



































Tomasi, John


[Expositions 7.1 (2013) 88–96]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Tomasi, John. Free Market Fairness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Xxvii + 

348 $35.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9780691144467. 

 

John Tomasi’s book is valuable and important not because it concludes an academic 

conversation about justice in the liberal tradition but because it starts one. This conversation 

should be of interest to a wide readership, not only specialists in political philosophy. In an 

academic but extremely accessible way, Tomasi discusses justice in contemporary Western 

society: what principles should organize society’s political, economic, and cultural institutions so 

as to secure and preserve its citizens’ individual rights while simultaneously working for the 

social good? Every reader who lives in a liberal democracy such as the United States, and who 

has witnessed the tug of war between apparently polar ideologies, between one major political 

party and the other, between Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, will find this of interest. 

The Brown University professor is drawn to aspects of both classical liberalism (including 

libertarianism) and high, or left, liberalism. Tomasi intends for his monograph to inaugurate a 

broader research program into a genuine hybrid framework for conceiving and then ultimately 

practicing liberal justice. His primary concern is with political philosophy (identifying the moral 

standard for evaluating society’s institutions and the range of permissible regime types) and 

political theory (advocating a regime type among all candidates that may best satisfy the moral 

standard). Public policy is much less extensively discussed. Tomasi hopes that the ensuing 

conversation will help to chart a path through the ideological impasse that currently characterizes 

U.S. politics, something in which everyone has a stake. This research program may also facilitate 

more open, regular, and robust teaching and writing about liberalism in all its pluriformity than 

typically occurs on college campuses. 

 

I. 

 

Tomasi’s book is well-written, well-organized, and well-argued. Following an introduction are 

chapters on the two major branches of liberalism to which Tomasi regularly refers: classical 

liberalism (chapter 1) and high, or left, liberalism (chapter 2). This survey is helpful for its 

conceptual descriptions, historical profiles, and terminological clarifications, particularly for 

those readers less familiar than others with political philosophy. More important, however, is the 

historical arc that Tomasi maps: “how the currently dominant left-liberal paradigm displaced the 

earlier classical liberal one” (xxv), an unbalanced situation with which Tomasi is dissatisfied and 

that occasions this book. Chapter 3 offers some reasons why the present cultural moment in the 

United States may be ripe for a reconsideration of liberalism as a whole. In chapter 4 (87–122), 

Tomasi explains how market democracy and free market fairness as its guiding moral standard 

meet this challenge. The remainder of the book anticipates and responds to potential objections 

by classical liberals and libertarians, on the one hand (chapters 5–6), and by high liberals, on the 

other (chapters 7–8). These chapters crystallize the justification that Tomasi adduces in offering 



89  Carpenter 

 

 

free market fairness as a morally superior political theory to schemes of justice in both major 

liberal branches. 

That, ultimately, is the heart of Tomasi’s argument. For all of his learned and necessary 

theoretical nuance, he defends a simple normative claim: the genuine, liberal hybrid of market 

democracy is morally superior as a political philosophy to both classical liberalism and 

libertarianism, on the one side, and to high liberalism, on the other. It is not a forced 

harmonization or compromise. He offers a self-contained and distinctive conception of liberal 

justice that blends the chief strengths of these two major alternatives. 

Specifically, Tomasi gravitates to four key philosophical ideas, two from each major branch 

of liberalism: “(1) capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty, (2) society as a 

spontaneous order, (3) just and legitimate political institutions as acceptable to all who make 

their lives among them, (4) social justice as the ultimate standard of political evaluation” (xv). 

The first two are from the classical liberal and libertarian branch; the third and fourth are key to 

the high liberal tradition. Demonstrating how these elements, often perceived as irreconcilable, 

may cooperate in a viable, standalone system is the aim of this initial study. Market democracy is 

the result: “a deliberative form of liberalism that is sensitive to the moral insights of 

libertarianism” (xv; my emphasis). Tomasi’s concision in this summary may conceal the 

significant and controversial nature of his two-part thesis. Some unpacking is needed. 

