Romy Claassen
Biographic Data
| ID | 221747 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Romy Claassen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Romy |
| FAMILY NAME | Claassen |
| SIGNATURE | CLAASSEN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7314-4986 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Social ownership democracy
Debates about alternatives to capitalism in post-Rawlsian political philosophy have focused on property-owning democracy and market socialism as the most promising socio-economic regime types. This paper argues that corporations in property-owning democracy and market socialism remain prone to tendencies to exploitation, either exploitation by investors or exploitation of investors. Hence it argues in favour of a third alternative, which it calls…
The corporation—a return to origins?
This paper contributes to contemporary debates in political theory about the power of business corporations by offering a genealogy of the corporation through the lens of a series of historical mutations of the corporate form. Originally, there were two corporate forms, both non-profit: member corporations (today's associations) and property corporations (today's charitable foundations). The contemporary business corporation arguably is a hybrid …
Corporate Purpose and Democratic Theory: A Governance Trilemma
Over the last years, both in the popular press, policy and business circles and in academia, people call for corporations to orient their behavior towards ‘purpose’. This is meant as a move away from shareholder value maximization as the lodestar for corporate action. But purpose-advocates are torn between two directions in thinking about corporate governance: towards corporate governance on behalf of stakeholders by an independent board, and tow…
Property as power: A theory of representation
Inequalities in wealth are a major concern in societal debates today (Atkinson, 2015; Piketty, 2014). Economic analyses abound showing that wealthy individuals and corporations can achieve commanding heights in the economy. They dominate more vulnerable parties, such as workers, consumers, members of less developed countries, the natural environment, and democracy itself (Christophers, 2019; Eeckhout, 2021; Mazzucato, 2018). How to respond to pri…
A Fiduciary Theory of Property
Ownership rights give substantial power to owners to affect the lives of nonowners. Critics of ownership’s power have compared it to the power of political rulers. Drawing on this analogy, this paper proposes to reconceptualize property as a fiduciary power. In a fiduciary relation, a fiduciary is empowered to make decisions over a beneficiary, for the interest of that beneficiary. The power is held in trust. Political rulers can be seen as a fid…
Varieties of Social Ownership: A Reflection on Plural Cooperativism
Kuch’s proposal for a regime of Plural Cooperativism relies on a universalization of the (worker) cooperative, while abolishing today’s dominant business corporations. It integrates several other components (public banks and stock markets) into such a regime. In this response, I first make some general comments about the normative framework of Kuch’s paper, which presents Plural Cooperativism as a way to instantiate the idea of ‘social ownership’…
Tussen norm en verlangen: De ervaringen van jongeren met een migratieachtergrond met romantiek en seks voor het huwelijk
The study, conducted in the Netherlands, examines the experiences of 55 young people from cultural communities in which premarital sex is not allowed. Participants come from different ethnic and religious backgrounds and include both men and women. The study explores how these young individuals navigate the expectations surrounding virginity and the norms of sexual segregation. Both men and women observe gender-dependent rules and feel controlled…
Introduction to Symposium on Jean-Philippe Robe, Property, Politics and Power
No sex before marriage? Migrant youth navigating restrictive norms regarding premarital relationships
While restrictive norms on premarital sexuality are not exclusive for Muslims, most of the research on premarital sexuality is on Muslim women, while young men are virtually absent. This Dutch study also includes young people of other religious backgrounds and young men. It discusses how the 55 young people who were interviewed experience and navigate the virginity imperative and norm of sex segregation. The deeply religious young people experien…
Political theories of the business corporation
Business corporations are important, often powerful actors within the economy. They are able to exercise power over other actors, such as employees, consumers and nation-states. This contribution discusses how corporate power is constituted (ontological question), for what purpose it should be exercised, (normative question) and how it should be controlled (governance question). It focuses on the competing anwers to these questions that have been…
Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives
Wealth creation without domination. The fiduciary duties of corporations
Corporations wield power in today's economies, and political theories of the corporation argue about the legitimacy conditions of corporate power. This paper argues in favour of a double-fiduciary theory for corporations. Based on a concession theory of markets, it sees all markets as authorized by states (in the name of society), for the purpose of creating economic value, or wealth. Hence corporations, as much as non-incorporated firms, have a …
The Corporate Power Trilemma
