7

New Right and Left

BY THE END of the 1970s, the New Right had arrived.¹ Under the Reagan administration, state-sponsored financial deregulation and the turn to global capital markets alleviated and postponed the state’s crisis.² At the same time, “the market” was enshrined as the solution to the problems caused by the end of the age of affluence.³ Markets were introduced into new areas of public and private life, and weaponized as the alternative to the state in attacks on its welfare and democratic functions.⁴ Amid the fracturing of the Keynesian consensus, and under the influence of monetarists like Milton Friedman, various forms of neoliberalism gained ground in liberal and conservative intellectual circles: antibureaucratic public choice theory, Austrian-inspired libertarianism, rational expectations theory, and supply-side economics.⁵

The neoclassical framework was projected from economics to politics. Economists, lawyers, and political scientists attacked aggregate concepts; conceived behavior in highly individualizing terms; condemned “unaccountable,” “rent-seeking” governments, bureaucratic “inefficiency,” and “non-market decision-making”; and argued for the privatization of public enterprises.⁶ For some, the government was no longer a unique authority, as Keynesians assumed, but one among several maximizing units.⁷ Others downgraded the state to an information- and knowledge-collecting entity and framed welfare provision as a drain on the economy. The argument that democracy causes inflation gained traction, as inflation was constructed as an “all-encompassing social crisis,” the prevention of which justified massive transformations in economic governance.⁸ American conservatism’s long-standing commitment to laissez-faire within labor markets and hostility to unions had free rein.⁹ Decisions were taken out of democratic politics and removed from public view. Both the public and the private were privatized.¹⁰ Yet the state was shored up for anti-statist ends as government policies and mechanisms forced change and realignment, strengthening capital rights and incentivizing doctrines of choice, responsibility, and competition in education, health, incarceration, and social services.¹¹ This was a radicalization of and departure from the midcentury rhetoric of anti-statism that had penetrated liberal philosophy. It had been a mark of Rawls’s youthful barebones liberalism that one of the few responsibilities he ascribed to the state was to run lighthouses. By the 1970s, libertarian economists no longer argued that lighthouses were public goods made necessary by market failure. Even they could be privatized.¹² Social justice, Hayek declared, was a “mirage.”¹³

Liberal philosophers underestimated how high the New Right would rise. Many did not see or did not object to the process of marketization taking place, whereby social relationships were subordinated to market logic and new aspects of life were commodified. In part this was because they were preoccupied not with the rising right, but the left. For political philosophers, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initially provided an opportunity to consider the nature of the social democratic left’s egalitarianism. The collapse of affluence during the previous decade, particularly in Britain, had looked at first like it might benefit the socialist left. “In the 1950s many of us thought that inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous,” wrote the Labour Party grandee and later founder of the Social Democratic Party Roy Jenkins in 1972. “It is now clear that this view was at best oversimplified and at worst just wrong.”¹⁴ Over the course of the 1970s, the Labour Party had responded by returning to ideas of industrial democracy and public ownership.¹⁵ In the United States, even as the traditional working-class constituency of left politics fragmented and was recomposed, and the political efforts to sustain it were abandoned, the Cold War thaw and leftward tilt of academia enabled the radicalization of philosophy, seen in the appeal of anticolonial global redistributive politics and Rawlsian engagements with socialism.¹⁶ With the relationship of capitalism to democracy under scrutiny following the fiscal crises, a socialist resurgence gradually became visible within political philosophy. “The apparent pause in economic growth, the crisis in stabilization policy occasioned by the current inflationary threats and realities, and the loss of purpose in redistributional measures all combine,” Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1978, “to raise anew the question of alternatives to capitalism.”¹⁷ By the 1980s, liberal political philosophy was being pushed to the left. Marxism was poised to enter the philosophical mainstream.

In response, a new wave of egalitarianism emerged, which brought more expansive and holistic ideas of justice and equality. A particular kind of socialist theory came to prominence, one populated by individual rather than collective agents and focused on distribution and ownership rather than labor. As neoliberal ideas were entrenched, philosophers developed new strategies to defeat, oppose, and accommodate them. These included the deployment of the ideas of the right in their theories—sometimes deliberately, often indirectly. Liberal Rawlsians had seen rebutting Nozick as a key part of the defense of egalitarianism and the redistributive state. Now the engagement with right-wing arguments was on a broader terrain. Philosophers explored ideas of the market and contract, private property rights and choice, responsibility, and welfare dependency. Some worried that the state’s capacity to intervene in the economy was being squeezed by the market, but many others embraced the rhetoric of the “magic” of the market.¹⁸ Markets were indispensable, and potentially neutral.¹⁹

Political philosophers began to debate ideas of property rights, ownership, and its moral analogue, responsibility. For Rawls, property rights had been institutional, part of the basic structure. Now pre-institutional property rights became crucial to many theories. A range of liberal, socialist, and Marxist philosophers, including Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, John Roemer, and David Miller, explored ideas of private, common, and joint ownership. Some liberal egalitarians used the resources of the right to advocate a shift to the left, incorporating New Right ideas about responsibility, markets, and choice for egalitarian ends. Debates about agency and ethical behavior that had been divorced from the distributive realm were placed within it. Others lowered their sights, abandoning the most demanding forms of egalitarianism and generating minimalist defenses of the welfare state under attack. For the first time since the transformation of philosophy in Rawls’s wake, it seemed to many that political and economic changes might undermine the bases of theories of justice and the liberal welfare state.

These encounters with left and right shaped liberal philosophy in a variety of ways. Egalitarians now debated the market and socialism, and to some extent the state and capitalism. On the one hand, many of these ideas were brought together within the distributive, egalitarian, and individualist paradigm and signaled its triumph. In discussions of the equalization of resources, an increasing number of social and political goods were rolled into bundles of endowments to be distributed. On the other hand, Rawls’s conceptual frameworks came under pressure. The equality debates marked a kind of disembedding of the Rawlsian project.²⁰ Until that point, the ideas about consensus, practices, growth, and the conditions of midcentury America’s aspirations that were built into Rawls’s theory had not been fundamentally altered when philosophers attempted to expand them into global and intergenerational terrains. Yet as they focused on the redistributive problems for which justice theory was built, they departed from Rawls’s assumptions. Many continued to develop accounts of hypothetical consensus and agreement, but others abandoned Rawls’s vision of the relationship of individual and institutional morality. In debates about pre-institutional property rights, responsibility, and desert, the boundaries of the institutional and political were redrawn. Rawls’s emphasis on the formative role of institutions on individual rights and choices was contested or set aside. An emphasis on the neutrality of institutions and processes made room for concern with outcomes. Political philosophers moralized a realm beyond the juridical and institutional framework, calling into question the concept of the basic structure itself. These critiques of the basic structure came from the bottom up: instead of the rules of the game, philosophers looked to the relations between players—to markets, to the realm of the social, and later to the “ethos” of justice and equality.²¹

The irony of this change in focus was that it did not help philosophers identify the transformation in the state they were witnessing. Those most focused on the New Right overlooked the decline of democratic control that followed from the depoliticization, privatization, and weakening of the welfare functions of the state that occurred in the 1980s.²² By contrast, many who maintained Rawls’s assumptions and sought to deepen liberal philosophy’s democratic procedures did not engage with the radicalization of egalitarianism. Moreover, this radicalization would not last. These debates about egalitarianism came at a particular conjuncture when the ideas of socialism and equality, though philosophically and morally coherent, were politically at odds and signaled different programs. The postwar conflict between socialism and equality—during which equality was prioritized as part of the abandonment of socialism—resurfaced in British political thought during the battle for control over the future of the Labour Party in the early 1980s.²³ In philosophy, liberal egalitarianism would win out. As leftist ideas were taken up, their hard edges were softened. Over the course of the decade, philosophers made even Marxist ideas fit the egalitarian framework or domesticated them in service of liberal aims. This was true of the debates about ownership and redistribution, and also of the few attempts by philosophers to politicize the economy and increase democratic control of distributive decisions. These ultimately gave way not to socialist theories of democratic control but to liberal theories of deliberative democracy and public reason.

Rawls’s theory outlasted its alternatives. As the state was privatized and new forms of regulation, capital investment, and financialization took economic decisions even further away from democratic politics, the experiments in analytical Marxism and democratic socialism that characterized philosophy in the last years of the Cold War led to liberal variants after its end. Socialism entered liberal egalitarianism, only to be subsumed by it.

1979 was a good year for the political right, but it was also a good year for liberal egalitarianism. When Amartya Sen gave the Tanner Lectures, he took for granted that there was no need to justify his focus on equality. Instead, he asked, “equality of what?”²⁴ Rawls had equalized primary social goods—“things that every rational man is presumed to want”—rather than utility, welfare, wealth, income, or equality of opportunity. Sen’s task was to replace Rawls’s primary goods with his “capabilities,” understood to encompass considerations of both need and choice. This, Sen argued, was the correct “currency” of egalitarian justice.²⁵ This move began a technical dialogue between political philosophers and economists like Arrow, James Meade, Anthony Atkinson, and others concerned with inequality and poverty who were to the left of their rightward-tending discipline. They sought to free economic thought from utilitarian welfare maximization and make it sensitive to distributional questions by supplementing the methods and “compensation criteria” of the new welfare economics with normative standards and weights.²⁶ Sen drew on their work and elements of the British welfare state tradition, with its nod to ethical socialism and focus on poverty, needs, agency, and well-being.²⁷ His question about the metric of equality preoccupied egalitarian philosophers for the next thirty years.

