Rawls, Inequality, and Welfare State Capitalism

• Department of Law

The EUI Legal and Political Theory Working Group hosts a session with Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern University).

Abstract

Rawls has often been taken to be a defender of welfare state capitalism. In fact, he believed capitalism (with or without a welfare state) is inherently unjust. The only morally acceptable economic systems were either democratic socialism (in which the means of production are owned by society ) or property-owning democracy, a market economy in which government continually intervenes to ensure widespread dispersal of the ownership of capital. He built these claims on a description of contemporary American capitalism that is almost completely false, and a remarkably optimistic account of the alternatives. That is unfortunate, because his framework is one of our most useful tools for identifying the pathologies of inequality. This paper will discuss how John Rawls offers a powerful framework for judging the astounding levels of inequality that modern capitalism has engendered but he is, however, not a good guide to that framework’s implications, because his own response is ill-informed about how the economy operates today.