Poverty, Justice, and Western Political Thought

by Vaughan, Sharon K.

• ISBN13: 9780739122686
• ISBN10: 0739122681
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-07
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

The number of people who live in poverty has always far exceeded the number who do not. The normative question of how governments ought to treat the poor goes to the heart of the idea of justice and thus it is an essential element of political theory. Yet, there has been no formal study of the treatment of poverty in Western political thought. The chapters of Poverty, Justice, and Western Political Thought include an analysis of the main arguments of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Rawls, and Nozick about the causes, effects, and solutions to the problem of poverty and how their treatments of poverty relate to the idea of a just society. This book asks: What is the relationship between poverty and justice in the state? If we are to understand the relationship between the poor and the idea of a just state in the tradition of Western political thought, then we must be able to recognize how these theorists' definitions, assumptions, and conclusions about poverty contribute to or detract from the idea of justice. At the core of this work is the claim that the demands of justice necessarily require that the political theorist engage with the problem of poverty, with the goal being to suggest some thoughtful and reasonable approaches to the problem.

Author Biography

Sharon K. Vaughan is assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Avoiding the Greatest Plague of All: Plato and Aristotle	p. 9
Societal Responsibility and the Undeserving Poor: John Locke	p. 45
The Noble Poor: Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith	p. 63
Empirical Influences and the Complexities of Poverty: Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill	p. 105
Poverty as a Challenge to Capitalist Economies: G. W. Hegel and Karl Marx	p. 139
Poverty and Justice: John Rawls and Robert Nozick	p. 163
Conclusion	p. 191
List of Abbreviations	p. 197
Bibliography	p. 199
Index	p. 209
About the Author	p. 223
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