Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Rawls, Adam Smith, and an Argument From Complexity To Property-Owning Democracy

Rawls, Adam Smith, and an Argument From Complexity To Property-Owning Democracy a l a n t h o m as This paper foregrounds one argument in Rawls's work that is crucial to his case for one, determinate, form of political economy: a property-owning democracy.1 Section one traces the evolution of this idea from the seminal work of Cambridge economist James Meade; section two demonstrates how a commitment to a property-owning democracy flows from Rawls's own principles; section three focuses on Rawls's striking critique of orthodox welfare state capitalism. This all sets the stage for an argument, presented in section four, from the complexity of economic interactions to the strategy of making markets fair in the only feasible way that they can be made fair, namely, by "patterning" their effects. Section five concludes by asking whether any scheme of this general type is a realistic form of utopianism for a society such as ours. I. Rawls and Meade Many early readers of A Theory of Justice took Rawls to be advocating a form of "Keynesian capitalist liberalism."2 However, if we define a capitalist society as one where people who do not own capital work for wages paid to them by capitalists (those who exclusively hold property and other forms of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Good Society Penn State University Press

Rawls, Adam Smith, and an Argument From Complexity To Property-Owning Democracy

The Good Society , Volume 21 (1) – Jul 25, 2012

Loading next page...
 
/lp/penn-state-university-press/rawls-adam-smith-and-an-argument-from-complexity-to-property-owning-mL006UvdnA

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
1538-9731
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

a l a n t h o m as This paper foregrounds one argument in Rawls's work that is crucial to his case for one, determinate, form of political economy: a property-owning democracy.1 Section one traces the evolution of this idea from the seminal work of Cambridge economist James Meade; section two demonstrates how a commitment to a property-owning democracy flows from Rawls's own principles; section three focuses on Rawls's striking critique of orthodox welfare state capitalism. This all sets the stage for an argument, presented in section four, from the complexity of economic interactions to the strategy of making markets fair in the only feasible way that they can be made fair, namely, by "patterning" their effects. Section five concludes by asking whether any scheme of this general type is a realistic form of utopianism for a society such as ours. I. Rawls and Meade Many early readers of A Theory of Justice took Rawls to be advocating a form of "Keynesian capitalist liberalism."2 However, if we define a capitalist society as one where people who do not own capital work for wages paid to them by capitalists (those who exclusively hold property and other forms of

Journal

The Good SocietyPenn State University Press

Published: Jul 25, 2012

There are no references for this article.