If it’s to survive the century, then, liberalism must rekindle a sense of hope, one that dovetails respect for institutions with a politics of plenty. I believe the solution can be found in two words: liberal socialism. 

For some, the term’s an oxymoron. Many classical and neoliberals see liberalism as doggedly committed to unbridled capitalism, with the economist Ludwig von Mises summarising the ideology as representing “private ownership of the means of production”. Many on the Left would surely agree. For socialists, isn’t liberalism the “bourgeois” ideology par excellence, serving as an intellectual defence of capital ownership and worker exploitation?

In fact, liberalism is a much more dynamic, complex family of creeds than these reductive labels suggest: while thinkers such as von Mises were quick to equate capitalism and liberalism, there’s always been an economically progressive strain to liberal thinking too. For these self-proclaimed liberal socialists, redistribution isn’t simply preferable — but actually the only way of securing liberal goals. Put it like this: domination by bosses is no less oppressive because it happens in the market and is sanctioned by the state. 

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Two of the first thinkers to develop these ideas were Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In his seminal book Rights of Man, and in pamphlets such as Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that property was a social rather than a natural institution. This meant that the rich owed society a debt for their property, a debt which could be paid through heavy taxes and fund a lively proto-welfare state. 

Wollstonecraft is, of course, most famous for her stirring arguments for women’s equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Less remembered, though, is her acid claim in the same work that from “respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.” From there, Wollstonecraft went on to argue that both the aristocratic rich and the emerging capitalist class could be compared to a fungus growing upon society, one which distorts its moral virtues through avarice and greed. 

Wollstonecraft and Paine were important precursors. But it was really John Stuart Mill who developed a mature form of liberal socialism. Mill is best remembered today for his uncompromising defence of personal liberty. Less familiar are his innovative economic arguments for workplace democracy. 

In his autobiography, Mill concedes that in his youth he’d been excessively rigid in his economic thinking, seeing “little further” than the classical liberals so beloved by Victorian Britain. In his mature period, however, Mill proudly identified as a socialist. One recent work reconstructs Mill’s liberal form of market socialism. In it, Helen McCabe particularly highlights his commitment to a welfare state and democracy, alongside the democratisation of the workplace through a transition to cooperatives and worker-run firms.

In the 20th century, many of the greatest liberal thinkers identified with liberal socialism too. This includes the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the great anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, alongside political theorists like Chantal Mouffe. But surely the best example here is John Rawls, the greatest liberal philosopher since Mill. 

After publishing A Theory of Justice, his most famous work, Rawls was variously praised or condemned for offering a moderate defence of the mid-century welfare state. In truth, however, his overall philosophy was much more radical. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, published posthumously, Rawls insisted that welfare capitalism still allowed too many inequalities to persist. That was particularly true, he added, of economic inequalities that meant citizens had unequal political power. This, Rawls felt, was incompatible with liberal commitments to citizens getting “fair value” from their political rights in a democracy. Rather, Rawls argued that only a “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialist” regime could genuinely embody liberal principles of justice. 

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Rawls and his fellow liberal socialists were right to worry. Many liberal democracies continue to fall short of their ideals — for all the reasons liberal socialists have highlighted for centuries. Nor is this merely an academic discussion. The further today’s plutocratic reality diverges from the grand egalitarian theories of liberal justice, the weaker liberalism becomes, with an increasing number of voters openly sceptical of democracy. 

That, it goes without saying, leaves room for extremists to thrive. In one 2019 study, for instance, a pair of political scientists attribute much of the popularity of right-populists to their promises to upend liberal elites and their policies. This flows from both the perception that liberal elites are out of touch with regular people, and that the institutions they govern aren’t accountable to their own citizens. This isn’t just perception: in American politics money really does talk, and loudly. The 1% are far more likely to get their way than the “people” the American constitution claims as the source of political legitimacy. 

The public, for their part, are hardly unaware of how they’re being treated. Surveys around the world show that people want the rich to pay more, think highly of unions despite decades of falling membership, and worry about soaring levels of inequality. When they realise liberals are not only failing to fix these problems — but are actively compounding them — they unsurprisingly drift towards authoritarians promising miracle cures, even if the latter prove worse than the disease. 

Liberal socialism, then, is inextricably bound to the future of liberal democracy. I try to retrieve this worthwhile tradition in my book — both backwards from Paine and Mill and on towards the future. Happily, I found plenty of contemporary scholarship to explore here, with an increasing number of academics now identifying with liberalism’s egalitarian ideals. What we might call a “liberalism of hope” has plenty of proponents, notably economists like Daniel Chandler. Philosophers, for their part, are moving in a similar direction: William Edmundson, Igor Shoikhedbrod and Elizabeth Anderson are just three examples among many. 

