When I read political philosophy, I’m regularly struck by just how naive the analyses are. Frequently, political philosophers commit what UCLA economist Harold Demsetz called the Nirvana Fallacy: comparing the actually existing world with an ideal that only exists in our imaginations. They also regularly indulge what Notre Dame political economist James Otteson calls the Great Mind Fallacy: assuming a super-brain of some kind can plan and create a good society. Together, these are part of self-styled philosopher-kings’ presumption that their moral and intellectual superiority entitles—indeed, obligates—them to boss other people around. What else are you to do when you are more equal than others?

University of Lincoln political scientist Nick Cowen’s Neoliberal Social Justice: Rawls Unveiled takes these presumptions to task and explains how classical liberal institutions accomplish high liberal goals. Rawlsian equality, Cowen argues, is classically liberal—or at least more classically liberal than many Rawlsians think, and they should take economic liberty much more seriously than they do.

Intentions and outcomes / Cowen grounds his argument in Robust Political Economy. It approaches institutions very much like public choice does, on the assumption that people don’t suddenly change their motivations and abilities too substantially when moving from the commercial to the political sphere. Importantly, he criticizes the conviction that bad outcomes result solely from bad intentions and the related conviction that “the social problem” is more dispositional than it is institutional. As he explains, “Coordination problems emerge from even the most unselfish cooperative agents.” He offers the example of someone serving nuts to someone with an allergy. I’m reminded of people at the pond in my local park throwing white bread to ducks and geese despite the large sign that reads, “Thank you for not feeding us bread,” and explains how bad it is for them. While we can know and monitor one another pretty efficiently in very small groups like families or groups of friends going on a camping trip together, the problem, Cowen argues, is epistemic: “Coordination problems are bound to emerge as communities of unselfish cooperators get larger.”

What does this mean for our obligations to one another? As befits a scholar who spent some time with Mario Rizzo at New York University, Cowen develops this point by considering the well-known problems we have understanding and acting in accordance with our own interests:

If people can easily miscalculate their own interests, then it is a mistake to suggest that people’s failure to anticipate what their obligations entail is fundamentally a motivational problem. At its extreme, such logic would have parallels with an attitude amongst Soviet managers that associated all errors in production with counter-revolutionary sabotage.

Or, as the late Austrian School economist Don Lavoie put it in his 1985 book Rivalry and Central Planning, “The problem is not that people will be insufficiently motivated to do the right things but, more fundamentally, they will not know what the right things to do are, even if they passionately wanted to do them.”

Useful institutions / Cowen argues that this is true in political action as well as economic planning. Context and institutions, which generate local knowledge, are indispensable. A productive asset’s capital value—and whether it will be “productive” at all—depends on the institutions, which affect people’s incentives to do productive things. For instance, I don’t want to write this review right now; I want to go play Xbox. The institutions, fortunately (?), are set up so that I have pretty powerful incentives to write the review. Markets, as imperfectly and incompletely as we let them function in the United States, are loci of the bids and offers that help me understand what my time is worth and, perhaps just as importantly, what I would need to give up if I wanted to get a new Xbox.

As Cowen points out, the fact that capital goods like tools and factories don’t have institution-independent “value” gets lost in arguments for government ownership (or redistribution) of the means of production. As he puts it, “Even the kingdom of heaven needs institutions.” In his analysis of economic democracy, he points out that “by requiring firms to steward capital assets, but never reduce their value, economic democracy is asking the impossible since the value of capital assets changes as part of the process of trial and error.” I would argue that capital assets only have intelligible value when they are bought and sold in free markets. Without free markets and voluntary exchange, the social knowledge people need in order to make coherent, meaningful plans does not exist as data.

Dollars and votes / Neoliberal Social Justice is a valuable contribution that should get readers thinking harder about several issues. First, it’s striking how much time and energy political philosophers spend on material equality and worrying that political outcomes will reflect the rich’s preferences. It’s not clear that’s a bad thing; if, as George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan and others have suggested, income and education help people think like economists, then this should lead to better public policy, holding everything else constant.

Second, it’s also striking how little time and energy political philosophers spend thinking about markets as moral, and even democratic, spaces. Cowen evaluates “cases for requiring democratic control of capital assets in the place of private firms and investors.” I don’t think the scholars he criticizes give enough weight to the implications of consumers’ sovereignty. The private firms and investors don’t have nearly as much power as their critics imagine. In a free market, the consumers call the tune. No amount of “corporate power” could make New Coke or the Ford Edsel profitable, and now they serve as cautionary tales in entrepreneurial and managerial blundering.

In any case, markets are radically “democratic” insofar as every dollar is a vote. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos may have more dollars than any single person in the middle or lower class, but the middle and lower classes have far more dollars than Bezos and his friends at the top of the Forbes 400. Those middle- and lower-class members vote with those dollars, making Walmart, action movies, and Big Macs ubiquitous. Given that the critics don’t see economic liberties as “basic,” they would likely have no problem with suppressing the votes that hoi polloi cast in the marketplace. Citing Brown University political theorist John Tomasi, Cowen writes, “A great many liberties that are basic according to ‘high liberals’ seem to presume a set of life plans.” “Basic liberty” to choose only what I know is good for you is not really liberty, is it?

Neoliberal Social Justice brings important considerations like the knowledge problem and entrepreneurial discovery into debates about how the just society “should” be organized. The result is an analysis and set of public policy recommendations that are much more classically liberal than the ones that have emerged from the Rawlsian tradition. Economic liberties, Cowen argues, are a lot more “basic” than many political philosophers seem to think, and utopia—to paraphrase Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan’s Why Not Capitalism?—is classically liberal.