Property-owning democracy, market socialism and workplace democracy

Christian Neuhäuser

Review of Social Economy, 2021, vol. 79, issue 3, 554-580

Abstract: The paper discusses why on the one hand William Edmundson thinks that market socialism is superior to property-owning democracy, while on the other hand Alan Thomas thinks that an egalitarian version of property-owning democracy is superior to market socialism. For the purpose of this discussion, the concepts of property-owning democracy and market socialism are systematized and it is argued that those concepts, as understood by Rawls, do not exhaust the list of possible alternatives to capitalism and state socialism. Economic democracy, understood as mandatory workplace democracy, will be introduced as a middle ground, somewhat closer to market socialism than property-owning democracy. Against this background, it is argued that questions of transition and stability are important for deciding between these regimes and the importance of two realistic constraints in making this choice, namely egoism of powerful agents and path-dependency in institutional design, is highlighted.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00346764.2020.1854333 (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:rsocec:v:79:y:2021:i:3:p:554-580

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RRSE20

DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2020.1854333

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Social Economy is currently edited by Wilfred Dolfsma and John Davis

More articles in Review of Social Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().