ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Can Economic Theory be Construed Without Justice?
Author:
A massive imbalance of power characterizes advanced capitalistic society societies. This, on the one side, reveals the insufficiency of the market as a perfect self regulating mechanism and, on the other, the bankruptcy of both individualism and utilitarianism as social and economic behaviour. We shall move from the recognition that one of the most urgent challenges of our times concerns the need to redress that massive imbalance of power characterizing contemporary societies. The starting assumption of our reasoning is that economic and political theory (above all in term of justice) should not be considered as completely separated discipline, but rather they ought to be considered as two faces of the same coin. That is, the way in which we think and organise economic activity cannot but stem from the way in which we conceive of society. This in turn, is derived from our understanding of human beings and of how they relate to one another. Interpersonal relationships depend upon the values - freedom, equality, social solidarity, and reciprocity - that people hold to be the most fundamental. Within this framework, economic theory ceases to be the study of optimal allocation of scarce resources and instead becomes an inquiry concerning the process of wealth creation (surplus). What are the norms regulating exchanges (social and economic) within market-driven societies? Is it possible to affirm that they are exchanges among equals or exchanges among powerful and powerless? It should not go unnoticed that this latter question has preyed on the most refined minds - from Plato and Aristotle to Marx. We shall attempt to show firstly that although Marx never developed a fully fledged theory of justice, his famous phrase to each according to needs, from each according to ability is indeed a valid basis for a just socio-economic order. However, to take Marx’s notion of justice seriously, it is necessary to give more relevance to the role of civil society in economic development. Sadly, over the last 250 years the majority of social, political, and economic thinkers have framed their doctrines according to a vision of society that is based upon two fundamental pillars: the State and the market. Consequently, we shall claim that in order to bring about a ideally just socio-economic order it becomes necessary to recognize as too narrow the societal vision built around the pair State/market. Hence, recuperating Polanyi’s idea, we shall propose a richer societal vision whose model of economic development comprised of a market economy, within which profit-oriented enterprises operate; a non-market economy, within which governmental agencies have the mandate to redistribute fairly both social power and material resources; and finally, an economic domain (social economy) of reciprocal solidarity formed by membership association ‘that are open and egalitarian enough to permit voluntary participation.’ What we shall try to emphasise is that a fully fledged social economy should not be confined to voluntary activities having high social content but low remunerative returns excluding civil society from the participation in economic activities having not only high social content but also high remunerative returns (high social content infrastructures such as motorways, railways, universities, school, asylums, urban renewal, park, library, cinema, hospital, museums, social centres, gyms, recreational spaces, etc.)
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