Customer Reviews:
The other shoe never drops.......2003-11-09
Before critiquing this book, Mr. Walzer should be given some credit. He manages to make a good argument for pluralism, equality, and the like, and avoids the deus ex machina thought experiments a la Rawls (with "original positions") or the like. For that, Mr. Walzer should be thanked.
Now for the problems. Walzer, author of "Just and Unjust Wars" and "On Toleration" (among many others), is trying to defend a certain order of society where differences can be accepted and equality may be ensured. But Walzer's arguments suffer from a major problem - his starting point(s) are left undefended, and indeed sometimes even undefined. The key to his system is "shared meanings," an idea that he has used in other works (like "Just and Unjust Wars" [J&UW]) under various names. What these shared meanings are, Walzer generally avoids saying directly. As he mentioned in J&UW, Walzer tends to avoid the more complex questions of the foundations for morality and the like - he tends, in practice anyway, to be an antifoundationalist. This presents a problem - he gives the reader all these beautifully reasoned arguments for his idea of society, but always leaves the starting-point out. As such, it is hard to make much of his argument, if you may find yourself in disagreement with his elusive first principles.
Walzer argues that he's starting with "shared meanings," and just following out logically what that entails. In practice, this results in a social democratic, left-oriented society. Fine. But one feels a sleight-of-hand is being played. The "shared meanings" are rather vague. Moreover, "shared" by whom? While Walzer gives some discussion to this, the question lingers. Shared by all those in Western society? By those in only one country? By those in one class? By those on the editorial board of "Dissent" magazine? The reader may find that s/he is locked into the "logical result" of premises that were unknown in the beginning.
Having written all that, this is a very important book in political thoery/philosophy. If those are areas you are interested in, you should read this book. While well-argued, I find it less than compelling (for the reasons discussed above). I could be wrong. Read and decide for yourself.
great theory.......2002-01-20
Finally, Walzer has published a book that challenges the liberal theory of rationality, justice, and the capitalist markets. Although Walzer does have a few inconsistencies, his theory of the individual and the community dwarfs the liberal theory of Rawls.
An easy, excellent read.......2001-07-08
One of the major achievements of this is book just how well-written it is. Like one previous reviewer noted, Walzer is much more readable than authors like Nozick and Rawls (not to demean their incredible works). The strength of this book I have found is uneven. Some topics it treats incredibly and others are sorely wanting. Walzer's work is best at showing how justice is not just a political experience but also an economic, social, cultural, religious, and personal one; thus, this book is not just about politics but also about ethics. I recommend the book highly. It's an easy, memorable read for those interested in the topic therein.
Fantastic.......2001-03-15
This is nothing less than the most important work of political theory written in the last 20 years. Walzer, unlike other post war liberal theorists like Nozick and Rawls, returns political theory to the realm of practical political reality. His propsed theory creates a rational and thoughtful framework to confront many modern social issues.
Walzer makes equality make sense.......2000-01-04
Spheres of Justice was assigned to me but, years later and the class notes long lost, it has become a loyal, dog-eared partner in my life. Walzer's framework provides a powerful tool for non-philosophers to understand, and then speak-up directly and intelligently for equality and democracy. Nonetheless, the sphere-conceit tends mask and mystify the material bases for some of the situations Walzer uses it to address. This book is not a replacement for Mill, Rawls, Locke, Marx, Kant, and Arrow, but it is a huge span in the bridge between theories advocating equality and public policies that can secure it.
Book Description
Distributive justice in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means. Samuel Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries.
Earlier notions of justice, including Aristotle's, were concerned with the distribution of political office, not of property. It was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that justice began to be applied to the problem of poverty. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity.
Fleischacker explains how confusing these principles has created misconceptions about the historical development of the welfare state. Socialists, for instance, often claim that modern economics obliterated ancient ideals of equality and social justice. Free-market promoters agree but applaud the apparent triumph of skepticism and social-scientific rigor. Both interpretations overlook the gradual changes in thinking that yielded our current assumption that justice calls for everyone, if possible, to be lifted out of poverty. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
Book Description
In Economic Justice and Democracy Robin Hahnel argues that progressives need to go back to the drawing board and rethink how they conceive of economic justice and economic democracy. He presents a coherent set of economic institutions and procedures that can deliver economic justice and democracy through a "participatory economy." But this is a long-run goal; he also explores how to promote the economics of equitable cooperation in the here and now by emphasizing ways to broaden the base of existing economic reform movements while deepening their commitment to more far reaching change.
