The Political Origins of Global Justice

Samuel Moyn

Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize

it was missed.

—T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, with its provisions for

economic and social rights, was broadly ignored in its own time, even as it is idolized in

ours.1 The text came late in its own era, essentially as a tardy charter for or template of the

national welfarist project to which all North Atlantic states had already committed

themselves, after the rising expectations they generated through their wartime promises. The

number who understood the Universal Declaration as a basis for a more transnational and

international political arrangement or project, rather than one taking place in modular states,

was tiny. Essentially the new document registered a higher level of consensus than before (or

since) that nineteenth century classical liberal citizenship needed a serious revision. And

human rights provided an optional framework for that update, which in fact predominantly

drew on other idioms, ranging from Christianity to communism. Thanks to decolonization,

this national welfarism became a global project, through its modular propagation. There

were internationalisms but not one that, like ours, involved the foundation of or significant

appeal to individual human rights.2

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 All this makes the centrality of human rights to our time surprising rather than

straightforward. And it seems clear that the meteoric rise in prominence of the Universal

Declaration since approximately 1970 has gone along with a transformation of our most

cherished projects. Now the document has become, not a belated and dispensable and

ignored charter for welfare states at home it was in its own time, but the basis of a new

movement and a premonitory dream of a new sort of international or postnational regime,

especially one meant to attend to foreign atrocity and misrule. Most revealingly, in the work

of the leading NGOs in the field from their rise in the 1970s until very recently, economic

and social rights were simply left aside — in spite of their centrality to national welfarism —

as international human rights assumed prominence.

Yet there is much debate about what to make of the coincidence of the scalar leap of

rights beyond national welfarism we often celebrate with the crisis of national welfarist

ideology we often deplore. For visions of cosmopolitan global justice have also surged, and

precisely in the “age of fracture,” as Daniel Rodgers’ already classic work on American

intellectual history has dubbed our time.3 So far there are two dominant positions to take in

response to this juxtaposition. One is apologetic: the coincidence is accidental, since two

phenomena can be historically concurrent without any more connection. The other, typically

Marxist, says that human rights are some of the sugar that has helped make the medicine of

so-called neoliberalism go down, and are causally implicated in its victories. This essay argues,

in contrast to both positions, that historical companionship is bad enough.4

No doubt, international human rights have some normative value and practical uses,

but mainly when it comes to stigmatizing evil states, from totalitarians in the Soviet Union to

petty despots in Syria recently. But human rights have been a notable failure so far in posing

any opposition — let alone enacting it — to the economic developments they have been

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forced to accompany across their own life span. Human rights have been powerless

bystanders to a victory of inequality but offered neither the source of a theoretical objection

or a practical opposition — even as they have become something like our sole vocabulary

for making ethically-inflected claims about political and especially global order. Even when it

comes to the economic and social entitlements the Universal Declaration proclaims, the

practical uses of human rights framework and movements seem disappointing, if not close

to nugatory, and entirely unrelated to any broader egalitarian agenda that the national

welfarist project not merely propounded, but took very far — relative both to the nineteenth

century, and to our time of escalating hierarchy between the wealthy and the rest both within

and among states.

This essay turns to a small and peripheral domain within which to explore these

fateful and world-historical developments: I refer to philosophy, which saw the rise of so-

called “global justice” within Anglophone political thought. The main justification for this

focus is that global justice seems to present a strong counterexample to the above trends.

Self-styled “cosmopolitans” since the invention of liberal global justice in the 1970s made

the scalar move of the human rights revolution to the globe. But they have gone far further,

globalizing a fully egalitarian demand once associated with national welfarism — and not

merely economic and social rights — and claiming that our humanity is strong authority for

commitment to full-fledged social justice beyond borders. They hardly seem guilty of

exchanging the strong and expensive though restricted solidarity of citizens for the weak and

cheap though universal solidarity of humans. It turns out, however, that philosophers, too,

have been historical companions of the dynamics that have defined our times.

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 The invention of global justice in philosophy now seems an essential rupture in the

history of liberalism, in which its rights-based social contract — restricted in its early modern

and early 1970s forms to boundaried territories and peoples — became imaginably global.

Before then, it seems fair to say, liberalism had been strikingly statist and even nationalist in

its premises.5 What happened?

