Session 5
Session 5. Capitalism and Freedom. The Private Enterprise System as a Protector and Promoter of Individual Freedom: (1) Proudhon on How Private Enterprise and Private Property Protect People from the Encroaching State. (2) Friedman on How Private Enterprise Protects Civil Liberties. (3) Marx on How the Rise of Capitalism Gave Workers Far More Freedom to Think and Act Expansively Than under Feudalism or Mercantilism.
Read first: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, From Theory of Property (1862), in Property Is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, ed. Ian McKay (AK Press, 2011), pp. 776-785. [ClassesV2]
Then read: Milton Friedman, "The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom," Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 7-21
Then: G. A. Cohen, "Marx's Dialectic of Labor," Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (1974): 235-261. [ClassesV2]
So you'd like to know more...
G. A. Cohen, "Freedom, Justice, and Capitalism," History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Clarendon Press, 1988): 286-304, pp. 286-296
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Argues against the claim that capitalism must give more freedom to people than anti-private-property socialism, since
private property requires constraining people's freedom.
Jon Elster, "Formal freedom in capitalism," Making Sense of Marx, pp. 208-211.
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Stresses how Marx shows that the freedom to the worker within capitalism both makes her freer than in prior
economic systems, and also obscures the injustices done her by capitalism.
Amartya Sen, "Markets and Freedoms: Achievements and Limitations of the Market Mechanism in Promoting Individual Freedoms," Oxford Economic Papers 45 (1993): 519-541
Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London, 1912).
Argues the direct contrary of Cohen' "Dialectic of Labour" thesis: that workers just before the advent of
capitalism around 1500 were more free--and certainly treated with more justice--than workers as members of the
industrial proletariat in the 19th century. For they either worked their own land (on which, it is true, they had to pay a small tithe to a noble landlord) or they worked as members of co-operatives: guilds. This system, which Belloc sees as the culmination of the Catholic Middle Ages, he calls "the distributive state." This Belloc sees as much more genuinely free for all than either capitalism, in which the wage-worker is chained to the capitalist, or socialism, in which all
are chained to the state. Hence Belloc agrees with Hayek that socialist policies are the road to serfdom, but so
are capitalist policies. He therefore calls for a new, modernized, distributive state, that is neither capitalist
nor socialist.