Liberty, equality and property-owning democracy

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 379-396

  O'Neill, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84886962391     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2009.01458.x     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
2. Although the most systematic discussion of the contract between "welfare-state capitalism" and "property-owning democracy" comes in JF, there is also a sustained discussion of property-owning democracy in Chapter V of Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971),
3. especially section 43, and again in the Preface to the French edition of A Theory of Justice (reproduced as the preface to the revised (1999) edition of A Theory of Justice, see especially at xiv-xvi). For Rawls's hostility to capitalism, another enlightening text is his exchange with Philippe van Parijs in their "Three Letters on The Law of Peoples and the European Union," Revue de Philosophie Economique 8 (2003): 7-20. Retrieved July 16, 2009 from http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/RawlsVanParijs1.Rev.phil. Econ.pdf.
4. Rawls, JF, 135.
5. In according significance to the fair value of the political liberties, Rawls is following Norman Daniels, "Equal Liberty and Unequal Worth of Liberty," in Reading Rawls, ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
6. See James Meade, Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964).
7. Although Rawls is avowedly following Meade in his use of the term "property-owning democracy," the term had a pre-history even before Meade's book. The term originates with the British Conservative politician Noel Skelton, and was popular as a label used to describe a range of policies proposed by mid-twentieth century British Conservatives, including Anthony Eden, especially around the time of the 1955 General Election. In harnessing the term to genuinely progressive ends, Meade was, perhaps somewhat mischievously, appropriating the language of his political opponents. On the genealogy of the term "property-owning democracy," see Amit Ron, "Visions of Democracy in 'Property-Owning Democracy': Skelton to Rawls and Beyond," History of Political Thought 29, no. 1 (2008): 89-108;
8. Ben Jackson, "Revisionism Reconsidered: Property-Owning Democracy and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-War Britain," Twentieth Century British History 16:4 (2005): 416-40. At any rate, none of the uses of the term that come before Meade's have much, if any, bearing on the content of Rawls's particular POD proposals.
9. James Meade, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property, 40-65, 75-77.
10. If Rawls's idea of a "property-owning democracy" stands in some neglect, this can rightly be claimed also with regard to the other institutional regime which Rawls endorses: that of "liberal socialism." Rawls's development of his idea of "liberal socialism" is rather limited, and it is not given as much space as POD in JF. Rawls does claim, though, that a "liberal socialist" regime could meet the demands of the two principles of justice in the same way as does a POD (see JF, 138).
11. Rawls envisages "liberal socialism" as involving a number of competing, democratically controlled firms, operating within "a system of free and workably competitive markets" (ibid.), and retaining free choice of occupation. See also Rawls's remarks on Marx in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
12. one may speculate that there would be, in effect, little real difference (other than in the specification of formal property relations) between a liberal socialist regime and some variant of property-owning democracy. For a number of liberal socialist proposals along the broad lines envisaged by Rawls, see Joshua Cohen, "The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy," Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (1989): 25-50;
13. David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
14. John Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
15. David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002);
16. Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, Our Democracy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
17. For fuller elaborations of the policies integral to a POD, see Richard Krouse and Michael McPherson, "Capitalism, 'Property-Owning Democracy,' and the Welfare State," in Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
18. Rawls describes himself as being indebted to the discussion of Krouse and McPherson at JF, 135.
19. See also Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007), 112-15, 132-36, 219-35;
20. Samuel Freeman, Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10-11, 75-109;
21. Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, "Property-Owning Democracy and the Demands of Justice," in Living Reviews in Democracy (forthcoming); and the other articles in the current Symposium.
22. For Scanlon's account of the badness of inequality, see his "The Diversity of Objections to Inequality," in his The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
23. See also Scanlon, "When Does Equality Matter?,"
24. unpublished ms., Department of Philosophy, Harvard University. For a broader discussion of Rawls's and Scanlon's treatments of the badness of inequality, with regard the various conceptions of the nature and value of equality, see Martin O'Neill, "What Should Egalitarians Believe?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 2 (2008): 119-56.
25. For further development of the idea that a concern with equality, understood as ranging over a set of diverse social primary goods, leads to a concern for reorganizing the structure and control of production itself, see Martin O'Neill, "Three Rawlsian Routes towards Economic Democracy," Revue de Philosophie Economique 8, no. 2 (2008): 29-55.
