Liberalism and Distributive Justice

Samuel Freeman is a leading political philosopher and one of the foremost authorities on the works of John Rawls. Liberalism and Distributive Justice offers a series of Freeman's essays in contemporary political philosophy on three different forms of liberalism—classical liberalism, libertarianism, and the high liberal tradition—and their relation to capitalism, the welfare state, and economic justice.

[These] essays are of admirable clarity, arguing for their positions in meticulous detail. For those interested in a comprehensive overview of Freeman's understanding of Rawlsian justice, the collection is likely to be an extremely valuable resource, not least for teaching., The papers in Liberalism and Distributive Justice usually begin from an interpretative question about Rawls; but that is rarely where they end up. The core of the book takes forward the Rawlsian project by seriously engaging with its aim: the development of a realistically utopian private property system that is not capitalist...Given the extent of the secondary literature on Rawls the comparative neglect of this topic has been surprising., Sam Freeman makes a novel argument for property-owning democracy over welfare-state capitalism...which is a proposed friendly amendment to Rawls's conception of fair equality of opportunity, Samuel Freeman's Liberalism and Distributive Justice addresses and corrects a number of confusions that have characterized accounts of Rawlsian justice and provides the foundations for a clear understanding of the logic underlying justice as fairness.

Samuel Freeman is the Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1985. He is the author of Justice and the Social Contract (OUP, 2006) and of Rawls. He edited the Cambridge Companion to Rawls, as well as John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy and his CollectedPapers.