This panoply of thinkers disagree about much. Yet all are united in rejecting what Alexandre Lefebvre calls the empty cynicism of neoliberal “liberaldom”. For Lefebvre, “liberaldom” is the kind of society that promises freedom and equality for all, yet ultimately makes no real effort to deliver. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By being a theory of hope for all, liberal socialism represents the best of the liberal tradition, and an ideology that can stand firm against the buffeting winds of our century. 

What might that look like in practice? Perhaps the best real-world examples are in Scandinavia. There is, to be fair, some argument about just how socialist they are. But as Scott Sehon notes, these debates are largely semantic: by most metrics, Denmark and Norway are far more socialist than almost any other state. A similar point was even made by Sweden’s iconic Prime Minister Olaf Palme when he pointed out that his country had moved further down the “road to socialism” than many explicitly Marxist states. 

The point here is that the Nordic model has produced the world’s highest quality of living for decade after decade. In large part, Oslo, Helsinki and the rest achieved this by dovetailing strong liberal-democratic institutions with redistributive economic programmes, similar to the philosophy advanced by Wollstonecraft or Paine. The connection to liberal socialist theory is even clearer given how Nordic governments integrated “co-determination” into the workplace. Offering workers a strong say on the boards of large companies, theorists such as Rudolph Meidner have even advocated giving staff shares in their employers, with the ultimate aim of making firms completely worker-owned. 

Unfortunately, the advent of neoliberalism meant the Swedish economist’s vision was never really implemented, even as Nordic ambitions have retreated somewhat from their mid-century peak. This was a serious mistake. In an era where millions feel they have little control over their lives at work, and where digital surveillance technology is now intruding on their domestic schedules, the democratisation of work and industry is long overdue. 

There are signs, in fact, that other progressive leaders are rediscovering liberal socialism for themselves. That’s especially true in Canada, where the New Democratic Party has a strong liberal socialist heritage. Former leader Ed Broadbent was a cheerleader for Millite cooperatives, and his thinking and activism have lately been reappraised. South of the border, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” have done much to update a liberal style of socialism for new generations, with millions of millennials now enthusiastic backers of the Green New Deal. Combined with the resurgence of liberal socialism in the academy, the tradition’s future seems bright — and just as well. Rosa Luxemburg once said that everyone faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. With the barbarians now looming, the choice for any liberal should be clear.

The loss caused friction among his relations, but at least it fitted the family history. In 1947, Eugene’s dad had won big on the lottery. However, in August of that month, the Romanian government, with no prior announcement, replaced the currency. 20,000 old lei were suddenly worth a single new leu. A low limit was imposed on the amount it was possible to exchange. The name of this policy was the Great Stabilisation. It made Eugene’s dad the owner of an enormous pile of worthless banknotes.

Luck attends our sense of most events of consequence. The stories of whole families might be told through it. Only matters of complete indifference seem untouched. And yet, it’s very easy to argue it out of existence. Luck might best be seen as a fiction we inhabit because we don’t like the idea that many events in the universe are random. We’re attached to the idea of our own agency and merit. We also love patterns — an instinct of immense evolutionary value that leads us to see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or believe that if a roulette ball has landed on red ten times in a row, it’s more likely to hit black on the eleventh.

This is the ground of What are the Chances, a new book by the psychology and neuroscience professor Barbara Blatchley. One of Blatchley’s most persuasive arguments is that we are pretty loose and inconsistent with the language we use when we evoke the idea of luck. We confuse fate (which implies a universe in which invisible forces have determined everything in advance) with destiny (a concept with more room for human agency) and chance (which is beyond the control of gods or humans). But in our daily lives, none of this seems to matter much, because such thinking is usually the means to an end: “We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events,” writes Blatchley, “because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself.”

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To see this in action, watch a quiz show. On an edition of Pointless a couple of weeks ago, a financial consultant called Helen knocked herself out of the quiz by declaring that Kat Slater in EastEnders was played by an actor called Jessie Williams. The totemic scoreboard gave its dreaded red negative twitch. “Very, very unlucky,” sighed Richard Osman, as he revealed that the correct answer was in fact Jessie Wallace.

