Equality

T HE M E S FOR T HE 2 I S T CE N T URY

Titles i n this series

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an
Insecure World
Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a
Political Distinction
Alex Callinicos, Equality
Diane Coyle, Governing the World Economy
Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate
James Mayall, World Politics: Progress and its Limits
Ray Pahl, On Friendship
 Equality

ALEX CALLINICOS

Polity
Copyright © A. T. Callinicos 2000

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Callinicos, Alex.
Equality / Alex Callinicos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7456-2324-7 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-7456-2325-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Equality. I. Title.
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I n Memoriam

Margaret Acton
(1919-1997)

Pelline Eyre
(1906-1998)
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ix 1

Inequality Today 1
A world of inequality 1
Poverty and inequality in the advanced
economies 3
Does inequality matter? 12

2 Equality and the Revolution 20

The dynamic of modernity 20
Socialism and equality: Marx, Tawney,

Crosland 26

3 Equality and the Philosophers 36

New Labour and socialist values 36
Rawls and the difference principle 41
Equality of what? 52
 Injustice, exploitation and desert 64
Identity and difference 79
viii Contents

4 Equality and Capitalism 88

Equality without tears 88
On the capitalist roller coaster 104
Equality versus the market 113
The test of reality 120

Afterword 1 30
Notes 134
Index 155
 Preface and
Acknowledgements

Tn venturing incautiously into the domain of normative

political theory, I have incurred some major debts. For
nearly twenty years now I have been a fellow traveller with a
very lively community of political philosophers at the
University of York. At least some of their understanding of
the deep issues raised by the idea of social justice must have
rubbed off on me and may therefore be reflected (no doubt
in distorted form) in this book. My general thinking about
equality has been greatly influenced by the work of three
other philosophers - Etienne Balibar, Jacques Bidet and
Jerry Cohen. I share with them a common back-
ground in the Marxist tradition - though I am sure they
would all think me much too orthodox, I have also learned
from the MA students who, over the years, have asked me to
supervise dissertations devoted to the relationship
between Marx and Rawls.
David Held must share some responsibility for this
book, since he suggested - while I was still reeling with
exhaustion from the effort of executing another of his
commissions - that I write it, and has offered much
helpful editorial guidance once I had succumbed to his
blandishments. David, along wr ith Tony Giddens and John
Thompson, is to be congratulated for developing in Policy a
publishing house where social and political theorists of
X Preface and Acknowledgements

often radically (and sometimes increasingly) divergent

views can flourish. I am also grateful to others at Polity -
Sandra Byatt, Louise Knight and Pam Thomas - and to
Chris Bessant, for making the process of producing this
book as smooth and painless as possible.
Sam Ashman and an anonymous referee read and com-
mented on my manuscript in draft. Chapter 3, the philo-
sophical core of the book, was presented as a paper at the
Political Theory Workshop at York. Though sinking with
flu, I found the discussion very helpful; Matt Matravers
(who has also been an invaluable source of arguments and
references) and Sue Mendus went beyond the call of duty to
provide me with their written comments. I would like to
thank them all: no doubt if I had taken their criticisms as
seriously as I should have, this would have been a better
book.
Equality is dedicated to the memory of two beloved
aunts. There is much bad luck in the world, but I am very
fortunate to have known them.
 Inequality Today

A world of inequality

Rich beyond the wildest imaginings of earlier generations,

the world enters the twenty-first century heaving with
poverty’ and inequality. The United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) produces an annual Human Devel-
opment Report largely devoted to the melancholy task of
documenting the steady growth in global social and econ-
omic inequality. According to the 1999 report, the ratio of
the income of the richest fifth of the world’s population to
that of the poorest fifth had risen from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 60
to 1 in 1990. By 1997 the ratio had risen to 74 to I. 1
In its most headline grabbing aspect, the Human Devel-
opment Report plots the progress of the super-rich.
Between 1994 and 1998 the richest 200 people in the
world more than doubled their net worth, from $440 to
$1,042 billion: the latter sum was equivalent to the income
of 41 per cent of the world’s population. During the same
period, the number of people who must live on less than one
US dollar a day remained unchanged at 1.3 billion. Between
them, Bill Gates, the Walton family (owners of the Walmart
supermarket chain) and the Sultan of Brunei were worth the
combined national income of the 36 least
developed countries in the world. 2
 Inequality Today 2

Inequality is not simply a literally global problem that

divides the rich North from the poor South. Inequalities
within individual countries are also growing. According to
the UNDP, the transition to market capitalism in eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union produced ‘the fastest
rise in inequality ever. Russia now has the greatest ine-
quality - the income share of the richest 20 per cent is 1 1
times that of the poorest 20 per cent.’ Between 1987-8 and
1993-5 the Gini coefficient measuring inequality rose in
Russia at an incredible rate from 0.24 to 0.48. In Latin
America, despite the sporadic waves of euphoria that
swept financial markets over the region’s resumption of
economic growth after the 1980s debt crisis, the Gini
coefficient remained stable at 0.58?
A much more vivid, and more heart-breaking, indica-
tion of the realities of global inequality than all these
statistics was provided by the case of Yaguine Koita and
Fode Tounkara. At the beginning of August 1999 these two
teenagers from Guinea-Conakry were found dead of cold
and asphyxiation in the undercarriage of an airliner at
Brussels airport. A letter found on their bodies
explained their desperate and fatal flight. It read in part:

. . . Your Excellencies the members and leaders of Europe,

We have the honourable pleasure and the great confidence to

write this letter to speak to you about the objective of our
journey and the suffering of us, the children and young
people of Africa . . . It is to your solidarity and your
kindness that we appeal for help in Africa. Help us, we
suffer enormously in Africa, help us we have problems and
some lack of rights for children . . . Thus, if you see that we
have sacrificed ourselves and risked our lives, it is
because people suffer too much in Africa and because we
 3 Inequality Today

need you to fight against poverty and war in Africa. Never-

theless, we want to study, and we ask you to help us study
to become like you in Africa, Finally, we beg you to forgive
us very firmly for having dared to write this letter to such
great personages as yourselves, to whom we owe much
respect . . /

The great personages of Europe paused briefly to shed a tear

for the boys before returning to their usual business of
denying refugees and ‘economic migrants’ access to their
countries.

Poverty and inequality in the

advanced economies

The gap between rich and poor has been growing in the
advanced economies themselves. Out of nineteen OECD
countries, only one saw inequalities in earnings and
income fall during the 1980s and early 1990s. 5 In the
United States, it has often been neo-conservative com-
mentators who have been quickest to note the trend. At the
end of the 1980s, the Republican political analyst Kevin
Phillips documented the systematic efforts of Ronald
Reagan’s two administrations to redistribute wealth and
income from the poor to the rich. Calling the 1980s a new
Gilded Era, he contended: ‘No parallel upsurge of riches
had been seen since the late nineteenth century, the era of
Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers.’6
A decade later, the Washington-based strategy consult-
ant Edward Lutrwak traced the further development of
this process, which he saw as a consequence of the devel-
opment of a new, uncontrolled ‘turbo-capitalism’:
 Inequality Today 4
The United States is on its way to acquiring the income-
distribution characteristics of a Third World country, with a
truly very rich top 1 per cent, and a significant minority
(roughly 12 per cent) which remains below the official
poverty line even though fully employed, forty hours a
week, fifty weeks a year. In New York State, whose econ-
omy is very dynamic and especially turbo-capitalist - it
contains Wall Street, after all - income distribution has
predictably become even more unequal than in the United
States as a whole. In 1996 the average income of the
richest one-fifth of all households was almost twenty times
higher at $132,390 than that of the poorest fifth at $6,787.
Only in Washington DC was the ratio even more extreme at
28.2, while the averages for the United States as a whole
were $117,499 and $9,254, a ratio of 12.7. In New York
State, moreover, the average income of the top-earning
fifth of all households increased by 46 per cent between
1978 and 1996, while that of the poorest fifth of all
households declined by 36 per cent. 7

Britain - the major economy to have followed the US

most closely in its trajectory towards deregulated free-
market capitalism during the 1980s and 1990s - displayed a
similar pattern. The New Labour government elected in
May 1997 is - as we shall see in subsequent chapters - at
best equivocal in its pursuit of greater equality, but
research into the causes of and remedies for poverty and
inequality has flourished under the patronage of the
ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.
According to this research, inequality in the distribution of
income, measured by the Gini coefficient, rose by a third
between 1977 and 1996-7. This reflected, inter alia, a
growing earnings gap - for men, earnings in the top decile
of the workforce rose twice as fast as those in the bottom
 5 Inequality Today

decile, for women four times as fast - and a rise in the

proportion of workless households from 9 per cent in 1979
to 20 per cent in 1995-6. 8
The detailed studies on which these conclusions were
based tend to challenge the idea put forward by neo-
liberal apologists for the policies of the Reagan-Thatcher
era that increased income inequalities are compensated
for by growing job-market mobility, allowing talented and
thrusting individuals to climb the economic ladder:

The pattern of year-to-year mobility . . . can be summa-

rized in terms of what I label the ‘rubber-band* model of
income dynamics. One may think of each person’s income
fluctuating around a relatively fixed ‘longer-term average*,
This value is a tether on the income scale to which people are
attached by a rubber band. They may move away from the
tether from one year to the next, but not too far because of
the band holding them. And they tend to rebound back
towards and around the tether over a period of several
years.9

The studies also contradict the view taken by defenders of

the Anglo-American variant of liberal capitalism that the
relatively high proportion of low-paid jobs in the US and
Britain offer their incumbents both secure employment
and the prospect of economic advancement:

There is strong evidence of a cycle of low pay and no pay.

The low-paid are more likely to be out of work in the
future; those out of work are more likely to be low-paid on
re-entry; and are even more likely to be so if they had been
low-paid prior to being out of work.
The hypothesis that low-paid jobs act as stepping-stones to
higher paid jobs is not supported by the data. The
 Inequality Today 6
evidence presented here suggests that low-paid jobs are
more likely to act as blind alleys than as stepping-stones to
positions higher up the pay distribution. 10

Blind alleys in which the low-paid are trapped, rubber

bands tethering us to our places in the income structure:
these metaphors hardly offer reassuring images of the
‘labour flexibility’ wr hich even centre-left politicians claim
among the chief merits of the Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire
economies. A third Treasury-commissioned paper sum-
marizes the evidence for wage mobility in Britain some- what
more formally:

the picture that is sometimes painted of a mobile society is

far from the truth. In fact, the evidence shows a high
degree of immobility with little long-range wage move-
ments. In addition to this there is evidence showing that
earnings mobility has fallen since the late 1970s. Given
that we have also seen a sharp rise in cross sectional wage
inequality [i.e. the overall distribution of earnings as
opposed to individuals’ movement from one place in this
distribution to another] over this time period, this tells us that
not only has the gap between rich and poor risen but the
ability of the low-paid to close this gap has fallen
considerably. Far from offsetting the increase in cross
section wage inequality, changes in mobility appears [$tc] to
have exacerbated this rise.11

What is revealed in these studies is an embedded structure

of inequality:

Although children frequently do end up in a different

economic position to their parents, for most people the
movement is short-range. This is particularly true of chil-
 7 Inequality Today

dren from advantaged backgrounds. Children with advan-

taged parents are very likely to end up advantaged
themselves . . . around 80 per cent of boys whose fathers
were in the top quarter of the earnings distribution end up in
the top half of the earnings distribution. But the chances of
ending up in the top half of the earnings distribution are
much lower for boys whose fathers were in the poorest
quarter. Just over a third of the boys with parents in the
bottom quarter manage to move up to the top half of the
earnings distribution. The pattern of mobility is not signif-
icantly different for girls.12
Studies such as the ones just cited quite legitimately
tend to concentrate on poverty and inequality as problems
afflicting the worst-off minority of the population. But
broader discussions often proceed on the assumption that
the growth in inequality documented above is one that
pits an affluent majority against an impoverished minority,
the latter frequently stereotyped as an ‘underclass" trapped
in a whole complex of deviant behaviours. Even egalitarian
philosophers often appear to share this belief For
example, Thomas Nagel writes: ‘As things are, democracy
is the enemy of comprehensive equality, once the poor
cease to be a majority.’13 Essentially the same view is at
the heart of the ‘Third Way’ political strategy pursued by
Bill Clinton in the United States and by social-democratic
leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder in the
European Union: since the poor constitute only a minority
of the electorate, the centre left must avoid redistributive
policies that might antagonize the affluent majority.
What is surprising about this very widely held belief is
that those who accept it rarely seem to engage with the very
considerable evidence contradicting it. The problem is
partly a conceptual one. The concepts of equality and
inequality are plainly relational: one can only establish the
 Inequality Today 8
degree to which either obtains by comparing different
individuals’ access to the relevant advantages (the correct
basis on which to make such interpersonal comparisons is
one of the main themes of chapter 3 below). 14 But even
some egalitarians are unwilling to conceive poverty also in
relational terms. Thus G.A. Cohen writes: ‘By plausible
absolute standards, most people in the past were poor,
and the target for redistribution could then be a rich
minority. Now, by the same absolute standards, the stan-
dards in the light of which it is pertinently pointed out that
62 per cent of UK households have videos, only a
minority are poor.’ 13
9 Inequality Today

But this seems much too quick. One can certainly

identify a set of biologically determined basic subsistence
needs the failure to meet which represents a benchmark of
absolute poverty. But the criteria for meeting these basic
needs are likely to change according to the standards
prevailing in the society in question. For example, few
would accept that what a medieval peasant would regard as
adequate housing can count as meeting the basic need for
shelter at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the fact
that a huge segment of the world’s population are forced
to live in shacks and hovels that might once have seemed
acceptable is now treated as evidence of the extent of
poverty today.
Moreover, there are also needs that do not reflect rhe
transhistorical invariants of human existence but whose
fulfilment may be a necessary condition of living an
adequate life in a given society. To lack access to a
telephone, television, or safe and efficient transport is to be
fundamentally disadvantaged in contemporary urban
civilization. Technological change may make much more
complex consumer durables a crucial resource for living an
adequate life. Amid all the hype surrounding the
internet and the world-wide web, the UND P points out
that in 1998 a tiny - generally affluent, educated and male
- 2.4 per cent of the world’s population used the inter-
net? 6 How long before lack of access to a personal com-
puter with a modem becomes the basis of a new form of
disadvantage?
These considerations suggest that poverty, like equality
itself, should be conceptualized in relational terms. Such
indeed is in many cases already the practice. For example, in
official British statistics the poor are defined as those living
on a household income below 50 per cent of the national
 Inequality Today 10
average (after housing costs). In 1996/7, 14 million
people, nearly a quarter of the population of the
United Kingdom, fell under this definition of poverty,
compared to only 4 million in 1979. 17
This growth in the numbers of the poor contrasts with
rising average incomes. In 1999, average earnings for full-
time British workers reached £20,265, a figure that cer-
tainly seems to support the image of a ‘contented'
majority. 18 Averages are, however, often misleading: in an
economy where the income of the better off has been
increasing much faster than that of the worse off, average
earnings may rise without the relative position of the
majority necessarily improving. In 1994/5 63 per cent of the
UK population received a net household disposable
income that was below the average: yet again this repre-
sented a rise compared to 1979, when 59 per cent of the
population were on below-average incomes. 19
These figures suggest only a deterioration in the relative
position of the majority, in Britain at least. A sufficiently
robust rise in absolute living standards could still leave this
majority enjoying considerably greater material comforts
than they did a generation ago - and indeed such is the
picture evoked by surveys that document the steady rise in
household ownership of a wide variety of consumer dur-
ables many of which (such as video recorders and personal
computers) did not exist thirty or forty years ago. A rising
tide lifts all boats, as John F. Kennedy once put it.
Yet, despite this profusion of new products for the mass
market, the greatest capitalist economy of them all, the
United States, presents a very different case, one where
living standards have come under constant downward
pressure over the past generation. This fact - which has,
astonishingly, gone largely ignored in both political and
 11 Inequality Today

theoretical debates - has nevertheless been thoroughly

documented and analysed by commentators and research-
ers of different political persuasions. Thus the neo-conser-
vative Luttwak writes:
Measured in constant 1982 dollars, the average earnings of
all ‘non-supervisory’ American employees working in all
industries and all services, other than agriculture or govern-
ment, peaked in 1978 at $8.40 an hour, only to decline to
$7.78 in 1980, $7.77 in 1985 and $7.52 in 1990, finally
increasing during the post- 199 3 boom, but even then only
by very little and very slowly, from $7.50 in 1996 to $7.66
in 1997?°
t

The Marxist historian Robert Brenner presents a similar

picture in his monumental study of post-war capitalism:

Between 1979 and 1990, real hourly compensation in the

[US] private business economy grew at an average rate of 0.
1 per cent. The trend in these years for hourly real wages and
salaries (excluding benefits) was far worse, falling at an
average rate of 1 per cent. At no time previously in the
twentieth century had real wage growth been anywhere so
low for anywhere so long.21

So too does the economic journalist Jeffrey Madrick from a

left-liberal perspective:

As a result of these factors, the average real income of

families was only a few' percentage points higher in 1993
than in 1973, and that largely because so many more
spouses were working. There have been shorter periods
when wages have fallen sharply, but as far as we can tell,
there has been no other twenty-year period since 1820
when average real wages fell, with the possible exception of
the years just before and after the Civil War. 22
 Inequality Today 12
Madrick goes on to document the consequences of what
Brenner describes as this ‘repression of wages’ - a longer
working year, up by a week and a half since 1973, for full-
time male employees; the largest increase in the propor- tion
of working spouses in the poorest households,
suggesting that many women entered the labour market
not in search of ‘empowerment’ but driven by financial
hardship; a decline in home ownership among the young; a
fall also in the number of cars purchased per worker as
Detroit shifted towards producing luxury vehicles such as
light trucks for the affluent middle class; shrinking propor-
tions of employees covered by private pension and health
insurance schemes. ‘In general,’ he concludes, ‘America is
evolving into a two-tier society, and the upper tier is
shrinking.’ 23
Remarkably then, in an era proclaimed as marking the
definitive triumph of liberal capitalism over the systemic
challenge represented by socialism and communism, the
working majority in the most powerful economy in the
world experienced, perhaps for the first time, something
resembling what Marx called ‘absolute impoverishment’.
Elsewhere in the advanced societies the picture is less
stark. Nevertheless, the same processes arc at work, as the
relentless drive to reduce costs in the face of international
competition places the jobs, wages and conditions of the
bulk of the working population under constant pressure.
One leading social-democratic economist, Will Hutton,
has summed up the consequences of this process in
Britain during the Tory years: ‘more than half the people
who are eligible to work are living either on poverty
incomes or in conditions of permanent stress and insecu-
rity’. He divides the working population into three groups.
‘The first 30 per cent are the disadvantaged1 - the unem-
 13 Inequality Today

ployed, those on government schemes and the like. ‘The

second 30 per cent are made up of the marginalized and the
insecure. This category is defined not so much by
incomes as by its relation to the labour market/ Those
falling under it ‘work at jobs that are insecure, poorly
protected and carry few benefits. This category1 more than
any other is at the receiving end of the changes blowing
around Britain’s offices and factories; it includes the grow-
ing number of part-timers and casual workers/ Finally,
there are 4 the privileged - the just over 40 per cent whose
market power has grown since 1979’. 24
The picture Hutton paints is, if anything, too optimistic
since he includes in the category of ‘the privileged’ those full-
time employees who have held their positions formore than
two years: many of these have come under intense pressure as
a result of the sustained efforts to restructure both public and
private bureaucracies along more profit- able lines. Indeed,
the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that various
developments - among them, chronic mass unemployment,
the growth in contract labour and flexible production, and
‘the deterritorialization of the enterprise" now freed from
any specific attachment to region or nation - mean that
‘insecurity [precarite] is everywhere today’: ‘Objective
insecurity supports a generalized sub-
jective insecurity which today affects, at the heart of an
advanced economy, the majority of the workers and even
those who are not or not yet directly hit.’ Indeed, this is part
of ‘a mode of domination of a new type, based on the
institution of a generalized and permanent condition of
insecurity aiming to compel the workers to submission, to
the acceptance of exploitation’. 25
 Inequality Today 14
Does inequality matter?

With these remarks of Bourdieu’s we plainly move beyond

the facts of inequality today to our moral and political
response to them. For some these facts require the kind of
interpretation present in Nagel’s observation that ‘[w]e live
in a world of spiritually sickening economic and social
inequality, a world whose progress toward the acknowl-
edgement of common standards of toleration, individual
 Inequality Today 15

liberty and human development has been depressingly

slow and unsteady.’ 26
But, of course, many would reject such an interpreta-
tion. For the neo-liberal defenders of unrestrained capital-
ism, the inequalities found in the advanced countries at
least are largely the consequence of individuals’ free
choices over the use of their talents and resources in a
market economy. As has been most forcefully argued by
Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the resulting
differences in wealth and income do not constitute an
injustice requiring political action to remedy it. Neo-
liberals tend to interpret the residual inequalities that they
do not believe can be explained in these terms as the
perverse effects of statist attempts to interfere in the
workings of the market. For some, among them adherents
to the New Right as well as supporters of more traditional
conservative views, the persistent inequality between black
and white that so scars American society in particular is to
be explained by genetic differences which, they claim,
underlie African-Americans’ poor performance in intelli-
gence tests.
It is hardly surprising that the political right should seek
either to explain away or even to defend social inequality.
But an impatience with the ideal of equality is to be found
even among those who identify with the contemporary
centre left. For example, David Goodhart, editor of the
crashingly dull British monthly Prospect, recently declared:

The old fixation with the ‘gap’ [between rich and poor] is rhe
problem. A third way theory of fairness should state that
the gap does not matter - or at least that it matters less than
the life-chances of the people at the bottom. Il these are
rising steadily then it does not matter that the rich are
 Inequality Today 16

getting even richer . . . ‘Gap’ thinking is also based on a

defunct zero-sum idea of wealth creation. In a 19th-
14 Inequality Today
century mining village it was clear that the mine owner’s
wealth in a sense caused the poverty of the miners. Other
than the odd sweat-shop, that is not the case today. The
poverty of the poor does not create the richness of the rich
and vice versa. Bill Gates has not amassed a fortune of
$150 billion by exploiting the poor of Seattle. 27

The evidence presented in the previous section should be

sufficient to put in question Goodhart’s complacent
belief that ‘the life-chances of the people at the bottom1 , or
indeed of the majority, ‘are rising steadily’. His remarks
about Bill Gates are indicative of the reverential attitude
that supporters of the Third Way adopt towards the super-
rich. This represents something of a cultural shift certainly
on the British left, if one recalls Denis Healey’s promise
in 1973, when unveiling to a delighted Labour Party7
conference the tax changes that he implemented after
becoming Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer the follow-
ing year: ‘There are going to be howls of anguish from the
eighty thousand people who are rich enough to pay over
seventy five per cent on the last slice of their income.’ 28 By
contrast, in a recent joint policy statement Tony Blair
and Gerhard Schroder announced: ‘we want a society
which celebrates successful entrepreneurs just as it does
artists and footballers1. 20 Whether this ambition is consist-
ent with the egalitarian professions both leaders also make is
something we will explore in the rest of this book.
In any case, the ideal of equality is too deeply embedded
in the political culture of the Western liberal democracies to
be simply dismissed as ‘defunct’. In a striking and
widely discussed essay, the Italian political philosopher
Norberto Bobbio recently challenged the idea that the
collapse of the Communist bloc had rendered the distinc-
tion between left and right obsolete. Drawing on both
historical and conceptual considerations, he argued that
 Inequality Today 15

'the criterion most frequently used to distinguish between

the left and the right is the attitude of real people in
society to the ideal of equality’. Pointing to the facts of
global inequality, Bobbio declared:

Faced with this reality there is a very clear distinction

between the right and the left, for which the ideal of
equality has always been the pole star that guides it. One only
has to shift one’s attention from the social questions within
individual states which gave rise to socialism in the last
century to the international social question in order to realize
that the left has not only not completed its task, it has hardly
commenced it. 30

Bobbio seems to me fundamentally right. 31 If the left is not

committed to equality, then it cannot be said to exist in any
meaningful sense. But neither the existence nor the nature
of this commitment can be taken for granted.
Goodhart’s clumsy attack on 'gap thinking’ did at least
have the merit of drawing attention to the confusion in
contemporary thinking about equality. Rarely has this
confusion been better exemplified than in Tony Biair’s
announcement: 'The class war is over. But the struggle for
true equality has just begun.’ 32
This little book is intended to reinforce Bobbio’s argu-
ment in three ways. In the first place, in the following
chapter, I consider the historical meaning of the modern
ideal of equality, tracing its origins in the great bourgeois
revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and its development in socialist thought. Secondly, it is a
remarkable fact that, in the past generation, while social and
economic inequalities have been growing dramati- cally,
the English-speaking world has produced a group of
philosophers committed, despite their other differences, to
articulating a rigorous and defensible egalitarian con-
21 Inequality Today

ception of social justice. Their founding text is, of course,

John Rawls’s great book A Theory of Justice, first published
in 1971, but, among others, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya
Sen, T.M. Scanlon, G.A. Cohen, Brian Barry, Thomas
Nagel, Richard Ameson and John Roemer have contrib-
uted to an extraordinarily rich and sophisticated debate.
Probably the best description of this philosophical cur-
rent is ‘egalitarian liberalism’. 3 '1 ‘Liberalism 1 is understood
here in the North American sense: like social democrats,
egalitarian liberals favour state intervention in and regula-
tion of the market (but not its abolition) in the interests of
social justice. The subtlety and depth of these philosophers’
efforts to clarify and defend the concept of equality have
been in more or less inverse proportion to their influence
on public policy.34 One aim of this book is bring their work
to bear on current political debates: this I seek to do in
chapter 3, which is devoted to a discussion of some of the
leading themes of egalitarian liberalism. Thirdly, in the
concluding chapter I return to the state of the contempor-
ary world, considering some of the causal connections
between the inequalities documented above and the econ-
omic structures of capitalism: understanding these connec-
tions, as I try’ to show, is a necessary condition of devising
any political strategy' capable of translating the philosophi-
cal theory of egalitarian justice into reality.
Jacques Bidet has recently lamented the ‘schizophrenia’ in
which

contemporary critical thought seems to oscillate between a

recourse to the sociologies of suspicion to which Marx
opened the way, when it wants to think the world as it is, and a
fascination with contractualism, with the doctrine of the rule
 Inequality Today 22
of law [TEtat de droit], the rights of man and of the citizen,
when it is trying to formulate a social project [wrc projet de
societe] ,35
I would not for a moment claim to have overcome here this
schizophrenia between Marx and Rawls, between critical
social theory and normative political philosophy.
Nevertheless, it does seem to me essential when consider’
ing the question of equality and inequality to engage in both
- that is, to offer both philosophical arguments and socio-
economic analysis. Arguably, this requirement is a crucial
feature of A Theory of Justice itself Brian Barry writes:

If Rawls had achieved nothing else, he would have been

important for having taken seriously the idea that the
subject of justice is what he calls ‘the basic structure of
society’ . . . Where we talk about the basic structure of
society we are concerned with the way in which institutions
work systematically so as to advantage some and disadvan-
tage others. Rawls’s incorporation of this idea of a social
structure into his theory represents the coming of age of
liberal political philosophy. For the first time, a major
figure in the broadly individualistic tradition has taken
account of the legacy of Marx and Weber by recognizing
explicitly that societies have patterns of inequality that
persist over time and systematic ways of allocating people to
positions within their hierarchies of power, status and
money. 56

This implication of Rawds’s theoretical enterprise has

not, however, been much reflected in the intellectual
practice of either political philosophers or social theorists
- hence the oscillation of which Bidet complains. In this
book, however, I seek to engage wr ith both philosophical
 23 Inequality Today
concepts and socio-economic structures. In doing so, I
concentrate to a large extent on Britain, and therefore
inevitably touch on the debates provoked by the New
Labour ‘project’. This may seem to involve the error,
wittily denounced by Gore Vida! during the 1997 general
election, of paying excessive attention to the affairs of a
mere province of the American empire. Nevertheless,
Britain under New Labour has come to play a certain
exemplary role. It is true that the basic idea of the Third
Way as a strategy for the ‘centre left’ (an expression whose
popularity is itself a sign of the influence of American
‘New Democrats’, for whom the word ‘socialism’ is
unmentionable) was coined by Bill Clinton and his advi-
sors in the run-up to the 1992 presidential election. The
contemporary United States is frequently cited as a model
by New Labour.
But, after a White House seminar devoted to the Third
Way drew, along with Clinton and Blair, the German
Chancellor, and the prime ministers of Italy and the
Netherlands, one of NewT Labour’s most assiduous media
courtiers announced that ‘the Third Way project . . . is
extraordinarily successful. It began as a British-American
ideological venture; now European and other leaders are
turning to it for inspiration, because they think it may
have something that helps them to understand a shifting,
shrinking world.’37 There may be some virtue, then, in
considering the egalitarian claims of the Third Way where it
is pursued with all the formidable powers of a British
government with a large parliamentary majority. ‘De te
fabula narratur!' - ‘the story is told of you’, to quote
Marx’s warning to the world that it too would suffer the
travails of industrial capitalism first experienced by
Britain. 38
 Inequality Today 24
Finally, I should perhaps say a word about the position
from which this book is written. My own intellectual and
political starting point is the classical Marxist tradition. For
reasons that I touch in chapters 2 and 3, Marx and his
successors were at best ambivalent about equality
conceived as an ethical ideal. One of the attractions of
egalitarian liberalism is that it offers intellectual resources
 Inequality Today 25

with which to help remedy the resulting gaps in the

Marxist tradition. 39 Nevertheless, this book is emphati-
cally not an attempt to develop a Marxist theory of egali-
tarian justice. Rather, my concern is to consider the best
contemporary philosophical work on equality, and to show
that taking its political implications seriously would
require a dramatic transformation of the present social
and economic order. If there is anything distinctively
Marxist about this book, it lies in the contradiction it
seeks to expose between the normative claims of egalitar- ian
liberalism, which does not directly challenge capitalist
institutions, and the continued existence of these
institutions. 40
 2
Equality and the Revolution

