1. Otto Kahn-Freund and Collective Laissez-Faire: An Edifice without a Keystone?
- Author
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Dukes, Ruth
- Subjects
- *
FREE enterprise , *INDUSTRIAL relations , *NATIONAL socialism , *PUBLIC interest - Abstract
This paper describes Otto Kahn-Freund's advocacy of the British ‘collective laissez-faire’ system of regulation of industrial relations, in which regulation proceeded autonomously of the state. It suggests that a weakness of collective laissez-faire as a normative principle was its failure to make adequate provision for the furtherance of the public interest. It links this failure to a more general reluctance, on the part of Kahn-Freund, to conceive of the state as representative of the public interest. And it seeks to explain this reluctance with reference to Kahn-Freund's experiences of living and working as a labour court judge in the Weimar Republic, and of moving to the UK as a refugee from Nazism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
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