Jack Knight and Jim Johnson engage in a particular kind of political theory in their recent The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. They want to consider "democracies" as existing social systems embodying particular instances of various kinds of institutions. They want to know how those institutions are likely to emerge, and they want to …
Polarization of American politics
If anything seems self-evident about recent American politics, it is the fact that our discourse and policy debates have become more polarized. Commentators and politicians seem to have moved to more extreme positions over time so that bipartisanship and compromise are all but impossible. As for rational, honest and fact-based debate about policies like taxes, …
Mark Blaug, John Rawls, and the history of political economy
In an earlier post I spent some time trying to determine what the major sources were of Rawls's knowledge of the history of classical political economy. I noted that Rawls refers several times in A Theory of Justice to Mark Blaug's important history of economic thought, Economic Theory in Retrospect , and speculated that this might have been an important source of …
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Rawls on a property-owning democracy
John Rawls's critique of capitalism was deeper than has been commonly recognized -- this is a central thrust of quite a bit of important recent work on Rawls's theory of justice. Much of this recent discussion focuses on Rawls's idea of a "property-owning democracy" as an alternative to both laissez-faire and welfare-state capitalism. This more disruptive reading …
Rawls and exploitation
image: Karl Marx by David Levine It is interesting to consider whether the principles of justice that Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice would in fact permit economic exploitation in Marx’s sense of the term. Do Rawls's two principles of justice permit what Marx would call systemic exploitation of one group of individuals by another? …
Rawls and classical political economy
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is highly relevant to the ways we think about our economic system. If we just read the citations, Rawls seems to be primarily influenced by "modern" economics -- Samuelson, equilibrium theory, game theory, and marginalist theory. And so we might suppose that his moral worldview reflects a neoclassical vision of …
Democracy in the mirror
Why is democracy something people should strive for? And how are we doing with ours? Consider first the fundamentals. Why is there a role for democracy in any circumstances? Fundamentally democracy is a form of group decision-making. Political institutions are needed in circumstances in which decisions must be made that affect all members of a …
Rawls’s framework for global justice
Rawls's A Theory of Justice was immediately received as a major and progressive contribution to the theory of justice within existing societies. His Law of Peoples (1999) was intended to carry his basic ideas about justice to the international realm. (Here is a PDF of a preliminary version of the title essay of the book as published in Critical …
The moral basis for an extensive state
A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism. The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today. I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John …
Inequalities and the ascendant right
The playing field seems to keep tilting further against ordinary people in this country -- poor people, hourly workers, low-paid service workers, middle-class people with family incomes in the $60-80K range, uninsured people, .... 75% of American households have household incomes below $80,000; the national median was $44,389 in 2005. Meanwhile the top one percent …
Understanding Society 