The dynamic of modernity

As a concrete social and political demand, equality is a

child of the great revolutions that inaugurated the modem
world. ‘The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as
the richest he, and therefore . . . every man that is to live
under a government ought first by his own consent to put
himself under that government,’ said Colonel Rain-
borough, a leader of the Levellers, the radical wing of the
English Revolution, during the Putney debates of October
1647? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, & the pursuit of happiness . . Nearly fifty years
after he wrote these words in the American Declaration
of Independence of 1776, Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed the
same view in his very last letter: ‘The general spread of
the light of science has already laid open to every view the
palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been
born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few
booted and spurred, ready to ride them
legitimately, by the grace of God.’ 2 And, of course, the
Great French Revolution of 1789-94 nailed to its mast
the watch-words liberte, egalue, fratemite.
 Equality and the Revolution 28
Equality as a political ideal thus emerged from the
struggle against the hierarchical order of the European
anden regime: even the American revolutionaries of 1776
turned against the Hanoverian state the ideologies of
republican liberty and natural rights that had played their
part in the seventeenth-century battles against Stuart
absolutism. To a society where an ordered structure of
ranks and estates was supposed to reflect the divine will was
counterposed one where all had a right to consent to and
participate in their government. As such, then, equal- ity
was conceived essentially as a political condition, justi-
fying, as Rainborough argues, government by consent
rather than any changes to the social and economic struc-
ture. Indeed, the fear of the propertied classes that enfran-
chising the propertyless masses would lead to social
revolution ensured that even manhood suffrage made only
fitful progress in Europe during the century after the
French Revolution.
Nevertheless, comparatively early on in this protracted
process, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America
(1835, 1840) discerned the emergence of a new form of
society characterized by ‘equality of condition’. Tocque-
ville’s analysis of democratic society conceived equality
less as a well-defined normative concept, or a specific set of
institutions or social structures, than as a mentalite or
structure of feeling. ‘Equality of condition’ represented
the absence of the status hierarchy constitutive of aristo-
cratic societies and therefore was consistent with the
existence of considerable differences in wealth and
income. Tocqueville was chiefly interested in tracing the
spiritual consequences of this new social order, its effects on
how citizens conceived themselves and their relation- ship
to public life; in doing so, he formulated a remarkably
 Equality and the Revolution 29
prescient account of the privatized individualism that is so
central a feature of modern Western societies. 3
 Equality and the Revolution 30

It is, however, the failure to realize equality as an ideal,

rather than these supposed consequences of ‘equality of
condition’, that has dominated the modem debate. The
contrast between aspiration and reality is built into the
initial formulations of the ideal. Most obviously, Rainbor-
ough and Jefferson speak of the equality of men. The
Levellers sought actually to enfranchise only property-
owners. Jefferson, notoriously, was a Virginia slave-owner:
‘how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the
drivers of negroes?’ asked Dr ohnson during the
American Revolution. 4 The ideal of equality came, it
seemed, packed with tacit or explicit clauses excluding
women, the poor, slaves and many other groups from its
ambit.
In a remarkable essay, Etienne Balibar has suggested
that these limitations imply not the abandonment of
equality as an ideal, but its radicalization. He argues that the
fundamental meaning of the main programmatic doc- ument
of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen of August 1789, is precisely the
equation of Man and Citizen: individual humans, simply
by virtue of their humanity, are political subjects. This
equation, however, implies another, that of equality and
liberty. This is what Balibar calls 'the prop- osition of
egaliberte'. By this ‘deliberately baroque . . . port- manteau-
word’ he does not mean ‘the intuitive discovery or the
revelation of an identity of the ideas of Equality and of
Liberty’. Rather, ‘it is the historical discovery, which
one could in fact call experimental, that their extensions are
necessarily identical. To put it plainly, that the situ- ations in
which each is present or absent are necessarily the same.’ In
other words: 'There are no examples of restrictions or
 31 Equality and the Revolution
suppression of liberties without social ine- qualities, nor of
inequalities without restriction or suppres-
sion of liberties.’5
Balibar draws two main implications from the idea of
egaliberte:

the meaning of the equation Man = Citizen is not so much

the definition of a political right as the affirmation of a
universal right to politics. Formally at least - but this is the
very type of a form that can become a material weapon - the
Declaration opens up an indefinite sphere of the ‘polit-
icization’ of demands for rights which reiterate, each in its
own way, the requirement of a citizenship or of an institu-
tional, public, inscription of liberty and equality: in this
indefinite opening is inscribed as well - and as early as the
period of the Revolution one sees the attempt - the
demand for the right of wage-earners or dependants such as
women and slaves, later that of the colonized. This right finds
itself formulated later in the following form: the
emancipation of the oppressed can only be their own work,
which underlines its ethical significance.h

Balibar argues, secondly, that intrinsic to *the proposition of

egaliberte' is its ‘absolute indeterminacy' . There is always a
discrepancy between the abstract equation of equality and
liberty and the concrete historical circumstances in which a
particular version of this statement is uttered:
‘ There will be a permanent tension between the conditions
that historically determine the construction of institutions
conforming to the proposition of egaliberte, and the hyper-
bolic universality of the statement.’ 7 This tension gives the
idea an inherently subversive character.
This account of egaliberte runs contrary to one of the
main assumptions of the liberal tradition, which, from
 Equality and the Revolution 32
Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to John Rawls and Isaiah
Berlin, has tended to treat equality and freedom as necess-
arily in conflict with one another. I return briefly to this
issue in chapter 3 below. For the present, it is more
important to stress that Balibar offers an intriguing analy-
33 Equality and the Revolution

sis of how the political demands of the great revolutions of

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have an inher- ent
tendency to outflank themselves. Ideals that were
intended initially to have quite a narrow reference, to
benefit primarily white men of property, proved capable of
indefinite extension. The result is a process of perma- nent
revolution in which a succession of new political
subjects - workers, slaves, women, colonial subjects, peo-
ple of colour, oppressed nationalities, lesbians and gays,
disabled people . . . - emerge to stake their claim to the
liberty and equality won by earlier struggles.
Jacques Bidet has constructed an ambitious theory
intended to show that this dynamic is inherent in modern-
ity itself. He argues that all modern societies presuppose
what he calls a ‘ metastructure’ constituted above all by
‘contra ctuality*, which embraces both the transactions
among individuals on the market and the social contract by
which autonomous agents agree to govern themselves. The
aspiration to egaliberte implicit in this metastructure is,
however, ‘reversed’ in the structures of domination and
exploitation that survived the ancien regime. But, Bidet
insists, ‘in modernity, domination, exploitation and vio-
lence are based on a, metastructural, reference to contrac-
tuality, to free and equal relations*. Thus, for example,
the structure of class inequality ‘cannot be conceived
except by starting from it [the metastructure], as its
“reversal”: the structure constitutes itself (and therefore can
only conceive itself) in the reversal of the principle it poses,
it builds itself under the form of the promise
unfulfilled, the pact denied’. 8
Bidet’s concept of the metastructure doesn’t seem to me
particularly helpful inasmuch as it rests on the claim that
modem societies are best understood by starting from the
34 Equality and the Revolution
promise of egaliberte that constantly shadows their
progress. As Bidet himself says, ‘the metastructure only
 Equality and the Revolution 2 5

ever advances in the conditions of the structure, in con-

flict’.4 In other words, the demand for freedom and
equality is made in societies that systematically deny it, that
indeed are riven by social and political struggles. What
is it about the structure of these societies that
encourages the aspiration towards egaliberte? In my view, it
is the contrast between the fact that capitalist societies treat
their members as legally free and equal and the
systematic socio-economic inequalities that they still har-
bour in their depths. Thus Marx argues that ‘the concept of
human equality’ can acquire ‘the permanence of a fixed
popular opinion . . . only in a society where . . . the
dominant social relation is the relation between men as
possessors of commodities’ - a relationship that, as we
shall shortly see, he believes gives rise to capitalist exploi-
tation. 10 This structural conflict feeds the political dis-
course of freedom and equality rather than, as Bidet
suggests, that discourse providing the necessary starting-
point for understanding modernity. 11
In any case, however precisely we theoretically interpret
it, the historical reality seems plain enough. Since the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, no inherited
institution or practice can any longer claim justification by
appeal to tradition or to divine sanction. Every social
relationship is open to question, in an endless debate in
which every' human must be treated as an autonomous
subject possessing the same rights as others. The rectifica-
tion of particular injustices - for example, the status hier-
archy of the old regime or New World chattel slavery simply
draws attention to others - the exploitation of workers,
say, or the racial oppression of black people - that
themselves demand remedy. The very generality of the
demand for egaliberte puts it in permanent conflict with the
particular historical conditions that prevail at any time.
This analysis casts Tocqueville’s account of ‘equality of
37 Equality and the Revolution

condition’ in a different light. It suggests a more dynamic

picture, in which existing social and political arrangements
are constantly liable to subversion by new demands to
extend the application of egalibene. If this is right, then the
proposals cited in the previous chapter that we abandon the
search for equality are likely to be disappointed: as long as
there are significant discrepancies in wealth and power,
there will be movements denouncing them as unjustified
and demanding their removal.

Socialism and equality:

Marx, Tawney, Crosland

The significance of socialism in this context is that it

originated in the recognition of the discrepancy between the
French Revolution’s promise of egalite and the reality of the
society that emerged from the upheavals after 1789.
Theodore Zeldin describes the concrete form taken by
this discrepancy in the Napoleonic Code Civil:

Troplong, First President of the Cour de Cassation, and

author of the leading commentary on the Civil Code . .
revealingly declared himself satisfied with it because he
considered that democracy existed when men have an
equal right to the protection of the law ‘in conditions of
inequality which they have created for themselves by the
legitimate exercise of their natural powers’. The Civil Code
certainly confirmed these inequalities. It had a narrow view of
citizenship, which it confused with the possession of
property, and so it made the penniless worker almost an
outlaw. It was concerned not with making men equal but
with protecting property. 12
 Equality and the Revolution 38

This duplicitous equality is well captured by Anatole

France’s bon mor. ‘The bourgeois law forbids with the
same majesty both the rich and the poor to sleep under the
bridge.’ But it was Marx who subjected it to the most
stringent analysis. In a famous passage in Capital he
considers the contract struck by capitalist and worker on the
labour market. This transaction takes place in the
‘sphere of circulation or commodity-exchange',

a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive

realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham. Free-
dom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us
say labour-power, arc determined only by their own free will.
They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law .
. . Equality, because each enters into the relation with the
other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they
exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each
disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because
each looks to his own advantage? ’

Once, however, we follow the capitalist and the worker

into ‘the hidden abode of production’, the picture
changes. The equality between them is only formal; really
they are unequal. For the worker is ‘free in the double
sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-
power as his own commodity, and that, on the other
hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of
them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization
[Verwirklichung] of his labour’. The worker enjoys political
and legal freedom: he does not suffer from the kind of
personal disabilities imposed on slaves or serfs. At the
same time, however, his only economically relevant prop-
erty is his labour-power. Denied access to the means of
 39 Equality and the Revolution
production, he is ‘compelled by social conditions to sell the
whole of his active life, his capacity for labour’. 14 The
capitalist uses his control of the means of production to
strike a highly favourable bargain: once employed, the
worker produces commodities for the capitalist under the
latter’s control in exchange for a wage that represents only
part of the value he creates. The worker’s apparent free-
dom and equality with the capitalist conceal an underlying
subordination and inequality whose outcome is the for-
mer’s exploitation.
Marx’s account of capitalist exploitation, and in particu-
lar the burning anger with which he describes the con-
dition of the working class, naturally invites the response
that he is morally condemning capitalism for violating
some universal principle of justice. The ostensibly egalitar-
ian ‘needs principle’ that he puts forward in the ‘Critique of
the Gotha Programme’ - ‘From each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs’’ - could be taken as
the basis of his theory of justice? 5 Yet Marx is consis-
tently hostile to any appeal to normative concepts. Under-
lying this stance seems to be the belief that the materialist
conception of history entails a relativist account of ethics in
which moral discourse is reduced to a reflection of the
requirements of the prevailing mode of production. This
implies that there are no universal ethical principles applic-
able to all forms of society. Yet Marx himself describes
capitalist exploitation as the ‘ theft of alien labour-time' ,
which, since he also makes it clear that this exploitation does
not violate capitalist property laws, implies appeal to
some transhistorical principle of justice. 16
Norman Geras, in his definitive treatment of this highly
controversial subject, offers the following proposal for
making sense of Marx’s contradictory statements on jus-
 Equality and the Revolution 40

tice and exploitation: ‘Marx did think capitalism was

unjust but he did not think he thought so.’17 In other
words, Marx’s erroneous meta-ethical theory prevented
him from seeing universal moral principles as anything
but the expression of historically specific class interests
and therefore from recognizing the basis on which he
himself condemned capitalist exploitation. This confusion
does not, however, stop Marx highlighting in the ‘Critique
of the Gotha Programme’ an important problem concern-
ing the relationship between any principle of egalitarian
justice and individual differences, but, as I argue when
discussing this problem in chapter 3, he is best understood
here as proposing a more complex egalitarianism rather
than as rejecting it altogether.
Marx also had a more directly political objection to
basing socialist demands on appeal to some principle of
distributive justice, namely that it limits these demands to
the partial reform rather than revolutionary transformation
of capitalism. Thus he argued that proposals for redistri-
bution tended to focus on the redistribution of income,
reflecting a failure to recognize that ‘[a]ny distribution
whatever of the means of consumption is only a conse-
quence of the distribution of the conditions of production
themselves.’18 Workers’ exclusion from the means of pro-
duction was responsible for their exploitation. Only a
revolution through which they gained control of these
resources offered a real remedy: the redistribution of
income through, for example, wage increases and progres-
sive taxation offered only the partial, and necessarily fra-
gile, amelioration of a fundamentally exploitive condition.
On the face of it, however, there seems no logically
compelling reason why a concern with distribution should
necessarily confine itself to that of the means of consump-
 41 Equality and the Revolution
tion rather than that of the means of production. Indeed, in
the following passage from Capitals Marx himself seems to
treat the collective ownership of the most basic produc- tive
resource - the land - as a moral principle:

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation,

the private property' of particular individuals in the earth will
appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in
other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all
42 Equality and the Revolution

simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the

owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its
beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to
succeeding generations, as boni panes familias [good
householders]. 19

It is nevertheless true, as we shall see in the two sub-

sequent chapters, that egalitarian theorists often focus on the
redistribution of income rather than that of productive
assets. This is generally the case, for example, with the
social-democratic tradition, where the problem of equality
has attracted far more attention than among Marxists.
Among the Fabians, for example, Shaw advocated equal-
ity of income: ‘the only satisfactory plan is to give every-
body an equal share no matter what sort of person she is, or
how old she is, or what sort of work she does, or who or wr
hat her father was’.20
Equality also stands at the centre of the thought of two of
the most influential figures in the British Labourist
tradition, R.H. Tawney and Anthony Crosland. Tawney,
writing during the Great Depression of the 1930s, did not
rely on any claim that humans are equal in capacity or
attainment - indeed, in a passage that offers a salutary
warning of the historical relativity of apparently solid
scientific judgements, he appealed to ‘Dr Bun’s admirable
studies of the distribution of educational abilities among
school-children’, studies which have long since been
exposed as resting on the fraudulent manipulation of the
evidence from IQ tests. 21
Even the economic inequality that Tawney documented
was of concern primarily for its moral and spiritual con-
sequences: ‘the machinery of existence - property and
material wealth and industrial organization, and the whole
43 Equality and the Revolution

fabric and mechanism of social institutions - is to be

regarded as a means to an end, and . . . this end is the
 Equality and the Revolution 31

growth towards perfection of individual human beings’.

I he chief evil of the class divisions in mid-twentieth-
century Britain lay in the tendency they implied to value
individuals according to their wealth and income. Equality
of opportunity in a society where the concentration of
economic power placed individuals in very different cir-
cumstances was insufficient to remedy this situation: ‘In the
absence of a large measure of equality of circum-
stances, opportunities to rise must necessarily be illusory.
Given such equality, opportunities to rise will look after
themselves.’ The restoration of moral community7
depended on the reduction of inequalities in economic
power and in ‘inequality of circumstance or condition,
such as arises when some social groups are deprived of the
necessaries of civilization which others enjoy’.22
The remedy to this situation lay, Tawney believed, less in
redistribution as such than in a reordering of social and
political priorities: ‘What is important is not that all men
should receive the same pecuniary7 income. It is that the
surplus resources of society should be husbanded and
applied so that it is a matter of minor significance whether
they receive it or not.’ Achieving this shift in priorities
required the expansion of social provision financed by
progressive taxation; the restriction of capitalist power by
trade-union action and legislation; and the extension of
publicly or co-operatively owned enterprises. It is fair to say
that public ownership occupies a privileged place in the
policies advocated by Tawney. This reflected both his
principled belief that what he regarded as essential indus-
tries should be in public hands for reasons of democracy and
efficiency, and a strategic judgement that nationaliza- tion
was necessary to overcome capitalist opposition:
All attacks on inequality, whatever the method emplo yed,
encounter determined resistance from the privileged classes,
32 Equality and the Revolution

during recent years, that resistance has hardened. It is an

illusion to suppose that either of the first two policies [i.e.
expanded welfare provision and trade-union action] can be
carried forward on the scale, or with the speed required, as
long as the key positions of the economic system remain in
private hands. 2 i

Crosland, by contrast, famously sought to reduce the

profile of nationalization in social-democratic strategy.
Writing as the Long Boom of the 1950s and 1960s began to
gather pace, he argued that the combined effect of
structural changes in capitalism - in particular, the concen-
tration of economic power in the hands of large corpora-
tions whose objectives were much more complex than the
maximization of short-term profit - and the new power of
governments to achieve full employment thanks to Keynes-
ian techniques of demand-management had made the
private ownership of the means of production a non-issue.
Nevertheless, Crosland insisted (in a manner that in some
respects anticipates Bobbio’s recent arguments) that there
was still a fundamental difference between left and right,
arising from the socialist commitment to equality:

The socialist seeks a distribution of rewards, status, and

privileges egalitarian enough to minimize social resent-
ment, to secure justice between individuals, and to equalize
opportunities; and he seeks to weaken the deep-seated class
stratification, with its concomitant feelings of envy and
inferiority, and the barriers to inhibited mingling among the
classes. This belief in social equality, which has been the
strongest ethical inspiration of virtually every socialist
doctrine, still remains the most characteristic feature of
socialist thought today.24
 Crosland offered three arguments for increasing social
equality. Two were instrumental, namely that ‘greater
 Equality and the Revolution 48

equality . . . will increase social contentment and diminish

social resentment’ and that ‘extreme social inequality , . . is
wasteful and inefficient’. The third was more principled,
since it ‘rests on a view of what constitutes a “just”
distribution of privileges and rewards’. Under this head- ing,
Crosland advanced a heterogeneous collection of
considerations. Three in particular stand out. First, ‘every
child’ has ‘a natural “right”, not merely to “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness”, but to the position in the social
scale to which his native talents entitle him: he should
have, in other words, an equal opportunity for wealth,
advancement, and renown’. This right was vio- lated by
the existence of private education and inherited wealth.
Secondly, ‘[t]he greater the inequality, the heavier the
concentration of power.’ Thirdly, while inequality of
incomes from work was acceptable, ‘both because
superior talent deserves some rent of ability, and because
otherwise certain kinds of work, or risk, or burdensome
responsibility will not be shouldered’, ‘it is not clear that
these considerations justify the present pattern of work-
rewards’. 25
The differences between Crosland and Tawney are
obvious. Not simply did they place a different emphasis on
the role of public ownership in reducing inequality, but
Crosland’s hedonist individualism - reflected in his
famous attack on the Puritanism of the Webbs and his call
for ‘a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and
dissent, culture, beauty, leisure, and even frivolity’ - sat ill
with Tawney’s Christian-socialist preoccupation with
moral community. 26 Yet there are also striking similarities
between their views on equality. Both, for example, shared
a fierce hatred of Britain’s so-called public schools: ‘The
idea that differences of educational opportunity among
 Equality and the Revolution 49

children should depend upon differences of wealth among

parents is a barbarity,’ Tawney wrote. 27 This reflected a
 Equality and the Revolution 50
34 Equality and the Revolution

shared belief that more democratic access to education

represented a critical means of reducing inequalities: as
Education Secretary in 1965-7, Crosland took the deci-
sive step in introducing comprehensive education in state
schools. 28
But, beyond these more specific concerns lay a common
belief that, to put it crudely, history was going their way.
Both Tawney and Crosland thought that the growth of
what Rudolph Hilferding called ‘organized capitalism’ -
national economies dominated by large corporations inter-
woven with the state - radically transformed the prospects
for democratic control over the economy. Social-demo-
cratic parties needed only to develop the political will and
vision to make that control a reality and use it to reduce
social inequality. Of the two, Crosland more closely fitted
Marx’s view that reformist socialists are concerned with the
redistribution of income rather than with that of
productive resources. Yet, even judged by the policy
agenda that he sought to set, the Labour governments in
which he served in the 1960s and 1970s took hardly any
steps towards greater equality. Indeed, the 1974-9
government of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan saw the
beginnings of the trend towards a wider gap between rich
and poor discussed in chapter 1.
This is part of a wider set of economic and social
changes among whose chief features are: a secular fall in the
rate of growth in the advanced economies compared to the
‘Golden Age’ after the Second World War; the decline of
‘organized capitalism’ as even the most power- ful nation-
states have found it increasingly difficult to control
economic life within their own borders; and, con-
comitantly, the internationalization of capital, reflected
 most visibly in the spectacular increase in both the quan-
tity and the mobility of capital invested in globally inte-
grated financial markets. More than anything else it is

these changes that, it is argued, make the traditional

socialist agenda represented in their different ways by
Marx, Tawney and Crosland obsolete, and require the
reinvention of social democracy along the lines of the
Third Way advocated by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. In the
following chapters, I seek first to clarify the meaning of
equality as a normative concept, before considering the
conditions of its realization in the contemporary world.
 Equality and the Philosophers 52

3
Equality and the
Philosophers

New Labour and socialist values

New Labour presents itself as the heir of the social-

democratic tradition. It seeks a Third Way between tra-
ditional ‘state socialism" and the neo-liberalism of the
Reagan-Thatcher era, but one based on traditional social-
ist values. Thus Gordon Brown, the most ideologically
self-conscious New Labour leader, is careful to seek to
situate himself with respect to Crosland’s legacy, both
stressing the economic changes since the 1950s - globali-
zation, chronic mass unemployment and so on - and
insisting that, Tar from marginalizing the issue of equality,
these changes mean the case for equality’ is even
stronger". 1 Crosland can indeed be regarded as the author
of that standard New Labour topos ‘Traditional Values in
a Modem Setting’. He argued: ‘The only constant ele-
ment, common to ail the bewildering variety of different
[socialist] doctrines, consists of certain moral values and
aspirations; and people have called themselves socialists
because they shared these aspirations." Accordingly, he
attacked attempts to equate socialism with specific means,
notably nationalization, aimed at realizing these values
 and aspirations? Precisely this distinction between values
and means was used to justify the deletion in 1995 of the
commitment to public ownership from Clause Four of the
Labour Party’s constitution.
What then are these eternal socialist values? Here is a
sample, from a joint policy document from Tony Blair
and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder: ‘Fairness
and social justice, liberty and equality of opportunity,
solidarity and responsibility to others these values are
timeless. Social democracy will never sacrifice them. To
make these values relevant to today’s world requires real-
istic and forward-looking policies capable of meeting the
challenges of the 21st century.’ 3 On the basis of material of
this kind, Alan Carling argues that ‘the Third Way’s values
apparently boil down to: autonomy, community,
democracy and equality1’. He goes on to say that these are
identical to 'the core values of socialism’ that he had
sought independently to define from 'an Analytical Marx-
ist perspective’. 4 One might then say that socialists have
traditionally argued that these values can be realized only
where productive resources are subject to collective and
democratic control. 5
The values of autonomy, community, democracy and
equality do indeed seem like a good starting-point for our
discussion. In the Erst place, treating these as core values
serves to indicate that egalitarians are not committed to
equality to the exclusion of all other virtues. The inter-
relations between these different ideals raise complex and
important issues. It may be, for example, that realizing
one may undermine another: such has been the classical
liberal stance on the relationship between liberty and
equality. It may also be that giving proper weight to
community may limit the restrictions that can legitimately be
 Equality and the Philosophers 54
placed on equality. (I return to both of these issues in the
next section.) Secondly, the fact that New Labour’s ethical
commitments are apparently identical with those of more
traditional socialists offers an opportunity to
38 Equality and the Philosophers

appraise the Third Way in terms that both its adherents and
its left-wing critics would acknowledge as valid.6
Once, however, we move beyond affirmations of general
principle, the ground becomes much boggier. Attempts
by exponents of the Third Way to specify the nature of their
commitment to equality are vague and sometimes
ambiguous. There are two main variants of New Labour
equality. One, chiefly identified with Gordon Brown, con-
trasts equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.
The first, which he associates with Croslandite critics of
New Labour such as Roy Hattersley, "would not only
leave the causes of poverty unaddrcsscd but requires a
prescribed, centralist imposition of outcomes, pays little
regard to effort or desert and would threaten a state where
opportunities are provided not imposed’. Brown prefers "a
maximalist equality of opportunity’ that is "recurrent,
lifelong, and comprehensive: political, social and econ-
omic opportunities for all, with an obligation by Govern-
ment to pursue them relentlessly’. Such equality is not
merely enjoined by considerations of social justice: "now in
the 1990s in the new economy, equality of opportunity is
also the key to economic prosperity. Why? Because we are
in a fast-changing information-based economy domi- nated
by the importance of knowledge, the skills of people and
their ability to act.’ Thus, a government that devotes
resources to the education and training of disadvantaged
individuals will find virtue rewarded, since a consequence
will be enhanced economic competitiveness. 7
 A fawning profile credited Brown with "elaborating . . . a
political philosophy of vast scope’, "a theoretical edifice that
challenges and is meant to challenge the main refer- ence
points of British socialism of the past century - from
Marxism through Tawneyite egalitarianism to Croslandite
revisionism’.8 This seems, on the face of it, an excessively
generous description. Equality of opportunity is in fact an
 Equality and the Philosophers 56
ambiguous concept embracing at least three distinct kinds
of equality. First of all, it can simply mean the formal
prohibition of discrimination on the basis of attributes
other than those strictly relevant to the position for which
individuals concerned are being considered. The experi-
ence of the United States over the past generation, where
the dismantling of legalized segregation as a result of the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s has not led to any
significant overall improvement in the condition of most
African-Americans, indicates that this version of equality of
opportunity is compatible with the persistence of struc-
tural inequalities. 9
Secondly, equality’ of opportunity can mean meritoc-
racy, where the distribution of income reflects individual
talent and effort. In such a society, rewards are unequally
distributed, but competition to gain access to these
rewards is open. One obvious difficulty arises from the
interaction of equal starting-points with unequal desti-
nations: one does not have to be too pessimistic about
human nature to expect that the better off under such an
arrangement would seek to ensure that their offspring
started the race ahead of their subordinates’ children.
Thirdly, what Carling calls ‘deep’ equality of opportunity
requires an extensive equalization of resources to ensure
that the competition for positions is genuinely open: but so
thorough-going is the required redistribution that this
version of equality’ of opportunity bears little resemblance
to the two others. 10
Brown does reject what he calls ‘narrow equality of
opportunity’, and even on occasion endorses Rawls’s dif-
ference principle, declaring that ‘wealth and incomes in-
equalities . . . can be justified only if they are in the
 Equality and the Philosophers 57

interests of the least fortunate’. 11 I consider in chapter 4

how far Brown’s policies match up to these highly
demanding egalitarian principles.
 Equality and the Philosophers 58

The other main New Labour conceptualization of

equality and inequality is in terms of, respectively, inclu-
sion and exclusion. This is reflected at the level of policy in
the attachment of a Social Exclusion Unit to the
Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street, but it also forms one
of main themes of Anthony Giddens’s book The Third Way.
For Giddens:

Two forms of exclusion are becoming marked in contem-

porary societies. One is the exclusion of those at the
bottom, cut off from the mainstream of opportunities
society has to offer. At the top is voluntary exclusion, ‘the
revolt of the elites’: a withdrawal from public institutions on
the part of more affluent groups, who choose to live
separately from the rest of society. 12

The phenomena to which Giddens refers undoubtedly

exist. Yet his treatment of them is, to say the least,
curious. For one thing, as Carling protests,

[i]t is a pretty astonishing move . . . to assimilate the social

positions of those at the very top and the very’ bottom of
social structure to a single social category the excluded -
especially as this result occurs by such very different mech-
anisms: people who could easily join the mainstream, but
choose not to do so are lumped together with those who lack
the wherewithal for joining the mainstream however
much they might wish.13

Furthermore, even if the assimilation were tenable, it

seems unclear why the withdrawals of rich and poor
should constitute an instance of inequality. It would seem
rather to represent a breakdown in community, or, at
most, a reason for reducing inequality because of its
 59 Equality and the Philosophers
negative consequences for social cohesion. What is thus
occluded in this discussion is any consideration of ine-
quality as a problem of distributive justice. Indeed., Car-
ling notes, Giddens ignores 'the extensive debate . . . on the
character of social justice’, and therefore his ‘treatment of
equality is extremely confused and uncertain’. 14 In a
more recent discussion, Giddens combines question-beg-
ging attacks on ‘the egalitarianism-at-all-costs that
absorbed leftists for so long1 with tendentious interpreta-
tion of the kind of studies of poverty and equality cited in
chapter 1. These dubious arguments are used to support a
‘dynamic conception of equality’ that, in policy terms,
seems to differ little from Brown’s strategy. 15
Giddens’s lack of interest in principled discussion of
equality and justice is by no means untypical of contem-
porary social democracy. G.A. Cohen protested bitterly at
the way in which the Commission on Social Justice,
appointed by the then Labour leader John Smith after the
1992 general election, ‘bow[ed| down before the success of
pro-market and anti-egalitarian ideology’. 16 The absence
of any systematic analysis of equality in the literature of
the Third Way suggests that there may be some political
profit to be gained from considering the very rich
philosophical discussions of the subject to be found in
the writings of the egalitarian liberals. Brown himself has
invoked the authority not merely of Rawls but of Amartya
Sen and Michael Walzer, although without specifying in
any very precise way the connection between
their work and his own policies.17 So what do the philos-
ophers have to teach us about equality?

