Philosophical Topics

As G. A. Cohen’s camping trip argument shows, community is an important value. But is there anything particularly socialist about it? Critics suggest not. Jason Brennan argues that we don’t need socialist institutions to secure community; capitalist ones will do just fine. Louis-Philippe Hodgson argues, in a similar spirit, that we don’t need explicitly socialist principles to secure community; standard-issue liberal egalitarian ones (like Rawls’s) suffice. But these critics are mistaken. Pace Brennan, I show that capitalism inevitably runs roughshod over community. Pace Hodgson, I show that Rawls’s justice as fairness cannot, absent explicitly socialist supplementation, adequately protect community. In sum, I show that advocates of community must also, and for that reason, be advocates for distinctively socialist principles and institutions. Or, in a slogan: no community without socialism.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s socialism has provoked debate for decades. His democratic theory and critique of political economy champions democratic socialism. In this article, I offer a philosophical reconstruction of the normative foundation of his democratic socialism in three steps. First, I argue that his philosophy of the modern democratic state supports the people’s advance of the principle of free and equal citizenship or civic equality. Next, I present his critique of the modern American welfare state, which asserts the fair value of political liberty and democratic control over productive activities. Finally, I introduce the method of the excluded groups from Darkwater as an ideal procedure for guiding democratic deliberation in a profoundly nonideal public sphere. The method foregrounds the voices of excluded groups to correct asymmetrical relations of practical power and to infuse democratic reason with practical intelligence, namely, new content and values that can lead to the development of a democratic socialist state.

The topic of alienation has fallen out of fashion in social and political philosophy. It used to be salient, especially in socialist thought and in debates about labor practices in capitalism. Although the lack of identification of people with their working lives—their alienation as workers—remains practically important, normative engagement with it has been set back by at least four objections. They concern the problems of essentialist views, a mishandling of the distinction between the good and the right, the danger of paternalistic impositions, and the significance of democratic authorization. This paper recasts the critique of alienation in a way that vindicates its importance for social and political philosophy and rebuts these objections. First, it provides an analytic framework to understand alienation—distinguishing its various conceptual, explanatory, and normative dimensions. Second, it accounts for the normative aspect of the critique of alienation by articulating it in terms of prudential and moral ideas of positive freedom regarding human flourishing and Solidaristic Empowerment. Finally, the normative account is developed further, and sharpened to respond to the four objections, through the introduction of the Dignitarian Approach—the view that we have reason to organize social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of individual human beings that give rise to their dignity.

This paper investigates the import for a conception of democratic socialism of Marx’s well-known principle “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,” arguing that it is best taken together with another of his principles: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” It considers their implications for the near term rather than some possible ultimate form of communal society, and also brings in a principle that I have developed previously—equal positive freedom—which in some ways synthesizes the other two. In analyzing the abilities and needs principle, the notion and extent of needs are explicated, seeing them as including not only material needs, but needs for recognition and for relationships. Marx’s crucial insight that distribution largely depends on the organization of the production process also comes into play. On these bases, the paper proposes that a system of democratically managed firms forms the centerpiece for democratic socialism, supplemented by some other institutions that would work to meet basic needs. The paper also proposes a role for the norms of reciprocity and solidarity, in addition to those of freedom and equality that are most evident in the three principles. Finally, the relative inattention to social reproduction in the early Marxist tradition is addressed with an interpretation of the notion of socializing care and a consideration of its import for institutional design, including cooperative ways of providing such care. Throughout, Marx’s distinctive notions of social individuality, socialized wealth, and the free development of individuals are appealed to for the guidance they can provide for interpreting the abilities/needs principle for the period ahead.

Socialists know that they ought to defend strikes, but why? The best argument is that strikes are acts of self-emancipation. The ideal of self-emancipation lies at the heart of socialist political theory. It is up to workers to emancipate themselves, not just because it takes class power to overthrow capitalism, but because there is an intrinsic connection between class struggle and socialist freedom. Workers can only possess and exercise the freedoms they are denied, but ought to enjoy, if they demand that freedom for themselves, through their own, collective activity. Strikes are an essential way of both winning and exercising those denied freedoms. They are therefore a path to, and partial realization of, the ideal of self-emancipation to which socialists are, or ought to be, committed.

Socialism has long been thought by many to be the enemy of freedom. Here, I argue that in order to understand the relationship between socialism and freedom, we must have a better idea both of what socialism is and of what it is to have a right to freedom. To start, I argue that the right to freedom is best understood as a right to direct one’s own will in the world consistently with the rights of others to do the same. This Kantian conception of the right to freedom is importantly different from the ubiquitous conception of freedom as negative liberty: with this Kantian conception, one’s right to freedom is limited to directing one’s own will and does not include a right to direct the wills of others. I then argue that socialism, like the right to freedom, is often misunderstood: today, socialists often argue for robustly democratic forms of socialism that are far from the autocratic so-called “socialist” regimes of the last century. With a better understanding of both socialism and the right to freedom, we can see that the right to freedom is indeed compatible with a robustly democratic form of socialism.

