Chandler is a lucid and elegant writer, and there’s an earnest sense of excitement propelling his argument ... Chandler deserves credit for refusing to relegate his book to the airy realm of wistful abstraction ... Despite his valiant efforts, the book enacts both the promise and the limitations of the theory it seeks to promote. It didn’t leave me cold, but it did leave me restless.
A stirring call by an LSE philosopher and economist for egalitarian liberalism based on the ideas of John Rawls ... If we are really serious about creating a free and equal society, at least some of the ideas Chandler suggests are necessary.
[Chandler's] goal, then, is to present a joined-up approach motivated and inspired by Rawls, rather than a faithful, literal rendering. And as a way of making Rawls relevant to policy this seems exactly right ... This is a welcome reminder of what progressive politics should be, away from the recent emphasis on, for example, being the toughest on immigration and crime.
It is not that these views are necessarily wrong, but they are rote. They all follow from one another among a certain set. This predictability is a shame, because Chandler’s book promises more ... He may well be right to argue for these ideas, and his book provides a thorough summary of many supportive studies. There is no doubt that tax policy in the UK favours capital over labour, and the very rich over everyone else. Free and Equal may come to feel prescient later in the century ... Yet the book’s style, which can feel at times like reading the marking scheme for a university paper, is unlikely to win over the unconvinced reader ... a smart and useful book, but also an oddly narrow and incurious one.
Those of us who are fans of Mill, Bertrand Russell and other egalitarian liberals will find much to like in Free and Equal. It does, however, raise a familiar question. How are we to get from here to there? ... It is perhaps telling that only the final half-dozen pages of this engaging book raise the question "Now what?
Thorny questions or no, Chandler brings good cheer and a positive outlook to the work of reshaping society, which marks an advance on the usual gloom and doom.
