Books by Paul Gowder

The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms

Published in 2023 with Cambridge University Press, The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms gives a case for building bottom-up participatory governance institutions into large internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. It does so through an argument rooted in the insights of generations of political scientists about the problems with information and self-control that political states experience, paired with an account of how large platform companies face similar problems. Democratizing the platforms on a global basis has the potential to help protect the world against the numerous ills that uncontrolled online misconduct has inflicted on the world---such as fraud, misinformation, and election disruption---while also potentially mitigating the neocolonial relationship that American companies currently have with the Global South.

The Networked Leviathan is available in paper and cloth. It is also available for free in open-access e-book PDF.

The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation

Published in 2021 by Hart, The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation gives an account of the peculiarly American instantiation of the rule of law. It focuses on explicating the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express? It also considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law

It is available for purchase in cloth, and for free open-access download in PDF or reading online.

The Rule of Law in the Real World

Published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press, The Rule of Law in the Real World gives a comprehensive theory of the political and legal ideal known as "the rule of law" which draws on both normative theory from political philosophy and strategic analysis from political science. The rule of law should be understood as the coordinated collective control of power, and matters because it constitutes a morally important kind of social equality. The book develops a case for how those properties should be taken into account in social scientific attempts to measure the rule of law as well as policy efforts to promote it.

It is available for purchase in paper and cloth.

NEW (10/24/23): The Rule of Law in the Real World is now available in free open-access e-book form! It can be accessed for free through this link. With immense gratitude to Cambridge University Press for permitting me to amend our contract seven years after publication to retroactively make a book open access. This also means that 100% of my published books can now be read completely for free.