Rawls and the difference principle

 Equality and the Philosophers 60
John Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice is a vast,
labyrinthine, tortuously constructed book. Since its publi-
cation nearly thirty years ago - and alongside various
essays intended by Rawls to elaborate on and sometimes to
emend its theses, many themselves republished in
revised form as Political Liberalism (1993) - the book has
become the object of an enormous philosophical industry. I
have no intention of contributing to this industry here. My
focus is strictly on those aspects of the book that are directly
relevant to the issue of equality.
A theory is often best understood by considering what it
is written against* In Rawls’s case it is utilitarianism. Over
the past two centuries, utilitarianism has probably been the
most influential intellectual tradition in the Eng- lish-
speaking world in the theoretical appraisal of public policy.
It conceives the good as welfare-maximization: initially,
welfare (or utility) was identified with pleasurable mental
states, but in the more formal modem literature it tends to
be treated as the satisfaction of a person’s prefer- ences for
some states of affairs over others. Individuals are treated as
rational choosers who, having ordered their preferences,
seek to maximize their welfare as defined by these
preferences. This conception of human agency informs
the neo-classical orthodoxy in economics. As an ethical
theory, utilitarianism judges actions by their con-
sequences: we are to seek those outcomes that achieve the
greatest sum of satisfactions for society at large. In Jeremy
Bentham’s words: ‘An action then may be said to be
conformable to the principle of utility . . . when the tend-
ency it has to augment the happiness of the community is
greater than any it has to diminish it.’18
There is an important sense in which utilitarianism,
which was given its canonical formulation by Bentham
61 Equality and the Philosophers
in the era of the American and French Revolutions, is
egalitarian in spirit, as is reflected by his axiom ‘everybody
to count for one, nobody for more than one’. 19 Neverthe-
less, the goal of welfare-maximization does not require an
equal distribution of income or wealth. If, on some highly
 Equality and the Philosophers 62

unequal distribution, the satisfaction of the rich so out-

weighs the dissatisfaction of the poor that the sum of
satisfied preferences is greater than that produced by any
other, more egalitarian distribution, then utilitarians would
have no reason to reject that state of affairs. Furthermore,
utilitarianism may have highly illiberal consequences, since
there may be cases where the general welfare of society’
could be increased at the expense of individual members of
that society. As Rawls puts it, ‘there is no reason in
principle why the greater gains of some should not com-
pensate for the lesser losses of some; or more importantly,
why the violation of the liberty of a few might not be made
right by the greater good shared by many.’20
For Rawls, this is a reflection of the fact that utilitarian-
ism involves extending to society a model of individual
choice: ‘just as it is rational for one man to maximize the
fulfilment of his system of desires, it is right for society to
maximize the net balance of satisfaction taken over all its
members’. This approach to social choice involves ‘con-
flating all persons into one’. Thus: ‘Utilitarianism does
not take seriously the distinction between persons.’21
Another way of making the same point is to say that
utilitarianism violates Kant’s third version of the Categor-
ical Imperative: 'Act in such a way that you always treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any
other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as
an endf 22 If utilitarianism enjoins the non-fulfilment of
my goals because this will contribute to a greater overall
sum of satisfactions, then I am being treated only as a
means and not as an end.
Liberal philosophers often invoke Kant’s principle in
order to ground individual rights. Robert Nozick, for
example, argues that these rights should be conceived as
 Equality and the Philosophers 63

‘side-constraints’ that offer individuals moral protection

against social action: ‘they may not be sacrificed or used
 Equality and the Philosophers 64

for the achieving of other ends without their consent . . .

Side-constraints express the inviolability of other per-
sons.’ 23 Nozick proceeds to rule out redistribution accord-
ing to some egalitarian ‘end-state principle’ because this
would violate individual rights and thus the separateness of
persons. What is remarkable about Rawls’s philosophi- cal
strategy is that he too starts from a Kantian critique of
utilitarianism, but nevertheless constructs on that basis an
egalitarian theory of justice. In his scheme, as Brian Barry
puts it, ‘rights are a conclusion, not a premiss’. 24 Individ-
ual rights, in other words, are conceived not as primordial
constraints on collective action, but as consequences of the
requirements of a just social order.
Rawls proceeds by seeking to rehabilitate the social
contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau and Kant. His
principles of justice are those that would be chosen in a
hypothetical ‘original position’. The parties in the original
position are conceived of as being rational actors in the
rather narrow sense in which rationality is understood in the
utilitarian tradition - that is, they order their prefer- ences
and seek the outcome that will maximize their welfare
as defined by these preferences. But the parties must
choose behind ‘a veil of ignorance’. In particular,
no one knows his place in society, his class position or
social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribu-
tion of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and
strength and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his
conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of
life, or even t he special features of his psychology such as his
aversion to risk or liability to pessimism or optimism. More
than this, I assume the parties do not know the
particulars of their own societ y?’
 65 Equality and the Philosophers

The parties to the original position are furthermore con-

fronted with what Hume called ‘the circumstances of
justice’, which obtain ‘whenever mutually disinterested
persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of
social advantages under conditions of moderate scar-
city’.26 The point of principles of distributive justice is to
provide a mutually acceptable basis on which to regulate
such conflicts. The subject of justice is what Rawr ls calls
‘the basic structure of society’,

the way in which social institutions fit together into one

system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties
and shape the division of advantage that arises through
social co-operation. Thus the political constitution, the
legally recognized forms of property, and the organization of
the economy, and the nature of the family, all belong to
the basic structure. 27

Rawls argues that rational actors in the original position

will choose two principles of justice. These concern the
distribution of the ‘primary’ social goods’, that is, of

a. basic rights and liberties . .

b. freedom of movement and free choice of occupation
against a background of diverse opportunities;
c. powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of
responsibility in political and economic institutions of the
basic structure;
d. income and wealth; and, finally,
e. the social bases of self-respect. 3K

What Rawls calls ‘justice as fairness’ involves the

following:
 Equality and the Philosophers 66

First Principle
Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive
total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a
similar system of liberty for all.
67 Equality and the Philosophers

Second Principle
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that
they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, . . . and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under
conditions of fair equality of opportunity. 29

Not surprisingly, Rawls’s derivation of these principles

has attracted much critical attention. Using the utilitarian
methods of rational-choice theory to arrive at liberal egal-
itarian conclusions is a remarkable intellectual feat, but
one that has provoked much scepticism. Even philo-
sophers such as Barry who are sympathetic to Rawls’s
basic enterprise argue that T.M, Scanlon’s version of
contractarianism, which forbids those actions inconsistent
with principles that no one motivated to seek informed
and uncocrced general agreement could reasonably reject,
provides a better procedure for arriving at principles of
justice.30
Much more important for our purposes is the radically
egalitarian character of Rawls’s second principle of justice,
the famous difference principle. Arguably this is the core of
his entire theory of justice. Indeed, he says ‘the two
principles . . . are a special case of a more general concep-
tion of justice’: ‘All social values - liberty and opportunity,
income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be
distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any,
or all, of these goods is to the advantage of the least
favoured.’ 31 In other words, the presumption is in favour of
equality. Inequalities require justification by the benefits
they bring the least advantaged.
There is a further aspect of Rawls’s radicalism. On one
interpretation of equality of opportunity, namely meritoc-
68 Equality and the Philosophers

racy, rewards are distributed according to individuals’

natural talents and the use they make of them. Bur, Rawls
 69 Equality and the Philosophers
argues, ‘the initial endowment of natural assets and the
contingencies of their growth and nurture in early life are
arbitrary from a moral point of view’. The veil of ignor-
ance conceals from the parties to the original position how
they have done in this distribution. Accordingly,

the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement

to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common
asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution
whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favoured
by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good
fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those
who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not to
gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover
the costs of training and education and for using their
endowments in ways that help the least fortunate as well.
No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a
more favourable starting point in society. But it does not
follow that one should eliminate these distinctions. There
is another way to deal with them. The basic structure can
be arranged so that these contingencies work for the benefit
of the least fortunate. Thus we are led to the difference
principle if we wish to set up the social system so that no one
gains or loses from his arbitrary place in the distribu-
tion of natural assets or his initial position in society
without giving or receiving compensating advantages in
return. 32

Rawls thus throws into the pot, to be distributed

according to the principles of justice, not merely alienable
resources such as the means of production, but also the
benefits obtained from the use of the inalienable assets
inherent in individuals. No wonder this aspect of Rawls's
argument has been strenuously attacked by New Right
theorists such as Nozick, who insists that Kant’s principle
 Equality and the Philosophers 70
of treating humans as ends requires that individuals are
entitled to their natural talents and to whatever they gain
through using them. 33 The difference principle thus
involves a deeper form of equality than equality of oppor-
tunity, at least as the latter concept is normally
understood.
Like many revolutionary works, A Theory of Justice is
deeply embedded in the tradition from which it emerged
- in this case, classical liberalism. This can be seen in two
respects in particular. First, there is what Rawls calls ‘the
priority of liberty’: that is, ‘the precedence of the principle of
equal liberty over the second principle of justice. The two
principles of justice are in lexical order, and therefore
the claims of liberty1 are to be satisfied first . . . liberty can
be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself? 34 Rawds’s
arguments for this position are characteristically complex,
but they do not conceal the fact that he here reproduces the
traditional liberal belief in a conflict between individ- ual
freedom and social equality, and opts for the former. He
must then confront the historical claim, implicit in
Balibar’s ‘proposition of egaliberte\ that attacks on
liberties are accompanied by increased inequalities, and
vice versa (see chapter 2). The privileged defend their
position by restricting individual freedoms, while such
restrictions in turn are likely to become the basis of new
privileges. Elsewhere in his system Rawls effectively
acknowledges
that the relationship between liberty and equality7 is more
complex than is implied by the lexical priority he gives to
the first principle of justice over the second. A just consti-
tutional order must secure what he calls ‘the fair value for
all political liberties’: in other words, ‘those similarly
endowed and motivated should have roughly the same
71 Equality and the Philosophers
chance for attaining positions of political authority irres-
pective of their economic and social class’. But, in actually
existing liberal democracies, Rawls notes, ‘[disparities in
the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed
what is compatible with political equality have generally
 Equality and the Philosophers 72

been tolerated by the legal system? 35 This is, of course,

precisely the point that Marxists have always made when,
as Rosa Luxemburg put it, they point to ‘the hard core of
social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the
sweet shell of formal equality and freedom’. 36 Indeed, in a
recent text Rawls acknowledges that 'Hegel, Marxist, and
socialist writers have been quite right in making this
objection.’ He goes on to specify the following institu-
tional conditions for securing the fair value of liberties:

a. Public financing of elections and ways of assuring the

availability of public information on matters of public
policy . . .
b. A certain fair equality of opportunity, especially in
education and training . . .
c. A decent distribution of wealth and income meeting the
third condition of liberalism: all citizens must be assured
of the all-purpose means necessary for them to take
intelligent and effective advantage of their basic
freedoms . . .
d. Society as employer of last resort through general or
local government, or other social and economic
policies . . ,
e. Basic health care assured all citizens?7

So it turns out that giving effect to the first principle of

justice depends on achieving a significant degree of socio-
economic equality. This surely supports Balibar’s claim
that liberty and equality go together, rather than - as the
classical liberal tradition contends - necessarily being in
conflict with one another. On effectively the same
grounds, Jacques Bidet prefers Rawls’s ‘general concep-
tion’ of justice to the two lexically ordered principles:
‘Adequately understood, the generic principle of justice
 Equality and the Philosophers 73
. . . stipulates that no difference with respect to liberty is
acceptable, because no inequality of liberty can be to the
74 Equality and the Philosophers

advantage (whatever this might be) of those who have

least.*38
The second respect in which Rawls’s theory of justice is
evidently deeply embedded in the classical liberal tradition
is its background presumption of a market economy. For
example, when considering different interpretations of the
second principle of justice, he assumes that 'the economy is
a free market system, although the means of production
may or may not be privately owned’. 39 As Bidet notes,
‘[t]he disjunction between the two principles makes body
with a division of the basic structure into two spheres, one
politics, to which the first [principle] applies, the other
economics, to which the second applies.’ With respect to the
latter, while in principle Rawls leaves open the choice
between private or social ownership of the means of
production, in effect 'he shows complete faith in the
market economy to assure economic rationality1 and dyna-
mism’. 40 Thus he considers the case of a 'property-owning
democracy’ where entrepreneurs enjoy much better pros-
pects than unskilled labourers. This inequality can be
justified under the difference principle if

the greater expectations allowed to entrepreneurs encour-

ages them to do things that raise the long-term prospects of
labouring class [he]. Their better prospects act as incen- tives
so that the economic process is more efficient, inno- vation
proceeds, and so on. Eventually the resulting material
benefits spread throughout the system and to the least
advantaged. 41

Rawls stresses that this is a hypothetical example, but it is

symptomatic of his thinking about incentives. We saw above
that he believes that the difference principle justifies giving
75 Equality and the Philosophers
the talented extra rewards if this will encourage them to
produce more and thereby to benefit the least
 Equality and the Philosophers 51

advantaged. This claim has been subjected to detailed

criticism by G.A. Cohen, who argues that it is inconsistent
with better and worst off belonging to the same moral
community (or, more precisely, what Cohen calls ‘justifi-
catory community’’). The better off’s claim to incentives is,
in effect, a form of blackmail, in which they threaten not to
make their contribution unless they are specially rewarded.
This is a demand that is often made in situ- ations of
conflict, but, Cohen contends, it is not one that can be
coherently made by one member of a justificatory
community7 to another: members of such a community
undertake to justify their actions to each other, and mak-
ing a threat is not offering the kind of reason that could be
accepted as a justification. 42 In the course of this
critique, Cohen expresses his

doubt that the difference principle justifies any significant

inequality in an unqualified way . . . The worst off benefit
from incentive inequality’ in particular only because the
better off would, in effect, go on strike if unequalizing
incentives were withdrawn. This inequality’ benefits the
badly off within the constraint set by the inegalitarian
attitude, and consequent behaviour, of the well off, a
constraint that they could remove. And an inequality’ can
also benefit the badly off within a constraint set, not by
inegalitarian attitudes per se, but by preexisting unequal
structures . . . I conjecture that social inequalities will
appear beneficial to or neutral toward the interest of those
at the bottom only when we take as given unequal struc-
tures and/or inequality-endorsing attitudes that no-one
who affirms the difference principle should unprotestingly
accept.43
 Equality and the Philosophers 61
A Theory of Justice is the founding text of egalitarian
liberalism. It sets out principles of justice with a radically
egalitarian content that it assumes can best be applied in
 Equality and the Philosophers 52

a market economy. This is no longer largely taken for

granted, as it is by Rawls, but is explicitly defended by
Ronald Dworkin, who argues that ‘the idea of an econ-
omic market, as a device for setting prices for a vast
variety of goods and services, must be at the centre of any
attractive theoretical development of equality of
resources’. 44 I address the relationship between equality
and the market in chapter 4. For the time being, it is
important to stress that the criticisms of Rawls by Cohen
and Bidet that we have just considered are friendly ones,
which seek not to reject his theory, but to expose its
internal inconsistencies. They suggest that Rawls’s prin-
ciples imply a much more radical challenge to existing
social and economic institutions than their author is gen-
erally willing to acknowledge. 45

Equality of what?

Debates about equality, Amartya Sen has suggested, raise

two central questions: ‘(1) Why equality? (2) Equality of
wfiatSTHe argues that it is the second question that is
mainly at issue in contemporary controversy over equality.
There are various respects in which people may be treated
equally or unequally: ‘Equality is judged by comparing
some particular aspect of a person (such as income, or
wealth, or happiness, or opportunities, or rights, or need-
fulfilments) with the same aspect of another person.’ The
inherent diversity of human beings means that treating
them equally with respect to one such ‘focal variable’ may
lead to considerable inequalities in other dimensions. It is
a rare theorist who does not favour equalizing some
 53 Equality and the Philosophers

variable: ‘Ethical plausibility is hard to achieve unless

everyone is given equal consideration in some space that is
important to the particular theory.’ Nozick, for example,
defends equalizing individual freedom (in effect equated
with self-ownership) at the price of deep inequalities of
wealth and income. Thus: ‘The engaging question turns
out to be “equality of what?” ’46
It is certainly true that human diversity is sometimes
bewilderingly reflected in the different focal variables that
various egalitarian liberals have argued should be used in the
inter-personal comparisons on which redistribution
should be based. Apart from Rawls’s primary social goods,
the main candidates for equalization are welfare,
resources, access to advantage (or opportunity for welfare)
and capabilities. Considering these in turn may help to
clarify not simply the nature of the redistributions pro-
posed, but also the deep ethical reasons for seeking to
achieve equality in the first place. 47
To take equality of welfare first, one might consider this a
modified version of utilitarianism. Both are instances of
welfarism, as Sen puts it, ‘the viewr that the goodness of a
state of affairs is to be judged entirely by the goodness of the
utilities in that state’. 48 Once again utility or welfare is
understood here as either pleasurable mental states or the
satisfaction of a person’s preferences. Two objections to
equality of welfare are what Cohen calls ‘the offensive tastes
and expensive tastes criticisms’. 49
TheTTrstris-st ted by Rawls: for welfarism, ‘if men take a
certain pleasure in discriminating against one another, in
subjecting others to a lesser liberty as a means of
enhancing their self-respect, then the satisfaction of these
desires must be weighed in our deliberations according to
 Equality and the Philosophers 54
their intensity, or whatever, along with other desires’. 50
There is something profoundly wrong with a conception of
justice that treats my preference for torturing you as, in
principle, equally worthy of satisfaction as a homeless
person’s preference for shelter.
~T<ot only do all preferences seem not to be of equal
55 Equality and the Philosophers

value, but satisfying some may cost more than satisfying

others. Such is the nub of the second criticism, put most
systematically by Dworkin: 'Equality of welfare seems to
recommend that those with champagne tastes, who need
more income simply to achieve the same level of welfare as
those with less expensive tastes, should have more
income on that account.’ In particular, what of those who
deliberately cultivate expensive tastes? If it seems
unreasonable to regard satisfying their desires as just as
urgent as satisfying those of people who have remained
content with more modest tastes, then we need to select a
different focal variable to equalize? 1
Once we start to consider the process through which
individuals’ preferences are formed, a third objection to J
equality of welfare emerges - to my mind the most
important one. Preferences often adapt to circumstances.
As Sen puts it, 7a] thoroughly deprived person, leading a
very reduced life, might not appear too badly off in terms
of the mental metric of desire and its fulfilment, if the
hardship is accepted with non-grumbling resignation.’ 52
This is the problem of sour grapes, or (to put it in more
highfalutin terms) of adaptive preferences: one .give.s up
wanting what one believes one cannot get. It may be
particularly dangerous in situations of acute inequality
and poverty to go by the preferences of the worst off, since
they may have given up hope of any improvement in their
condition. 53
In place of equality of welfare, Dworkin proposes equal-
ity of resources. He imagines an auction in which all
material productive resources are sold to individuals each
with an equal amount of money with which to bid. Sub-
auctions allow them also to insure themselves against
being handicapped or lacking various skills. Underlying
56 Equality and the Philosophers

this proposal is a particular view of the rationale for

equality. On this view, as Cohen puts it, ‘a large part of
 Equality and the Philosophers 55
the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the influ-
ence of brute luck on distribution’. 54 Dworkin distin-
guishes between two kinds of luck - ‘option luck’, ‘wr hich
is a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn
out’, and ‘brute luck’, which is ‘a matter of how risks fall
out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles’.55 A
victim of brute luck cannot be held responsible for the
resulting disadvantage. Being bom poor is one relevant
example of brute luck. One of Rawls’s most important
contributions to egalitarian thought has been to argue that
the distribution of natural talents among individuals rep-
resents, in effect, another case of brute luck, from which
those advantaged are only entitled to benefit if allowing
them to do so will improve the condition of the wTorst off.
Dworkin argues that the case for equality of resources
‘produces a certain view of the distinction between a
person and his circumstances, and assigns his tastes and
ambitions to his person, and his physical and mental
powers to his circumstances’. 50 A person can thus be held
responsible for her tastes and ambitions, but not for her
physical and mental powers. The latter are, like the socio-
economic position into which she is born, matters of brute
luck. An initial equal distribution of resources would,
when undergirded by a hypothetical insurance market to
compensate for inequalities in natural assets, place indi-
viduals in the same circumstances. Their responses to
these circumstances would differ according to their tastes
and ambitions, producing unequal outcomes. A driven
and abstemious individual will end up with more
resources than someone more laid-back who has expen- sive
tastes. But this inequality will be a consequence of
individual choices rather than the brute luck of being born
with more wealth or talent than others.
Cohen comments: ‘Dworkin has, in effect, performed for
egalitarianism the considerable service of incorporating
59 Equality and the Philosophers

within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-

egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.’57
But the relationship between choice, preferences and cir-
cumstances is complex. There is, in the first place, the
problem we have already encountered of adaptive prefer-
ences. Dworkin contends that individuals are responsible
for their preferences as long as they identify with them.
However, John Roemer objects that it is wrong to hold
people ‘accountable for their choices, even if they follow
from preferences which were in part or entirely formed
under influences beyond their control . . . Preferences are
often adjusted to what the person falsely deems to be
necessity, and society does her no favour by accepting the
consequences that follow from exercising them.’ 58
Secondly, individuals may, for reasons outside their
control, benefit differently from the same share of
resources. Sen imagines two people, A and B: ‘person A as a
cripple gets half the utility that the pleasure-wizard B does
from a given level of income’. Neither Rawls’s differ- ence
principle nor Dworkin’s equality of resources takes this
‘utility disadvantage', for which it would be absurd to hold
A responsible, into account. Such cases illustrate the general
fact that ‘the conversion of goods to capabilities varies
substantially from person to person and the equality7
of the former may still be far from the equality of the
latter’. 59 These considerations also count against equality
of income, advocated, for example, by Shaw, who wrote:
‘The really effective incentive to work is our needs, which
are equal.’60 The case of A and B shows that our needs
are not equal: to give A the same income as B would be to
treat her unfairly.
This second objection led Cohen to propose, in answer to
Sen’s question, equality of access to advantage, where
 Equality and the Philosophers 60
‘advantage’ refers to ‘a heterogeneous collection of desir-
able states of the person reducible neither to his resources
bundle nor to his welfare level’.61 He offers the following
rationale for this proposal:

For Dworkin it is not choice but preference which excuses

what would otherwise be an unjustly unequal distribution.
He proposes compensation for power deficiencies, but not for
expensive tastes, whereas I believe that we should
compensate for disadvantage beyond a person’s control, as
such, and that we should not, accordingly, draw a line
between unfortunate resource endowment and unfortunate
utility functions. A person with wantonly expensive tastes has
no claim on us, but neither does a person whose powers are
feeble because he has recklessly failed to develop them.
There is no moral difference, from an egalitarian point of
view, between a person who irresponsibly acquires (or
blamelessly chooses to develop) an expensive taste and a
person who irresponsibly loses (or blamelessly chooses to
consume) a valuable resource. 'Hie right cut is between
responsibility and bad luck, not between preferences and
resources.62

Cohen’s approach dovetails with various attempts to

develop the idea of ‘deep’ equality of opportunity. For
Roemer, for example, this idea means that ‘society should
do what it can to “level the playing field” among individ-
uals who compete for positions, or, more generally, that it
level the playing field among individuals during their
periods of formation, so that all those with relevant poten-
tial will eventually be admissible to pools of candidates
competing for positions’. The ‘mounds and troughs in the
playing field’ correspond to ‘the differential circumstances
for which they [i.e. individuals] should not be held
 61 Equality and the Philosophers
accountable and which affect their ability to achieve or
have access to the kind of advantage that is being
sought’. 63
Sen, however, offers a different solution to the inade-
 Equality and the Philosophers 62

quacies of welfare and resources as focal variables: equality

of capabilities. This idea depends on distinguishing
between achievements the means of achievement, and
freedom to achieve. Welfarism concentrates on achieve-
ment - the actual satisfactions that individuals derive from
various states of affairs. This is an inadequate measure of
equality for the reasons we have seen above. Both Rawls’s
primary goods and Dworkin’s resources represent a shift
towards the means of achievement. This is a step in the right
direction, but it does not go far enough. The diver- sity of
human beings means that, as we have already seen, someone
who is mentally or physically disabled or prone to some
serious illness, for example, will not extract the same benefit
from a given bundle of resources as someone who does not
suffer from these disadvantages. The extent of their freedom
to achieve, as well as their actual achieve- ments, will
therefore differ. Thus: ‘Primary goods suffers from a
fetishist handicap’ in that it ‘is concerned with good
things rather than with what these good things do to
human beings’.64
To remedy these defects, Sen proposes that we think of a
person’s well-being as depending on the quality of ‘a set of
interrelated “functionings”, consisting of beings and
doings’. These ‘can vary from such elementary things as
being adequately nourished, being in good health, avoid-
ing escapable morbidity and premature mortality, etc., to
more complex achievements such as being happy, having
self-respect, taking part in the life of the community, and so
on’. The '‘capability to function . . . represents the
various combinations of functionings (beings and doings)
that the person can achieve’. It thus reflects ‘the person’s
freedom to lead one type of life rather than another’. It is
equality in these capabilities that Sen proposes that wc
 63 Equality and the Philosophers
should seek to achieve: ‘individual claims are not to be
assessed in terms of the resources or primary goods the
persons respectively hold, but by the freedoms they actu-
ally enjoy to choose the lives they have reason to value’.65
Most unusually for a normative political theory, Sen’s
capability approach has had a considerable impact on
more empirical social-science literature: it has, for
example, helped to inspire the efforts of the United
Nations Development Programme to construct various
indicators that measure development in Third World
countries better than the crude indices offered by national-
income statistics such as growth in gross national prod-
uct. 66 From a philosophical point of view, it has the
considerable interest that it seeks to relate freedom and
equality. Equality of capabilities is concerned with individ-
uals’ freedom to achieve the functionings they value. ‘This
freedom, reflecting a person’s opportunities of well-being,
must be valued at least for instrumental reasons, e.g. in
judging how good a “deal” a person has in the society.
But, in addition, freedom may be seen as intrinsically
important for a good social structure.’ If choosing is seen as
a constituent part of the good life, then ‘at least some types
of capabilities contribute directly to well-being, mak- ing
one’s life richer with the opportunity of reflective
choice’. 67
Sen’s attempt to relate liberty and equality is important
for at least two reasons. First, as we have seen, neo-
liberals such as Nozick attack egalitarianism on the
grounds that its achievement would drastically reduce
individual freedom. But Sen argues that counterposing
liberty and equality in this way ‘reflects a “category mis-
take”. They are not alternatives. Liberty is among the
 Equality and the Philosophers 64

possible fields of application of equality, and equality is

among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty’.’68
Secondly, the capability approach offers a positive ration-
ale for equality. Rawls, Dworkin and Cohen offer effect-
ively a negative reason for seeking to achieve equality in
65 Equality and the Philosophers

the preferred dimension: people should not suffer the

consequences of disadvantages for which they are not
responsibles whether these disadvantages derive from the
distribution of productive resources or the incidence of
natural talents. But one might also value equality for the
more positive reason that, by equalizing individuals’ free-
dom to achieve well-being, it contributes towards what
Tawney called ‘the growth towards perfection of individ-
ual human beings 7. 69
Tawney here offers a very clear statement of the ethical
doctrine that Rawls calls ‘perfectionism’, which under-
stands the good as the achievement of personal well-being.
Rawls argues that this doctrine cannot be pan of a theory of
justice: the parties to the original position do not know their
conception of the good, reflecting the fact that in liberal
societies conceptions of the good are inherently diverse.
70 Sen approaches this subject with caution. He
gives the capability approach a genealogy that includes
both Aristotle, who offered a theory of the good conceived
as an objectively knowable condition of well-being (eudai-
monia), and Marx, who tacitly relied on such a theory
when he argued that individuals fulfil themselves through
free activity. But Sen also rejects Martha Nussbaum’s
proposal that he extend his own theory by ‘introducing an
objective normative account of human functioning’, main-
taining that ‘quite different specific theories of value may be
consistent with the capability approach’. 71
One advantage of developing the capability approach in
the direction suggested by Nussbaum is that it would offer a
way of integrating two of the core values common to both
traditional socialism and the Third Way, namely
autonomy and equality. One might, for example, under-
stand equality as equal access to well-being, and well-
66 Equality and the Philosophers

being itself as critically involving (though not reducible to)

individuals’ ability successfully to pursue goals that they
 67 Equality and the Philosophers

have chosen for themselves, but which are conceived as

having value independently of being chosen and pur-
sued. 72 At the very least, Sen suggests that we should
value equality not so much as a passive condition, but
rather as enabling us actively to engage with the world, and
through doing so to live the kind of life we desire.
It is, however, this very running together of equality and
autonomy that gives Cohen pause. Sen is right, he argues,
to reject the welfarist idea that ‘the whole relevant effect on a
person of his bundle of primary’ goods is on, or in virtue of,
his mental reactions to what they can do for him’. Sen
has identified what Cohen calls ‘midfare 5, ‘the non-utility
effect of goods 5 , which consists of ‘states of the person
produced by goods, states in virtue of which utility levels
take the values they do’. But midfare cannot be reduced
to the capabilities with which goods endow indi- viduals, or
the exercise of these capabilities, since ‘goods cause further
desirable states directly, without any exercise
of capability on the part of their beneficiary 5. 73
It is not clear how damaging this criticism is. Sen
understands functionings to embrace both ‘beings1 and
‘doings’: that is, states as well as activities. Cohen pro-
poses equalizing access to advantage, which, he acknowl-
edges, ‘is, like Sen’s “functioning11 . . ., a heterogeneous
collection of desirable states 5. 74 Sen himself notes that ‘if
advantage is seen specifically in terms of well-being (ignor-
ing the agency aspect), then Cohen’s “equality of access to
advantage” would be very’ like equality of wrell-being
freedom’. 75 r fhe difference between the two perspectives
seems to lie less in what they seek to equalize than in their
underlying rationales for equality: Cohen’s concern is to
eliminate the consequences of brute luck, while Sen is
drawn towards a perfectionist theory, where equalizing
 Equality and the Philosophers 68

capabilities enables people to realize themselves. Either

equality implies a very considerable redistribution of
wealth and income. For the purposes of my argument in the
following chapter, 1 shall treat them as equivalent.
Writing from a position very similar to Cohen’s, Rich- ard
Ameson criticizes Sen for failing to come up with an index
that would allow us to rank individual capabilities. In the
absence of such an index, it is very hard, given the diversity
of human beings that Sen himself stresses, to compare
and therefore to seek to equalize the capabilities of different
persons. Ameson effectively confronts Sen with a
dilemma. We can take individual preferences into account,
in which case we are back to welfarism. But any objective
ranking of functionings and capabilities indepen- dent of
preferences presupposes ‘the adequacy of an as yet
unspecified perfectionist doctrine the like of which has
certainly not yet been defended and is in my opinion
indefensible’. 76
Ameson’s own preferred egalitarian currency, equality of
opportunity for welfare, also goes beyond individuals’ actual
preferences. He argues that we should take ‘hypo- thetical
preferences’ as ‘the measure of an individual’s welfare’.
These are the preferences ‘I would have if I were to engage
in thorough going deliberation about my pref- erences with
full pertinent information, in a calm mood, while thinking
clearly and making no reasonable errors’. Idealizing
preferences in this way is essential if Ameson’s position is
not to collapse into straight equality of welfare, with all the
difficulties that this involves. But, he concedes, the effect is
to require ‘a normative account of preference formation
that is not preference-based. A perfectionist component
may thus be needed in a broadly welfarist
 69 Equality and the Philosophers

egalitarianism.’77 Arneson is thus caught in the same

dilemma between welfarism and perfectionism with which
he confronts Sen.
The difficulty that faces Ameson’s critique of Sen is
significant for two reasons. First, it supports Roemer’s
conclusion: ‘Some objective measure of a person’s con-
dition should, it seems, surely count in the measure of
advantage salient for distributive justice, for a subjective
measure does not appear to permit a solution to the tamed
housewife problem’ - that is, to the adaptation of prefer-
ences to confined circumstances. 78 Despite Rawls’s
strenuous resistance to perfectionism, the theory of egali-
tarian justice is incomplete without an objective account of
human well-being. Secondly, this means that egalitarian
liberalism must confront the same kind of objection that is
often made to Marx’s critique of capitalism, namely that
it counterposes people’s real needs and interests to the
actual preferences they have. The latter, according to the
Marxist theory of ideology, tend to reflect the effect of
capitalist social relations, which leads to individual desires
being distorted or adjusted downwards. 79
Egalitarian liberals may resist being drawn on to this
hotly contested terrain. It is hard to see how they can
avoid it, however, for their more radical redistributive
proposals are likely to be met by appeals to common
sense. Thus the Labour Party’s Commission on Social
Justice, in its extraordinarily conservative discussion of
equality, invokes popular intuitions to dismiss Rawls’s
opposition to basing justice on the notion of desert. For
example: ‘Few7 people believe’ that ‘no rewards . . . are . . .
a matter of desert’. Or again: ‘people . . . rightly think that
redistribution of income is not an aim in itself. Insofar
 Equality and the Philosophers 70

as the authors of these assertions are not simply dressing up

their own views as what they claim ‘people’
think, they are making the prevailing beliefs in society the
benchmark of social justice. Indeed, they declare that ‘it is
certain that the British public would not recognize in such
a theory [i.e. Rawls’s], or in any other theory with such
ambitions, all its conflicting ideas and feelings about social
justice’.80
The question of how to validate any theory of justice is
undoubtedly a difficult one, but it is hard to see what the
point of political philosophy is if it merely serves up the
‘conflicting ideas and feelings’ that happen at any given
time to predominate on the subject. In particular, making
these the benchmark of what we mean by social justice may
give theoretical sanction to attitudes that reflect the belief of
those who hold them that they cannot hope for anything
better. Egalitarian liberalism cannot simply take actual
preferences and the beliefs that justify them at face value.
Thus, rather surprisingly, it joins hands with Marx- ist
ideology-critique.

