Economy and Social Freedom

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In liberal political philosophy, the status of the market remained uncontroversial for a long time, or it was even idealized in a one-sided way, usually under the assumption that markets as such are primarily efficiency-enhancing institutions. In the last couple of years, however, markets proved to be crisis-prone, amplifiers of inequality and institutions with an internal dynamics of their own, permeating non-economic spheres of life in a problematic way. This is why markets today come increasingly under critical philosophical scrutiny. At the same time, the recent world economic crisis not only shook the faith in the efficiency of free markets, it also contributed to the philosophical and public revival of the notion of socialism. Against this backdrop, my research project examines the normative foundations and the institutional framework of what in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls is called liberal socialism: an economic form overcoming the capitalist dimensions of the market while ensuring political freedoms and democratic rights. The research project builds on the Hegelian notion of social freedom for outlining a normative justification and the institutional requirements of a liberal socialism. According to the notion of social freedom, others should not primarily be understood as barriers to individual freedom, but as a condition and even enlargement of it. This notion allows for the insight that it neither suffices to redistribute economic output in solidarity, nor to equalize the initial economic conditions. What matters above all is, instead, the adequate realization of solidarity within economic practices themselves. The liberal socialism put forward here still grants an important role to the market. But it argues for transforming the market constitutively, so that its ethical deficits can be reduced significantly, for example as regards the exploitation of power imbalances or the externalization of social costs. In this perspective, market socialism not only aims at taming the market by regulatory or welfare policies, but at transforming it constitutively: It is about socializing the market from within, by changing its constitutive rules and by strengthening its internal regulative mechanisms.The research project is not only of contemporary socio-political significance, it also brings political and social philosophy into a closer dialogue. By combining the philosophy of the market with institutional proposals from economics and the social sciences, it also operates with a decisively interdisciplinary approach.