In 1981, Ronald Dworkin—then Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, teaching at NYU, and famous for his defense of rights theories—responded to Sen’s provocation.²⁸ He published a two-part essay that provided a defense of “equality of resources.” Dworkin thought that equality should be determined in terms of what is distributed, rather than in terms of the satisfaction of recipients’ wants or preferences. Like Rawls, he wanted a theory that avoided the difficulties associated with measuring welfare. An account of equality should ensure that recipients of resources were free to do with them what they chose, but also should avoid a problem that plagued accounts that distributed according to welfare or “subjective” ideas of utility, which allowed people who had expensive tastes to claim a right to more goods. Dworkin argued that Rawls had not gone far enough. What was required was a distinct and prior theory of equality that went beyond Rawls’s institutional practices and that was concerned with what equality demanded in a deeper sense.²⁹

The political implications of Dworkin’s conceptual turn to equality were also clear. Writing in the aftermath of Thatcher’s first electoral victory, Dworkin argued that that election represented not an “ideological revolution”—a collapse of faith in the welfare state or a belief in “free enterprise”—but a signal of the “non-ideological” nature of the British electorate and the failure of the Labour Party to persuasively set out its core egalitarian principles. Labour, Dworkin continued, “must give up trying to deduce a vision of the fair society from its historical association with the trade unions. The basis of that association must follow from the party’s principles, not the other way around.”³⁰ Like many British liberals who championed the left’s move to the center in the aftermath of Thatcher’s victory, Dworkin wanted a social democratic theory of equality that could be decoupled from its historic association with the labor movement. He, like them, underestimated the rise of the right in part because he underestimated how this decoupling of equality from collective bargaining would hasten the hollowing out of social democracy.³¹ Instead, Dworkin’s task was to show that the ideas of market liberalism could be incorporated into egalitarianism without damaging the cause of equality.

The thought experiment Dworkin introduced to justify his account of equality briefly rivaled the original position in its notoriety. A group of people are shipwrecked on an uninhabited desert island and want to share the island’s resources equally. Each islander is given an equal share of the new currency—clamshells—and in an auction they bid for the resources that matter to them, until they are satisfied with their share. In the auction, people have to give up more clamshells to get something that others also value highly. They give up less if they have unusual tastes. When eventually a distribution results from the auction, it flows from the situation of initial equality and reflects people’s choices. But because individuals are not the same—they have different talents and different “handicaps”—additional transfers are needed for the distribution to be sensitive to these circumstances.³²

So Dworkin introduced a second device to supplement the auction, the idea of a “hypothetical insurance market.” The islanders are imagined now to be in a situation of limited knowledge similar to that behind the veil of ignorance. They do not know whether they have a disability, or whether their “talents” are productive and marketable. Each can purchase insurance against the risks they face—against the possibility they will end up with low marketable talent or, in a separate insurance market, against the risk they will have a handicap of some kind. If they end up with a level of talent below that they insured against, they get a payment. If they end up having a more marketable talent than they predicted, they pay out. There is no further redistribution. Inequalities that now emerge are justifiable. Each individual has been compensated for any bad luck in their circumstances they did not choose. From that point on, they are responsible for the consequences that flow from the choices they make. They can play it safe, or take risks. Either way, their fate is up to them.³³

This was a theory of equality that relied on markets.³⁴ It began with a hypothetical auction to define equality of resources. It corrected for inequalities through a hypothetical insurance market to determine tax rates. But Dworkin was also clear that real markets were necessary to egalitarianism. The market had “come to be regarded as the enemy of equality,” because of the “vast inequality in property” that markets have in practice “permitted” and “encouraged.” “Both political philosophers and ordinary citizens,” he wrote, had pictured equality as the “antagonist or victim of the values of efficiency and liberty supposedly served by the market, so that wise and moderate politics consists in striking some balance or trade-offs between equality and those other values, either by imposing constraints on the market as an economic environment, or by replacing it, in part or altogether, with a different economic system.” Dworkin rejected this picture. “The idea of an economic market, as a device for setting prices for a vast variety of goods and services, must be at the center of any attractive theoretical development of equality of resources.”³⁵ The market was conceived as a mechanism of neutrality. Competitive markets had been part of Rawls’s theory, but Dworkin gave them new weight, even at the level of metaphor: where Rawls’s discomfort with state planning led him to the democratic discussion, Dworkin’s invoked the auction.

Ideas of choice and responsibility were also central to Dworkin’s argument. He rejected simple equality of welfare, since equalizing the welfare of individuals required compensating people for bad choices they made “freely,” such as being lazy. People should be held responsible for the outcomes of their choices. But they were not responsible for the circumstances in which they made those choices (if those circumstances were not themselves chosen). Distributions, Dworkin argued, should be “ambition-sensitive” but “endowment-insensitive.”³⁶ People should be compensated if they were unlucky. But compensation was only due for certain kinds of bad fortune. It was not due to all of society’s losers. Dworkin distinguished between different kinds of luck. “Option luck” was “a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out—whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined.” Situations of option luck were those where individuals had deliberately chosen to enter into a risky situation. “Brute luck” was “a matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles.”³⁷ Situations of brute luck were those where individuals had not chosen to gamble but were exposed to risks because of factors beyond their control. An unpredicted “falling meteorite” was the paradigm case of bad brute luck. A bought stock that rises was good option luck. The ideal of equality of resources only required full compensation for the differential effects and outcomes of brute luck. If you gambled and had bad option luck, no compensation was owed.³⁸

The timing of Dworkin’s intervention was propitious. His foregrounding of choice, responsibility, and markets came at a moment when nonmarket forms of social organization were under attack. Many attempted to close the gap between the economists’ model of a perfectly competitive market and real-life markets, to enshrine the latter as the only reliable mechanism for social choice, even as monopolies were protected in practice.³⁹ The state encouraged citizen responsibility and entrepreneurial values, while abdicating responsibility for citizen welfare.⁴⁰ Individual choice and consent (actual rather than hypothetical) became the basis of legitimacy claims. Dworkin made these ideas in general important to egalitarianism in a way that had hitherto been true only of “right-wing political philosophy.”⁴¹

Dworkin also addressed one specific set of arguments, associated with the “law and economics movement,” about the relative effects of private property rights and competitive markets on distributional outcomes.⁴² These arguments had roots in debates among welfare economists, for whom the question of the distribution of initial endowments and property was traditionally crucial to determining the fairness of outcomes. Politically, this kind of theory could go both ways. Where the state was deemed responsible for securing this distribution, the emphasis on fair initial distribution could point toward a revolutionary statist politics. Some social democratic economists suggested this possibility in the early 1980s.⁴³ Yet most neoclassical economists separated efficiency from distribution, suggesting that competitive markets could secure (Pareto-) efficient (though not necessarily fair) outcomes without fair initial distributions. In 1960, the economist Ronald Coase’s theorem of social costs had dramatically expanded the domain within which markets were thought to lead to efficient outcomes.⁴⁴ In his wake, many claimed that competitive markets could ensure efficient outcomes, regardless of the initial distribution of property rights, and that the requirement for public goods was a “costly illusion.”⁴⁵ These ideas percolated into law and philosophy through the work of Richard Posner, who saw the task of law as increasing economic efficiency.⁴⁶ Common law—property, torts, crimes, and contracts—already took the structure of economic reasoning and could be explained in terms of its tendency to maximize preferences.⁴⁷ Tort law and personal injury claims had been revived at midcentury as part of the defense of the rights and integrity of the autonomous individual, the repudiation of the administrative state and direct government regulation, and the privatization of compensation and welfare.⁴⁸ Now they were adjudicated as a means of increasing economic value. Property rights established in common law were a basis for market exchange. They could underpin market deregulation and privatization.

Like many legal and political philosophers, Dworkin was steeped in this literature. At a fundamental moral level, he opposed these ideas. He was not alone: various legal schools challenged this view of law as efficiency. Critics of law and economics included neo-Marxists, critical legal theorists, and legal realists who saw law as power and politics, as well as welfare rights and constitutional theorists who saw law as an instrument for realizing the deep constitutional values, morality, and the highest ideals of the nation.⁴⁹ Dworkin was on the side of the latter. In a response to Posner and Guido Calabresi, he attacked the law and economics view that wealth maximization was a value in itself or that it could be traded off with justice. It “makes no sense as a social goal,” he wrote, “even as one among others.”⁵⁰ The economic analysis of law suggested that the chief moral purpose of law was efficiency, understood as being based on “willingness to pay.”⁵¹ Dworkin condemned that view outright. For a rights theorist, allocating property rights to those whose use of them was most “valuable” was anathema. Dworkin rejected their priorities, joining others who described the normative conception of efficiency as “ideological”—biased toward the rich (who will pay more) and the productive (who own more productive assets).⁵²