But unless she had fallen under the influence of some invisible force that erases soap facts from the heads of random victims, Helen had not been unlucky. She had simply been wrong. Her knowledge of Queen Vic landladies was inadequate to the demands of the game. Should Osman have put it in these terms? Absolutely not. It would have been fatal to the pleasures of his own show. A game of skill that has no language of luck is no game at all.

It’s also harder to win. The former cricketer Ed Smith, who wrote Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (2012), was once part of a team that decided it would abolish such consoling words and stop ascribing human fault to the imagined influence of cosmic forces. It took six weeks at the bottom of the results table to reverse the policy. Sometimes magical thinking gets magical results.

But what about games with higher stakes than Pointless, or Kent vs Middlesex? An attractively round 50 years ago, the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), one of the few works of political philosophy to be adapted as a stage musical. The lottery was an important metaphor for Rawls. For him, life issued us with two tickets at birth. One for the natural lottery, in which the prize is a biological potential inherited from our parents. One for the social lottery, in which winners emerge from the womb into highly favourable material, social and political circumstances. Like all true examples of luck, these advantages have no dimension of desert or merit. Luck is unearned.

We can all think of figures in public life — dynastic columnists, aristocratic models, the progeny of 60s rock stars who clutter up ES Magazine — who owe at least part of their success to early receipt of a Rawlsian Thunderball. And in experimental situations, as in life, recipients of this good fortune do not always perceive their privilege. A famous study at Stanford University set up games of Monopoly in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit.

I don’t much like Monopoly, but I do play the National Lottery. Since Covid came, I’ve bought tickets more frequently. I always let the app choose the numbers, because the pure aleatory nature of the process seems both the point and the pleasure. I’d never dream of gambling in anything where knowledge, skill or judgement plays a part. (If, like Sid James and Hattie Jacques in Carry On at Your Convenience, I owned an occult budgie that tweeted on hearing the winner of the 2.30 at Newmarket, I’d consider the bet a fraud on the bookie.)

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The National Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity — mainly by people who regard themselves as clever, many of whom wrongly attribute the thought to Voltaire. The seventeenth-century economist William Petty is a better source. In his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions he wrote that “a Lottery … is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools.” (Thank you, QI elves.) But there are more accurate and less snobbish ways of describing its community of players.

A 2009 study by the ecumenical Christian think-tank Theos found that employed professionals spent around £40 a year on the lottery, £30 a year less than manual workers. Benefit claimants were the most prodigious buyers of scratch cards, and the lowest earners — those on £15k–20k per year — were laying out almost a week’s earnings on tickets for the main draw. Theos hasn’t updated these findings, but suspects, as scratch card sales have climbed and draw tickets fallen, that the Lottery now “leans ever more on sales to lower income players”. Camelot has produced no data to contradict this.

If the lottery is a tax, it is a tax on poverty. Those who pay it do not do so because they lack knowledge or are guilty of some kind of cognitive error. A person spending £1.50 of their £86 Universal Credit on a ticket knows what proportion of their income this represents. That money, however, purchases something powerful. Participation in a game that makes Rawls’s lotteries irrelevant. If, to choose a not particularly random example, David Cameron buys a ticket for the Set for Life draw, he is no more likely to win than anyone else.

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The machine that reduces an ordered stack of National Lottery balls to a random field of tumbling atoms is called Excalibur. This is one of Barbara Blatchley’s conceptual confusions. Excalibur, as any viewer Monty Python and the Holy Grail will know, is a sword of fate or destiny, not chance. The film’s group of soil-eating anarcho-syndicalists would see the contradiction. When one (played by Michael Palin) tells Graham Chapman’s King Arthur that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” he is objecting to two things: a society in which outcomes are predetermined by supernatural forces, and one in which wealth and power are largely inherited. There would be less inequality in a world where mud-eaters were as likely to receive a magical sword as a royal figure who has an ancestral supply of ham and jam and Spam. (You might remember that this conversation ends with Graham Chapman attempting to beat Michael Palin to the ground.)

Most attempts to reduce economic inequality accept the results of Rawls’s social lottery and then try to ameliorate their effects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever suggested working towards the same end by harnessing the power of chance. A massive increase in inheritance tax, for instance, which could be funnelled into the National Lottery, distributing unearned wealth randomly through the population. Having lost — again — on my most recent ticket, I’d be happy to consider it. We could call it the Great Stabilisation.

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is therefore likely to be many readers’ first introduction to a new field of inquiry that synthesises the age-old insights of behaviour genetics and the new technology of genomics. Harden is a scientist who ventures where few academics dare to tread. Indeed, the book was written because so many people remain ignorant of behaviour genetics, and suspicious of any attempt to introduce biologically based variables into sociological matters.

By this measure, The Genetic Lottery is a success. Harden concisely reduces a century of research into a digestible and comprehensible form. Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.

To a large extent, I expected this, as I know the author personally. We both live in Austin, where she is a professor at the University of Texas. I became acquainted with Harden in 2016 following a massive social media conflagration triggered by her sensible contention that liberals needed to acknowledge the insights of behaviour genetics, and that the field was not necessarily racist.

A committed band of online “social justice warriors” have continued to hound her; a population geneticist told me several years ago that another scientist at a seminar dismissed Harden as “Charles Murray in a skirt”. This was somewhat ironic given that she once wrote a piece titled “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ”. Harden’s disagreements with conservatives also elicit outrage from the online Right, but that is of little impact. As an academic, the only serious reputational risk comes from the baying of her own ideological tribe.

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It’s unfortunate, then, that though Harden provides a potted history of eugenics, much of her historical interpretation is tendentious, and seems geared to reassuring the intended audience that they are on the right side of history. She observes, for instance, that the statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson “argued that progressive-era social reforms, like the expansion of education, were useless”. What the reader may fail to glean from this is that Pearson was a committed socialist and freethinker, who was also engaged with feminism and suffrage.

Where the narrative shines is when Harden explores fields that have long been taboo. For example, the notion that genetics can cause patterns in social phenomena is ignored by whole fields of scholarship, but it’s no coincidence that adopted individuals are much more likely to engage in crime as adults if their biological parents were convicted of offences.

Harden further illustrates this with her own research on abstinence from sex. The State of Texas promotes abstinence policies because it believes there is a strong correlation between early sexual activity and negative life outcomes such as crime. To test this assumption, Harden’s team tracked down identical twins, who share both genes and environment, and first had sex at different stages in life. They found that there was no difference in life outcomes.

The Genetic Lottery comes alive whenever Harden writes about her own research. At one point, she reports that “executive function” — your cognitive behaviour, ranging from memory to self-control — is nearly 100% heritable in children, meaning that all the variation in the population can be attributed to variation in genes. The correlation in executive function between identical twins is 1.0, while between full siblings it is 0.5. Since twins share 100% of their genes and full-siblings just 50%, this is exactly the pattern you would expect in a fully heritable characteristic, whether executive function or eye-colour. This research has no straightforward immediate political implications, so the exposition is freed from a need to gauge the impact on the audience.

But statistical correlations remain unconvincing to many. A specific criticism of twin-studies centres on the likelihood that parents treat twins more similarly than full-siblings. That’s partly why the late population geneticist Richard Lewontin thought behaviour genetics was a useless field with deep methodological problems. His views are not unusual for geneticists who work in molecular or evolutionary (rather than behavioural) fields today.

It is at this point that Harden illustrates why her book could only be written in 2021. Whereas past geneticists had to assume that full-siblings were exactly 50% related, today genomics allows a precise quantification of the level of relatedness. I know, for instance, that I share 52.49% of my DNA with one brother, 50.26% with another, and 4.57% with my first-cousin once-removed (the expectation in the last case is 6.25%).

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In 2006, geneticists applied the new technology to the study of heritability, generating relatedness scores from genomics for thousands of sibling pairs. They discovered that very heritable traits did indeed show more similarity in those siblings who were genomically more related. Heritability was more than a statistical construct, it was a biophysical reality.

One of the most striking figures in The Genetic Lottery shows that “polygenic risk scores”, a statistic used to predict your position along a distribution of values, such as from shortest to tallest, are already as powerful as parental income at predicting the rate of college completion. Those students in the bottom 25% of parental income have a 15% chance of completing college. Those in the bottom 25% of the polygenic risk score also have a 15% chance of doing so.

This task in explaining the state of behaviour genetics today is helped by bodies such as the UK Biobank, which offers researchers 500,000 individuals with 820,000 genetic markers per individual. It has resulted in papers which are generated in an almost turnkey fashion. Consider “Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain”, which concludes that “Alleles associated with educational attainment (EA) showed the most clustering, with EA-decreasing alleles clustering in lower SES areas such as coal mining areas”. In plainer English, smarter people migrated south, leaving those remaining in the north of England on average less intelligent due to their genes. Needless to say, this was a controversial result.

Harden spends a great deal of time exploring population structure because of its relevance to possible variation in human psychology and behaviour. She reports on survey data that liberals in particular are suspicious of — results which indicate variation in intelligence due to genes — and she argues that this is due to its connection with the history of racism and classism in the United States. Harden asserts that intelligence is heritable within a group, but does not necessarily imply that it explains differences between groups in outcome.