By “deliberative,” Tomasi means democratic, and this in the sense that the legitimacy of the 

institutions and their actions is based on principles that can be endorsed by all citizens in that 

social regime (see: 74, 88, 102, 173–74, 267). Society, he affirms, is “a fair system of social 

cooperation” (xv). The deliberative or democratic characteristic is foundational to forms of 

liberalism that are committed foremost to the idea that “each person has an equal claim to a fully 

adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties” (180). High liberals in particular view justice as 

requiring more than formal equality. Society properly ordered according to this liberty principle, 

in other words, will therefore be based also on some kind of reciprocity among citizens who 

initially occupy different (i.e., unequal) positions. 

Reciprocity, on the common high liberal understanding, leads to distributional exchanges to 

secure various outcomes fairer than would otherwise obtain. The reciprocity principle and the 

exchange process are commonly referred to as social justice. Social justice provides each citizen 

an equal and actual, not merely formal, claim to the basket of basic rights that form the 

fundamental structure of society. These basic rights are prerequisite for a well-ordered society to 

function as a fair system of cooperation. The basic liberties combine with the reciprocity 

principle to shape what John Rawls, for instance, refers to as the “basic structure of society”: 

“the basic structure is the way in which the main political and social institutions of society fit 

together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties 

and regulate the division of advantages that arise from social cooperation over time” (Rawls 

2001, 10). With the reciprocity principle operating in the context of this institutional background 

justice, citizens may thereby enjoy a fair, not just formal, equality of opportunity to realize fully 

their capacity as moral, self-governing persons across generations. Rawls advances one such 



Review of Free Market Fairness  90 

 

 

powerful left liberal theory. There are others. For the most part, the family of high liberalism –

represented by Rawls in Tomasi’s account―holds to an egalitarian view of social justice. “We 

benefit the poor,” as Tomasi fairly summarizes egalitarianism, “by working toward institutions 

that make the holdings, opportunities, and statuses across society more equal [. . .] equality itself 

[is seen] as a value” (xviii; see: 226–37). 

Such an approach that emphasizes this sort of reciprocity-based fairness, and particularly 

status, typically subordinates private economic liberty to other liberties deemed more basic or 

more important for the achievement of moral self-agency. Private economic liberty, a central 

concept for Tomasi, refers to the range of freedoms that involve human working and owning. In 

explaining what he means by the recurring phrase “thick conception of economic liberty,” 

Tomasi borrows four categories from James Nickel: labor (employing one’s body and time in 

accepted arrangements), transacting (managing one’s household and professional economic 

activity), holding (acquiring, owning, developing, and transacting personal and commercial 

productive property), and using (decision-making about consuming and producing) (see: 22–23, 

89). 

Left liberal regime systems such as those that Rawls endorses may permit degrees of these 

sorts of economic liberty. Property-owning democracy, for example, allows but limits personal 

economic liberty; however, it permits more economic liberty than liberal socialism, which 

greatly restricts private ownership of productive property. These high liberal, or specifically 

social democratic, systems, however, do not protect a thick view of economic liberty in the way 

Tomasi thinks of it, because they tend to view the differences that ensue from the real-life 

exercise of such wide liberties as justice-destroying, not justice-enabling. For instance, wouldn’t 

protected economic freedoms as basic liberties support price collusion in business, or prevent 

democratic control of the workplace, and so create unjust hierarchies? For high liberals, either 

robust economic liberty does not hold the same place and weight as other basic rights (like 

freedoms of conscience, association, and expression) within the basic structure of society, or a 

thick view of personal economic liberty is not deemed necessary to the effective exercise of all 

citizens’ moral powers and the realization of the aims of justice in a fair system of cooperation. 

Tomasi disagrees. 

We are now positioned to see clearly the innovative and controversial aspect of Tomasi’s 

argument: social justice and a thick conception of private economic liberty. “The distinctive 

characteristic of market democracy, in all its variations,” Tomasi insists, “is that it affirms a thick 

conception of private economic liberty while being committed to a distributive ideal of social 

justice” (264). How can this be? An answer emerges by understanding Tomasi’s view of social 

justice. 

