Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

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But,” he argues, “the freedom to spend large amounts of money on a private education, or indeed to pass on unlimited amounts of wealth through gifts and inheritances, simply doesn’t have the same importance.

I benefitted from a state school education in the 1960s, and at university found it an equally strong foundation to any privately schooled student.The other half, or rather two-thirds, of the book, is more interesting and likely more impactful, as it presents a take on the application of these theoretical principles on specific (well, to a limited extent) policy questions and areas. The insights from the original position experiment, which Rawls imagined would be so inspiring as to bind fractured societies together, are what Chandler thinks we need now, not only to make societies more equal, but to fill the moral vacuum at the heart of our politics. Based on the work of egalitarian liberal philosopher John Rawls (which this book explains and defends, before focusing on its applications), this vision is far more attractive and intelligent than existing or proposed alternatives.

It is nonetheless perfectly realistic in the sense that few or none of Daniel Chandler’s proposals for a better world would be impossible to bring about if we had the gumption to try to do so. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. Slightly more surprising is the warm welcome Chandler gives to the idea of a universal basic income, paid to all adults at a rate of something like 60 per cent of the median income. Some of Rawls' left-communitarian critics have presented attractive frameworks for foreign policy, such as Walzer's highly engaged internationalism in A Foreign Policy for the Left.Overall, Chandler gives a nice overview of Rawls' philosophy in the first part of the book and provides a nice array of examples of how these ideas could be implemented, with real world examples to back these up, but falls short of explaining how to get around clashes between people's different world views, which I feel needs to be addressed. I hope that Daniel Chandler, with such an impressive debut as an author, will get to work on a sequel that addresses these equally important questions from a Rawlsian perspective combined with the best contemporary empirical scholarship.