There are many conceptions of equality, but perhaps the most widely held is equal opportunity. One reason for its popularity could be that many people consider it as a compromise between equality and liberty. But the concept is important to devoted or more radical egalitarians as well, because opportunities, as Fishkin rightly argues, are really important for us. They determine not only what we get, but also who we are: our talents and our ideas of the good. And this is true not only for the early part of our lives (education is often mentioned in this respect), but also throughout our adulthood as well.

Many philosophical works have been published about equal opportunities. But there are three ways in which Fishkin's book is refreshing. First, most of the works so far limit themselves to access to particular goods or to certain spheres of life: equal opportunity for education, equal opportunity for jobs or for positions of power. Such works tackle sources for unequal opportunities, for example the correlation between one's socio-economic (not to mention family) background and one's chances to get the much sought after jobs.

The second way in which the book differs from other works on equal opportunity is that Fishkin does not accept the assumption many equal opportunity theorists make, namely that talents are independent of circumstances (pp. 104–15). Most theorists assume that equal opportunity is achieved when and if (ignoring luck) talent and effort are the only parameters that determine success. This conception is out of touch with reality, argues Fishkin, since talents and abilities are often the result of, and depend upon, previous opportunities and circumstances (see pp. 115–30).

Thirdly, and most importantly, Fishkin's question is radically different from and more far-reaching than the question raised in other works on equal opportunity. Instead of asking who lacks equal opportunities and how to compensate for this lack, or in other words how to equalise opportunities, Fishkin focuses on widening the range of opportunities. He wants to research the institutional obstacles to reaching a wide range of opportunities to as many people as possible. So instead of looking at the way people lack opportunities, Fishkin looks at the opportunities we (should) have and asks why we do not have them.

Fishkin wants to widen what he terms ‘opportunity pluralism’. His method is to look at political, social, cultural and economic institutions, which he calls ‘bottlenecks’, because one has to go through them, or pass them so to speak, in order to really grasp opportunity. Also, Fishkin does not look at the end results, since he believes that they reveal very little about what opportunities people had. For example, people who developed in very different ways could be equally happy with their lives at a certain age, and yet it is possible that at a certain point in their lives they faced very different opportunities. So in a way, Fishkin does not think that the essence of equal opportunities is that they are equal, but rather that they are plentiful and that they are about removing, or at least loosening, the bottlenecks which are associated with them. For policy planning, to see that people have equal opportunities implies tackling those institutional bottlenecks.

So what are the bottlenecks? They are narrow places ‘in the opportunity structure through which one must pass in order to successfully pursue a wide range of valued goals’. They could be a particular test, or particular institutions of higher education, or being familiar with the local language, or with certain cultural codes, or, in some societies, membership in the favoured ethnic group, or racially favoured group, or even caste (pp. 130–93). Fishkin distinguishes between qualification bottlenecks, developmental bottlenecks that relate to critical opportunities in one's development, which one has to overcome, in order to be able to develop in many directions (literacy is an example), and instrumental-good bottlenecks (for example money). While discussing the latter, Fishkin comes the closest to mainstream equality theories, which often relate to the ‘currency’ which is distributed – in most cases, money. However, as Fishkin clearly argues, there could be other instrumental-good bottlenecks, as long as they are at the core of what makes one become more competitive in other spheres.

Bottlenecks are socially formed institutions. The goal of a good theory of equal opportunity, argues Fishkin, is to propose a social political and economic structure which makes these bottlenecks less significant. There are two such models, the unitary and the pluralistic models, about which Fishkin elaborates. Fishkin is in favour of the latter. In order to achieve genuine equal opportunity, that is one that bypasses the problem of bottlenecks, societies have to move towards the pluralistic model, which, among other things, allows different persons to pursue different conceptions of the good (pp. 186–98).

This pluralist theory of opportunities is welcome not only because Fishkin's attitude is ‘the more the merrier’, but also because he points to the way different spheres of inequality in opportunities are related. For example, if one has overcome class barriers in marriage, this does not imply that she has had the same opportunities in jobs or other fields (pp. 199–204). This pluralistic theory goes hand in hand with other egalitarian theories, and in particular those associated with the Capabilities theory (Sen, Reference Sen1999; Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2001; Alkire, Reference Alkire2002; Wolff and de Shalit, Reference Wolff and de Shalit2007). Fishkin's book also corresponds to recent works on equality because, like many other works, he ends his book with a policy-oriented discussion of how to implement his philosophical ideas. This is more than welcome.

It seems to me that together with another fascinating (though very different) recent book (Segall, Reference Segall2013), Fishkin's book is a must read for anybody interested in egalitarianism in general and equality of opportunity in particular. Fishkin's is an energising voice in the literature on equal opportunity, and even if some would say that it is naïve or kind of utopian, the very fact that his approach and focus are completely different makes this book so important to both philosophers and policy scholars alike.