The stereotypical presentation of the field’s origins and progress, I shall argue, is

radically incomplete. On that presentation, global justice emerged from internal criticism,

and correction from within, of John Rawls’s political theory in A Theory of Justice (1971). It

was born as friendly critics among his early followers burgeoned into a stampeding crowd

after Rawls finally presented his own disappointing picture of global politics in The Law of

Peoples (1993-99). At first just a few and then a great number of philosophers, the story goes,

boldly extended Rawls’ famous “difference principle” governing just distribution to the

global scale that he confusingly but consistently refused to give it. Thanks to this scalar leap

against Rawls’s predisposition, the rise of global justice heroically breached what Martha

Nussbaum (one of his dissatisfied students) called “the frontiers of justice.”6 In this

presentation, philosophers revealed the world as a realm of suffering and injustice as none

had done before, reacting to “globalization” quickly and urgently.

But it turns out that these philosophers were latecomers not pioneers – just as Rawls

had been with respect to national welfarism. What is now called global justice, understood as

a body of theory pursued in Anglo-American philosophy departments, surely did emerge

from within Rawlsian precincts. But I shall argue that it did so only under the pressure of

and in reaction to an earlier and external countermodel — in the face of an alternative

schemes of global justice it was as much concerned to criticize as it was simply to move

beyond the hitherto constraining early geography of liberal visions of distribution. Especially

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in the hands of the essential pioneer, Charles Beitz, global justice emerged in view of and

response to the countermodel known as the “New International Economic Order” (NIEO).

It was the main actual movement for global justice in the era, and nothing like it has since

appeared — though global justice in academic philosophy certainly now exists.

To treat theory as a hydraulic replacement for lost practice is already to imply why

the events chronicled here matter. The vision of global justice Rawls’s followers have

brought to bear on human misery has remained essentially a scholarly movement, with little

or no impact on real world outcomes. In this, it is much like Rawls’s original thought itself,

with due allowance for early excitement that Rawls’s difference principle might extend the

welfarist generosity of the post-World War II age yet further, through constitutional

interpretation or other means. Tragically, A Theory of Justice proved the dusk, not the dawn, of

the national welfarism it belatedly translated into abstract premises. And where Rawls

offered an unintended elegy for the national welfarism of the postwar age, the invention of

global justice appeared precisely as that national welfarism began to be wrecked. If it fits in

the age of fracture, global justice does so because, even more than the international human

rights movement, it has proven no serious enemy of the historical victors of the age that

both inhabit. Returning to the inception of global justice is thus to revisit the scene of a

potential mistake, from which something can still be learned now.

Towards Global Justice

According to most theorists of global justice, cosmopolitanism took long and proved

hard to achieve against the millennial background of provincial moral conceptions. It was

family, tribe, and especially nation that crowded out the rare but precious insight into the

common humanity of all members of the species, and the rights they might enjoy on the

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basis of their humanity alone. That unusual awareness accumulated slowly in a cosmopolitan

tradition, originating with the Stoics, revived by Immanuel Kant, and culminating in global

justice. But not only was this “tradition” a flimsy construction historically — in the final

analysis, the Stoics and Kant share little with each other, and less with today’s cosmopolitan

theorists of global justice. The older lineages were much more a construction of the school

itself as a usable philosophical past than they were the sources of its formation in the first

place. And their quickly routinized presentation masked two much more important historical

facts. One was that the claims based on human universalism had teemed in the annals of

history, jostling and competing to win followers: as Sheldon Pollock has put it, “There has

been not just one cosmopolitanism in history but several.”7 The other is that global justice

emerged much more recently, in specific geopolitical circumstances: the stimulus and target

of global justice was no parochial moral conception, but a very different, more short-term,

and now forgotten cosmopolitanism.