But Dworkin also adapted structural elements of their framework. He was not antigovernment like these thinkers, though the non-interventionist possibilities implicit in the ground rules vision of liberal egalitarianism made it amenable to antibureaucratic arguments. Like Rawls, he thought that excessive government intervention was not necessary for people to make choices and live their lives well, if the social structure was set up correctly. But for Dworkin, what that meant was providing everyone with a fair initial endowment of resources and setting up a fair framework for interaction in a market economy, with tort and criminal law protections. Thus, initial endowments, insurance markets, private property rights, and a tort conception of responsibility were imported into egalitarianism. Dworkin used the “resourcist” framework of bargaining, markets, and compensation, but inverted it to secure equality.⁵³ He relied on a principle of willingness to pay to determine what others would pay for what an individual person possesses in an ideal marketplace. Yet he claimed to eliminate that principle’s bias to the rich by making it operate blindly, in an insurance market where participants began as equal. He introduced an idea of responsibility developed in debates about “contractual immunities” and accidents. This adapted common law debates about how people should be compensated for their bad luck and behavior (about whether they should take responsibility for costs of accidents, and how compensation works for the uninsured in regimes of strict liability or negligence). He suggested that rights, insurance, and the common law twinned with the efficient and fair mechanisms of the market could enable equality and guard against market excesses.⁵⁴

Dworkin’s theory of equality was among the first after A Theory of Justice that did not focus on opposing Nozick or on shoring up liberal egalitarianism’s institutional, nonhistorical character in response to Nozick’s critique. Nozick had drawn from the new law and economics but had been far more interested in providing a philosophical basis for initial distribution—his justification of unequal distributions of property rights in terms of first occupancy or labor.⁵⁵ Like Nozick, Dworkin began with rights outside the institutional realm. He held that people were, and should be held, responsible for their choices, and used a market to account for initial endowments. Yet he insisted his market was not historical and contingent, like Nozick’s, but purely hypothetical and “servile.” It was designed not to direct resources to their highest-valued uses regardless of the initial distribution of property rights, but to make the initial distribution equal and fair.⁵⁶ Against left and liberal squeamishness about the moral limits of markets, Dworkin insisted they could serve egalitarian ends.

This was both an extension of and a departure from Rawls. In many respects, Dworkin continued Rawls’s project. He wanted to derive equality from impartiality and rationality. Committed to state neutrality between conceptions of the good, he extended aspects of Rawls’s idea of primary social goods, which did not have neutral consequences and implied that people with expensive tastes would get less from the same resources than people with modest tastes.⁵⁷ He also extended Rawls’s wariness of continuous state intervention. Social institutions would mimic the basic idea of the thought experiment: that for many goods, redistribution takes place only once, to make individuals’ starting places fair. Dworkin brought to the fore the questions about luck and fortune with which Rawls had struggled: about whether people could be said to deserve their misfortune, whether that misfortune could be linked to their “free” choices, and whether protection from the consequences of bad luck should be universal or conditional. Rawls had answered these questions by making individual behavior, character, and choice irrelevant from the point of view of distributions. His treatment of natural talents as collective assets and his downgrading of desert (as an institutional principle and in judgments about natural endowments) had offered a philosophical counterpart to the welfare state’s rejection of the distinction between deserving and undeserving welfare recipients. With that state in crisis, a market logic twinned with a focus on individual property and responsibility now supplanted the “revolt against desert.”⁵⁸ Deflationary accounts of individual responsibility were left behind. Dworkin reintroduced a distributive relationship between ethical behavior and distributive reward—one that turned not on altruism but on choice.

The result was a demanding egalitarianism. But alongside the centrality of the market, the return of choice looked like a concession to the right, as many of Dworkin’s readers—including, most influentially, Elizabeth Anderson—later saw.⁵⁹ It raised questions that a social liberal like Dworkin might have wanted to avoid: should needy citizens be left to suffer if their needs were caused by “irresponsible” and chosen actions of their own? Despite this, it was not the right that took up Dworkin’s theory. Another change was under way within philosophy, one that would lay the groundwork for Dworkin’s ideas to be put to work for the left instead.

Philosophers came to the Anglophone revival of Marx some years after a “historically centred Marxist culture” developed among historians and sociologists.⁶⁰ But by the end of the 1970s, the resurgence of socialist and left-liberal ideas had made Marxism ascendant. With exceptions like Robert Paul Wolff and the New Left followers of Herbert Marcuse, philosophers in the 1970s steered clear of Marxism. They ignored the American socialism associated with Monthly Review, the debates over the reception of “Western Marxism” that took place in the pages of New Left Review, and the American reception of critical theory in Theory and Society, Telos, and New German Critique.⁶¹ Now analytical philosophers and political theorists began tentatively to explore the ideas of thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, whom they saw as forging something novel out of the Western European disillusionment with Marxism.⁶² Above all, however, they went back to Marx himself.⁶³ Some wanted to make Marxian ideas safe for liberal and democratic frameworks. Peter Singer published an introduction to Marx that rendered him a cross between a humanitarian Hegel and an ethical socialist.⁶⁴ Many tried to extract a theory of justice from Marx.⁶⁵ Others stripped the working class of its historical role as Marxism’s collective agent. Sheldon Wolin enlisted Marx as a disillusioned theorist of the “omnipotence” of capital. The theory of revolution provided “solace” in the face of despair at rising technocracy—an account of what human agency was no longer able to achieve under meritocratic, managerial capitalism.⁶⁶ Others explored the prospects for a Marxist theory of law and the state.⁶⁷ In 1983, the annual publication of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy was on Marxism. Reclaiming Marxism became a way for many to signal the belief that “society can be better than it is.”⁶⁸

One group of theorists who sought a systematic engagement with Marxism of a methodologically novel kind began to focus on ideas of property, ownership, and responsibility in a way that was not only consistent with but transformative of liberal egalitarianism. In 1978, a set of philosophers, political scientists, economists, and sociologists known retrospectively as the founders of “analytical Marxism” began meeting annually. Their initial members included G. A. Cohen, Adam Przeworski, Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright, and Robert Brenner. These theorists engaged in a series of controversies within Anglophone Marxism, about the value controversy, the world capitalist system (sparked by the work of Immanuel Wallerstein), and the transition to capitalism debates (prompted by Brenner’s account of the development of agrarian capitalism, which became a cornerstone of a new “political Marxism.”)⁶⁹ But they also developed a distinctive methodological approach of their own that turned on a belief that Marxism could be reconstructed through a “search for foundations” and made compatible with the tools of modern social science. Marxism, Roemer wrote, emphasized class struggle, collective action, and “the social formation of the individual.” Social scientific tools, by contrast, postulated the individual as an “agent with given preferences and objectives, determined outside the model, who maximizes individually subject to constraints.”⁷⁰ The central claim of analytical Marxism was that the two approaches could be brought together.

Each member of the group did so in different ways. Cohen looked to functional explanation, while Brenner, Roemer, and Elster used rational choice and decision theory to introduce new ideas, like that of “adaptive preferences,” into debates about economic rationality.⁷¹ Some saw their use of rational choice as strategic. It was a bourgeois “paradigm” they intended to “disarm” by showing that it could be used to draw “anti-bourgeois conclusions,” just as Marx had done.⁷² For most, their opposition to European Marxism ran deep, reflected in their unofficial name, the “No Bullshit Marxism Group.”⁷³ But their intellectual efforts had more than methodological results. In their debates with liberal egalitarians, they made market socialism a distributive theory of equality. Marxian ideas were made to fit the Rawlsian framework.

For political philosophers, two of the most important members of the analytical Marxists were Cohen and Roemer. Cohen, a Canadian with youthful Communist Party roots in postwar Montreal, had trained at Oxford under Gilbert Ryle. Now at University College London, he was already debating the likes of Nozick, T. M. Scanlon, and public choice theorists when he published his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978).⁷⁴ That book defended a determinist conception of the theory of historical materialism and sought to provide an alternative to various currents within European Marxism.⁷⁵ Cohen’s stated aim was to extend the study of Marx’s Capital that Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar had recovered, while challenging their approach, particularly its sociological framework and metaphors of levels, conjunctures, and divisions. Althusser’s vision dominated British Marxism, from the New Left to Marxist feminism.⁷⁶ Cohen rendered the Marxist view of society closer to the analytical philosophical one, constituted by individuals and by horizontal rather than vertical relationships.⁷⁷ His technological determinism was also a rejection of E. P. Thompson and the First British New Left, whose emphasis on class consciousness as the “hallmark” of class formation, rather than “objective” ownership relations, was deemed too voluntarist and subjectivist for Cohen.⁷⁸ By using functional explanation to conceive of the economic structure as determined by productive forces, Cohen downplayed the agency of collective entities and the role of class struggle.⁷⁹

Cohen’s book helped to spark a series of debates about the validity of the labor theory of value, ideology, class, and transition.⁸⁰ The analytical Marxists used rational choice tools to pinpoint the dynamics of transition between phases of capitalist development and to stipulate the conditions for successful socialist transformation.⁸¹ They also renewed debate about the theory of exploitation—whether exploitation could be defined in ethical as well as technical terms, and whether it applied only to transactions in the labor market or to any markets (including noncapitalist ones).⁸² In the debate over exploitation, Cohen gave a sense of what was in store for analytical Marxism. He abandoned the labor theory of value and the conception of exploitation as the unequal exchange of social labor. In its place, he used a distributive framework, asserting a quasi-Rawlsian idea of exploitation defined in terms of nonreciprocity. He defined exploitation, in terms of interpersonal power, as taking “unfair advantage” of someone.⁸³

Roemer’s intervention in the exploitation debates took a less agent-centered approach and focused on property. He decentered the labor market as the primary and particular site of capitalist exploitation, focused on ownership and income rather than labor and exchange, and redescribed capitalism as a system of social inequality. Roemer defined exploitation in terms of the “unjust distribution of property in the means of production.”⁸⁴ A former mathematics teacher and organizer with a San Francisco teachers’ union, Roemer was responding in part to a set of arguments within American Marxism that focused, after the publication of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), on the sociology of the labor process, problems of control and coercion in the workplace, and the implications of the entrenchment of managerial control in modern corporations for the future of class struggle, conceived as resistance to workplace coercion.⁸⁵ Those who, like Roemer, were skeptical of the sociological focus on class composition and the labor process sought to displace it with what critics labeled a “market-oriented” approach to capitalist accumulation and crisis.⁸⁶ It was a mistake, Roemer argued, to elevate “the struggle between worker and capitalist in the process of production to a more privileged position in the theory than the differential ownership of productive assets.”⁸⁷ Class struggle could not account for the transition between modes of production. To say otherwise was to reduce “historical materialism to a voluntarist social theory”—not a theory of history, but a “sociology of domination.”⁸⁸ Focusing on the labor process would lead to a “faulty” or “nonmaterialist” analysis, whereby exploitation in socialist countries could be deemed the same as exploitation in capitalist ones.