Authors critical of corporate power focus almost exclusively on one solution: bringing it under democratic control. However important this is, there are at least two other options, which are rarely discussed: reducing powerful firms’ size and influence, or accepting corporate power as a necessary evil. This article provides a comparative perspective for evaluating all three options. It argues that the trade-offs we face in responding to corporate…
Making Power Explicit: Why Liberal Egalitarians Should Take (Economic) Power Seriously
In this paper we argue that liberal-egalitarian theorists of justice should take power, especially economic power, seriously and make it explicit. We argue that many theories of justice have left power implicit, relying on what we call the “primacy of politics” model as a background assumption. However, this model does not suffice to capture the power relations of today’s globalized world, in which the power of nation states has been reduced and …
Hobbes Meets the Modern Business Corporation
Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. T…
Why economic agency matters: An account of structural domination in the economic realm
Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for focusing on concrete economic structures and re-focus the debate about justice onto questions of power. In this article we build on their work, but we argue that a positive notion of economic agency is needed as a criterion for what makes economic struct…
Rethinking the European Social Market Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue
This contribution offers an introduction to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. It places the Special Issue against the background of the debate on free markets versus social protection in the European Union and the inclusion of the notion of ‘social market economy’ in the Treaty on European Union. It sketches the meaning and development of the social market economy concept, and introduces the key questions underlyi…
Four Models of Protecting Citizenship and Social Rights in Europe: Conclusions to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy
This article offers a synthesis of and conclusion to the contributions included in the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. Based on different understandings of citizenship in the European Union and the roles of the EU and its member states in providing social protection arrangements, it develops a typology of four models of the EU's role in social protection. It then discusses the contributions to this Special Issue in …
European Duties of Social Justice: A Kantian Framework
This contribution asks how to approach the question of whether the European Union should – replacing or supplementing member states – also be a locus of social justice‐based duties to provide welfare state services. The contribution scrutinizes two important theories of global justice (cosmopolitan and relational theories) and finds that their normative assumptions hinder them from adequately addressing this question. A new theory is proposed, in…
Capabilities in a Just Society: A Theory of Navigational Agency
What sort of entitlements should citizens have in a just society? In this book, Rutger Claassen sets out a theory of what he terms 'navigational agency', whereby citizens should be able to navigate freely between social practices. This shows how individuals can be at the same time free and autonomous in striving for their own goals in life, but also embedded in social practices in which they have to cooperate with others. He argues that for navig…
An Agency‐Based Capability Theory of Justice
The capability approach is one of the main contenders in the field of theorizing social justice. Each citizen is entitled to a set of basic capabilities. But which are these? Martha Nussbaum formulated a set of ten central capabilities. Amartya Sen argued they should be selected in a process of public reasoning. Critics object that the Nussbaum‐approach is too perfectionist and the Sen‐approach is too proceduralist. This paper presents a third al…
Justice as a claim to (social) property
Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. …
Markets as Mere Means
There has been a remarkable shift in the relationship between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued…
Financial Crisis and the Ethics of Moral Hazard
The 2008 global financial crisis raises ethical as much as financial questions. Moral outrage centered on the imbalance between banks (too big to fail) profiting from excessive risk-taking in good times and taxpayers suffering the costs in bad times. The paper analyzes this imbalance in terms of ethical theory. It first develops a rights-based framework to answer questions about the moral obligations of states and banks towards each other. It the…
The Capability to Hold Property
This paper discusses the question of whether a capability theory of justice (such as that of Martha Nussbaum) should accept a basic “capability to hold property.” Answering this question is vital for bridging the gap between abstract capability theories of justice and their institutional implications in real economies. Moreover, it is vital for understanding the difference between egalitarian and libertarian versions of the capability approach. I…
Making Capability Lists: Philosophy versus Democracy
The article discusses a fundamental problem that has to be faced if the general capability approach is to be developed in the direction of a theory of justice: the selection and justification of a list of capabilities. The democratic solution to this problem (defended by Amartya Sen) is to leave the selection of capabilities to a process of democratic deliberation, while the philosophical solution (defended by Martha Nussbaum) is to establish thi…
Why economic agency matters: An account of structural domination in the economic realm
Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for focusing on concrete economic structures and re-focus the debate about justice onto questions of power. In this article we build on their work, but we argue that a positive notion of economic agency is needed as a criterion for what makes economic struct…
The Commodification of Care
This paper discusses the question whether care work for dependent persons (children, the elderly, and disabled persons) may be entrusted to the market; that is, whether and to what extent there is a normative justification for the “commodification of care.” It first proposes a capability theory for care that raises two relevant demands: a basic capability for receiving care and a capability for giving care. Next it discusses and rejects two objec…
Institutional pluralism and the limits of the market
This paper proposes a theory of institutional pluralism to deal with the question whether and to what extent limits should be placed on the market. It reconceives the pluralist position as it was presented by Michael Walzer and others in several respects. First, it argues that the options on the institutional menu should not be principles of distribution but rather economic mechanisms or ‘modes of provision’. This marks a shift from a distributiv…
Rethinking the European Social Market Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue
This contribution offers an introduction to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. It places the Special Issue against the background of the debate on free markets versus social protection in the European Union and the inclusion of the notion of ‘social market economy’ in the Treaty on European Union. It sketches the meaning and development of the social market economy concept, and introduces the key questions underlyi…
Four Models of Protecting Citizenship and Social Rights in Europe: Conclusions to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy
This article offers a synthesis of and conclusion to the contributions included in the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. Based on different understandings of citizenship in the European Union and the roles of the EU and its member states in providing social protection arrangements, it develops a typology of four models of the EU's role in social protection. It then discusses the contributions to this Special Issue in …
Social Freedom and the Demands of Justice: A Study of Honneth's Recht Der Freiheit
In his most recent voluminous work Das Recht der Freiheit (2011) Axel Honneth brings his version of the recognition paradigm to full fruition. Criticizing Kantian theories of justice, he develops a Hegelian alternative which has at its core a different conception of freedom. In this paper, I will scrutinize Honneths latest work to see whether he offers a promising alternative to mainstream liberal theories of justice. I will focus on two key diff…
Political theories of the business corporation
Business corporations are important, often powerful actors within the economy. They are able to exercise power over other actors, such as employees, consumers and nation-states. This contribution discusses how corporate power is constituted (ontological question), for what purpose it should be exercised, (normative question) and how it should be controlled (governance question). It focuses on the competing anwers to these questions that have been…
Wealth creation without domination. The fiduciary duties of corporations
Corporations wield power in today's economies, and political theories of the corporation argue about the legitimacy conditions of corporate power. This paper argues in favour of a double-fiduciary theory for corporations. Based on a concession theory of markets, it sees all markets as authorized by states (in the name of society), for the purpose of creating economic value, or wealth. Hence corporations, as much as non-incorporated firms, have a …
Hobbes Meets the Modern Business Corporation
Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. T…
The Capability to Hold Property
This paper discusses the question of whether a capability theory of justice (such as that of Martha Nussbaum) should accept a basic “capability to hold property.” Answering this question is vital for bridging the gap between abstract capability theories of justice and their institutional implications in real economies. Moreover, it is vital for understanding the difference between egalitarian and libertarian versions of the capability approach. I…
The Corporate Power Trilemma
Authors critical of corporate power focus almost exclusively on one solution: bringing it under democratic control. However important this is, there are at least two other options, which are rarely discussed: reducing powerful firms’ size and influence, or accepting corporate power as a necessary evil. This article provides a comparative perspective for evaluating all three options. It argues that the trade-offs we face in responding to corporate…
Markets as Mere Means
There has been a remarkable shift in the relationship between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued…
European Duties of Social Justice: A Kantian Framework
This contribution asks how to approach the question of whether the European Union should – replacing or supplementing member states – also be a locus of social justice‐based duties to provide welfare state services. The contribution scrutinizes two important theories of global justice (cosmopolitan and relational theories) and finds that their normative assumptions hinder them from adequately addressing this question. A new theory is proposed, in…
The conservative challenge to liberalism