It was the Vietnam war that first roused American liberals working in philosophy

departments from the slumbers that excluded political thought for so long. Rawls had been

hard at work on A Theory of Justice for decades by then, but a large number of others were

mobilized — across all fields — as a result of the spectacular collapse of domestic consensus

around the Vietnam war that became especially visible in 1966-67.8 Rawls himself changed

Philosophy 173, his moral philosophy course, to incorporate new materials on war (notably

conscientious objection) in these years.9 These intellectual events, which suddenly brought

the world of war and massacre home to American philosophers, were undoubted departures,

but mainly for them, who were hardly the first globally to understand the questionable

morality of the American Cold War, or to criticize it on theoretical grounds. And the moral

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philosophizing unleashed by the Vietnam war really did not lead to the immediate invention

of “global justice” — suggesting the need to search further into the era it opened.

Rather, there were two rapidly crystallizing geopolitical contexts in the immediate

aftermath of Rawls’s book in which the global approach to justice he had excluded suddenly

become imaginable. One was the food crisis of 1972-74, which became apparent just as the

Vietnam war was being wound down. Peter Singer’s famous paper on famine, which

appeared in the third issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs in spring 1972, originated in

reflections on the displacement and hunger following on the devastating cyclone and

successful independence bid in what became Bangladesh across the brutal years of 1970-72.

But this was mere prologue to the so-called “world food crisis” of the several years

thereafter that struck many places — including Bangladesh again in 1974, where a million

died.10 Singer’s paper sparked a considerable discussion in the several years that followed of

the moral implications of the worst sort of destitution in the world, especially when it

reached the depths of mass starvation.11 These events were one contributing factor in the

turn to global justice.

But there was a second more important cause: the NIEO’s challenge. For it was not

simply discomfort with Singer’s consequentialism — triggering Onora O’Neill’s alternative

approach, for example, and much other debate about hunger and obligation — that proved

the real catalyst for the field.12 A focus on absolute destitution that made justice a matter of

charitable palliation (at least as a first step) simply seemed too narrow for several liberal

political theorists, who wanted to make the international system a topic of inquiry into just

social relations — as if it were possible to view the globe as just the sort of “basic structure”

that Rawls had seen open to just social relations in the state. It was here that the NIEO was

to matter so profoundly, for just as the world food crisis broke out, the global south also

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became the source of an open and quite shocking revolt against prevailing global hierarchy.

And by the later 1970s, once the vivid memory of starving children had passed, the first

discussion generally became absorbed into the second discussion. As early as late 1976

Henry Shue was asserting that just food policy was inseparable from fundamental principles

of global justice, and Thomas Nagel argued similarly that “charity is not enough” since “the

ethical aspects” of the hunger are simply “part of the general problem of global economic

inequality.”13

Charles Beitz on the Path to Global Justice

For their proposition about the priority of principles of international distribution to

specific conclusions about food policy, both Nagel and Shue cited an article that Charles

Beitz (1949-) published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1975, which anticipated the

dissertation he completed at Princeton University in 1976, defended in 1978, and published

in 1979 as Political Theory and International Relations.14 A peripheral graduate student in the

1970s, Beitz turned out to be of tremendous importance in the long run. According to his

Princeton friend Samuel Scheffler, at the time Beitz’s topic “was sometimes met with what I

fear may have seemed like a kind of polite condescension, for [it] struck most of us as a bit

peripheral to the main issues raised by Rawls’s theory.” But now it is apparent, he continues,

that Beitz “helped to invent a new subject, the subject of global justice, which is today one

of the most hotly debated areas within all of political philosophy.”15 Though he was only in

his twenties, global justice was “the house that Chuck built,” as surely as the normative

revolution in liberal political thought that Rawls sponsored is “the house that Jack built.”16

In retrospect, Beitz reported with excessive generosity that it was his main

undergraduate teacher at Colgate University, Huntington Terrell, who made the critical

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moves. Terrell published almost nothing after his Harvard philosophy Ph.D. of 1956 but, in

Beitz’s memory, saw the internationalist failings of Rawls’s Theory of Justice when he read it in

manuscript on a Harvard leave year.17 On his return, Terrell assigned a draft of the book in

the course Beitz took in spring of 1970 as a college senior.18 Yet the mainline Protestant

internationalism out of which Terrell sprung — his father headed the Connecticut Baptist

Convention and Terrell held a Colgate chair named after mainline leader Harry Emerson

Fosdick — never seriously elaborated concerns with global distribution, and its long-term

focus on peace remained exclusive in Terrell’s own emphases during the Vietnam era.19

Indeed, Terrell’s pacifist leanings (his wife was a lifelong Quaker) led him to early

membership in the academic movement known as “peace studies,” and Beitz worked for

him the summer after his college graduation in an institute funded by the Institute for World

Order to help construct that field.