The targeted readership for The Genetic Lottery will almost certainly dismiss the case for behaviour genetics if that requires them to connect it to potentially racist implications. Yet Harden’s book is actually rooted in social justice, and her belief that “people’s moral commitments to racial equality are on shaky ground if they depend on exact genetic sameness across human populations”. Nevertheless, much of the narrative gets bogged down in race and particularities of American politics.

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Harden is a white liberal who is deeply committed to the cause of racial justice in the historical context of black and white Americans. Presumably her audience is as well. But her ultimate goal is to talk more about John Rawls than Ibram X. Kendi. For The Genetic Lottery is a theory of justice informed by unearned genetic advantages and undeserved genetic disadvantages.

Harden personalises this by contrasting herself with her brother. Though siblings are 50% similar, she explains, they are also 50% different. Raised in the same household, she asks who was dealt the better hand — she did better at standardised tests but also has ADHD — between the two siblings. Do these differences speak at all to the moral value of the siblings? Of course not. We know this intuitively. It is self-evident.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduced the “difference principle”. This argues that inequality in outcomes is permissible if those inequalities benefit the least-advantaged members of society. Similarly, towards the end of her book, Harden considers three scenarios conditioned on Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”, where you don’t know what endowments you’ll randomly be allotted. First, a society where the “biologically superior are entitled to greater freedoms and resources”. Second, a society “structured as if everyone is exactly the same in their biology”. Finally, a society “structured to work to the advantage of people who were least advantaged in the genetic lottery”.

Science does not tell you which choice to select. Harden points out that in the US, both conservatives and liberals often behave as if we live in the second scenario. But what if we consider the reality that outcomes are to some extent caused by varying genes? Though these facts do not necessarily change one’s values, they do change the prescription for how one can achieve the just outcomes we might have in mind.

Of course, biology is not everything, but The Genetic Lottery reminds us that it is a factor we ignore at our own peril when we craft social policy. In 2021, we now have the technology to plumb the depths of our human nature. The results may not always be to our liking, but the facts are ultimately unchangeable.

Given this “veil of ignorance”, drifting unmoored from history, what would you choose? A cutthroat, greedy glorified casino? A land structured by the hierarchies of class, wealth, race and gender? An egalitarian but oppressive East German dictatorship? Or, more plausibly, some kind of Scandinavian-style social democracy, in which the strong and ambitious have room to rise, but there’s a well-provisioned welfare state for the weak and unlucky?

Such, in very simplistic terms, is the argument developed in John Rawls’s seminal book A Theory of Justice, which was published exactly fifty years ago this month. For many readers, it remains the last genuinely great work of Anglo-American philosophy, an enduring guide to the principles behind a good society. In the United States it sold an estimated 300,000 copies, though how many readers made it all the way through is an unanswerable question. And almost overnight, it turned Rawls into the leading champion of liberal democratic pluralism, apparently reconciling individual liberty and social good, freedom and fairness, aspiration and responsibility.

That was Rawls in January 1971. Half a century on, what went wrong? In the academy, Rawls retains a high position. Even though his book has been challenged, philosophy students and professors across the English-speaking world still speak his name with awe. Yet the values he came to represent – justice, fairness, decency, pluralism – have rarely seemed so embattled. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Hillary Clinton is currently hosting a White House event to mark Rawls’s legacy. Not in our own, though. Instead, in an irony of exquisite cruelty, the anniversary of Rawls’s most famous work coincided with the gravest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War: an orgy of violence at the United States Capitol actively encouraged by President Trump.

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“President Trump”. To Rawls – a shy, gentlemanly, scholarly man, who taught for four decades at Harvard and died in 2002 – those two words would surely have been utterly unimaginable, the antithesis of everything he held dear. But of course philosophy – just like history, social science, art and culture – reflects the age in which it was written. And Rawls’s world, to put it bluntly, is dead. He may be about to exit the White House, but we live in Trump’s world now.

Rawls’s life tells the wider story. He was born in Baltimore in 1921. In those days his hometown was a handsome and enormously successful port, railroad hub and manufacturing city – a far cry from the drug-scarred wasteland depicted in The Wire. The son of a well-known local lawyer, he lost two of his brothers in childhood to diphtheria and pneumonia – a reminder of the fragility of life in pre-New Deal, pre-Great Society America. And he grew up in an environment suffused with understated religious belief, studying theology at Princeton and seriously considering entering an Episcopalian seminary.

