Teoría política

El problema es que su concepto de justicia es una justicia social, y eso lo aleja del liberalismo de forma radical. ¿Que no es Marx? De acuerdo. Pero no es liberal.

Locke Versus Rawls on Equality
by Antony Flew

[Posted October 26, 2001]

[This address was given by Professor Flew on the occasion of his being awarded the 2001 Schlarbaum Prize, presented by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.]

I am the first Englishman and the first professional philosopher to receive the Schlarbaum Prize. So it seems appropriate to begin by talking about the greatest English philosopher, John Locke. For me-as I believe, for the Founding Fathers of the American Republic-the philosophy of political liberty was first developed in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690, almost exactly a century before the adoption of the American Constitution. A new constitutional settlement under the Dutch-born Protestant King William, it was largely written earlier and in a period in which Locke was himself involved in assisting his patient and patron, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, in the political struggles which eventually achieved that new constitutional settlement.

The first of Locke's Two Treatises was in its day crucially important. Nowadays, it is read only by extremely conscientious or somewhat eccentric scholars. In it, Locke refuted the traditional established doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. That was the doctrine that all legitimate kings are and must be endowed with their sovereign powers and duties by God. The first chapter of the Second Treatise reviews the conclusion of the First Treatise. Then, in the first two paragraphs of the second chapter, Locke introduces his three key ideas: first, the idea of a State of Nature; second, the idea of a reciprocal equality of individual freedom rights and individual freedom duties; and, third, the idea of these reciprocal freedom rights and freedom duties as arising from and conditioned by the Law of Nature. The first of these two paragraphs reads:

To understand Political Power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider what State all Men are naturally in, and that is, a State of Perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and Dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man.

The second of these two complementary paragraphs reads:

A State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same facilities, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination and Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted Right to Dominion and Sovereignty.

The first common confusion here which needs to be dispelled concerns the idea of a State of Nature. This idea should be recognized as the fertile theoretical fiction which it is rather than misinterpreted as a misguided exercise in historical speculation.

It was intended to reveal how it would be reasonable for human beings as essentially rationally animals to behave under the conditions stipulated.

Nor must we allow ourselves to be misled here by Bertrand Russell's deriding of Aristotle's definition of man as "the rational animal." For Aristotle, as of course Russell knew perfectly well, was in offering this famous definition not foolishly intending to commend our species as one consisting entirely of beings always perfectly rational as opposed to irrational in both their thought and their behavior. Instead, Locke wanted to distinguish it as one uniquely consisting of creatures capable of both rational thought and rational behavior, whatever the nature of their actual performances.

Some may at this point recall that, during the Senate hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas as a justice of the Supreme Court, one senator, whom I now charitably refrain from naming, objected that that nominee's belief in the subsistence of a normative as opposed to merely descriptive Law of Nature disqualified him for that proposed appointment. Since I find it hard to believe that that or any other senator was unaware that the very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence contains the apparently unacceptable phrase, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," I am inclined to interpret his objection as arising from a well-justified fear that Clarence Thomas would, if appointed, be so conservative as to see it as his judicial duty to assess the acceptability of any law or judgment by reference only to its compatibility or incompatibility with the original intents of those who adopted the Constitution, and those who by due and proper process amended it.

A more respectable objection to the idea of a normative as opposed to merely descriptive Law of Nature insists that it is impossible validly to deduce a normative conclusion from a purely descriptive premise. That, as a point of logic, is absolutely correct. But it can, I suggest, be overcome by introducing what is to any natural, as opposed to revealed, morality the essential idea of reciprocity. For how in a State of Nature could anyone require everyone else to respect their own proclaimed rights, save by their simultaneously accepting a reciprocal obligation to respect the equal rights of everyone else?

Next, I want to suggest that these prescriptive, entitling Laws of Nature and the consequent freedom rights were at least by Locke himself conceived as arising from the essential nature of the objects supposed to have been Divinely created rather than from ad hoc Divine endowments upon them. My academically justifying reason for suggesting this is that, in the second paragraph just quoted, Locke insists that the rights arising from the Law of Nature "should be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless [my emphasis] the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him . . . an undoubted Right to Dominion and all Sovereignty." And that, of course, is precisely what Locke believes that he has in the First Treatise shown that God has not done.

