Matthew Schrepfer

In this article, I provide an interpretation of Rousseau's case for democracy: his argument for why “every law which the people in person have not ratified is invalid; it is not a law.” The people must ratify every law because sovereignty “lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation” or alienation. Taking my cue from this remark, I argue that Rousseau's radically free, choice-based conception of the will makes it impossible for anyone to legitimately agree to submit to a nondemocratic sovereign, explaining why only democracy can be legitimate on his view. However, the principle that “who wills the end wills the means also” means that citizens can, in willing one thing, commit themselves to willing more than they realize. This explains why Rousseau sometimes seem to treat the general will as a fact that citizens can be mistaken about.

In this article, I provide an interpretation of Rousseau's case for democracy: his argument for why “every law which the people in person have not ratified is invalid; it is not a law.” The people must ratify every law because sovereignty “lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation” or alienation. Taking my cue from this remark, I argue that Rousseau's radically free, choice‐based conception of the will makes it impossible for anyone to legitimately agree to submit to a nondemocratic sovereign, explaining why only democracy can be legitimate on his view. However, the principle that “who wills the end wills the means also” means that citizens can, in willing one thing, commit themselves to willing more than they realize. This explains why Rousseau sometimes seem to treat the general will as a fact that citizens can be mistaken about.

Market structures have come to dominate every area of our society, and market logic—in the form of rational choice theory, the law and economics movement, and the like—has equally dominated our thinking about society. In this thesis, I will examine one critique of this state of affairs: that offered by G.W.F. Hegel. I compare Hegel’s critique of the market to the similar critique of modern communitarians like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, and argue that Hegel’s distinctive conception of freedom allows him to capture what is right about the modern communitarian view while avoiding most of the common criticisms.

ABSTRACT: Debates about global distributive justice focus on the gulf between the wealthy North and the impoverished South, rather than on issues arising between liberal democracies. A review of John Rawls’s approach to international justice discloses a step Rawls skipped in his extension of his original-position procedure. The skipped step is where a need for the distributional autonomy of sovereign liberal states reveals itself. Neoliberalism denies the possibility and the desirability of distributional autonomy. A complete Rawlsian account of global justice shows the necessity and possibility of a charter between liberal states, assuring each a proper minimum degree of distributional autonomy.

John Rawls’ resistance to any kind of global egalitarian principle has seemed strange and unconvincing to many commentators, including those generally supportive of Rawls’ project. His rejection of a global egalitarian principle seems to rely on an assumption that states are economically bounded and separate from one another, which is not an accurate portrayal of economic relations among states in our globalised world. In this article, I examine the implications of the domestic theory of justice as fairness to argue that Rawls has good reason to insist on economically bounded states. I argue that certain central features of the contemporary global economy, particularly the free movement of capital across borders, undermine the distributional autonomy required for states to realise Rawls’ principles of justice, and the domestic theory thus requires a certain degree of economic separation among states prior to the convening of the international original position. Given this, I defend Rawls’ reluctance to endorse a global egalitarian principle and defend a policy regime of international capital controls, to restore distributional autonomy and make the realisation of the principles of justice as fairness possible.