Social Justice and Varieties of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique

In assessing the various forms of welfare capitalism, normative political philosophy typically draws on two major philosophical traditions – republicanism and liberalism, invoking either equality and the public good or, alternatively, individual autonomy as normative criteria for evaluation. Drawing, instead, on Critical Theory as a tradition of social philosophy, I advance a proposal for assessment of the types of welfare capitalism conducted as ‘immanent critique’ of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Normative criteria thus emerge within a diachronic dimension of social transformation, which in turn grounds the comparison among synchronic types of capitalism. This ultimately enables a research agenda for the operationalisation of a normative analysis of capitalism within which social justice is gauged by the degree of voluntary employment flexibility – a key factor in the distribution of life-chances in the early twenty-first century.