Introduction to Political Theory

individual to hand over some (most, all) of the ‘rights’ he enjoys in the ‘state of nature’ to a coercive authority. Rawls diffe ...

Motivation in the original position Rawls attributes to people in the original position a certain psychology, or set of motivati ...

What would be chosen in the original position? Now we come to the second part of Rawls’s theory: the choice of principles. Agent ...

Rawls argues that we would choose option 10: the democratic conception. Options 1–3 are incoherent. Because you can only have on ...

The first principle is a familiar one – each person has an equal right to free speech, association, conscience, thought, propert ...

to agents that their economic position will not be dire even if they end up among the worst-off. Let us look at the other two di ...

Nozick’s starting point: private property rights The very first line of Anarchy, State, and Utopiareads: ‘individuals have right ...

movement from smallholdings to large estates, with smallholders (serfs) forced to hire out their labour for a daily wage, thus b ...

Just transfer Just transfer is dependent upon just acquisition, for you cannot justly transfer what you have not justly acquired ...

to maximise total or, alternatively, average, utility. Who gets what under this arrangement is irrelevant: person A may get 25 u ...

divide over the implications for the ownership of external things from the self- ownership premise. One of the most influential ...

organisation – ‘mode of production’ – changes, but what characterises all modes is a class relationship in which one class explo ...

scarcity situation that we will be able to determine the correct distribution of resources. Gerald Cohen is unusual amongst Marx ...

and so on. Each owns what the other lacks. We now imagine a rule is imposed, whereby when A is not using something he owns, B ha ...

(a) You will be committed to giving priority to the worst-off and so will regard redistributive income tax as legitimate. (b) Yo ...

formula. What Cohen rejects is the idea that mixing your labour establishes merely ‘first acquisition’. For Locke and Nozick, on ...

State and Utopiahe offers an imaginary account of how monopoly providers of security might emerge from the operation of the mark ...

96 Part 1 Classical ideas Fundamental Is the form of Is the form of Is the form of Does the form of question: taxation likely to ...

ownership, but uses it against Nozick’s initial acquisition argument; he also rejects Rawls’s motivational assumptions, arguing ...

Weblinks See the Companion Website for further resources. Note 1 Rawls claims to eschew any view on risk, arguing that agents in ...