John Rawls: Property-Owning Democracy

John Rawls, as we saw last time on Then & Now, came to the following conclusions about what a just society should like. He said that:

‘‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values, is to everyone’s advantage.’’

But what would this look like in practice? It’s only in recent years that attention has begun to be focused on how this might be implemented politically.

Rawls barely addressed this question, but he did suggest two possible systems: liberal or democratic socialism, and property-owning democracy, and while he said that justice as fairness is agnostic between them, he leaned towards the latter.

So what is a property-owning democracy?

Property-owning democracy means citizens have a real stake in the productive capital of society, some ownership of the means of production.

He writes: ‘Property-owning democracy avoids [inequalities], not by redistributing income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (educated abilities and trained skills) at the beginning of each period’.

If all citizens have a stake in a sizeable amount of property, access to capital and the productive decisions of society, it prevents power from resting in the hands of the few.

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Sources:

Thad Williamson, Who Owns What? An Egalitarian Interpretation of John Rawl’s Idea of a Property-Owning Democracy

Martin O’Neill, Liberty, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy

Tom Malleson, Rawls, Property-Owning Democracy, and Democratic Socialism

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

John Rawls, Justice as Fairness

Gavin Kerr, ‘Predistribution’, property-owning democracy and land value taxation