Rawls's Difference Principle and Radical Land Reform — Epoche B2
Beyond Welfare: The Difference Principle, Property Regimes and the Limits of Land Reform John Rawls is routinely read as the philosopher of the welfare state [1] : a theory that leaves ownership where it is and corrects the results afterwards through taxes and transfers [2] . This essay argues that the reading is wrong, and that Rawls himself said so. His two principles are compatible with regimes that disperse ownership of productive assets, and he explicitly rejected welfare-state capitalism as unable to satisfy them. To that extent the counter-conventional claim is correct: the difference principle reaches property, not merely income. A stronger and more tempting claim then fails. It is natural to conclude that the theory licenses radical redistribution of a nation's land where past dispossession has left ownership grossly concentrated, and to read the Zimbabwean programme of the 2000s as a case in point. That inference does not go through, for three reasons internal to Rawls's own theory — and seeing why shows what kind of theory the difference principle belongs to. The two principles A Theory of Justice (1971) asks what principles free and equal persons would choose to govern the basic structure of their society — its constitution, its property system, its main economic institutions — if they chose from behind a veil of ignorance hiding their own class, talents and conception of the good. Rawls argues they would choose two, in a fixed order of priority. The first secures for each person an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a like liberty for all — in the later restatement, an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties. The second governs social and economic inequalities in two parts: they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. The second part is the difference principle . The ordering matters throughout: the first principle takes priority over the second, and fair equality of opportunity over the difference principle, so a gain for the worst off cannot be purchased by curtailing basic liberties. Fair equality of opportunity is stronger than open competition. Rawls's formulation is that those at the same level of talent and ability, with the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system. That is demanding, and it is the part of the theory bearing most directly on inherited wealth. Rawls on property regimes The claim that Rawls endorses the welfare state is not an interpretation he shared. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) he distinguishes five kinds of regime and asks of each whether it could realise the two principles: laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, state socialism with a command economy, property-owning democracy, and liberal socialism. He concludes that only the last two can. His objection to welfare-state capitalism is not the one usually attributed to him. It is not that transfers are too small. It is that a regime permitting large concentrations of wealth, and redistributing income only at the end of each period, leaves the concentration itself in place. Concentrated ownership of productive assets translates into political influence, undermining the fair value of the political liberties protected by the first principle, and it shapes the life chances of children born into different positions, offending against fair equality of opportunity. A property-owning democracy works upstream instead, dispersing ownership of capital and of human capital. The mechanisms Rawls mentions are accordingly not income taxes but taxes on inheritance and gift, restrictions on bequest, and wide access to education. He treats liberal socialism, in which productive assets are publicly or cooperatively owned within a constitutional democracy, as an equally admissible answer. A textual point is often missed. Among the basic liberties Rawls includes the right to hold personal property, which he takes to be necessary for a sense of independence. He does not include a right to private ownership of natural resources or of the means of production. That is left to the second principle and to the circumstances of a particular society. The tempting inference So far the radical reading has support. If the difference principle reaches the ownership of productive assets, and land is the principal productive asset in an agrarian economy, then a society in which most of the fertile land is held by a small minority, whose holdings originate in colonial dispossession, appears to be one whose basic structure Rawls condemns: fair equality of opportunity is plainly not met when access to the means of livelihood is determined by ancestry. Zimbabwe after 1980 is the case usually cited, and the starting position is not in dispute. A large share of the best arable land remained with a small number of commercial farmers whose title descended from settler expropriation, while the majority farmed poorer land under insecure tenure; as Sam Moyo documented across a long series of studies [3] , the negotiated transfers of the first two decades changed this very little. By any Rawlsian standard the pre-reform structure was unjust, and the inference to a programme of compulsory redistribution looks short. Why the inference fails Three features of Rawls's theory block the move from that verdict to the endorsement of a redistributive programme. First, the difference principle is a standard for the design of the basic structure, not a warrant for particular transfers. Rawls is explicit that his is a case of pure background procedural justice: institutions are arranged so that whatever distribution emerges from them is just, and one does not assess individual holdings one at a time. A theory of that shape tells you what institutions to build. It does not, by