A John Rawls recipe book



Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Daniel Chandler. Penguin Random House, 2023. 404 pages.


As the jacket blurb says, this book about the philosophy of John Rawls aims at “dragging his theory of justice down from Harvard’s ivory towers and into the streets with the people.”

For those already familiar with Rawls (unfortunately not many people), this book will be redundant. But Chandler does lay out Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” in lay language rather than in the dense language of moral and political philosophy. Chandler includes real-world examples of where some of Rawls’ ideas actually have been put to the test, and he proposes ways of bringing justice as fairness into the theory and practice of good politics.

Chandler is an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics.

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