Yet the single biggest influence on Rawls was the Second World War. He served in the infantry in the Pacific and endured days under fire in the trenches in the Philippines. According to one account, the future philosopher found this particularly traumatic because he and his comrades knew it would end in torrents of blood: the Japanese would never surrender and would take no prisoners. “One soldier in a dugout close to Rawls stood up and deliberately removed his helmet to take a bullet to the head,’ it says, ‘choosing to die rather than endure the constant barrage.” That was not all. A few weeks after the war ended, Rawls was sent to Hiroshima. There he gazed upon the ruins of what had once been a thriving city, the ultimate demonstration of man’s power for destruction. Some fifty years later, he was still haunted by the sight.

For the next quarter-century, however, Rawls lived in a world that was demonstrably getting better. It is hard to think of any society, at any time, that has ever matched the dynamism, optimism and cultural confidence of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s – the years of booming suburbs and jangling jukeboxes, drive-in movies and Technicolor blockbusters, Vladimir Nabokov and Marilyn Monroe, the civil rights movement, the Apollo missions and the New Frontier. This was the world in which Rawls moved to Harvard and began work on his great work. The articles flowed: “Justice as Fairness”, “The Sense of Justice”, “Distributive Justice”, laying the foundations for the behemoth to come.

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Later, critics complained that Rawls had been too kind to his own society, his own time. He was too comfortable, they said, too moderate. He assumed too much common ground; he had produced an elegant justification for the liberalism of his class. As the New Republic’s Linda Hirshman later put it: “Just close your eyes, Rawls said, and think of what kind of political society you would make if you didn’t know who you were … and you’d produce unlimited free speech and moderately redistributive capitalism.” In Hirshman’s words, “this white male Harvard professor closed his eyes and produced the government of Cambridge, Massachusetts”.

Even if that’s true, can you blame him? In the mid-1960s, if you had asked most people around the world where and when they would choose to be born, where they would take their chances behind a veil of ignorance, they would probably have chosen the United States of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the richest, most powerful country on earth, the latter’s Great Society was transforming the lives of millions, offering a hand-out to those who needed it. Unemployment was a thing of the past, inflation not yet a pressing concern. Americans drove American cars, and they always would. Things could only get better. In this context, why wouldn’t you assume that given the right liberal principles, people would inevitably find their way to a fairer society?

But in January 1971, when A Theory of Justice reached the shelves, the wheels were coming off. This was Richard Nixon’s America now: more abrasive, more divided, more anxious about the future. The carnage in Vietnam was taking a heavy toll. The shambles of Watergate, the last time sensible people were seriously worried about a presidential coup, would deal a severe blow to the image of American democracy. The OPEC oil shock, the widening fissures of race and gender, the growing anxieties about crime and pornography, the sense of a chasm between the “elites” and the “people”, even the first glimmers of a technological revolution that would destroy millions of jobs worldwide – all these things were taking shape in Nixon’s America, at the very moment of Rawls’s intellectual triumph. Even Donald Trump was taking his first steps into the Manhattan real estate market.

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The decades since then, spanning the lifetime of anybody under the age of fifty, have not been kind to the assumptions with which Rawls grew up. In 1971 it was reasonable to think that with the advances of the civil rights and feminist movements, social solidarity would become stronger, not weaker. As rising affluence closed the gap between rich and poor, people would become more aware of what they had in common. And the new gospel of court-protected human rights – of which Rawls is often seen as a champion – would ensure even the weakest were treated fairly and equally. All perfectly sensible expectations. All wrong.

Perhaps the biggest thing, though, is simply a question of style. When critics discuss Rawls today, they almost always mention that he was a middle-class, Ivy League-educated white man. In radical circles, the value that he personified above all – a quiet, reserved, urbane civility – is now treated as fake, inauthentic, a marker of privilege. Even that brilliant image of the “veil of ignorance” is now used to beat him. “Eyes Wide Shut: John Rawls’s Silence on Racial Injustice” reads the title of one blistering academic essay. “He placed many layers of muffling abstraction between his readers and real-world struggles for justice,” complains another critic. “Rawls was so deeply in the grip of white ignorance about the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the creation of the modern Western world,” the black philosopher Charles W. Mills recently explained, that black students who dream of change “will get no help from white Rawlsianism”.