Beitz’s first publication was a coedited collection of readings based on this course

answering to the widespread feeling at the turn of the 1970s for a spiritual reorientation.

“Questions of war and peace,” Beitz wrote in the introduction, “are far more profound that

the traditional questions asked of international relations; they are bound up with the roles

that each individual must choose to play in the world, with his or her personal fate and

moral identity.”20 Soon after the course Beitz worked at the Institute for World Order with a

fellow student to generate a much broader guide for those whom the New Left and campus

activism had inspired to change the world, starting at home. Only a brief concluding section

of Beitz’s co-authored mass circulation “guide to living and working for social change,”

entitled Creating the Future, concerned global politics, itself barely focusing on distributive

justice. But it did denounce a global hierarchy in which “all good things flow to the north or

simply circulate within it.” Stating a “tenacious faith” in change from below, Beitz and his

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co-author recommended that those longing for renovation engage in consciousness raising

and systemic criticism. “If you are somehow inclined to be a planner, and philosopher, a

visionary, a poet, see if the idea of global society is not worthy of your prolonged creative

energy.”21

And yet it may have been more significant that the book also registered the collapse

of the New Left in the few years after 1970 at a desperate moment when “the ebbing, not

the rising, of the tide of change” seemed to set the parameters for Beitz’s immediate

personal choices.22 Timing matters: his undergraduate experience initially led him to hope to

revive the new left, and Beitz did not turn to global justice until several years after. Beitz’s

decision to enroll at Princeton (after a brief stint at the University of Michigan) and his

choice to move away from radical Richard Falk on the faculty once there – even if he

embarked on his classic paper in Falk’s seminar – were most revealing. That it was

undertaken as a doctorate under liberals Thomas Scanlon and Dennis Thompson suggests

that global justice must be seen as much as a departure from the new social movements of

the late 1960s as it was their legacy.

Indeed, there is clear evidence that it was certainly not Vietnam in its own right, but

post-Vietnam events, that counted most. In his inaugural article Beitz suddenly noted that

the “as too often diverted attention from more pressing distributive issues..”23 Beitz’s move

from a far more general and full spectrum engagement with the political situation of the time

to a philosophically rigorous approach less redolent of the popular idioms of the 1960s than

the professionalized framework of liberal political philosophy also bepoke a widespread need

to distinguish sane and defensible approaches from ones that were too eclectic, loose, or

“radical.” But most dramatically, Beitz’s own deradicalization continued as he developed

global justice, and in particular as he watched the NIEO wax and wane.

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 The NIEO and Its Enemies: The Third World against Global Liberalism

In essence, the NIEO was a postcolonial revolt against North Atlantic geopolitical

and economic hegemony, established in the age of empire and ratified at World War II’s

close. The revolt emerged from the incubator of a United Nations grouping of

developmentalist states known as the United Nations Conference on Trade and

Development, which in turn gave rise to the Group of 77, movements given strength both

by the sheer number of new states after decolonization and the economic disturbances of

the early 1970s which temporarily opened the prospect – whether exciting or frightening

depended on who was asked -- of a fundamental remaking of world order. But it was the

brief role of OPEC in assisting calls for the NIEO in the years of the oil shock that damaged

North Atlantic industrial democracies that counted most. It both galvanized the movement

and inspired fear and anxious commentary, both in large quantities.24

But in the end the NIEO’s basic proposals were fairly simple. Faced with the

inability of the postcolonial developmentalist state to launch quick growth on its own, the

NIEO hoped to empower national governments and the international system of governance

to assert sovereignty over natural resources and to restore equity to global wealth patterns

after centuries of extractive colonialism. Along the way, it demanded massive aid increases,

credit on favorable terms, and debt forgiveness. The crucial fact about the NIEO was that it

was governmental — a program of statist “self-determination” in which global economic

forces (including multinational corporations) would be made to serve the new nations rather

than vice versa. In the form of an alliance-based subaltern internationalism, the new order

also called for the reshaping of the existing hierarchy of governmental power in the world,

which — the alliance claimed — worsened or at least stabilized an economic order that

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permanently disempowered the historically weak and immiserated the historically poor. Thus,

its plan for global justice did not supersede but rather presupposed nation-states or at any

rate postcolonial nation-states as both fora and agents of solidarity, especially when they

acted in concert.

