To build a fair society, we must first be able to envision it. John Rawls can help

In much of the world, there’s a shared sense that liberal democracies have grown corrupt and stagnant, leaving them unable to respond to society’s most pressing problems – including the climate crisis and inequality, in its many forms – and making them vulnerable to anti-democratic movements. Addressing an audience at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London this April, the UK economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler draws from his book Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? (2023) to outline practical steps towards a more effective progressive political movement, and by extension, a more just society. In doing so, he suggests that we should look to the ideas of the 20th-century US philosopher John Rawls, who outlined a blueprint for a ‘realistic utopia’ within a liberal democratic framework in his landmark work A Theory of Justice (1971).