Here Roemer took aim both at the New Left’s elevation of alienation and at those who saw the domination of the worker as primary to understanding exploitation and class. He argued that work organization defined only the nature of alienation. By contrast, the coercion that was definitive of exploitation came not at the point of surplus extraction in the labor market but at the point of maintaining property relations.⁸⁹ Capitalist exploitation was “the appropriation of the labour of one class by another class, realized because of their differential ownership of or access to the nonhuman means of production.”⁹⁰ The focus on the labor market was neither necessary nor sufficient for exploitation since the transfer of value can take place through product markets, credit markets, or both. Property distribution was primary. Workers’ control and industrial democracy were reducible to more general concerns.⁹¹ Workplace coercion, he argued against his Marxist critics, was implied by property relations: the distribution of assets and endowments included social relations of production; viewing capitalism as a “system of unequal property” did not preclude seeing it as also a system of unequal work.⁹²

This definition of exploitation was designed to enable its diagnosis in different kinds of regimes. There was feudal, socialist (between workers’ cooperatives), and status exploitation (within centralized planned states). In the international division of labor and unequal exchange that Roemer called “imperialism without empire,” a combination of these persisted.⁹³ This expansion of the theory was an accommodating move. Both Roemer and Cohen were as interested in exploring Eastern state socialism as they were in alienation within Western capitalism.⁹⁴ Over the long term, Roemer’s extension of exploitation theory suggested his foresight: in a period of deindustrialization, financialization, and the ballooning of credit markets, Roemer’s account freed the theory of exploitation to diagnose exploitation beyond the labor process.⁹⁵ In the short term, Roemer’s redefinition of exploitation cleared the way for his justification of market socialism. With a continuous distribution of property, market socialism could enable superior efficiency, as well as freedom and equality. As many on the left focused on market fundamentalism as the major threat to freedom, equality, and community, Roemer looked for the source of unfreedom not in the marketplace but in the state-maintained property rights regime.⁹⁶ This was the basis of his critique of the capitalist state as the underwriter of property rights regimes.

The focus on property distribution also paved the way for the accommodation by liberal justice theorists of socialism, now with the workplace dethroned. Analytical Marxists would soon move seamlessly between these accounts of exploitation and egalitarian distributive justice. The liberal egalitarian and Marxian paradigms were being rendered compatible. By the mid-1980s, socialism was a philosophical force.

The interest of analytical Marxists in property relations converged with the return of debate over private property rights to the core of neoclassical economics and Dworkin’s resource framework to bring about a resurgence of interest in property and ownership.⁹⁷ Outside philosophy, the politics of property was back, in battles over property taxes, in the revolution in shareholder value, and in the “new capitalism of asset appreciation” that boomed in the 1980s.⁹⁸ Within philosophy, these changes were reflected in the rush to theorize property across ideological divides.⁹⁹ Sen’s and Dworkin’s provocation to rethink the currency of egalitarian justice was answered in increasingly technical, welfare economic form, with new theories of equality of resources, wealth, opportunity, and human capital. Sen and Martha Nussbaum introduced their account of capabilities.¹⁰⁰ Roemer theorized talents, Richard Arneson argued for equal opportunity for welfare, and Cohen insisted on equal access to advantage.¹⁰¹ Both egalitarians and socialists explored how markets and initial endowments operated in tandem to secure fair property distributions. For the remainder of the 1980s, philosophers on the right and left took up the problem of ownership at many levels of argument. Dworkin’s desert island thought experiment, for instance, was adapted by Roemer in his exploration of class formation and exploitation. (Later, the coupons of his “coupon socialism” functioned much like Dworkin’s clamshells.) Many accepted that to get their theories off the ground they needed an account of initial endowments, property rights, and a market mechanism, which were only implicit in earlier justice theories.

Yet in politics, the relationship between ideas of socialism and equality was vexed, particularly in Britain, and philosophers at Oxford and elsewhere remained engaged with party politics. In the United States, many socialists might have seen social democracy as a necessary first step. But as Dworkin’s comments on the future of the Labour Party after Thatcher’s election showed, in Britain there was a live choice between social democracy and socialism. After the split of the Labour Party, the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and Labour’s 1983 election defeat with its socialist wing at the helm, the “modernizing” right and the soft egalitarian left of the party competed in a struggle to frame “Old Labour” socialism as a thing of the past.¹⁰² The conceptual coherence of ideals of socialism and equality was threatened by a political incompatibility, as many who opposed socialism weaponized equality to do so. This conflict was reflected in the writings of left-liberal and socialist philosophers in Britain, who were consumed by questions about the future of socialism, its alternatives, and its survival in the face of the New Right.¹⁰³ Postwar Labour thinkers had not taken the threat of neoliberal ideas very seriously and had dismissed Hayekian critiques of planning; the heirs to Labour’s revisionist wing now actively engaged them, defending pro-market anti-interventionist forms of social democracy.¹⁰⁴ Economists like James Meade and Richard Layard had long advocated using the market rather than the bureaucracy to restrain prices and monopoly power.¹⁰⁵ Their ideas about taxation and income planning found new defenders within the Labour Party—for instance, with soft left MP Bryan Gould (whose Socialism and Freedom [1986] used Rawls’s theory to defend liberty and equality as socialist ideals associated with the state as an engine of “development” rather than “planning”).¹⁰⁶ There was a wave of interest in Rawls and Meade’s vision of property-owning democracy and debate over whether the market or private ownership was the key producer of inequality. Some defended “mixed regimes” and the redistribution of ownership, not just of personal property but also of “social property” and productive assets.¹⁰⁷ The idea of property-owning democracy was reinterpreted as being even closer to liberal socialist regimes. The efforts by Richard Krouse in this direction would shape Rawls’s reinterpretation of his own ideas in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Reading Krouse further radicalized Rawls’s initial presentation of property-owning democracy and led him to accentuate its departure from welfare-state capitalism.¹⁰⁸

These debates about socialism, equality, and ownership raged among philosophers at Oxford, which by the 1980s rivaled Harvard as political philosophy’s international elite center of gravity. Its faculty included Dworkin, Derek Parfit, Sen, David Miller, Joseph Raz, Bernard Williams, and soon Cohen. Like Meade, Atkinson, and the welfare economists of inequality at the London School of Economics, many were supporters of the new SDP or wanted to reinvent socialism through the market. At a Fabian Society–associated “Socialist Philosophy Group” meeting in 1986, its members asked what place markets had in “the realisation of socialist values of equality and justice”: could they be relied on, or were they “irrevocably imbued with the ethos and practice of capitalism . . . just another version of the mixed economy, i.e. humanism with a capitalist face?”¹⁰⁹ Miller, the foremost philosophical proponent in Britain of the view that markets could provide for socialism, thought it possible to construct from the libertarians’ “basic insight into the virtue of markets” a “theory of socialism that included a full-blooded, unapologetic commitment to a market economy.”¹¹⁰ Aligning his ideas with the pluralist democratic socialism of Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983), and also Robert Dahl’s defenses of pluralist economic democracy, he insisted that defending markets was not about “rolling back the state.”¹¹¹ Markets were efficient, but they also gave workers autonomy (particularly in occupational choice) and allowed people to “flourish as individuals” by responding to the fact that “we are all unique persons with distinct tastes and preferences.”¹¹²

It was possible to start from the same place as the right, Miller suggested, and to defend a “pure model” of market socialism according to which capital ownership was socialized and the market mechanism abolished for labor and capital, but retained as a means of providing goods and services. He envisioned a society of cooperative enterprises in competition, where “different returns to individual desert flow within distributive boundaries set by a strongly constitutionalist state.” Inequalities were only permissible within cooperatives if they stemmed from differences of skill and responsibilities among members, and between them, if arising from “variations in market conditions and economic performance.” Miller stressed that this was a development of social democracy, not a departure from it.¹¹³ He did not uphold the liberal belief in market neutrality. Nor did he go fully toward a decentralized socialism—his cooperative vision still required central investment banks—which invited critiques from market liberals like John Gray, who saw it as collapsing into state planning.¹¹⁴ Miller disagreed. Antibureaucratic liberalism here met with British market socialism, in a turn away from the state. At the same time that egalitarians looked to markets, socialists did too.