But I myself have a less detachedly academic reason for wanting to show that the validity of the rights claims made in the Declaration of Independence is not logically dependent on a belief in the Divine creation of human beings. It is that that is a belief which I am myself unable to share and which is, for better or for worse, even in the United States, becoming progressively less universal.

I now offer two constructive suggestions about the interpretation of the first two clauses of the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal." The first, which will be universally acceptable today but certainly would not have been in 1776, is that the word "men" should in future be construed as referring to all human beings of either sex; or, if the PC police insist, of either gender.

The second is that we should here construe the word "equal" as referring to our equality as creatures possessing the essential and peculiar characteristics of human beings: above all the characteristic of being members of a most peculiar kind who can and therefore cannot but make choices between the various alternative and often very different possibilities of action or inaction which are from time open to us. It is because some of these alternative possible choices could be made of our own free will and others only under various forms of coercion or constraint that freedom matters so much.

In the chapter from which the first two paragraphs were quoted earlier, Locke went on to insist that although the State of Nature is "a State of Liberty, yet it is not a State of License . . . The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal or independent, no right to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty or Possessions."

However, human beings being human, there are bound to be transgressors. There has, therefore, even in the State of Nature, to be some provision for dealing with them. So, Locke asserts,

And that all Men may be restrained from invading from invading others' Rights, and from doing hurt to one another . . . the Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Mans hands, whereby everyone has a right to punish the transgressors of the Law to such a Degree, as many hinder its Violation.

What next? Locke gave his answer in Chapter IX, "Of the Ends of Political Society and Government." It is that

If Man in the State of Nature be so free, as has been said . . . why will he part with his Freedom? . . . To which `tis obvious to Answer, that in the state of Nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others. . . . This makes him willing to joyn in Society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the Mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call be the general Name, Property.

Locke therefore concluded that "The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government is the Preservation of their Property." The crucial Lockean conception of property is more comprehensive than the common contemporary notion. But thus to make the preservation of the people's property, in this understanding of the word "property," the "great and chief end . . . of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government . . ." is to provide, as did the Founding Fathers of your republic, for an extremely limited form of government. In later chapters, Locke insisted that on his principles there must be no taxation without representation, and consent. He also considers how consent is to be determined, insists that we must distinguish between the Dissolution of the Society and the Dissolution of the Government, and provides examples of peoples who "met together and incorporated themselves as a commonwealth." The Second Treatise is thus a work which might have been written to appeal to the revolting colonists of America. Although it was not, of course in fact it did.

Anyone who wonders how it is that a constitution which was intended to provide for only such a very limited government has come to be interpreted in such a way as to provide one which seems almost unlimited must take account of, among many other things, the enormous influence upon the intellectuals, in the nearly thirty years since it was first published, of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice-work which, I was recently told, is widely used in teaching in those law schools from which America's future judges will come.

The first essential step in any critique of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) has to be to insist that the title is in a very relevant way misleading. For the first half-dozen pages make it absolutely clear that the book will be concerned exclusively, not with old-fashioned, without-prefix-or-suffix justice, but with social justice. It was indeed precisely because so many people had for so long been eager to maintain that their preferred political and social policies would constitute the achievement and/or the maintenance of social justice that this book received such an extraordinary welcome on its first appearance, and still continues to be more frequently referred to than any other twentieth-century work of moral and political philosophy.

There is today so much talk of social justice that many may be surprised to learn that the first occurrence of the expression "social justice" known to the revisers of the great Oxford English Dictionary is in Chapter V of Utilitarianism (1861), where J.S. Mill speaks of the "highest standard of social and distributive justice." This was apparently the first occasion of which anyone writing in English employed the expression "social justice." But the distinction between distributive and corrective justice-a distinction which, as far as we know, was first made by Aristotle-was already familiar to the writers of treatises on old-fashioned, without-prefix-and-suffix justice in many other languages.

