ABSTRACT
The issue of economic inequality has been a perennial focus of political science, and a great deal of recent work in the field has prompted us to scrutinize the range of responses to this problem available to the modern, liberal democratic state. Among these responses, by far the most frequently employed is redistribution: the use of the coercive power of the state to transfer wealth from the comparatively well-off to the comparatively disadvantaged (either in the form of direct payments or in the guise of social programs). Yet one of the most obvious stories one could tell about the course of post-war political theory in the Anglophone tradition would center on its failure (despite numerous attempts) to reconcile the practice of redistribution with the fundamental, normative commitments of liberalism. The problem is straightforward. Liberal political theory envisions a right-bearing citizen who is to be treated as an end, rather than a means, and who is to be left alone to follow the dictates of his own conscience unless his actions threaten the similar rights of others. But redistribution seems to assume a rather different sort of citizen: one whose assets are to be regarded as presumptive community property, to be disposed of (with or without his consent) according to the wishes of society as a whole (as determined by the majority of citizens, or their representatives). Here the citizen is regarded as a means, not an end. Liberalism and redistribution, in short, seem to rely on incompatible visions of the relationship between states and persons. Theorists have, accordingly, encountered great difficulty when trying to combine them in a single framework.
