by Jeroen Bouterse
In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”
Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.
This combination is crucial. One of the most dangerous narratives taking root in the collective subconscious is that liberalism has had its day; that history is moving on, that liberal democracy belonged to a geopolitical era that is coming to an end, something we tried and that we know the limits of; a system that has already given all it will ever be able to give. Well, not if Chandler has anything to say about it. “There are plenty of exciting and workable ideas about how we could do things differently”, he announces. As our guide to these ideas he has selected John Rawls, and this is quite plainly an excellent decision: Rawls is at the center of 20th-century liberal political thought, but also utopian and principled to an extent that he can hardly be accused of rationalizing an already-existing situation. It makes complete sense to use him as a rallying point for a forward-looking form of liberalism.
In the theoretical part of his book, Chandler takes two fundamental principles straight from Rawls. The first principle guarantees equal protection of basic personal and political liberties above all else. These are liberties that are necessary to exercising our moral capacities: our ability to form views about what is a good life for ourselves and about what is a good society, and to act according to those views. Freedom of speech, for instance, is a basic right because (and to the extent that) without it, these moral capacities are frustrated. The second principle insists that inequality in income, wealth, power, and opportunities for self-respect in a society is only acceptable if there is fair equality of opportunity, and if such inequality is integral to an arrangement that benefits the least well off compared to other arrangements. This last condition is called the difference principle.
Chandler stresses, rightly, that these priorities are nontrivial. Their precise formulation, and the restrictions upon trade-offs that Rawls has stipulated, distinguish them clearly from right-wing and left-wing alternatives, without becoming a muddled compromise between them. A good place to see this is in Rawls’s perspective on property. Rawls counted property as a basic right grounded in the need to exercise our rational powers. As such, it is heavily guarded – it takes precedence over the principles limiting inequality. It is also limited: not every form property ownership can take is necessary for us to exercise those powers. In the second instance, property can be justified as a feature of a system that meets the principle of equality of opportunity and the difference principle; but on this level, different arrangements can be considered – Rawls considered both a ‘property-owning democracy’ and ‘liberal socialism’ to be live options. We can debate the relative merits of these different forms of social organization, but if we do so on Rawls’s terms, we are already moving away from libertarian or Marxist frameworks in which property rights are either absolute and natural, or in which they have to be transcended just like all forms of alienation.
The justification for Rawls’s principles over these alternatives is that they are what rational people would agree on in the ‘original position’. The term denotes an imagined assembly writing a social contract, where everybody meets under a veil of ignorance: leaving at the door all knowledge of their own skills, personal inclinations, social position, and beliefs. Forgetting all of these contingent facts, but knowing that all people have an interest in exercising their moral capacities and that there are goods that virtually always help with that (such as the basic freedoms), you ought to come to the conclusion that a society is most fair if it is organized along the lines of Rawls’s two principles.
It is rather important to the outcome of the thought-experiment that under the veil of ignorance, we bracket our actual beliefs and values but elevate our capacity to have beliefs and values. The pragmatic reason for this, which Chandler explains in a persuasive manner in his second chapter, is that this approach justifies liberal political institutions without having to justify liberal conceptions of the good life, increasing the number of people that can freely support these institutions. The philosophical reason is that it is as moral persons that we are entitled to equal justice; it makes sense that it is in that capacity that we are invited to the assembly in which we set up the social contract.
In A theory of justice, Rawls explains that this definition of the subjects of justice excludes (non-human) animals while stipulating, in a standard Kantian move, that it applies equally to all human persons regardless of the degree to which they are in fact a moral personality (441-443). Non-human animals play no part in Chandler’s argument either. This is understandable; I don’t know where one would start amending Rawls’s contract theory to include them. Their absence is not an technical weakness in the theory, but it does constitute a major limitation to a contractarian construction of a just society.
Apart from this, readers curious about the practical implications of Rawls’s philosophy have very little to complain about. Chandler pulls up his sleeves in the second part of his book, showing with admirable conciseness which Rawlsian considerations bear upon all kinds of topical issues. LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, free speech, constitutional limits to majority rule, education, and migration are all touched upon in one chapter. Chandler notes that Rawls’s principles themselves don’t always tell us what the perfect balance is, but that they do allow us to rule out some positions. In particular, they exclude arguments that are not ‘public’: we ought to appeal to political values that our fellow citizens can share even if they don’t share our personal moral or religious beliefs.
Most of these discussions remain necessarily limited, but thanks to Chandler’s clear prose, we get a clear sense of the contours of a Rawlsian perspective. An exception is migration. Chandler does say that “there is no question that we have moral obligations to people in other countries simply by virtue of our common humanity”; but just like Rawls, his primary unit of analysis is ‘domestic justice’ in a single political community, idealized as a complete and closed social system. This makes it difficult to deal with international issues, migration in particular. In a note, Chandler points out the criticism that Rawls has received for his (lack of) statements on migration, but he decides that the issue lies beyond the scope of Rawls’s framework and of his own book. Here I disagree. Migration is a contentious issue in the domestic politics of many democracies; a defining issue for the illiberal right, and also something that liberal politicians often show a willingness to compromise on. An encompassing liberal theory should have something to say about this.
Moreover, migration does raise questions that go to the heart of contractarian thinking: it involves people seeking to opt in to a certain kind of society, meeting the condition of reciprocity which is central to contract theory. At what point are decisions about their inclusion made? Should we think of everyone in the ‘original position’ as knowing they will enter by birth the society whose principles they are deliberating? Or should rational agents under the veil of ignorance consider the possibility that they themselves might be immigrants, whose inclusion or exclusion is contingent upon the laws of that same society? The first interpretation seems impossible to justify; but in the second interpretation, it is hard to imagine that people in the original position would agree to laws under which they might be excluded from their own utopia.
In the following chapter, Chandler employs Rawls’s principles not just to adjudicate present-day cultural controversies, but also to sketch how we can improve our democracies in ways that go beyond the old and familiar. The central concept here is that of political equality. According to Chandler, this obviously implies voting equality, but it also requires reasonably equal opportunities for democratic deliberation and effective participation. Among the more exciting ideas to improve these are ‘democracy vouchers’ that citizens can use annually to contribute to political parties (in combination with caps on other donations), and ‘media vouchers’ that would increase the resources of ethical and accountable private media, “promoting public interest news without violating freedom of speech”.
The next two chapters tackle economic justice: removing class, race, and gender barriers to equal opportunity, and allowing everyone to meet their basic needs. Again, the topic is familiar, but the understanding of liberalism we have reached allows for quite radical interventions. Depending on where the reader is, that is; some of Chandler’s policy proposals come down to getting to Denmark, and this is less transformative if your society is already Denmark. But even for northern-European countries, there is an ambitious to-do list. Among else, Chandler makes the case for a Universal Basic Income and for vast wealth transfers funded by a steep inheritance tax.
Not all of these are no-brainers. It is not clear that every conceivable intervention leaves the least well off better off in the long run (especially compared to similarly costly alternatives), and there may be some point where measures aiming to increase social-economic justice do start to interfere with basic freedoms, which in that case always trump those measures. Chandler also admits that Rawls himself was not warm to the idea of a Universal Basic Income. But the point is not to settle all arguments within the space of two chapters; the point is to show what we can aspire to, how far-reaching social reform could be while staying in the orbit of liberal principles. This requires an understanding of these principles that is not shy about levying heavy taxes on wealth and high income. Rawls’s idea of fairness gives us a lot of room for that, compared to forms of liberalism that start wringing their hands whenever redistribution is on the table.
Crucial steps in the argument revolve around ownership, and this is especially true in the last chapter, about workplace democracy. Again, Chandler warns against extending common-sense notions of ownership to more complicated social forms. “What it means to own something is not as simple as it might seem, and […] the rights we have as owners – whether of a car or of a firm – are social choices.” That firms are owned by shareholders, then, doesn’t settle the question how much control shareholders should have over firms, and understanding this opens the door to allowing forms of worker control (some of which already exist in Europe). Whether this is in fact a good thing to apply rigorously and everywhere depends on its consequences for the least well off in the long run; but again, the lesson is that radical transformations in our economic regime can be on the table.
They can, and they ought to. In his conclusion, Chandler stresses that bold visions are non-optional: “there is […] an urgent need for a compelling vision that can renew faith in liberal and democratic ideals and galvanize people to build a better society.” He has convinced me that, a few important blind spots notwithstanding, Rawls’s thinking provides a great amount of coherence to such a vision. Whether it will provide politicians, parties, and voters in general with enough motivation to keep the liberal project going is another matter. It may be true that nearly everyone rationally ought to elect to live in some form of a Rawlsian “realistic utopia”; but sometimes, it is precisely those of us who have the most to gain from democracy who are, in Larry Diamond’s words, our own worst enemies.