Emanuel Smikun

Distributive Justice and Fair Exchange: How to Find and Use Social Standards Emanuel Smikun

How do we know that the cause pursued by a social action is just? Inspired by the classics of sociology, this book evaluates rationality and fairness of relations among stratified groups of social status and their class interests in recurring cycles of social production, consumption, distribution and exchange. The focus is on standards of evaluation. Rationality is associated with consumption, and fairness with production. Since distribution and exchange mediate between production and consumption, they are evaluated for both rationality and fairness. Social institutions such as income, wealth, marriage and family become indicators of social structures evaluated as variably unfair and irrational. Emanuel Smikun employs innovative methods to demonstrate empirically how modes of social consumption, social exchange, social distribution and social production form the foundation of status and class structures.