Free and Equal BY Daniel Chandler

Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics, is a passionate evangelist for the great American philosopher John Rawls, using Rawls as his fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Rawls’s magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice” (1971), was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme where everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (economic inequalities have to be justified by their effect on the least advantaged). The vision Chandler extracts from this is, on the whole, a sane one of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.