Description
‘Algorithmic governance’ systems increasingly coordinate social, economic, and political life across national borders through automated decision-making, predictive analytics, and personalized interventions. This paper examines whether cosmopolitan justice, defined as transnational moral obligations toward global distributive fairness and democratic legitimacy, can survive the rise of technocratic algorithmic coordination that operates outside traditional frameworks of political accountability. Drawing on the concept of the ‘Algorithmic Leviathan,’ it argues that algorithmic systems function as apolitical coordinators that eliminate occasions for political contestation by replacing democratic deliberation with optimization-driven satisfaction of individual preferences. Unlike Hobbes’s ‘territorial Leviathan,’ contemporary algorithmic governance operates transnationally through platform infrastructures, surveillance networks, and automated decision systems that transcend state sovereignty. This creates a fundamental tension with the cosmopolitan framework, which requires ‘vertical sovereignty,’ multi-level democratic governance distributing authority from local to global institutions so as to realize duties of global justice. The paper concludes by proposing institutional reforms, namely including a ‘Global Algorithmic Oversight Board,’ regional data compacts, and redistributive mechanisms treating data as 'global commons', a step that would politicize algorithmic governance through transnational democratic participation.