If members of the shadow frontbench seek inspiration on how to differentiate their future administration from the mendacious nonentities who have run the country for the past 13 years, they could do worse than read this book. Free and Equal is a stirring call by an LSE philosopher and economist for egalitarian liberalism based on the ideas of John Rawls. The late Harvard professor wrote a book 50 years ago that saw him feted as a political thinker of the calibre of Plato, Hobbes and Mill, but, as far as I can tell, he had precisely zero impact on the real world. Maybe now his time has come.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls invited us to imagine what a just society would look like by means of an elegant thought experiment. Suppose, Rawls suggested, that we are all behind what he calls a “veil of ignorance”, with knowledge of our talents, income and wealth, as well as our core values, temporarily erased. In this “original position”, what principles of justice would we agree to be bound by? What kind of social contract would we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a good one? Rawls argued that we would choose a set of basic liberties necessary for flourishing, including freedom of expression and of conscience, and a free choice of occupation.
