Abstract

This paper presents a critique of American liberal capitalism, a system that began as a mere experiment but has now become the only form of life that isbroadly recognized as legitimate. Such legitimation is sustained by the seemingly objective and transcendent authority of a consensus that, as a matter of fact, isincapable of self-critique and judgment. For in liberal capitalism, the quest for happiness is measured primarily by the successes of free enterprise and the freemarket in general. These successes have thus become the only legitimate sources of individual and collective action. But in spite of such successes, liberal capitalism does nothing about the actual unjust relations between different social classes and between different countries. In order to address this unjust situation, liberal capitalism rightly searches for a theory of justice that can provide genuine selfjustification or self-legitimation. But capitalist culture has wrongly found such self-justification in the liberal theory of Rawls, whose veil of ignorance ends up legitimating capitalism’s own “worst of all possible situations.”