According to John Kekes, contemporary Anglo-American political theory is dominated by egalitarian writers to the extent that all other voices are either drowned out or systematically excluded. Egalitarians “write books about each other's books, and mostly articles about each other's articles” (p. 188), and when confronted by those who disagree, they merely resort to “abuse” (p. 66). This egalitarian hegemony is both surprising and, where it does not render political theory irrelevant, politically dangerous because it is built on illusions rather than rational, defensible, arguments. The point of this book is to reveal those illusions and the absurdities that follow from them.

The Illusions of Egalitarianism is in 13 brief chapters, and each follows a similar pattern. First, the illusion is revealed, then its consequences discussed, and finally a gesture is made toward a different way of seeing things. These illusions stem from, and help to reinforce, what Kekes calls “the optimistic faith” of egalitarians “that human beings are, if not basically good, at least inclined that way” (p. 4), from which, Kekes believes, egalitarians draw the conclusion that whatever goes wrong must be the fault of bad institutional design and not the evil of human beings. The result is a fundamental inconsistency in egalitarianism: Its constructive aim is to promote autonomy by trying to ensure that all have access to equal rights (p. 9) and its corrective aim is to decrease the evils of “poverty, exploitation, crime, the abuse of … power, racism, sexism [and so on]” (p. 9). These aims are inconsistent, he claims, because decreasing evil requires restricting, and so making unequal, the rights of evildoers (p. 15). What makes egalitarians blind to this inconsistency is their optimistic faith (p. 25).

Kekes's twin attack—that there is an inconsistency at the heart of egalitarianism that is concealed by an untenable belief in the goodness of human beings—then underpins the remaining chapters. These deal with “responsibility” (egalitarians undermine it); “justice” (John Rawls corrupts it by ignoring desert); the absence of any justification for the assumption of equality and the moral inequality of persons; Martha Nussbaum's “maternalism” (which imposes on people ways of life that they might reasonably reject); Peter Singer and the menace of relieving poverty (that is the job of the local government and, in any case, most people in poverty are responsible for their own condition because they continue to breed despite not being able to feed their children); Joseph Raz's perfectionism (too perfectionist); the impossibility of liberal neutrality; and the hypocrisy of liberals proclaiming themselves tolerant when really only permitting those things of which they happen to approve.

Given Kekes's view of the current state of the discipline, there is a problem in evaluating this book. For the author, there is a fight on, in which a liberal egalitarian establishment marginalizes critics, and when such critics do manage to slip the net, egalitarians fail to take them seriously. The problem with such paranoia is that it is self-reinforcing. All criticism can be taken as further evidence of the establishment's refusal to countenance any opposition. Be that as it may, something has to be said lest this book should fall into the hands of the naive or, still worse, into those of students of political theory.

Kekes's project is a worthwhile one. If only for the reasons Mill gives, the dominance of liberal egalitarianism in political theory is indeed regrettable. Everyone could learn from more radical challenges to the intellectual status quo. Moreover, this is not only a general matter. There are specific issues where liberal egalitarianism is weak and important questions (some of them mentioned in this book) need to be addressed: Is “equality” an axiom that cannot be derived from anything else, or does it stand in need of justification? Is it reasonable to expect religious believers, for example, to put their beliefs to one side when thinking of themselves as citizens? And is there an important gap between the moral significance given to responsibility and desert in our broader moral experience and the apparent denial of their significance in much egalitarian writing?

If these questions are important, and the project of challenging egalitarianism worthwhile, this book is neither. The standard of both argument and scholarship is deplorable. Even the index is shoddy. At the heart of the problem is Kekes's unwillingness to take his opponents seriously. The portrayals of Rawls, Raz, Singer, and others will be unrecognizable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of their works. Egalitarians, to take the fundamental inconsistency that Kekes alleges is at the heart of the problem, do not promote equal freedom simpliciter. Restricting the rights of rapists and burglars (p. 65) is not inconsistent with ensuring the kind of equal freedom proposed in Rawls's first principle. That principle, Kekes writes, “aims at equality of opportunity,” while Rawls's second principle aims at “equality of outcome” (p. 84), which is just wrong.

In short, everyone should welcome books that offer genuine challenges to egalitarianism (if only for the health of the discipline). But mounting that challenge by alleging, for example, that it is an implication of Rawls's work that “Nobel Prize winners should compensate members of the Flat Earth Society” (p. 47) does nothing to further the debate. Quite the reverse; it allows egalitarians to sit back and think their opponents muddleheaded and irrelevant. Sadly, in this case that would be quite right.