Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Maximilian KRAHE

Capitalism is controversial. Supporters argue it maximises freedom and/or prosperity, even that it is necessitated by natural rights. Critics argue that it is exploitative, alienating, unjust, and/or corrupting. While each of these arguments can be evaluated individually, tallying them up or assessing their relative normative weight appears impossible: definitions of capitalism are elastic, causal links opaque, normative foundations controversial. Does this mean that political theorists and philosophers should refrain from overall evaluations of capitalism, restricting themselves to offering individual arguments for and against, but desisting from coming to overall conclusions? Not necessarily, I argue in this paper: a democratic critique of capitalism holds the potential, at least for those who share certain​ widely accepted premises, of a conclusive and conclusively negative evaluation. Besides analytically developing this critique, the paper bolsters the case for it through a close reading of parallel passages from G.A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism and Jason Brennan’s Why Not Capitalism.