Real freedom for all: what (if anything) can justify capitalism?

Resumo

In the Preface of Real Freedom for All What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?, Philippe Van Parijs characterizes his book as the result of three "intellectual developments". A critical survey of old and new economic indictments of capitalism first led him to ask "[w]hat exactly is fundamentally wrong with the capitalist societies we live in?" and, more particularly, with libertarian defences of capitalism? What motivates the latter, and certainly more speculative question, is made clear: it is, he claims, "only by taking the libertarian defence of capitalism as seriously as it deserves that the Left could ever hope to regain the ideological nerve which is so badly needed in order to reach beyond purely defensive struggles." (vii). The second development led him from his work on universal basic income, as a radical strategy for fighting unemployment in Western Europe, to the discovery of its crucial relevance to the question of the legitimacy of capitalism. Again, the idea is should now be the answer to the question which appears in the subtitle of his book: namely that if anything can justify capitalism, it is the possibility it offers of working out, from within, the institutional devices which can counter the social plague it generates. A third development led Van Parijs to articulate and to spell out a conception of justice to which he gradually came to think he could subscribe. So in the end, we have an alterna tive to libertarian defences of capitalism.