Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Marx and Rawls on the Justice of Capitalism: A Possible Synthesis?

  • Published:
The Journal of Value Inquiry Aims and scope Submit manuscript

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. See Allen W. Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1 (1972), pp. 244–282; and Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (Arguments of the Philosophers), Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 148–150. See also Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

  2. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 137–138.

  3. See Rodney G. Peffer, in Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Arthur Di Quattro in “Rawls and Left Criticism,” Political Theory, Vol 11, No. 1 (983), pp. 53–78.

  4. Norman Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder,” New Left Review, Vol. 195 (1992), pp. 44–45.

  5. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 958.

  6. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 739.

  7. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 732. See also pp. 301–302, 448–454, 548–550, 730–734, 738–743, 792–794, 798–799.

  8. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 799. See also Norman Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, Vol. 150 (1985), p. 57.

  9. Norman Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, Vol. 150 (1985), p. 85.

  10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 460–461; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 16.

  11. Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder,” p. 63.

  12. Geras, “Addendum and Rejoinder,” p. 65.

  13. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, New Edition, Volume One, Rules and Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982a), pp. 54, 60.

  14. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 19. For an account based on this, see Philip J. Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 170.

  15. Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (London and New York: Routledge 1998), p. 123.

  16. Gerald. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12; see Geras, “Addendum and Rejoinder,” pp. 53–54, 59–61.

  17. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 146–155.

  18. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 301, 731.

  19. Cohen, pp. 151–152; Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 253. Cf. Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 16–17.

  20. Cf. Kai Nielsen, “On the Poverty of Moral Philosophy: Running a Bit with the Tucker–Wood Thesis,” Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. 33 (1987), pp. 160–162.

  21. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 67–72; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 156–157.

  22. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 116–117, 123–125.

  23. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 18–19, 57–58.

  24. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, §§13–17, p. 26.

  25. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 42–43.

  26. Cohen, Rescuing Equality and Justice, p. 385.

  27. See Ian Hunt, “How Egalitarian is Rawls’s Theory of Justice?” Philosophical Papers, Vol. 39, No. 2 (July 2010), pp. 155–181, especially pp. 160–162.

  28. See David Estlund, “Political Quality,” Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000); Andrew Mason, Levelling the Playing Field: the Idea of Equal Opportunity and its Place in Egalitarian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 82–88; and Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 128.

  29. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 243.

  30. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 18.

  31. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 74–75.

  32. Philippe Van Parijs, “Difference Principles,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 203; and Stiglitz, Whither Socialism?

  33. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), p. 194.

  34. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 165.

  35. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 171–173.

  36. Op. cit., p. 173.

  37. Op. cit., p. 171; see, among others, Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 194.

  38. Ian Hunt, “Overall Freedom and Constraint,” Inquiry, Vol. 44, No. 2 (June 2001), pp. 144–148.

  39. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 165–166.

  40. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 158–162.

  41. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 248; Justice as Fairness, pp. 176–179.

  42. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 371; and Justice as Fairness, p. 177.

  43. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 19.

  44. See A. M. Shandro, “A Marxist Theory of Justice?” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 22 (1989), pp. 27–47.

  45. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 6; A Theory of Justice, pp. 244–245.

  46. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 147.

  47. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 8–9.

  48. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 280.

  49. See Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

  50. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Cambridge University Press, 1997), Ch. 2.

  51. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 738–799; pp. 770–772.

  52. Op. cit., pp. 769–771, 781–785, 788–791.

  53. David Schweickart, After Capitalism (New Critical Theory), Second Edition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 71–79.

  54. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 769–799, especially p. 792. See also p. 799.

  55. Op. cit., pp. 932–933. See also, pp. 932 and 938–939.

  56. Op. cit., p. 797.

  57. Joseph Stiglitz, Whither Socialism? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

  58. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Causes and Consequences of the Dependence of Quality on Price,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXV (March 1987), pp. 1–48. See also, Joeseph Stiglitz, “The Contributions of the Economics of Information to Twentieth Century Economics,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 115, No. 4 (November 2000), pp. 1447, 1457–1461.

  59. David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Second Edition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 77–79.

  60. David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and After Capitalism, Ch. 3.

  61. Schweickart, After Capitalism, pp. 75–76.

  62. Schweickart, Against Capitalism, p. 68.

  63. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 138–140.

  64. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 239–242, 247–249, and Justice as Fairness, pp. 135–140, 176–178.

  65. See Schweickart, After Capitalism, pp. 66–73.

  66. Schweickart, Against Capitalism, p. 69, see also After Capitalism, p. 67.

  67. Schweickart, Against Capitalism, p. 87, see also After Capitalism, pp. 60–66, and Ch. 5.

  68. Robert Mayer, “What’s Wrong with Exploitation?” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2007), pp. 137–150, see especially, pp. 144–146.

  69. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), Ch. 9.

  70. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 34.

  71. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 46.

  72. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 34, 41, 91, 151–152.

  73. See Brian Barry, “Capitalists Rule OK? Some Puzzles About Power,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2002), pp. 155–184.

  74. Justice as Fairness, §52.2, p. 178.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Ian Hunt

Authors
  1. Ian Hunt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ian Hunt.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Hunt, I. Marx and Rawls on the Justice of Capitalism: A Possible Synthesis?. J Value Inquiry 47, 49–65 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9366-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9366-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation