Equity Advocates: Can a 50-year-old idea save democracy?

Jennifer Szalai

The American political theorist John Rawls may be known for abstractions like “the original position” and “the difference principle,” but any mention of his name puts me in mind of something decidedly more tangible: cake. Consider the potentially combustible situation of two children who have been given a cake to share between them. How do you ensure that the division of the cake is fair and will elicit the least complaint?

The key is to involve both children in the process and to enforce a separation of powers: Assuming they’re old enough to handle a knife, one child can cut the cake and the other can get first pick of the slice. The child tasked with cutting will therefore be extremely motivated to divide the cake as evenly as possible.

Rawls included a version of the cake-cutting scenario in “A Theory of Justice,” his landmark 1971 book that the economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler wants to resurrect for a new era. In “Free and Equal,” Chandler argues that Rawls’s approach, which combines a liberal respect for individual rights and differences with an egalitarian emphasis on fairness, could be “the basis for a progressive politics that is genuinely transformative.”

If this is an opportune moment for Chandler’s book, it’s also a difficult one. At a time when political rancor and mistrust reign supreme, Chandler seeks to present an inspiring case for liberalism that distinguishes it from tepid complacency on the one hand and neoliberal domination on the other. Yet in doing the hard work of spelling out what a Rawlsian program might look like in practice, Chandler ends up illustrating why liberalism has elicited such frustration from its many critics in the first place.

Rawls’s theory was premised on the thought experiment of the “original position,” in which individuals would design a just society from behind a “veil of ignorance.” People couldn’t know whether they would be born rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white — and so, like the child cutting the cake who doesn’t get to choose the first slice, each would be motivated to realize a society that would be accepted as fair even by the most vulnerable. This is liberalism grounded in reciprocity rather than selfishness or altruism. According to Rawls’s “difference principle,” inequalities would be permitted only as long as they promoted the interests of the least advantaged.

Chandler is a lucid and elegant writer, and there’s an earnest sense of excitement propelling his argument — a belief that Rawls’s framework for thinking through political issues offers a humane way out of the most intractable disputes. People might not agree on much, Chandler says, but the “veil of ignorance” encourages us to find a mutually agreeable starting point. If we don’t know what community we are born into, we should want a “reasonable pluralism.” We should also want the state “to maintain the conditions that are the basis for our freedom and equality as citizens.”

As an example, Chandler raises the thorny issue of free speech. “Political, moral and religious” speech “is integral to developing our sense of what is fair and how to live,” he writes, which is why it deserves robust protection. But since some speech, such as advertising, plays “no meaningful role” in helping us figure out how to live a good life, such speech can be limited. The idea is to balance individual and group freedoms with the need for peaceful coexistence. The state should protect the rights of gay people not to be discriminated against — even though the state cannot force anyone or any group to approve of gay relationships. Chandler, who is gay, suggests that premising gay rights on getting everyone to agree on the question of morality is a waste of energy: “For some people this” — the belief that homosexuality is a sin — “is part of their faith and no reasoned argument will persuade them otherwise.”

Chandler deserves credit for refusing to relegate his book to the airy realm of wistful abstraction. The last two-thirds of “Free and Equal” are given over to specific policy proposals. Some of them sound familiar enough — restricting private money in politics; beefing up civic education — while others are more far-reaching and radical, including the establishment of worker cooperatives, in which “workers decide how things are done,” and the abolition of private schools.

As impressive as his prescriptions are, I found their endless parade to be enervating. Chandler’s unwavering reasonableness made me feel as if I were floating in saline; after he laid out his terms and edged out countervailing arguments, there were no points of friction, no sharp edges that could serve as a goad to thought. He persuasively refutes the conflation of liberal egalitarianism with technocracy, and helpfully points out that an emphasis on technocratic competence “leaves many voters cold.” But despite his valiant efforts, the book enacts both the promise and the limitations of the theory it seeks to promote. It didn’t leave me cold, but it did leave me restless.

And in a way, that’s part of Chandler’s point: A Rawlsian framework encourages people with a variety of deeply held commitments to live together in mutual tolerance, free to figure out questions of individual morality and the good life for themselves. For anyone who venerates consensus in politics, this sounds appealing; given the fissures of our current moment, it also comes across as wildly insufficient.

“Free and Equal” includes a detailed chapter on “Rawls and His Critics,” but mostly navigates around anything that might truly rattle the Rawlsian framework. Regarding Katrina Forrester’s “In the Shadow of Justice” (2019), a searching and brilliant history of how his ideas presumed a postwar consensus that was already fracturing at the time that “A Theory of Justice” was published, Chandler has little to say. He mentions her work in his endnotes, only in the context of how long it took Rawls to write his book and how it was initially received.

This felt to me like liberal flexibility in action — a form of accommodation that absorbed Forrester’s book by assimilating it into Chandler’s preferred terms. Perhaps Forrester wouldn’t be surprised by this move; as she puts it, “The capaciousness of liberal philosophy squeezed out possibilities for radical critique.”

But no philosophy is capacious enough to squeeze out the endless possibilities thrown up by reality. Among the stellar blurbs on the jacket of Chandler’s book is one that is spectacularly ill timed: It is by Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, who has, in the last few weeks, tried to placate Republican lawmakers by revealing (typically confidential) details of disciplinary procedures against professors and calling in the police to clear out pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Shafik didn’t write this book, and Chandler isn’t responsible for what she does. But her endorsement suggests why even “Free and Equal” — as conscientious a paean to liberalism as one could imagine — feels so unequal to the fury of this moment.