Injustice, exploitation and desert

That equality as a political ideal can be justified only by an

objective account of well-being is also suggested by
Elizabeth Anderson’s detailed and skilful critique of ‘luck
egalitarianism’, by which she means the approach favou- red
by Dworkin, Cohen and others that concentrates on
remedying the consequences of brute luck. Luck egalitar-
ians, Anderson contends, combine ‘some of the worst
aspects of capitalism and socialism’: on the one hand,
they adopt a harshly individualistic attitude towards the
71 Equality and the Philosophers

victims of bad option luck, leaving them to suffer the

consequences of their own choices (by, for example,
becoming disabled through their own negligence); on the
other hand, they deny the victims of bad brute luck the
equal respect to which they are entitled, patronizingly
compensating them because of their inferiority to others.
Not only does this reinstate ‘the stigmatizing regime of the
Poor Laws’, but policing the line between ‘the deserv- ing
and the undeserving disadvantaged’ would require
 Equality and the Philosophers 72

‘the state to make grossly intrusive, moralizing judgements

of individual’s choices’.81
Anderson’s polemic systematically selects for the least
charitable reading of luck egalitarianism. Thus she argues
that it is sexist because women who are disadvantaged by
caring for children would count as cases of bad option
luck: ‘Since women are not on average less talented than
men, but choose to develop talents that command little or
no market wage, it is not clear that luck egalitarians have any
basis for remedying the injustices that attend their
dependence on male wage-earners.’ But this is a counter-
example only to a version of egalitarianism such as Dwor-
kin’s that takes no account of the dependence of
individuals’ choices on the circumstances in which they
find themselves. Given the way the highly unequal struc-
tures of our societies systematically disadvantage women,
becoming an economically dependent child-carer may
often be the best option available to them: Anderson
effectively acknowledges the pressure of circumstances in
these cases when she refers to ‘entirely reasonable (and
for dependent caretakers, even obligatory) choices’.82
Equalizing access to advantage surely implies creating
circumstances where women are not obliged to become
economically dependent on male wage-earners.83
Anderson does nevertheless succeed in highlighting the
vulnerability to damaging counter-example of any version of
egalitarianism that is unable to appeal to some strong
account of our reasons for seeking equality in the first
place (she herself opts for Sen’s capability approach). She
does, moreover, reveal respects in which at least some
kinds of luck egalitarianism concede too much to liberal
individualism. One notable example is the tendency to
attribute inequality chiefly to the unequal distribution of
individual talents. The socialist tradition offers a different
66 Equality and the Philosophers

explanation when it draws attention to exploitation as a

cause of unjustified inequality. As we saw in chapter 2,
Marx sees capitalist exploitation as a consequence of the
unequal distribution of productive resources. Workers,
denied direct access to the means of production, are
compelled to sell their labour-power to the capitalists, who
control these means on terms that lead to the former’s
exploitation. This exploitation consists in the workers
performing surplus-labour for the capitalists: that is, they
work not simply to support themselves and their depen-
dants, but also to provide the profits in search of which the
capitalists made their investments in the first place. The
surplus-labour is appropriated by capitalists who make
no productive contribution themselves - or at least none
commensurate with the reward they receive. This
antagonistic relationship between exploiters and exploited
in turn constitutes the basis of the class structure. 84
O n the face of it, the unequal distribution of alienable
productive resources seems as much a case of brute luck as
that of inalienable natural talents. Recent debates about
equality have, however, tended to sideline the issue of
exploitation. Even Roemer, who has devoted considerable
effort to restating Marx’s theory in a form that does not
offend the intellectual sensibilities of neo-classical econo-
mists, concludes that the injustice of exploitation derives
from an unjust inequality in the distribution of assets, not
from the extraction of surplus-labour flowing from that
distribution. He thereby shifts the focus of attention away
from exploitation itself to the question of distributive
 Equality and the Philosophers 74
justice.85 Some egalitarian liberals adopt a considerably
more negative attitude towards the idea of exploitation.
Thus Thomas Nagel writes:

an egalitarian system would have completely to forget the

idea, still popular in some quarters, that the root of social
 75 Equality and the Philosophers
injustice is exploitation - in the sense of a failure to reward
people in accordance with their productive contribution or
the true value of their labour. The defence of equality
requires that rewards not depend on productive contribu-
tion! and in particular that some people receive much more
of the social product than they contribute/ 6

Part of what Nagel has in mind here (he also rejects the
labour theory of value) is the fact that differences in
individual talents will lead to different productive contri-
butions; also individuals may not be able to contribute at al!
because they are too young, too old, too ill or unem-
ployed. The kind of egalitarian thinking we have been
considering in this chapter suggests that these differences
represent disadvantages for which the individuals con-
cerned should be compensated. An egalitarian distribution
would thus not correspond to individuals’ productive
contributions. This line of thought is hardly new. Indeed,
Marx argues in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’
that it is its failure to take into account these differences and
the consequent claims for compensation that makes the
‘contribution principle’, according to which individu- als
should be rewarded proportionally to their labour,
defective, though he still thinks this principle would gov- ern
distribution in the period immediately after a socialist
revolution. 87
Do these considerations mean that egalitarians should
abjure any interest in exploitation? No, because the injust-
ice of exploitation does not depend upon the contribution
principle. A person is exploited if and only if she is
illegitimately compelled to work for others. One may
freely choose to work for others - for example, as a gift, or
where a genuinely voluntary exchange takes place.
 Equality a n d the Philosophers 76

There are also cases where one may be legitimately com-

pelled to work for others - for example, where taxes are
democratically imposed to meet the legitimate aims of
government (including that of achieving social justice).
Slavery and serfdom are clear cases of illegitimate com-
pulsion. What is distinctive about Marx's account of
capitalist exploitation is that the appearance of free
exchange between worker and employer is nullified by the
unequal distribution of the productive forces: as a result,
workers are compelled to sell their labour-power to the
capitalists on terms that lead to their exploitation. They
have, in other words, no acceptable alternative to working
for capitalists on these terms. This is a violation of their
liberty, even if they are not directly coerced into perform-
ing surplus-labour for the capitalist, but rather do so as a
result of what Marx calls ‘the silent compulsion of econ-
omic relations’. 88
Thus exploitation is directly unjust, independently of any
injustice in the initial distribution of productive assets,
because workers are illegitimately compelled to work for the
capitalist. Furthermore, it indirectly contributes to
injustice in so far as its consequence is an unequal distri-
bution of access to advantage. In other words, the polari-
zation between rich and poor documented in chapter 1
may largely be a consequence of exploitation, as contem-
porary economic structures serve both to restrain or
reduce the living standards of the majority and to increase
the wealth of the privileged minority. As Erik Olin Wright
puts it, exploitation is ‘defined by a particular kind of
mechanism through which the welfare of the exploiters is
causally related to the deprivations of the exploited. In
exploitation, the material well-being of exploiters causally
77 Equality and the Philosophers
depends upon their ability to appropriate the fruits of the
labour
of the exploited.' 89 Thus, if we are interested in the causes of
inequality, exploitation proves to be very important
indeed.
A major study attempting to give empirical content to
 Equality and the Philosophers 78
Marxist economic concepts estimates that the rate of
surplus-value, which measures the degree to which work-
ers are exploited, rose in the United States from 170 per
cent in 1949 to 219 per cent in 1989 — an increase of 44 per
cent.90 This finding implies that there is a causal
connection between the growth of inequality and poverty
since the late 1970s and the appropriation of a growing
amount of surplus-labour by capital. Reviewing the per-
formance of the US economy between 1973 and 1996,
Robert Brenner writes: 'the defence of profitability
throughout the period, and its partial recovery in the
1990s, has been predicated upon a repression of wages
without precedent throughout the last century, and per-
haps since the Civil War’.91 Wealth and poverty, and the
highly unequal structures of advantage and disadvantage
that they imply, are thus causally related.
It is in this light that we should consider David Good-
hart’s protest that 'Bill Gates has not amassed a fortune of
SI 50 billion by exploiting the poor of Seattle’ (see
chapter 1). If Gates has accumulated his billions thanks to a
nation- and indeed world-wide process of economic
restructuring, in which the introduction of information
technology has contributed to the large-scale destruction of
jobs and constant pressure on w'ages and conditions, then
he zs implicated in a process of exploitation. The
contribution principle may, by common consent, be a
poor guide to remedying this state of affairs, but it does not
follow that exploitation does not play a major part in
producing the inequalities that require correction. More-
over, the places that exploiters and exploited have in the
structure of exploitation give them interests in, respec-
tively, maintaining or reducing inequality: to that extent,
exploitation is directly relevant to the political processes
through w'hich injustice can be corrected? 2
 Equality and the Philosophers 79
Exploitation also has a bearing on the question of
 Equality and the Philosophers 80

desert. A natural way of justifying the idea that people

should be rewarded according to their productive contri-
bution is by appealing to the idea of desert: one might say
that people deserve to receive the fruits of their own
efforts. Now' one of the leading themes of Rawls’s political
philosophy is his opposition to basing the theory of justice
on the notion of desert. We have already seen that he
rejects the idea that people deserve their natural talents.
Nor, he argues, would it be feasible to reward people
according to the effort they make, since "the effort a
person is willing to make is influenced by his natural
abilities and skills and the alternatives open to him . . . The
idea of rewarding desert is impractical.’ It is also
incoherent, since it is only once we have established
principles of justice that we can determine what it is that
people deserve: ‘the concept of moral worth is secondary' to
those of right and justice, and it plays no role in the
substantive definition of distributive shares . . . For a
society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral
desert as a first principle would be like having the insti-
tution of property in order to punish thieves.’93
At its most general, the concept of desert seems simply
equivalent to that of entitlement, or having a legitimate
claim to x. A more specific version of the concept ties
entitlement to responsibility: here a person has a legit-
imate claim to x because of some act or omission on her
part. Arguably Rawls, when claiming that individuals
don’t deserve their natural talents, appeals equivocally to
both these concepts, but it is desert in its second and
more specific sense that seems most relevant to questions of
distributive justice. Luck egalitarians like Dworkin and
Cohen give desert in this sense a residual role in their
theories in so far as they seek to shield individuals from the
 81 Equality and the Philosophers

consequences of brute luck in the distribution of

productive resources and natural talents, while accepting
inequalities that flow from how people choose to make
use of their capabilities once (as Roemer puts it) the
playing field has been levelled. On this basis, I might be said
to deserve whatever outcomes my actions have once access
to advantage is equalized in the appropriate way.
But New Labour versions of equality seem to give
desert a much more important role. As we saw earlier in this
chapter, Gordon Brown attacks ‘equality of outcome’ for
ignoring ‘effort or desert’. The Commission on Social
Justice even supported Nozick against Rawls on the ques-
tion of desert, arguing that ‘one can deserve the rewards of
one’s talents without deserving one’s talents, and that
‘[s]ome inequalities are justified . . . in terms of need,
merit, or reward’. 94 David Miller has offered a more
systematic defence, from a socialist perspective, of the
claim that ‘some income inequalities are deserved* :
If we try to take seriously the idea that people can only
deserve things when they are fully responsible for what
they achieve - in the sense that the outcome was not
affected by the contingencies which impinge unequally on
different people - we find that the scope of desert shrinks to
vanishing point. We can never say, in a real sense, that a
person deserves rewards and benefits for what they have
done, because it is always reasonable to assume that their
performance was affected by factors for which they were not
responsible.95

Miller’s argument takes us back to the problem that we

encountered above, that circumstances are likely often to
shape choices: indeed, it is a more general version of
Rawls’s point that the effort someone puts in will be
influenced by her talents. One might take this as strength-
 Equality and the Philosophers 82

ening the claim that desert is a hopeless basis for distribu-

tive justice. Miller instead argues that such a conclusion
leads one to ‘recommending strict equality. There will
83 Equality and the Philosophers

always be some external differentiating factor to account

for the different efforts and choices that people make. 5 ,6
Much depends on what is meant here by ‘strict equality’. If
Miller means levelling the playing field by instituting equal
access to advantage or equality of capabilities or
whatever, then this is, of course, precisely the state of
affairs that the egalitarian philosophers we have been
considering are trying to achieve. If, however, ‘strict
equality’ means a continual process of intervention to
eliminate all the differences between individuals that
might derive from their circumstances, then this seems a
pretty1 unattractive ideal, and one that corresponds to the
right’s caricature of what the left wants.
But it does not seem that the egalitarian hostile to
basing justice on desert is driven ineluctably towards the
latter sense of strict equality. There are aspects of a
person’s situation that are unambiguously not under her
control, such as the class position and natural talents that
she inherits. There are other aspects of her situation where
the relative contributions of circumstance and choice are
less clear-cut - for example, her own actions. The fact that
we give reasons for our actions and that both actions and
reasons are matters of reflection and debate is cen- trally
involved in our being held responsible for these actions.
How deep responsibility goes is a complicated matter
because we are in an important sense products of both
nature and society. But the case of brute luck does not seem
similarly complicated: how can we be held responsible
for the wealth and income of our parents and the genetic
endowment we inherit from them? There are more difficult
cases - for example, those discussed above of the worker
and the dependent child-carer where choices are
undeniably made, but where there is a strong case for saying
 Equality and the Philosophers 84

that the surrounding circumstances are so constraining that

the individuals concerned should be
compensated for the negative consequences of their
choices. Perhaps we should say that these are really cases of
brute luck, despite appearances to the contrary. And then
there are the cases, of which everyday life is full, in which
individuals are held responsible for their choices,
major and minor.
The philosophical roots of the difficulty are familiar
enough. We employ two apparently inconsistent
languages when talking about people - one of intentional
action, the other of causal explanation. One naturally
lends itself to the attribution of responsibility, while the
other seems to make such matters dissolve. Lurking
behind these languages are some of the hardest philosoph-
ical questions, concerned with freedom and determinism.
Because of their difficulty, various theoretical ploys have
been devised to finesse them. But this does not alter the fact
that we seem to require both these languages, and
therefore also the necessity, alike in everyday life and in
political and moral discourse, of drawing a dividing line
between those cases where we hold individuals responsible
for their actions and those where we regard the pressure of
causes beyond their control as so great as to absolve them
of responsibility. The egalitarian theories of justice that I
have been discussing offer one way of doing so by proposing
that we compensate individuals for the dis- advantages
that flow from the unequal distribution of productive
assets and natural talents, but, having thus secured
them equal access to well-being, leave it up to
them what use they make of this freedom? 7
 85 Equality and the Philosophers

Miller’s attempt, on the contrary, to make desert one of

the principal forms of distributive justice seems to reflect his
particular concern to make a case for market socialism
- that is, for an economy where goods and services are
produced for sale on the market by competing workers1
co-operatives. Thus he writes: ‘If we want to show that
market allocations can be substantively . . . just, the only
possible way forward is to demonstrate that each partici-
pant receives what he deserves by some criterion of
desert/ He goes on to contend:

If . . . we want to keep something like our present concept of

desert and the practices that go with it, there is much to be
said for using overt demand as a way of measuring the value
of Output. Even if, from a spectator’s point of view, we think
that our whole social system is producing goods which have
little or no real value, we should not expect an individual
producing within the system to take up such a lofty attitude.
From the participant’s perspective, wT hich is also the
appropriate perspective for making desert judge- ments, it
is a mistake to try to look behind consumers’ demand in an
effort to discover their ‘real’ needs (by some
criterion)? 8

The circularity of this proceeding is striking: only by

appealing to desert can we establish the justice of market
transactions, while desert itself is reflected in the state of
market demand! The contorted formulations that he uses
seem to reflect a certain defensiveness on Miller’s part.
And well they might, for he seems to be making two pretty
amazing assertions: (1) the monetary valuations that con-
sumers put on goods and services when they purchase
them accurately reflect their needs; and (2) these valu-
ations further entitle the producers of the goods and
 Equality and the Philosophers 86

services to the incomes they receive for participating in

their production. Claim (1) does not directly concern us
here, but it is worth saying that one does not require a very
strong theory of real needs to know that the money income
that people have to spend on goods and services may not
correspond to what they perceive themselves as needing. All
one has to do to establish this truth is to ask
anyone in the street."
 87 Equality and the Philosophers

As for claim (2), is it really the case that the incomes

derived from market transactions reward according to
desert? Let us take effort as a marker of desert. Consider
workers in the computer-chip industry, which experiences
very substantial fluctuations as a result of world-wide
shifts in supply and demand. As a result of those fluctua-
tions, workers putting in the same amount of effort may find
that their earnings change considerably, or even that they
lose their jobs because of lay-offs or plant closures. Is it
really plausible to say that these changes track desert? Or
again, workers with particular skills may find that their
earnings increase spectacularly without any change in the
effort they put in because these skills are in much demand:
this has been the fortunate situation of many kinds of
computer expert because of the Millennium Bug. Do
these workers deserve these higher earnings, or should we
just say that they have been lucky? These examples con-
cern non-equilibrium situations, and Miller argues that
‘there are good posiof tivev alrueea sownhsenf omr
etaaksuinrginge qdueisliebrrti1u? m00
prices as indicators
But even in the spectacularly unrealistic idealized con-
ditions that define equilibrium in neo-classical value the-
ory, prices reflect the relative scarcities of goods and
services. In what sense can those who receive relatively
high or low incomes as a result of these scarcities be
said to deserve to benefit or suffer from them?101 No
wonder that Hayek carefully avoids basing his defence of
market-generated inequalities on any appeal to desert,
insisting that ‘the value which a person’s capacities or
services have for us and for which he is recompensed has
little relation to anything we can call moral merit or
deserts’. 102
 Equality and the Philosophers 88

Miller applies what seems like a hopeless general argu-

ment to the case of profits, arguing that ‘genuine entrepre-
reward because it creates value*.103
neurship . . . deserves
It is here that the question of exploitation is relevant.
Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation does not involve an
appeal to the idea of desert. He rejects the contribution
principle, according to which people should be rewarded in
proportion to their labour, as a case of 'bourgeois right > if
he has a principle of justice (though he denies that he has
one), it is the needs principle: ‘From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’104 Further-
more, as we have seen, exploitation can be condemned as
unjust simply because it violates workers’ freedom, since
they are illegitimately compelled to work for the capital-
ists. Marx’s theory of exploitation is nonetheless relevant
here because of the critical light it throws on various
desert-based justifications of profit.
The particular justification against which Marx directs his
fire appeals to the capitalist’s abstention from con-
sumption in order to fund his investments. 105 Miller relies
rather on the entrepreneurial role of the capitalist in
identifying some gap in the market that he can profitably fill,
and successfully organizing the production and sale of
whatever commodities are required to take advantage of
this opportunity. Let us concede for the purposes of
argument that whoever performs this role deserves some
reward. The difficulty is then threefold. First, how do we
calculate this reward? Consider the case of the financial
speculator George Soros. Famously he made a $1 billion
profit on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, when the
pound sterling was forced out of the Exchange Rate
Mechanism of the European Monetary System. 106
89 Equality and the Philosophers

Presumably this profit was partly a matter of Soros’s

skill and foresight in anticipating the movements of cur-
rency markets. But all of it? And if not all of it, how
much? This difficulty1 is a case of the general one noted
above. If we simply accept the market as an accurate judge
of desert, then we say that people deserve to benefit from
 Equality and the Philosophers 90

all sorts of arbitrary contingencies: for example, to what

extent were Soros’s profits boosted by the presumably
unforeseen incompetence of the British government? But
trying to separate out that portion of the profits that
reflected Soros’s own contribution, and that for which
other factors were responsible seems like an impossible
task.
Secondly, what of the cases where market rewards and
contribution move in opposite directions: for example, the
numerous instances where chief executives’ salary and
share-option packages are increased significantly, even
though the performance of their companies has deterior-
ated over the relevant period? The justifications for such
rises typically make no appeal to desert, but rather assert
that competition in the international market in top execu-
tives is driving up their earnings, and therefore forcing
rises on companies that wish to retain or attract the best
people, llie underlying rationale here is provided by the idea
that, on grounds of efficiency, special incentives must
be offered to talented individuals, not by any notion of
desert.
Finally, what of the cases where individuals gain profits
without performing any entrepreneurial function? Sup-
pose, for example, that the decision to dump sterling in
September 1992 had been made not by Soros but by a
manager whom he had hired to run his hedge fund. No
doubt this manager would have been generously rewarded
for her services, but the lion’s share of the profits would have
gone to Soros and the investors in his fund. This situation
is still far from uncommon. Major multinational
corporations such as BMW are owned by families that
play little or no role in their management. On what basis
can they claim that their income from the company is a
reward for entrepreneurship?
 Equality and the Philosophers 91

They might appeal instead to the idea that their profits

92 Equality and the Philosophers

compensate them for risking their capital. I cannot discuss

here the concept of risk, which has become hugely inflated in
contemporary theoretical and policy debates, but it
seems to me that any serious normative treatment of the
subject would have to come up with a way of comparing the
moral worth of, say, the risks that rich people face when
they play the stock market with that of the hazards
confronting workers compelled to undertake dangerous
tasks in a polluted workplace because of the absence of
alternative employment in their area. 107
Miller does show some unease about the case of exploi-
tation. He recognizes that in capitalist societies ‘[tjhe
worker’s needs and the employer’s command of resources
together create the power relationship that culminates in
exploitation.’ Market socialism will, however, be different
because under it 'individuals can acquire resources only
through engaging in productive activity, and these
resources, once acquired, cannot be converted into private
capital’. Therefore: 'There is nothing incoherent in the
attempt to establish an economy that is market-based but
exploitation-free.’108 But, if Miller’s market socialism
proved viable (a big if), this would not establish the justice of
markets in general, but rather that one kind of market
economy did not generate capitalist exploitation. It does
not follow that market socialism would be just, since, even if
access to the means of production were equalized,
individuals wr ould still receive higher incomes because of
their scarce talents: that is, they would still benefit from
brute luck.
To conclude: desert can at best play a residual role in any
theory of distributive justice. Attempts to justify income
inequalities should do so either by appealing to one of the
fundamental conceptions of equality considered in the
93 Equality and the Philosophers

earlier sections of this chapter or by arguing that incentives

are required on grounds of efficiency. All too
 Equality and the Philosophers 94

often, invoking desert simply confuses these two distinct

kinds of consideration in a way that obscures the issues at
stake.

Identity and difference

There is a final theoretical difficulty with equality’ that has

attracted much attention in recent years. This concerns
the question of difference. Any conception of equality
necessarily involves inter-personal comparisons with
respect to one of the dimensions that we have considered
above - welfare, primary goods, resources, access to
advantage, or capabilities. But it is often objected that the
differences among human beings are too great for such
comparisons to be tenable.
Sometimes this objection takes the vulgar form of iden-
tifying radical egalitarianism with ‘equality of outcome’, by
which is meant the demand that society should seek to place
all individuals in exactly the same material situation. But
none of the various attempts to define what Cohen calls
the currency of egalitarian justice, reviewed earlier in this
chapter, can be reduced to this caricature. On the
contrary, the aim of equalizing those circumstances over
which individuals have no control is to leave them free to
pursue their goals: given that these goals differ, the out-
come of individuals exercising their capabilities will also be
different. Equality is not uniformity. The idea that it
entails the suppression of individual difference is
nonsense.
Traditionally, this objection has come from right-wing
defenders of social inequality - though this has not pre-
vented New Labour theorists like Gordon Brown and
 95 Equality and the Philosophers
Anthony Giddens from attributing the idea of equality of
outcome to their left-wing critics. But, in contemporary
debates, the problem that difference poses for egalitarians
has taken a more sophisticated and often a more radical
form.
Two kinds of issue tend to be involved. In the first
place, it is sometimes claimed that the political move-
ments that developed in the 1960s and after have focused on
a new kind of social division. These reflect non-class- based
inequalities - oppression on the basis of gender, race,
nationality, sexual orientation and the like. But, it is argued,
remedying these inequalities does not simply involve
their abolition: on the contrary, the oppressed seek to
construct a collective identity that, among other things,
gives a new and positive evaluation of the difference on the
basis of which they suffer discrimination. On this basis,
Etienne Balibar suggests that there is a limit to the dynamic
of egaliberte: movements such as contemporary feminism
represent the emergence of 'a postmodern epoch, in which
the question is posed of transcending the abstract
or generic concept of man’.109
Secondly, some of these movements raise the question of
cultural difference. In modern liberal societies, people of
diverse national origins, religious faiths and political
beliefs co-exist while having very different conceptions of
the good. This problem has come to preoccupy many
liberal philosophers. Thus Rawls’s later work, represented
notably by Political Liberalism, has sought carefully to
restate the theory of justice as fairness so that it makes no
appeal to any single substantive metaphysical account of the
good, but rather involves principles consistent with a
number of different theories of the good. But beyond the
problem of value-pluralism is that of relativism: some
 Equality and the Philosophers 96

argue that the differences in conceptions of the good and

indeed in larger systems of belief are so fundamental that no
theory of justice is rationally justifiable according to some
universal set of criteria. For the postmodernist phil-
 Equality and the Philosophers 97

osopher Richard Rorty, for example, Rawls's left-liberal

theory of justice is merely one articulation of the values
that happen to prevail in American society. 110
I wish to address the questions raised by the problem of
difference at three levels. In the first place, there is the
conceptual challenge that it supposedly poses to equality as
an ideal. Chief among the sophisticated left-wing critics of
equality is Marx, who invokes difference when criti-
cizing the contribution principle:
This equal right [to the proceeds of one’s labour] is an
unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class
distinctions, because everyone is only a worker like every-
one else; but it tacitly recognizes the unequal individual
endowment and thus productive capacity of workers as
natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its
content, like every) right. Right by its nature can exist only as
the application of an equal standard; but unequal individ-
uals (and they would not be different individuals if they
were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard
only insofar as they are made subject to an equal criterion, are
taken from a certain side only, for instance, in the
present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more
is seen in them, everything else is ignored. Besides, one
worker is married, another not; one has more children than
another, etc., etc. Thus, given an equal amount of work
done, and hence an equal share in the social consumption
fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be
richer than another, etc. To avoid all these defects, right
will have to be unequal right rather than equaL111

This argument should at any rate absolve Marx of the

charge of wanting to impose the same uniform condition on
all human beings. His characteristically paradoxical
formulation that ‘equal right’ is ‘a right to inequality'
 Equality and the Philosophers 98

conceals an important tension. He establishes that the

contribution principle, by ignoring differences in produc-
99 Equality and the Philosophers

ers’ natural talents and dependants, leads to their unequal

treatment, and implies (though he cannot assert this
because of his confused views on ethics) that this is unjust
(why else does he refer to the contribution principle
having ‘defects’?). Marx further contends that any prin-
ciple of equality, because it applies the same standard to
diverse individuals, must treat them unequally, with, once
again, the implication that this treatment is unjust.
But does this follow? Certainly, as Sen contends, the
diversity of human beings means that treating them
equally in respect of one variable or set of variables implies
that they will be differently treated in other respects. But it
does not follow that this different treatment is unjust. A
person who is disabled may receive more resources than one
who is not in order to secure equality of capabilities: in this
case, the aim of differential allocation is to achieve equal
treatment. Marx’s criticism of the contribution prin- ciple is
best taken not as a rejection of all principles of equality
but rather as a rejection of this principle as insufficiently
egalitarian, and as a call for a rehned prin- ciple that takes
into account all those differences for which individuals
should be compensated. The needs principle might be
thought of as an example of this kind of refine- ment. This
is how Sen takes Marx’s argument, which, he says, ‘focused
attention on the necessity to address our manifold
diversities, including differences in need’. 112 We
can indeed see the debate about the currency of egalitarian
justice as precisely a process of refining our conceptions of
equality in order to take account of all those differences that
unfairly disadvantage individuals.
If this line of reasoning is correct, the mere existence of
difference does not defeat equality. But what, secondly, of
the argument that certain differences limit the scope of
100 Equality and the Philosophers

equality? Nancy Fraser has made a widely discussed pro-

posal that we distinguish between two kinds of justice,
 101 Equality and the Philosophers

one of which is concerned with redistribution, and the

other with recognition. The first is concerned with ‘socio-
economic injustice, which is rooted in the political-econ-
omic structure of society’ and gives rise to such
phenomena as exploitation, economic marginalization and
deprivation.

