Justice as a claim to (social) property

Abstract

Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. This paper provides an appraisal of Kohn’s recovery of solidarism, taking as its main theme the relation between property and social justice. The paper first offers a typology of four theories of justice (right- and left-libertarianism, luck and relational egalitarianism) and discusses the relation of each of these to the concept of property. Then it argues that solidarism is akin to left-libertarianism in the way it formulates justice as a claim to social property. Finally, it argues that solidarists cannot escape grounding their theory in a non-property based fundamental principle, which makes the theory much less distinctive from egalitarian theories of justice than may appear at first sight.

Keywords:

• Margaret Kohn
• solidarism
• property
• social justice
• egalitarianism
• libertarianism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank audiences at the Workshop on ‘Approaches to Public Goods: Solidarity and Social Justice’ (Toronto, May 2016), at the Economic Ethics Network Meeting (Barcelona, July 2016) and at the Annual Conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (Boston, September 2016). In particular I would like to thank Margaret Kohn, Igor Shoikhedbrod and Avigail Ferdman, as well as two anonymous reviewers of this journal, for their comments. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research contributed funding under project no. 360-20-390.

Notes

1. More precisely, Gaus defines capitalism as the conjunction of three institutional elements: maximally extensive property rights, efficient markets and firms led in the interests of their owners. But the latter two elements he derives from the idea of maximally extensive property.

2. As an alternative, first-occupation instead of labour-mixing may be the justificatory ground. (Narveson, 2001, p. 79). Conceptually, these appear close cousins, since ‘grabbing’ an object may be treated as mixing one’s labour with it in a rather minimal sense.

3. I am not arguing this case is convincing, even on its own terms. Most importantly, a defence of capitalism doesn’t follow as straightforwardly as presented here in the main text to the extent that (1) the libertarian theory includes a Lockean proviso, and/or (2) the principle of rectification is applied to rectify wrongful transfers. Many libertarians downplay these potential problems.

4. There has been debate about the coherence of the acceptance of self-ownership and the defence of an egalitarian distribution of world-ownership (Fried, 2004). However, let’s assume a coherent position is possible.

5. Luck egalitarians differ on whether all differences in talents are unchosen, hence whether all economic differences arising from the exertion of talents should be equalised (Cohen, 1989, p. 922). Here for simplicity’s sake I assume they are.

6. Kohn argues that one of the solidarists (Leon Bourgeois) used an explicitly luck egalitarian argument about choice and chance (Kohn, 2016, p. 616). This raises the question why in the second article Kohn distances herself from luck egalitarianism (Kohn, this issue). Whatever of that, I would argue that luck egalitarianism is implicit in the solidarists’ endorsement of the socialisation (not just of external resources, but also) of the fruits of individual productive labour.

7. Kohn’s argument here shares a lot with recent arguments to justify human rights to membership in society (Cohen, 2004). If membership is indeed central for Kohn, then it is not the claim to a share of the society’s collective property itself which grounds a set of human rights (in particular here: social rights), as in Matthias Risse’s theory of human rights (Risse, 2009, 2012). Rather, membership in a society comes first in terms of normative justification, and collective property, generated as a spin-off of social activity in that society, is a way of expressing the claims of membership.

8. Historically, solidarism was contrasted on the left-wing of the spectrum with socialism (Kohn, 2016, p. 604), but here I will follow Kohn in leaving this out of consideration and focusing on welfare state capitalism as the contemporary opponent of solidarism.