Political Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide for Students and Politicians, Adam Swift, Polity Press, £11.99

Some decades ago there was a temporary alliance of economic writers from across the political spectrum in favour of what we fondly called expansionist economic policies - although our opponents could legitimately have called them deficits and depreciation.

At the height of this campaign I invited for lunch (at the expense of course of my journalistic employer) the late Frank Blackaby, editor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research review.

To my surprise he spent the first part of the lunch sulking. My crime? To have conceded that, whatever one might have thought of Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd's macroeconomic policies, he was at least right to have made tax adjustments which effectively lowered some of the confiscatory upper marginal tax rates which had been inherited from the wartime period, and had become simply a penalty on those who did not know the tax avoidance ropes and a bonus for tax accountants. I tried to argue that there were more more sensible methods of redistribution; but Blackaby was unwilling to contemplate the slightest praise for this minor Conservative rollback.

This was my first intimation of how strongly egalitarian gestures were valued even by members of the moderate Left, who were not interested in other traditional issues such as nationalisation or abolishing the public schools. Equality serves as an ersatz religion for much of the academic left in Britain and the US Ivy League. The egalitarian religion will never be answered by the political Right who are far too concerned with the boundaries of national jurisdictions and the allegiances which are supposed to follow from them to go into any detail on what these national authorities ought to be doing.

My second intimation came a few years later on a sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford where I found almost universal acceptance of some kind of material equality as a goal, which maybe had to be traded off reluctantly against some incentive payments for the sake of economic efficiency. Even economists outside the left had to content themselves with contorted arguments to show that purportedly egalitarian policies did not achieve their proclaimed objectives. But they did not query the latter. Suppose, however, that the disincentive effects were modest or that economic growth was overvalued? In that case we would have to go back to the egalitarian paradise of equal chances to compete for equal prizes.

One might therefore welcome in principle a tract by an Oxford political philosopher (no prizes for guessing that he is at Balliol) for writing a defence of egalitarianism instead of simply assuming it. Unfortunately its potential value is more than negated by the author's pretence that he has simply written a neutral analysis and is not advocating anything. His method is a caricature of the early post-war books on moral philosophy, which purported to analyse moral language without imposing judgments.

Adam Swift's pretence that he is not advocating anything weakens the book even from his own point of view. Senior egalitarian writers, such as those who contribute to the publishers puff, agonise over whether equality should be considered at a particular moment or over a lifetime; between individuals or between families and whether people with exceptional needs (e.g. due to illness) deserve more than a mathematically equal proportion. These and many more profound questions are overlooked. Even the issue of whether equality should be applied within national frontiers or all over the world is skated over in a few sentences; and there is nothing at all about equality between this and future generations. And Swift is so obsessed by equality of material conditions that he does not even take on the political Right on subjects such as equality of status or respect.

It would however be a waste of time to look for subtleties in Swift's work. His first paragraph starts with the claim that Tony Blair had followed his reading recommendations and then says that he is trying a bit more systematically to tell the prime minister some of the things he would know if he was studying political philosophy today.

Most writers in this neck of the woods use she as the indefinite third person singular, but few with such thudding monotony as Swift, especially in the course of telling us how he tries, as he claims, not to influence the opinions of his unfortunate undergraduates. And then we have the insufferably patronising sentence "My father's inability to make any sense of one of my journal articles stiffened my resolve to write something even he might understand." Three cheers for Swift senior.

Ideally Swift junior would like his book to be read by Labour politicians to force a more redistributive agenda onto the prime minister and chancellor. Be he reluctantly accepts his publisher's word that books like his are mainly read by students. So he adopts the second best tactic of hoping to influence the political world via the undergraduate route.

His final chapter makes clear that he sees any backsliding from egalitarianism in terms of the influence of focus groups, spin doctoring and other concessions to ugly reality. (Some of this was included in Prospect last September). He leaves his unfortunate undergraduate with no notion that there can be respectable non-opportunist opposition to egalitarianism - let alone for the view that philosophy is and largely should be a matter of analysis, which can only put forward policy ideas in a most tentative and Socratic form.

One conclusion is that Tony Blair can expect little help from the academic Left if he is looking for a third way. Nearly all its members (barring a few macroeconomists) were perfectly happy with Old Labour but were horrified that the electorate would not follow it.

No doubt Swift would love me to warn undergraduates, their parents and tutors off his book so that he could gleefully quote my anathemata all over the place. But I am not going to do anything of the sort. Students of all ages should read his book and also read opposing statements from the non- egalitarian liberal side. Modesty prevents me from going further.