Tomasi follows theorists who wish to benefit all members of society, and benefit the least 

advantaged to the largest degree. These theorists also recognize that greater equality in people’s 

holdings may result in everyone’s having cumulatively less than each might otherwise have had. 

“We benefit the poor,” he writes, “by choosing social institutions that generate the largest 

possible bundle of goods under their personal control (even if, in doing so, some other citizens 



91  Carpenter 

 

 

may personally control still larger bundles of goods” (xviii; see: 8, 234–36). This view of social 

justice is humanitarian (or prioritarian), not egalitarian. Just the same, this humanitarian 

approach envisions a society’s institutions as oriented to reciprocity, as working for the greatest 

benefit of the least advantaged: “The basic rights of all citizens in place, social institutions 

should be designed so that the members of the poorest class personally control the largest 

possible bundle of goods (say, wealth and income)” (xviii). Envisioned is a form of Pareto 

superiority. Most basically, and broadly, however, social justice for Tomasi “is not a property of 

particular distributions, but of social institutions taken as a whole” (xvii). 

Like Rawls, Tomasi views a primary aim of political justice as promoting the free and fair 

exercise of people’s capacities as moral self-authors: “In seeking the most appropriate 

specification of the basic rights and liberties, we seek the specification that most fully allows 

citizens to develop themselves as responsible self-authors and that also displays the respect that 

they have for their fellow citizens as responsible self-authors” (82). Therefore, market 

democracy condemns (and would harshly punish) price collusion and fraud as unconscionably 

disrespectful of fellow citizens as responsible self-authors. Democratic control of the workplace 

is one way to experience economic liberty, but so is determining other terms of willing 

employment. Tomasi’s argument is that “private economic liberties have a special role in 

protecting citizens as they develop and exercise these moral capacities. The platform of 

economic exceptionalism [i.e., subordinating private economic liberties to other liberties deemed 

more basic] renders high liberalism a morally impoverished view” (82). Why? Because personal 

agency―whether exercised as a partner in the solution to the problem of poverty (236), or as a 

social participant with equal political autonomy (183), or as freely having this independent 

capacity to exercise responsibly along with one’s fellows (232–33)―is basic to the flowering 

and fulfillment of individual self-authorship which high liberalism affirms. Agency, and not 

merely status, is a good in a just society. The economy is a domain of agency. Full personal 

economic agency is required as one of the social bases for the self-respect that institutions in a 

just, liberal society are supposed to organize.  

Private economic liberty is therefore an essential ingredient in the basic structure of society 

for the attainment of justice: “[M]arket democracy affirms capitalistic economic liberties as first-

order requirements of social justice” (xv). Indeed, for Tomasi market democracy occupies the 

highest moral position as a genus of liberalism because it enlarges and protects private economic 

freedom, properly understood, as a first-order, basic liberty that, along and on par with other 

basic rights, promotes personal self-authorship, and it does so in conjunction with something like 

Rawls’s reciprocity, or difference, principle (see: 121, 184–92).  

Private economic liberty for Tomasi is not (simply) instrumental to economic efficiency or 

distributional ideals, as in classical liberalism. No Adam Smith. Neither does market democracy 

privilege or exalt as supreme economic liberty above other basic rights, as in orthodox 

libertarianism. No Robert Nozick. “Instead, market democracy affirms the moral importance of 

private economic liberty primarily on deliberative grounds: market democracy sees the 

affirmation of private economic liberty as a requirement of democratic legitimacy itself” (xv). 



Review of Free Market Fairness  92 

 

 

Without private economic liberty, the basic basket of rights in a political system is deficient; this 

liberty therefore is equally a requirement of real social justice (172). Free market fairness―an 

intentional riff on John Rawls’s justice as fairness program―is, Tomasi contends, the morally 

best theory of justice that should guide all market democratic regimes (174–76). 

 

II. 

