Suchergebnisse

We have long been accustomed to thinking of democracy as a major selling point of Western institutions. That a set of political institutions should be democratic is widely regarded as thesine qua nonof their legitimacy. So widespread is this belief that even those whose institutions do not look very democratic to us nevertheless insist on proclaiming them to be such (though the number taking this gambit dropped dramatically around the end of 1989). Meanwhile, an adulatory attitude toward democracy has arisen in many quarters, and many theorists have taken up anew the idea that if democracy is the way to go in political institutions, then it must also be the way to go in "other" areas, notably in economic and social institutions. So there has arisen a call for "economic democracy" — which is taken to mean, especially, that the "means of production" should be managed by their constituent workers in concert rather than by some few who own, or act for the owners of, those enterprises. Robert Dahl, in his influentialPreface to Economic Democracy, sums it up nicely when he proclaims a "stronger justification" for worker participation: "Ifdemocracy is justified in governing the state, then it mustalsobe justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it isnotjustified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state."

This article seeks to provide the philosophical foundations for the very idea of economic rights, comparable to the foundations that have long been available for the rights around the notion of liberty. The author then situates economic rights, so understood, within the realities of contemporary capitalist political economy, as it has been analysed over the years by Prabhat Patnaik. JEL Codes: B0, K1, N1, P1, P2

The recent movement among state supreme courts to affirm rights not protected by the United States Supreme Court has occasioned much favorable commentary. In one area of this new judicial federalism—economic rights protection—the response has been less enthusiastic. State courts used various clauses of their respective constitutions to protect these rights even before the Civil War and have continued to do so despite the U.S. Supreme court's abdication of any serious role in the realm of economic rights. This persistence by state courts is justified by a historically valid substantive content of the due process clause, the numerous clauses in state constitutions concerned with the protection of property, and the role of the state courts in the American constitutional system. The arguments frequently invoked by critics of judicial activism on the part of the federal judiciary do not apply with the same force to the state judiciary. State courts can contribute to American constitutional liberties by actively protecting an area of rights that would otherwise find no forum for vindication.

There has been much debate on the question of rights in African
communitarian thinking. Some scholars have averred that duties are
prior to rights in African communitarian society, and that to prioritise
rights is foreign to the non-Western perspective. Yet, there are others
who argue that in non-Western societies rights are prior to duties. I
share this view. I present my position by arguing that economic rights
in African communitarianism affirms autonomy of the individual,
though the same rights are expressed through the ideas of consensus and
human well-being. In my argument I state that human well-being is well
expressed as a communal effort climaxed through consensus where all
these are premised on individual autonomy. By arguing in this way, I
respond to the accusation that says African philosophers who argue for
the priority of rights have failed to demonstrate how rights are considered
prior to duties in African societies.