This interest in markets and property had another dimension that focused more on agents than on structures and property relations. Concerns with ownership had a moral analogue: the ownership of personal actions, and individual responsibility for them. These had become concerns of the right, but the left now took them up, responding to Dworkin’s ideas of choice and responsibility and the libertarian idea of “self-ownership.”¹¹⁵ Rawls’s initial followers had shored up the institutional character of liberal egalitarianism in response to Nozick’s historical arguments and, as Cohen argued, had questioned the liberal assertion that “each person has full private property in himself.” For Cohen, this showed Rawls, Dworkin, and others to be more like social democrats than liberals: they denied self-ownership by seeing talents as morally arbitrary and a matter of luck. Talents did not, morally speaking, belong to individuals but to society. By contrast, “right-wing liberalism” accepted the assertion of ownership and added that self-owning persons could acquire rights to unequal amounts of external resources.¹¹⁶ Left-wing liberals accepted self-ownership but added that individuals were egalitarian with respect to external resources. Cohen took seriously Nozick’s suggestion that there was a clash between self-ownership, freedom, and equality. Many egalitarians would disagree, taking up the commitment to self-ownership alongside the equal division of resources, but Cohen remained committed also to a socialist vision of the “joint ownership of the world’s resources.” He suggested that maintaining a true “equality of condition,” associated with joint ownership rather than equal division of resources, would involve giving up on the “flirtation” with ideas of self-ownership.¹¹⁷

Yet Cohen saw a strategic value in arguing from libertarian premises. “Dworkin,” he wrote, looking back in 1989, “has performed for egalitarianism the considerable service of incorporating within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.”¹¹⁸ Dworkin had made central the question of whether inequalities generated by differences between individuals that went beyond their class positions were justifiable. People had different talents, or they lacked them altogether. Some had expensive tastes, which they developed themselves or inherited. Some worked hard, others were lazy. Some were virtuous, others were lucky. These differences generated “individualized inequalities,” many of which arose from people’s choices: their productive work habits, their irresponsible or expensive lifestyles, their bad luck and disadvantage.¹¹⁹ Against Rawls’s long-standing commitment to the moral arbitrariness of talents, Dworkin had argued that individuals were responsible for these when inequalities were traceable to their tastes and preferences, but not when they derived from their resources and capacities. While egalitarians like Scanlon responded to Dworkin by downplaying the relevance of choice when it came to compensating people for their “chosen expensive tastes,” Cohen took Dworkin’s argument further.¹²⁰ “The fundamental distinction for an egalitarian,” he wrote, “is between choice and luck in the shaping of people’s fates.”¹²¹ Inequalities due to brute luck were nullified. Egalitarianism did not “enjoin redress of or compensation for disadvantage as such,” but attended to “‘involuntary’ disadvantage, which is the sort that does not reflect the subject’s choice.”¹²² Disadvantage was “to be redressed when it reflects either exploitation or bad luck.” The aim of egalitarianism was to eliminate involuntary disadvantage.¹²³

Cohen put choice, responsibility, and the ownership of actions as well as resources at the center of his demanding egalitarianism, which required significant redistribution and implied a strong, interventionist state. This was part of his effort to moralize a wider terrain and move political philosophy away from liberal worries about neutrality and processes to a concern with outcomes.¹²⁴ Cohen was a self-declared “moralist.” He brought a wide range of relations and actions under the purview of justice and equality. His view of equality entailed that “everything that is contingent about us in relation to other moral beings is potentially a matter of distributive justice between us.” It evened out the “general arbitrariness of fortune” in a way that, some suggested, was more the job of a “just God” than a “requirement of human justice.”¹²⁵ On this view, action should not be disregarded by distributive theories, in the way that Cohen later accused Rawls of having done with his focus on institutions.¹²⁶ What was needed was a theory that held individuals to account for the outcomes they produced, regardless of specific social relations.

This foregrounding of responsibility was meant to ensure that the rich were not let off the hook. Ethical socialists were used to thinking about value in terms of contribution and were not afraid of moral distinctions between, for instance, the idle and the laboring poor, or the investing capitalist and the idle rich. Cohen continued this tradition. He critiqued Rawls for demanding too little from people’s personal commitments, for demoting the “egalitarian conscience,” and for allowing the rich high levels of income as an incentive to increased production (an enrichment that was justifiable for Rawls if it benefited the least well off). This, for Cohen, was inadequate in principle.¹²⁷ But it was also inadequate in a political landscape of increasing inequality and a rising super-rich. The socialist emphasis on the rich made good egalitarian sense.

Cohen’s egalitarianism attacked the relaxed attitude of Rawlsians to incentives and the implication that there need be no absolute limits placed on the wealth of the rich. His opposition to Rawls’s restriction of justice to the basic structure also sought to accommodate the lessons of the feminist claim that the “personal is political.”¹²⁸ While his reinterpretation of Marx had been accused of replacing politics with technological determinism, his later work swapped determinism for agency and a focus on the “repugnant motives” and greed of the capitalist rich.¹²⁹ The commitment to choice and responsibility drew many objections. Practically, the bureaucratic challenges in deciding what counted as choice were enormous. Politically, his ideas were accused of paternalism.¹³⁰ Conceptually, he ran up against the “morass of the free will problem,” though Cohen was happy to grant that in metaphysical terms much of human life, including our choices, may well be outside of our control.¹³¹

It was also bad timing. The egalitarian incorporation of choice and responsibility seemed not so much a service to social democracy as a “capitulation” to the right.¹³² Problems of responsibility and luck had lurked around the fringes of justice theory in debates about law, public morality, and political crimes since the Vietnam War.¹³³ But they had not played a major role in distributive theories.¹³⁴ When philosophers finally invoked them, it was during a political moment when attacks on the unaccountability of state bureaucracies were joined with critiques of the welfare state’s “culture of dependency” among “irresponsible” welfare recipients. Ideas of responsibility were not used to attack the rich but to criticize the behavior of the poor.

These disputes over the ownership of actions and property redrew conventional distinctions between liberals and socialists. The turn to property reshaped liberal egalitarianism. The distributive and choice paradigms also reshaped socialist philosophy. In the last years of the Cold War, socialist philosophers began to give up the commitments that once divided them from liberals, particularly the defense of public ownership. In 1989, Roemer still insisted that the rejection of private property rights was definitive of socialism. He disputed claims that private ownership was necessary for efficiency and redistribution of private property rights was sufficient for equality, insisting that state ownership of productive assets was vital for the latter and did not threaten the former.¹³⁵ Yet the argument that markets promoted equality was soon used to justify the rejection of public ownership. When the postwar generation of liberal socialists had abandoned public ownership as definitive of socialism, they had justified this move by appealing to the expansion of managerial control across property regimes.¹³⁶ Rawls’s regime flexibility had in turn implied that the distinction between public and private ownership was not what mattered, so long as property was widely dispersed. In the early 1990s, Roemer made a similar move, for different reasons. He insisted that the connections between market institutions and property relations were less determinate than many had understood, in both capitalism and socialism. Socialism was best thought of as a “kind of egalitarianism, not the implementation of a particular property relation.”¹³⁷ Property relations were brought to the center of Roemer’s theory, only to be subordinated to markets.

Here, the collective imperative was abandoned. Roemer’s later coupon socialism sat within a tradition he retrospectively saw as including property-owning democracies of the liberal egalitarian kind.¹³⁸ Market socialism, redefined as first a form of egalitarianism, was compatible with a variety of regimes, including “social republican” ones in which private property was constrained by its uses.¹³⁹ Other analytical Marxists also swapped commitments to public ownership for income-based solutions to distributive inequality, like a “universal grant” of guaranteed income, which was described by Robert van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs in 1986 as a “capitalist road to communism.”¹⁴⁰ Many gave up the commitment to joint-ownership, looking to self-ownership, initial endowments, and equalization of resources instead. The anti-interventionist logic of these theories led philosophers to take on increasingly libertarian positions. A left libertarianism emerged, associated first with Hillel Steiner, whose “starting-gate theory” argued that every individual starting a life should get a right to use an equal amount of natural resources.¹⁴¹ These theories, described by Cohen as the response of “a politically bereaved” left, had individualizing tendencies, since the wide dispersal of ownership could lead to a diminished capacity for collective control. Many of their proponents set questions of control aside.¹⁴²

The main conceptual division among analytical political philosophers that followed from these debates was not between liberal egalitarians and socialists over the distribution of property. It was about political theory’s vision of social institutions and the state. The debates about equality, property, and socialism broke down the distinctive shape of post-Rawlsian liberal philosophy. Political philosophers brought to the fore elements of Rawls’s theory that had been submerged within his concept of the basic structure of society. After A Theory of Justice was published, Rawls’s readers had set the character of liberal egalitarianism as institutional, nonhistorical, and focused on existing practices, not rights outside them. Though many had challenged Rawls’s theory, they had mostly contested the scope of the basic structure, not Rawls’s institutional focus itself. Philosophers who chastised Rawls for ignoring international or environmental politics tried to extend that focus to the world and the future. The consensual core of Rawls’s theory, born of his idealization of midcentury American civil society and his framing of that society as a system of practices, remained intact. This was true despite challenges from theories that framed society in terms of domination or conflict, questioned the narrative of incremental progress on which Rawls’s theory relied, and attacked the social contract tradition.¹⁴³ Those theories—leftist, anticolonial, feminist, critical race—were kept outside of the philosophical mainstream, their exclusion given philosophical legitimation by their incompatibility with the central tenets of liberal egalitarianism.¹⁴⁴ Many philosophers continued to accept those tenets: when the foremost Rawlsian feminist philosopher, Susan Okin, in her Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), challenged Rawls’s designation of the family as beyond politics and the subordination of the realm of moral relations and private action to institutions, she still argued that one remedy for this naturalizing of the patriarchal family was its inclusion within the basic structure.¹⁴⁵

