The central claim of this book is that the dichotomy between economic dependence and economic independence is completely inadequate for describing the political challenges faced by contemporary capitalist welfare states. The simplistic contrast between markets and states as sources of income renders invisible the relations of dependence established in our basic economic institutions such as the family, property, and money. This book is a work of political theory that attacks narrow conceptions of dependence and identifies distinct senses of dependence that (...) might allow political communities to make clearer decisions about the justice of our economic institutions and practices. Inheritance, for example, is as much a form of dependence as support by a welfare state, but these are never compared in debates about economic justice. This book begins the work of comparing forms of economic dependence, and argues that economic dependence is always an issue of both vulnerability and parasitism. It builds bridges between political theory and social science, and is of relevance to those concerned with social and economic justice in and beyond contemporary capitalist welfare states. (shrink)

For several decades, public political discourses on ‘welfare dependency’ have failed to recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four senses of ‘economic dependence’ that can help to clarify what is missing from these discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian philosophical work has examined the problems (...) of dependence on states, in families and in markets, the present approach adds a further dimension to our cultural and political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires a clarification of the ‘varieties of dependence’ that exist in contemporary societies and economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not about escaping dependence entirely. (shrink)

This article introduces the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ to explain how the stories that we encounter in property theory and public rhetoric function to make some actors appear ‘independent’, and thus capable of acquiring property in their own right, while making other actors appear ‘dependent’ and thus incapable of acquiring property. The argument develops the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ out of the work of legal scholar Carol Rose and political theorist Carole Pateman, before using it as a tool for contrasting (...) the canonical property stories of John Locke and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. We argue that the link between property and dependence provides a useful starting point for understanding issues of economic justice that share a common political problem: how do we choose to govern the relation between dependence and independence through the institution of property? (shrink)