From forced labour to creative work

Martina Tazzioli: I would like to start with a general question about your work: how does your theorisation of basic income connect with your reflections on precarity and on the emergence of ‘the precariat’ as a class? 1 Guy Standing: Well, I’ve been working on both subjects for many years. When we set up BIEN, […]

John Rawls and Human Welfare

John Rawls and Human Welfare John Watt INTRODUCTION John Rawls has been a dominant figure over the last generation of Western social philosophy. I know of four book-length studies of his thought – Barry (1973), WoIff (1977), Schaefer (1979) and Martin (1985) – and two volumes of collected essays: Daniels (1975) and Blocker and Smith […]

More on Market Socialism; A Level Philosophy: A Reply to Roche

Comment Soris Frankel More on Market Socia.lism I In Radical Philosophy 39 Alec Nove rejected my argument concerning the historical obsolescence of market soclallsm. Nove particularly emphasised that my lack of an alternative model was no substitute for his own ‘feasible soclallsm’ model. While I plead guilty to lacking an elaborate blueprint of the future […]

Dependency culture?: Welfare, women and work

Commentary Dependency culture? Welfare, women and work Mary mcintosh Like many in Britain, I have watched the New Labour government with fascination. I have felt eager welcome and revulsion, hope and despairing resignation. We have seen huge progress in democracy, with hope at last for a political settlement in Northern Ireland, devolution for Wales and […]

What’s left of cosmopolitanism?

Over the past few decades, most Western democracies which contain national minorities have offered them a degree of cultural and in some cases territorial autonomy. In Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?* the Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka lays out principles that justify this unusually happy experience after the fact. Then he considers whether the experience […]