When pre-institutional property rights were brought into the debate about equality, however, the commitment to the idea of basic structure began to waver. The dissolution of the basic structure led philosophers to new realms: challenges to it from the point of view of gender and racial injustice would slowly be incorporated into mainstream philosophy. Other challenges were slower to materialize. Though states were being transformed by processes of privatization, political philosophers did not revise their conceptions of the state to diagnose these processes, which often took place beyond traditional juridical and legislative institutions.¹⁴⁶ Instead, they reconfigured the basic structure by revising the relationship of institutions and persons. Persons were always prominent within the Rawlsian institutional apparatus, though this had been recently accentuated at the level of justification—in the moral basis for justice theory’s cosmopolitan extension and in Rawls’s Kantian reinterpretation of his theory. Yet individual ethics and action had remained in a realm separate from distributive justice. Now, at the same time that Parfit was breaking down the Rawlsian framework, the analytical Marxists expanded justice and equality beyond the institutional frame and brought a wider range of relations into moral and political consideration.

Despite his institutionalist commitments, it was Dworkin’s introduction of personal responsibility and choice that put this process of dissolution in motion. Dworkin made the problem of moral responsibility for individual choices central to distributive justice. Cohen’s egalitarianism helped to enshrine in philosophy a set of categories, which he used to make demanding egalitarian arguments that took on a life of their own.¹⁴⁷ The choices of individuals became crucial to debates about distributive equality. Elizabeth Anderson would later designate a fundamental dividing line between institutional or relational egalitarians and these “luck-egalitarians.” Their “equality of fortune” theory drew from “the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism.” In prescribing “rugged individualism” plus “insurance policies,” it amounted to a defense of capitalism and the welfare state. Luck-egalitarians conceived of equality merely as a “pattern of distribution.”¹⁴⁸ They downplayed the effects of individual choices on the fortunes of others and also struggled to establish the conditions of choice and responsibility in a way that helped rather than punished the constituencies of a socialist politics.¹⁴⁹ The distributive paradigm had been extended too far, at the expense of its institutional and relational basis.

The philosophical strategy of using the premises of the right for egalitarian arguments had been a risky one. It introduced ideas into egalitarianism that had valences of their own. The revival of property and responsibility cut both ways. Egalitarian principles incorporated conditionality into their universality. Even as egalitarians set an extremely low threshold for the point at which these choices affected distributions, they reopened questions about the responsibility of individual agents over their outcomes, the place of individual desert, and the place of contributory principles in welfare states.¹⁵⁰ At a time when the right dominated debate, the strategic decision to include choice, responsibility, private property rights, and the market served to preserve these ideas in “fact-insensitive” principles.¹⁵¹ Liberal philosophy’s capacity for incorporation was such that even these became part of ideal theory.

Meanwhile, other political philosophers were abandoning the heights of ideal theory and problems of ownership. They addressed the changes brought about by the New Right in other ways, by exploring questions of democratic control and legitimacy or developing minimalist approaches to defend the welfare state and its policies.¹⁵² The most sustained minimalist justification of the welfare state during this period was Robert Goodin’s. He aimed to “fight free-market opponents of welfare states on their ground,” deploying “‘internal logic’ arguments” to do so. Goodin defined the welfare state as primarily a “compulsory, collective and largely nondiscretionary” mode of welfare provision.¹⁵³ Conventional justifications for it rested on the claim that if basic needs were not being met, they must be met by the state. Moreover, the welfare state preserved “nonmarket relations and values.”¹⁵⁴ Just as there were interpersonal relationships that should stay outside markets, so the supply of certain goods and services should too.¹⁵⁵ We had a moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable, and this set limits to markets.¹⁵⁶ Yet Goodin wanted to show that these principles, which placed the welfare state “outside the market, outside its operative laws and its underlying justificatory logic,” did not have to carry “all the weight” of justification. It was possible to show, even from market premises, the necessity of the state and nonmarket provision.¹⁵⁷

With welfare provision threatened with privatization, Goodin provided a defense of the welfare state that could be sustained in these circumstances. Not just any market reason for welfare would do. The welfare state could not be justified by the neoclassical logic that saw it as correcting market failures, or by its role in coordinating charitable impulses and providing public goods and benefits that private markets could not. The view of the welfare state as social insurance designed to remedy the failures of private insurance markets did not work either. Insurance was not fundamentally redistributive, but functioned to preserve expectations and remove uncertainty. There were anyway moral objections to insurance models of social welfare: “Insurance norms simply cannot justify the welfare state’s most characteristic function, which is to guarantee to meet the basic needs of those persons who are antecedently most likely not to meet them without assistance.”¹⁵⁸ Instead, Goodin argued that the welfare state provided crucial “preconditions” of the market. Market interaction required people to be “independent market actors.” So dependency had to be eliminated. It was this that the welfare state guaranteed.

Dependency was a signature idea in the right’s assault on the welfare state.¹⁵⁹ It had been part of the debate about poverty and entitlements in the United States since Nixon’s failed guaranteed income plan of the late 1960s; by the 1980s, it had returned to the discourse of the right in two interrelated strands.¹⁶⁰ One was part of a radicalized “moral” defense of capitalism that attacked social security and promised to return “personal control” to citizens. The other was part of a racialized discourse around the “culture” of poverty. As commentators on the right went beyond the use of anti-inflationary hysteria to justify the deregulation of business, the disciplining of labor, and the privatization of social security, they framed the welfare system as a drain on the economy and a drag on capitalism. If money spent on welfare was left in private hands, it would generate sufficient growth to eliminate poverty. Welfare institutions themselves kept people poor by discouraging risk-taking and encouraging “welfare dependency.”¹⁶¹

Such moral defenses of capitalism that saw entrepreneurial culture as the solution to poverty went much further than efficiency arguments for markets. The radical conservative champion of supply-side economics George Gilder, whose Wealth and Poverty (1981) was described as the “bible of the Reagan Administration,” criticized not only Hayek but Friedman for providing merely “technical and pragmatic” defenses of capitalism.¹⁶² This was a long way from the midcentury defenses of free markets or the free enterprise system, and from market liberals’ ethical critiques of capitalism. Gilder condemned social insurance and redistribution as perpetuating poverty by breaking the link between “hard work,” effort, and reward and by stifling entrepreneurship. “Altruism,” he declared, “is the essence of capitalism.”¹⁶³ These attacks on the welfare state in the name of the market and capital rights intersected with the second invocation of dependency arguments, which focused on the restoration of “family values” and “family responsibility”—a key demand of the Christian right and the “pro-family” cultural conservatism of the late 1970s, and a feature of both neoconservative and neoliberal family policy.¹⁶⁴ When Charles Murray’s Losing Ground was published in 1984 amid racist attacks on “welfare mothers,” it rejuvenated conservative arguments about the “pathology” of the “underclass.”¹⁶⁵ These included claims that “poverty programs produced the poverty they paid for.” Only the “work ethic” encouraged through workfare could “cure” the psychological and moral phenomenon of dependency.¹⁶⁶

Goodin tried to reclaim these ideas to defend the welfare state. He wanted to turn the idea of “family responsibility” to “strategic advantage” by showing that moral responsibilities to provide for needy strangers derived from the same source as responsibility to provide for families.¹⁶⁷ “The problem that the welfare state is designed to answer,” Goodin wrote, “is the problem of dependency.” The state did not produce poverty, but rather solved it—in a way that even the moral defenders of capitalism might approve. It was only in the welfare state that “needy citizens” no longer depended—“as they did historically (and, if the New Right gets its way, once again would) under a regime of public or private charity—upon the arbitrary will of those dispensing the benefits.” The problem of dependence had historically been solved through work, wages, or property ownership. For Goodin, the solution was the impersonal and non-arbitrary provision of goods and services to the needy to allow them access, participation, and political “independence.”¹⁶⁸

Bureaucracy here was given a qualified defense, at a time when many on the left saw the welfare state as part of the problem and some left critiques converged with the narratives of the right. Walzer, for instance, accepted that political dependency was the disappointing outcome of the welfare state and proposed instead socialized distributions or new schemes to ensure the “self-respect” and “self-esteem” of the poor.¹⁶⁹ A small group of social democratic and socialist feminist theorists disagreed: they characterized the welfare state as a means not of creating but addressing dependency, and challenged the leftist skepticism about state power, paternalism, and instability.¹⁷⁰ Goodin aligned with them. In doing so, he added a twist. In a series of essays and later in his Reasons for Welfare (1988), he insisted that the problem of dependency was in fact “the problem of exploitation.”¹⁷¹

