Class, Classlessness, and the Critique of Rawls

Abstract

ROFES;SOR NIELSEN'S ARTICLE, most of which I agree with, is to be welcomed for carrying the many critiques of Rawls a useful stage further. I should, however, like to comment on the two points on which Nielsen calls my critique into question. (1) Nielsen questions my assertion that Rawls has drastically narrowed the scope of his enquiry by postulating that class inequalities amounting the differences in the life prospects of members of different classes are inevitable, and so confining himself to a search for principles that will justify such inequality. Nielsen suggests that this assertion rests on a confusion between two concepts of class. He points out, rightly, that I make the criterion of a society the existence in it of class exploitation, defined as the continuous transfer of part of the powers of those in one class to those in another for the benefit of the latter, and that I allow as a society one in which there are different levels of income and authority, but where occupancy of a higher level is neither the result nor the means of exploiting others. He then argues that such a classless society might reasonably be thought to confer differences in life prospects; that, if it did, it as well as my class-divided society would be in Rawls' sense; and that therefore Rawls is not unreasonable in postulating that such differences are inevitable, at least in any society based on extensive division of labour.