ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Social Justice and Freedom: More Than Utopian Ideas?
Author: THOMASBERGER Claus
There are strong tendencies in economic theory to consider social justice an unscientific and utopian idea, today. Often justice is reduced to the enforcement of property rights and the law of contract. The origins of this narrow interpretation are to be found in the debates of the interwar period. The optimism and the belief in human freedom, social justice, and unlimited progress which had characterized the last decades of the 19th century were challenged by World War I, the Great Depression and fascism. As a consequence, the enlightenment of economic theory was criticized as a ‘constructivist’ illusion. Economic theory should recognize the reality of the market mechanism. Is social justice a utopian idea? Is it justified to exclude it from the agenda of economic science? Or is it impossible to explain the transformation of modern societies without referring to the reality of social justice and freedom? The paper will try to answer some of these questions by focusing on the debates between Ludwig v.Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Karl Polanyi and others which for the most part took place during and at the end of the interwar period.
Registred web users only can download this paper - Go back
Please note that files available for download have not been checked for viruses. These files have been submitted by authors of the conference to this web site. Conference organisers can't accept any responsibility for damages caused to users by downloading such files.