Customer Reviews:
News from Nowhere.......2007-07-09
The late Victorian artist William Morris wrote a short novel about a man waking up one morning into a socialist world. He was transported instantaneously into a new cultural and economic world where coins and money were artifacts suitable only for display in a museum. Robin Hahnel's book is a counterpart to this utopic dream,
but unlike fantasy, it is a thorough struggle and wrestling with the idea of how to transition from a competitive and profit-oriented economic system to a system based on need and cooperation and human sensitivity. He deals with history of socialist movements, past and present, small and large, with reforms in taxation, labor standards, labor bargaining power, global imbalances, living wages; and he covers the anticorporate and environmental and consumer-producer cooperatives and poverty movements. It is thorough. Admittedly it would be better just to wake up one morning into that utopia, but this book is about the next best thing. I am grateful he wrote it.
A brilliant, comprehensive re-casting of democratic socialist ideas for the Twenty-First Century.......2007-03-09
This book fully deserves to become a key text in college courses on issues of economic justice and democratic political theory. Based firmly in the important, although historically neglected, libertarian socialist tradition, this text is an exceptionally comprehensive critical appraisal of late capitalism and the various attempts to create alternatives to it.
Robin Hahnel's principled, committed, non-dogmatic and thoroughly people-oriented approach to political economy is a refreshing and much-needed reboot on issues of democracy and justice that are still suffering the after-shocks of Cold-War era entrenched positions. Hahnel's socialism is of the thoroughly democratic variety that rejects both the compromise of essential principles for the sake of power that has often characterised social democracy, as well as the rigid, dogmatic positions of the authoritarian Left. The result is a powerful and convincing argument for a radically democratic model of society governed more fully "by the people and for the people", born of a flexible, pluralistic and principled approach to political-economy.
Readers of this book would also benefit from reading Michael Albert's "Parecon".
Book Description
What does it mean to think critically about politics at a time when inequality is increasing worldwide, when struggles for the recognition of difference are eclipsing struggles for social equality, and when we lack any credible vision of an alternative to the present order? Philosopher Nancy Fraser claims that the key is to overcome the false oppositions of "postsocialist" commonsense. Refuting the view that we must choose between "the politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution," Fraser argues for an integrative approach that encompasses the best aspects of both.
Customer Reviews:
just a brilliant book.......2000-04-13
In this collection of essays, Nancy Fraser makes equally strong political and scholarly contributions. Arguing that "postsocialism" leaves the left lacking in utopian vision, she begins by attempting to formulate such a vision. Rather than choosing to focus on the goal of recognition or that of redistribution (put another way, on cultural or social issues), she argues that any effective leftist politics must work for both simultaneously. Throughout the book she maintains this balance between cultural and social concerns and strategies for change. The result is both politically inspiring and intellectually stimulating.
Book Description
Disagreements about the morality of markets, and about self-interested behavior within markets, run deep. They arise from perspectives within economics and political philosophy that appear to have nothing in common. In this book, Daniel Finn provides a framework for understanding these conflicting points of view. Recounting the arguments for and against markets and self-interest, he argues that every economy must address four fundamental problems: allocation, distribution, scale, and the quality of relations. In addition, every perspective on the morality of markets addresses explicitly or implicitly the economic, political, and cultural contexts of markets, or what Finn terms ‘the moral ecology of markets’. His book enables a dialogue among the various participants in the debate over justice in markets. In this process, Finn engages with major figures in political philosophy, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, as well as in economics, notably Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchannan.
