Multinational corporations stretch across the globe, moving goods with dizzying speed. The logistical challenges in producing the simplest products today are immense, as just-in-time supply chains operate with clockwork precision and companies squeeze every margin to deliver maximum consumer value. The construction of this new global production system, which began in the 1970s, coincided with the increasing interest in global justice within academic political theory. Yet if workers in a garment factory were to browse this literature, they would find little, if anything, that spoke to their circumstances. Employed by a national subcontractor of a multinational corporation, those workers are governed by a transnational supply chain that blurs the national–international boundary so central to global justice debates. Exploited and dominated within their workplace, their primary worry is not their location within the global distributive scheme, and so they would have little concern about the international applicability of John Rawls’s difference principle, under which economic inequalities are only justified if they provide maximal benefit to the least advantaged in society.

Benjamin McKean’s Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom seeks to remedy this situation. Drawing on a wonderfully subversive interpretation of Rawls, McKean seeks to reorient how political theorists respond to contemporary globalized capitalism. Rather than beginning with abstract principles of justice, McKean develops an orientation toward the injustices of neoliberal capitalism grounded in solidaristic responses to workers’ and consumers’ mutual (though, of course, very distinct) subjection to global corporate supply chains. Such an orientation, he argues, can better displace our current neoliberal common sense than can theories of global justice.

Perhaps most surprisingly, McKean argues that the resources for such an orientation can be found in the Hegelian strains of Rawls’s philosophy—and particularly in some of his most speculative passages on how realizing justice could achieve the “outer limit of freedom.” Within the context of global justice debates, Hegelian themes are most often aligned with critiques of global justice for failing to understand how abstract norms become embedded in local, national contexts. In contrast, McKean aligns Rawls’s Hegelianism with a radical tradition that includes Theodor Adorno and W. E. B. Du Bois, thinkers for whom freedom is actualized through the negation of the existing order. In more concrete terms, McKean argues that individuals can move toward the outer limit of freedom by heeding calls for solidaristic action from workers with whom they are connected through global supply chains.

With its focus on a social-movement–oriented account and its attention to both the realities of and ideological justifications for contemporary capitalism, I found myself in agreement with much of McKean’s argument. However, even as I found the broad orientation compelling, I want to raise some worries, which boil down to this: Can you make activist wine out of Rawlsian grapes?

The core of McKean’s normative argument circles around his account of dispositional freedom, which, for Rawls and for McKean, is realized through the habitual disposition to act in a way that expresses the principle of reciprocity. The basic theoretical dilemma to which dispositional freedom responds is how we can be free when we are so deeply shaped by our circumstances. Neoliberals resolve this dilemma by identifying freedom with choice in the market, bracketing the institutional and cultural context that shape people’s desires.

If we reject the neoliberal fiction of market choice, how can we realize freedom? In place of neoliberalism’s orientation toward an always brighter future, dispositional freedom argues for the essentially retrospective nature of freedom. We are free to the extent that we can come to see our social institutions as embodying principles to which we, as rational agents, could have assented. Rawls writes that the “outer limit of our freedom” can be realized when individuals come “over the course of their life…to freely accept, as the outcome of reflective thought and reasoned judgment, the ideals, principles, and standards that…effectively guide and moderate the political power to which we are subject” (Political Liberalism, p. 222). To the extent that the institutions that shape us embody Rawlsian principles of justice, affirming them affirms our freedom, because they are what we would have chosen if we could have.

This brings me to my first worry: this view of freedom appears to sever the connection between freedom and agency, whether individual or collective. Rather, at first glance it is a highly contemplative view of freedom, realized through philosophical reflection. Here, it is notable that McKean focuses on the function of “orientation,” rather than the role of political theory that Rawls explicitly identifies with Hegel—that of “reconciliation,” whereby political philosophy may “calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us the way in which its institutions, when properly understood from a philosophical point of view, are rational” (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 3; emphasis added). To what extent does the dispositional view of freedom lend itself to this function, rather than encouraging active efforts to transform existing institutions?

McKean responds to this concern in several ways: first, by emphasizing the expressive aspects of dispositional freedom and its connection to habit; second, by developing an account of the outer limits of freedom amidst an unjust society, one informed by Du Bois and Adorno; and third, by connecting freedom to solidarity through Rawls’s notion of a natural duty of justice. These discussions formed, in my view, the richest and most compelling parts of the book. If in Rawls’s ideal world we feel at home by habituating ourselves to express reciprocity, in our unjust world we move toward the outer limit of freedom by habituating ourselves to feeling alienated from our unjust institutions and to heeding calls to solidarity from those suffering from injustice. McKean argues that global supply chains provide a particularly important context for such calls to solidarity, because consumers already stand in a political relationship with workers and so have a particular obligation to heed their calls for solidaristic action.

Yet the problems I identified earlier with regard to dispositional freedom shadow these discussions. McKean argues that acting based on “solidarity is a fitting specification of the natural duty of justice” (p. 152). For Rawls, the natural duty of justice enjoins us to construct just institutions where they do not exist. But it is not entirely clear why acting based on solidarity follows from the natural duty of justice. One alternative to McKean’s account would be to say that any action that brings the world closer to the Rawlsian utopia discharges our natural duty of justice, regardless of whether it is taken in conjunction with other people or in response to a call of solidarity. If I have a choice between two actions—one heeding a call of solidarity, but the other more likely to realize justice—then what reason do I have to follow the call of solidarity? Why Rawlsian participatory social movements rather than Rawlsian Leninism?

McKean provides three reasons. First, acting based on solidarity itself “models the freedom and equality we want to realize” (p. 150). Second, solidarity helps overcome the potential motivational deficit of the natural duty, showing we have a shared interest in overcoming injustice. And third, given the ideologically distorted nature of our beliefs, heeding calls for solidarity from the oppressed is likely to give us a more epistemically accurate picture of injustice and what is required to fight it. Each of these arguments faces difficulties. The first faces an objection that has been developed in Rawlsian debates about democracy: namely, that what models freedom and equality is genuinely furthering justice, and not that the structure of the means deployed displays those principles. This objection is particularly salient in the context of a retrospective theory of freedom, where freedom is realized not through present activity but through coming to recognize how one’s actions contributed to the realization of rational principles. If, after the fact, you can come to see your actions as contributing to justice, what concern is it whether you acted based on solidarity or whether your actions modeled freedom and equality?

In the case of the motivational and epistemic grounds of solidarity, I worry that they fail to show that acting based on solidarity itself realizes our freedom—rather than positioning solidarity instrumentally, as more likely than alternatives, all things considered, to lead to just outcomes that will then realize our freedom. What is missing, in my view, is a robust internal connection between freedom, empowerment, and collective action. And so I worry that Rawls can only get us so far in resisting neoliberalism, because his theory of freedom insufficiently ties freedom to democracy, to the assertion of collective power in the face of oligarchic capture and marketization. It is vital, for reasons McKean persuasively develops, to separate collective empowerment from the impossible ideal of state sovereignty. McKean also provides powerful reasons to begin the critique of neoliberalism from the reality of global supply chains understood as political structures that should be subject to critique and political resistance. Disorienting Neoliberalism thus stands as a genuine achievement in political theory, markedly advancing debates about neoliberalism, global justice, and freedom. To the extent that I disagree with it is only to push the critique of neoliberal capitalism beyond the outer limits of analytic normative political philosophy.