 

Although the foregoing accurately represents the main lines of Tomasi’s well-researched, boldly 

conceived, and clearly presented argument, it does not replicate the richness of it. Tomasi’s 

broad and deep working knowledge of classical liberal, libertarian, and high liberal figures is 

impressive. His novel reading of Friedrich Hayek on the place of social justice within the 

spontaneous order not only grounds market democracy’s institutional rather than legislative 

approach to the basic structure; it will also challenge specialists and non-specialists who read 

Hayek’s explicit (and popularly reproduced) denials of social justice per se out of their 

conceptual context. Readers of Tomasi’s monograph will be treated both to a comprehensible 

discussion of political philosophy’s liberal contours and to a book-side seat of a first-rate 

theorist’s honestly and civilly practicing the trade. 

Free Market Fairness invites critical evaluation. Indeed, a number of questions arise. Most 

basically, a reader should ask: Is market democracy a legitimate hybrid theory of justice? To 

answer this, one must explore at least two objections: from one side, that market democracy and 

free market fairness are internally inconsistent; and from the other, that they are, unlike left 

liberal schemes such as Rawls’s, unrealistic. I want to discuss briefly these two objections before 

introducing a few others and returning to the question of hybridity. Along the way I believe we 

will see why this book will be of interest to diverse groups of readers. 

First, is it the case, as classical liberals might object, that “social justice, as a concept, is 

incompatible with the ideal of a society of free individuals” because it “corrodes the spontaneous 

order upon which a free society depends” (141)? Tomasi labels this inflamed reaction to, or dis-

ease with, the concept of social justice “social justicitis.” His antidote is to point out the 

“distributional adequacy condition” for any version of liberalism. The condition is that “the 

institutions being endorsed are deemed likely to bring about some desired distribution of material 

and social goods” (126). Many classical liberal and libertarian writers, he convincingly 

demonstrates, have included not an egalitarian version of this condition but a sufficientarian 

version of it in their theories: every citizen or class of citizen must come to hold some target 

bundle of real goods regardless of the proportion of that bundle of goods to another’s. 

Much of chapter 5 is devoted to cataloguing this idea in prominent figures from Locke to 

Epstein. The rest of the chapter defends the concept of social justice by showing readers how 

Hayek advocates an indirect method of securing a social order that is still “cosmoic” (a 

spontaneous order that forms independently of human intentionality about achieving a unified 

goal) rather than “taxitic” (humans organized within a structure, typically centrally planned, to 

realize an identifiable, unified goal [146]). Hayek embraced cosmoic social orders and 



93  Carpenter 

 

 

energetically rejected taxitic ones. Tomasi, in other words, shows by a close reading of many 

historical texts how one (read: Tomasi) can maintain one’s classical liberal credentials―as solid 

as Hayek’s―while supporting what goes by the name social justice in a sufficientarian sense. 

Tomasi explains the indirect method of shaping the social order that Hayek approved by 

quoting him at length: “‘A spontaneous order may rest in part on regularities which are not 

spontaneous but imposed. [. . .] For policy purposes, there results thus the alternative whether it 

is preferable to secure the formation of an order by a strategy of indirect approach, or by directly 

assigning a place for each element and describing its function in detail’” (in Tomasi 2012,155; 

my emphasis). The path to providing social justice while still being taxitic is, for Tomasi, by 

putting in place the right institutional framework that will “support a society that is both 

distributively fair and economically free” (226; see: 159–60). For example, to reduce or remove 

the “corrupting influence of money in politics” and to provide fair political equality, market 

democracies would constitutionally “restrict the range of economic issues that are allowed on the 

political agenda,” rather than “seeking to equalize political influence by constructing elaborate 

[legislative] programs that seek to equalize wealth across society” (252–53). 

