UNTIL RECENTLY, POLITICAL THEORY in the West had seemed to settle into an entente cordiale within classical liberalism between the respective champions of freedom and equality. Liberalism was beset from the outset by a tectonic tension between these two moral ideals, because bestowing freedom on individuals to pursue their private conceptions of human flourishing must always issue in the kind of unequal outcomes that strike the unreflective observer as morally objectionable.
Today, it seems, the battle between the libertarian and egalitarian expressions of liberalism has broken out afresh and there is no reason to suppose it will be resolved anytime soon. The widespread application of the label “postliberal” to describe
