Difference between revisions of "Rousseau’s Challenge to Libertarianism"
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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So where’s the objection? So far it looks like Rousseau has just fabricated a just-so story to justify his political views. We know that his history is hilariously oversimplified if not completely false. | So where’s the objection? So far it looks like Rousseau has just fabricated a just-so story to justify his political views. We know that his history is hilariously oversimplified if not completely false. | ||
| − | Dismissing Rousseau on these grounds misses the deeper normative challenge. Rousseau asks us to imagine someone who is not convinced of natural rights to property, at least as interpreted by the richer laborers in society. The responder has a rational complaint: who made you [the rich, the “haves] judge of where your property rights begin and end? It’s a dangerous juridical power, one that can easily be used to keep people hungry and powerless. In light of the suffering of the property-less, why should they ever think that the claims of the rich and powerful are naturally legitimate? What could justify the haves in using coercion to protect their property when the have-nots have so little? | + | Dismissing Rousseau on these grounds misses the deeper normative challenge. Rousseau asks us to imagine someone who is not convinced of natural rights to property, at least as interpreted by the richer laborers in society. The responder has a rational complaint: who made you [the rich, the “haves"] judge of where your property rights begin and end? It’s a dangerous juridical power, one that can easily be used to keep people hungry and powerless. In light of the suffering of the property-less, why should they ever think that the claims of the rich and powerful are naturally legitimate? What could justify the haves in using coercion to protect their property when the have-nots have so little? |
What Rousseau brings into focus is that, at the most fundamental level, property rights are coercive and so trigger a requirement of justification to those who are putatively disadvantaged by the property system. Obviously there are lots of classical liberal replies, mostly revolving around the claim that the putatively least-advantaged will benefit enormously from the coercion required to institute and articulate private property rights. | What Rousseau brings into focus is that, at the most fundamental level, property rights are coercive and so trigger a requirement of justification to those who are putatively disadvantaged by the property system. Obviously there are lots of classical liberal replies, mostly revolving around the claim that the putatively least-advantaged will benefit enormously from the coercion required to institute and articulate private property rights. | ||
