About the project
Review of the litterature
The hard core of political activity in many industrialized countries has gradually turned into a winner-takes-all political economy causing a permanent increase in inequality, which in turn leads to among political leaders, more submission to the preferences of individuals belonging to the upper decile of the income distribution. However, if we are looking for a democracy where each person can look the other in the eye without fear of intimidation, the defender of egalitarians policies should implement measures aimed at achieving a more equitable balance in the relative power enjoyed by the various market players, thereby reducing the power of the wealthy. Thus, if we are engaged in a more egalitarian distribution of wealth then we must explore the political instruments making it possible to achieve the main forms of predistribution underlying a property-ownning democracy.
The theme of predistribution concerns a question of social justice which is at the center of our concerns as philosophers and as citizens. The programs of redistribution of wealth produced by social cooperation having shown their limits as a means of reducing economic and social inequalities (Chwalisz & Diamond, 2015), should we not rather think of promoting programs of predistribution, that is to say interventions that could put people in more favorable positions before entering the labor market or in the process of producing wealth, thereby reducing unfair inequalities and increasing real equality of opportunity for all? The idea of “predistribution” thus draws our attention to the need to implement, in contemporary democratic societies, public policies which aim to generate a more equitable distribution of the benefits of social cooperation. Predistribution is better understood when compared to redistribution. Redistribution consists of the implementation of policies that mitigate the unequal consequences of market activity through ex-post tax transfers, while predistribution consists of the implementation of policies that allow to reshape the powers of those who engage in market activities by modifying the distribution of these powers before taxes and the traditional fiscal transfers of the welfare state, thus making it possible to avoid inequalities occurring even before the redistributive intervention of the State (O’Neill, 2020). Indeed, the need for a predistributive approach to progressive reforms is the consequence of a number of important socio-economic developments which have taken place in many liberal democratic societies since the 1970s. First, inequalities in the distribution of the fruits of social cooperation have increased dramatically, with increasingly extreme concentrations of income and wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals and businesses. The consequences of this socio-economic inequality are numerous and profound: stagnant wages and the standard of living of the least privileged members of these societies; reducing opportunities for social mobility; increased unemployment and precarious jobs; a growing influence of extremely economically powerful individuals and groups on democratic political processes.
Regarding property-owning democracy, first of all, we should evaluate if this view is internally coherent. Does it suffice to make a society capitalist if one removes a distinct class with a monopoly of the means of production? How can this goal be realised in a stable way – will not the less wealthy simply sell their capital stake back to the wealthy? The project will investigate transitional arrangements such as John Roemer’s voucher capitalism and Kelso’s scheme of increasing workers’s shares in their places of employment. Does the project have any historical basis? The United States has pioneered various forms of asset based egalitarianism ranging from “land grants” to the selective state insurance of key markets. What is the historical record of these two approaches – is there any reason to think that one or the other is preferable or ought they to be combined? What is the relation between a property owning democracy and full employment? There has been, historically, a very successful form of property-owning democracy that has not only failed to reduce inequality – the so-called “responsibility sensitive” egalitarianism of the New Right has exacerbated inequality. That kind of view focuses on initial human capital – education and skills – but in the absence of a commitment to full employment it has simply distributed scarce jobs on the basis of market “merit” in an anti-egalitarian way. Must the property-owning democrat also be committed to full employment? Do wealth taxes interfere with those market signals that channel savings to productive investment? Will a property-owning democracy actually maintain those price signals better than under rentier capitalism? Should land or other sovereign assets form the basis of sovereign wealth funds or is this to perpetuate “the resource course” and reinforce inequalities generated by the holding of natural assets?
Plan and Methods
Our research plan will start by identifying the main causes of the increase in wealth inequality over the past four decades (Galbraith, 2014), then to understand how they challenge the ideal of equal opportunities, and then propose a predistributive model allowing to counter this unequal tendency (Thomas, 2017; Hockett, 2020).
There are, however, various conceptions of predistribution as it is a recent concept and the discussion is still in its infancy. Therefore, rather than assuming that the distinction between redistribution and predistribution is relevant and coherent, we will try to demonstrate the relevance and coherence of the distinction as one of our objectives.
Another step in our research plan is to clarify the definition of predistribution by formulating, explaining and justifying the differences between several main forms of predistribution currently available in the market of political ideas. We thus assume that the distinction between predistribution and redistribution is relevant, which is a controversial position, since some authors consider that the distinction between these two concepts is at best of degree and not of nature, at worst rhetoric. However, assuming that our clarifications will allow us to produce a coherent conception of predistribution, we will also explore the advantages of regarding property-owning democracy as a particularly powerful expression of predistributive politcs.
There is a dilemma faced by all countries. On the one hand, it is good to promote a system of solidarity and equality so that there is not a minority of people who benefit from growth or who suffer from economic crises. On the other hand, however, it is also good to promote a fluid economy, where starting a business, hiring someone or signing a contract does not involve long bureaucratic procedures and excessive taxes. It is difficult for the two to coexist: because in order to have more redistribution, there also needs to be a more present state, more bureaucracy and control of resources, and higher taxes. One of the promises of the idea of predistribution is promoting equality without increasing the weight of the state in people’ lives.The rules of the game matter to provide incentives for predistributive policies. In representative systems, the representatives have an interest in increasing their control over the economy. The more control over the economy they have, the more power to change the society according to their preferences. Therefore, they tend to increase this control more than necessary when they implement redistribution. In contrast, in direct democracies the preference of the median voter is much determinant. The median voter aims to maximize her revenue, which means that the institutional mechanisms to equalize incomes will minimize their impact on the economic production. Contrary to representative, median votes have preferences consistent which predistributive mechanisms. Some evidence of that is provided studying Switzerland and the Unites States (Matsusaka, 2020).