The second kind of injustice is cultural or symbolic. It is

rooted in patterns of representation, interpretation, and
communication. Examples include cultural domination
(being subjected to patterns of interpretation and com-
munication that are associated with another culture and are
alien and/or hostile to one’s own); nonrecognition (being
rendered invisible via the authoritative representa- tional,
communicative, and interpretive practices of one’s own
culture); and disrespect (being routinely maligned or
disparaged in stereotypic public cultural representations
and/or in everyday life interactions). 113

Injustice of distribution has been analysed by theorists

such as iVIarx, Rawls, Sen and Dworkin, and has been the
concern of the socialist movement. Injustice of recognition
has come into focus with the development of the post-
1960s movements. The injuries it embraces are common to
the oppression of women, blacks, lesbians and gays, and
marginalized national and ethnic groups, and form the
material of contemporary identity politics. Fraser stresses
that ‘this distinction between economic injustice and
cultural injustice is analytical. In practice, the two are
intertwined? Indeed, ‘far from occupying two airtight
separate spheres, economic injustice and cultural injustice
arc usually inter-imbricated so as to reinforce one another
dialectically’. 114 She nevertheless argues that it is worth-
while drawing the distinction between them in order to be
 Equality and the Philosophers 102

able accurately to characterize the different kinds of rem-

edy they require.
A main thrust in the considerable criticism that Fraser's
proposal attracted has been to deny that economic and
cultural injustice can be thus distinguished. 115 At a purely
conceptual level, Fraser is entitled to dismiss this objection.
Her distinction undoubtedly identifies two different kinds of
disadvantage. But the causal interaction between the two
goes deeper than Fraser suggests. It is not just that,
typically, economic and cultural justices in some general
sense mutually support one another. When we come to give
an account of the disadvantages that a particular group
suffers because of what one might loosely call their cultural
identity' - race, nationality or whatever - these
disadvantages typically embrace both what one might call
the injuries of misrecognition - disparagement, stereo-
typing and so on - and also various economic disabilities.
If we consider, for example, the plight of Kosovo Alba-
nians under Serbian rule, their oppression involved not
merely that they were denied political autonomy and the use
of their language, and stigmatized as breeding too
much, but also that they were excluded from jobs and
university places, and that their ownership of land was
reduced. Or again, the Palestinians have engaged in a long
drawn-out struggle for precisely the type of recognition
with which Fraser is concerned. But remedying their
plight depends crucially on restoring their access to the
basic productive resource - land - that they lost as a result of
the establishment of the State of Israel and the 1967 war.
Going in the other direction, from redistribution to
recognition, we have seen that egalitarian theorists have
frequently highlighted the spiritual ills associated with
inequality. 116
 103 Equality and the Philosophers
In the face of this kind of ‘intertwining' of the economic
and the cultural, one might ask: what is the point of so
sharply contrasting the two kinds of injustice? Fraser’s
answer, as we have seen, is that it allows us to clarify the
different kinds of solution to them. Now it is true that the
distinction may help us to see what is wrong with certain
incautious political claims - Judith Butler, for example,
moves from insisting that the cultural is material to assert-
ing that the central place of the heterosexual, monoga-
mous family in capitalist relations of production gives the
kind of cultural contestation practised by lesbian and gay
activists a privileged position in any strategy for social
change. Fraser’s careful analysis allows her to unpick this
series of conflations that so conveniently place the kind of
Queer Theory practised by Butler in the front line of the
anti-capitalist struggle. 117
But Fraser’s own preferred strategy of ‘transformation’ in
the dimensions of both economic and cultural injustice
envisages what she calls ‘deep restructuring’ in both the
relations of production and ‘the relations of recognition’
that would be mutually supportive. 118 So, once again, the
‘intertwining’ of the two kinds of disadvantage seems
more important than the analytical distinction between
them. At the very least, this debate indicates that equality as
an ideal is not irrelevant to what Fraser calls the
injustice of recognition. Indeed, for the very injuries that she
lists under this heading to count as wrongs, appeal must be
made to some principle entitling individuals to equal
recognition: it is noteworthy that among the primary goods
that are to be distributed according to the two
principles of justice, Rawls lists ‘the social bases of self-
respect’. Moreover, the causal interdependence of eco-
nomic and cultural injustice implies that any serious
 Equality and the Philosophers 104

attempt to remedy the injuries of, say, racism or the

oppression of women is likely to confront all sorts of
claims for the redistribution of material resources. Prop- erly
addressing these claims requires an egalitarian prin- ciple of
distributive justice. In this respect also, difference does not
trump equality.” 9
105 Equality and the Philosophers

The third issue, of cultural relativism, raises questions of

too great complexity to be properly addressed here* I simply
wish to point to the existence of two kinds of
egalitarian response. The first is straightforwardly philo-
sophical. Egalitarian theorists such as Barry and Scanlon
offer principled arguments that either challenge relativism
outright or at least seek to restrict its scope*120 This kind of
response is, I believe, essential and entirely justified.
But we can also respond to the relativists in what one
might call a ‘historicist 1 way. The era since the bourgeois
revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
has unleashed, as we saw in chapter 2, a succession of
movements demanding wr hat Balibar calls egaliberte lib-
erty and equality, understood as being capable only of
joint realization.
The initial challenges to the Divine Right of Kings and
more generally to authority and privilege sanctioned by
tradition and prescription have unleashed a process in
which different forms of inequality have been subjected to
critical scrutiny and political opposition. The movements
against Fraser’s injustice of recognition are a continuation
of this process. Inequalities between men and women,
black and white, straight and gay that were held in the
past to reflect biological necessity have been exposed as the
contingent consequences of social relationships. These
difference-based movements have widened the scope of
egaliberte rather than, as Balibar contends, revealed its
limits*
The result is a condition in which, in the advanced
capitalist societies at least, the diversity of conceptions of
the good that so preoccupies liberal theorists co-exists
with a generalized presumption against inequality -
against the background of extensive and growing socio-
106 Equality and the Philosophers
economic inequalities both within these societies and on a
global scale. This is a paradoxical and unstable state of
 Equality and the Philosophers 107

affairs, but it is not one where equality can be dismissed as

mere prejudice. The attempts by philosophers such as Rawls
to articulate an egalitarian theory' of justice must be seen in
the context of societies where equality has been on the
political agenda at least since the French Revolution. This
historical context does not make any particular the- ory
true, let alone guarantee the triumph of equality, but it
means that egalitarian theorists are grappling with prob-
lems not of their own invention - problems that reflect
something about the deep structure of modernity itself.
 4
Equality and Capitalism

Equality without tears

It should be clear that the theories of egalitarian justice

discussed in the previous chapter imply a considerable
redistribution of society’s resources. John Roemer recently
estimated that to achieve ‘deep’ equality of opportunity
with respect to education in the United States, with the
objective of ensuring that children in whatever circum-
stances who expend the same effort will have the same
adult earning capacity, would require spending $900 on
every white student and $2,900 on every black student. 1
Yet redistribution has dropped off the policy agenda,
even in the case of governments ostensibly committed to
equality. Some historically-minded commentators have
compared the version of the Third Way practised by
Tony Blair with the New Liberalism, which emerged in
Britain around 1900, and which inspired the policies of the
great Liberal administrations of Campbell-Banner- man
and Asquith between 1905 and 1915. Thus Alan Ryan
writes: ‘The third way first showed up in British policies
ninety -five years ago. At that point it was, and in so far as
it is coherent it remains, the ideology of the New
Liberalism . . . The truth is that the third way is neither
New Labour, as its admirers say, nor warmed
 Equality and Capitalism 110
over Thatcherism, as its detractors say, but a reversion to a
very old idea.’2
The comparison is no doubt an attractive one to Blair
himself. He has frequently deplored the division in British
‘progressive’ forces brought about by the formation of the
Labour Party and stressed the inspiration he finds in such
great Liberal figures as Gladstone, Asquith and Keynes.
The Labour Party, then, is led by someone who doesn’t
believe in wihtsene xoisntee nccoens(pideerrhsapths
enofrteqsuuecnhcya pwith aradowxrhiiccahl situation
religious doubts are avowed these days by members of the
clergy). But Blair might find the reality of the New
Liberalism a bit too radical for his liking.
The historical conjuncture in which it emerged was one
where it was widely agreed in the British political elite that
two challenges confronted the established order. One was
the external threat presented to British industrial and
naval supremacy by such rising powers as Germany and the
United States; the other was the prospect of domestic social
conflict raised by the emergence of an increasingly powerful
and assertive labour movement. Many Liberal and Unionist
politicians agreed that the situation required considerable
additional government expenditure on the navy (notably
the Dreadnought programme) and a pro- gramme of major
social reforms to alleviate working-class discontent and
improve the physical quality of a human ‘stock’ that the
Boer War revealed to have often been greatly diminished
by poverty.
They differed, however, on how to finance the expendi-
ture. Unionists such as Joseph Chamberlain argued that
protective tariffs would have the double advantage of rais-
ing the necessary moneys and protecting British industries
from foreign competition. New Liberals remained commit-
 Equality and Capitalism 111
ted to free trade, but were willing to depart from laissez-
faire to the extent of supporting extensive state intervention
 Equality and Capitalism 112

in the economy and redistributive taxation. The latter

would not only finance higher government expenditure, but
also help to strengthen a broad ‘progressive’ coalition
embracing both the Liberals and a growing but still politi-
cally subordinate labour movement. Such w as the logic of
Lloyd George’s famous 1909 Budget, which sought to pay
for the recent introduction of non-contributory old-age
pensions and for the Dreadnoughts by shifting the tax
burden on to the rich through higher income tax and death
duties and a new duty1 on the value of land. The furious
Unionist reaction greatly embittered party conflict, particu-
larly after the changing parliamentary balance brought the
Irish question back to the centre of politics in the years
immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. 3
The economic and social policy of the New Liberalism
was thus a classic instance of what it has become habitual
for New Labour dismissively to stereotype as ‘tax-and-
spend’. Lloyd George saw his 1909 Budget as merely the
beginning of a state-directed programme of agrarian
reform that was designed to break the power of the landed
aristocracy and would be financed by taxing landlords’
rents. 4 Blair’s own attitude to redistribution is nicely
captured by an anecdote from the 1997 election cam-
paign, told by a journalist close to his court: ‘Early on in the
campaign, I was foolhardy enough to ask Mr Blair if there
might be some small role for wealth distribution in the
politics of the centre left. It would have been safer to
venture he regularly beat his wife.’5
If Blair can claim a Liberal ancestry, it is less Gladstone
in his old age, reviled by the aristocracy as a traitor to his
class, or the young, Radical Lloyd George, than the more
right-wing Liberal Imperialists such as Asquith and Sir
Edward Grey, who supported the Boer War and took
 113 Equality and Capitalism

Britain into the First World War. During the 1999 Balkan
War, Richard Gott denounced the belligerent stance
adopted by Blair and his supporters as ‘a throwback to the
colonialism of the last century’, when the imperial powers
intervened at will in the affairs of independent states and
peoples'? The ambitious ‘doctrine of international com-
munity' unveiled by Blair at the height of the war, claim- ing
the NATO powers’ right to mount ‘humanitarian
interventions’ wherever they see fit, indeed legitimizes the
assertion of Western military might to maintain the exist-
ing, manifestly unjust global distribution of resources. 7
Gordon Brown, a much more traditional Labourist
politician than Blair, has been more consistent in his use of
egalitarian language, though the word ‘redistribution’ seems
to have been banned in New Labour discourse. The
journalist Samuel Brittan, one of the inventors of
monetarism, has sympathetically described Brown’s policy
as Chancellor of the Exchequer as ‘ “redistributive market
liberalism” - with only a light touch on redistribution’. 8
While Brown has pursued an orthodox neo-liberal macro-
economic policy, notably by giving the Bank of England
independent control over interest rates and by reducing
overall public expenditure in real terms, he has simul-
taneously practised what David Piachaud calls ‘redistri-
bution by stealth’. This has involved higher benefits and
new tax credits directed at poorer households with chil-
dren, financed, in the case of the withdrawal of the
children’s tax credit for higher-rate income tax-payers, by
tax rates for those on middle incomes. 9
higher marginal
Brown’s broad approach to equality' is an instance of
what Stuart White has named ‘endowment egalitarianism" ,
This involves equalizing ‘the background distribution of
 Equality and Capitalism 114

productive endowments so that market interactions lead to a

greater initial equality of income, lessening the need for
subsequent redistribution’. 10 The New Labour version of
this approach involves, however, equalizing access to only
one productive endowment - skills - through
115 Equality and Capitalism

improved education and training. Thus, while still in

opposition Brown called for

a new economic egalitarianism which starts from the rec-

ognition that it is indeed people’s potential - and thus the
value of their labour - that is the driving force of the
modem economy, and that the modem economy succeeds or
fails through enhancing the skills of everyone. Instead of
labour for the benefit of the few, the challenge is to rebuild
our economy to ensure labour can use capital for the
benefit of all.1’

Brown underlines that improving skills is an alternative to

any more extensive redistribution of productive resources:
‘where the success and failure of an economy depend on
access to knowledge more than access to capital, individ- ual
liberation arises from the enhancement of the value of
labour rather than the abolition of private capital’. 12 This
approach corresponds broadly to Joel Rogers’ and Wolf-
gang Streeck’s argument that the left requires a post-
Keynesian policy of ‘effective supply’, in which the state
seeks to provide the collective goods - notably education
and training - on which they claim competitiveness in the
era of ‘flexible accumulation’ depends. 13
In office Brown has pursued this ‘new economic egali-
tarianism’ under the slogan of ‘Work as the Route to
Opportunity’. New tax credits have been introduced to
guarantee poor households with children a higher mini-
mum income; the rates at which benefits and credits are
withdrawn from those in work have been graduated to
give more poor people an incentive to move into paid
employment; resources are being devoted to what a Treas-
ury paper calls ‘[h]elping people from Welfare to Work with
116 Equality and Capitalism
the New Deal programme to provide new work
opportunities for people who have become detached from
 Equality and Capitalism 9 3
the labour market’; and ‘the Government is working to
tackle inequality of opportunity at its roots’ by raising
education standards. 14
While not perhaps quite meriting some of the plaudits
directed at it by journalists eager to ingratiate themselves
with New Labour, there is no doubt that Brown’s strategy is
a seriously intended and systematically conceived
attempt to reduce inequality and poverty in British society.
It is, however, misconceived, internally incoherent and
therefore incapable of achieving its stated objectives.
The central contradiction lies in Brown’s attempt to
combine neo-liberalism and egalitarianism. The Treasury
paper cited above stresses the importance of ‘[a] macro-
economic framework which promotes a platform for long-
term sustained growth. This will help prevent the large
swings in output which destroy jobs and create pools of
long-term unemployment which have a scarring effect on
people’s subsequent employment opportunities.’ 15 As
Chancellor, Brown constantly repeats the mantra that
‘prudent’ monetary and fiscal policies are necessary to
avoid the ‘boom and bust’ cycle that he associates with the
previous Conservative administration.
There is a superficial paradox here, namely that Brown
holds the politicians of the Thatcher era responsible for
economic instability while appropriating the neo-liberal
orthodoxy which they were the first British government of
the post-war era to seek systematically to apply. But the
deeper contradiction lies in his belief (which dissolves this
apparent paradox) that neo-liberal macro-economic poli-
cies, correctly applied (as, he claims, they were not by the
Tories), will, in effect, abolish the business cycle and
thereby contribute towards eliminating the mass unem-
ployment that Brown correctly holds to be one of the
main sources of poverty and inequality.
This belief implies the relatively crude version of neo-
119 Equality and Capitalism

classical orthodoxy that holds that economic crises and

mass unemployment are caused by imperfections of the
market mechanism. This version is associated in particular
with the doctrine of the natural rate of unemployment,
demolished by Keynes in the 1930s but rehabilitated by
Milton Friedman and his fellow monetarists in the 1970s.
On this view, the rate of unemployment tends to a certain
level reflecting factors determining the supply and demand
of labour in the real economy. Any attempt by the govern-
ment to push unemployment below this rate - for
example, by seeking to increase effective demand - will
simply increase the rate of inflation; hence the natural rate is
often called the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rare of
Unemployment (NAIRU). To reduce the natural rate of
unemployment requires ‘supply-side’ measures that give
employers a greater incentive to hire workers. 16
Some indication of the kind of measures involved is
provided by an unusually blunt internal Bank of England
memorandum written in July 1930, as the Great
Depression forced up Britain’s already high levels of
unemployment:

Of the remedies proposed, the Bank prefer -

(1) Reduction of real wages in the sheltered industries [i.e.
those not exposed to international competition) , and if
this is insufficient, in the unsheltered as well.
(2) Reduction of real social service benefits to a point
where fear of unemployment is increased and the
mobility of labour stimulated.
(3) Redistribution of taxation to bear less heavily on profits
and more heavily on sheltered classes of all kinds, and
redistribution of social service charges so that they will
not be a tax on employment.
 Equality and Capitalism 120

(4) Rationalization.
(5) A Calvinist outlook. 17
This generous spirit of pre-Keynesian economic liberalism
still informs contemporary neo-liberalism, even if the lat-
ter’s public language is usually less brutal. Bastions of
laissez-faire such as the European Central Bank argue that
the chronic mass unemployment afflicting the advanced
economies is largely ‘structural’: that is, it is caused by
supply-side defects, chief among which are over-rigid
labour markets, over-mighty trade unions and over-gen-
erous welfare provision. Contemporary social-democratic
leaders increasingly endorse this diagnosis. In a recent
policy statement, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder
declare: ‘In much of Europe unemployment is far too high
- and a large amount of it is structural.’ They go on to call
for ‘a new supply-side agenda for the left’.18
Apart from lower corporate taxation, this agenda calls for
‘a fruitful combination of micro-economic flexibility and
macro-economic stability’. In particular, ‘[r|igidity and
over-regulation hamper our success in the knowledge- based
service economy of the future . . . We need to become
more flexible, not less.’ At the same time, Blair and
Schroder protest: ‘Modem social democrats arc not laissez-
faire neo-liberals. Flexible markets must be com- bined with
a new'ly defined role for an active state. The top priority
must be investment in human and social capital.’ 10 Once
again it is the enhancement of individuals’ endowments of
skills through education and training that is held to
differentiate the Third Way from neo-liberalism. Despite
this strategy’s emphasis on allowing individuals to fulfil
their potential, it has a concealed authoritarian
dimension. Consider the world prescribed by the neo-
liberal orthodoxy outlined above. The pursuit of macro-
 121 Equality and Capitalism

economic stability through sound fiscal and monetary

policy is expected by this orthodoxy to remove the causes of
cyclical unemployment, by eliminating (or greatly alle-
viating) the cycle of boom and slump. Meanwhile, labour-
market flexibility - largely established in the United States
and Britain, both Thatcherites and supporters of the
Third Way agree - will do away with structural unemploy-
ment. Finally, programmes such as Labour’s New Deal
will prepare the long-term unemployed for re-entry into - or
first experience of - the labour market.
In such a world, anyone who is still without a job must
have freely chosen this condition. The Utopia implied by
neo-classical models of perfect competition will have been
established: all unemployment will be voluntary. The
closer we approach this happy state of affairs, the more
appropriate it will presumably be to force on to the labour-
market those recalcitrants who persist in remaining job-
less. There is, therefore, a rather sinister ring to Blair’s and
Schroder’s ‘active supply-side labour market policy’
seeking, inter alia, to ‘[introduce targeted programmes
for the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged
groups to give them the opportunity to reintegrate into the
labour market on the principle of rights and responsi- bilities
going together’, and ‘assess all benefit recipients, including
people of working age in the receipt of disability benefits,
for their potential to earn, and reform state employment
services to assist those capable of work to find
appropriate work’,20
‘Assisting’ people into work may turn out to mean
driving them there - perhaps, as has happened in the
United States under the 1996 welfare ‘reform’ endorsed by
Clinton as part of his strategy of triangulation (i.e.
adopting the policy agenda of the Republican right), by
 Equality and Capitalism 122

withdrawing their benefits altogether. The threat is almost

explicit in the Blair-Schroder document: ‘New policies to
offer unemployed people jobs and training are a social
democratic priority but we also expect everyone to take up
the opportunity offered.’21
We can see the same logic at work in a recent speech of
Brown’s, where he affirmed New labour’s commitment to
full employment only to reinterpret this goal as
‘employment opportunities for all’.22 Once again, the impli-
cation is that it is incumbent on individuals to take up
these opportunities. When Brown announced in Novem- ber
1999 that the New Deal welfare-to-work programme would
be extended to unemployed people aged 25 or over
(originally it was restricted to those between 18 and 24), the
Financial Times commented: ‘Clearly Tony Blair’s
government is moving determinedly towards a system of
workfare - one that makes benefits conditional on willing-
ness to work.*23
Once this logic is understood, what is often thought to be
a contradiction in Third Way politics dissolves. Com-
mentators contrast Blair’s embrace of economic liberalism
with the moral authoritarianism he often displays with
respect to such issues as law and order and family values.
This combination of stances is unpalatable both for more
traditional Croslandite social democrats, who tend to
favour leaving individuals free to conduct their personal
lives within the limits set by public policy committed to
reducing inequality, and for those neo-liberals who hold that
free-market economics is part of a more general
libertarian approach to life.
But there is no contradiction in New labo ur thinking
here. If orthodox macro-economic policy and flexible
markets are undergirded by policies designed to enhance the
 123 Equality and Capitalism

market capacity of the disadvantaged, any remaining

unemployment must flow from the faults of the individu- als
concerned. Whether these faults are seen as conse-
quences of personal moral failings or a more general
‘culture of poverty’ that encourages dysfunctional behav-
iour, it is but a short step from accepting this diagnosis to
supporting a public policy aimed at, through a mixture of
sanctions and incentives, re-educating the individuals con-
cemed and breaking down their resistance to participating
in the world of work. In this sense, the accusation that
Third Way policies tend to reinvent the Victorian concept of
the undeserving poor is valid.
Three further features of this whole pattern of thought
are worth noting. The first is the emphasis on paid
employment as the road to salvation, or, as Brown would
put it, ‘the Route to Opportunity". Any particular instance
of disadvantage - being a lone parent, suffering from
disability and so on - is to be remedied by getting the
person concerned a job. This strategy can be justified by the
evidence, noted in chapter 1, that poverty and in-
equality in societies such as Britain and the United States
are closely related to unemployment and low-paid work. But
it does not follow from such a causal explanation that
the remedy lies in trying to shoe-horn everyone into jobs.
Most obviously, very large sections of the poor - notably
many disabled people and the old - cannot realistically be
expected to enter (or re-enter) the labour market. In
circumstances w’here social policy requires that welfare
recipients be assessed ‘for their potential to earn’, the
effect may be to reduce those with no such potential to
permanent second-class status. Treating work as the pri-
mary means for reducing inequality can thus operate as a
mechanism of exclusion. The effects may not be merely
 Equality and Capitalism 124

symbolic. Piachaud notes the redistribution of state ben-

efits in Britain under New Labour to the disadvantage of the
childless unemployed:

As for non-retired households without children, the poorest

tenth of these are mostly out of employment and receive
three-fifths of their income from social security benefits.
Some of these may escape poverty as a result of welfare-to-
work policies. For those who remain on social security, the
 125 Equality and Capitalism

present policy of freezing these benefits in real terms will

mean this group will fall further behind and their poverty will
increase. The effect of this over five years is estimated to be
an increase in poverty of 200,000 households con- taining
over 300,000 people. 24

Secondly, the first step on the road to salvation is

education. Indeed, the Treasury paper cited above implies
that the ‘roots’ of ‘inequality of opportunity’ lie in poor
education. In this respect, New Labour remains at one
with Old Labour. As we saw in chapter 2, both Tawney and
Crosland laid particular emphasis on attacking in-
equalities in education. In the case of New Labour, the
stress is less on inequality as such (the hostility that
traditional social democrats displayed towards the public
schools has entirely vanished) or even on higher spending
on education, but on making better use of existing
resources by bullying or bribing teachers to meet nation-
ally enforced norms of efficiency. While this obnoxious
policy is largely inherited from the Blair government’s
Tory predecessors, its justification has changed. The
Thatcherite objectives of getting value for taxpayers’
money and suppressing progressive teaching methods
remain, but the overarching aim is now to provide individ-
uals with the skills needed to participate in the labour
market. In its particulars as well as its general design, the
Third Way is a strange mixture of conservative measures
alloyed by social-democratic aspirations.
This approach is vulnerable to the fundamental objection
to all social-democratic strategies that seek to reduce in-
equality by widening access to education, namely that
educational performance does not produce but rather
 Equality and Capitalism 126

reflects the broader pattern of social and economic disad-

vantage. According to the Blair government’s own research,
if one father’s earnings are double the level of another,
his son’s maths test score is on average five percentile
points higher than the other’s and 2.7 percentile points
higher up the reading test distribution.
for a daughter the gain is five percentile points up the
distribution of both maths and reading tests scores. 25

These regularities suggest that efforts to improve the

education system are likely to be ineffective unless they are
linked to a transformation of the basic structures of
inequality. The New Labour approach is also vulnerable
because of its presumption that the surest long-term strat-
egy for reducing unemployment and thereby increasing
opportunity is to provide individuals with the appropriate
education and training. As Blair and Schroder put it,
‘lifetime access to education and training and lifelong
utilization of their opportunities represent the most
important security available in the modem world’. 26 This is
what Robert Kuttner calls ‘a human capital cure’. 27 It is
dependent on the claim, repeatedly made by Brown, that in
the information-hungry economies of contemporary
advanced capitalism, competitiveness is increasingly a
function of the quality of the human capital available: that
is, on the knowledge and skills of the workforce.
Whatever the relationship between competitiveness and
human capital, the implied claim that greater access to
education will of itself reduce unemployment is not sup-
ported by the evidence. 'Fake the case of the United
States, increasing held up as a model by European advo-
cates of the Third Way. Edward Luttwak has made, from a
neo-conservative perspective, a compelling case against the
127 Equality and Capitalism

claim that the decline in the workforce of such manu-

facturing ‘Old Titans’ of American capitalism as General
Motors is being compensated for by the rise of the ‘New
Titans’ of the information-technology industry. As Luttwak
 Equality and Capitalism 128

notes, in 1995 the New Titans of information technology

employed a total of 128,420 workers, less than a fifth of
General Motors’ workforce of 721,000. Microsoft
employed a mere 15,500:

If the US economy consisted only of Old Titans with a very

large but diminishing number of employees, and of New
Titans that employ very few, unemployment would be rising
to phenomenal levels. Of course, this is not so because of the
vast and diverse array of services, everything from local,
State and Federal government to dry-cleaners, with the huge
and growing health-care industry' in between. Within it,
there are the retail and fast-food giants, . . . which have
added greatly to the number of their employ- ees. But there is
a catch: they offer neither the superlative jobs that abound in
the information technology’ sector, nor the plain but well-
paid industrial jobs of the Old Titans. In large-scale retailing
and in the fast-food chains, many employees work at the
minimum wage, many others earn not much more, and only
a few at the top are very’ well paid. 28

This pattern reflects the fact that, as Luttwak puts it,

[t]he New Titans can and do prosper by supplying only the

world’s elites and near elites - the buyers and users of
computers, software and peripheral ancillaries - w'itb very-
high-margin products in relatively small volumes . . . What
this means from a larger perspective is that information-
technology' is not a job-creator in the way electric motors
(the last big leap) certainly were, displacing some manual
workers along w’ith steam engines, while giving birth to
several new' industries that offered much employment and
still do. Instead, as chance would have it, information
technology' is a job ‘sink’ as physicists would say: it destroys
 129 Equality and Capitalism
clerical and, increasingly, administrative jobs by the
million. 29
If this analysis is correct, low-paid jobs are unlikely to
offer many of their occupants the opportunity, thanks to
education and training, to climb up the occupational
ladder. Low pay will remain what the studies cited in
chapter 1 suggest it is now - a blind alley from which the
working poor cannot escape. The Blair-Schroder docu-
ment tacitly concedes this: ‘The labour market needs a
lowT-wage sector in order to make low-skill jobs available.
The tax and benefits system can replenish low incomes
from employment and at the same time save on support
payments for the unemployed.’30 The income guarantees
offered by Brown to families with children, by increasing the
incentive to accept low-paid jobs, effectively subsidize
employers offering such jobs. Whatever the benefits of
paid employment, it is not clear how this policy genuinely
widens opportunities.
Thirdly, the New Labour strategy presumes that it is
possible to increase equality without any significant redis-
tribution of wealth and income. Such is the implication of
Blair’s announcement: ‘The class war is over. But the
struggle for true equality has only just begun.’ Behind it lies
the claim I have just considered that, by enabling
individuals to realize their potential through greater access to
education and training, government can at the same time
enhance economic competitiveness. And so, ‘after a century
of antagonism, economic efficiency and social justice are
finally working in partnership.’ 31 But even if the claims
for improving human capital were true, is it really plausible
that all the vast and entrenched inequali- ties surveyed in
chapter 1 - including, let us recall, those on a global scale -
could be seriously reduced without any noticeable
 Equality and Capitalism 130

redistribution? Only the naive or the self- deceiving

could believe that it is? 2
Self-deception is indeed a noteworthy characteristic of the
more committed egalitarians in New Labour’s ranks.
Brown is sufficiently in touch with his Old Labour roots
occasionally to denounce ‘privilege and greed’. Thus not
long ago, in a more than usually boastful speech, he
looked forward euphorically to a second term of office: ‘it
will be the British people, that will be able to say, in the
words of Roosevelt, in our first term, these forces of
reaction and privilege met their match; in their second
term they found their master’? 3
Who does he think he’s kidding? Brown is a leading
member of a government that has dedicated itself to
avoiding giving offence to the rich and privileged. Minis-
ters from Blair down have sought their company, cele-
brated them publicly and solicited their financial
contributions. Promises made in opposition to the trade
unions concerning such issues as the minimum wage,
union rights and working hours have been watered down in
the face of big-business opposition. When the Trade and
Industry1 Secretary, Stephen Byers, announced ‘a
crackdown on excessive boardroom pay’, the Financial
Times cynically commented: ‘In the event, there was little
behind the rhetoric, which explained the sighs of relief
from the City audience.’ 34 If New Labour does obtain a
second term, the ‘forces of reaction and privilege’ will be
able to rest easy in the knowledge that they are the
masters.
These contortions reflect the fact that Blair and Brown
believe that they can achieve equality without tears -
without, that is, significant social conflict. But this is the
merest delusion. So profound are social and economic
 131 Equality and Capitalism

inequalities, so unjust (in the terms discussed in the

previous chapter) is the current distribution of resources,
that the situation can begin to be remedied only by
dramatic transfers from the rich to the poor. This may be an
uncomfortable truth, and many may conclude that
redistribution on this scale is politically impossible. But
those who choose, for whatever reason, to settle for second
or third best are not entitled to the comforting illusion
that what they have opted for amounts to social justice.

