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1 results

  • 2 - The Theory Rawls, the 1844 Marx, and the Market

  • from Part I - Rawls and History
  • Edited by Paul Weithman, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Rawls’s <i>A Theory of Justice</i> at 50
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 36-59

  • Summary

    In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.