In Steven Klein’s thoughtful critical engagement with Disorienting Neoliberalism, he asks, “Can you make activist wine out of Rawlsian grapes?” and he answers no, because the result lacks “a robust internal connection between freedom, empowerment, and collective action.” I worry that Klein’s question mistakes my aim, and as a result, his account of my conception of solidarity renders it more philosophical than political.
Klein reads my book as offering a Rawlsian view, even if a “wonderfully subversive” one, but the orientation to the neoliberal global economy that the book develops and the disposition to solidarity it advocates can be taken up by people with a range of egalitarian views. Because of its avowed defense of inegalitarian hierarchies and its open celebration of economic power over political rights, neoliberalism both enables and requires a coalition of left egalitarians—liberal, Marxist, anarchist, and otherwise—if it is to be resisted successfully. I highlight the Hegelian dimensions of Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism to show that his view, which has played an outsized role in the global justice literature, shares common intellectual roots with critical theory and other traditions as a way of helping build such a coalition. In that sense, my aim is more akin to showing that egalitarian liberal grapes need not be out of place in the fruit salad of leftist views—but certainly do not need to be the star of the dish.
Klein’s winemaking metaphor remains apt, however: if egalitarian liberalism is to play this role, it must be systematically transformed, and I agree this requires leaving Rawls’s vineyard. It is for this reason that the book turns to thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodor Adorno, and Iris Marion Young to provide a guide for how anyone who believes freedom and equality must be realized together could express their freedom in our unequal and unjust world. On my reading, these thinkers draw from the same Hegelian resources but break decisively with the assumption—shared by Rawls and Hegel—that the ideal freedom of people in a well-ordered society provides a useful model for us.
This turns me to the role of solidarity. Klein argues that the motivational and epistemic grounds for solidarity provided by my account treat solidarity instrumentally. I would say instead that it treats solidarity politically. That is, my view treats solidarity as the solution to a particular political problem that we face today: how to resist and transform a deeply unjust neoliberal world. This is a project that requires collective action; it is idle to ask whether an individual should act in solidarity if they could do more to further justice through some other action, because social justice is not the kind of thing any one individual can bring about.
This entails the second sense in which my account of solidarity is political: it should be endorsable from many perspectives because diverse individuals need to act together to achieve justice. Klein’s desire for a more “robust” connection between freedom, empowerment, and collective action seems to imply the (dare I say) analytic view that an account should find some necessary connection among freedom, empowerment, and collective action. But this is too strong; sometimes collective empowerment entails dominating others. And while in our neoliberal context, it is particularly important to be able to find freedom in organized collective action, Du Bois and Adorno were not wrong to cherish the experience of solitary thinking as a potential expression of freedom. In this case, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to think with Klein.