It is clear that the main reason why many people are eager to describe their favorite policies as productive of a kind of justice is, of course, that this makes those people appear to themselves and to others to be in unchallengeable occupation of the moral high ground. Yet Rawls nowhere does anything to warrant claims that social justice actually is a kind of justice-of justice as traditionally conceived and commended, that is. On the contrary: his own uneasiness-for deterministic reasons-about the applicability of the concepts of just desert and his failure to recognize the possibility of just entitlements which are neither (creditably) deserved nor (discreditably) undeserved leave him with no room at all for the idea of doing justice as traditionally conceived. Indeed, even when writing A Theory of Justice, Rawls would appear to have been at least partially aware that he was not in fact presenting an account of justice as traditionally conceived. For he himself there described that work as an account of "justice as fairness." This has led some irreverent but of course very serious critics to construct a possible series of books with titles of the form A Theory of X, in which members would for various values of X actually present accounts of that value of X as something else.

Most remarkably-and yet, in the circumstances, all too understandably-Rawls himself never offers any definition of the word "justice." He must surely be the first author of a substantial treatise pretending to be about justice not to have done so. Instead, it is only on his 579th page that he explains, without any suggestion of apology, that he was eager "to leave questions of meaning and definition aside and get on with the task of developing a substantive theory [not of `social' justice but] of justice." A philosopher trained as I was at Oxford in the school of Litterae Humaniores cannot fail here to recall the remark made by Plato's Socrates at the very end of The Republic: "For if I don't know what justice is, I shall hardly know whether it is a virtue or not or whether its possessor is or is not happy."

The second necessary critical step is to recognize that "in the original position," the hypothetical social contractors of Rawls are "for simplicity . . . required to assume that the chief primary goods at the disposition of society are rights and liberties, income and wealth (ibid., p. 62; emphasis added). The only reason we are given for making this enormous socialist assumption is the commendably frank but otherwise inadequate admission that "We want to define the original position so that we get the desired solution" (ibid., p.141). This solution, to the surprise of none of our contemporaries, is that "the first principle of justice" is "one requiring an equal distribution" (ibid., pp. 150-51). If, but only if, one was thinking of making a free distribution of one's own property among the members of some group of potential beneficiaries, then the initially reasonable but defeasible assumption would indeed be equality.

To make this required assumption is, in effect, to assume that what is customarily called the national income is not, or at any rate ought not to be, what it actually is-namely, the sum of all the incomes of all the individuals and all the firms in the nations-but instead to assume that it is, or at any rate ought to be, the income of that hypostatized collectivity, the nation, or, rather, the state. The phrase "the national income" is thus a prime nonphilosophical member of the class of what Gilbert Ryle famously characterized as "Systematically Misleading Expressions."

Consider, for example, this assumption as it was very clearly made in An Approach to Social Policy, an official document of the National Economic and Social Council of the Republic of Ireland, a document drafted for them by D.V. Donison and first published in 1975 by the Stationery Office in Dublin. From it we learn that that the Council is by its terms of reference required to "promote social justice," which for its members apparently involves or simply is "the fair and equitable distribution of the income and wealth of the nation."

This fist unargued assumption-that all income and wealth is available for redistribution free of any and all morally valid prior claims to ownership-should have astonished anyone with a knowledge of what philosophers typically said about justice in previous centuries. For it is, surely, historically unprecedented. Hume, for instance, in dealing with justice in the three sections of the part of his Treatise of Human Nature which treats "Of justice and injustice," makes no mention of even the theoretical possibility of the collective ownership of all the wealth in a nation. Aristotle, too, in distinguishing distributive from corrective justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, most emphatically did not take it for granted that all wealth and income is available, free of all antecedent deserts and entitlements, for distribution or redistribution by the state (1131A 25-29 and 1131 B 28-33).

