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Jason Brennan and John Tomasi have argued that if we focus on income alone, the Difference Principle supports welfare-state capitalism over property-owning democracy, because capitalism maximizes long run income growth for the worst off. If so, the defense of property-owning democracy rests on the priority of equal opportunity for political influence and social advancement over raising the income of the worst off, or on integrating workplace control into the Difference Principle’s index of advantage. The thesis of this paper is that even based on income alone, the Difference Principle is not as hostile to property-owning democracy as it may seem, because the Difference Principle should not be interpreted to require maximizing income growth. The main idea is that it is unfair to make the present worst off accept inequality that doesn’t benefit them, for the sake of benefitting the future worst off, if the future worst off will be better off than they are anyway.

Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded forms of liberalism, and Michel Foucault on the distinction between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, we provide a conceptual treatment and mapping of the ideological positions that constitute the bulk of modern scholarly CSR debate. Thus, we distinguish between embedded liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and re-embedded liberalism. We develop these four orientations in turn and show how they are engaged in “battles of ideas” over the meaning and scope of corporate responsibilities—and how they all remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary debates and developments in the field of CSR and corporate sustainability.

At a London railway station bookstall in 1903, E. M. Forster purchased a copy of the inaugural issue of Independent Review journal. Upon opening it, he felt that a “new age had begun” (Forster 1934, 116). Summing up the Review’s political perspective, Forster said that “[i]t was not so much a Liberal review as an appeal to Liberalism from the Left to be its better self” (115). This “Liberalism from the Left”, or New Liberalism as it was better known, aimed to be more ethical than its classically Liberal predecessor through the introduction of welfare schemes such as unemployment insurance and better housing for the poor. By analysing the fragments, working notes and manuscripts associated with Howards End (1910) alongside the published version of the novel, my paper aims to reveal how Forster’s affinity towards New Liberalism influenced his portrayal of the lower-middle-class insurance clerk, Leonard Bast, as he drafted his novel. From initially being rendered as a lothario and opportunist, Bast evolved into a lowly office worker, who is sympathetically depicted as a victim of laissez-faire liberal economics and at risk of falling into an abyss of poverty through no fault of his own. This article ultimately reveals that Forster’s delineation of Bast is more compassionate than some critics have argued, but it is a compassion which is obscured by what Forster refers to as his “failure of technique” in the published version of the novel (Wilson 1993, 32).

The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. InPost-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russiabeyondthe Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s,Post-Soviet Socialuses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.

Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept.

This paper presents a novel philosophical analysis of the problem of law enforcement’s use of biased face recognition technology (FRT) in liberal democracies. FRT programs used by law enforcement in identifying crime suspects are substantially more error-prone on facial images depicting darker skin tones and females as compared to facial images depicting Caucasian males. This bias can lead to citizens being wrongfully investigated by police along racial and gender lines. The author develops and defends “A Liberal Argument Against Biased FRT,” which concludes that law enforcement use of biased FRT is inconsistent with the classical liberal requirement that government treat all citizens equally before the law. Two objections to this argument are considered and shown to be unsound. The author concludes by suggesting that equality before the law should be preserved while the problem of machine bias ought to be resolved before FRT and other types of artificial intelligence (AI) are deployed by governments in liberal democracies.

Mill’s classic argument for liberty requires that people’s exercise of freedom should be governed by the harm principle (MHP): that is, an action should not harm another. In this paper, we develop the concept of a Millian harm equilibrium (MHE) in n -person games where players maximize utility subject to the constraint of an MHP. Our main result is in the spirit of the fundamental theorems of welfare economics. We show that for every initial ‘reference point’ in a game the associated MHE is Pareto efficient and, conversely, every Pareto efficient point can be supported as an MHE for some initial reference point. This is an important result for an old question in political philosophy over whether the exercise of liberty is consistent with order in society and for how we think about policy in a non-ideal world.

Classical liberals have been more preoccupied by domestic policy and institutions than by international affairs. This paper makes the case for a classical liberal foreign policy outlook that could address the collective challenges facing free societies. In the United States, libertarian foreign policy thinking has been outsourced to structural realism. However, in the form in which it is deployed to make the case for restraint, such realism often contradicts basic analytic and normative tenets of classical liberalism. The current international situation is a wake-up call for classical liberals to rethink and update their foreign policy intuition to an era in which the international environment seems less conducive to classical liberal values than much of the post-war period.

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset has influenced several thinkers of the twentieth century, among whom Julius Evola, Ayn Rand, and Pierre Bourdieu specifically have been examined in this article. The selection of thinkers indicates that Ortega has influenced both those on the left and those on the various strands of the right. In relation to Evola, Ortega’s critique of the emergent masses in the age of modern democracy has been emphasized, although they do not share the same overarching social philosophy as Ortega is essentially a proponent of liberalism which Evola fiercely opposes. Regarding Rand, there are striking affinities between Ortega’s major work Revolt of the Masses and Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness in relation to personal responsibility and the state’s role in providing welfare. Bourdieu, on his behalf, has manifestly linked his reasoning in his major work Distinction to Ortega’s work The Dehumanization of Art . Overall, this shows that Ortega’s philosophy has an impact on both the left and the right.