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DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY AND ECONOMIC LIBERTY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2011

John Tomasi
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Political Science, Brown University

Abstract

Libertarians and classical liberals typically defend private economic liberty as a requirement of self-ownership or on the basis of consequentialist arguments of various sorts. By contrast, this paper defends private economic liberty as a requirement of democratic legitimacy. In recent decades, many philosophers have converged upon a certain view about political justification. If a set of social institutions is to be just and legitimate, those institutions must be acceptable in principle to the citizens who are to lead their lives within them. This deliberative or democratic approach to justification is traditionally associated with thinkers on the left who are skeptical of the importance of private economic liberty. This article shows how the protection of private economic liberty is a requirement of citizens' developing and exercising the moral powers they have as democratic citizens. Democratic legitimacy does not require the affirmation of absolute economic liberty rights as sometimes defended by libertarians. But democratic legitimacy does require that a wide range of private economic liberties be meriting constitutional protection on a par with the civil and political liberties of democratic citizens. This opens the way for a wider defense of classical liberalism based upon the idea of democratic legitimacy.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2012

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References

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10 Obviously, there are other logically coherent approaches available here. For example, one might seek to justify a concern for social justice in terms of the same foundational ideas by which libertarians or classical liberals commonly defend the priority of economic liberty. That is not my project.

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18 I think of indentured servitude as primarily involving questions of labor, while slavery is more fundamentally an issue of ownership. I am open to alternative ways of categorizing these issues.

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36 Market democracy makes room for worker-owned firms, and so for whatever forms of economic freedom might be available therein. Against liberal socialism, however, market democracy insists that citizens cannot be compelled to work in worker-owned firms. Nor can workers be compelled to join unions, though individuals may have the right to do so for purposes of collective bargaining. In all these areas, market democracy insists that we protect the private economic liberties of liberal citizens.

37 Rawls, Justice As Fairness, 41.

38 Adam Smith described people as simultaneously “self-interested” and “other regarding.” Rousseau and Kant offered accounts of the moral powers of citizens. For an illuminating discussion of the idea of moral powers in Rousseau and Kant in relation to that of Rawls, see Spragens, Thomas A. Jr., Getting the Left Right: The Transformation, Decline, and Reformation of American Liberalism (University Press of Kansas, 2009), 6871Google Scholar.

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50 Conversation with Charles Larmore sharpened my understanding of these issues, even though our convictions on these matters diverge.

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68 John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness, chap. 6 “Two Concepts of Fairness.”

69 Rawls, Justice As Fairness, 135–40.

70 John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness, chap. 7 “Feasibility, Normativity, and Institutional Guarantees” and chap. 8 “Free Market Fairness.”