Tomasi’s well-documented reading of Hayek is undisputedly a minority report, but there is 

something to it, something that rings true. For political theorists, it is worth pursuing and 

revisiting Hayek himself, who so greatly influenced Margaret Thatcher and serves as a gateway 

for many libertarians to the Austrian economic school. If fully appreciated, this insight about 

regularities imposed indirectly on a spontaneous order will also be a helpful corrective to the 

oversimplified everyday political caricatures that frequently occur in debates about classical 

liberalism and free market society. Teachers and students of Locke, Smith, Madison, and others, 

moreover, may read them with increased sensitivity to their socio-political complexity, and to the 

readers’ presuppositions in approaching them. 

Second, is a market democratic interpretation of justice as fairness―what Tomasi calls free 

market fairness―realistic? Is it able to realize justice as fairness? Throughout the book, John 

Rawls is Tomasi’s major conversation partner. This is because Tomasi himself believes that 

Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness is, once corrected along market democratic lines, the most 

compelling liberal scheme on offer (175). I might add that Rawls’s is perhaps both the most 

tightly argued and the most pervasively assumed, and pursued, high liberal theory of justice in at 

least the United States. This does not mean that people with similar political and moral views 

explicitly credit them to Rawls. It is, rather, that his theory is in the air that U.S. citizens breathe 

both on campuses of higher education and in much mainstream media. Persuasively arguing that 

market democracy meets Rawls’s core criteria of justice as fairness and exceeds it in granting 

moral self-agency to citizens would be a philosophical coup (see: 227–28). 

Does Tomasi succeed? In chapters 7–8 (especially, 203–15), he explains what ideal theory is 

and meticulously shows how both Rawls’s and his respective proposals realize justice as 

fairness―on their own preferred social democratic and market democratic interpretations. By 

and large Tomasi argues his case convincingly. 



Review of Free Market Fairness  94 

 

 

This section on ideal theory, or feasible aspirational standards, is the most conceptually 

abstract in the book and will test the patience of the non-specialist. It is also the most important 

for understanding how free market fairness, like Rawls’s influential justice as fairness view, is 

realistically utopian. 

What does it mean to be realistically utopian? “For a candidate regime type to achieve this, it 

must aim to satisfy [its] standard of justice by means of institutional arrangements that even if 

unlikely to fully achieve justice if adopted by an actual society are not utterly utopian with 

respect to that aspiration” (264–65). Rawls used ideal theory to help him identify the desired goal 

of justice in society, which might not be fully instantiated now but which might under more 

favorable conditions later be secured. That is, in ideal theory a regime type realizes justice as 

fairness (or free market fairness) if it pursues that moral standard with arrangements that are 

sociologically realistic under the most auspicious historical, cultural, and economic conditions 

(see especially: 222–25). 

Here Tomasi is compelling. He does not appear to commit any fallacies in his analogical 

modus ponens reasoning: If Rawls’s justice as fairness theory is sociologically realistic on the 

most favorable conditions (ideal theory), then it realizes justice; Rawls’s justice as fairness 

theory is sociologically realistic; therefore, it realizes justice. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, 

of market democracy and free market fairness. This is logically valid. 

Where readers may object most is to the further moral superiority conclusion that Tomasi 

draws. This is the inference that free market fairness is morally better as an ideal regime―it 

offers a “more inspiring [moral] ideal” (265)―than justice as fairness because free market 

fairness (a) equally realizes social justice within the institutional arrangements of ideal theory 

and also (b) provides a fuller basket of, and greater protection to, basic rights and liberties 

(including a thick conception of personal economic liberty). (Tomasi makes a similar argument 

that high liberalism’s reasons for affirming thin property rights should lead to affirmation of 

market democracy’s thick view [76–79].)  

Readers may demur because they dispute practical feasibility. These doubts should be raised 

but must be considered in terms of (and then may be much alleviated by) ideal theory (see 

especially: 227–47). Readers may also affirm the ultimate value of securing self-authorship for 

citizens but protest the empirical claim (see: 182–84) that increased control of goods and wealth 

augments the value that individuals place on agency, in addition to status, in a justice-realizing 

regime. Or they may question whether thick economic liberties can or should be basic liberties. 