Book Description
The
Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism provides a comprehensive set of reviews of literature on the economics of nonmarket voluntary transfers. The foundations of the field are reviewed first, with a sequence of chapters that present the hard core of the theoretical and empirical analyses of giving, reciprocity and altruism in economics, examining their relations with the viewpoints of moral philosophy, psychology, sociobiology, sociology and economic anthropology. Secondly, a comprehensive set of applications are considered of all the aspects of society where nonmarket voluntary transfers are significant: family and intergenerational transfers; charity and charitable institutions; the nonprofit economy; interpersonal relations in the workplace; the Welfare State; and international aid.
*Every volume contains contributions from leading researchers
*Each Handbook presents an accurate, self-contained survey of a particular topic
*The series provides comprehensive and accessible surveys
Book Description
The Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism provides a comprehensive set of reviews of literature on the economics of nonmarket voluntary transfers. The foundations of the field are reviewed first, with a sequence of chapters that present the hard core of the theoretical and empirical analyses of giving, reciprocity and altruism in economics, examining their relations with the viewpoints of moral philosophy, psychology, sociobiology, sociology and economic anthropology. Secondly, a comprehensive set of applications are considered of all the aspects of society where nonmarket voluntary transfers are significant: family and intergenerational transfers; charity and charitable institutions; the nonprofit economy; interpersonal relations in the workplace; the Welfare State; and international aid.
*Every volume contains contributions from leading researchers
*Each Handbook presents an accurate, self-contained survey of a particular topic
*The series provides comprehensive and accessible surveys
Book Description
Equally at home in economic theory and political philosophy, John Roemer has written a unique book that critiques economists' conceptions of justice from a philosophical perspective and philosophical theories of distributive justice from an economic one. He unites the economist's skill in constructing precise, axiomatic models with the philosopher's in exploring the assumptions of those models. His synthesis will enable philosophers and economists to engage each other's ideas more fruitfully.
Roemer first shows how economists' understanding of the fairness of various resource allocation mechanisms can be enriched. He extends the economic theory of social choice to show how individual preferences can be aggregated into social preferences over various alternatives. He critiques the standard applications of axiomatic bargaining theory to distributive justice, showing that they ignore information on available resources and preference orderings. He puts these variables in the models, which enable him to generate resource allocation mechanisms that are more consonant with our intuitions about distributive justice. He then critiques economists' theories of utilitarianism and examines the question of the optimal population size in a world of finite resources.
Roemer explores the major new philosophical concepts of the theory of distributive justice--primary goods, functionings and capability, responsibility in its various forms, procedural versus outcome justice, midfare--and shows how they can be sharpened and clarified with the aid of economic analysis. He critiques and extends the ideas of major contemporary theories of distributive justice, including those of Rawls, Sen, Nozick, and Dworkin. Beginning from the recent theories of Arneson and G. A. Cohen, he constructs a theory of equality of opportunity. Theories of Distributive Justice contains important and original results, and it can also be used as a graduate-level text in economics and philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
Excelent.......2000-07-27
This is an excellent book, it introduces the economists in topics that they are usually treated by philosophers and to the philosophers in topics that they are usually treated by economists. With an interesting proposal of the equality of opportunities, it uses the instrumental one intensively mathematical.
Book Description
Cost-benefit analysis is a widely used governmental evaluation tool, though academics remain skeptical. This volume gathers prominent contributors from law, economics, and philosophy for discussion of cost-benefit analysis, specifically its moral foundations, applications and limitations.
This new scholarly debate includes not only economists, but also contributors from philosophy, cognitive psychology, legal studies, and public policy who can further illuminate the justification and moral implications of this method and specify alternative measures.
These articles originally appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies.
Contributors:
- Matthew D. Adler - Gary S. Becker
- John Broome - Robert H. Frank
- Robert W. Hahn - Lewis A. Kornhauser
- Martha C. Nussbaum - Eric A. Posner
- Richard A. Posner - Henry S. Richardson
- Amartya Sen - Cass R. Sunstein
- W. Kip Viscusi
Customer Reviews:
Good overview.......2007-08-27
An excellent collection of helpful and challenging discussions of cost-benefit analysis, covering both strengths and weaknesses from a variety of perspectives. Some major names in the fields (such as Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Posner, and Cass Sunstein) are included.
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Political
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Anarchy, State and Utopia
A Theory of Justice: Original Edition
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
Justice, Gender, and the Family
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
