John Locke Lite: the strange philosophy of a "left libertarian".

• Author: Palmer, Tom G.
• Position: Libertarianism without Inequality - Book Review

Libertarianism without Inequality, by Michael Otsuka, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 180 pages, $39.95

PEOPLE FIGHT ABOUT love and lucre. They also fight about labels. A little tussle is under way right now among academic political theorists over the label libertarian.

Advocates of massive redistribution who seek to make every property title subject to expropriation have decided they want to be known as "libertarians." Since it's hard to appropriate a label outright, they're willing to share it: They have taken to calling themselves "left libertarians," to distinguish themselves from "right libertarians." One of them, Philippe van Parijs, uses the term "real libertarianism," because he feels real liberty is about doing whatever you want to do, which means you have a right to be comfortably supported by others, even if you are able-bodied but refuse to produce anything and instead spend all your time surfing and hanging out.

The central goal of these "left libertarians" is to show that one can maintain a core commitment to what John Locke termed "property in one's person"--and thus can call oneself a libertarian--and yet support a state that is empowered to redistribute property on an ongoing basis in accordance with some formula of fairness or justice.

The latest attempt to capture the libertarian label for a radically egalitarian redistributive state is Michael Otsuka's Libertarianism Without Inequality, a collection of essays that try to reconcile individual freedom, egalitarian redistribution, and consensual government. (The middle section, which seems to have been added to pad out an otherwise very thin book, attempts to defend some rather implausible claims about criminal justice and the right to self-defense. Since they're not particularly relevant to the issue of "left libertarianism," I'll set them aside.) The work is an attempt to say something interesting by exploring the author's hunches and intuitions. It fails.

Otsuka, a reader in philosophy at University College London, was a student of the analytical Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen, who holds forth at Oxford University and to whom Otsuka dedicates the book as his "teacher, mentor, comrade, friend." Cohen gained some fame for a series of attacks on Robert Nozick's defense of free market capitalism--collected in his book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Inequality--that simultaneously demonstrated Cohen's flair for bizarre examples and his weak grasp of economics and bargaining theory.

Otsuka attempts to show that the radically egalitarian redistribution he favors is intuitively plausible if you share his intuitions (which many people will not); that he is entitled to call himself a Lockean after he has reformulated...