Special double issue of “Critical Review” on “Free Market Fairness”

In 2014, we have the opportunity to advance an important objective: expanding the normative discussion of capitalism to include empirical reality. We hope to further this goal by publishing a special double issue of Critical Review containing responses from leading political theorists to John Tomasi's new book, "Free Market Fairness" (Princeton UP, 2012). The concrete output, other than the special issue itself, will be sales of the issue in college bookstores to our target audience of scholars and especially future scholars; sales to this audience in response to an advertising campaign in select publications and online; influence on this audience through students' and scholars' access to the journal in more than 1,400 college and university libraries around the world; and probable republication of the issue in book form. The enduring impact is subtle but potentially quite important. One of Tomasi's key arguments is that the well-being of the worst off *may* better be advanced by capitalism than by political action. A logical next step, for normative political theorists who contribute to or read the special issue, is to draw on empirical disciplines such as economics and political science to make this comparison. Tomasi keeps to the plane of what he calls "political philosophy," assigning to "political theory" the task of determining whether the well-being of the worst off is, in fact, better advanced by markets than government. Pursuit of this task would be welcome in itself, as political theorists tend to be isolated from empirical realities. But it should also help legitimize the incorporation of empirical analysis into normative theory in which Critical Review is engaged, magnifying the impact of our ongoing critique of the ability of political decision makers to know what they need to know if they are to succeed in improving on capitalism.