In defining "the original position so that we get the desired solution" (A Theory of Justice, p. 141), the solution desired is that "the first principle of justice" should be "one requiring an equal distribution" (ibid., pp. 150-51). This may well seem an obvious truth to those who have become unthinkingly accustomed to taking the word "equality" and the expression "social justice" to be logically inseparable if not actually equivalent. But before the twentieth century, even those few who believed this principle to be true would scarcely have dared to present it as obvious and incontestable. Certainly Aristotle did assert that ". . . the just is the equal-a view that commends itself to all without proof . . ." But he then went on at once to argue that "if persons are not equal they will not have equal shares." So Aristotle's actual conclusion was not a substantial practical prescription but a purely formal principle. It was not that equal shares for all is the imperative of justice. Rather, it is that the rules of justice, like all rules, require, not that all cases, but only that all relevantly like cases, should be treated alike (Nicomachean Ethics, 1131A 12-14 and 1131A 23-24).

The third necessary critical step is to recognize a second requirement imposed upon the Rawlsian hypothetical social contractors. The first requirement should certainly have astonished anyone with a knowledge of what in the past philosophers typically said about justice and property. But readers astonished by that first requirement should be even more flabbergasted by the second. For, in explaining "The Main Idea of the Theory," Rawls asserts that "Once we decide to look for a conception of Justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and contingencies of social circumstances in the quest for political and economic advantage, we are led these principles. They express the result of leaving aside those aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view" (A Theory of Justice, p. 15: emphasis added).

Certainly, if all possible grounds for any differences in deserts and entitlements are thus to be dismissed as morally irrelevant, then, if anyone is to be allowed truly to deserve or to be entitled to anything at all, it does perhaps become obvious that everyone's deserts and entitlements must be equal. For it is precisely and only upon what individuals serverally and individually have become obvious and now are, as the result of their different genetic endowments and of their different previous experiences and activities, that all their several and often very different present deserts and entitlements cannot but be based.

It is, for instance, only and precisely because one particular individual has justly acquired more property than another that their property rights, their property entitlements, have become unequal. Again it is only and precisely because one individual has committed a crime and another has not that their just deserts necessarily become unequal. It is, therefore, monstrous to dismiss such facts as irrelevant on the grounds that they are "arbitrary from a moral point of view." To seek "a conception of justice" which demands this dismissal is to seek something which is not justice at all. If this is indeed what is required by "social justice," then "social justice" is no more justice than People's Democracy is, or was, democracy.

Given the two requirements which Rawls imposes on his social contractors in the original position, he cannot but refuse to admit the moral validity of any individual property rights, any individual property entitlements. But now, how is Rawls proposing to justify his own insistence on "the priority of liberty," the insistence that "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others" (ibid., p. 60) and that "each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override" (ibid., p. 3)?

Far be it from me to deny these claims, whatever I might want to say about their foundation. But for Rawls, the insistence on the possession of these inviolable rights constitutes an unwitting admission of the actuality of some most fundamental entitlements which neither are nor could be either (creditably) deserved nor (discreditably) undeserved. And, if he had gone on, as I have done, to explore the kind of justifications for claims to the possession of such rights offered by the Founding Fathers of the American Republic and their contemporaries, then he would have found, as we have seen, that for them these rights to freedoms were essentially connected with property rights to their persons, to their individual talents, and the products of the exercise of those individual talents.

My fundamental objection to the theory construction of Rawls is that it is based upon two monster-not to say monstrous-assumptions. There is first the socialist assumption that "income and wealth" are "at the disposition of society." Then there is, second, the assumption that "the accidents and contingencies of social circumstances" are, "from a moral point of view," irrelevant. These two assumptions are said, no doubt truly, to be necessary in order to produce the desired conclusions. I am myself inclined to say that the first is simply unsupported while the second is simply insupportable. Yet without sufficient support for these two fundamental assumptions, the whole system surely collapses? I am tempted to add, "And good riddance." For the collectivism of Rawls's undertaking to regard the distribution of natural abilities as a collective asset, so that the more fortunate are to benefit only in ways that help those who have lost out" (p. 179, emphasis and comma added) not only constitutes a most unlovely dog-in-the-manger commitment but also one which is manifestly inconsistent with the initial insistence upon "the priority of liberty." I confess, not very shamefacedly, that had I discovered that my principles required such a commitment, I should have taken that as a pressing reason for reviewing those principles.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Antony Flew has taught philosophy at the University of Reading, England, and is author of many books. See the prize announcement and his complete vita, and the following additional articles by Flew:

"Could There Be Universal Natural Rights?"