As socio-economic inequality continues to increase, confidence in the traditional redistributive approach of the welfare state to solve this problem is gradually diminishing. Likewise, progressive taxation and public investment have been revised downwards, in particular because of the ideological domination of austerity policies in most developed countries, in particular since the global financial crash of 2008 (Drennan, 2016; Tooze, 2019). This is how more and more voices have been raised to characterize traditional progressive redistribution as both economically ineffective and socially destructive and unjust. It is in this context of a rise in inequalities and the growing crisis of the redistributive welfare state that predistribution has gradually emerged as one of the new ideas of left thinking in recent years. In a period of budgetary austerity, predistribution indeed appears to be a convincing alternative because it makes it possible to reduce the recourse to taxes and traditional ex-post transfers in order to reduce inequalities. However, it should be noted that for most authors, predistribution should be seen as a remedy to a deficient redistributive state or not as a means of legitimizing the redistributive capitulation of the welfare state. Indeed, many scholars are beginning to consider that we should be concerned not only with the redistribution of wealth through state taxes and transfers, but also with the distribution of wealth before it is redistributed by the state. In other words, we should worry not only about recent trends in redistribution (of income), but also about recent trends in predistribution (of economic power).
The idea of a property-owning democracy has a long history as traced in papers such as Jackson (2012) or in Thomas (2017). The phrase was coined by the Scottish MP Noel Skelton, but the concept exists in the tradition of Roman Catholic social thought as well as in republicanism (Dagger, 2006). The idea was the centerpiece of the work of mid-twentieth century economist James Meade (Meade,1993). Meade was a direct influence on the most famous political philosopher of the twentieth century John Rawls. The idea of a property-owning democracy occurs in both editions of Rawls’s main work, A Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971/1999). However, as his work developed, it became the predominant idea in his last work on domestic justice, Justice as Fairness (Rawls, 2001). This aspect of Rawls’s work did not produce much discussion in the literature until the publication of Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson’s ground breaking anthology (O’Neill & Williamson, 2012). The concept of a property-owning democracy is defended at length in Thomas (2017). There is a separate strand in the property-owning literature deriving from nineteenth century egalitarian Henry George’s approach to land. George claimed that land, being exogenously given, could not be made more productive by an entrepreneur. Land ought therefore to be socially owned by the state as monopolist and leased out for a usage fee. Alternatively, property could remain in private hands but be subject to a special tax. This version of an asset based egalitarianism is defended by, inter alia, Gavin Kerr and Posner & Weyl (Kerr, 2016; Posner & Weyl, 2018). A variation of this view is basing asset based egalitarianism on sovereign wealth funds, that may themselves reflect the value of natural resources (Lansley, 2016).
While there has been serious research on the history of the idea of “property-owning democracy”, it has been mainly concerned with the british and anglo-saxon tradition (Jackson, 2012). We wish to deepen and diversify it. And additionnal role of this project would be to investigate the 18th century republican egalitarian discourse and arguments in favour of an ideal of a property-owning society. We hope to compare and assess the different ways in which such diverse authors as Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine both conceive and justify this ideal. Also, beyond these more philosophically-minded authors, what can be said of the ideological underpinnings and perspectives of the economically egalitarian and democratic-republican coetaneous discourse, such as can be gleaned from some anti-federalist literature, or girondin-jacobin propaganda as well as their practical proposals, schemes and laws (Gross, 1997)? What role did the market, class divisions, and the division of labour play within the political philosophy of Rousseau, Jefferson and Paine more generally and within their respective conceptions of a property-owning egalitarian regime? How did they, prior to the advent of modern socialism, perceive the intervention of the state in the economy, and what risks and potentialities did they see in the notion of social and economic planning vis-à-vis their ideals of human freedom, individual rights and democratic rule? In what ways did these views relate, conflict or contrast with those held by the more traditional and hegemonic liberal tradition? Finally, what insights, if any, can these views offer us today that are of contemporary relevance to the debate on inequality, domination and property-owning democracy?
We will thus contribute to clarify, from a historical perspective, a double orientation worked by the republican-socialists of the 19th century in the field of pre-distribution. For these republican-socialists the autonomy of citizens had to be reflected not only on an intellectual level (independence of thought) but also on a material level (economic independence). And this autonomy was thought as the mark of an individual efforts to develop his own talents, efforts which had to be fairly retributed. Indeed, the centrality of work as a legitimate source of enrichment appeared as a means to think the reduction of inequalities and capital endowment of citizens in two ways: on the one hand, by the predistribution of social wealth not associated to individual work (e.g. natural resources which, by definition are not produced by individuals) ; and, on the other hand, by the distribution of capital accumulated throughout a lifetime of work that cannot be legitimately, according to those republican-socialists, inherited by those who have not themselves worked to produce it. We'd like to shed light on this tradition with a restitution and discussion, on the one hand, of the content of Léon Walras's economic works (1896) and, on the other hand, by a restitution and discussion of the criticism of the inheritance that runs from the Saint-Simonians to Emile Durkheim (in the French case).
References
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