This essay is concerned with the question of what kind of economic system would be needed in order to realize Rawls’s principles of social justice. Hitherto, debates about ‘property-owning democracy’ and ‘liberal socialism’ have been overly schematic, in various respects, and have therefore missed some of the most important issues regarding the relationships between social justice and economic institutions and systems. What is at stake between broadly capitalist or socialist economic systems is not in fact a simple choice in a single dimension, but rather a range of choices across a range of different dimensions. This essay, then, has a dual objective: first, it aims to provide a richer account of this normative territory, while showing how issues of economic democracy, decommodification and the limits of markets, and the role of democratic economic planning, all raise questions of justice that are not well captured by focusing only on questions of ownership. Second, it aims to show how the case for democratic socialism can be developed from Rawlsian foundations, in a way that is sensitive to the normative affinities between Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism and democratic socialism, and which attends carefully to the different kinds of institutional elements which a stable, just, and democratic society would require. Taking these aims together, the hope is that we can move onward to a richer debate about the ways in which the realization of democratic socialist institutions may be seen as a requirement of social justice.

Economic liberty is best understood in opposition to economic domination. This article develops a radical republican conception of such domination. In particular, I argue that radical republicanism provides a more satisfactory account of individual economic freedom than the market-friendly liberties of working, transacting, holding, and using championed by Nickel and Tomasi. So too, it avoids the pitfalls of other conceptions of economic liberty which emphasize real freedom, alternatives to immiserating work, or unalienated labor. The resulting theory holds that economic domination occurs when someone’s access to civic capabilities is contingent on the arbitrary economic power of others. Socialist institutions—suitably configured—can deliver on this individual economic freedom, allowing the dominating power of proprietors, shareholders, landlords, and managers to be kept in check, and providing an unconditional minimum that allows individual citizens to be less beholden to others in meeting many of their most fundamental civic needs. Thus, I conclude that socialism can be championed as a politics of individual economic liberty.

How do we know if people are equal? Contemporary philosophers consider a number of issues when determining if the goals of egalitarian distributive justice have been achieved: defining the metric of equality; determining whether the goal is equality, or simply priority or sufficiency; establishing whether there should be conditions, e.g. bad brute luck, for the amelioration of inequality. In all this, most egalitarians contend that what is to be equalized is not people’s actual shares of the good in question, but rather, the opportunities to have such shares. I counter this view with an ‘egalitarian flourishing’ approach that, in seeking to make people equal in actual well-being, takes exception to the role of opportunity in contemporary argument. The flourishing view means a focus on outcomes, on how people live, in order to enable people to live equally flourishing lives. I argue that if we consider the complex dynamics of choice and circumstance, the role of nonmaterial considerations and the ideal of an egalitarian community, equality of opportunity proves to be an inadequate approach to the realization of the egalitarian ideal.

This essay provides an internal critique of John Rawls’s case for liberal socialism. A liberal socialist regime combines liberal rights with public ownership of the means of production. The state deliberately manages capital to promote both economic and moral ends. I argue that liberal socialism cannot satisfy Rawls’s own criterion for a well-ordered and legitimate regime: stability for the right reasons. Liberal socialism cannot be stable much as reasonable comprehensive doctrines cannot. Reasonable comprehensive doctrines impose detailed patterns of conduct on citizens in ways they can reasonably reject. Liberal socialism imposes similarly invasive and complex directives through what I shall call reasonable economic plans: multifaceted directives for the ownership and operation of capital that satisfy Rawls’s justice as fairness. Consequently, imposing any reasonable economic plan will destabilize the regime. For this reason, liberal socialism cannot serve as an ideal regime type for Rawlsian egalitarians.

This paper argues that recognition is, fundamentally, a relationship between a person and a reason. The recognizer acts for a reason, in the interpersonal case, only when she takes the recognizee’s rational intentions—intentions whose content is favored by reasons—as reasons. Free agency, on this view, is a rational power to act for reasons: the recognizer’s disposition to take the recognizee’s rational intentions as reasons across relevant possible worlds in which she forms these intentions. On the basis of this generic account of free agency, I argue that free productive agency is a rational power to produce for reasons: the recognizer’s disposition to take the rational productive intentions of the recognizee as reasons across relevant possible worlds in which she forms these intentions. But capitalism makes it impossible to satisfy this requirement, for it subjects the taking of reasons to the realization of profit. So capitalism makes capitalist and worker unfree and the realization of free productive agency impossible.

This paper offers a new version of a historically influential, yet today unpopular, neglected, and on the whole insufficiently developed argument for socialism: socialism makes it possible for people to really act together. This idea of socialist action, combining the claims that there is a particularly valuable form of joint action and that socialism is about making such action possible, played an important role in the history of the labor movement, going back to the early Marx and running through various strands of socialist thought. I shall argue that socialist action should be seen as central to the socialist project, its critique of capitalism, and the institutional alternatives envisaged by it.