Book Review: The Privatized State, by Chiara Cordelli

• Author: Anna Stilz
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211059549
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(5) 809 –830

© The Author(s) 2021

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Privatized State, by Chiara Cordelli, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2020. 335 pp.

Reviewed by: Anna Stilz, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ,

USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211059549

Government in the twenty-first century is privatized: many essential state

services, including education, prisons, military defense, adjudication, health

care, and welfare services are now provided by private-sector organizations,

and frequently, these services are financed through private philanthropy.

How should we evaluate this state of affairs? Chiara Cordelli argues that we

should see it as a deep failure of democratic legitimacy—indeed, as a “regres-

sion to the state of nature” (7). Cordelli holds that we have urgent democratic

reasons to constitutionally limit privatization and to demarketize our public

bureaucracies.

Cordelli’s rich book makes three important contributions. First, it offers us

an ideal theory—broadly inspired by Kant—of how official discretion in

public administration could be made democratically legitimate. Second, it

presents a strong critique of the privatization of state services: Cordelli argues

that extensive privatization undermines the preconditions of democratic self-

rule, and she holds that private organizations are constitutively incapable of

living up to the requirements of democratically legitimate public administra-

tion. Finally, the book presents some nonideal prescriptions for reform. Given

that we now live in privatized states, where do we go from here? Cordelli

offers both provisional recommendations for improving the legitimacy of

privatized service provision, and longer-term prescriptions for transitioning

away from the privatized state toward a more democratic system of public

administration.

This is an impressive and ambitious book and there’s a lot to like about

it—it’s creative, well-written, and it covers a very wide terrain. At its heart is

a Kantian conception of state legitimacy, conceived as a value distinct from

distributive justice or equality. To pinpoint the concept of legitimacy, Cordelli