Republicanism and Property-Owning Democracy: How are they connected?

Journal article

Recent years have seen a growth of interest in republicanism in academic political theory (Sandel, 1996; Pettit, 1997, 2012; Skinner, 1998; Honohan, 2002). There has also been a more modest growth of interest in “Property-Owning Democracy” (POD) as a form of economic organization, as advocated by John Rawls (Rawls, 1999). A POD is a market economy, with a significant role for private ownership of the means of production, but in which public authority is used to sustain an egalitarian distribution of productive assets so that market outcomes are more equal than is typical of a capitalist society. The categorisation of Rawls’s theory as “liberal”, combined with the tendency to see “liberalism” and “republicanism” as rival, even opposing schools of thought, might lead one to think that republicanism and POD stand in some kind of rival or antagonistic relationship. There are, however, strong reasons for seeing them as mutually supportive. In this paper I shall explore how POD arguably supports republicanism as a political ideal, and how republicanism also arguably supports POD as an economic ideal. By extension, I shall suggest that liberalism — or, at least, a Rawlsian liberalism— and republicanism are more appropriately seen as mutually supportive than in opposition (see also Audard, 2007; Thomas, 2016).

Authors: White, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Journal: ocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville
• Volume: XXXVII
• Issue: 2
• Publication date: 2017-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-12-06
• EISSN: 1918-6650
• ISSN: 0730-479X