This paper reconstructs the political–theoretical triangle between liberalism, communitarianism and conservatism. It shows how these three positions are related to each other and to what extent they are actually incompatible. The substantive outcome is the following thesis: the conservative position poses a challenge to liberalism that communitarianism is unable to offer and that liberalism cannot incorporate as it could with communitarianism. Th…
The status struggle: A recognition-based interpretation of the positional economy
Competition for positional goods is an important feature of contemporary consumer societies. This paper discusses three strategies for a normative evaluation of positional competition. First, it criticizes an evaluation in terms of people's motives to engage in such competition. A reconstruction of an American debate over the status-motivation of consumer behavior shows how such an analysis founders on the difficulties of distinguishing between s…
The status struggle: A recognition-based interpretation of the positional economy
Competition for positional goods is an important feature of contemporary consumer societies. This paper discusses three strategies for a normative evaluation of positional competition. First, it criticizes an evaluation in terms of people's motives to engage in such competition. A reconstruction of an American debate over the status-motivation of consumer behavior shows how such an analysis founders on the difficulties of distinguishing between s…
Institutional pluralism and the limits of the market
This paper proposes a theory of institutional pluralism to deal with the question whether and to what extent limits should be placed on the market. It reconceives the pluralist position as it was presented by Michael Walzer and others in several respects. First, it argues that the options on the institutional menu should not be principles of distribution but rather economic mechanisms or ‘modes of provision’. This marks a shift from a distributiv…
The conservative challenge to liberalism
This paper reconstructs the political–theoretical triangle between liberalism, communitarianism and conservatism. It shows how these three positions are related to each other and to what extent they are actually incompatible. The substantive outcome is the following thesis: the conservative position poses a challenge to liberalism that communitarianism is unable to offer and that liberalism cannot incorporate as it could with communitarianism. Th…
The Commodification of Care
This paper discusses the question whether care work for dependent persons (children, the elderly, and disabled persons) may be entrusted to the market; that is, whether and to what extent there is a normative justification for the “commodification of care.” It first proposes a capability theory for care that raises two relevant demands: a basic capability for receiving care and a capability for giving care. Next it discusses and rejects two objec…
Making Capability Lists: Philosophy versus Democracy
The article discusses a fundamental problem that has to be faced if the general capability approach is to be developed in the direction of a theory of justice: the selection and justification of a list of capabilities. The democratic solution to this problem (defended by Amartya Sen) is to leave the selection of capabilities to a process of democratic deliberation, while the philosophical solution (defended by Martha Nussbaum) is to establish thi…
Public Goods, Mutual Benefits, and Majority Rule
The Foundations of Capability Theory: Comparing Nussbaum and Gewirth
This paper is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the basic idea of the capability approach. Our aim is to compare Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice with Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, on two points: the selection and the justification of a list of central capabilities. On both counts, we contend that Nussbaum’s theory suffers from flaws that Gewirth’s theory may help to remedy. First, we argue that her notion of a (digni…
Human dignity in the capability approach
The capability approach is a broad normative approach which has been developed from the 1980s onwards, most prominently by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In the philosophical context, the main use of the approach is to assess the justice of social arrangements: societies are just to the extent that they guarantee each citizen an entitlement to his or her basic capabilities. In more recent years, Nussbaum has emphasized the…
Social Freedom and the Demands of Justice: A Study of Honneth's Recht Der Freiheit
In his most recent voluminous work Das Recht der Freiheit (2011) Axel Honneth brings his version of the recognition paradigm to full fruition. Criticizing Kantian theories of justice, he develops a Hegelian alternative which has at its core a different conception of freedom. In this paper, I will scrutinize Honneths latest work to see whether he offers a promising alternative to mainstream liberal theories of justice. I will focus on two key diff…
Financial Crisis and the Ethics of Moral Hazard
The 2008 global financial crisis raises ethical as much as financial questions. Moral outrage centered on the imbalance between banks (too big to fail) profiting from excessive risk-taking in good times and taxpayers suffering the costs in bad times. The paper analyzes this imbalance in terms of ethical theory. It first develops a rights-based framework to answer questions about the moral obligations of states and banks towards each other. It the…
The Capability to Hold Property
This paper discusses the question of whether a capability theory of justice (such as that of Martha Nussbaum) should accept a basic “capability to hold property.” Answering this question is vital for bridging the gap between abstract capability theories of justice and their institutional implications in real economies. Moreover, it is vital for understanding the difference between egalitarian and libertarian versions of the capability approach. I…
