ABSTRACTJohn Tomasi's Free Market Fairness claims to provide a principled defense of classical-liberal institutions. Respect for the development of our moral powers or “self-authorship,” according to Tomasi, requires that we make certain economic liberties basic, including freedom of contract and the right to accumulate property. Yet Tomasi's principles and his institutions are at odds. Tomasi has provided ethical grounds for defending not classical-liberal but radical-democratic, even socialist, economic freedoms. This is most vivid in Tomasi's account of the “liberties of working.” (...) He argues that it is not just the choice of work but control of the workplace experience that is a vital part of our self-authorship. If this is true, Tomasi has not given a defense of a robust right to “freedom of contract,” but rather of those rights of control over work and property that leftists have long argued for. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 228-244, May 2022. Private property rights involve coercion against non-owners in their enforcement. As critics of private property point out, this coercion involves a restriction on freedom. Sometimes, such critics suggest that collective property expands rights of access, and therefore expands freedom relative to private property. Does this follow? This paper argues no. To make this argument, I look at two particular forms of collective property: open-access commons and closed-access communes. Both (...) may give rise to potential threats to freedom. This does not mean that collective property never expands freedom relative to private property. It only means we cannot infer from the fact that collective property rules extend rights of access that collective property expands freedom. The upshot is a need to pay more attention to how different property rights work in practice. (shrink)

Neo-classical liberals aim to offer a more consistent, coherent, and morally ambitious form of liberalism than the traditional classical and social liberal alternatives by providing grounds for a strong commitment to both individual economic liberty and social justice. The key neo-classical liberal claim is that the stringent protection of negative economic liberty does not conflict with, but is rather an essential component of, a commitment to political and social justice. My focus in this article is not on this key neo-classical (...) claim itself, but rather on the conceptually prior question of the meaning and institutional implications of the negative conception of individual economic liberty. In addressing this question I trace some lines of argument which derive from the classical political economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing in particular on ideas and arguments developed by the American economist and social critic Henry George, I argue that a fully coherent and defensible conception of negative economic liberty is compatible with a commitment to a strongly conditional form of private landownership, but is incompatible with a commitment to absolute private property in land. (shrink)

In recent literature on the philosophical foundations of socialism a growing number of theorists have endorsed the claim that freedom as non-domination is a fundamental normative commitment undergirding socialist politics. On this sort of view, a broad range of traditional socialist claims can be explained and justified by reference to freedom as non-domination. In this paper, I argue that even if these theorists are right that opposition to domination is a core socialist normative commitment, it is not clear that that (...) opposition is best understood in terms of a commitment to a particular conception of freedom. Instead, socialist opposition to domination can be more fruitfully understood as flowing from a commitment to a relational conception of equality, according to which relationships with a substantially egalitarian character have a special value. I argue, first, that a relational egalitarian construal of socialist opposition to domination can retain all of the benefits of the freedom as non-domination construal, and, secondly, that a relational egalitarian account will have benefits that a freedom as non-domination approach will lack. I conclude that there are still significant benefits to retaining a place for equality in our considered account of the normative foundations of socialism. (shrink)

This article concerns freedom and financial markets. First, I consider the republican case for liberalization, extending Robert Taylor’s economic model of republicanism to financial markets. This case adopts what I call a “philosopher-king” approach to political theory, arguing by reference an ideal or first-best set of policies or reforms. Then, I investigate the negative externalities of several decades of financial market liberalization, including the erosion of political accountability and the growing concentration of political and economic power in the hands of (...) those best suited to profit from the rise of finance. From this “political economy” perspective, the impact of liberalization is clear: we paid for greater access to credit with political and economic domination. In republican terms, we traded freedom for credit. My analysis, moreover, has implications for republican debates on freedom and the market. In second-best worlds, where reforms will almost certainly be incremental, shaping the balance of power in ways that impact future policy, judging reforms by reference to a vision of domination-free markets will often suggest policies that make individuals less free. The political economy approach is far more relevant to debates about which economic institutions further or hinder freedom as non-domination. (shrink)