Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) Are Unreasonable
- Measuring Opportunity: Toward a Contractarian Measure of Individual Interest
- Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions
- Why Even Egalitarians Should Favor Market Health Insurance
- Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice
- The Dual Role of Property Rights in Protecting Broadcast Speech
- Regulation of Foods and Drugs and Libertarian Ideals: Perspectives of a Fellow-Traveler
- Profit: The Concept and Its Moral Features
- Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail
- Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
- Libertarianism as if (the Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered
- On the Failure of Libertarianism to Capture the Popular Imagination
- Imitations of Libertarian Thought
- Index
Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) Are Unreasonable
- Measuring Opportunity: Toward a Contractarian Measure of Individual Interest
- Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions
- Why Even Egalitarians Should Favor Market Health Insurance
- Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice
- The Dual Role of Property Rights in Protecting Broadcast Speech
- Regulation of Foods and Drugs and Libertarian Ideals: Perspectives of a Fellow-Traveler
- Profit: The Concept and Its Moral Features
- Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail
- Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
- Libertarianism as if (the Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered
- On the Failure of Libertarianism to Capture the Popular Imagination
- Imitations of Libertarian Thought
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Libertarianism needs a theory of class.
This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: “The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?” A greater number will say: “We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one.”
The first objection is simply mistaken. While the prominence of the Marxist theory of classes may have left rival approaches obscured in its shadow, class analysis is thousands of years older than Marx; and in Marx's own day the Marxist version of class analysis was only one of a number of competing and very different theories, including several far more congenial to libertarianism. The problem of class is one that faces any serious political theory, Marxist or otherwise.
The second objection is also mistaken, but not so simply. It is true that a libertarian theory of class already exists. More precisely, several different theories of class are current among today's libertarians, inherited from different strands within libertarianism's intellectual ancestry. But although each of these theories offers important insights, I propose to argue that none of them is adequate, and that the shortcomings of libertarian thinking about class have done serious harm to the libertarian cause.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Problems of Market Liberalism , pp. 303 - 349Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998