Pun Salad

I thought I would like this book better. (But as usual, I have forgotten my reason for putting it on my get-via-Interlibrary-Loan list.) But it's not awful. The author, Alexandre Lefebvre, seems to be going out of his way at times to make his argument accessible, with examples from the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation (he holds up Amy Poehler's character, Leslie Knope, as a hero); The Wire; Bird Box; The Good Place; … What's the most popular topic on Pornhub? ("The answer may surprise you!")

And he describes how he uses Legos in his classroom presentations to illustrate how people from different walks of life "fit in" to a social structure.

But (for me) the warning signs come early when Lefebvre lists off the features of liberalism he's championing. Many are unexceptionable, but… "progressive taxation" is one of them? Also: early on, Lefebvre explicitly excludes "neoliberalism" from his Big Liberal Tent; he's also down on Mont Pelerin Society "classical liberals", who (he claims) invented the term as a mere "polemical tactic" to (presumably) bathe in the aura of early liberalism. For some reason.

The book heaps praise on John Rawls. (Which made me look in the index for "Nozick, Robert". Nope.) Lefebvre has done his meticulous research on Rawls, including digging out his unpublished works in dank Harvard archives. He uses what he finds to illustrate and illuminate Rawls' fuller views, beyond those set forth in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. This assists Lefebvre in his advocaccy for adopting liberalism "all the way down", not just in advocating Rawls' well-known recipes for liberal legal and political structures.

In fact, he's generally critical of what he calls "liberaldom", which (my words) seems to be liberalism corrupted in numerous non-Rawlsian ways. This makes it easier for people to claim to be liberals, while in fact cooperating in all sorts of implicit and explicit illiberal ways in order to maintain their livelihood, wealth, and social status. Tsk! He points to a bad example in Australia, their tax-advantaged individually-owned retirement accounts. These are disproportionately used by the already well-off, hence maintaining structures of inequality? Double tsk!

Bottom line: Lefebvre seems like a nice enough bloke, but I didn't get much out of his book. That's on me, but I suspect that he wasn't trying to deal with my Rawls-skepticism.