By far the best chapter is the first one on the teachings of John Rawls, who relaunched political philosophy after a period of decadence, in the early 1970s. But like most left-wing Rawlsians, Swift is much more at home with Rawls's redistributive principles than with the primacy of civil rights and civil liberties which Rawls himself deliberately puts first. And he has little time for non-left wing Rawlsians who stress the tool of the veil of ignorance as a method of reaching a degree of consensus rather than on Rawls's semi-egalitarian results.

The index is a giveaway. It has a whole column on equality but two lines on poverty. Swift does try to find reasons for preferringing an income distribution in which everyone receives 20 to one in which the worse off receive 25 and the better off 40. He ties himself up into knots in so doing. However ironically egalitarians quote their opponents as saying that equality is based on envy and jealousy, it does not make it any less true.

Swift then resorts to his first debating trick, which is suddenly to reduce the level of argument by suggesting that his reader might prefer equality of opportunity. He then has no difficulty in showing that opportunities cannot be literally equal when people come from different material and cultural backgrounds. But this is really a cheap ruse. An undergraduate can reply either that her initial choice of words was misleading and say that she really meant removal of the more obvious obstacles to the progress of the less privileged. Or she could reinterpret equality of opportunity in a slightly less literal way a la Gordon Brown.

His second debating trick comes in a later reference to Rawls when he considered the amount of inequality that might be required to persuade the well endowed to give of their best. He says that any such payments are a form of blackmail. Past political philosophers of all schools of thought tried to treat human beings as they actually were instead of admonishing them for not adopting a spartan form of sainthood. Even Plato confined ascetic practices to a handful of guardians.

But is in fact a Lord Nuffield or a Bill Gates, who creates something which did not exist before and is rewarded for it, engaging in a form of blackmail? And what do we say about lesser businessmen or professionals, or sportsmen or pop stars who have the luck to possess scarce and valued talents?

There are two ways of looking at income and wealth. One is to envisage a pie to be divided up by a central authority, like a mother cutting a cake for her children. From this point of view it is departures from equality that have to be justified. The other is the entitlement theory. What each person gets, he or she receives from others as a legitimate transfer or in exchange for a service that he or she has provided.

Neither theory entirely corresponds to the facts. The weakness of the pie theory is that there is no fixed sum to go round, as individuals add to the pie by their activities. The final distribution of resources is the unintended product of many individual decisions. The weakness of the entitlement theory is that the very content of property rights and the rules governing their transfer, as well as their physical protection, are the result of collectively enforced rules which we are at liberty to change. To muddle through with a mixture of the two concepts (Redistribution, yes, equality no) is better than the hell on earth which would prevail if either were carried through to its logical conclusion. What is wrong with the common sense conclusion, which the Nuffields of this world usually accept, that they have some claim to a high reward and also some duty to accept some redistribution towards the less favoured?

It is Swift's third debating trick that I find most unforgivable. Readers will know that I am sceptical about the idolatry in which the late Isaiah Berlin was held. Nevertheless, he has never been forgiven by the Left for by far his best piece of political philosophy, namely his essay distinguishing between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is what its name suggests: an area of life in which I can make my own choices without coercion. Positive liberty is, if you like, a richer concept covering a great many desirable states such as adequate nutrition, universal schooling as well of course as democratic voting rights and anything else of which the writer happens to approve.

Berlin was no Thatcherite; and he did not believe that negative freedom was the sole guide to policy. His constant theme was that ideals were in inevitable conflict and that a painful choice might have to be made. He was very willing to accept that, for a starving Egyptian peasant, food might have a higher priority than liberty. But he did not think it served anyone's interest to confuse the different goals.

A variety of philosophers and politicians have refused to leave the matter there. Instead of accepting that social justice or economic growth or whatever are different - and sometimes more important - goals than freedom, they insist on using the word freedom to cover all desirable states of affairs, thereby contributing to general confusion.

Swift's case against Berlin is that both his positive and negative freedom covered a great many different states of affairs and were not rigorously defined. But Berlin's whole method was to give hosts of examples which were put in contrasting families to indicate rival ideals and goals; and a commentator who cannot see that cannot see anything at all.

A similar confusion even permeates the penultimate chapter on communitarianism. Swift starts off by showing very effectively the erroneous nature of the most frequent metabiological attacks on liberalism. The question whether the individual derives from society or whether society is built up from individuals is a chicken and egg one. But Swift gets into a bog when he looks for differences of substance. Surely the point is that communitarians - many of whom are Conservatives - value the group more than individuals and want to promote the welfare of entities such as France or Edmund Burke's little platoons rather than the individuals who make them up.

In the worst cases, as we know to our cost, it is the prevalence of groups espousing some fanatical ideology or religion that is valued rather than the welfare of flesh and blood human beings. These are issues on which we shall have to stand up and be counted sooner rather than later and receive scant help from Swift's so-called conceptual analysis.