What are the prospects for achieving more egalitarian income distributions in market democracies? Does the failure of twentieth-century socialism, as practiced by the centrally-planned economies, relegate modern societies to the degrees of inequality we currently observe? I argue that although a system of market socialism, in which profit flows are quite equally distributed among citizens, may be economically feasible, significant inequality would remain. In advanced democracies, much of existing inequality is due to differential levels of education, and educational finance policies, in such societies, are decided by democratic political competition. Can we expect democracies with competitive politics, in which parties are organized along income-class lines, to generate the kind of investment in education that would, over time, reduce or eliminate income differences due to differential family background? I argue that democracy will not necessarily produce a policy of educational finance which would implement equality of opportunity, in this sense. A degree of social solidarity may be necessary to reduce inequality to the levels observed in the most egalitarian market economies.

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Arguments about disparity in the Japanese society, from the viewpoint of studies on social stratification, have pointed out two important issues: Income disparity and disparity between regular and irregular workers. Studies on social stratification have not analyzed these issues seriously. They have studied occupations rather than income; they have implicitly assumed that workers have regular jobs. To overcome these deficiencies, this paper studies the effect of employment status -regular workers versus irregular workers- on income by analyzing the 2005 Social Stratification and Social Mobility (henceforth, SSM) Survey data. The result of regression analysis with logged income as the dependent variable and occupation and employment status as independent variables shows that employment status has stronger explanatory power than occupation does. Arguments about disparity, however, have made another claim that disparity has recently been growing. To check the empirical validity of this claim, we compare regression coefficients of two regression models using the 1995 SSM and the 2005 SSM data. The result of the comparison shows that the coefficient of regular workers had become smaller from 1995 to 2005, which means that income disparity between regular and irregular workers had shrunken. To test this result rigorously, we build a sophisticated regression model and apply it to the 1995 SSM and 2005 SSM data. In the model we fix coefficients of the model using the 1995 SSM data and add interaction terms between the survey year and each independent variable. The coefficient of an interaction term shows increase or decrease in the explanatory power of the independent variable in the interaction term depending on its sign (positive or negative). The result of the regression analysis shows that the coefficient of regular workers is negative, which means that income disparity between regular and irregular workers had shrunken over the decade. It is risky to say that income disparity has shrunk based only on these results. Rather, what we would like to say is that these results would promote fruitful dialogue between arguments about disparity in the Japanese society and studies on social stratification.

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This article aims to clarify the structure and dynamics of contemporary Japan as so-called "gap-widening society" from the viewpoint of class studies. For this purpose, 4-class scheme, which consists of capitalist, new middle, working and old middle classes on the basis of jobs, employment status, size of business and gender, is introduced and operationalized for quantitative analysis. Thereafter, economic disparity among classes are measured, income determination processes and income functions are estimated, and structure and trend of inter-generational class mobility is examined. Findings are as follows. (1) Class locations are very important determinant of income, independent of factors such as education, years of work experience and size of business. Income functions vary depending on class locations, which means different income determination processes exist corresponding to class locations. (2)Economic disparity among classes is expanding and its importance as component of total economic disparity is becoming large. Poverty rates vary greatly depending on class locations and these variations are becoming large. (3)Concerning about intergenerational class mobility, all classes show some exclusiveness, nevertheless capitalist class is extremely exclusive, and its exclusiveness has been strengthened in this 30 years. These findings imply that class theory and 4-class scheme have much power of explanation for social structure and processes of the "gap-widening society" in contemporary Japan. Speaking generally, contemporary Japan can be called class society.

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In this paper, I'll show that Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) includes a hidden purpose, which is, the purpose to set out the framework of some kind of liberal communism. First, I make clear the failure of his 'moral geometry' and its ideological character. Second, I situate his concept of justice in the history of it. According to this, it turns out that his theory of justice can not be the universal and neutral moral science, but presupposes certain ideology from the beginning. Rawlsian justice does include some communistic aspects ex ante. In section 3, I discuss the distinctiveness of his theory in view of what is called 'a fixed point of our moral judgments.' It is a fundamentalistic foundation of his theory of justice, from which his principles of justice, especially the difference principle, are derived indeed. The original position and veil of ignorance are all the device to disguise that fact. Next, I argue that Rawls intentionally neglects a controversial theme, id est, 'Work-Ownership Thesis.' Despite the fact that Work-Ownership Thesis is a widely accepted belief, he has never discussed it. It's because that thesis sharply conflicts with the fixed point he exposes, and so, its acceptance would make it impossible for him to derive the difference principle. Furthermore, a simple neglect of the thesis means that the difference principle is a highly communistic principle. For it is only in the highly achieved communistic society that the thesis can be perfectly neglected. In section 5, I prove that the difference principle thus derived is both irrational and unreasonable. This is explained as the result of making one fixed point of our moral judgments absolute, and so losing the balance with some other fixed points that Rawls doesn't take up. Upon preceding arguments, in the last section 6, I conclude that it is very dangerous for one to make his favorite moral judgments absolute without thinking much of other ones. His judgments as such are just his own personal judgments, or indeed prejudices, that he expects his readers to accept, and the lack of balance will lead to a political disaster.

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This paper attempts to define the merit system within the framework of the principles of political economy. Previous studies on the merit system lack theoretical definitions of two of its major factors, personal appraisal and seniority raise, with types of wage payment being analyzed only in terms of formation of surplus value and its concealment. On the contrary, recognition of the individuality of owners of labour power commodity of wage-labours reveals their mutually competitive aspects. Furthermore, the differentia of labour requires evaluation of individual work, that is, personal appraisal. Likewise, company specialized expertise entails continued service. Since expertise and know-how accumulated through experience does not necessarily show up as immediate performance, it is difficult to grasp its existence and range. It is thus necessary to measure the degree of skill accumulation by assessing work attitude and potential capability of individual labourers, with reference to continuous service as proxy variable. In this way, the merit system in which pay increase width and promotion are judged by personal appraisal is called for. One of the most significant consequeces of defining the merit system in terms of the principles of political economy is that incorporation of the differentia of labour into theoretical analyses enables us to examine in a theoretically principled way the diversity of capitalistic economy, which has been conventionally explained by market external factors.

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