Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Paperback – 11 April 2024

Ordered for a present.Good price, fast delivery.

A fascinating exploration of freedom both political & personal & their limits. It attempts to define fairness , and offer practical ideas of how such a society would look. A detailed political thesis will always illicit disagreement but there is a great deal to admire here. As a UK citizen whose democracy does not include a written constitution I found the discussion of proportional represented fascinating but feel it could have benefitted from considering how qualifications such as those in Germany link in with the overall definition of fairnessHighly recommended !!!!

Our political discourse is split upon lines that are hundreds of years old: left versus right. Markets versus state. Freidman versus Keynes. But what if we could build a new foundation for our politics and economics from the ground up? This is what author Daniel Chandler brings to the table with is appraisal of the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls. He seeks to answer the BIG questions of our times: how to relieve inequality? How do we tackle climate change? How do we bring back integrity to our party politics? How do we build trust in democracy? Chandler introduces the reader to Rawls’ proposals for a “basic liberties principle”, “equality of opportunity”, “the difference principle”, "the just savings principle” and the “original position”. The author’s explanation of these is not entirely clear. Being an economist and philosopher himself Chandler struggles to communicate these principles forcing the reader to really pay attention. If you can wade through the early sections (which introduce and appraise these ideas) then the second half of the book becomes more solutions-orientated and easier to read. We applaud the idea that we can somehow reboot our society around new philosophies the spurn traditional tribal party politics. Unfortunately, Chandler regurgitates a whole bunch of liberal ideas that we have seen before. This is the crux of the problem. Rawls may have given us a new starting point but he offered few actual workable alternatives. His philosophy gave us the tools to re-order our priorities based upon a world where we look upon the status quo with completely fresh eyes and without preconceptions. What is worse is that Chandler’s interpretation of Rawls is just another point of view. It is not the only conclusions that can be drawn and other philosophers have taken a far more right-wing route in their interpretations.You could argue that Chandler has just taken solutions that he likes and made the fit around Rawls’ philosophy rather than the other way around. Not that there is anything wrong with the solutions on offer. They are just a bit tired. Yes the UK could do with a written constitution and a proportional representative voting system. Yes we should get the money out of politics, address climate change, address inequality, raise taxes, embrace new forms of democracy at work. An so on, and on. It is utopian. Platitudinous. There is no route map. As it stands today there is absolutely zero political appetite for changes like this. Chandler throws everything in from patriotism to universal basic income. It is such a mixed bag. A hodge podge of every good idea that has no political traction whatsoever. We live in a real world where good people are fighting a desperate rear-guard action to stop fascism from taking grip. Our political system is so inept that a few extremists can easily convince over half the electorate to vote for ideas so truly awful that they beggars belief. Progressive politics is all but dead and this is just one more book brimming over with lots of great (albeit recycled) ideas that we so desperately need to be made real. To make it work we need great politics and greater politicians and both are in woeful supply. Chandler’s work is well researched and gives us a rallying cry for a new form of progressive politics. Yet it exists in an alternative reality far removed from the challenges we face. We have to fix the underlying operating code of politics so that we can get these real fixes on the table to be discussed. That forum barely even exists. Give us the tools and we will do the job. This book is the tool yet our hands are tied behind our backs. Thoughtful yet frustrating.

I approached this book with some trepidation, it's a chunky volume on a quite complicated subject. It examines the work of John Rawls and his Theory of Justice. However once into it it was a bit of a page turner, certainly one of the better books I have read on this subject. You don't need to have read John Rawls to gain anything from it, in fact you can come into it quite 'cold' and still get a lot out of it.

Really enjoyable read, great ideas laid out and made me feel more hopeful for the future. Hopefully this will inspire some future leaders.

