Free Market Fairness

Free Market Fairness is a 2012 book of political philosophy written by John Tomasi, a Professor of Political Philosophy at Brown University. Tomasi presents the concept of "free market fairness" or "market democracy," a middle ground between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls's ideas. The book was widely reviewed.

Tomasi looks at followers of Friedrich Hayek on the right and John Rawls on the left, only to conclude that both views are not mutually exclusive. Taken together, they can lead to "free market fairness" or "market democracy," whereby the government is not prescriptive, but makes sure opportunities are available to all.

Tomasi's fusionist project combines a foundational commitment to social justice with a foundational commitment to private economic liberty. Tomasi calls this hybrid "Market Democracy" and he holds it up as a moral rival to familiar conceptions of social democratic justice. "Free Market Fairness" is a leading text of the movement known as "Bleeding Heart Libertarianism," which seeks to combine a commitment to economic liberty with a commitment to social justice.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Adam Wolfson suggested, "Mr. Tomasi's book is emphatically a work of political theory, not a blueprint for political action, much less a catalog of policy solutions."

In the peer-reviewed academic journal "Political Theory," Elizabeth Anderson describes "Free Market Fairness" as launching "a major research program - Market Democracy." Anderson writes, "market democracy offers a refreshing change from stale debates within libertarian and high liberal ideal theory. Tomasi is right to stress that the economy is an important domain of liberty wrongly denigrated by high liberals, as distributive justice has been wrongly denigrated by libertarians." In a review in the European journal "Res Publica," Alan Thomas calls Free Market Fairness "a landmark publication in political philosophy." Thomas writes "It deserves many readers for its clarity, intelligence, openness to the ideas of others and yet insistence that the classically liberal tradition deserves to be represented alongside the standard options in recent political philosophy." In The Financial Times, Samuel Brittan criticized this, adding, "Unfortunately the book does not live up to its splendid introduction." He concluded, "Tomasi describes free-market fairness as a research programme rather than a fixed dogma. There is clearly a lot more to research."