So much, then, for one of the greatest philosophers the New World has ever produced. There’s plenty of time for a comeback, of course, and A Theory of Justice will surely never go out of print. But will the next fifty years be kinder to Rawls? Probably not. The next half-century is unlikely to be an age of self-confident liberal pluralism: quite apart from the strongmen in Russia, China, Turkey and Iran, American democracy itself has rarely seemed in weaker health. And the common ground, the tolerance and decency for which Rawls stood, seems vanishingly elusive.

One story says it all. Last autumn, while the staff of the New York Times were tearing themselves apart about the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing violence in America’s streets, one columnist circulated a copy of Rawls’s essay on public reason. “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation, and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism,” she wrote. “I think that all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.”

“Philosophy schmosiphy,” one of her colleagues wrote back. “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

Numinous objects of piety and reverence, rights carry an authority no moral or political argument can match. As a result, questions in ethics and politics to which in the past there could be a variety of reasonable responses are now seen as having only one correct answer. If you find that answer unsatisfactory, you are not just disagreeing with other people. You are rejecting an imperative from which dissent is not permitted.

The position of rights is particularly incongruous in this country. More than in any other modern state, Britain’s constitution consists of precedents and conventions arising from historic political settlements. There is no body of rights codified in law that can constrain the sovereignty of parliament, while parliament itself is governed by precedent and accepted procedures.

The European Convention of Human Rights was incorporated into UK law in the Human Rights Act of 1998, and since then, the judges of what has become Britain’s Supreme Court can determine whether the rights recognised in the Convention are being respected by governments and legislators. But authority and legitimacy still reside in parliament rather than in any judicial body, and the ultimate determinant in any major public issue remains a political decision, not a legal interpretation.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

A situation in which major issues are resolved through the compromises of politics is intolerable to contemporary liberal thinkers. For them, law is a repository of moral truth, which can be determined beyond reasonable doubt. Disagreement on basic moral issues is evidence of error, which law should correct. If you think like this, British institutions are fundamentally defective.

So it is that there are continuous demands from legal scholars and journalistic commentators that our constitutional arrangements be overhauled so that human rights can constrain what any government can do. In this way, Britain can approach the higher rationality that is evident in countries such as the US, where law has a far greater role in the political process.

Jonathan Sumption’s Reith lectures on “Law and the Decline of Politics” present a considered response to these demands. His argument throughout is that inflating human rights beyond a baseline guaranteeing individual security and freedoms of expression and association imposes too great a burden on law, and leads to a dangerous shrinkage in political participation. Effectively, law is usurping politics:

“The problem about the legal model is that it marginalises the political process. When a judge identifies something as a constitutional, or a human, or a fundamental right, he is saying that it derives from a higher law than the ordinary decision-making processes of the state. He is declaring that its existence and extent are not to be determined by political choice. Yet, very many judicial decisions about fundamental rights are themselves political choices only made by a smaller and unrepresentative body of people.”

Here, Sumption captures the chief failing of the prevailing doctrine of rights. Politics is not constrained but confined to a small body of people. Judges are assumed to be able to provide answers to questions that the political processes of a democratic state are unfit to decide. Over time, the range of these questions has expanded to the point that practically every public issue is framed in terms of rights. More and more issues are taken to law, while ever fewer are settled by public political choice. As the empire of rights expands, politics shrivels away.

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The oppressive individualism of human rights

By Giles Fraser

There is more wisdom in Sumption’s five short lectures than could be gleaned from reading innumerable volumes of political and legal philosophy that have appeared in recent decades. Listening to them, I was reminded of an academic seminar I attended some 30 years ago. It was addressed by one of the leading lights of American jurisprudence. During the discussion that followed the paper, the speaker was asked how people with HIV/AIDS should be treated. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied: “They should be accorded the full protection of their rights under the constitution.”

While sympathising with the speaker’s concern for the wellbeing of people with HIV/AIDS, I could not help noting a certain absurdity in his response. The seminar was taking place in Oxford, and there were no embedded rights in the British constitution at the time. His response made sense only if he was invoking the American constitution (as he interpreted it) and took for granted that its authority was universal. None of the other participants questioned this assumption or gave any sign of finding it strange. I left shortly afterwards.

At that point in the late Eighties, an American discourse of rights had already displaced the British liberal tradition embodied in the work of John Stuart Mill. It tends to be forgotten that Mill is not a theorist of rights. It is true that his celebrated principle of liberty, which forbids curbing individual liberty except when harm to others may be done, stakes out a protected zone of individual freedom. But the scope of that zone is not determined by rights. It is identified by a calculus of utility, the results of which will vary according to changing circumstances.

