Nick Cowen, neoliberal social justice: Rawls unveiled

It has been fifty years since John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), but engagement with the philosopher’s masterpiece does not appear to be slowing anytime soon. Rawls is most famous for his two principles of justice. The first principle says that all are entitled to equal basic liberties, and the second says that economic inequalities should be structured so that they maximize the welfare of those who are least advantaged. On their own, these principles don’t tell us much about institutions. Yet, Rawls had a view on this. According to Rawls, the two principles of justice are inconsistent with laissez-faire capitalism and welfare-state capitalism. They are consistent with market socialism and an economic system first developed by economist James Meade called property-owning democracy. Thus, Rawls (and his followers) are quite skeptical of markets, and tend to embrace economic systems that require significant state intervention.

Nick Cowen challenges this dominant strain of thinking in his important and timely Neoliberal Social Justice: Rawls Unveiled. Cowen takes Rawls’s basic theory of justice as a given. As he states the book’s central question: “What are the policy implications of Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness if we introduce realistic assumptions about human behaviour and social theory?” (Cowen, 2021, p. 3). In answering this question, Cowen’s main contribution is to challenge the prevailing wisdom, which says that Rawls’s theory leads us away from free markets and toward economic systems that rely on significant state control of the economy. It is this dogma that Cowen rejects. On his reading, Rawls’s theory of justice leads us toward, not away from, free and open markets.

Cowen’s book can be split into two parts. The first part confronts Rawlsians on their own terms, in the world of ideal theory. This will require some explaining. Over the past decade or so, there has been a heated methodenstreit among political philosophers. At a very general level, political philosophers are concerned with the principles and institutions that should govern human society. For much of its history, political philosophy has been concerned with how persons like us should organize ourselves. Hobbes assumed that persons were plagued by selfishness, anticipation, and vainglory; Locke realized that we are all subject to biases and must thus rely on impartial umpires to settle our disputes; and Rousseau told us to take “men as they are and laws as they might be” (Rousseau, 1987 [1762], p. 17). Call these the non-ideal theorists.

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