The G-77 propounded its Declaration for the Establishment of a New International

Economic Order at a special session of the UN General Assembly in the spring of 1974.

With the intervening oil shock of late 1973 fresh in the mind, the developed world suddenly

paid extraordinary attention to the third world’s call for economic self-determination

(through nationalization if necessary), fearing a general spike of commodity prices potentially

now under the control of the nations to the south. “For the first time since Vasco de Gama,”

another much cited statement of the moment had it, “mastery over a fundamental decision

in a crucial area of the economic policy of the center countries escaped their grasp as certain

peripheral countries wrested it from them.”25 In a famous line, French president Valéry

Giscard d’Estaing mordantly described OPEC’s quadrupling of oil prices as “the revenge on

Europe for the nineteenth century.”26 As for the NIEO’s even bolder call to “correct

inequalities and redress existing injustices, making it possible to eliminate the widening gap

between all the developed and the developing countries,” both politicians and academics

responded with worry.27 For the following two years, before the alliance between oil-

producing states and the rest of the G-77 proved flimsy and the North Atlantic industrial

democracies weathered the storm, it seemed genuinely plausible to many an observer that a

major transformation in world politics was in the offing. “A conflict between two worlds —

one rich, one poor — is developing,” Time magazine remarked in late 1975, “and the

battlefield is the globe itself.”28 It is surprising that this once notable set of events is now

almost totally forgotten – and it seems to be unknown among those who have entered the

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field of global justice since the Cold War. After all, the field began as an attempt to justify

the NIEO’s real world claims.

The First Version of Global Justice

In a sense, what the Vietnam war was to liberal political philosophy generally, the oil

shock was to global justice particularly: the sensitizing event — or rude awakening — that

precipitated a change in consciousness and academic field. In any case, the fleeting but the

pertinence of the NIEO occurred precisely when Beitz first turned to invent “global justice,”

and for this reason the first uncorrected version of it bears close scrutiny.

Of course, it is perhaps unsurprising that the afflatus of discourse concerning world

economic relations opened a challenge to the otherwise independent birth of liberal

contractarian political theory in Rawls’s Theory of Justice. But it always takes an individual to

notice, and Beitz played this role. For all the innovative aspects of the book that proved the

swansong of national welfarism in the United States, Rawls’s text took up a surprisingly

conventional picture of international affairs. Now it seems troubling that Rawls assumed that

as its parties lost their classes, bodies (including genders), and cultures, the national units of

the historical world persisted in the famous “original position” from which Rawls derived his

principles of justice. But if nothing else it is an illuminating testament to the staying power of

the post-World War II national framing of the welfarist aspiration.

A few others before Beitz had noticed the implausibility of postponing world affairs,

as Rawls did, to a second-stage contract undertaken by state parties resulting in conventional

minimal principles of world order. (Along with the fundamental treaty principle of pacta sunt

servanda, these allowed the use of force for the sake of self-defense but prohibited aggression

and constrained means of warfare -- principles that Rawls later supplemented in The Law of

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Peoples by allowing humanitarian intervention given the existence of what he called “outlaw

states” in non-ideal circumstances.)29 Beitz offered a serious criticism of Rawls’s rationale for

allowing the nation-state to be treated as analytically and politically free-standing even in

what Rawls termed “ideal theory.” It is of great interest that the criticism did not turn on the

role of a prior violent history (including colonialism, whose role the NIEO emphasized) in

producing the peoples and boundaries that are morally arbitrary from the perspective of

cosmopolitan universalism. Instead, Beitz targeted Rawls’s assumption that each nation was

self-sufficient enough to be treated separately analytically and have its own contract (and then

state borders) politically.30

In response, Beitz made two main arguments. First, the unequal distribution of

natural resources worldwide forbade the simplification of treating global justice as a second-

stage problem. Second, and more boldly, Beitz claimed that it was simply false empirically to

suppose that it was possible to disentangle states, especially for the purposes of a contract

governing distributive justice in an age of multinational corporations, capital flows, and

economic “interdependence.” Beitz argued that no one familiar with the empirical situation

of the world in the 1970s — or at least the new perceptions of interdependence then —

could conclude that entering separate state-based ventures in social justice was possible at all.