O n the capitalist roller-coaster

Beyond these specific difficulties, the fundamental contra-

diction of the Third Way, conceived as a social-demo-
cratic strategy’, lies in its attempt to combine egalitarian
aims with a neo-liberal economic policy. Can social in-
equality be significantly reduced in an economy that con-
forms to the Anglo-American model of deregulated,
laissez-faire capitalism? Among the many reasons support-
ing the conclusion that it cannot, two in particular stand
out.
First, social and economic inequalities have widened
dramatically over the past two decades, at precisely the
time when neo-liberal policies have become dominant in
Western counsels. The fact that in the advanced countries
this process has gone furthest in the two countries - the
United States and Britain - where the return to laissez- faire
has been most pronounced suggests that this is no mere
coincidence. Indeed, the basic thrust of fiscal policy in the
Reagan-Thatcher era - cuts in income and corpor- ate
taxation that benefit the rich and the better-off, greater
reliance on regressive indirect taxes that hit the worse off
 Equality and Capitalism 132

relatively hard, reductions in social expenditure that hurt the

poor - could have no other effect than to widen
inequalities.
The New Labour government in Britain has persisted
with Thatcherite fiscal policy, presiding over a fall in the
share of national income taken by public expenditure to its
lowest level since the 1960s, while holding out the
promise of yet more tax cuts. Quite aside from the defects
surveyed in the previous section, the kind of measures
advocated by supporters of the Third Way to reduce the
gap between rich and poor are likely to be ineffective
when thrown into the balance against the consequences of
this approach.
Secondly, the rational kernel in the version of equality of
opportunity espoused especially by Gordon Brown is its
recognition of the connections between unemploy- ment,
low pay and poverty. But the neo-liberal era has been one
of slow growth in output and therefore high levels of
unemployment. As Angus Maddison puts it in his study of
the long-term development of modern capi- talism, ‘there
was a golden age of greatly accelerated growth in the
quarter-century from the Second World War, and a very
substantial deterioration after 1973, though performance
in this last phase has been better than in any earlier period
since the golden age’. The annual average rate of growth
of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the sixteen
main market capitalist economies was 2.4 per cent in 1820-
70, 2.5 per cent in 1870-1913, 2.0 per cent in 1913-50,
4.9 per cent in 1950-73 and 2.6 percent in 1973-89. 35
Since the period 1913-50 includes the Great
Depression of the 1930s, by far the most serious economic
crisis in the history’ of capitalism, when output fell by
nearly 30 per cent in the US and Germany, what we have
 133 Equality and Capitalism

seen since 1973 is a fall in the average growth rate back to

nineteenth-century levels. Maddison’s figures only go up to
1989, but the 1990s have seen no real break in this
pattern. At the end of 1996 the Financial Times reported
O EC D projections that ‘annual average growth for the
EU and the US for most of the 1990s will be only 1.9 per
cent (compared to 1.6 per cent in Japan)’. The paper
compared ‘this dreary performance with average growth in
the 1960s and early 1970s - an average of 4.8 per cent
in Europe, 4.3 per cent in the US and 9.4 per cent in
Japan’?6 Towards the end of the decade, the American
economy picked up speed, growing at an average rate of
nearly 4 per cent in 1996-9, but this is unlikely to change
the overall picture for the advanced countries, given that
continental Europe stagnated for much of the 1990s,
while Japan grappled with the worst deflationary crisis
experienced by any major economy since the 1930s. In the
year 2000, 35 million people are expected to be
unemployed in the OECD bloc of rich countries. 37
It is, when one thinks about it, a remarkable tribute to the
role of institutional power in securing the acceptance of
ideas - and to the effrontery of the free-marketeers - that
neo-liberalism should have triumphed over Keynesian
economics and been entrenched as economic orthodoxy
during an era when the average growth rate nearly halved.
But then intellectual modesty has not been one of neo-
liberals’ most obvious characteristics. Perhaps the most
striking case is that of Russia, where the application of
free-market ‘shock therapy’ in the 1990s led to an econ-
omic catastrophe greater than anything seen even in the
Great Depression, wider socio-economic inequalities, and
the wholesale transfer of the most profitable public assets to
a handful of private entrepreneurs largely recruited from
 Equality and Capitalism 134

the old nomenklatura. Yet the Russian government’s

Western academic advisers, such as Jeffrey Sachs and
Richard Layard (co-author of a book published in 1996
called The Coming Russian Boom).,show no sign of contri-
tion. One wonders what would be the effect if the kind of
performance indicators imposed on British higher edu-
cation during the Thatcher era were applied to such
advice?8
This is not to hold neo-liberalism responsible for the
economic slowdown after 1973. Its intellectual and politi-
cal rehabilitation was a reaction to this slowdown and to
the failure of Keynesian measures to overcome it. All the
same, there is a strong case for saying that the return to
laissez-faire has made the situation worse. Take the case of
die chronically high levels of unemployment in the Euro-
pean Union. The orthodox line, endorsed by Blair and
Schroder, that these are a consequence of labour-market
rigidities produced by over-regulation and strong trade
unions (on the Continent at least), has recently been
challenged by an OEC D study that found no strong
connection between employment protection legislation
and the level of unemployment. 39
An alternative explanation of mass unemployment lies in
the hard-wiring of neo-liberal policies into the EU, first by
the convergence conditions for economic and monetary
union laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, and then by
the establishment, under the same treaty, of an indepen-
dent and unelected European Central Bank with sole
control of monetary policy since the euro was launched at
the beginning of 1999. 40 One provocative recent study
goes even further, arguing that Europe’s high unemploy-
ment levels compared to the United States reflect the fact
that American public policy is in some respects more
 135 Equality and Capitalism

egalitarian and certainly more actively committed to job

creation than that of a EU now under largely social-
democratic management. 41
More fundamentally, the simple truth is that capitalism
doesn’t wKork in the way in which neo-classical orthodoxy
claims that it does. It just is not the case that a market
economy, if left to its own devices, will attain a full-
employment equilibrium. As Hayek, the most astute mod-
em defender of the free market, acknowledged in his
theoretical writings, capitalism is an inherently unstable
economic system that unavoidably moves through a cycle of
boom and slump. There are many reasons why this is so: let
me just mention two of the most important ones. 42
136 Equality and Capitalism

The first we can associate with Keynes, since one of the

main themes of the General Theory is the constitutive
instability of financial markets. The same theme has been
stressed by contemporary left-Keynesian writers such as
Will Hutton and Larry Elliott in Britain. 43 Struggling to
predict an inherently uncertain future and thereby to find
the most profitable moment to buy or sell assets, investors
on financial markets are liable to collective movements
driven by greed and fear that can have devastating effects on
the productive economy. Neo-liberal policies of dereg-
ulation - strongly promoted by successive US adminis-
trations since the 1970s - and the revolution in
information technology have interacted with longer-term
economic trends greatly to increase the volume and inter-
national mobility of the money capital invested on finan- cial
markets. The result has been the great surges of
speculative Western investment that have first uplifted a
succession of 'emerging market’ economies - Mexico in the
early 1990s, East Asia and Russia in the latter half of the
same decade - and then, when euphoria turned sud- denly
to panic, dashed them down as capital fled as
quickly as it had entered in the first place? 4
The human consequences of these huge flows of money
in and out of particular economies have been severe. In
Indonesia, real salaries dropped by 30 per cent in 1998, and
the incidence of poverty7 rose to between 14 and 20 per
cent (compared to 11 per cent two years before).
Household income in South Korea was 20 per cent lower in
the third quarter of 1998 than a year previously. In the
Philippines, real per capita income fell by 12 per cent in
1998. 45 '
The severe financial panic that set in after the Russian
crash in August 1998, and that led briefly in the early
137 Equality and Capitalism
autumn to a flight for cash as confidence in the credit
system vanished, strengthened a growing chorus of voices
 Equality and Capitalism 109
critical of the ‘Washington consensus’ - the US Treasury-
International Monetary Fund axis promoting the global
adoption of neo-liberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s. The
idea of capital controls, designed to allow govern- ments
to regulate inflows and outflows of speculative money,
became fashionable, particularly after the Malay- sian prime
minister, Mahatir Mohamed, used them with apparent
success to alleviate the impact of the Asian crisis. Even the
World Bank and the IM F performed U-turns and
endorsed the use of capital controls. 46
In practice, the limits of laissez-faire have been demon-
strated by the determined intervention of the governments
of the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrial countries to
end each panic. IMF rescue packages were constructed for
Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia and Brazil with the dual
aim of reassuring financial markets by lending the affected
countries the money to repay their Western cred- itors and
requiring the recipients to adopt neo-liberal ‘reform’
packages that would open them up to further foreign
investment. Even more spectacularly, in Septem- ber 1998
the US Federal Reserve Board led fifteen major investment
banks in bailing out the hedge fund Long Term Capital
Management (LTCM), which had been bankrupted by
the shock- waves of the Russian crash. LTCM’s
speculations in financial derivatives left it at the peak with
an incredible $900 billion market exposure
supported by only $4.8 billion in capital.47 So the fund had
to be rescued, lest its collapse send already panicky financial
markets into free fall.
Such interventions by the G 7 and the Fed achieved
their aim of reassuring the markets, but at the cost of
increasing ‘moral hazard’. In other words, their effect is to
convince investors that they will be protected against the
negative consequences of their speculations and thus to
encourage them to take even greater risks, with yet more
140 Equality and Capitalism

damaging results, in the future. As one financial journalist

put it, ‘[t]he extent of moral hazard is impossible to
measure. But with each new financial crisis, and each bail-
out, whether by the International Monetary Fund, indi-
vidual central banks or governments, the in-built bias
towards excessive risk-taking is reinforced.’ 4*
In the aftermath of the 1998 panic there was much talk of
the need for reforms in the global ‘financial architec- ture’.
But one of the most intelligent and incisive com- mentators
on the world economy, the Financial Times columnist
Martin Wolf, suggested that the practical impact would
be slight:

The world’s financial powers will neither prevent crises nor

be able to cure them painlessly. They lack the interest, the
will, and, given the politics, the means to do so . . . The
conclusions of this painful episode are three: the new world
of capital market openness is extremely vulnerable to crisis;
the world can do little limit the pain of the afflicted; and it is
up to emerging market economies to understand the risks
they run and decide how best to deal with them. The world
can do something to help reduce the chances of crises; it
can help reduce the subsequent pain. But it is the people of
the emerging market economies who experience the pain and
their governments that bear the chief responsi-
bility for minimizing it. 49

These conclusions may be if anything insufficiently

bleak in suggesting that the advanced economies are
largely insulated from the consequences of financial crises.
Arguably the most important form of moral hazard cre- ated
by the Federal Reserve Board and other central banks when
they rescued LTCM and cut interest rates in the autumn
of 1998 was on Wall Street. The reassurance offered by
141 Equality and Capitalism
this intervention encouraged share prices to rise to ever
more stratospheric levels, taking them even more
 Equality and Capitalism 142

out of line with company earnings than they already were.

While the rate of inflation was subdued, the price of
financial assets soared. The resulting ‘wealth effect’
encouraged middle-class American households, enriched by
the boom, to run down their savings even more and to lash
out on consumer goods, and thereby allowed the US to act
as ‘consumer of last resort’ for the world economy, partially
compensating for the depressing impact of the Asian crisis.
But, by inflating the stock-market bubble to even greater
dimensions, the Fed’s intervention may mean that when
Wall Street finally falls, the effects on America
and the world will be severe. 50
The second reason for believing that capitalism is inher-
ently unstable is offered by Marx. He argued that the
sources of economic crises lie deeper than what he called
the credit system (though he wrote in Capital Volume III, a
pioneering analysis of financial crises). On his account, the
tendency towards boom and slump arises from capi- talist
relations of production themselves. Competition among
rival capitals leads to investment in plant and
equipment rising faster than the workforce from whose
labour profits are extracted. The result is a fall in the
general rate of profit unless various counteracting influ-
ences (of which the most important is economic crisis
itself) push it back up. This tendency of the rate of profit to
fall, Marx claimed, underlies the cyclical movement of the
capitalist economy to move between boom and
slump. 51
This theory has provoked enormous controversy since it
was first published just over a century ago. Nevertheless,
there is considerable evidence that the period of instability
and slow growth from which the global economy has
suffered since the early 1970s involves a deep-seated crisis of
 Equality and Capitalism 143
profitability in the advanced world. Robert Brenner’s major
study of post-war capitalism offers a detailed dem-
112 Equality and Capitalism

onstration of this proposition, though it posits different

mechanisms as responsible for the fall in the rate of profit
from those invoked by Marx:

Between 1970 and 1990, the manufacturing rate of profit for

the G-7 economies taken together was, on average, about
40 per cent lower than that between 1950 and 1970
. . . the radical decline in the profit rate has been the basic
cause of the parallel, major decline in the rate of growth of
investment, and with it the rate of growth of output,
especially in manufacturing, over the same period. The
sharp decline in the rate of growth of investment - along
with that of output itself - is . . . the primary source of the
decline in the growth of productivity, as well as a major
determinant of the increase in unemployment. The reduc-
tions in the rate of profit and of growth of productivity are at
the root of the sharp slowdown in the growth of real
wages.52

If this diagnosis is correct, then many of the phenomena

held to represent the health of capitalism over the past
decade - for example, corporate downsizing, the increas-
ing intensity of international competition, the tendency of
multinational corporations to site more of their operations
abroad, the febrile behaviour of the financial markets - are
in fact symptoms of, and responses to, the low profit- ability
of productive investment in the advanced econom- ies. The
pressure on living standards documented in chapter 1 -
most notably the fall in real average hourly earnings of
American non-supervisory workers - also becomes
intelligible as part of a process of corporate
restructuring designed to restore the rate of profit to its
post-war peak. How far this process has gone in the US is a
matter of controversy even among Marxist economists: my
own opinion is that the boom that developed in the late
1990s was a relatively superficially based phenomenon
 Equality and Capitalism 113
rather than a sign that the long-term crisis of profitability
had been overcome? 3 Whether or not this judgement is
correct, historical experience suggests that any such reso-
lution is likely to be temporary. The world in the twenty-
first century will find itself on the same roller-coaster of
boom and slump that it has ridden for the past 200 years.

Equality versus the market

The upshot of the preceding section is that capitalism as an

economic system is chronically liable to profound and
disruptive collapses in output and employment. The
human consequences are severe. According to the United
Nations Development Programme,

[P]ast crises show that while economies regain output

growih and macro-economic balances - inflation, exchange
rates, balance of payments - fairly quickly, it takes longer for
employment and wages to recover. An analysis of more than
300 economic crises in more than 80 countries since 1973
shows that output growth recovered to pre-crisis levels in
one year on average. But real wage growth took about four
years to recover, and employment growth five years. Income
distribution worsened on average for three years, improving
over pre-crisis levels by the fifth year.54

The last sentence quoted paints perhaps too rosy a pic-

ture, since, as the Human Development Report itself shows,
the general trend is towards growing inequalities of wealth
and income. In the light of these considerations, the idea,
central to New Labour strategy, that an egalitarian social
policy can somehow be pursued in the context of the kind of
 Equality and Capitalism 114
deregulated capitalism to be found in Britain and the US is
simply Utopian. Nor is it obvious that some more
114 Equality and Capitalism

humane version of capitalism can be found that will

provide a more favourable environment for egalitarians.
After the collapse of the Eastern bloc discredited the
idea of a socialist alternative to the existing system, the
belief gained ground in social-democratic circles that
world history would now take the form of a struggle
between rival models of capitalism. In particular, ‘Rhine-
land capitalism’, with its generous social provision, regu-
lated markets and institutionalized bargaining between
state, capital and labour, offered a more attractive model for
the centre left than Anglo-American laissez-faire. The idea
of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, drawing its inspiration from
Germany and Japan, was briefly floated in New Labour
circles in the mid-1990s before being squashed as too
radical by Blair and Brown. But the problem with this
approach lies deeper than the conserv atism of the Labour
leadership. Actually existing stakeholder capitalism has
been in serious trouble since the early 1990s. Japan’s and
Germany’s economic performance over the past decade
has been considerably worse than that of the US. In both
countries, the political and business classes are deeply
divided in the face of powerful pressures to restructure
their economies along more Anglo-Saxon lines. It is
doubtful whether ‘Rhineland capitalism’ any longer rep-
resents a stable and coherent alternative to neo-
liberalism. 55
The difficulty of pursuing egalitarian aims in a capitalist
context is, however, much more far-reaching than the
question of the viability of particular economic models.
Any serious attempt to achieve greater equality is likely
significantly to disrupt the functioning of capitalism as an
economic system. Take, for example, the quite widely
canvassed proposal that, in place of existing welfare sys-
tems, every adult citizen should receive a basic income
from the state. This is often seen as a way of overcoming
 Equality and Capitalism 1 15

the irrational consequences of the interactions of the tax

system and means-tested benefits, which leave the poor in a
poverty trap where they have little or no incentive to
accept paid employment. But Brian Barry argues that the
introduction of a basic income would serve wider egalitar-
ian objectives: for example, helping to pave the way for
market socialism. 56
Philippe Van Parijs and Robert Van Der Veen go even
further, arguing that ‘if communism is to be approached
within a capitalist context, it must be by way of raising as
much as possible the guaranteed income in the form of a
universal grant’. 57 They propose paying everyone a basic
income of half per capita GD P, with adjustments to take
account of such variables as age and degree of handicap.
This ‘Capitalist Road to Communism’ (where the latter is
understood in Marx’s sense, as opposed to the caricature
once known as ‘existing socialism’) would involve ‘redis-
tribution . . ., roughly, from those who perform paid work to
those who do not’ - a proposal justified by the claim that
‘under advanced welfare-state capitalism, access to
(paid) labour has become a privilege’.58
This assertion reflects the belief widespread among left-
of-centre intellectuals in northern Europe that wage-
labour is becoming a relatively marginal social experience.
As a general proposition this is mistaken. Despite chroni-
cally high levels of unemployment in the advanced econ-
omies over the past generation, only a relatively small
minority of the economically active population is jobless
(Van Parijs’s and Van Der Veen’s claim that ‘in Western
Europe, the employed population contributes less than
half of the total adult population’ must depend for its
truth on the dubious device of including old-age pension-
ers in the latter figure). 59
 Equality and Capitalism 1 16

In the United States working hours rose by nearly 4 per

cent between 1980 and 1997, while elsewhere in the
116 Equality and Capitalism.

industrialized world working hours remained stable or

declined slightly?0 The idea that paid work is vanishing
derives any plausibility it may have from the experience in
northern Europe in the same period of slow growth and
high unemployment, rendered tolerable by relatively gen-
erous welfare provision and a relatively large drop in
working hours. This state of affairs is now coming under
increased pressure as both the European Central Bank
and big business demand reductions in social expenditure
and labour-market deregulation.
But the real problem with the basic income proposal lies
elsewhere, in the resistance it would evoke from
capitalists. Van Parijs and Van Der Veen dismiss this
objection: ‘Given the considerable leeway provided by
massive unemployment, it is hard to believe . . . that the
replacement of the current social security net in advanced
welfare states would dramatically damage profits (all
things considered) and drive freely moving capitalists
away.’61 This is, to say the least, a remarkably naive
attitude in the light of the long experience of social-
democratic governments ‘blown off-course’ (to use Har-
old Wilson’s famous phrase) by the large-scale flight of
capital: the most recent example is the Mitterrand admin-
istration in France, forced in 1981-3 to abandon its
programme of Keynesian macro-economic policies and
extensive nationalization by the collapse of the franc on the
foreign exchanges.
Since then the markets have shown themselves
extremely sensitive to any move by a government in a
‘tax-and-spend’ direction. In March 1999 Oskar Lafon-
taine, the first committed Keynesian to serve as the
finance minister of a leading economy for many years, was
driven to resign from the new Red-Green government in
117 Equality and Capitalism.

Germany as the result of a concerted campaign by leading

industrialists. His chief crime was to propose a relatively
 Equality and Capitalism 118

limited shift in the tax burden from wage-earners to

companies. In response, some of the largest German
corporations threatened to move their operations abroad.
The Financial Times baldly summarized the effect of this
blackmail: ‘Following their angry revolt over higher taxes,
the leaders of German industry have claimed their scalp.’62
Barry envisages that the provision of a subsistence-level
basic income would require ‘a flat tax on all incomes of fifty
per cent (which would, of course, be made higher on larger
incomes)*.63 If such a proposal were seriously can-
vassed by a major party with a serious prospect of holding
office anywhere in the advanced world, the reaction of the
privileged would be extravagantly ferocious.
It is important to understand that the burden of this
criticism is not that the basic-income proposal is unrealis-
tic. As I argue at greater length in the next section, too
narrow a measure of ‘feasibility’ would strangle at birth
the practical search for a more equal society. My claim is
rather one of incompatibility: a basic income is inconsist-
ent with a functioning capitalist economy. Part of the
point of the universal grants proposed by both Barry and
Van Parijs and Van Der Veen is to provide an acceptable
alternative to paid employment. But this would drastically
undermine the incentive to strike a labour contract on
terms favourable to capital.
One of the driving forces behind neo-liberal efforts to
reduce public expenditure and ‘reform’ the welfare state has
been the belief that, as a result of the Long Boom, social-
security benefits were eroding the incentive to per- form
wage-labour, particularly at low levels of pay. The aim has
been, in the words of the pre-war Bank of England
memorandum cited earlier in this chapter, to cut benefits ‘to
a point where fear of unemployment is
 119 Equality and Capitalism

increased and the mobility of labour stimulated 1. A sub-

sistence-level basic income would more than reverse the
effects of these reductions. That is a good reason for
supporting such a proposal, but it nevertheless conflicts with
the conditions under which a viable capitalist econ- omy
could be reproduced. In that sense, the resistance that
capitalists would undoubtedly mount to any serious
attempt to introduce a basic income would be rationally
based. The thought, in other words, is not simply that
such an attempt would evoke damaging opposition from
business interests, but that this opposition would reflect an
accurate insight into the preconditions of profitable
capitalist enterprise.
Supporters of basic income are thus left with a dilemma.
Either the grant is set at so modest a level that it acts - like
the minimum income guarantee introduced by Gor- don
Brown - as a subsidy to employers paying low wages or, if it
is fixed anywhere near subsistence, it will disrupt the
functioning of the capitalist economy and evoke fierce
opposition from business interests that will itself have a
destabilizing impact. Barry proposes introducing basic-
income gradually, but - in all likelihood long before it
neared subsistence level - the point would be reached
where the latter alternative came into play. The correct
response to this dilemma is not to reject the basic income
proposal, which has undoubted attractions, but to recog-
nize that it can succeed only as part of a wider move
towards socialism in which, critically, control over produc-
tive resources is taken from the hands of the capitalists and
collectively exercised by those whom Marx called the
‘associated producers’. 64
The case of basic income illustrates a more general
point. Any attempt to move significantly in the direction of
 Equality and Capitalism 120

greater equality implies making drastic inroads in the

workings of the market that would seriously interfere with
the conditions of capitalist reproduction. Social-demo-
cratic attempts to rein in the operations of the market
 Equality and Capitalism 121

while offering scope for egalitarian policies thus suffer

from difficulties of principle. Lionel Jospin, leader of the
French Socialist Party, has sought to differentiate himself
from the Blair-Clinton Third Way, declaring: *1 am for the
market economy as opposed to the market society? 6 5
Shortly after taking office as Prime Minister in June 1997,
Jospin said: ‘If market forces are allowed to let rip, it will
spell the end of civilization in western Europe.’ 66 But, how to
rein in market forces without producing the kind of
disruptive polarization 1 have discussed above? In practice,
Jospin has pursued policies not that different from Blair’s,
privatizing on a far greater scale than his right-wing pre-
decessors and allowing the election promise of a 35-hour
week to be watered down beyond recognition, though (a
shrewder politician) he has kept his supporters happy with
left-wing rhetoric. 67
In other words, social democrats continue to face the
more general version of the dilemma stated above, one
that has dogged them for the past century. In government,
either they can avoid confrontation with capital and man-
age the market as best they can, in which case they must
abandon their egalitarian aspirations, or, if they stick to
their guns, they can succeed only if they take control of
productive resources away from the minority who cur-
rently control them. The economic and political hazards of
the latter course are enormous, but it is hard to see how
anyone seriously interested in a significant increase
in equality7 can deny its necessity.
I have so far justified this on instrumental grounds, but
we should recall that a basic thrust of the egalitarian
liberal arguments reviewed in chapter 3 was that access to,
among other things, productive resources should be
equalized. It is one of the great merits of Rawls and
 Equality and Capitalism 122

Dworkin in particular to have placed this issue, so to

speak, on the philosophical agenda (though they leave
120 Equality and Capitalism

open when this equality requires collective ownership of the

means of production). 68 The narrow version of
‘endowment egalitarianism’ prevalent in New Labour cir-
cles has reduced the redistribution entailed to improving the
availability and quality of education and training, but the
principled argument should direct our attention to the
requirement of equal access to the means of production
themselves. The chief weakness of egalitarian liberalism is
that it fails to recognize that achieving this equality, and
indeed the other equalities canvassed by its proponents, is
inconsistent with the maintenance of capitalist relations of
production.

The test of reality

Any version of egalitarianism must confront the charge that

its implementation either is impossible or would produce
such negative consequences as to make it undesirable.
One standard objection to the radical forms of egalitarian
justice discussed in chapter 3 is that the redistribution
they require would severely undermine economic effi-
ciency. Deprived of the incentives provided by income
inequality, economic actors would produce less, and the
resulting falls in productivity and output would reduce the
incomes of all, including that of the disadvantaged whom
the redistribution was intended chiefly to benefit. Rawls’s
difference principle seeks to address this objection by
authorizing inequalities that benefit the worst off.
A socialist version of egalitarianism is likely to face even
stronger objections to its feasibility. The convulsions at the
end of the 1980s, which destroyed what I prefer to call the
Stalinist societies in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
undermined whatever credibility the idea of social- ist
planning still had left. G.A. Cohen, founder of Analyt-
 Equality and Capitalism 121
ical Marxism and a leading egalitarian political
philosopher, writes: ‘The socialist aspiration was to extend
community to the whole of economic life. We now know
that we do not know how to do that, and many think that
we now know that it is impossible to do that/ 6 9 He is
therefore ready to settle for market socialism, but very
much as second best, since, "while market socialism may
remove the income injustice caused by the differential
ownership of capital, it preserves the income injustice
caused by differential endowments of personal capacity’,
and continues to rely on ‘some mixture of greed and fear’
to motivate economic actors. 70
Even market socialism would, by taking control of
productive resources away from private capital, represent a
very substantial change. The critical question has always
been whether the combination of genuinely collective
ownership of the means of production and reliance on the
market mechanism to allocate resources between sectors
and enterprises constitutes a reproducible economic sys-
tem over any period of time - I doubt strongly that it is. The
broader issue of the economic feasibility of socialism is an
enormous question that I cannot begin properly to address
here. Suffice it to say that I believe that egalitari- ans such
as Cohen are too hasty in dismissing socialist planning on
the basis of the Soviet experience.
However we choose to characterize the social character
of ‘existing socialism’ (in my view it was a version of
capitalism rather any kind of post-capitalist society), the
form of planning it employed required the total concen-
tration of power at the centre. In principle at least, infor-
mation flowed upwards from ministries and enterprises to
the planners, and decisions in reverse order, from the top
downwards. This structure made a certain crude sense as a
means of securing for military-related heavy industries
priority in resource allocation - the real motive for the
127 Equality and Capitalism

system - but, as free-market critics from Mises and Hayek

onwards argued, it produced hypertrophy and paralysis at
the centre and widespread evasion and inefficiency in the
enterprises. This system of ‘planning’ (if it deserves the
word, since it was so driven by exogenous pressures from
the global structure of military competition) plainly failed. It
does not follow, however, that other versions of plan- ning
must do so. Yet, through some bizarre ideological
mechanism, every conceivable alternative to the market
has been discredited by the collapse of Stalinism. Plainly this
has much to do with the historical context of that
collapse, and most particularly what it is now convenient to
call globalization - the marked trend for production, trade
and finance to burst beyond national confines. This
internationalization of capital goes a long way towards
explaining why the Soviet Union fell apart when it did:
brutally successful in mobilizing and centralizing resources
on a national scale, the Stalinist system was wholly
incapable of seizing the new competitive advantages
offered by global economic integration.
The demise of ‘existing socialism’ is thus the most
dramatic demonstration of the incompatibility of nation-
ally organized capitalism with rhe new world economy.
The further inference, made even by the more left-wing
egalitarian philosophers such as Cohen, that this experi-
ence demonstrates the necessary superiority of the market
over other forms of economic co-ordination does not seem
warranted by the evidence. The choice between, on the one
hand, market capitalism, particularly in its Anglo-
American variant, and, on the other hand, defunct Stalin-
ism is a hopelessly impoverished one. Yet it is the sole one
offered by mainstream political discourse - if only as a
way of affirming, yet again, the superiority of liberal
 Equality and Capitalism 128

capitalism. Now that the immediate reverberations of the

upheavals of 1989 and 1991 have worked themselves out,
and as the defects of capitalism once more make them-
selves felt, it is surely time to give serious consideration to
models of democratic socialist planning. It does not seem
beyond the powers of human ingenuity to devise a much
more decentralized system of planning in which infor-
mation and decisions flow horizontally among different
groups of producers and consumers rather than vertically
between centre and productive units. Pat Devine’s model of
‘negotiated co-ordination’ illustrates how such a system
might work. One of its merits is that it would require the
extensive democratization of economic and social life - a
development that would in any case be desirable on other
grounds. 71
There is thus no reason why socialist planning should not
be consistent with an economy capable of reproduc- tion
over time. But socialism, like any radical egalitarian- ism,
must confront the objection that, even if in principle
economically feasible, it cannot be realized because of the
conflict it implies with entrenched human motivations.
This view is expressed, from an egalitarian liberal perspec-
tive, by Thomas Nagel. He sees this as an instance of the
struggle within the individual between, on the one hand, l
[t]he impersonal standpoint [that] in each of us produces
. . . a powerful demand for universal impartiality and
equality’, and, on the other hand, ‘the personal standpoint
[that] gives rise to individualistic motives and require-
ments which present obstacles to the pursuit and realiz-
ation of such ideals’. 72
More specifically, Nagel suggests: c My suspicion is that a
politically secure combination of equality with liberty7 and
democracy would require a far greater transformation of
 129 Equality and Capitalism

human nature than there is reason either to expect or to

require.’ Moreover: ‘Economic life cannot be disen-
tangled from private choice and personal motivations,
without disastrous consequences. And the operation of
such motives in the economy seems bound to frustrate the
pursuit of a comprehensive egalitarian ideal however great
may be the political will to achieve it. This is the familiar
problem of incentives? Consequently, we should settle for
what’s feasible, the establishment of a 'social minimum’
financed by progressive taxation that leaves major inequal-
ities in place? 3
Nagel’s position is, as he points out, ‘the point of view
behind contemporary social democracy’? 4 Perhaps the
greatest merit of his argument is that it reveals this point of
view’s dependence on the traditional conservative view that
egalitarian social change is rendered null by human nature.
Indeed, it is hard not to see Nagel’s counter- position
of the impersonal and personal perspectives as a
modem philosophical restatement of the ancient
Christian-Platonic conception of the person as a complex
entity composed of antagonistic higher and lower selves? 5
Of course, to give an argument a dubious genealogy is not
thereby to dispose of it. Disputes over human nature are
notoriously hard to resolve, in large part because
normative and factual considerations are usually hope-
lessly entangled. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding our-
selves of the standard socialist objection to appeals to
human nature in order to trump calls for egalitarian
change, namely that such appeals tend to confuse the local
and the contingent with the universal and the natural.
Cohen in effect offers a version of this objection when he
argues that incentive structures that favour the better off
maximize productivity and output only given the con-
 Equality and Capitalism 130

straints set by inegalitarian attitudes and structures? 6

In other words, relative to the context defined by these
attitudes and structures, offering incentives to the better off
may indeed produce optimal results. But this says
nothing about how individuals will behave in a different
social context. In a suitably altered social structure, where
different beliefs about individuals’ relations to each other
prevail, motivations other than the expectation of material
reward may suffice. One example is what Cohen calls the
community motivation — ‘I produce because I desire to
serve my fellow human beings while being served by
them’, where I expect my service to be at least roughly
reciprocated, but do not (as in the case of market motiv-
ation) produce because I desire to be served in turn. 77
One obstacle in seeing our way round the expectations
produced by inegalitarian structures and attitudes is the
effect of what Marx named fetishism. These historically
specific structures and attitudes and the ways of behaving
they produce have come to seem natural and therefore
unalterable. Whatever the negative features of the Keynes-
ian era, it did involve a considerable widening of the areas of
social and economic life that were seen as being amen- able
to conscious control and even transformation. The neo-
libcral reaction of the past generation represents a
dramatic narrowing of the scope for autonomous human
intervention. Once again the market mechanism has been
hypostatized into a natural force unresponsive to human
wishes.
Fetishism reduces the set of what is thought to be
possible, and therefore makes it harder to mobilize sub-
stantial numbers of people to support greater equality. It
does not follow that this obstacle cannot be overcome.
The situation would indeed be difficult if egalitarians such
 131 Equality and Capitalism

as Nagel and even Cohen were right in believing that the

majority of citizens, in the advanced economies at least,
were affluent, contented and therefore indifferent to the
plight of an impoverished minority. But this belief is false, as
I tried to show in chapter 1. Even where real pay has not
actually fallen (as it did in the United States between the
early 1970s and the late 1990s), those wage-earners
belonging to what in America is known by the delightfully
oxymoronic expression the ‘working middle class’ are
caught up in a structure of insecurity where - largely
because of the economic tendencies discussed earlier in this
chapter - their jobs, earnings, conditions and long- term
future are under constant threat from waves of
restructuring and downsizing afflicting public and private
sectors alike.
It follows that the interests of the working majority can be
mobilized in support of a strategy of social transforma- tion.
This possibility is obscured by the impact of the neo- liberal
offensive of the 1980s in defeating organized labour and
leaving it seriously weakened. Particularly in the US and
Britain, where the New Right were most successful, the
result has been a climate of political despair and social
atomization: it is hardly surprising that the spurious solu-
tion of the Third Way has flourished in these
circumstances.
But in continental Europe, where the workers’ move-
ment did not suffer defeats on the scale of the British
miners’ strike of 1984-5, the 1990s saw7 both an intensi-
fication of social conflict and a revival of left-wing politics.
This process has gone furthest in France, where the public
sector strikes of November-December 1995 represented a
turning-point that pushed society significantly to the left.78
 Equality and Capitalism 132

