L’État-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » : une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty

In this paper, I would like to present some remarks on the idea of a “property-owning democracy”, first presented by James Meade in 1964 as an institutional remedy to the rise of inequality and then developed by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (1971) and in Justice as Fairness. A Restatement (2001). Far from being obsolete in the present state of increased and extreme inequalities as described by Thomas Piketty in his influential Capital in the XXIst Century, (2013), I will show that Rawls’s focus on inequalities of capital, not only of income, is still relevant today. Only a wide dispersion of capital and property through a return to high levels of taxation can remedy the failure of Welfare State benefits to reduce inequalities. Rawls’s argument is based on the need not only to fight poverty, but also to create economic conditions for civic and social inclusion. He advocates a quasi-republican conception of the person as citizen, not only as consumer, that echoes Bruce Ackerman’s stakeholder society (1999). But he also, and more convincingly in my view, draws on Mill’s conception of the individual as a self-developing being and argues that a property-owning democracy is the condition for her autonomous development.