Dependency and exploitation were not often taken together in these debates. Exploitation and relations of economic subordination were at this time often distinguished from the political category of dependency, which was applied to those outside the workforce. Many who wanted to describe oppressive relations outside the realm of productive labor—or beyond the scope of technical Marxian exploitation—had deployed ideas of subordination, domination, or oppression to differentiate between these realms or had instead expanded the imaginary of work and the worker.¹⁷² Goodin went in the opposite direction, collapsing the distinctions by marrying a republican language of arbitrary power and dependence with the analytical Marxists’ expansive conception of exploitation, in a way that moved both beyond the realm of labor and economic power.¹⁷³ Exploitation was not only a characteristic of economic relations, reducible to “non-reciprocity” and dependency theories of “unequal exchange.” It was a process, not an end-state, and could be personal as much as economic, institutional, or distributive: “Lovers can exploit one another just as surely as can economic classes,” Goodin wrote.¹⁷⁴ “Just as the analysis of the notion of ‘adultery’ is parasitic upon an analysis of the duty of marital fidelity, so too is the analysis of exploitation parasitic upon an analysis of this duty to protect the vulnerable.”¹⁷⁵ Interpersonal exploitation occurred in situations that ought to be characterized by fair play, where power was unequal or monopolistic, and where it was “wrong to play for advantage” when “your relative advantage derives from others’ grave misfortunes.”¹⁷⁶ Yet it could be rendered even more basic: exploitation involved “a violation of our duty to protect the vulnerable,” both people and things.¹⁷⁷ The point of the welfare state was thus to prevent the exploitation of dependencies. By providing needed, nondiscretionary assistance, the state “safeguards those dependent upon its services from exploitation” and secures the minimal independence required “for them to participate in the other market and quasi-market sectors of their society.”¹⁷⁸

This was a defense of the welfare state that turned on vulnerability, not fairness, protected interpersonal life as much as economic relations, and domesticated Marxian categories to appeal to market liberals.¹⁷⁹ The emphasis on avoiding market dependency had parallels with the contemporary analysis of the welfare state as enabling decommodification.¹⁸⁰ The focus on arbitrariness was shared by republican political theorists like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, who were beginning to retheorize freedom as independence and nondomination and who addressed the social dimensions of subordination to challenge liberal egalitarianism.¹⁸¹ With the focus on the vulnerable, Goodin reasserted a utilitarian form of the needs-based welfare state tradition.¹⁸² His was a domestic humanitarianism, akin to the international theories of the moral minimum. His claim that needy strangers were like needy family members was key to his later cosmopolitanism. Yet in certain respects, Goodin also moved to a new site of political philosophy. He used the tools of theories that refocused on social and interpersonal relations to open up liberal philosophy to concepts of domination, exploitation, and relational power. But he trained his attention on the state. With this combination of concerns, Goodin pointed not beyond the basic structure but to a new realm within it. He looked at aspects of the state that many philosophers ignored and that common legal and juridical interpretations of the basic structure precluded—the administration and delivery of welfare rather than the justice of courts, legislatures, and taxation.

Though Rawls had intended the basic structure to capture the administrative state in theory, in practice his primary interests had been in legal and distributive efforts to constrain the administrative and executive functions of the state and its agencies via the Constitution and lawmaking bodies. Subsequent liberal egalitarians had thus focused on distributional questions about inequality and ownership or on juridical ones about laws, courts, constitutions, and the democratic communities that interpreted them. The critiques of Rawls’s institutionalism tended to miss his interest in persons, psychology, and community, but they also thus missed the ways in which the institutions of state had been limited in Rawls’s vision, with its partial representation of the administrative state. With philosophers now as interested in outcomes as in processes, and egalitarians extending the distributive paradigm at the expense of the administrative, these state institutions became even more attenuated. In this context, Goodin stood out by not only looking from legal and legislative institutions to different kinds of associations, relations, or norms but by focusing on different elements of the state—its bureaucratic functions as a welfare provider. In his contribution to the responsibility debates, he focused not on the recipients of goods or the dirty hands dilemmas of great leaders, but on bureaucratic officials and public service providers—what Dennis Thompson had termed the problems of “many hands.”¹⁸³ But Goodin also applied liberal egalitarian lessons to this new subject matter. His work remained characterized by a wariness of bureaucrats: he wanted official discretion in the delivery of welfare to be curtailed, to minimize the risk of exploitation. His remedy for bureaucratic overreach was the liberal one of binding the hands of state officials with impartial rules to constrain discretion—a culture of bureaucratic responsibility that imposed “obligations, duties and responsibilities” on public officials—not the neoliberal alternative of having the market do the job instead.¹⁸⁴ He defended the nonconditionality and universality of welfare provision, but he remained largely silent on how the political constituencies might be built to implement those impartial rules or instantiate the moral and political principles they were meant to express. Bureaucratic expertise was not constrained by party, unions, democracy, or the decisions of collective actors, but by prior ground rules and regulations independent of them.

In these years of debate about equality and socialism, the liberal philosophers who began to think about the state had, for the most part, a different set of concerns: with the justification and authorization of basic institutional rules of social order. Prosperity within nations was no longer as widely shared as in the postwar decades.¹⁸⁵ Demands for social spending to ensure social harmony went unmet, and distributional conflicts threatened stability. A decade after the welfare state’s crisis, philosophers began to explore its motivational and democratic bases and to interrogate the legitimacy and justifiability of the existing liberal order. Midcentury British theorists had seen that state as designed to meet needs and as underpinned by either altruism, social solidarity, or both. Rawls’s theory had required people to have a sense of justice to uphold and comply with the principles of justice. Given widespread declinism, many asked whether those bases still could exist—or whether they ever had.¹⁸⁶ Economists and sociologists argued that “slow growth” and threats to affluence undermined altruism.¹⁸⁷ It seemed that political philosophy would have to adjust in more ways than simply incorporating the premises and tropes of the right. Could a demanding egalitarian or Rawlsian justice theory be justified against this backdrop?

To answer that question and explore the empirical constraints on normative theory, some philosophers revisited the historical circumstances of the welfare state. Goodin claimed that the welfare state had not been founded on altruism but was best understood as a mutual insurance scheme to protect against uncertainty, and thus a result of enlightened self-interest.¹⁸⁸ Rather than attribute the wartime origins of the British welfare state to altruism or increased national solidarity, he argued, the experience of war had increased uncertainty and led people to join a risk-sharing scheme. Miller responded that this view made the welfare state vulnerable to market liberal arguments: if social insurance were the aim, that insurance might just as easily be purchased in a competitive market.¹⁸⁹ Altruism, he argued, better reflected the motivational realities of welfare states, in times of peace as well as war. It made people open to entering into a scheme where the better off were willing to contribute to the welfare of the worse off. British attitudes signaled that altruism still underpinned the welfare state: people did not mind if others privately bought “superior medical care or education,” so long as there was a welfare floor. Yet this did not signal a strong sense of social justice, which would be expressed in the belief that everyone was required to have reciprocal access to the same goods. A social justice basis for the state dispensed with the idea of the welfare floor and required a more “thorough displacement of the market.”¹⁹⁰ In the absence of such a basis, altruism was a “second-best foundation.”¹⁹¹ Goodin disagreed. Transfers should be reconceptualized as “insurance against interrupted earnings.” Counter to what neoliberals argued, this insurance was more efficient when delivered through public rather than private mechanisms. Substantial redistribution could be justified on the insurance view, without appealing to outdated ideas of equality or altruism. The “solidarity” of the shared risk pool was enough.¹⁹²

Compared to this demanding egalitarianism born of either Rawlsian liberalism or analytical Marxism, these defenses of social insurance seemed a lowering of sights. But some insisted such minimalism could deliver socialism. In “The Continuing Relevance of Socialism” (1988), Brian Barry proposed an account of socialism that downgraded ownership and claimed the collective control of life conditions as its central principle, with the practice of social insurance as its embodiment. Resisting the collapse of socialism into egalitarianism, and critical of both the new market socialism and egalitarianism’s obsession with the “free will problem,” Barry argued that “no reorganisation of ownership”—including cooperative—could “overcome the inadequacies of the market.”¹⁹³

Barry looked on in horror at the placid acceptance of libertarianism. He saw the anxieties about the threat that inflation posed to democracy as a ploy “to get democratic approval for tying the hands of elected governments in perpetuity” and “to cripple the ability of governments to make economic policy.” Any concession to public choice or monetarist liberals involved viewing the “democratic state, with its inevitable tendency to regulate, make collective provision, and redistribute, with antipathy.” James Buchanan’s decade-long call for a “constitutional counterrevolution” to undo the work of the New Deal and the Warren Court benefited from “anti-inflationary hysteria,” which had allowed him to “mobilize behind proposals that would, in calmer times, be widely recognized as reactionary twaddle.”¹⁹⁴ Philosophers had given too many concessions to the libertarian right: they took on right-wing ideas of private insurance markets, choice, responsibility, and good behavior and accepted the logic of the market and the corrosion of politics. The idea that once the rules were set down people could act individually but not collectively was pernicious. The triumph of liberal individualism had made people believe that “the worst thing you can say about some area—education, say, or public transport—is that it has become politicised.” Thatcherism’s success lay in the identification of “selfish, antisocial choice with self-interest, so that the choice in favour of the interests which we share collectively is treated as a piece of self-sacrifice.”¹⁹⁵

The challenge was to remove this ideological obfuscation and find a new legitimacy for the state. This could not be done through a “mass conversion to altruism.” The task was one of education, via collective action for shared ends—in trade unions, mutual benefit societies, and public schemes of insurance.¹⁹⁶ To date, the “underlying ethos” of British society was based not on an insurance model of income replacement, but on a means-tested “needs model” of “Good Samaritanism writ large.”¹⁹⁷ It focused on sufficiency, which, Barry argued, contra Goodin, was only made possible by the social solidarity of wartime (rather than the fear of uncertainty war produced). Without that solidarity, welfare benefits could not be expected to be generous. By contrast, an insurance model did not rely on altruism or a high level of solidarity. But it enabled citizens to control their lives. For Barry, it was that control, not ownership, that mattered for socialism.