What is forbidden in one place or time many not be prohibited in others. It may make sense to legalise drugs if the harm done by drug use is mainly to small numbers of drug users. If the number of drug users is large and there are harmful effects on society at large, the calculus may point to other policies. The background to Mill’s liberalism is not a supreme court interpreting human rights but a body like the House of Commons (where Mill himself served as an MP for some years), which frames and amends legislation in the light of its changing impact on general welfare.

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An absence of ethics is driving our mass anxieties

By Paul Collier

As an attempt to revive this British tradition, Sumption’s lectures make a pivotal contribution to public discourse. We need reminding that the empire of rights is recent and comes with large costs. Whether Sumption’s argument will be heeded is doubtful, however. The hollowing out of politics that has occurred, along with the expansion of rights, is hardly inadvertent. It reflects the anti-political liberalism that is in vogue in English-speaking countries.

As formulated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin among others, American liberal legalism understands politics as a sphere of collective decision-making containing only what is left over once the demands of justice and rights have been met. The marginalisation of politics is the principal objective of the new liberalism that has come to power over the past generation.

Of course, politics cannot actually be eradicated from the judicial process. It is clearly visible in the appointment of American Supreme Court judges. Bret Kavanagh was appointed in a hideously embarrassing spectacle of naked and crude political partisanship. But politics is pervasive throughout the judicial process. When competing interpretations of rights are being adjudicated, what is being decided is which among a range of rival political outlooks will prevail.

Jurisprudential disputes between ‘originalists’ who aim to stick to what the constitution was intended to mean, and others who want the freedom to apply its principles in new conditions, are political conflicts pursued by legal means. The underlying questions have to do not with law but the proper functions of government. Theories of rights cannot offer an escape from politics because they are themselves political ideologies.

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What's so illiberal about debating abortion?

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

At times, Sumption seems to hark back to a time when law was less politicised because more scope was allowed to democratic choice. But law is inevitably shaped in some degree by prevailing political ideas, and today it cannot avoid the formative influence of the ruling version of liberalism. In his first lecture, Sumption observes that ours is “a censorious age”, the product of “growing moral and social absolutism which looks to produce conformity”, not unlike the stifling climate in Victorian England after the Evangelical Movement transformed the lax sensibilities of Georgian times.

But he fails to note how liberalism has mutated from being a philosophy of tolerance that allows individuals and communities with different values to live together peaceably, to one that aims to enforce what are judged to be the correct values on everybody. Along with the practice of public shaming and ostracism, the proliferation of rights is one of the central strategies adopted to achieve this end.

The result is a culture of conformity in some ways more repressive than that of Victorian times. John Stuart Mill may have complained bitterly against the tyranny of public opinion, but what he had to contend with was chiefly unpleasant gossip about his irregular friendship with Harriet Taylor. He was not threatened in his career or livelihood, whereas dissidents from today’s orthodoxies may face being driven from both.

The censoriousness of rights-based cultures today is not accidental. The inflation of rights endangers not only democracy but also personal freedom, for it de-legitimates what was once an accepted diversity of moral viewpoints. If only one view of a contentious issue — abortion, say — is judged to be in accord with human rights, all other views are not only mistaken, but criminal. My own views are strongly pro-choice. But where societies are deeply divided it is worth seeking a compromise, never fixed or final, which most people can live with, and on this basis a liberal abortion regime has been achieved in many countries. If the US remains polarised on this and other issues, one reason is that they have been framed in terms of rights.

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Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

An over-extended empire of rights comes with a number of disadvantages. It hollows out democracy by removing ever more issues from public political choice. It imperils personal freedom by criminalising what used to be legitimate moral differences and polarises society by turning those differences into conflicts that cannot be settled by reasonable compromise. In all of these ways, the empire of rights has the effect of undermining social acceptance of liberal values.

But the illiberal empire of rights has another and more fundamental disadvantage. It is inherently unstable. There are many ways of understanding populism, but one that seems plausible to me is that it is a reaction against an attempt to remove certain issues from the domain of democratic decision-making. If only one view of immigration is deemed rational and morally tolerable, the issue is effectively excluded from public debate. At the same time, a space is created for demagogues.

Denying expression to a widespread public concern is rarely sustainable for long in a functioning democracy. If those who feel this concern are dismissed as retrograde and racist, they will soon flock to leaders who mobilise and accentuate their fears. Populism is a backlash against the expanding empire of rights and a warning that the empire is in danger of bringing about not only its own downfall, but that of liberal societies themselves.