John Rawls can be called many things, but “libertarian” isn’t one of them. To combine Rawls and libertarianism doesn’t seem like a promising project, but this is just what John Tomasi, a political philosopher who taught at Brown University when his book Free Market Fairness was published in 2012, attempted to do. The book remains the best and most comprehensive defense of the position just described.
Tomasi describes, in an engaging way, what led him to what appears at first sight a mixture of incompatible commitments. On the one hand, he found classical liberalism appealing; on the other hand, he was attracted to a conception of justice usually taken to be inimical to that position.
Two classical liberal ideas especially attracted him. The free market enables people to mold their own lives; no longer need they passively react to the wishes of others:
Growing prosperity seems to give an ever-wider range of people a sense of power and independence. It encourages a special form of self-esteem that comes when people recognize themselves as central causes of the particular lives they are living — rather than being in any way the ward of others, no matter how well meaning, other-regarding or wise those others might be. . . I am also drawn to the libertarian idea of “spontaneous order.”… Friedrich Hayek argues that a free society is best thought of as a spontaneous order in which people should be allowed to pursue their own goals on the basis of information available only to themselves. Along with the moral ideal of private economic liberty, I find the libertarian emphasis on spontaneous order deeply attractive.
Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness, which he accepts, can be adapted to the defense of “market democracy,” Tomasi’s version of classical liberalism. It is by no means the same as the libertarianism of Rothbard and Nozick:
Within the framework of market democracy, economic liberties can properly be regulated and limited to advance compelling interests of the liberal state.… Unlike strict libertarians, market democrats can join high liberals as well as classical liberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Richard Epstein, who say that the liberal state should be given the power to provide a social minimum funded by a system of taxation.
In order to determine what the social minimum should be we need a theory of justice, and, “I [Tomasi] choose justice as fairness simply because, once it has been adjusted and corrected according to market democratic principles, it is the conception of liberal justice I find most compelling.”
But even if Tomasi is not a strict libertarian, doesn’t his position differ entirely from that of Rawls, who expressly repudiates as inadequate the “system of natural liberty”? How then can Tomasi arrive at a Rawlsian defense of market democracy?
What Tomasi has in mind is this. Rawls’s own social-democratic views are simply interpretations of his theory of justice. If we accept Rawls’s principles of justice, we are not bound by Rawls’s own views about how these principles are to be implemented, and the door to a market-democratic interpretation of Rawls lies open. To think otherwise, Tomasi holds, is to fall victim to what he calls an “ipse dixit” fallacy. “At the extreme, the exegetical approach treats justice as fairness as a plot in the archaeology of ideas rather than as a living, growing research paradigm.”
For each of Rawls’s principles of justice, then, Tomasi offers an interpretation congenial to market democracy. Rawls’s first principle specifies a set of liberties that enjoys lexical priority to the distributive requirements of the second principle. Rawls does not include rights to acquire and hold productive property among the set, but Tomasi does. The ability to engage in business often proves an excellent way to develop one’s moral powers. Why, then, exclude it from the list of protected liberties? Tomasi intends this point to apply to what Rawls terms the “special conception of justice,” where “social conditions are favorable to the attainment of social justice.” He contends that with “prosperity, the existence of thick private economic liberty is for many citizens an essential condition of responsible self-authorship.”
Tomasi offers his own understanding of other Rawlsian principles. For fair equality of opportunity, Tomasi stresses the need for each person to have a wide variety of choices, as opposed to efforts to counter the effects of unequal starting points. For the difference principle, he emphasizes the need to increase through economic growth the wealth of the worst-off class. Not for him are efforts directly to reduce inequalities, e.g., through progressive taxation.
Tomasi has little use for strict libertarians. They consider property rights “absolute”; by this he appears to mean that they would not allow the interventions by government such as the social-safety net and provision of vouchers that he thinks acceptable. He remarks that libertarians “single out the economic liberties for special treatment. But instead of lowering the status of the economic liberties, libertarians elevate them above all others. Economic liberties become the weightiest of all rights. Indeed, libertarians such as Jan Narveson assert that liberty is property.”
As you would expect, I don’t find Tomasi’s criticisms convincing. If, as Narveson and Rothbard think, all rights can be analyzed as property rights, how does it follow that property rights are more important than other rights? To the contrary, the conclusion negates the premise. If there are no rights besides property rights, property rights cannot be more important than property rights. If Tomasi means that libertarians believe that property rights in the ordinary-language sense exceed in importance other rights such as civil liberties, this by no means follows from the libertarian view of property. In fact, it is directly contrary to Rothbard’s own view that self-ownership is the primary right.
My favorite passage in the book is this:
From George Washington’s warning to avoid the dangers of exclusive economic and military pacts with other countries…to James Madison’s proposal of a constitutional amendment requiring political leaders wishing to go to war to raise funds from current taxes (rather than hiding the costs through borrowing), advocates of limited government have long been among the strongest critics of the politico-military establishments common with contemporary states…the very idea of a large publicly funded military-industrial complex runs against the grain of market democracy.
That is well said indeed, but it fits much better with Rothbardian libertarianism than the strange amalgam of Rawls and classical liberalism that Tomasi presented to us in Free Market Fairness.