"Enforced Equality Or- Justice?"

"Human Choice and Historical Inevitability"

"Philosophy of Freedom"

"Social Science: Making Visible the Invisible Hands"

"Socialism and Social Justice"

Books by Antony Flew available through Amazon.com:

Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Argument from Plato to Popper

How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning

A Dictionary of Philosophy

Hume's Philosophy of Belief: A Study of His First Inquiry

The Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality

Thinking About Social Thinking

Equality in Liberty and Justice (November 2000)

Pero debo examinar más el tema. Hace mucho tiempo lo había analizado y había llegado a esa conclusión (y a otras más graves aún), pero ahora no las recuerdo.
Por ahora les recomiendo leer lo siguiente:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n2-1.html

y la crítica rothbardiana a Rawls, que incluye a todo contrato colectivo imaginario para imponer el imperio de un monopolio del inicio de la fuerza partiendo del contractualismo individual:

http://www.poderlimitado.org/pdf/HoppeII.pdf

Tema
Rawls en tela de juicio
Por Gorka Etxevarria
Febrero del 2001

Siempre he tenido intención de proponer a alguna revista de pensamiento la creación de una sección que llevase como título la coletilla "en tela de juicio...". En ella el lector podría acercarse un poco más a las verdaderas razones que han hecho que teorías famosas como las de Galbraith o las de Keynes hayan fracasado estrepitosamente en su puesta en práctica.


ESTA sección bien podría inaugurarse con John Rawls, gurú de la izquierda y uno de los teóricos políticos más conocidos, sobre todo por ser autor de la célebre Teoría de la justicia . La propuesta de Rawls, que rescata la teoría del contrato social dándole una nueva formulación, entiende que las normas de equidad se alcanzan mediante el concurso de los ciudadanos que, sin saber el puesto o estatus que ocuparán en la sociedad, deciden justamente los principios por los que "las instituciones sociales (...) distribuyen los derechos y deberes básicos y determinan la división de las ventajas derivadas de la cooperación social" .
Según esta creencia, todos los hombres deben tener iguales derechos y deberes básicos y las desigualdades de riqueza y autoridad sólo "son justas si traen beneficios compensadores para todos y particularmente para los menos aptos" y si son adscritos a cargos abiertos a todos.

El contrato social
La duda inicial que puede surgirnos es por qué la gente debe aceptar ese acuerdo. Que generaciones pasadas lo firmaran no implica que las actuales tengan que rubricarlo ya que sus intereses pueden diferir de los de sus antepasados. Y esto es así porque hablar de "acuerdo presupone ser lo que casi era en su totalidad, un contrato entre la gente entonces existente y por necesidad les vincula a la gente entonces existente" , decía el constitucionalista y abogado Lysander Spooner. Es en definitiva, la cuestión de que si la razón de la obediencia al gobierno fuera mantener la palabra podríamos objetar mantenerla o no .
Otra complicación que aparece en la formulación de Rawls es que si los contratos requieren alguien que los haga cumplir, ¿cómo puede haber un contrato social que cree un órgano ejecutor del contrato sin estar asegurado su ejecución por un meta-ejecutor creado por un meta-contrato social? La regresión es infinita.

¿El resultado del acuerdo será el que Rawls cree?
Rawls pone a los ciudadanos bajo un "velo de ignorancia" (no saber cuál será su puesto en la sociedad, ni sus capacidades...) para que elijan los principios de justicia correctos (o lo que él entiende como tal) sin estar tentados de escoger los principios que más les benefician optando por aquellos adecuados para el bien común.
Pero a Rawls no se le ocurre que el resultado de ese proceso de elección podría ser otro distinto al que él defiende . Quizá su error sea disponer a los hombres como jugadores. Los más cautelosos no elegirán lo mismo que los que suelen arriesgarse hasta perder la chaqueta . Así, por ejemplo, David Gauthier entiende que bajo esas circunstancias adoptarán "una forma profundamente individualista de sociedad de mercado competitivo" .
Por otro lado, al elegir un orden, éste "debe ser ya justo", pues, en palabras de R. Spaemann, "la justicia de la elección no se puede establecer mediante un cálculo de los intereses bajo condiciones fácticas" . Realmente esas personas no eligen más que lo útil para ellos y, si puede parecer que eligen lo justo, hay que interrogarse acerca de si mejorar la situación de los menos afortunados no es el objeto de la justicia sino, como dice Millán-Puelles, el de la caridad y la generosidad, virtudes individuales que no pueden imponerse por la ley (aun así basta con mirar a nuestras leyes para darse cuenta de que imponen la filantropía minando las bases de la moral: elegir o no si somos virtuosos).

