Martin O’Neill & Thad Williamson 
Property-Owning Democracy 
Rawls and Beyond

Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond features a collection of original essays that represent the first extended treatment of political philosopher John Rawls’ idea of a property-owning democracy.

* Offers new and essential insights into Rawls’s idea of ‘property-owning democracy’

* Addresses the proposed political and economic institutions and policies which Rawls’s theory would require

* Considers radical alternatives to existing forms of capitalism

* Provides a major contribution to debates among progressive policymakers and activists about the programmatic direction progressive politics should take in the near future

Table of Content

About the Editors vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword xiii
Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers

Introduction 1
Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson

Part One: Property-Owning Democracy: Theoretical Foundations 15

1 Justice or Legitimacy, Barricades or Public Reason? The Politics of Property-Owning Democracy 17
Simone Chambers

2 Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History 33
Ben Jackson

3 Public Justification and the Right to Private Property: Welfare Rights as Compensation for Exclusion 53
Corey Brettschneider

4 Free (and Fair) Markets without Capitalism: Political Values, Principles of Justice, and Property-Owning Democracy 75
Martin O’Neill

5 Property-Owning Democracy, Liberal Republicanism, and the Idea of an Egalitarian Ethos 101
Alan Thomas

6 Property-Owning Democracy and Republican Citizenship 129
Stuart White

Part Two: Interrogating Property-Owning Democracy: Work, Gender, Political Economy 147

7 Work, Ownership, and Productive Enfranchisement 149
Nien-hê Hsieh

8 Care, Gender, and Property-Owning Democracy 163
Ingrid Robeyns

9 Nurturing the Sense of Justice: The Rawlsian Argument for Democratic Corporatism 180
Waheed Hussain

10 Property-Owning Democracy or Economic Democracy? 201
David Schweickart

Part Three: Toward a Practical Politics of Property-Owning Democracy: Program and Politics 223

11 Realizing Property-Owning Democracy: A 20-Year Strategy to Create an Egalitarian Distribution of Assets in the United States 225
Thad Williamson

12 The Empirical and Policy Linkage between Primary Goods, Human Capital, and Financial Capital: What Every Political Theorist Needs to Know 249
Sonia Sodha

13 The Pluralist Commonwealth and Property-Owning Democracy 266
Gar Alperovitz

14 Is Property-Owning Democracy a Politically Viable Aspiration? 287
Thad Williamson

Index 307

About the author

Martin O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in Political
Philosophy in the Department of Politics at the University of
York.

Thad Williamson is Associate Professor of Leadership Studies
and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law, University of
Richmond.