Nicholas Vrousalis - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Exploitation is a globally pervasive phenomenon. Slavery, serfdom, and the patriarchy are part of its lineage. Temporary and sex workers, commercial surrogacy, precarious labour contracts, sweatshops, and markets in blood, vaccines or human organs, are some contemporary manifestations of exploitation. What makes these exploitative transactions unjust? And is capitalism inherently exploitative? This book offers answers to these two questions. Nicholas Vrousalis argues that exploitation is a form of domination, self-enrichment through the domination of others. On the domination view, exploitation complaints are not, fundamentally, about harm, coercion or unfairness. Rather, they are about who serves whom and why. Exploitation, in a word, is a dividend of servitude: the dividend the powerful extract from the servitude of the vulnerable. Vrousalis claims that this servitude is inherent to capitalist relations between consenting adults whereby capital is monetary control over the labour capacity of others. It follows that capitalism, the mode of production where capital predominates, is an inherently unjust social structure.

Markets are thought of by some as liberating the individual. Rather than a feudal system in which each is assigned a role or tasks by an authority, each is free to make decisions concerning how to use their resources and direct their productive activities in light of market prices for goods and services. These prices are not dictated but reflect the preferences of individuals, aggregated by an invisible hand. In this posthumous work, political philosopher Waheed Hussain argues that this way of thinking about markets obscures their systemic nature. He shows that a better way to think about the invisible hand is as a mechanism that drops each of us into a maze whose design is opaque to us. It liberates us from the direct bondage of a feudal system; but leaves us subordinate to an arbitrary authority, one whose character is harder to discern. Hussain locates this authority in the way the market shapes the options available to us, exercising what he calls an impersonal authority over each of us. According to Hussain, the market system is objectionable when and because it is arbitrary, governing us without giving anyone a voice concerning how the authority is exercised. This is incompatible with what Hussain takes to be fundamental to human freedom, the freedom to make choices in the face of an option set that one can make sense of as being available for good reasons, to which one can assent as a free person.

According to Kant, citizenship amounts to freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit), and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). This Element provides a unifying interpretation of these three elements. Vrousalis argues that Kant affirms the idea of interdependent independence: in the just society, citizens have independent use of their interdependent rightful powers. Kant therefore thinks of the modern state as a system of cooperative production, in which reciprocal entitlements to one another's labour carry a justificatory burden. The empirical form of that ideal is a republic of economically independent commodity producers. It follows that citizenship and poverty, for Kant, are inextricably connected. Vrousalis explains how Kant's arguments anticipate Hegel's discussion of the division of labour, Marx's account of alienated labour, and Rawls' defence of a well-ordered society. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

According to Kant, citizenship amounts to freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit), and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). This Element provides a unifying interpretation of these three elements. Vrousalis argues that Kant affirms the idea of interdependent independence: in the just society, citizens have independent use of their interdependent rightful powers. Kant therefore thinks of the modern state as a system of cooperative production, in which reciprocal entitlements to one another's labour carry a justificatory burden. The empirical form of that ideal is a republic of economically independent commodity producers. It follows that citizenship and poverty, for Kant, are inextricably connected. Vrousalis explains how Kant's arguments anticipate Hegel's discussion of the division of labour, Marx's account of alienated labour, and Rawls' defence of a well-ordered society. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Gerald Allan Cohen was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford for 23 years and is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the past quarter-century. He died in 2009.The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen is the first full-length study on the unity of Cohen's political thought. It proceeds thematically, studying a range of fundamental concepts such as materialism, freedom, equality, fraternity and the market, all the while revisiting Cohen’s seminal treatment of Marx, Nozick, Dworkin, Rawls and Sen.Nicholas Vrousalis brings together the diverse strands of argument in Cohen's thought and critically reconstructs them in the context of contemporary debates in social and political theory. This reconstruction highlights common threads running through Cohen's numerous contributions to contemporary philosophy, without underrating the inevitable tensions between them.