26. Although I shall be going on in the two following sections to take issue with some of the arguments regarding property-owning democracy offered by Freeman, here at least I am very much in agreement with Samuel Freeman who, in his discussion of POD, also emphasizes that the difference principle enjoins us to "maximize the total index of primary goods, including powers and opportunities available to the least advantaged" (and not just income and wealth). See Freeman, Justice and the Social Contract, 107.
27. Needless to say, even if it is true that FEO can be achieved without recourse to type-(i) policies, this does not mean that it is easy to achieve FEO, given the political difficulties of enacting (even very limited versions) of type-(ii) policies. For a discussion of some of these difficulties in a U.S. context, see Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
28. With regard to the British context, see Martin O'Neill, "Death and Taxes: Social Justice and the Politics of Inheritance Tax," Renewal 15, no. 4 (2007): 62-71;
29. Stuart White (with Rajiv Prabhakar and Karen Rowlingson), How to Defend Inheritance Tax (London: Fabian Society, 2008).
30. See Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
31. On "starting-gate" theories, see Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 2, esp. 87-89.
32. See also Freeman's discussion of POD and FEO in Freeman, Rawls, 135-36.
33. Indeed, a number of writers take exactly this approach to the problem of the corruption of politics by economic inequalities. See, for example, Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983);
34. Micky Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1992);
35. Michael Sandel, "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Value 21, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), retrieved July 16, 2009 from http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/sandel00.pdf.
36. With regard to Rawls's engagement with the criticisms of socialists and radical democrats, it is important here to note the limits to how far one can go, within the constraints of a POD, in securing the fair value of the political liberties by means of reallocating ownership and control of economic resources. Many socialists and radical democrats hold that, unless there is state ownership (or at least effective state control) of the means of production, and therefore of investment decisions, democratic politics will be unacceptably constrained by the structural power of capital to limit state action (i.e., by virtue of its threat advantage in removing economic investment). (See, e.g., Cohen, "The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy," 25-50.
37. For a socialist critique of Rawls, see David Schweickart, "Should Rawls Be a Socialist? A Comparison of His Ideal Capitalism with Worker-Controlled Socialism," Social Theory and Practice 5 [1979]: 1-27.
38. See also Arthur Di Quattro, "Rawls and Left Criticism," Political Theory 11 [1983]: 53-78.) Fully accepting this line of argument would suggest that private ownership of productive assets is inconsistent with ensuring the fair value of the political liberties, and that hence the only acceptable socioeconomic regime is liberal socialism rather than either POD or WSC. If this socialist "structural constraint" argument works, then POD and WSC are, so to speak, in the same boat, as regards failing to meet the demands of Rawls's first principle. As we have seen, this is certainly not Rawls's own view. Although I cannot pursue these issues further within the constraints of the present discussion, it is worth noting that this is likely to be the most important issue on which the plausibility of Rawls's response to his socialist critics is likely to turn. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for prompting me to say more on this matter.
39. On the broadly Rawlsian view of property rights as conventional, see Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
40. and also Martin O'Neill, "Entreprises et Conventionnalisme: Régulation, Impôt et Justice Sociale," Raison Publique 10 (2009): 171-200.
41. We might conclude that Rawls's "WSC" is roughly equivalent to the subclass of "liberal" welfare states (as opposed to "conservative/corporatist" or "social democratic" welfare states) as identified by Gøsta Esping-Andersen in his Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), esp. 26-29.
42. On the political theory of "really-existing" welfare states, see Robert Goodin, "The End of the Welfare State?" in The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
43. Christopher Pierson and Francis G. Castles, ed., The Welfare State Reader, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
44. On the post-war Labour governments in the UK, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
45. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2006).
46. On the evolution of Labour's political thought over the twentieth century, see Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Political Thought, 1900-64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
47. On social democracy in Sweden, see Jenny Andersson, Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
48. On social democracy in general, see Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
49. On Daniels's proposals, see Daniels, "Health Care Needs and Distributive Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 10 (1981), 146-79;
50. Daniels, Just Health Care (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
51. Daniels, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).