The image of Western liberal democracies is spreading and it is hard to deny the allure. Through a rich vein of Enlightenment thinking, they claim to represent a way of reconciling man’s natural autonomy with the subjection to authority that citizenship requires. In empowering people to have a say in the matters that affect them, many have come to view them as the panacea to a global economic market that systematically generates vast inequalities in living standards. ...

Yet this is not a true reflection of the logic which governs the global market. In opening up domestic economies to grave differences in bargaining power and leverage, it paves the way for rich transnational corporations from different parts of the world to exploit local workers. To argue by analogy, 17th century philosopher Giambattista Vico insisted that every law should be built upon the two pillars, the certum and the verum. There should be a tension between the certum, legal certainty – an ‘obscurity of judgement backed only by authority’ – and the verum, a higher standard of justice. Reducing the market to the sole pillar of science paves the way for reification, treating people as objects. Entire communities become mere statistics, in a move which robs them of their moral force and makes their rights much easier to disregard.