The same pattern can be seen elsewhere in Europe, as is

illustrated by the intense controversy provoked by
Schroder’s decision, after ousting his left-wr ing opponent
Lafontaine, to sign up to the Third Way by issuing a joint
policy document with Blair (see above) and announcing a
programme of public spending cuts.
Pace the theorists of globalization, it is still possible to
construct collective agents on the basis of the kind of
mixture of shared interests and ideals that has historically
inspired the labour movement. The great demonstration
that disrupted the meeting of the World Trade Organiz-
ation in Seattle on 30 November 1999 offered a glimpse of
what this agent might be like, as trade unionists and non-
governmental organizations concerned with the
environment and Third World poverty came together to
contest the neo-liberal agenda shared by the world’s polit-
ical and economic elites. Michael Moore vividly evoked
the character of the demonstration:

It was a massively representative body of Americans (and

Canadians and Brits and French, etc.) . . . - Teamsters and
turtle-lovers, grandparents and Gap clerks, the home- less
and computer geeks, high school students and Alas- kans,
nuns and Jimmy Hoffa, Jr, airplane mechanics and
caffeinated slaves from Microsoft. A few were professional
protestors, but the majority looked as if it was their first
exercise in a constitutionally protected redress of griev-
ances. 'Ph ere were no ‘leaders’, no ‘movement’, no idea of
what to do except stop the World Trade Organization from
holding its secret meeting , . . Mark it down, this last great
important date of the 20th century - 30 November 1999 -
The Battle of Seattle, the day the people got tired of having
to work for a second job while fighting off the collection
agents and decided that it was time the pie was shared with
 133 Equality and Capitalism

the people who baked it. 79

Despite such hopeful portents, the scale of the social

transformation that is required is enormous, particularly
when we take into account the structurally entrenched
equalities that exist on a world scale. A book of this nature
cannot offer any sort of detailed prescription. It is, how-
ever, worth stressing that the point of advocating equality
along the lines canvassed in chapter 3 is not to ensure that
everyone receives exactly the same amount of the currency
of egalitarian justice. Shaw made the point well: ‘ All social
reforms stop short, not at absolute logical completeness or
arithmetical exactness, but at the point at which they have
134 Equality and Capitalism

done their work sufficiently.’80 What is required is a

substantial move towards securing equal access to advan-
tage. No one should be under the illusion that even steps in
this direction that fell well short of fully achieving this
objective would not evoke intense resistance from those
who benefit from the unjust social structures that prevail
today. To demand equality is to propose revolution.
The greatest obstacle to change is not, however, the
revolt it would evoke from the privileged, but the belief that
it is impossible. Confronted with a threatening econ- omic
environment, and with the traditional alternatives to
capitalism in disarray, it is very easy for individuals to
despair. It seems to me part of the duty of those seriously
committed to egalitarian ideals to refuse to surrender to this
mood. This does not imply embracing facile optimism that
ignores the real constraints on change. But this
sentiment hardly seems the main danger at present. It is far
more tempting to confuse the feasible with the very limited
range of options offered by existing socio-econ- omic
structures. Doing so, however, would be more than to
commit an intellectual mistake. Given the scale of
suffering and inequality on a world scale, it would be to
acquiesce in evil.
Cohen, in the critique of left-liberal justifications of
incentives that I have already cited, compares the better off
who predict that they will produce less, making the poor
suffer, unless they continue to be specially rewarded with a
kidnapper who predicts that the child he has taken will
suffer unless her parents come up with the ransom money.
His point in doing so is to demonstrate the moral
incoherence of such assertions when they are made by the
person who has the power to make the prediction come true.
They are symptomatic of the absence of what Cohen calls a
135 Equality and Capitalism

‘justificatory community’ between kidnapper and parents,

rich and poor.81
 Equality and Capitalism 1 2 9

But there is a larger truth in this comparison. As a

matter of fact, most of us live in the shadow of the
blackmail of capital. A small group of corporate rich move
their money from country to country in the search of the
highest return. They are able, with a large degree of
success, to demand that public policy is tailored to suit
their needs. Governments that threaten their interests are
punished by capital flight and investment strikes. The rare
offending politician is subjected to media ridicule and
driven from office. But the bulk of the political elite is
happy to flit like moths in the glow with which a money-
worshipping culture surrounds the rich. Empty chatter
about ‘communitarianism’ co-exists with the absence of
anything resembling a genuine community.
It is time - more than time - to call the blackmailers’
bluff. Their success depends on the strange climate com-
bining complacency and pessimism, conservatism and fear
that has come to pervade Western societies over the past two
decades. Challenging this climate requires courage,
imagination and will powrer inspired by the injustice that
surrounds us. Beneath the surface of our supposedly
contented societies, these qualities are present in abun-
dance. Once mobilized, they can turn the world upside
down.
 Afterword

It may be helpful, in conclusion, to state the argument of

this book in the shape of four theses:
1 Social and economic inequality is a chronic feature of
the contemporary world. The available evidence suggests
that, in the era of capitalist triumphalism ushered in
during the 1980s by the victories of the New Right in the
United States and Britain and by the collapse of the
Eastern bloc, the gap between rich and poor has steadily
grown, both on a world scale and within individual
countries. Of course, there is nothing new about such
inequalities, but they represent a standing reproach to
modern liberal societies that, since the American and
French Revolutions, have guaranteed their citizens equal
respect. The promise of what Etienne Balibar calls egali-
berte - of equality and liberty conceived as principles that
can only be realized jointly - seems indeed to be a
constitutive feature of modernity, and one that it is far
from fulfilling. The pressure that this failure places on
politicians - even at a time when much trouble has been
taken to expunge large-scale ideological conflicts from
mainstream discourse - is reflected in the considerable
efforts by the New Labour government in Britain to
demonstrate that it is pursuing a strategy aimed at signifi-
cantly diminishing inequality. The fact that, as I have tried
to show, this strategy stands very little chance of succeed-
ing hardly diminishes the urgency of the issue.
2 Egalitarian liberalism has, since the appearance of
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice nearly a generation ago,
greatly improved our philosophical understanding of the
nature of distributive justice. The difference principle
offers a criterion by which to judge whether unequal
distributions are to be tolerated, namely only when they are
to the advantage of the worst-off. The debate over the
currency of egalitarian justice has also, despite the arcane
by-roads into which it has sometimes strayed, also pro-
duced greater clarity. Both G.A. Cohen’s equal access to
advantage and Amartya Sen’s equality1 of capabilities sug-
gest that what we should be seeking to equalize is individ-
uals’ ability to engage in as wide a range as possible of
activities and states (what Sen calls ‘functionings’) that
they have reason to value. Sen’s capabilities approach has
the further merit of indicating that egalitarianism is driven
not merely by the justified desire to eliminate the harmful
consequences of brute luck, but by the objective of ensur-
ing that all have equal access to well-being, where well-
being involves the successful pursuit of goals that are both
valuable and freely chosen. The fact that well-being can- not
be reduced to the satisfaction of individual preference is
important because it rules out the more subjectivist
versions of luck egalitarianism that hold individuals
responsible for the consequences of all the choices they
make once access to welfare or resources has been equal-
ized. Often circumstances so confine choices that individ-
ual preferences adapt to this constrained situation. To
treat the decisions reflecting these preferences as the
outcome of free choice would be to do the individuals
concerned a grave injustice.
 Afterword 140
3 The greatest weakness of egalitarian liberalism is,
however, its assumption that justice can be done within
132 Afterword

the framework of a capitalist market economy. This is a

premiss that it shares with the ideologists of the Third
Way. It is reflected in egalitarian liberals’ tendency to
neglect the role of exploitation - the extraction of surplus
labour from wage-labourers - in creating and sustaining the
existing structures of inequality (Cohen is an excep- tion:
his concern with exploitation reflects a continuing socialist
commitment). They focus on differences in nat- ural talent
as the main source of inequality - a view that completely
fails to address the entrenched structures of privilege and
power on a world scale. The inherent con- flict between
capitalism and equality is suggested by the direct connection
between the various measures taken to revive profitability
over the past two decades - deregula- tion, corporate
downsizing, tax cuts for the better off, reductions in
social provision - and the growing gap between rich and
poor. More abstract reflection suggests that the measures
that egalitarians recommend to improve the condition of the
worst-off would, above all by under- mining the incentive to
take part in the labour-market on terms favourable to
capital, severely disrupt the profitable functioning of the
capitalist economy. Egalitarian justice can be achieved only
against capitalism.
4 This conclusion, of course, poses the greatest political
difficulty: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, few
believe that there is a viable and attractive socio-economic
alternative to capitalism. The idea of market socialism
offers a half-w'ay house, seeking to combine collective
ownership of the means of production with the market’s
supposed superiority to other forms in the efficient allo-
 cation of resources. Even if this combination were stable
(which seems doubtful), it would leave unremedied the
injustices arising from differences in individual ability and
need. But a non-market alternative to capitalism seems
quite outside the bounds of contemporary common sense.

To change this state of affairs will require, among other

things, a revival in Utopian imagination - that is, in our
capacity to anticipate, at least in outline, an efficient and
democratic non-market form of economic co-ordination.
Our current inability to do so is a consequence both of
disappointed hopes and of the imaginative dominance that a
particular type of capitalism - the Anglo-American
laissez-faire model - has acquired for various contingent
reasons. What the French call la pensee unique - a narrow
set of neo-liberal dogmas and recipes - currently exerts an
almost totalitarian hold on policy debate. But this will
pass. Already we can see the signs of a developing popular
reaction to the effects of this consensus. From the move-
ments that are currently emerging against neo-liberalism
will develop new visions of how to run the world better.
Here lies our best hope of forcing modernity finally to
fulfil its promise of equality and liberty.
 Notes

Chapter 1 Inequality today

1 United Nations Development Programme (hereinafter

UNDP), Human Development Report 1999 (New York,
1999), p. 3.
2 Ibid., pp. 37, 38, and Guardian, 12 and 14 July 1999.
3 UNDP, Human Development Report 1999, pp. 36, 39. The
Gini coefficient is used by economists to measure the
degree of inequality: the closer it is to 1.00, the higher the
level of inequality; the closer it is to zero, the greater the
equality.
4 Liberation,5 August 1999.
5 UNDP, Human Development Report 1999, pp. 37, 39.
6 K. Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (New York, 1991),
p. 10.
7 E, Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism (London, 1999), p. 67.
8 HM Treasury, Tackling Poverty and Extending Opportunity,
March 1999, p. 17.
9 S. P. Jenkins, ‘Income Dynamics in Britain 1991-6’, in
Persistent Poverty and Lifetime Inequality: The Evidence,
CASEreport 5/HM Treasury Occasional Paper No. 10,
March 1999, p. 4.
10 M.B. Stewart, ‘Low Pay, No Pay Dynamics’, ibid., p. 76.
11 R. Dickens, ‘Wage Mobility in Great Britain’, ibid., p. 80.
12 Tackling Poverty and Extending Opportunity, p. 31.
13 T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York, 1991), p. 90.
 Notes to pp. 7-15 135
G.A. Cohen’s arguments for the obsolescence of Marxist
class theory in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality
(Cambridge, 1995), esp. Introduction and ch. 6, rely on the
same assumption without explicitly defending it.
14 See also E.O. Wright, 'Inequality’, in id., Interrogating
Inequality (London, 1994).
15 G.A. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, in J. Franklin, cd.,
Equality (London, 1997), p. 41.
16 UNDP, Human Development Report 1999, pp. 61-6.
17 D. Piachaud, ‘Wealth by Stealth’, Guardian, 1
September 1999.
18 Financial Times, 5 July 1999.
19 J. Pullinger, ed., Social Trends 28 (London, 1998), p. 100
and Figure 5 .17.
20 Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism, pp. 95-6.
21 R. Brenner, ‘Uneven Development and the Long Down-
turn’, New Left Review, 229 (1998), pp. 191-2.
22 J. Madrick, The End of Affluence (New York, 1997),
pp. 16-17.
23 Ibid., pp. 139-42 (quotation from p. 142).
24 W. Hutton, The State We're In (London, 1995), pp. 109,
108.
25 P. Bourdieu, Contre-feux (Paris, 1998), pp. 95, 96-7, 99. 26
Nagel, Equality and Partiality, p. 5. 27 D. Goodhart, ‘Don’t
Mind the Gap’, Prospect, August/
September 1999, p. 12. But compare Michael Prowse’s
much more thoughtful piece, ‘Mind the Gap’, Prospect,
January 2000.
28 Quoted, D. Healey, The Time of My Life (London, 1990),
p. 369. Healey denies, however, that he said he planned to
‘squeeze the rich till the pips squeak’.
29 ‘Europe: The Third Way/Dte Neue Mitte - Tony Blair and
Gerhard Schroder’, 8 June 1999, [Link], p. 5.
30 N. Bobbio, Left and Right (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 60, 82. 31
Though I do not accept his argument in its totality. Thus Bobbio
claims that cutting across the distinction between
left and right is one that unites extreme left and right
136 Notes to pp. 15-19

against moderate left and right in, respectively, opposition to

and support for democracy and freedom: see ibid., pp.
20ff. This begs important questions raised by Bobbio’s
earlier writings on socialism: for a contrasting view' of the
relationship between socialism and different forms of
democracy, see A. Callinicos, The Revenge of History
(Cambridge, 1991), ch. 4.
32 T. Blair, Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 28
September 1999, [Link], p. 4.
33 Rawls himself says his ‘two principles [of justice] express
an egalitarian form of liberalism’, Political Liberalism
(expanded edn, New York, 1996), p. 6. See also R. Dwor-
kin (1978) ‘Liberalism’, reprinted in M. Sandel, ed.,
Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford, 1984).
34 For a discussion and proposed explanation of this con-
trast, see S. Scheffler, ‘Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes,
and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics’, Philosophy &
Public Affairs, 21 992).
35 J. Bidet, Theorie generale (Paris, 1999), p. 9.
36 B. Barry7, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995), p. 214.
37 J. Lloyd, ‘Prepare Ye the Way of Blair’, New Statesman,
10 May 1999, p. 25.
38 K. Marx, Capital, I (Ha rmondsworth, 1976), p. 90.
39 Indeed, two of the theorists listed above as egalitarian
liberals - Cohen and Roemer - have a Marxist back-
ground. They are leading representatives of the current
known as Analytical Marxism. I am fairly sceptical about
this group’s claim to be renewing the Marxist tradition, but
this does not diminish the interest of Cohen’s and
Roemer’s contributions as normative political philo-
sophers.
40 To this extent Andrew Gamble is right to say that ‘Marx-
ism does not represent the negation of liberalism so much as
the attempt to fulfil it’: ‘Why Bother with Marxism?’, in A.
 Gamble et al., eds, Marxism and Social Science
(Houndmills, 1999), p. 4.

Notes to pp. 20-27 137 Chapter 2

Equality and t he revolution

1 Quoted, C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714

(London, 1969), p. 119.
2 T. Jefferson, Writings (New York, 1984), pp. 19, 1517
(letter to Weightman, 24 June 1826).
3 For more on Tocqueville’s analysis of modernity, see A.
Callinicos, Social Theory (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 67-72.
4 Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford, 1980), p. 876.
5 E. Balibar, ‘“Droits de 1’homme” et “droits du citoyen”:
La Dialectique modcme de I’egalite et de la liberte’, Actuel
Marx, 8 (1990), pp. 20, 21, 22.
6 Ibid., p. 23. Balibar here cites Marx’s affirmation: ‘The
emancipation of the working class is conquered by the
working classes themselves’: Marx and Engels, Selected
Correspondence (Moscow, 1965), p. 327.
7 Balibar, ‘“Droits de 1’homme” et “droits de citoyen”’,
p. 23.
8 J. Bidet, Theorie generale (Paris, 1999), pp. 34, 35.
9 Ibid., p, 38.
10 K. Marx, Capital (3 vols, Harmondsworth, 1976-81), I,
p. 152.
1 1 Bidet argues that to start with social structures rather than
the metastructure is to reduce contractuality to ‘an “ideo- logical
superstructure”, . . . a simple surface form conceal-
ing the real relations (of force)’: Theorie generale, p. 34
n. 1 1 (see also ibid., pp. 146-7). But there is no contra-
diction between insisting that modem societies must be
analysed primarily in terms of their inegalitarian structures
and accepting ‘the proposition of egaliberte - and more
generally some version of egalitarian normative theory - as
 having whatever truth ethical sentences generally pos- sess.
Such, indeed, is the position I take in this book.
12 T. Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Ambition and Love (Oxford,
1979), pp. 199-200.
13 K. Marx, Capital, I, p. 280.
14 Ibid., pp. 279, 272-3, 382.
138 Notes to pp. 28-36

15 K. Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Marx

and Engels, Collected Works, XXIV (London, 1989), p. 87.
16 Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 705. See
G.A. Cohen, Review of A. Wood, Karl Marx, Mind, 92
(1983).
17 N. Geras, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, in
A. Callinicos, ed., Marxist Theory (Oxford, 1989), p. 245.
See also the useful discussion in J. Elster, Making Sense of
Marx (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 4.
18 Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, p. 87.
19 Marx, Capital, III, p. 911. See Geras, ‘The Controversy
about Marx and Justice’, pp. 255-6.
20 G.B. Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism (London, 1928), p. 19.
21 R.H. Tawney, Equality (4th edn, London, 1952), p. 36.
See, on Burt, S.J, Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Har-
mondsworth, 1984).
22 Tawney, Equality, pp. 84, 111, 117.
23 Ibid., pp. 118, 126-7. See also pp. 208-9 for Tawney’s
more detailed criteria for taking industries into public
ownership.
24 C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956),
p. 113.
25 Ibid., pp. 205, 214, 208, 209, 210-11. See also ibid.,
pp. 296ff. I have rearranged the order of Crosland’s
arguments.
26 Ibid., pp. 520-4 (quotation from p. 524).
27 Tawney, Equality, p. 157.
28 See, for example, C. Price, ‘Education Secretary’, in D.
 Leonard, ed., Crosland and New Labour (Houndmills,
1999).

Chapter 3 Equality and the philosophers

1 G. Brown, ‘Equality - Then and Now’, in D. Leonard, ed.,

Crosland and New Labour (Houndmills, 1999), p. 37.
Notes to pp. 36-38 139
Considerable efforts are indeed made by Brown and other
contributors to this collection to claim Crosland for New
Labour. Raymond Plant’s judicious essay - ‘Crosland,
Equality and New Labour* - rather stresses the
differences.
2 C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956),
pp. 101-3 (quotation from p. 101).
3 ‘Europe: The Third Way/ Die Neue Mine - Tony Blair and
Gerhard Schroder', 8 June 1999, [Link], p. 1.
4 A. Carling, ‘New Labour’s Polity'’, Imprints, 3 (1999),
p. 217. See also G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and
Equality (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 260-2, and A. Carling,
‘What Do Socialists Want?’, in M. Cowling, ed., Marxism,
the Millennium and Beyond (Houndmills, forthcoming). I
am grateful to the author for supplying me the latter paper
prior to publication.
5 It is perhaps worth making clear that I do not believe
socialism can be reduced to a set of values. In the Marxist
tradition it is conceived as a social system - or, more
precisely - as the transitional formation connecting two modes
of production, capitalism and communism. But this
formation can also be seen as realizing the values
listed above.
6 Brian Barry argues against identifying socialism with
equality: ‘If taken as fundamental equality - the equal claim
to consideration of all human beings - it does not distinguish
socialism from liberalism or indeed from most (non-racist)
forms of modem conservatism. If taken as material equality,
it is also inaccurate since very' few socialists have ever been
or are now in favour of complete material equality*: Does
Society Exist? (London, 1989), p. 17. But since Barry goes
on to suggest that ‘relative equality’ is ‘a theorem derivable
from an adequate account of social justice’, his definition of
socialism as ‘social justice plus collectivism’ doesn’t seem to
differ signifi- cantly from two of the values listed by Carling -
equality and community.
7 G. Brown, ‘In the Real World', Guardian, 2 August 1996.
140 Notes to ppt 38-44

8 J. Lloyd, ‘Iron Will, Steely Intellect’, New Statesman &

Society, 24 May 1996, p. 8.
9 See, for example, Andrew Hacker’s systematic survey of
black disadvantage in Two Nations (New York, 1993).
10 Carling, ‘New Labour’s Polity’, p. 233. See also J. Roe-
mer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA, 1 998), p. 1.
1 1 Brown, ‘Equality’, pp. 43, 44.
12 A. Giddens, The Third Way (Cambridge, 1998), p. 103. 13
Carling, ‘New Labour’s Polity’, p. 234 n. 40.
14 Ibid., pp. 233, 234. Aside from Carling’s excellent cri-
tique, further discussion of Giddens’s The Third Way will be
found in A. Callinicos, ‘Social Theory Put to the Test of
Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens’, New Left
Review, 236 (1999), pp, 79-85,
15 A. Giddens, ‘Why the Old Left is Wrong on Equality’,
New Statesman, 25 October 1999, p. 25.
16 G.A. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, originally pub-
lished in New Left Review, 207 (1994), but cited here
according to the repnnt in J. Franklin, ed., Equality (Lon-
don, 1997), p. 34. See also later in this chapter.
17 Lloyd, ‘Iron Will, Steely Intellect’, p. 9.
18 J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (London, 1982), pp. 12-13.
19 J.S. Mill and J. Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays
(A. Ryan, ed., Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 336.
20 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972), p. 26.
21 Ibid., pp. 26-7. ’
22 H.J. Paton, The Moral Law: Kant's Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals (London, 1972), p. 71. See also
Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 179-83.
23 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford, 1974),
pp. 31, 32.
24 B. Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995), p. 201. It
is therefore misleading to describe Rawls, as Michael
Sandel does, as the exponent of a ‘rights-based ethic’: see
Introduction to M. Sandel, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics
(Oxford, 1984), pp. 3ff.
25 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 137.
 iVores w pp. 45 -4 9 141

26 Ibid., p. 128.
27 J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (expanded edn; New York,
1996), p. 258.
28 Ibid., p. 181.
29 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 302.
30 See, in addition to Barry, Justice as Impartiality, T. Nagel,
Equality and Partiality (New York, 1991), and now' T.M.
Scanlon, U/t’ Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
31 Rawr ls, Theory of Justice, pp. 62, 303.
32 Ibid., pp. 311-12, 101-2. The normative question of
whether individuals are entitled to their natural talents is,
as far as I can see, independent of the causal problem of
the relative importance of genetic endowment and social
environment in producing these talents in the first place. 33
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 183 230. Noz-
ick’s critique of Raw4s in fact depends on what Cohen
calls ‘the thesis of self-owmership, which says that each
person is the morally rightful owner of his own person
and powr ers, and, consequently, that each is free (morally
speaking) to use those powr ers as he wishes, so long as
he does not deploy them aggressively against others.’
See, for extensive critical discussion of this thesis, Cohen,
Self-Ozunership, Freedom, and Equality (quotation from
P- 67).
34 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 244. See also ibid., pp. 541-8.
35 Ibid., pp. 225, 226.
36 M.-A. Waters, ed., Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York,
1970), p. 393.
37 Raw'ls, Political Liberalism, pp. Iviii n. 34, Iviii-lxix. The
first two conditions of liberal conceptions of justice are the
liberties themselves and the ‘special priority’ given them:
ibid., p. xlviii. All these passages come from the 1995
Introduction to the paperback edition. Rawds includes the
same list of conditions (a)-(e) in his recent The Law of
Peoples (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 50, a text that other-
wise does seem to represent a retreat from his earlier,
more universalist claims.
153 Notes to pp. 50-53

38 J. Bidet, John Rawls et la theorie de la justice (Paris, 1995),

p. 26.
39 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 66.
40 Bidet, John Rawls, pp. 26, 27. 41
Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 78.
42 G.A. Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, in
G.B. Peterson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
XIII (Salt Lake City, 1992). Rawls himself sees an import-
ant connection between the difference principle and the idea
of fraternity: Theory of Justice, pp. 105-6.
43 Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community1,
pp. 269-70.
44 R. Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Pan 2: Equality of
Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), p. 284.
45 Though the defiant tone of Rawls’s response to criticisms
of his theory for being ‘abstract and unwordly’ indicates
some awareness of this challenge: see, for example, Politi-
cal Liberalism, pp. Ix-lxii.
46 A. Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Oxford, 1992), pp. 12, 1, 3,
4. Sen first presented the issue in these terms in a
celebrated 1980 lecture, ‘Equality of What?’, reprinted in
id., Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford, 1982). As
so often, Aristotle made the point first: ‘Justice is held by all
to be a certain equality . . . But equality in what sort of things
and inequality in what sort of things - that should not be
overlooked’: The Politics (Chicago 1985), 3.12, p. 103, I
am grateful to Gordon Finlayson for this refer- ence. It is,
incidentally, a striking indication of the gap that continues
to separate Anglophone from Continental intellectual
culture, that Bobbio (and his translator) should
apparently believe Sen to be a woman: see Left and Right
(Cambridge, 1996), p. 1 12 n. 3.
47 J. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge MA,
1996), chs 5-8, offers a lucid introduction to recent
debates, albeit one accompanied by much axiomatic econ-
154 Notes to pp. 50-53

omic theorizing. I have also benefited from reading a

helpful survey, M. Clayton and A. Williams, ‘Egalitarian
 Notes to pp. 53-59 143
Justice and Interpersonal Comparison *, Morell Studies in
Toleration, Discussion Paper Series No. 146, University of
York, April 1999.
48 Sen, ‘Equality of What?’, p. 359.
49 G.A. Cohen, ‘The Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics,
99 (1989), p. 912.
50 Rawls, Theory, pp. 30-1.
51 R. Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Wel-
fare’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), pp. 228-40
(quotation from p. 228).
52 Sen, Inequality Reexamined, p. 55.
53 See J. Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge, 1983). Roemer is
the egalitarian theorist who has had the merit of most
strongly stressing this problem, though he tends towards an
excessively determinist view of the relationship between
circumstances and preferences, arguing that ‘every indi-
vidual in society can be represented as a vector of circum-
stances’: Theories of Distributive Justice, p. 242.
54 Cohen, ‘Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, p. 931.
55 Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, p. 292.
56 Ibid., p. 302.
57 Cohen, ‘Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, p. 933.
58 Roemer, Equality of Opportunity, pp. 19, 20. See also
Theories of Distributive Justice, ch. 7.
59 Sen, ‘Equality of What?’, pp. 357, 365, 368.
60 G.B. Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism (London, 1928), p. xiv. In fact, Shaw acknow-
ledges individual differences to the extent of proposing
that those doing less attractive work should be compen-
sated with more leisure: ibid., pp. 77-9.
61 G.A. Cohen, ‘Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and
Capabilities’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, eds, The
Quality of Life (Oxford, 1993), p. 28.
62 Id., ‘Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, p. 922.
63 Roemer, Equality of Opportunity, pp. 1, 5.
64 Sen, ‘Equality of What?*, p. 368. See also, for example,
 id., Inequality Reexamined, pp. 27 ff and 73-87.
65 Id., Inequality Reexamined, pp. 39-40, 81.
157 Notes to pp. 59-63

