Abstract

In the first two chapters, Cohen deals with justice, freedom, and equality without mention of self-ownership, offering a devastating critique of the libertarian claim that despite great economic inequality, laissez-faire capitalism is the most just society because it is the most free. The assumption, made by liberals as well as libertarians, that we have to choose between liberty and equality fails to acknowledge that a system based on large-scale private property entails the unfreedom of the majority without property. Cohen shows the libertarian claims to rest on circularity and on abuse of the ordinary language of freedom.