Positive Freedom, Markets, and the Welfare State

Abstract

Abstract The comparative merits of market and certain distinguished non-market resource allocation mechanisms have continually been at the centre of debate in economics and political philosophy. Doubtless they will remain there. For here one faces the grandest of human concerns, embracing as it does issues bearing on liberty and welfare, the aspirations of people, their potential and realized capabilities, and the fulfilment of their needs. It enables us to see individuals in a social context, to ask about the possible features of a civil society, the obligations that people may have to themselves, to one another, and to agencies. Then again, we are able to enquire into the obligations that agencies have to people and to one another, the extent to which responsibility needs to be delegated among offices and persons, the role that dispersed information may play in answers to these, and so on. The debate is central to any discussion of the kind of society we ought to aspire to be members of.