The late Gerald Cohen once wrote that there are “at most two books in the history of western political philosophy that have a claim to be regarded as greater than Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’: Plato’s ‘Republic’ and Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan.’”
Unfortunately for us, this leviathan of political philosophy had little to say about what his ideas would look like in practice. Daniel Chandler wants to change that.
Chandler, an economist and philosopher who serves as research director for the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism at the London School of Economics, recently flew across the pond to give a talk at BESI on his new book “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society.”
Recorded on October 17, 2024, Chandler’s talk takes us through his case for a new progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our societies for the better, using Rawls’ humane and egalitarian liberalism as its starting point.
Rawls is perhaps most famous for a thought experiment that aims to clarify the point of view he calls “the original position”: a fair and impartial position that we should take up when determining what’s just. The thought experiment helps us adopt that point of view by asking us to imagine that we’re designing a society, but don’t know who we’ll be within it: rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would we want that society to look like?
Rawls’ answer? Something free and equal — hence the title of Chandler’s book. Applying this insight, Chandler lays out a practical agenda touching on urgent political issues, such as balancing the rights of LGBTQ communities with religious freedoms. He also offers a vision of what an economic system inspired by Rawls’s principles might look like.
After his talk, Chandler welcomed Brian Judge, policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, for commentary, before opening up questions to the floor.
“Rehabilitating liberalism, introducing Rawls to a wider audience, those goals are partly intellectual but also political in the sense that I think that Rawls’s ideas can help provide an intellectual basis for a broad-based, progressive and liberal politics,” said Chandler of his project.
About the Speaker
Daniel Chandler is an economist and philosopher based at the London School of Economics, where he is research director of the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism. He is the author of “Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?” a book Thomas Piketty has referred to as “a fantastic book… [that] provides us with the moral basis for an ambitious egalitarian agenda, and a roadmap for putting this into practice.”
Daniel has degrees in economics, philosophy, and history from Cambridge and the LSE, and was awarded a Henry Fellowship at Harvard where he studied under Amartya Sen. Prior to joining LSE, he worked as a policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, and as a researcher at think tanks, including the Resolution Foundation and Institute for Fiscal Studies.