Democratic Equality and the Justification of Welfare-State Capitalism

Platz, Jeppe von

doi:10.1086/709981

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…This also makes a case for officially recognizing the need for institutions fulfilling this role, for example, in constitutional preambles (Khaitan 2019)—meaning that its legal framing would be more explicitly connected to substantive considerations of economic justice. Now, it is worth noting that, at least in this level of abstraction, several systems could plausibly satisfy this requirement, varying from demanding forms of social democracy in which economic power is radically redistributed (von Platz 2020) to a property-owning democracy (Thomas 2017) or a socialist democracy characterized by public ownership over productive assets (Vrousalis 2019). Whether these systems will stably realize formal and substantive political equality is a matter of debate, and my argument here is ecumenical with regard to which one should be favoured.…”

Section: The Egalitarian Case For Class-specific Political Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

Harting

2023

Political Theory

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Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic tendencies of representative government have recently paid more attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy political equality fully, their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality. Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs.

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Section: The Egalitarian Case For Class-specific Political Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

Harting

2023

Political Theory

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“…There is now a very rich literature on the sort of economic regime POD could be, comparing it to, among others, liberal socialism (O'Neill, 2021), social democracy (Von Platz, 2020), republicanism (Thomas, 2017b; White, 2016, O'Neill &White, 2019), and free market fairness (Tomasi, 2012). Many commentators (among them Forrester, 2019; Jackson, 2014; O'Neill, 2021) have also enriched Rawls's project with a study of its predecessors, from Thomas Paine (1792) to the Cambridge economist James Meade (1964).…”

Section: Pod As Rawls's Proposed Alternative To Wscmentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Audard

2023

Journal of Social Philosophy

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Recent studies by economists such as Piketty (2013, 2019) and Atkinson (2015) have contested the well-established view that post-war redistribution policies have been successful in the long term at slowing down the rise of structural inequalities. In reality, the claim goes, they have dealt mostly with reducing inequalities of income through redistribution and have left inequalities of wealth and capital ownership uncontrolled. These, according to their studies, have now risen in the developed world and reached levels more typical of 19th Century Europe.To make matters worse, perceptions of and attitudes towards fighting inequalities as unjust that Rawls saw as based on a wide consensus of citizens' "considered judgments" (Rawls, 1999, p. 17), have changed, leading to them being accepted as the justified and even necessary price to pay for economic growth and as a reward for merit. Economic arguments based on the need for incentives for raising productivity and the "trickle-down effect" have become widely accepted as if the price of economic efficiency should be disconnected from the demands of equity. Meritocracy has provided ethical arguments too. As John Roemer says, "today the most important problem for the social sciences of inequality is understanding how electorates have come to acquiesce to policies which increase inequality… and to try revealing the logic of the I would like to thank the editors of the Special Issue on Rawls for inviting me to develop ideas that I first presented in a previous paper published in French in 2016, "L'état-providence face aux inégalités et la démocratie de propriétaires: une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty," Tocqueville Review, 2/2016), as well as in another paper in English in 2018: « Self-development and Social Justice ». I hope to be able to develop these ideas in a future book on property-owning democracy and its philosophical justifications.

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“…But of course, many proponents of greater social justice will be suspicious of this claim and will in fact be wedded to various progressive defences of the state. Many currently well-regarded egalitarian visions of social justice, for instance – property-owning democracy, social democracy, market socialism, and so on – make space for the continued existence of states and socioeconomic classes of some kind (Schweickart, 2011; Thomas, 2017; von Platz, 2020). But because Bookchin’s long-term case is so intimately tied to the complete eradication of the state and the class system, proponents of visions like these are unlikely to consider municipalist agency as key to the arrival of their own preferred long-term institutional goals.…”

Section: Bookchin's Case: the Long-term Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Murray Bookchin and the value of democratic municipalism

Shelley

2022

European Journal of Political Theory

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Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of just social change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice.

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Democratic Equality and the Justification of Welfare-State Capitalism

Cited by 9 publications

References 19 publications

An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Murray Bookchin and the value of democratic municipalism

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