggest that two main considerations explain the attraction of the concept: the limits of political knowledge and the irrationality of the political.

This summer, Eric Schliesser published a series of posts on “neoliberalism” addressing various topics, such as polycentricity, (polycentric) philosophy of science, and AI. I wanted to reflect on the first topic, as it overlaps with my current work. I plan to address the third one in the near future.

In his post on polycentricity and neoliberalism, Eric addresses the reinvention by a new generation of classical liberals through their appropriation of the (Elinor and Vincent) Ostroms’ Bloomington School work on polycentricity. The most interesting aspect of this appropriation is that, as Eric rightly points out, it’s not (only) motivated by the updating of old liberal obsessions with competition and secession under a new framework. It also signals a new willingness to reflect on systems of administrative governance. As I’ve been reading and writing on polycentricity extensively lately, I have some thoughts to offer that are hopefully complementary to Eric’s.

My first point concerns the extreme malleability of the polycentricity concept. In what I take to be the foundational paper for the renewed interest in polycentricity from a broadly classical liberal perspective, Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko associate this concept with three features.[1] First, multiple partially autonomous decision centers that can freely pursue various ends or, at least, choose means to achieve imposed ends. Second, an overarching system of rules that organizes interactions between decision centers and determines conditions of entry/exit from the polycentric system. Third, a spontaneous order that results from the decentralized choices of decision centers within the boundaries of the system of rules. This extremely general characterization opens the door to an infinity of polycentric governance configurations that Aligica and Tarko capture in the following figure:

Source: Aligica and Tarko, “Polycentricity,” p. 257.

This figure illustrates the great diversity of governance systems that fall under the label “polycentric.” This reflects the concept’s history. Michael Polanyi used it to contrast a monocentric and centralized organization of scientific research with a mode of scientific governance emphasizing autonomy, experimentation, and diversity.[2]