The challenge for high liberals would be to provide “a moral explanation of how any such 

narrowing of private economic liberty enhances the status of persons as responsible self-authors” 

(82). Tomasi suggests that readers who are attracted to the Rawlsian vision of justice as fairness 

but who resist his vision of free market fairness bear the burden of proof: if both systems realize 

social justice, why is Rawls’s ideal, with fewer constitutional guarantees of basic liberties, 

morally better than Tomasi’s ideal, which provides them? 

This is a powerful a fortiori argument. It invites responses. That is precisely the conversation 

that Tomasi desires. One line of critical reply is that Tomasi understands social justice differently 



95  Carpenter 

 

 

than do left liberals, but he seems to claim that because he uses the same criterion for evaluating 

just institutions as left liberals his view is morally superior to theirs. He would be guilty of 

equivocation, using polyvalence to his argumentative advantage. Is the difference between 

Tomasi’s humanitarian (or sufficientarian) and Rawls’s egalitarian conceptions of social justice 

sufficiently minor as to admit of this type of reasoning? 

I think the differences do admit this reasoning for Tomasi’s stated purposes. He is 

unequivocal in applying to market democracy Rawls’s difference principle: that differences in 

goods among social members must work to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. This is a 

sufficient point of contact for the common pursuit of social justice on Rawls’s and his preferred 

interpretation of it. The divergence lies in the primary paths taken to achieve social justice: 

legislative (for social democratic regime types) vs. constitutional (for market democratic ones 

[see: 252]). Tomasi acknowledges that someone who affirms an egalitarian view of social justice 

will be unhappy with market democracy. His aim, however, is to carve out a legitimate place for 

the pursuit of social justice in a way that does not require the institutions and procedures of left 

liberalism (see: 271; also: 269, 85). 

Not all will be convinced that this is legitimate. Not all readers will concede that it will be 

publicly valuable to improve conditions for the least advantaged by “a strategy of wide private 

economic liberty, limited government, rapid economic growth, and by guarding the space within 

which a vibrant civil society might develop and grow” (230). Nor will they agree that “the 

system that most benefits the poor is the one that best encourages the production of goods, 

opportunities and experiences that those citizens find valuable,” including enlarged economic 

agency for moral self-authorship (231). Nor still will they grant the deliberative point that “the 

public affirmation of a system of commercial exchange that aims at raising the [personally 

controlled] income of the least well-off is a profoundly democratic expression of reciprocity” 

(231). Tomasi is undeterred. 

Anticipating this reaction, he clarifies that market democracy is not a trickle-down theory and 

that it does not claim that “market distributions define social justice” (231). Ultimately, his 

argument, and hope, is that many readers will reconsider the value of moral self-authorship as a 

social goal, the fullest ability “to conceive of and carry out their distinctive life plans” within a 

fair system of equal opportunity―not for the poor or least advantaged only but for everyone 

generally, whether in wealth, education, health care, or the like. This is a fair system that secures 

social justice through institutional arrangements which maximize the bundle of goods under each 

person’s personal control and “protects every citizen from domination in the formulation of the 

rules and policies that are to govern cooperative life” (249; see: 251–52, 267). 

So then, is market democracy a true hybrid theory of liberalism that respects (i) society as a 

spontaneous order, (ii) private economic liberty, (iii) deliberative legitimacy, and (iv) social 

justice as the institutional evaluative standard? Probably the best answer is itself a hybrid: yes, if 

you grant ideal theory; no, if you don’t. 

Answering “yes” does not entail acceptance of Tomasi’s central thesis. It merely 

acknowledges that his thesis cannot be easily dismissed. In seeking to make room for free market 



Review of Free Market Fairness  96 

 

 

fairness at the table of liberal theories of justice, Tomasi has given citizens and scholars alike 

much to consider. He has produced an incisive account of a genuine hybrid form of liberalism 

that deserves a wide readership and equally wide discussion. 

 

CRAIG B. CARPENTER 

Havertown, Pennsylvania 

 

 

Work Cited 

Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge: 

Belknap/Harvard University Press. 

 

 


