Property-Owning Democracy, socialism and Justice. Rawlsian and Marxist Perspectives on the Content of Social Justice

The work focuses on the developments in Rawlsian liberal political theory and argues that a properly constructed Rawlsian liberalism can overcome most of the criticism posed by Marxism. While a number of works in normative theory, both in the 1980s and in the mid-2010s, have constructed Marxist critiques of the liberal position, this thesis represents the first coherent attempt to answer them. The paper focuses on how predistributivist approaches can reply to the alienation and exploitation objections that Marxism brings to liberalism.

The book argues that, with the exception of the self-realization at work objection, Rawlsian liberalism, when interpreted to include rights to considerable shares of the common wealth, can refute the Marxist criticisms. This result is highly relevant for philosophers sympathetic to Marxism but who still want to work in the liberal paradigm.