Daniel Chandler is an unqualified admirer of John Rawls, whom he acclaims as ‘the twentieth century’s greatest political philosopher’ (p3, 52), a claim advanced without evidence or proof, whilst contrarily admitting that Rawls made little public impact (p7), and ‘said relatively little about race’ (p185), despite this being a major issue in US society. Otherwise Chandler credits Rawls’ principles with almost universal ethical power. Rawls becomes a messianic figure.Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness generates his principles of justice as equal claim to basic rights and liberties, equal opportunities, and maximising benefits to least advantaged people, his ‘maximin’ (p60) difference principle, all subject to his savings principle of inter-generational equity.Chandler cites Robert Nozick’s critique of Rawls (p77) in defence of personal property rights. He also cites Amartya Sen’s view that Rawls is too ‘transcendental’ (p97). A wider contrast however is that whilst Sen in his ‘The Idea of Justice’ found justice elusive to define (in his example of which of 3 girls should own a flute, the one who made it, the one who can play it, or the one who has no other toys), Rawls’s principles suggest an almost mathematically exact maximin definition of distributive justice.Subsequent chapters on freedom and democracy are rather mundane and repetitive, but the section on education is interesting and stimulating. Funding of early years education to the level of Denmark’s 1.3% of GDP (p176) to achieve the Scandinavian result where inherited income advantage is <20% compared to UK/US 50% (p172) is a compelling argument, as is reducing UK university student fees from being above any peer country (p183), and increasing UK education spend to international levels (p184). But the proposal to ban private schools (p177) is too extreme and counterproductive. The aim should be to level up not down, to create state schools performing equally as well as private schools. This is not impossible. I benefitted from a state school education in the 1960s, and at university found it an equally strong foundation to any privately schooled student. Parents currently contribute some £9bn to the education sector through private schools. Better to let them keep doing that whilst matching private schools offer in state schools.Chandler is 100% right in proposing basic income (p210ff). Automation is reducing aggregate labour income, and conditionality wreaks havoc in poverty and unemployment traps, humiliation and intrusion. UBI is affordable as work with Cambridge Econometrics shows. More on the web site www.ubi.org. Hiking taxes is not the only solution. Wealth taxes have been withdrawn because wealth is a stock and income a flow, because wealth is held in many forms, making administration very complex. Can a wealth tax be paid in wealth? Workplace democracy is a fine concept, except that the skills of management, leadership and entrepreneurship are rare. The German model is appealing, but goes with long term stable stock market funding and a deep social contract which is widely embraced. Chandler then provides 110 page of notes, showing that the book is well researched.

Super interesting used it for my personal statement. Great if your pursuing economics/business/management

pass along!

What happens when you prioritize money and economic growth above all other social, moral, and political considerations? Look around. This is the world neoliberalism created—unbounded greed, delusional faith in “markets,” rampant inequality, political incivility, environmental destruction, and widespread psychopathology. After 40 years of failed “trickle-down economics” based on the shoddy philosophy of Hayek, Freidman, and Nozick, it’s about time for a new plan and a new direction.Luckily for us, we already possess the intellectual foundations for a better society, developed by the twentieth century’s greatest political theorist—John Rawls.In this urgent political manifesto, Daniel Chandler describes and defends Rawls’s theory of justice and outlines its practical implications. The result is a vision for society that transcends the culture wars and reestablishes core values in society that cannot simply be reduced to the maximization of profits.The core ideas of Rawlsian philosophy are simple enough. Society should be, above all, fair—the kind of society you would agree is fair if you didn’t know what position you’d hold in that society ahead of time. It’s the world you would want to live in regardless of whether you were born rich or poor, black or white, male or female, gay or straight. It is, essentially, a society where you would be best off if you happened to be born into the least advantaged position financially, intellectually, or socially. It’s a society that tolerates inequality (in contrast to Communism), but only insofar as it improves the standards of living for the least advantaged.The key idea for Rawls is that in a pluralistic society, we shouldn’t expect to agree on much. We each have our own religions (or no religion) and various ideas about how to live a good life. We therefore can’t base our society on specific religious or philosophical viewpoints because we should never expect these to attain universal assent. Instead, our political institutions should establish and protect basic liberties (that we can all more or less agree on) that allow us to pursue these different goals according to the dictates of our own conscience. And it should establish and promote an equality of opportunity for everyone to do so—not, as is currently the case, an opportunity for the rich to simply get even richer. For Rawls, crucially, economic rights—to own unlimited amounts of property and to exploit others in the process—do not trump all other rights.Chandler not only does a terrific job of explicating the theory and defending it from criticism from both the left and right, but also advances the thought of Rawls by showing us what its practical implications might look like—something Rawls never did, which probably explains why his ideas are not more politically actionable. This book is hopefully, for the sake of all of us, a remedy for this shortcoming.

I had long thought that, as a white middle-class male, Rawls did not pay sufficient attention to questions of race, class and gender. Chandler has done us all a favour by showing how the machinery of the Original Position can be put to work to make out a reform programme that also takes in a good deal of what is awry wiith capitalism in its present form and that might even mitigate the ecological disaster we are facing. Though it is only June, this sure to be my Book of the Year.

This is a clear easy to read explanation of John Rawls ideas such a “justice as fairness “ ,people being free and equal.Lots of ideas for friendly discussion.However I doubt if the times are favourable for the widespread adoption of his theory-that said anyone interested in humanity should read it.

Daniel Chandler writes about John Rawls' work THEORY OF JUSTICE in a clear and relevant way that it is important for contemporary readers to understand.John Rawls wrote in the early 1970s asking "what kind of society would you choose to live in, if you didn't know where you would be within it - rich or poor, black or white, elite or marginalized, gay or straight, Christian or atheist, Muslim or infidel?A decade later, Reaganism suppressed all such questions and questioning. "Fairness" itself was being discredited, so Rawls' philosophy had no 'standing', and it's only now that his ideas can be re-presented fairly with the expectation of being heard seriously.Daniel Chandler's new work is both timely and valuable. This is important, this means something.