Impractical Equality. - Review - book review

Reason, Oct, 2000 by Richard A. Epstein

Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, by Ronald Dworkin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 505 pages, $35.00

Throughout his long and distinguished career as an academic lawyer and political philosopher, Ronald Dworkin has been obsessed with a single theme: to show how an--or, more precisely, his--egalitarian vision of the world can shape the character of our legal, political, social, and market institutions. In Sovereign Equality, Dworkin brings together essays that he has written on this subject over the past 20 years and wages a two-front war to persuade the reader of his grand idea.

The first half is intended to show that the rigorous philosophical foundations of his concept of equality of resources is superior to any rival conception of liberty. More ambitiously perhaps, he argues that his concept is powerful enough to reduce liberty to a subsidiary principle whose chief value is not as a stand-alone ideal, but as an adjunct or component to the complete theory of equality. The second half of the book, much of which consists of reviews originally written for The New York Review of Books, is devoted to applying his egalitarian theories to pressing social issues: campaign finance, welfare reform, universal health care, unemployment insurance, genetic medicine, and cloning.

Dworkin's influence on current political debate is substantial, at least if the work of any avowed public intellectual ever has any influence on public affairs. He is by any standards an elegant writer and an ingenious debater. His standard ploy starts by expressing indignation about the deplorable state of American practice in some chosen area. For example, campaign financing today is a "disgrace," and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act was "a plain defeat for justice." These broad, largely unsubstantiated, apocalyptic judgments are then used as a lever to force a reconsideration of current practice in light of Dworkin's grand theory, which promises to remedy the problem at hand. His is an ambitious agenda, but ultimately one that will persuade only those diehards who embrace Dworkin's egalitarianism from the get-go.

Why? At the most general level, Dworkin leaves his reader with a sense of urgent uneasiness. He is almost too smooth, too slick, and too elusive for his own good. He never immerses himself in the grubby particulars of any institution, case, or practice. His universe of discourse is largely self-contained and conducted only at the highest level of abstraction. Once on Mt. Olympus, he conducts probing dialogues and sharp exchanges, but only with himself. His mini-Platonic dialogues typically state a position, then give--sometimes in quotation marks no less--the imagined reply of some overmatched adversary, which is duly demolished with a clever example or some newfound distinction on the nature of preferences, the multiple forms of luck, or whatever.

His explicit reliance on, or confrontation with, other writers is, with a couple of notable exceptions, virtually nonexistent. He will from time to time address by name (but in passing) writers on the left, such as Amartya Sen or G.A. Cohen, but those of us with conservative, libertarian, or vaguely market-oriented positions are nameless placeholders whom Dworkin never deems worth engaging.

In Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin's opening gambit reads, "No government is legitimate that does not show equal concern for the fate of all those citizens over whom it claims dominion and from whom it claims allegiance." The categorical force of his declaration is surely incorrect: Let there be a government formed with the universal consent of the governed that seeks other ambitions--the maximum liberty of action for all individuals consistent with respect for the like liberties of others, for example--and Dworkin might be able to argue with some conviction that this vision is inferior to his own model of equal concern and respect. But it takes a lot more to denounce a rival conception as "illegitimate" when it may just be wrong.

Dworkin's way of putting things can be quite chilling. Some of us--me, for example--do not want the government to be concerned with, or for, their fate, and would prefer, in large portions of their lives, to be left alone to succeed or fail as they may by their own devices. The "concerned" government quickly becomes a meddlesome government, whose cumbersome political processes could easily lead it to do more bad than good. (Go ask those denied access to marijuana if you don't believe me.) An insistence on the limits of government is not a self-interested plea of the privileged or the well-to-do. It is a political ideal that urges the government to attend certain public functions--the maintenance of order and the provision of infrastructure--while allowing people to organize their private lives, free from external interference and without external subsidy, as they see fit.

But the last portion of Dworkin's fundamental axiom places that private space in peril. A government that exercises "dominion" could come, insensibly, to exercise ownership over individuals, not sovereignty over citizens. A government that demands allegiance claims loyalty and fealty, but may not supply the level of protection and respect that renders it worthy of loyalty from its citizens. As Dworkin states it, equal concern and respect sounds more like a veiled threat than a cherished ideal.