chapter 27
...................................................................................................................................................LIBERTY,
EQUALITY, AND
PROPERTY
...................................................................................................................................................andrew williams
1Introduction
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Political philosophers working in the analytic tradition have now spent nearly
three decades debating the idea that distributive institutions should ensure
that we share fairly in each other’s fortunes and misfortunes. Like various of
their other recent debates, this one was launched in 1971 with the publication
of John Rawls’s masterpiece,A Theory of Justice(Rawls 1971 ). This chapter
examines how under-acknowledged assumptions about property rights, akin
to those more frequently associated with Rawls’s foremost libertarian critic,
Robert Nozick, have had an important inXuence on the debate. My aim is to
show that Nozick’s challenge to egalitarians has played an important role in
Ronald Dworkin’s alternative statement of liberal egalitarianism, and thus in
indirectly shaping later non-Rawlsian egalitarianisms. Before examining
those later views, I shall begin with some very brief remarks about Rawls’s
initial formulation of the luck-sharing project.