When James Harrington theorised the English Commonwealth in 1656, he insisted that "empire follows the balance of property"—land distribution determined constitutional form as decisively as formal institutions. Yet when Philip Pettit reimagined republican liberty three centuries later, property appeared only as "background condition," not as active mechanism of domination. In most contemporary political theory, ownership is rendered invisible, naturalized as pre-political fact, obscuring the very structure of political possibility.

Roman law constructed property (dominium) as absolute private right and predicate for citizenship. As Wood demonstrates, liberty and property were inseparable: only the free man (liber) held dominium; the slave could not. Post-Hannibal, the aristocratic appropriation of public land destroyed the smallholder class and catalysed the Gracchan crisis—proof that property distribution correlates with constitutional affordances.

Observe Locke's pivot: property becomes the "great and chief end" of political society yet simultaneously "natural", derived from labour "before" the social contract. Politics is recast as protection of property, never its constitution. By Rawls, property is relegated to “background justice”—its form itself invisible (until it reappears in Property-Owning Democracy). Pettit's "freedom as non-domination" centers on interpersonal and state relations, while bracketing employer-employee, landlord-tenant, creditor-debtor relations as mostly "economic”, not intrinsically political.

Political theory thus faces explanatory deficit. How to classify polities where formal democracy coexists with wealth concentration enabling regulatory capture or capital veto? Standard typologies oscillate between "democracy" and "oligarchy," unable to account for power’s triangulated character when state authority is contaminated by property structures while popular sovereignty remains formally intact but substantively constrained.

The Political Power Triangle makes this visible. Imperium (state), dominium (property as social relation), and potestas populi (popular power) form mutually constituting axes: State-People (legitimacy: democracy↔autocracy), Property-People (distribution: social justice↔exclusion), State-Property (regulation↔capture). Imperium enforces dominium; dominium shapes imperium; potestas legitimates imperium but is conditioned by dominium. Property structures Individual-Economy and State-Economy interactions. The triangle's centre—the actual common good—reveals not only who rules, but how the configuration of power defines the very potential of justice.

Aristotle grasped what modernity ignores: democracy requires distributed property because concentrated dominium corrupts. In an age of platform monopolies and eroded commons, recovering property's political centrality is urgent. Only by theorising appropriative structures can political theory map—and contest—the deep powers that shape our modern freedom.

To move from theory to diagnosis, the Political Power Triangle can be operationalized as a rigorous mapping tool: any political or economic regime can be positioned in this ternary space according to the distribution of imperium (state authority), dominium (property as social relation), and potestas (popular power). Each regime’s coordinates—empirically or theoretically derived—make visible the underlying architecture of power and its ethical implications. For example, laissez-faire capitalism appears in the bottom right of the triangle (high dominium, minimal imperium and potestas), signalling a regime where property rights and market allocation dominate, and popular agency is structurally marginalised. By contrast, a theocratic or authoritarian economy clusters in the bottom left (maximal imperium, negligible property or popular power), while commons-based or cooperative governance rises toward the top, where potestas (collective agency) is maximized and neither state nor property monopolize control. Intermediate forms—social democracy, guild socialism, solidarity economy—occupy the interior, their coordinates reflecting hybrid balances of state, property, and people. Thus, the triangle’s diagnostic value is twofold: it not only clarifies how political-economic theories and real-world regimes are shaped by the structural allocation of power, but also allows us to interrogate the common good each system affords.

This diagnostic logic is further deepened by plotting actual countries within the Political Power Triangle, using empirical and theoretical estimates of how state authority, property relations, and popular power are configured in each case. The selected countries are not arbitrary, but exemplify maximally distinct regime types grounded in both historical trajectories and contemporary political economy: Saudi Arabia anchors the bottom left as an archetypal rentier autocracy, where imperium (state and royal authority) is overwhelming and both property rights and popular voice are structurally suppressed; the United States marks the bottom right, where dominium—private property and capital—command decisive sway, and the formal architecture of democracy belies a reality of concentrated market power and regulatory capture; Sweden, near the triangle’s top, embodies a social-democratic equilibrium, balancing state capacity and popular agency with a regulated but not dominant property axis, historically rooted in strong labor movements and corporatist compromise; India, positioned closer to the edge, represents a plural and often contradictory regime, where formal democracy persists amid enduring inequalities of property and a historically fraught and dynamic relationship between state capacity and civil society. Other archetypes—China, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Nigeria, Iran, Cuba—are similarly and illustratively mapped, each reflecting the historically contingent arrangements of power, law, property, and participation unique to their context.

