Pravda kao trgovina, trgovina kao pravda : neproglašena sveobuhvatna doktrina
Justice as trade, trade as justice: the undeclared all -encompassing doctrine

Summary/Abstract: John Rawls was convinced that any political doctrine which purports to be all-encompassing must end in practical totalitarianism. His theory of justice which presents justice as a procedure of simple quantitative exchange, relies on the Anglo-Saxon concept of justice, which abandons the idea of return to the original, god-given universal balance and substitutes it with the idea of establishing a societal balance through reciprocal, quantitative, interestbased exchange, i.e. by means of a rationally calculated interest-based trade (‘I give you as much as you give me’). Within the liberal discourse, absorbed by Anglo-Saxon patterns and values, justice functions as trade, and trade has been elevated to the level of mechanism establishing the ultimate, metaphysical balance, i.e. justice. In that respect, Friedrich A. Hayek and his theory of free trade as the path towards justice, and Rawls’s theory of justice as trade, are the two aspects of one and the same all-encompassing theory. And just as Hayek’s theory of trade as justice has been validated in its ultimate expression in form of the World Trade Organisations, Rawls’s theory of justice as trade found its ultimate expression in form of the United Nations. Within that context, the UN is a means analogous to WTO, indented for the global distribution of one and the same justice, based on the principle of reciprocal, interest-based exchange among the assumed collective and autonomous individuals called ‘nations’ which – just like the assumed physical autonomous individuals - posses the simplified ability for autonomous, rational, interest-based calculation on the basis of symmetry, reciprocity, and exchange, i.e. activity which is supposed to lead to the establishment of justice as the universal order. Despite all its divergent manifestations, liberalism is a unique discourse, deeply rooted in allencompassing premises of ‘free trade’ and ‘national self-determination’ which one cannot escape from in the modern world. Aggressive imposition of one of those premises of liberalism, i.e. the principle of national self-determination, has led to a disaster of epic proportions in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Is such imposition of Rawls’s concept of justice as trade and Hayek’s concept of trade as justice leading to the same outcome globally?

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