unCommon Authors, an Author Video Series: FREE AND EQUAL by Daniel Chandler

By Coll Rowe | September 18 2025 | College & University Reads

PRH Education/Common Reads presents:

unCommon Authors
unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and
unique authors talking about their books.

 

Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?

This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century’s greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. As economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues in this hugely ambitious and exhilarating manifesto, it is by rediscovering Rawls that we can find a way out of the escalating crises that are devastating our world today.

 

© Antonio Olmos

Daniel Chandler is an economist and philosopher based at the London School of Economics, where he is Research Director of the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism. He has degrees in economics, philosophy, and history from Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and was awarded a Henry Fellowship at Harvard, where he studied under Amartya Sen.

A Manifesto for a Just Society
9780593687536

“A vigorous case for adopting the liberal political framework laid out by John Rawls. . . . Chandler is a lucid and elegant writer, and there’s an earnest sense of excitement propelling his argument—a belief that Rawls’s framework for thinking through political issues offers a humane way out of the most intractable disputes.” —The New York Times Book Review

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