While British theorists debated the foundational moment of the postwar welfare state, American philosophers began to revisit the American founding in a parallel debate about the legitimation of the American state, which proved as important to the direction of American liberal philosophy as socialism had been in Britain. A number of legal philosophers associated with SELF, including Frank Michelman, Bruce Ackerman, and Cass Sunstein, defended a constitutionalist “civil republicanism” that looked to the American republicanism recently reinterpreted by J.G.A. Pocock for historical models of “popular participation,” not only in legislative assembles but in “a dispersed and continuous process of political discussion among coconstituents . . . and their representatives”—images “of taverns and town meetings, the people out of doors.”¹⁹⁸ The US Constitution, Sunstein argued, prohibited “naked preferences”: the distribution of resources to private groups on the basis of their political power. Society should aim not to reconcile opposed, private, exogenous interests, but to transcend these in a search for a common good, in which preferences were formed through government processes and “collective self-determination.”¹⁹⁹ Liberal constitutional lawyers turned to republicanism and to history. They often did so, however, in order to reinforce the defense of the judiciary and the same legal liberalism they had developed in the aftermath of the Warren Court.²⁰⁰

With the lines between public and private being redrawn, political philosophers defended the public in a variety of ways. Some joined historical models to theories of interpersonal justification. Rawls’s arguments about hypothetical consent, which saw government arrangements as justified if they could or would be accepted by contracting parties, were extended and contested.²⁰¹ Scanlon’s version of contractualism, which determined the acceptability of moral principles by appealing to reasons that no one would reasonably reject, became influential. Rawls had emphasized the importance of the condition of publicity to political justification in A Theory of Justice. But in new work leading up to its long-awaited sequel, Political Liberalism (1993), he developed it further in his account of “public reason.” The practice of public reason–giving—which was built from his Kantian conception of persons as free and equal, and that looked to the deep values that Rawls believed determined a government’s relation to its citizens and their relationship to one another—was meant to provide the political justification to ensure that the rules that regulated society were acceptable to all those who lived under them.²⁰² Alongside the works of Habermas, increasingly read by Anglophone philosophers, these ideas provided the basis for new theories of “deliberative democracy.” Rawlsians explored the parallels between Habermas’s theory of communicative action and ideal speech situation, in which all speech is free of compulsion, and Rawls’s original position. Habermas, in a much-quoted passage, had argued that in this speech situation the “unforced force of the better argument” prevailed. It provided a model of reason-giving through which democratic consensus could emerge.²⁰³

With this account of public reason, a range of egalitarian, liberal, and socialist political and distributional arrangements were given novel forms of liberal moral justification. Just as distributional theories were focusing on individualized initial endowments in a way that threatened to hollow out the public, others thus set about establishing deliberative schemes and procedures to rebuild it. Egalitarians who relied on market mechanisms and assumed exogenous preferences defended ideal procedures for public, rational discussion to transform motivations and preferences. The market, Jon Elster wrote, should give way to “the forum.”²⁰⁴ These theories interrogated the Rawlsian democratic deficit and provided legitimizing correctives to the Rawlsian distributive focus, which risked encouraging a technocratic “administrative” form of politics. “The public” became the alternative to both market and state. In such liberal visions, however, it remained in a non-antagonistic relationship with both.

This marked a return to liberal egalitarian’s postwar roots. It soon became conventional to see Rawls as having transformed his theory while developing his political liberalism by taking a “relativizing,” “pluralist,” and “political” turn.²⁰⁵ But Rawls and the political philosophers who turned to public reason and deliberative democracy were revisiting familiar territory.²⁰⁶ Rawls’s postwar concerns with discussion, present in his early “discussion games” but given up in the interpersonal focus on “you and I” of the original position and reflective equilibrium, were revived. Tocqueville enjoyed another renaissance. This was even true among analytical Marxists; Rawls’s early suggestion that Tocqueville sounded Marxist seemed to be shared.²⁰⁷ The town hall meeting or equivalent forms of democratic politics had been essential to Rawls’s account of the acquisition of the sense of justice. The motivational basis of justice theory was now again held to require democracy of this form.

The move to democratize liberal egalitarianism by appeal to republican and deliberative ideals and liberal democratic institutions was in part a response to the growing popularity of market critiques of the state and bureaucracy. The town meeting was the symbol of liberal philosophers’ efforts to provide democratic alternatives to state and market. Under the influence of these ideas about justification, the rise of deliberative democratic theory took place at some distance from the search for socialist control. There were, however, exceptions: in the early work of Rawls’s student Joshua Cohen, they came together. Cohen argued that deliberative democracy was itself a form of socialism. To get a deliberative procedure modeled on ideal speech situations off the ground required economic democracy. Ideal deliberative procedures were both justification and model for deliberative institutions. Like Walzer, who analogized “town meetings” and “workers’ control,” Cohen thought that socialism followed from democracy.²⁰⁸ He also argued that it was workplace democracy combined with the public control of investment that provided the institutional conditions from which free deliberation could proceed.²⁰⁹ “Normative accounts of socialism commonly focus on the question: who should have the bundle of rights that comprises the ownership of capital?” This was the wrong question. “Social philosophy should not premise a highly unified conception of property and confine our attention to different ways of shifting the bundle around.” Ownership should be “unbundled.” The key socialist ideas were “democratic association” and the dispersal of powers—ideas that collective ownership did not easily accommodate.²¹⁰ Here Cohen broke with the emphasis on ownership and distribution within analytical Marxism and egalitarianism and also rejected the idea that common ownership was definitional of socialism. What mattered instead was an assertion of control and the politicization of the economy.

Cohen moved away from these ideas, leaving behind the political-economic arrangements he had stressed as necessary for the realization of deliberative democracy. He later focused more on “associational democracy” than socialism, alongside Jane Mansbridge and other New Left–inspired theorists of participatory democracy.²¹¹ Their focus on social actors and struggles tried to return a social justice orientation to liberal philosophy, one that had been promised by its origins in responses to the social movements of the 1960s but remained largely unfulfilled. Once ideas of public ownership and large-scale collective control were abandoned in the Third Way debates of the 1990s, more attempts to rebalance away from ownership toward control would culminate in theories of “stakeholder” democracy, as well as “agonistic” critiques of liberalism.²¹² But the question of democratic control that connected the theories of interpersonal justification and deliberation with egalitarian debates about distribution took a back seat among Rawlsians, who rarely joined their demanding egalitarian institutional vision to the kind of account of collective politics in a class-divided society that might have enabled it.²¹³ What remained was a challenge to bureaucracy and depoliticization in the name of democracy and deliberation. The experiments in socialism gave way to a liberal deliberative account of justification and legitimacy that conceived of democratic politics in terms of speech and public reason-giving rather than collective action against injustice. An “ideal proceduralism” came to be seen as the foundation for democratic legitimacy.²¹⁴

At the end of the Cold War, it was clear that the 1980s had marked the success of liberal egalitarianism in certain respects and its contestation in others. Even as the new approach to liberal philosophy triumphed, its politics and its conceptual commitments were challenged. Egalitarianism became more technical, because of its relationship with economics. At the same time, in response to the attack on the welfare state, it became more strategic. The distributive paradigm that turned on questions of ownership was more robust than ever. The demands of equality were at once more radical and more concerned with the themes of the right—luck, choice, and responsibility. Many had begun to contest the fundamental assumptions of Rawls’s conceptual architecture. Some went beyond liberalism to embrace the ideas of the socialist and Marxist left, or looked to the ideas of the right. Others found the marketization of liberalism hard to resist. As G. A. Cohen and others tried to extend the reach of egalitarianism, they shifted the Rawlsian focus from the basic structure to other institutions, relationships, and forms of social power.²¹⁵ Many moved from a general institutional focus to initial endowments, the market, and the forum.

These paved the way for bottom-up challenges to the basic structure, to widen its scope and to include gender, racist, and interpersonal injustices. But there were few top-down reassessments. Political philosophers looked from the rules of the game to the ethos of the players, but still few asked who controlled and managed the teams.²¹⁶ The worries about the place of collective politics did not generate a socialist justification for egalitarian distribution or a philosophical diagnosis of the transformation of the administrative state and global capitalism, but instead liberal theories of public justification and reason-giving. The horizons of philosophers were shaped by defenses and critiques of the market, and so, like nearly everyone else, many misdiagnosed the changes they were living through. In the end, the response to the New Right accelerated the triumph of the philosophical view of politics as distribution and deliberation.