Some decades ago there was a temporary alliance of economic writers from across the political spectrum in favour of what we fondly called expansionist economic policies. At the height of this campaign I invited for lunch the late Frank Blackaby, of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. To my surprise he spent the first part of the lunch sulking. My crime, it turned out, was to have conceded that Selwyn Lloyd was right to adjust some of the confiscatory upper marginal tax rates, inherited from the wartime period, which had become simply a penalty on those who did not know the tax-avoidance ropes.
This was my first intimation of how strongly egalitarian gestures were valued even by members of the moderate left who were not interested in nationalisation or abolishing public schools.
Equality is an ersatz religion for much of the academic left. My second intimation of this came a few years later on a sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford, where I found an almost universal belief in some kind of material equality as a goal, which then reluctantly had to be qualified by incentive payments for the sake of economic efficiency.
One might therefore welcome a tract by a political philosopher (from Balliol of course) which defends egalitarianism instead of simply assuming it. This is undermined, however, by the author's pretence that he has written a neutral analysis. He skates over the difficult issues of whether equality should be considered at a particular moment or over a lifetime; between individuals or between families and whether people with exceptional needs deserve more than an equal proportion. Even the issue of whether equality should be applied within nations or globally is passed over in a few sentences. Swift is so obsessed by material equality that he does not even take on the political right on subjects such as equality of status or respect.
This book suggests that Tony Blair can expect little help from the academic left. Most of them were happy with old Labour, merely sad that the electorate would not vote for it. Swift wants his book to be read by cabinet ministers but accepts that its real audience is students. His unfortunate undergraduate is, however, left with no notion that there can be a respectable non-opportunist opposition to egalitarianism-or that philosophy could be a matter of analysis, proposing policy only in a tentative and Socratic form.
The best chapter is on John Rawls. But like most left-wing Rawlsians, Swift is more at home with Rawls's redistributive principles than with the primacy he gives to civil rights and liberties. He has little time for non-left wing Rawlsians who stress the use of the veil of ignorance as a method for reaching consensus rather than equality.
The index is a giveaway. It has a whole column on equality but two lines on poverty. Swift does try to find reasons for preferring an income distribution in which everyone receives ?200 a week to one in which the worse off receive ?250 and the better off ?400. He ties himself up into knots in so doing. Egalitarians mock their opponents for saying that they are inspired by envy and jealousy: it does not make it any less true.
Swift then resorts to several debating tricks. The first one is to suggest that his reader might prefer equality of opportunity. He then has no difficulty in showing that opportunities cannot be equal when people come from different material and cultural backgrounds. This is a cheap ruse. What people really mean by equality of opportunity is removal of the more obvious obstacles to the progress of the less privileged.
His second debating trick is pulled out when he considers the amount of inequality that might be required to persuade the better off to give of their best. He says that such payments are a form of blackmail. Past political philosophers of all schools of thought tried to treat human beings as they actually were instead of admonishing them for not being saints. Even Plato confined ascetic practices to a handful of "guardians."
It is absurd to say that Lord Nuffield or Bill Gates, who create something which did not exist before and are well rewarded for it, are engaging in a form of blackmail. And what do we say about lesser businessmen or sportsmen or pop stars who have the luck to possess valued talents?
There are two ways of looking at income and wealth. One is to envisage a pie to be divided up by a central authority, like a mother cutting a cake. From this point of view, it is departures from equality that have to be justified. The other is the entitlement theory. What each person gets, he or she receives from others as a legitimate transfer in exchange for a service that he or she has provided. Neither theory entirely corresponds to the facts. The weakness of the pie theory is that there is no fixed sum to go round-individuals (not the state) add to the pie by their activities. The final distribution of resources is the unintended product of many individual decisions. The weakness of the entitlement theory is that property rights are the result of collectively enforced rules which we are at liberty to change.
To muddle through with a mixture of the two concepts-redistribution, yes, equality no-is better than the hell on earth which would prevail if either were carried through to its logical conclusion. What is wrong with the common sense conclusion, which the Nuffields and Gates's usually accept, that they have some claim to a high reward and some duty to accept some redistribution towards the less favoured?
It is Swift's third debating trick that I find most unforgivable. I am sceptical about the idolatory in which the late Isaiah Berlin was held. Nevertheless, he has never been forgiven by the left for his best essay distinguishing between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is an area of life in which I can make my own choices without coercion. Positive liberty covers a great many desirable states such as adequate nutrition, universal schooling, voting rights and anything else of which the writer approves.
Berlin was no Thatcherite; and he did not believe that negative freedom was the sole guide to policy. His guiding theme was that ideals were in inevitable conflict and that painful choices had to be made. He was willing to accept that for a peasant, food might have a higher priority than liberty. But he did not think it served anyone's interest to confuse the different goals. Unfortunately many philosophers and politicians have not been so scrupulous. Instead of accepting that social justice or economic growth or whatever are different-and sometimes more important-goals than freedom, they insist on using the word freedom to cover all desirable states of affairs, thereby leaving everyone confused.
Swift's case against Berlin is that both positive and negative freedom cover many different states of affairs and were not rigorously defined. But the whole point of Berlin's method was to give hosts of examples which were put in contrasting families to indicate rival ideals and goals.
A similar confusion informs the chapter on communitarianism. Swift starts with an effective critique of the metabiological attacks on liberalism. But he misses the point that communitarians-many of whom are Conservatives-value groups more than individuals and want to promote the welfare of entities like France or Edmund Burke's "little platoons" rather than the individuals in them. In the worst cases, as we know to our cost, it is groups espousing a fanatical ideology or religion who forget about real humans. These are issues on which we shall soon have to stand up and be counted; this book will not be much help in so doing.
