Egalitarianism and the Great Recession: A Tale of Missed Connections?

Maffettone, Pietro

doi:10.1007/s11158-016-9349-7

Egalitarianism and the Great Recession: A Tale of Missed Connections?

Maffettone, Pietro

Authors

Pietro Maffettone

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to act as a corrective to the comparatively deafening silence of egalitarian political philosophy’s response to the Great Recession. The paper thus provides an accessible analysis of a new strand of empirical research into the causes of the crisis. This new literature, which has largely gone unnoticed by the broader philosophical community, maintains that the main driver of financial instability is income and wealth inequality coupled with income stagnation at the bottom of the income distribution. Building on this empirical research, the paper puts forward six connections between egalitarian political philosophy broadly construed, and the findings of the new literature it surveys. These connections are understood as operating in two directions: that is, they both provide reasons for egalitarians to play a larger role in debates concerning the moral aspects of financial instability, and also offer valuable insights to egalitarians to reorient their position concerning central facets of their arguments.

Citation

Maffettone, P. (2018). Egalitarianism and the Great Recession: A Tale of Missed Connections?. Res Publica, 24(2), 237-256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9349-7

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Nov 18, 2016
Online Publication Date	Jan 11, 2017
Publication Date	May 1, 2018
Deposit Date	Nov 23, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Nov 28, 2016
Journal	Res publica : a journal of legal and social philosophy
Print ISSN	1356-4765
Electronic ISSN	1572-8692
Publisher	Springer
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	24
Issue	2
Pages	237-256
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9349-7

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© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.