Unlike Henry Mintzberg’s influential “rebalancing society,” which partitions society into government, business, and plural sector—the triangle does not treat these axes necessarily as fixed sectors, but as dynamic, historically mediated structures whose interplay determines both the forms and limits of political transformation. The mapping is not merely classificatory: it is diagnostic, revealing how the quality of a society’s common good and the prospects for transformation are constrained or enabled by its actual distribution of power. Nevertheless, we can imagine that genuine “rebalancing” would enhance a society’s capacity for flourishing—provided that this shift addresses not only imperium, but also the structures of dominium.

Translating the Political Power Triangle from the macro level of political regimes to the meso level of organisational analysis requires more than analogy; it demands a precise re-specification of each axis, grounded in the distinctive logics and institutional forms of the modern firm. At the macro level, imperium, dominium, and potestas designate, respectively, the locus of state authority, the social structure of property, and the sphere of popular agency. Yet, as a growing body of critical management and heterodox economic theory has recognised, corporations themselves are “mini-polities”—governed by constitutions, shaped by regimes of property and control, and animated (or constrained) by the agency of their members (Ciepley 2013; Anderson 2017; Stout 2012).

This reconceptualisation is not only supported by the classical canon but also by the heterodox economics of the firm, which critiques standard agency theory for ignoring the political nature of the corporation as a nexus of competing and cooperating interests (Williamson, Jensen & Meckling, Blair & Stout, Zamagni, Ghoshal & Moran, Bowles & Gintis). The result is a genuinely political framework for organisational diagnosis: a lens that renders visible the deep structure of authority, property, and agency, and the ways their interplay defines not only who rules and who benefits, but the organisation’s potential for justice, resilience, and transformation.

The image presents a comparative mapping of fifteen distinct organisational archetypes, each positioned within the Political Power Triangle according to empirically and theoretically informed assessments of executive authority (imperium), ownership and resource control (dominium), and member agency (potestas). The selection of archetypes is grounded in a synthesis of canonical and heterodox literatures—including Mintzberg’s organisational configurations, Ouchi’s typologies, Blair & Stout’s team production, Anderson’s “private government,” Ostrom and Novkovic on commons and cooperatives, and contemporary research on platform governance, steward ownership, and hybrid models. The typology ensures both breadth and parsimony: it encompasses conventional forms (public shareholder corporations, state or parastatal enterprises, founder- or family-controlled firms), alternative and hybrid legal structures (B Corps, social enterprises, platform cooperatives), as well as nonprofit, philanthropic, and decentralised forms (NGOs, DAOs, commons governance). Their positions are not arbitrary but reflect a multidimensional logic: state enterprises cluster in the lower left, where executive authority and hierarchical control are paramount and member agency is minimised; public shareholder corporations and proprietary platforms gravitate toward the lower right, dominated by capital and asset control; while organisational forms that foreground participatory governance, distributed ownership, or collective agency—such as worker cooperatives, NGOs, and DAOs—are mapped toward the apex, reflecting maximal potestas. Hybrids and transitional forms (e.g., B Corps, steward ownership, professional partnerships) occupy the triangle’s interior, illustrating the spectrum of possible configurations and the ways in which contemporary organisational innovation seeks to rebalance legacy distributions of power. In this sense, the diagram does not merely classify; it enables critical diagnosis of organisational design, exposing the latent architecture of authority, ownership, and agency that shapes each firm’s developmental trajectory and ethical affordances.

In sum, the Political Power Triangle reveals the deep architecture of power and participation that shapes not only states, but the very design and ethics of modern organisations. By making visible the structural interplay of authority, ownership, and agency, it offers both a diagnostic lens and a normative guide—challenging theorists and practitioners alike to confront the latent distributions of power that define our institutional futures. In an era marked by economic concentration and democratic uncertainty, only such clarity can ground the pursuit of more just and flourishing forms of collective life.

#PoliticalPhilosophy #Property #Democracy #PowerStructures #Republicanism #Leadership

A few relevant clarifications