Justice at work: Arguing for property-owning democracy

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 397-411

  Hsieh, Nien Hê ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84886990158     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2009.01459.x     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), xiv.
2. A capitalist welfare state, according to Rawls, "permits a small class to have a near monopoly of the means of production." A property-owning democracy is an economic regime that seeks to ensure "the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (that is, education and trained skills) at the beginning of each period, all this against a background of fair equality of opportunity." See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 139.
3. For a more detailed discussion, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 234-42.
4. See also 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), 79-106.
5. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 139.
6. Samuel Freeman, Justice and the Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
7. Samuel Freeman, Rawls (London: Routledge, 2007).
8. For further discussion about liberal egalitarian arguments concerning the nature of work and work, more generally, see my paper, "Justice in Production," The Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2008): 72-100.
9. Iris MarionYoung, "Self-Determination as Principle of Justice," The Philosophical Forum 11 (1979): 30-46.
10. For other arguments, see Rodney Peffer, "Towards a More Adequate Rawlsian Theory of Social Justice," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1994): 251-71;
11. Rodney Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990);
12. Barry Clark and Herb Gintis, "Rawlsian Justice and Economic Systems," Philosophy and Public Affairs 7 (1978): 302-25;
13. David Schweickart, "Should Rawls Be a Socialist?A Comparison of His Ideal Capitalism with Worker-Controlled Socialism," Social Theory and Practice 5 (1978): 1-27.
14. For a discussion of such arguments, see Joshua Cohen, "The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy," Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (1989): 25-50.
15. See also Martin O'Neill, "Three Rawlsian Routes towards Economic Democracy," Revue de Philosophie Économique 8 (2008): 29-55.
16. For one version of this argument see Cohen, "The Economic Basis," 28-29.
17. Cohen draws upon Carol Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
18. Between Rawls's earlier and later work, there is some variation in how comprehensive these requirements are taken to be. At a minimum, they apply to basic features of the constitution and justification for the use of the coercive power of the state. For helpful discussion, see Russell Muirhead, Just Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21-26. I thank Thad Williamson for pressing me to clarify this point.
19. For some accounts, see Richard Arneson, "Meaningful Work and Market Socialism," Ethics 97 (1987): 517-45;
20. Norman Bowie, "A Kantian Theory of Meaningful Work," Journal of Business Ethics 17 (1998): 1083-92;
21. Adina Schwartz, "Meaningful Work," Ethics 92 (1982): 634-46;
22. Adrian Walsh, "Meaningful Work as a Distributive Good," Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 233-50.
23. For a notable exception to this view, see Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Van Parijs argues that what counts as meaningful work is inherently subjective. I thank an anonymous referee for raising this point.
24. Jon Elster, "Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life," Social Philosophy and Policy 3 (1986): 97-126.
25. James Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economics Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
26. Freeman, Rawls, 224-26.
27. Freeman, Justice and the Social Contract, 108.
28. For a proposal along these lines, see Edmund Phelps, Rewarding Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). I thank an anonymous referee for pointing to Phelps's proposal.
29. Parts of the following discussion are drawn from my "Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism," Social Theory and Practice 31 (2005): 115-42 and "Justice in Production."
30. I thank Martin O'Neill for pressing me to clarify some of these points. I discuss the relation between this account and Philip Pettit's conception of freedom as non-domination in "Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism." I discuss the relation between workplace republicanism and workplace democracy in "Workplace Democracy, Workplace Republicanism, and Economic Democracy," Revue de Philosophie Économique 9 (2008): 57-78.
31. For a classic account, see Ronald Coase, "The Nature of the Firm," Economica, new series 4 (1937): 386-405.
32. For discussions of the contemporary economic literature on the theory of the firm, see Pierrre Garrouste and Stéphane Saussier, "Looking for a Theory of the Firm: Future Challenges," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 58 (2005): 178-99;
33. Oliver Williamson, "The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract," Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002): 171-95.
34. For an example along these lines, see Michael Walzer's well-known discussion of the Sunset Scavenger Company, a trash collection company organized as a worker-owned cooperative. See Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 177-83.