Political Liberty in the Welfare State: Radical Democracy versus Property-owning Democracy

Abstract

One of the most distinctive features of Rawls’s theory of justice is that it is not concerned simply with articulating ideal principles of distribution in abstraction from what would be required to apply these principles, but rather with how principles of justice can be publicly realized in a framework of stable social institutions. The relationship between Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness and political economy has recently been taken up from two contrasting perspectives. First, Rawls’s approach has been seen as offering continuing practical political inspiration. Rawls argued that welfare state capitalism failed to adequately realize the principles of justice as fairness. His favoured alternative regime type of property-owning democracy has received increasing attention and has been see as offering philosophical foundations for policies such as ex ante ‘predistribution’ as opposed to ex post redistribution. The second is historical contextualization, situating Rawls’s approach to political economy within the tradition of the ‘liberalism of freedom’, comprising Kant, Hegel and J.S. Mill, to which he takes his theory of justice as fairness to belong. In this paper I will argue that such historical contextualization is indispensable for adequately understanding Rawls’s idea of property-owning democracy. In particular, showing the inspiration that Rawls takes from Kant and Hegel helps to illuminate the relationship between his substantive principles of justice and procedure of justification through reflective equilibrium and to show that it is a commitment to political liberty and not simply the difference principle that provides the primary normative foundation of property-owning democracy. Having done so, however, there are reasons to doubt both the desirability and feasibility of property-owning democracy as a means of realizing Rawlsian principles under the conditions of contemporary capitalist societies. I turn to Jürgen Habermas’s model of radical democracy for a superior alternative and to develop interrelated lines of methodological and normative critique.