In conjunction with the Hertie School of Governance Lecture Series, Challenges and Opportunities in a Globalizing World – Public Policy and the Public Good, Global Policy brings its readers this lecture by Philippe Van Parijs with commentary by Claus Offe.
At least four very different conceptions underlie common claims about what is and what is not required by justice at the level of the European Union:
- Cooperative justice between nation states pursuing their respective interests
- Solidarity between nation states forming a community
- Distributive justice between the citizens of an incipient nation state
- Global distributive justice as gradually realized at a supranational yet sub-global level.
Starting from some published correspondence Van Parijs had on this subject with John Rawls, he discusses these four views and defends one of them as the most appropriate.
Philippe Van Parijs directs the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics at the University of Louvain, Belgium. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and a doctorate in the social sciences from the University of Louvain. He was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2011 and is now a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Oxford and Leuven. He is one of the founders of the Basic Income Earth Network and chairs its International Board. His books include Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), Marxism Recycled (Cambridge UP, 1993), Real Freedom for All (Oxford UP, 1995), L’Allocation universelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2005, with Y. Vanderborght; Das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen, Campus, 2005), Just Democracy. The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme (Colchester: ECPR, 2011) and Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford UP, 2011; Sprachengerechtigkeit für Europa und die Welt, Suhrkamp, 2013, forthcoming).
Claus Offe teaches Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance. He completed his PhD at the University of Frankfurt and his Habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld (1975-1989) and Bremen (1989-1995), as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin (1995-2005). He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at, among others, the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and the New School University, New York.
Global Policy and the Hertie School of Governance have also recently collaborated to review The Governance Report 2013.