66 See, for example, United Nations Development Pro-

gramme, Human Development Report 1999 (New York,
1999), pp. 127-246.
67 Sen, Inequality Reexamined, p. 41.
68 Ibid., pp. 22-3.
69 R.H. Tawney, Equality (4th edn; London, 1952), p. 84.
70 Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 325—32.
71 A. Sen, ‘Capability and Well-Being’, in Sen and Nuss-
baum, eds, The Quality of Life, pp. 47-8. See also M.
Nussbaum, ‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian
Approach1, in the same volume, and R.W. Miller, ‘Marx
and Aristotle: A Kind of Consequentialism*, in A. Callin-
icos, ed., Marxist Theory (Oxford, 1989).
72 For an account of well-being in these terms, albeit one
critical of egalitarianism, see J. Raz, The Morality of Free-
dom (Oxford, 1986).
73 Cohen, ‘Equality of What?’, p. 18. See also id., ‘Amartya
Sen’s Unequal World’, New Left Review, 203 (1994).
74 Cohen, ‘Equality of What?*, p. 28. See also id., ‘Currency
of Egalitarian Justice’, pp. 920-1.
75 Sen, ‘Capability and Well-Being’, p. 46.
76 R. Ameson, ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Wel-
fare’, Philosophical Studies, 56 (1989), pp. 90 -2 (quotation
from p. 92).
77 Ibid., pp. 82, 83, 93 n. 19. See Roemer, Theories of
Distributive Justice, p. 268. In a more recent comment on
Elizabeth Anderson’s attack on ‘luck egalitarianism’ (see the
next section), Arneson goes so far as to make the
fundamental yardstick of distributive justice well-being,
understood as ‘achievement of what is objectively worth-
while or choiceworthy in human life’ (p. 2): http /ww’w.
brown . edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/[Link] .
See also R. Arneson, ‘Equality of Opportnity For Welfare
Defended and Recanted*, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7
(1999).
78 Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, p. 309.
158 Notes to pp. 59-63

79 For further discussion of these issues, see A. Callinicos,

Making History (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 3.
 Nores to pp. 6 3- 6 6 145
80 Commission on Social Justice, The Justice Gap (London,
1993), pp. 13, 6. David Miller has recently sought to offer
a more careful defence of such a conception of political
philosophy, arguing that ‘a normative theory of justice . . . is
to be tested, in part, by its correspondence with our
evidence concerning everyday beliefs about justice. Seen in
this way, a theory of justice brings out the deep struc- ture of
a set of everyday beliefs that, on the surface, are to some
degree ambiguous, confused, and contradictory’:
Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 51.
But, as he himself notes, his approach is vulnerable to the
objection that ‘to see justice in this way is to abandon its
most basic critical function; our theory cannot judge an
entire society, including its beliefs, to be radically unjust 1
(p. 279 n. 16). Exactly. In fact the theory of justice Miller
outlines in this book goes a long way beyond the common-
sense beliefs it supposedly articulates. To that extent, he
cannot simply appeal to these beliefs to corroborate his
theory. Miller, in other words, is in the same boat as
Rawls and other egalitarian liberals whom he criticizes for
seeking to revise our intuitions about justice.
81 E.S. Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics,
109 (1999), pp. 308, 311, 310.
82 Ibid., pp. 297-8, 301.
83 Anderson’s critique also suffers from apparent inconsist-
encies. She is rightly critical of both resource and welfare
egalitarians for giving ‘subjective preferences a central role
in the measurement of equality’ (ibid., p. 294), but taxes
them with paternalism when they seek to protect individ-
uals from some of the harmful consequences of their
choices (pp. 300-1). Yet, as wre have seen in the previous
section, any critical political theory must acknowledge that
individuals’ actual preferences are not always an accurate
guide to their interests. Anderson herself makes the same
point: ‘If individuals find happiness in their lives despite
 being oppressed by others, this hardly justifies continuing
the oppression,’ ibid, p. 304.
84 Marx argues that capitalists may make a productive con-
146 Notes topp. 6 6 - 6 9

tribution in so far as they perform the function of super-

intendence and management required by any productive
process, but this function is not inherent in the nature of
capital, and the revenue the latter receives is not a reward
for performing this function: see Capital, I. (Harmonds-
worth, 1976), pp. 448-51.
85 J. Roemer, 'Should Marxists be Interested in Exploita-
tion?’, in id., ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986).
See also J. Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and
Class (Cambridge, MA, 1982) and Free to Lose (London,
1989).
86 Nagel, Equality and Partiality, p p. 98-9.
87 Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, XXIV (London, 1989), p. 86. See
also the next section.
88 Marx, Capital, I, p. 898. See also G.A. Cohen, 'The
Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’, in Roemer, ed.,
Analytical Marxism, and Self-Ownership, Freedom, and
Equality, ch. 8, and J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx
(Cambridge, 1985), ch. 4. I must confess my bafflement
that, despite the great lucidity displayed in the two essays
cited, Cohen should, for much of the book of which the
second essay is part, entangle himself in tortuous argu-
ments intended to deal with the bizarre connection he
sees between Marx’s theory of exploitation and the liber-
tarian idea, shared by Nozick and Locke, that individuals
own themselves. For a splendidly sensible deflation of
these arguments, see B. Barry, 'You Have to be Crazy to
Believe It’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 October 1996.
89 E.O, Wright, Interrogating Inequality (London, 1994),
p. 40.
90 A.M. Shaikh and E.A. Tonak, Measuring the Wealth of
Nations (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 146-51.
91 R. Brenner, 'Uneven Development and the Long Down-
turn’, New Left Review, 229 (1998), p. 3.
 92 E.O. Wright, Class Counts (Cambridge, 1997) is a major
attempt systematically to apply an exploitation-based
Notes to pp. 70-81 147

theory of class to a sample of contemporary capitalist

societies.
93 Rawls j Theory of Justice, pp. 312, 313.
94 Commission of Social Justice, The Justice Gap, pp. 13, 43.
See the critique in Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’,
pp. 37-41.
95 D. Miller, ‘What Kind of Equality Should the Left Pur-
sue?’, in Franklin, ed., Equality, pp. 89, 91. See also B.
Williams, ‘Forward to Basics’, ibid., pp. 51-3, and Miller,
Principles of Social Justice, ch. 7.
96 Miller, ‘What Kind of Equality’, p. 92.
97 There is an important account of responsibility7 in Scan-
lon, What Owe to Each Other, ch. 6.
98 D. xMiller, Market, State, and Community (Oxford, 1989),
pp. 157, 162.
99 Elsewhere Miller acknowledges this: ibid., pp. 146-50.
100 Ibid., p. 174.
101 In considering Miller’s arguments I have benefited from
reading an unpublished manuscript by G.A. Cohen,
‘David Miller on Market Socialism and Distributive Jus-
tice’, October 1989.
102 F.A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London,
1960), p. 94. See Miller, Principles of Social Justice,
pp. 182-9, for a w'holly unpersuasive critique of Hayek.
103 Miller, Market, State, and Community, p. 172 n. 30. 104
Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, pp. 86, 87. 105 Marx,
Capital, I, pp. 298-300. 106 See P. Stephens, Politics and the
Pound (London, 1997),
ch. 10.
107 For a critical discussion of the fashionable concept of ‘risk
society’, see A. Callinicos, Social Theory (Cambridge,
1999), pp. 299-305.
108 Miller, Market, State, and Community, pp. 195, 197, 199. 109
E. Balibar, ‘“Droits de 1’homme” et “droits du citoyen”:
 La Dialectique moderne de J’egalite et de la libertc’, Actuel
Marx, 8 (1990), p. 31.
110 See, for example, R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Soli-
darity (Cambridge, 1989).

148 Notes to pp. 81 - 89

111 Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, pp, 86-7.

112 Sen, Inequality Reexamined, p. 121.
113 N. Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition?’, New
Left Review, 212 (1995), pp. 70, 71.
114 Ibid., 72.
115 See esp. I.M. Young, ‘Unruly Categories: A Critique of
Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory ’, New Left Review,
222 (1997), and N. Fraser, ‘A Rejoinder to Iris Young’,
ibid., 223 (1997).
116 It is important to be clear that stressing the interaction
between injustices of distribution and of recognition
implies no claim about explanatory priority. In other
words, to affirm that, say, racial oppression involves econ-
omic deprivations is not necessarily also to affirm that
these deprivations (or the tendency for them to occur)
causally or functionally explain racial oppression. There is,
however, an important sense in which I believe the latter
claim is true: see A. Callinicos, Race and Class (London,
1993), and ‘History, Exploitation, and Oppression’,
Imprints, 2 (1997).
117 J. Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, 227 (1998),
and N. Fraser, ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capi-
talism: A Reply to Judith Butler’, ibid., 228 (1998).
118 Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition’, pp. 86-91. 119
Anne Phillips offers a judicious discussion of these issues
in Which Equalities Ma tter? (Cambridge, 1999).
120 Barry, Equality as Impartiality, pp. 3ff, and Scanlon, What
We Owe to Each Other, ch. 7.

Chapter 4 Equality and captalism

 1 J. Roemer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA,
1998), pp. 74-83.
2 A. Ryan, ‘Britain: Recycling the Third Way’, Dissent,
Spring 1999, p. 77. See also W.G. Runciman, ‘Diary’,
London Review of Books, 10 December 1998, p. 33.
Notes to pp. 90-94 149
3 For two classic accounts, see G. Dangerfield, The Strange
Death of Liberal England (London, 1935), and R.C.K.
Ensor, England 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1936), chs XII and
XIII. Peter Clarke has written several more emollient, but
still illuminating studies of the New Liberalism,
notably Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge,
1971) and Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge,
1978).
4 D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
(London, 1990), pp. 69-70.
5 P. Stephens, ‘Who Gives a Damn for the Blessed Poor?’,
Financial Times, 9 April 1997.
6 R. Gott, ‘The Drive to Intervene’, Guardian, 20 May
1999.
7 See A. Callinicos, ‘Barbarity and Hypocrisy: The Ideology7
of Humanitarian Intervention’, in T. Ali, ed., Masters of
the Universe? (London, 2000).
8 S. Brittan, ‘A Good “Liberal" Budget’, Financial Times,
19 March 1998.
9 D. Piachaud, ‘Wealth by Stealth’, Guardian, Society sup-
plement, 1 September 1999.
10 S. White, ‘What Do Egalitarians Want?’, in J. Franklin,
Equality (London, 1997), pp. 70-1.
11 G. Brown, ‘The Politics of Potential: A New Agenda for
Labour’, in D. Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left (Cam-
bridge, 1994), p. 114.
12 Ibid., p. 116.
13 J. Rogers and W. Streeck, ‘Productive Solidarities’, in
Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left. For a critical assess-
ment of New Labour economic thinking, see N. Thomp-
 son, ‘Supply Side Socialism’, New Left Review, 216
(1996).
14 HM Treasury, Tackling Poverty and Extending Opportunity,
March 1999, pp. 23, 35.
15 Ibid., p. 23.
16 Brown’s acceptance of the analytical core of monetarism,
including the doctrine of the natural rate of unemploy- ment
(though not all its policy prescriptions), is spelled
150 Notes to pp. 94 - 103

out in his Mais lecture, ‘lhe Conditions of Full Employ-

ment’, 19 October 1999, [Link].
17 Quoted in P. Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution in the
Making, 1924-1936 (Oxford, 1988), p. 136.
18 ‘Europe: The Third Way/ Die Neue Mine — Tony Blair and
Gerhard Schroder’, 6 June 1999, [Link], p. 6.
19 Ibid., p. 8.
20 Ibid., p. 12.
21 Ibid., p. 11.
22 G. Brown, Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 27
Sep. 1999, [Link], p. 7 (emphasis added).
23 Financial Times, 10 November 1999.
24 Piachaud, ‘Wealth by Stealth’.
25 Tackling Poverty and Extending Opportunity, p. 32.
26 ‘Europe: The Third Way/Dw Neue Mute', p. 9.
27 R. Kuttncr, ‘Don’t Forget the Demand Side’, in Miliband,
ed., Reinventing the Left, p. 146.
28 E. Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism (London, 1999), pp. 79,
80-1.
29 Ibid., pp. 82, 83.
30 ‘Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mine', pp. 12-13.
31 T. Blair, ‘Speech to the Labour Party Conference’, 28
September 1999, [Link], pp. 4, 8.
32 It is entirely typical of this ideological climate that the
Commission on Social Justice should concede that ‘one
person’s reward can be another person’s loss’ and, sliding
quickly past the case of ‘vast rewards for captains of
industry’, cite in illustration of this truth the high wage-
 claims that it supposes caused the stagflation of the 1970s:
The Justice Gap (London, 1993), p. 14. The thought that
the captains of industry might bear some responsibility for
inequality and poverty cannot be voiced in the contempor-
ary Labour Party.
33 Brown, ‘Speech to the Labour Party Conference’, pp. 6, 7,
Roosevelt’s second term (1937-41) in fact saw the New Deal
run aground. In particular, the administration’s switch,
under conservative pressure, from deficit finance
Notes to pp. 103 - 109 151

to a balanced budget helped to abort the recovery from the

Great Depression and precipitate the 1937-8 reces- sion,
‘[t]he steepest economic descent in the history’ of the
United States’, according to Charles Kindleberger, The
World in Depresston 1929-1939 (Harmondsworth, 1987), p.
271. For an interesting contemporary’ analysis, see J.
Strachey, /I Programme for Progress (London, 1940), Part
IL
34 Financial Times, 20 July 1999.
35 A. Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development
(Oxford, 1991), p. 48 and Table 3.2, p. 50.
36 Financial Times, 21 December 1996.
37 OECD Employment Outlook, June 1999.
38 On Russia’s experience of neo-liberalism, see M. Haynes
and P. Glatter, ‘The Russian Catastrophe’, International
Socialism, 2.81 (1998), and P. Gowan, The Global Gamble
(London, 1999), ch. 9.
39 OECD Employment Outlook, June 1999.
40 See J. Grahl, After Maastricht (London, 1997).
41 J.K. Galbraith et al., ‘Inequality and Unemployment in
Europe: The American Cure’, New Left Review, 237
(1999).
42 I am indebted for the general formulation that follows to
some remarks of Perry Anderson’s: see ‘The German
Question’, London Review of Rooks, 7 January 1999, p. 16.
43 W. Hutton, The State We're In (London, 1995), and L.
 Elliott and D. Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity (London,
1998).
44 For analyses of the East Asian and Russian crashes, see A.
Callinicos, ‘World Capitalism at the Abyss’, International
Socialism, 2.81 (1998), and Gowan, Global Gamble, ch. 6. A
useful theoretical analysis is provided by xM. Itoh and
C. Lapavitsas, Political Economy of Money and Finance
(London, 1999).
45 Financial Times, 21 June 1999.
46 Stratfor, ‘World Bank Reverses Position on Financial
Controls and on Malaysia’, Global Intelligence Update:
Weekly Analysis, 20 September 1999, [Link].
152 Notes to pp, 109-1 14

47 Guardian, 10 October 1998.

48 J. Plender, ‘Taming Wild Money1, Financial Times, 20
October 1998.
49 M. Wolf, ‘No Magic Potion1, Financial Times, 12 May
1999.
50 See, for example, M. Wolf, ‘Watch Out for the Fireworks’,
Financial Times, 27 January 1999. The highly unstable set
of financial imbalances sustaining the American boom is
carefully analysed in two Phillips & Drew research papers
by Bill Martin and Wynne Godley, ‘America and the
World Economy’ (December 1998) and ‘America’s New
Era’ (October 1999).
51 For a brief exposition of Marx’s crisis theory, see A.
Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London,
1983), ch. 6. Useful signposts in the vast literature on this
subject include C. Harman, Explaining the Crisis (rev. edn,
London, 1999), J. Weeks, Capital and Exploitation (Lon-
don, 1981), M.C. Howard and J.E. King, A History of
Marxian Economics (2 vols, London, 1989, 1992), and S.
Clarke, Marx's Theory of Crisis (London, 1994).
52 R. Brenner, ‘Uneven Development and the Long Down-
turn: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Boom to
Stagnation, 1950-1998’, New Left Review, 229 (1998), p. 7.
Another recent major study that focuses on the behaviour of
 the rate of profit is G. Dumenil and D. Levy, La Dynamique du
capital (Paris, 1996). For a critical assessment of Brenner’s
article, see A. Callinicos, ‘Capit- alism, Competition, and
Profits’, Historical Materialism, 4 (1999).
53 Callinicos, ‘Capitalism at the Abyss’, pp. 21-4.
54 United Nations Development Programme, Human Devel-
opment Report 1999 (New York, 1999), p. 40.
55 M. Albert, Capitalism against Capitalism (London, 1993)
offers the most general statement of the stakeholder case,
though it has, of course, informed Hutton’s writings. For
a critique, see A. Callinicos, ‘Betrayal and Discontent:
New Labour under Blair’, International Socialism, 2.72
(1996), pp. 5-13.
Notes to pp. 1 1 5 - 1 2 4 153

56 B. Barry, ‘The Attractions of Basic Income’, in J. Frank-

lin, ed., Equality (London, 1997).
57 R. Van Parijs and R. Van Der Veen, ‘A Capitalist Road to
Communism*, in P. Van Parijs, Marxism Recycled (Cam-
bridge, 1993), p. 163.
58 Id., ‘Universal Grants versus Socialism’, in Van Parijs,
Marxism Recycled, pp. 178, 179.
59 Ibid., p. 206 n. 4.
60 Financial Times, 6 September 1999. There is an excellent
critique of the thesis of the end of work in M. Husson, ‘Fin
du travail ou reduction de sa duree?’, Actuel Marx,
26 (1999).
61 Van Parijs and Van Der Veen, ‘Universal Grants versus
Socialism’, p. 189.
62 Financial Times, 13 March 1999.
63 Barry, ‘The Attractions of Basic Income’, p. 163.
64 See E.O. Wright, ‘Why Something like Socialism is
Necessary for the Transition to Something like Commun-
ism’, in id., Interrogating Inequality (London, 1994).
65 Liberation, 3 October 1998. 66
Financial Times, 7 June 1997.
67 J. Wolfreys, ‘Class Struggles in France’, International
 Socialism,84 (1999).
68 See, for example, J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (rev. edn,
Oxford, 1999), pp. xiv-xvi, and R. Dwr orkin, ‘Liberalism’,
in M. Sandel, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford, 1984),
pp. 68-9.
69 G.A. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, in Franklin, ed.,
Equality, p. 37.
70 Id., Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 259,262.
71 P. Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning (Cambridge,
1988). For a somewhat broader discussion of the issues
raised in this and preceding paragraphs, see A. Callinicos,
The Revenge of History (Cambridge, 1991).
72 T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York, 1991), p. 4.
73 Ibid., pp. 90, 91, 124.
74 Ibid., p. 125.
154 Notes topp. 124-128

75 The philosophical underpinnings of Nagel’s position will

be found in The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986).
76 G.A. Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, in
G.B. Peterson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
XIII (Salt Lake City, 1992), pp. 269-70. See chapter 3
above.
77 Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 262. See
also id., ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, pp. 35-7.
78 See Wolfreys, ‘Class Struggles in France’, and S. Beroud et
al., Le Mouvement social en France (Paris, 1998). For a
discussion of some of the intellectual consequences, see A.
Callinicos, ‘Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre
Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens’, New Left Review, 236 (1999),
pp. 85-102.
79 Michael Moore’s Newsletter, 7 December 1999, www.
michaelmoore . com .
80 G.B. Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism (London, 1928), p. 385.
81 Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, e.g.
pp. 307-10.
 Index

adaptive preferences 54, 56, Bidet, Jacques 16-17, 24-5,

64, 131, 143 49- 50, 52, 137
American Revolution 20,
21, 22, 42, 130
Anderson, Elizabeth 64-5,
144, 145
Aristotle 60, 142
Ameson, Richard 16, 62,
144
Asquith, H. H. 88, 89, 90
autonomy 27-8, 36-7,
48-50, 52-3, 59-62,
67-8, 86-7, 130, 133

Balibar, Etienne 22-4, 48,

80, 86, 130, 137
Balkan War (1999) 90-1
Bank of England 9 1 , 94,
117
Barry, Brian 16, 17, 44, 46,
86, 115-18, 139, 146
basic income 114-18
Bentham, Jeremy 27, 42
Berlin, Sir Isaiah 23
Blair, Tony 7, 14, 15,
18, 35, 37, 88-91,
95, 96, 99, 100, 102,
103, 107, 114, 119,
126
BMW 77
Bobbio, Norberto 14-15,
32, 135-6, 142
Bourdieu, Pierre 12
Brazil 109
Brenner, Robert 10, 69,
111-12, 152
Britain 4 - 6, 8 - 9, 11 - 12 ,
17-18, 88-104, 113-14,
126, 130
Brittan, Samuel 91
Brown, Gordon 4, 36,
38-9, 41, 71, 79, 91-104,
105, 114, 118, 139, 149-
50
brute and option luck 54-7
59-60, 64-5, 66, 70-1,
72-3
Burt, Cyril 30
Butler, Judith 85
Byers, Stephen 103
 173 Index

Callaghan, James 34 48-9, 122-3, 136

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir desert 38, 63, 70-9
Henry 88 Devine, Pat 123
capitalism 16, 19, 25,
27-35, 50, 63, 64, 73-8,
85, 104-29, 131-3, 139,
145-6
liberal capitalism 4, 5 - 6 ,
11, 104-7, 113-14, 122,
133
stakeholder capitalism
113-14
Carling, Alan 37, 39, 40-1,
139
Chamberlain, Joseph 89
Clarke, Peter 149
Clinton, Bill 7, 18, 35, 96,
119
Cohen, G, A. 7, 16, 41,
50-1, 52, 53, 55-7, 59-
60, 61-2, 64-5, 70-1,
79, 120-2, 124-5, 128,
131, 132, 135, 136, 141,
146
Commission on Social Justice
41, 63-4, 71, 150
community 31, 33, 36-7,
40-1, 128, 129, 139
contribution principle
67-79, 81-2
Crosland, C. A. R. 30,
32-4, 35, 36-7, 99, 139

democracy 20-4, 26, 37-8,

 Index 174

difference 29, 58-9, 67, 95,99-102, 120

79-87 egalibene 22-4, 48, 80, 86,
difference principle 39, 130, 137
42-52, 56, 120, 131, 142 egalitarian liberalism 15-17,
distribution of means of 19, 41-87, 119-20,
production 27-34, 50, 123-4, 131-2, 136
54-5, 66, 68, 70-3, 78, Elliott, Larry’ 108
118, 119-20, 121, 132 English Revolution 20, 21
distribution of natural talents equal access to advantage
30, 33, 39, 46-8, 50-1, 53, 56-7, 61-2, 72-3,
54-5, 60, 65-6, 70-3, 131
78, 81-2, 121, 132, 141 equality
Dworkin, Ronald 16, 52, of capabilities 53,57-62,
54-7, 58, 59-60, 64-5, 65, 72-3, 82, 131
70-1, 83, 119-20 of income 30, 56, 143
of opportunity 31, 33,
38-9, 48, 53, 57, 62, 88,
economic crisis 93-4, 91-104, 105
104-13
education 33-4, 38, 91-2,
of resources 53, 54- 7, 58, Finlayson, Gordon 142
145 Financial Times 97, 103,
of welfare 53 - 4, 58 , 6 2, 105, 110, 1 17
145 France 26, 116, 119, 126
European Central Bank 95, France, Anatole 26-7 Fraser,
107, 116 Nancy 82-5, 86 freedom see
EuropeanUnion 7, 105-7 autonomy French Revolution
exclusion and inclusion 20,21,
40-1 22-3, 25, 42, 87, 130
exploitation 27-30, 65-70, Friedman, Milton 94
76-8, 132, 146
Gamble, Andrew 1 36
Federal Reserve Board 109, Gates, Bill 1, 14, 69
110, 11 General Motors 100-1
financial markets 76-8, Geras, Norman 28
108-11, 152 Germany 89, 105, 114,
 175 Index

116-17 Goodhart, David 13-15,69

Giddens, Anthony 40-1, Gott, Richard 90-1
79, 140 Grey, Sir Edward 90 Group
The Third 1Toy 40-1, 140 of Seven (G7) 109,
Gini co-efficient 2, 4, 134 112
Gladstone, W. E. 89, 90
Hattersley, Roy 38 Hayek, F.
A. von 75, 107,
122
Healey, Denis 13, 135
Hegel, G. W. F. 49
Hilferding, Rudolph 34
Hume, David 4 4 - 5
Hutton, Will 11-12, 108,
152

incentives 47, 50-1,

117-18, 120, 124-5, 128
Indonesia 108, 109 inequality
1-14, 24-5,
26-8, 30-4, 54, 93, 98,
99-100, 113, 130
International Monetary Fund
(IMF) 109,110

Japan 105-6, 1 14
Jefferson, Thomas 20, 22
Johnson, Dr Samuel 22
Jospin, Lionel 1 19
justice 15-16,19, 28-30,
40-87, 131, 141, 142,
145

Kant, Immanuel 43, 44,

47-8
 Index 176

Kennedy, John F. 9 Keynes, The General Theory of

J. M. 89, 94, 108
Keynes, J. M. (cont.) Marxism 18-19, 48, 63-4,
Employment Interest and 135, 136
Money 108 meritocracy 39, 46-7
Koita, Yaguine 2 - 3 Mexico 108, 109
Kuttner, Robert 100

Labour Party 13, 14, 41,

34, 63, 89, 150
see also New Labour
Lafontaine, Oskar 116-17,
126
Layard, Richard 106 Lloyd
George, David 90 Locke,
John 44,146
Long Term Capital
Management (LTCM)
109, 110
luck egalitarianism 54-7,
59, 60, 61, 64-5, 70-1,
131
Luttwak, Edward 3- 4,
9-10, 100-1
Luxemburg, Rosa 49

Maddison, Angus 105

Madrick, Jeffrey 10-11
Marx, Karl 11,16-17,
27-30, 34, 35, 60, 63,
66, 67,76,81-2, 83,
111-12, 118, 125, 137,
145-6
Capital 27, 29, 1 1 1
‘Critique of the Gotha
Programme’ 28-9, 67
 177 Index

Microsoft 101 Phillips, Anne 148 Phillips,

Mill, John Stuart 23 Miller, Kevin 3 Piachaud, David
David 71-9, 145 Mises, 91, 98-9
Ludwig von 1 22 Mitterrand,
Francois 1 16 modernity 20-
6, 89 -7, 13 0
131, 133, 136
Mohamed, Mahatir 109
Moore, Michael 127

Nagel, Thomas 7, 12-13,

16, 66-7, 123-4
needs principle 28, 76,
81-2
neo-iiberalism 36, 92-8,
104-7, 108, 109, 125,
126, 132, 133, 149-50
New Labour 4, 17-18,
36-41, 88, 91-104, 105,
113-14, 120, 130, 139
see also Third Way
New Liberalism 88-90
Nozick, Robert 13, 43-4,
47-8, 52-3, 59, 71, 141,
146
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
13
Nussbaum, Martha 60

Organization for Economic

Co-operation and
Development (OECD)
106, 107

Philippines 108
 Index 178
16, 46, 86 Schroder, Gerhard
planning 121-3 7, 14,
Plant, Raymond 139 poverty
1-12, 54, 6 8-9, 9 3,
97-9, 105, 108
primary social goods 45-6,
58, 95

Rainborough, Colonel
Thomas 20, 21, 22
Rawls, John 16-17, 23, 39,
41-52, 53, 56, 58,
59-60, 63, 70-1, 80-1,
83, 85, 87, 119-20,
131-2, 136, 140, 141,
142
The Law of Peoples 14 1
Political Liberalism 42, 80 A
Theory of Justice 16, 17,
41-52, 131
Reagan, Ronald 3, 5, 36,
104
responsibility 55-6, 57, 65,
70-3
Roemer, John 16, 56,57,
62-3, 66, 71, 88, 136,
143
Rogers, Joel 92
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 103,
150-1
Rorty, Richard 8 1 Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques 44 Russia 2,
106, 108, 109 Ryan, Alan 88

Sachs, Jeffrey 106 Sandel,

Michael 140 Scanlon, T. M.
 121, 132
18, 37, 95, 96, 100, 102, Soros, George 76-7
107, 126 South Korea 108,109 Soviet
Seattle protests (1999) Union 2, 120-3, 132 Stalinism
126-7 120-3
self-ownership 53, 141, Streeck, Wolfgang 92
146
Sen, Amartya 16, 41, 52 -3, Tawney, R. H. 30-2, 33-4,
54, 56, 57-62, 65, 82, 35, 60, 99
83, 131, 142 taxation 14, 29, 31, 67-8,
Shaw, George Bernard 30, 89-90, 91, 94, 104,
56, 127-8, 143 115-16
Smith, John 41 Thatcher, Margaret 5, 36,
social democracy 7,18, 89, 93, 104, 106
30-5, 88-104, 107, Third Way 7, 14-15, 18,
116-17, 1 18-19, 124 35, 36-41, 60, 88-105,
socialism 26-41, 60, 64, 119, 120
65-6, 83, 118, 120-5, Tocqueville, Alexis de 21,
132-3, 136, 139 23, 25-6
market socialism 72-8,
160 Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de (cowr.) 109, 110-11, 112-14,

Democracy in America 21 115-16, 125-6, 130, 152
Tounkara, Fede 2 - 3 utilitarianism 42 4, 53-4

unemployment 7,11-12,
94-8, 105-7, 115-18,
149-50
United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP)
1-2, 8, 59, 113
Human Development Report
1-2, 113
United States 3 -4 , 9 - 11 ,
13, 18, 39, 69, 89, 96,
98, 100-1, 104-7, 108,
 Index 180
Van Der Veen, Robert
115-18
Van Parijs, Philippe 115-18
Vidal, Gore 17-18

Walzer, Michael 41 Webb,

Beatrice and Sidney
33
Weber, Max 17
White, Stuart 91
Wilson, Harold 34,116
Wolf, Martin 110
World Trade Organization
(WTO) 126-7
Wright, Erik Olin 68

Zeldin, Theodore 26