Transcendental vs. comparative approaches to justice: a reappraisal of Sen's dichotomy

Ragip Ege, Herrade Igersheim and Charlotte Le Chapelain

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2016, vol. 23, issue 4, 521-543

Abstract: In The Idea of Justice , Sen describes two competing approaches to theorising about justice: “transcendental institutionalism”, in which he includes Rawls, and “realisation-focused comparison”, in which he includes Condorcet and himself. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that a comparative approach cannot exist without a transcendental dimension. Contrary to Sen, who claims that a transcendental theory is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to frame comparative judgments, it is shown that a transcendental dimension is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition of any comparative approach. To illustrate our thesis, we refer to the works of three great authors: Condorcet, Sen himself and the later Rawls.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2014.916734 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:23:y:2016:i:4:p:521-543

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2014.916734

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().