Radical Philosophy Review

ONLINE FIRST

published on April 4, 2018

Nancy Holmstrom

The Dialectic of the Individual and the Collective
An Ecological Imperative

Instead of understanding property and rationality individualistically as in capitalism, the ecological crisis makes it imperative that we change the priority to the social/collective point of view. Public goods/commonstock should be the default, and private property should have to be justified. Rationality should be understood not primarily from an individual perspective, but from a social/collective point of view. This does not entail the sacrifice of individual rights and freedom to the collective, but rather the synthesis of the two. Planning and freedom coincide if the planning is democratic, which can only happen in a more egalitarian society.