The Independent Review

“It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it,” urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room. “That is no excuse,” replied Mr. Brownlow. “You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and i

In “Basic Economic Liberties: John Rawls and Adam Smith Reconciled” (2021), Nick Cowen looks at the disjoint in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice between the absolute priority that Rawls gives to political liberty (which is not to bend in the slightest

In this symposium, Alexander Rawls interestingly discusses how and why one may incorporate claims of desert into John Rawls’s conception of justice. After briefly reviewing the divergence of Rawls from Rawls, I argue that John Rawls was concerned wit

In A Theory of Justice ([1971] 1999), John Rawls argues that moral desert should have a minimal role in accounts of distributional justice. In “A Theory of Justice with Claims of Desert,” Alexander Rawls argues via an internal critique that John Rawl

I read with interest Alexander Rawls’s essay “A Theory of Justice with Claims of Desert,” which, like my own recent work (Cowen 2021a, 2021b), attempts to reconcile John Rawls’s approach to justice as fairness with classical liberal commitments to ec

As we enter the third century of the American experiment it is essential to recognize that we can draw upon two quite distinct intellectual traditions in shaping future patterns of organization. One possibility is to draw upon the intellectual tradit

According to a persistent narrative on the free-market revolution led by the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s,1 the country was purely “a laboratory for cutting-edge free market experiments” imported from the United States (Klei

In the United States, excess demand exists for adopting healthy babies, while an excess supply exists of older children or children with physical or emotional disabilities. Nationally, 5 percent of older children age out of the foster-care system wit

In June 2021, classical liberal economics lost one of its most able and prolific voices. Scholar, teacher, and public communicator Steven G. Horwitz died of multiple myeloma at the far too young age of fifty-seven. A native of the Detroit area, he gr

By Eric Mack Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2018. Pp. vii, 162. $19.95 paperback. Eric Mack has spent a career producing cutting-edge work at the forefront of libertarian political thought. In Libertarianism, Mack takes a step back and offers an acce

By David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 292. $110 hardcover. As its subtitle reveals, this book is aimed at readers who are interested in the early history of the Virginia School of political economy.