Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx.

Kant deploys analogies from private law in describing relations between states. I explore the relation between these analogies and the broader Kantian idea of the distinctively public nature of a rightful condition, in order to explain why states, understood as public things, stand in horizontal, private legal relations without themselves being private. I use this analysis to explore the international law analogues of the three titles of private right, explaining how territory differs from property, treaty from contract and the specific form of status relations between nations. I conclude with a brief discussion of the ongoing relevance of these horizontal relations.

I argue that institutions charged with giving justice must understand responsibility in terms of norms governing what people are entitled to expect of each other. On this conception, the sort of responsibility that is of interest to private law or distributive justice is not a relation between a person and the consequence, but rather a relation between persons with respect to consequences. As a result, nonrelational facts about a person’s actions and the circumstances in which she performs them will never settle the questions of responsibility that matter to institutions charged with giving justice. I show the significance of this way of thinking about responsibility by contrasting it with prominent conceptions of responsibility which suppose that its moral significance derives from the ways in which an individual person acts in the world. I demonstrate its power by focussing on cases in which responsibility is widely agreed to run out in ways that non-relational conceptions of responsibility cannot explain.

In Legality, Scott Shapiro introduces what he calls the “Planning Theory of Law.” Shapiro introduces the idea of a plan with examples from outside of the law. He then must provide an account of what is distinctive about law, such that the other plan-based social orders are not also legal systems. He gives two answers: first, a legal system is organized by a moral aim. Second, a legal system is self-certifying. I examine these in turn, and argue that each can only characterize what is distinctive about law if the relevant moral problem that law aims to solve is itself specifically concerned with authority—that is with who gets to decide about what. Other forms of planning assign roles to people to solve problems that have nothing to do with authority; law uses role-based authority to solve a moral problem that is fundamentally about authority.

Group rights have long been of special concern to Canadians. Quebec has maintained a distinct language and civil law system, and Canada's Aboriginal Peoples have always had (“enjoyed” is perhaps the wrong word here) different legal rights from those of other Canadians. Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sought to reduce the significance of these special protections. He argued that they were the product of historical compromise and political wrangling rather than of any principled vision ofjustice. As a result, he opposed any special status for Quebec in favour of nationwide bilingualism, and sought to dismantle the reserve system for the First Nations. He sought to replace both with the idea of universal citizenship.

In 1959, an article in the Harvard Business Review asked “Can Capitalism Win the Intellectuals?” Thirty years later, affirmative answers are prominent. Economic stagnation and downright collapse in the planned economies of Eastern Europe, coupled with the seeming inability of the deficit-ridden welfare states of the West to maintain social services provide at least part of the explanation. But philosophers have been eager to show that this is more than an historical trend.

Multiculturalism is an increasingly important topic for philosophers, largely because of the practical problems posed by diversity. Traditional political philosophy had little to say about cultural difference, taking the existence of a shared language and culture pretty much for granted. The multicultural societies of the contemporary world make such assumptions untenable. Traditional questions of fairness and sovereignty find hard cases in such policy issues as immigration, education, criminal law, and freedom of expression.

‘Liberal’ is still a term of abuse in US presidential politics and certain academic circles. But gone for now are the days when liberals were saddled with responsibility for (depending on who was making the accusation) crime, promiscuity or crass concern with material wealth. Instead, competing political visions increasingly do battle for the right to carry the liberal banner.

David Gauthier's recent and elegant Morals by Agreement sets itself the task of deriving morality from the non-moral premises of the theory of rational choice. Gauthier uses the device of a social contract to demonstrate the rational basis of a morality emphasizing rights against force and fraud, private property and the keeping of contracts. Gauthier's social contract is supposed to demonstrate the basis of a morality that is both categorical and enforceable. If his argument is successful, it will demonstrate both the demands that morality may rightly make on each of us, and the moral demands that we may rightly hold each other to.