Sacrificando al individuo
Pese a que Rawls recoge la idea kantiana de que el hombre es un fin y no un medio para ser utilizado en beneficio de los demás, su teoría dista bastante de ser coherente con esa idea .
Rawls cree que hay que restringir el desarrollo individual a favor de los menos favorecidos, vulnerando de este modo la libertad de unos en beneficio de otros . Lo que no ve es que en un ambiente menos propicio para la libertad la capacidad creativa del individuo se ve coartada, ya que con tantas limitaciones a las posibilidades de actuar y con el incentivo a hacerse pasar por menesteroso, incapaz o parado, a nadie le apetecerá trabajar más para la sociedad. El trabajo se sustituirá por el pillaje y la creación de empresas por la fundación de grupos de presión dispuestos a presentar sus intereses como los de la gran mayoría, cuando no es así.
Aparte de este argumento, podemos añadir que el que la mayoría decida el destino de la minoría conlleva no respetar los derechos inalienables del individuo y eso es despótico. Como irónicamente comenta Nozick, "mi vida mejoraría de diversas maneras si usted decidiera convertirse en mi devoto esclavo, suponiendo que yo pudiera superar la incomodidad inicial. ¿Es la causa de mi estado actual el que usted no se convierta en mi esclavo" .
Llegados a este punto cabe preguntarse si el individuo tiene o no el derecho de aprovechar sus cualidades y con ellas quedarse con el fruto de su trabajo. Es decir, si tiene derecho a los beneficios siempre y cuando no lo obtenga por fraude, coacción o vulneración de contrato. Restringir el florecimiento de las facultades individuales -como Rawls sugiere- no sólo supone reprimir "las diferencias y la diversidad" sino que, en palabras de Hayek, también equivale a "paralizar la posibilidad de nuevos descubrimientos" . Ese sería un mundo tribal que no tendría nada que ver con la civilización de la que disfrutamos.
El capitalismo encaja mejor que la economía intervenida de Rawls en el respeto a la dignidad de cada uno (no sacrificándonos en pro de la mayoría) y permite a cada cual utilizar su mente y su trabajo para vivir de forma independiente, como les plazca, no pidiendo autorización a nadie para dirigirse como más le convenga. El libre mercado crea, en suma, un ambiente propicio para la autorrealización personal.
Desgraciadamente las regulaciones gubernamentales sobre la sociedad siguen patrones rawlsianos limitando estas ricas posibilidades. Rawls pretendía superar el utilitarismo, pero ha caído en él aun sin proponérselo yendo contra el derecho de propiedad de uno sobre su persona y los resultados de su trabajo.

El socialismo de mercado de Rawls
Rawls asegura que "teóricamente al menos un régimen socialista puede aprovechar las ventajas de una economía de mercado" . Pero como agudamente puntualiza Kirzner, Rawls desconoce que desde Mises sabemos que el socialismo real fracasará inevitablemente por la imposibilidad de efectuar el cálculo económico . Así, en la teoría socialista los recursos no se pueden asignar efectivamente puesto que no se cuenta con las señales que los precios libremente formados proporcionan; o sea, no se puede ajustar la oferta a la demanda si ésta aumenta o disminuye.

