For at least 20 years, Adam Smith scholarship has turned on severing his association with neoliberal free-market fundamentalism. No, the experts all seem to claim, Smith was not an unqualified defender of laissez-faire competition (Lisa Herzog, Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory, 2013), nor was he allergic to all types of government intervention (Samuel Fleischacker, Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy, 2013), nor did he prioritize individual economic growth and self-interest over all distributional concerns or other normative priorities (Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government, 2017). And yet, despite so many compelling interventions in political science, economic history, and philosophy, the recovery of Smith’s thought has not been able to specify its political thrust.

At the same time, twenty-first-century economics has witnessed an equally persistent trend. The equitable economic expansion of the mid-twentieth century no longer occurs in the wealthiest capitalist democracies, which instead endure stagnating growth (Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016), skyrocketing income inequality (Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014), and polarized labor markets (Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lovely and Lousy Jobs,” Review of Economics and Statistics 89 [1], 2007). The data overwhelmingly indicate that, when left to their own devices, unfettered markets are neither fair nor free. Although such studies have been found convincing, they leave us with the lingering question about what is to be done.

In Just Work for All, Joshua Preiss seamlessly marries these two currents of scholarship to deliver an answer. Although he never says as much, Preiss offers a theory of justice based on the American Dream, informed by the “real” Adam Smith. At bottom, Preiss contends, “Americans are Smithians” (p. 53). Americans, like Smith, only champion markets within a context of a “well-ordered society” like the midcentury one, where growth is equitably distributed and remuneration mirrors a commitment to “market-specific virtues” such as innovation, thrift, and hard work (chapter 2).

However, Americans, also like Smith, recognize that markets are inherently susceptible to distortion “by powerful economic agents who are able to shape the rules of the game of markets in their favor,” creating a winner-take-all society (p. 53). Such economic organization feeds off monopoly rents for the select few, paradoxically inhibiting the equitable share of growth and the elevation of the working poor that the market was initially intended to serve (chapter 1). Winner-take-all systems characterize the current moment in which technological innovation in automation and expansion of highly immovable assets (digital marketplaces) push workers into a low, marginally productive service class, diminishing their bargaining power and allowing for a patently “un-American” level of economic domination (p. 77).

Echoing Smith, Americans, Preiss contends, identify government regulation in defense of the working poor as the only means to contain “the way in which profit-seekers use economic or political power to reserve the fruits of production for themselves” and ultimately preserve the political legitimacy of the capitalist engine (p. 60). And yet, despite so much agreement on this score, we are still mired in debates about the next step forward.

For Preiss, the answer has always been right before our eyes, residing in the American Dream properly understood. Preiss’s revision of Smith prompts us to see the American Dream as a regulative ideal with two subsidiary principles of equality and opportunity: fair race and just work (chapter 3). Commonly associated with the American Dream, fair race encompasses the meritocratic principle in which concerns over a level playing field and equal treatment encourage policy oriented toward opportunities in higher education and antidiscrimination laws. However, the second tenet of the American Dream, the idea of just work, offers a relational principle that ensures that everyone possesses the “opportunity to turn work into at least a middle-class standard of living for themselves and their families” (p. 73). Just work demands a mutually achievable set of outcomes for both market winners and losers so that those who work hard “will at least cross a minimum (context-relative) threshold of achievement” (p. 148). On their own, policies that focus on higher education and antidiscrimination, he explains, will never be able to satisfy the imperatives of just work.

As a regulative ideal, then, the American Dream functions along these two axes, but for too long, philosophers have treated it exclusively as an indicator of a fair race that offers the potential to rise to the top to only a small percentage of winners. Here Preiss subtly attacks a prevalent element of many theories of capitalism—that the potential for monopoly rents, astronomical rewards, and intergenerational wealth motivates the market virtues that produce the technological innovation of capitalist expansion. The American case, Preiss intimates, contravenes this hypothesis, because most Americans have always prioritized just work over the fair race, as demonstrated in the tradition characterized by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. Yet somehow, in debates between liberal egalitarians and libertarians, realism and idealism, and “capitalism” and “socialism,” we have lost sight of just work in contemporary political theorizing.

In this respect, the problem lies with us as political philosophers. Preiss elegantly demonstrates that the reigning conceptual frameworks of justice do not capture the consensus that already exists around how to alleviate the vicissitudes of our winner-take-all economy. By taking just work seriously, Preiss articulates a practicable framework that not only grants individual agency but also takes into consideration the structural conditions that make an ethic of personal responsibility practicable. A reorientation toward just work could enable both Black and white working Americans to come together in sufficient numbers to advance policies in favor of all workers (chapter 4) or to help end the gendered division of labor by adopting policies that mitigate women’s entrenchment in service labor (chapter 5). Similarly, such a focus might also unleash momentum for policy that mirrors many demands of economic democracy (economic co-determination, sovereign wealth funds, and sectoral bargaining, to mention a few examples), but ones that often suffer because they are labeled too “socialist” to warrant consideration (chapter 7).

Preiss’s study begins and ends with specific policy positions that would be able to generate enough support if they were articulated within the paradigm of just work. Yet these proposals do not capture its main contribution: the American Dream as a theory of justice, a theory that captures shared public intuitions without compromising philosophical rigor. Maybe out of fear of promoting the myth of American exceptionalism, Preiss hesitates to identify the American Dream as a regulative ideal even though his argument amounts to as much. Instead, he prefers to call his conceptual apparatus a “pluralistic,” “trans-historical,” and “context sensitive” “public philosophy of markets.”

Epistemic humility is always admirable, but Preiss’s consistent qualifications undermine the theoretical prowess of his own framework. He even spends a considerable amount of time distinguishing his theory from that of Rawls, yet Rawls himself never claimed that his theory of justice could not exist among others (chapter 6). As Katrina Forrester (In the Shadow of Justice, 2019) has intimated, perhaps we still live under Rawls’s specter only because we are too afraid to step out of it—to identify our proposed frameworks as theories of justice plain and simple. Despite his protestation to the contrary, Preiss suggests that the American Dream is more universal than we currently assume and that historical circumstances have left us with an impoverished designation of an idea that, when properly articulated, captures a theory of justice we still hold dear. In a moment when winner-take-all markets render a middle-class life for the majority a sheer fantasy, Just Work for All contends that we aren’t quite ready to let go of the dream for a reason and provides a compelling case for hanging on.