Tomasi’s Grand Synthesis

John Tomasi is one of the most innovative political theorists in the field today, a distinction he has earned by attempting to reconcile the right and left-wing camps of liberalism. His latest work, Free-Market Fairness is a sustained, rigorous and compelling effort at such a synthesis. On his view, we do not have to choose between a commitment to social justice and private economic liberty, or between capitalism and democracy; rather, we can reasonably, and in fact we must, commit ourselves to the variety of normative ideals upheld by these two warring schools of liberal thought. Professor Tomasi’s project’s profound importance owes precisely to the fact that members of these respective traditions have for so long defined themselves in opposition to each other on the level of metaphysics and ethics. The video posted below provides a brief synopsis of the central claims Professor Tomasi makes in his book, Free-Market Fairness, which was recently released by Princeton University Press.

Here is a description Tomasi has given of the divide that currently exists between libertarians/classical liberals and what he calls, high liberals:

For decades, the residents of these camps have stared at each other across an icy, windswept divide. Occasionally, the defenders of private economic liberty call out to their opponents to abandon the ideal of social justice and come over to join them in affirming one another as self-owners (or utility maximizers). But the advocates of social justice are just as firmly committed to the moral ideal of persons as democratic citizens, committed to living among institutions that all might endorse. Each group is anchored to a very different view about the nature of moral personhood, and each knows that the anchors on the other coast are as firmly set too. So for the most part they just go about their business, and let the wind between howl, lonely and wild.

On this account Tomasi’s latest effort represents a much needed ice-breaker that will hopefully go on to shift the currents of contemporary political theory.

As should be clear to any regular reader of this blog, I have myself been pursuing an agenda that is very similar to Tomasi’s. The main difference owes in our points of departure; whereas, Tomasi is essentially reconciling Rawls and Hayek, I have been working on reconciling Hegel and Hayek. Nevertheless, I have recently been engaged in a rigorous study of Rawls with the goal of seeing how to integrate his principle of social justice into a Hegelian social philosophy. One of the reasons I find Hegel so useful here is that his ethical theory of civil society already contains a robust defense of market institutions and private property rights. In fact, Hegel’s claims about the right to recognition (including the rights of personhood and the rights of moral conscience) and the role ‘the corporations’ and the overall market process plays in forging people into good, democratic citizens seems consistent with Tomasi’s claim “that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy.” Over the past few years I have compiled a list of topics worth exploring that have hitherto been overlooked or not fully developed because of the polarizing divide that exists between free-market liberals and high liberals. At some point tomorrow, I will provide a preliminary discussion of some of these topics.