Conclusión
La teoría de la Justicia de Rawls ha sido considerada como una obra maestra en la materia y como la contrapartida a Sobre la Libertad de J. Stuart Mill. Ni lo uno ni lo otro. Rawls no ha podido evitar caer en contradicciones y volver al contractualismo de Rousseau, en el que a la gente se le podía obligar a ser "libres" y someterse a la voluntad general, que era verdadera por ser fruto del consenso (¡y a la que nadie podía cuestionar!).
No olvidemos que trata de organizar la sociedad a su gusto y como Hayek resaltó, así se cae en la fatal arrogancia . Ésta consiste en descartar los hábitos, normas e instituciones que han surgido evolutivamente del interactuar humano, muy superiores a las que se elaboran "a priori", ya que llevan consigo la sabiduría de la experiencia de generaciones pasadas que por prueba y error han seleccionado aquellas que mejor han permitido el desarrollo de las sociedades y de los individuos. Creer en el poder ilimitado de la razón para encontrar la "verdad sobre todo" no es más que pura quimera. En la utopía yace el germen de la tiranía. Ya lo dejó escrito Frank Chodorov: "Cuando la gente dice 'hagamos algo al respecto' ellos quieren decir 'tomemos la maquinaria política de modo que podamos hacerle algo a cualquier otro'. Y ese otro eres invariablemente tú" .
Si quieren profundizar en la teoría de Rawls les recomendamos Justicia como equidad" , que refleja de forma clara sus ideas. Ahora bien léanlo con espíritu crítico y sobre todo vacunados contra la falta de realismo de los intelectuales.

Gorka ETXEBARRÝA

Bibliografía
- R. Gargarella. "Los críticos del 'liberalismo político' de Rawls". Revista CLAVES. Núm. oct-nov., 1997, pp. 61-64.
- D. Gauthier. Egoísmo, moralidad y sociedad liberal. Ed. Paidós. Col. Pensamiento Contemporáneo, Barcelona, 1998. Cap. I, "Justicia y dotación natural hacia una crítica del marco ideológico de Rawls".
- J. Gray. Postrimerías e inicios. Ideas para un cambio de época. Editorial Sequitur. 1998. Cap.3, "El liberalismo antipolítico de Rawls", pp. 65-69.
- F.A. Hayek. Hayek sobre Hayek y La fatal arrogancia. Unión Editorial. 2ª ed, Madrid, 1997. Cap V, pp. 271-291.
- Jesús Huerta de Soto. Estudio preliminar al libro de Kirzner, Creatividad, Capitalismo y Justicia distributiva y "Socialismo, corrupción ética y economía de mercado" en Ética pública y Moral social, Luis Núñez Ladevéze (editor), Ed. Noesis, Madrid, 1996; pp. 101-132.
- I. Kirzner. Creatividad, Capitalismo y Justicia distributiva. Unión Editorial, Madrid.
- H. Lepage. ¿Por qué la propiedad? Instituto de Estudios Económicos, Madrid, 1986; pp. 299-300.
- P. Lóizaga (editor). Diccionario de Pensadores Contemporáneos. Emecé editores, Barcelona, 1996. Voz Rawls, pp. 293-298.
- T. Machan. Individuals and their rights. Open Court, Ill, USA, 1988; pp. 199-201. "Rawls: Justice as equality of resources" (traducido en este número de Veintiuno). Se puede adquirir a través de la revista de libros liberales, Laissez Faire Books, 938 Howard St. S. Francisco, CA, USA por 14.95$.
- T. Machan. Private rights & Public illusions. Transaction Publishers, Rutgers. The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903; pp. 16-17, 79-81 y 256-257. También se encuentra disponible en Laissez Faire Books a 19.95$.
- A. Millán-Puelles. El valor de la libertad (Editorial Rialp, Madrid, 1995. Pp. 249-257).
- J. Rawls. Teoría de la Justicia. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Méjico, 1979. Especialmente Cap. I.
- J. Rawls. Justicia como equidad. Tecnos, Madrid, 1986. Especialmente el prólogo de M.A. Rodilla.
- J. Rawls, Sobre las libertades. Editorial Paidós. Col. Pensamiento Contemporáneo, núm. 9, Barcelona. Prólogo de Vitoria Camps.