Sociologías de la elección y nociones de libertad: la Renta Básica como proyecto republicano para sociedades de mercado

Abstract

The making of social policies depends on a particular description of social life. Its specification is something necessary when it comes to give a conscious political direction to all mechanisms and institutional devices that make up social policyas a whole. The way contemporary political philosophy has approached the proposal of a Basic Income constitutes an especially revealing example of this question. In this paper I present, first, the conceptual framework and the analysis of social life from which republican tradition has tackled its controversial notions of freedom and neutrality. Second, I compare the perspective of republican freedom with the notion of freedom that operates within the framework of Philippe Van Parijs real freedom perspective, which upholds a criterion of justice stating that a free society is that in which the number of options at the most disadvantaged person disposal is the greatest. Third, I defend an approach to Basic Income requiring a categorization of options so as to give priority to those options that, even being -maybe- of less importance in numerical terms, confer individuals greater guarantee of security in the definition and development of their own life plans, that is, that ensure the absence of arbitrary interference by others. In that way, I propose, in keeping with the republican tradition, a normative approach to Basic Income in which it is assumed that those entities that are to be considered free -or unfree- are not decisions themselves, hut socio-institutionally embodied individuals facing the task of making them. I finally show the outcome of the bringing into play of the republican perspective when it comes to politically -institutionally- design the implementation of Basic Income in the context of the market societies we are living in.