ABSTRACT
The ideals of democracy and equality have inspired progressive political movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The democratic egalitarian seeks a world in which political rulers are agents accountable to the majority will of the citizens; inequalities in income, wealth, and status are not extreme; and the members of society collectively take responsibility for assuring decent conditions of life for all, including the least advantaged, so that, so far as is feasible, each member of society has the opportunity and ability to choose sensibly among a wide array of valuable life options and live well. The shining ideals of democracy and inequality are disparaged in the Lockean libertarian and classical liberal traditions of political thought, which have themselves become inspirations for many thinking people in modern times, perhaps especially in prosperous market-economy societies. Contemporary libertarianism is a set of views about liberty, property, and government, claimed to be justified in two very different ways.