An Agency‐Based Capability Theory of Justice
The capability approach is one of the main contenders in the field of theorizing social justice. Each citizen is entitled to a set of basic capabilities. But which are these? Martha Nussbaum formulated a set of ten central capabilities. Amartya Sen argued they should be selected in a process of public reasoning. Critics object that the Nussbaum‐approach is too perfectionist and the Sen‐approach is too proceduralist. This paper presents a third al…
Justice as a claim to (social) property
Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. …
Markets as Mere Means
There has been a remarkable shift in the relationship between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued…
Capabilities in a Just Society: A Theory of Navigational Agency
What sort of entitlements should citizens have in a just society? In this book, Rutger Claassen sets out a theory of what he terms 'navigational agency', whereby citizens should be able to navigate freely between social practices. This shows how individuals can be at the same time free and autonomous in striving for their own goals in life, but also embedded in social practices in which they have to cooperate with others. He argues that for navig…
Rethinking the European Social Market Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue
This contribution offers an introduction to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. It places the Special Issue against the background of the debate on free markets versus social protection in the European Union and the inclusion of the notion of ‘social market economy’ in the Treaty on European Union. It sketches the meaning and development of the social market economy concept, and introduces the key questions underlyi…
Four Models of Protecting Citizenship and Social Rights in Europe: Conclusions to the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy
This article offers a synthesis of and conclusion to the contributions included in the Special Issue ‘Rethinking the European Social Market Economy’. Based on different understandings of citizenship in the European Union and the roles of the EU and its member states in providing social protection arrangements, it develops a typology of four models of the EU's role in social protection. It then discusses the contributions to this Special Issue in …
European Duties of Social Justice: A Kantian Framework
This contribution asks how to approach the question of whether the European Union should – replacing or supplementing member states – also be a locus of social justice‐based duties to provide welfare state services. The contribution scrutinizes two important theories of global justice (cosmopolitan and relational theories) and finds that their normative assumptions hinder them from adequately addressing this question. A new theory is proposed, in…
Making Power Explicit: Why Liberal Egalitarians Should Take (Economic) Power Seriously
In this paper we argue that liberal-egalitarian theorists of justice should take power, especially economic power, seriously and make it explicit. We argue that many theories of justice have left power implicit, relying on what we call the “primacy of politics” model as a background assumption. However, this model does not suffice to capture the power relations of today’s globalized world, in which the power of nation states has been reduced and …
Hobbes Meets the Modern Business Corporation
Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. T…
Why economic agency matters: An account of structural domination in the economic realm
Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for focusing on concrete economic structures and re-focus the debate about justice onto questions of power. In this article we build on their work, but we argue that a positive notion of economic agency is needed as a criterion for what makes economic struct…
Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives
Wealth creation without domination. The fiduciary duties of corporations
Corporations wield power in today's economies, and political theories of the corporation argue about the legitimacy conditions of corporate power. This paper argues in favour of a double-fiduciary theory for corporations. Based on a concession theory of markets, it sees all markets as authorized by states (in the name of society), for the purpose of creating economic value, or wealth. Hence corporations, as much as non-incorporated firms, have a …
The Corporate Power Trilemma
Authors critical of corporate power focus almost exclusively on one solution: bringing it under democratic control. However important this is, there are at least two other options, which are rarely discussed: reducing powerful firms’ size and influence, or accepting corporate power as a necessary evil. This article provides a comparative perspective for evaluating all three options. It argues that the trade-offs we face in responding to corporate…
Tussen norm en verlangen: De ervaringen van jongeren met een migratieachtergrond met romantiek en seks voor het huwelijk
The study, conducted in the Netherlands, examines the experiences of 55 young people from cultural communities in which premarital sex is not allowed. Participants come from different ethnic and religious backgrounds and include both men and women. The study explores how these young individuals navigate the expectations surrounding virginity and the norms of sexual segregation. Both men and women observe gender-dependent rules and feel controlled…
Political science (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law and economics (18 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works)