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Sovereign Virtue : The Theory and Practice of Equality
Sovereign Virtue The Theory and Practice of Equality Author:Ronald Dworkin Ronald Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles—first, it is of equal importance that all human lives flourish, and, second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life—to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that ea... more »ch person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. "[For] two decades, Dworkin has been developing answers to … questions [of public policy] as part of a powerful and surprising response to the larger question of how we should reconcile liberty with equality … If we care about having a rational public discourse about the many contests that seem to pit liberty against equality, we owe his book a careful reading." —K. Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books "[Dworkin] presents an original and comprehensive political theory that claims to unite equality not only with freedom but also with other allegedly competing values, such as democracy, community and the good life. And he repeatedly connects his abstract speculations to specific controversies from contemporary political life. This is what political philosophy should do, and Dworkin does it better than anyone else." —Thomas Hurka, Toronto Globe and Mail« less