“If evidence of global economic and political interdependence shows the existence of a

global scheme of social cooperation,” Beitz affirmed, “we should not view national

boundaries as having fundamental moral significance.” The analytical expedient of

proceeding directly to state-based contracts having failed, a global bargain would take place,

with Rawls’s difference principle applying to world economic hierarchy. “The state-centered

image of the world has lost its normative relevance because of the rise of global economic

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interdependence,” Beitz concluded. “Principles of distributive justice must apply in the first

instance to the world as a whole, then derivatively to nation-states.”31

While Beitz soon called his alternative “cosmopolitan,” he also effectively admitted

that both his argument about natural resources and about the impossibility of analytical

isolation of nations in a global economy followed much more from contemporary sources

than from Kant’s (or anyone else’s) texts in the philosophical tradition.32 For my purposes

here, therefore, it is crucial to consider how Beitz’s initial two-pronged globalizations of

Rawls was inflected by exceptionally time-sensitive empirical assumptions and political

inferences — before turning to how those assumptions changed slightly but revealingly as

Beitz moved from article to book as the NIEO’s moment passed.

When Beitz appealed to the worldwide maldistribution of natural resources as a

response to Rawls’s account, the NIEO’s exceptional salience affected the account in an

interesting way. In 1975, Beitz treated the NIEO principles as normatively flawed but

potentially justifiable for the moment. Given its goal of radicalizing the principle of national

sovereignty by extending it to local resources rather than undermining it for the sake of states

with the bad luck of poorly endowed territory, the NIEO’s arrogation of economic

sovereignty, Beitz wrote, seemed “prima facie unjust.” All the same, Beitz allowed, this

conclusion about the NIEO’s natural resources principle was mitigated; though asserted

across the board and for all time, its true purpose, Beitz recognized, was local and

temporary: “to defend developing nations against resource exploitation by foreign-owned

businesses and to underwrite a national right of expropriation.” As a matter of fact, the

footnote in which Beitz first engaged the NIEO indicated that in 1975 he thought it could

be shown that developed countries had so pillaged the third world for resources that

assertion of “sovereignty-for-the-time-being” over natural resources seemed completely

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justifiable. But Beitz already criticized the NIEO’s “extreme” assertion of permanent

sovereignty as the problem rather than the solution.33

Yet Beitz’s acknowledgment of the reason the NIEO asserted permanent sovereignty

— as part of a search for larger corrective mechanisms for global hierarchy — went far

further in his account of empirical interdependence and its normative consequences.

Strikingly, Beitz clearly indicted the preeminent role of multinational corporations which,

along with prevailing trade rules, created a dynamic in which “value created in one society

(usually poor) is used to benefit members of other societies (usually rich).”34 Even more

revealingly, Beitz relied on dependency economics (the school of thought most closely

associated with UNCTAD and its sequels) to conclude that “poor countries’ economic

relations with the rich have actually worsened economic conditions among the poor.” It was

in view of these facts, Beitz emphatically concluded, that “Rawls’s passing concern for the

law of nations seems to miss the point of international justice altogether.”35 Though Beitz

never directly answered his opening question in the article, whether “efforts at large-scale

institutional reform” for which the NIEO called were justified, his conclusion sounded close

to affirmative: “The duty to secure just institutions where none exist endows certain political

claims made in the nonideal world with moral seriousness… When the contract doctrine is

interpreted globally, the claims of the less advantaged in today’s non-ideal world — claims

principally for food aid, development assistance, and world monetary and trade reform —

rest on principles of global justice.”36

Beitz beyond the NIEO

Like his article, Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations of four years later —

though mostly written by 1976 it underwent two rounds of revision before publication —

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began its discussion of international distributive justice with an epigraph from the NIEO

Declaration stressing interdependence.37 But much transpired as Beitz finalized his account.

For one thing the human rights revolution, associated with though not singlehandedly

caused by Jimmy Carter’s election to the American presidency, intervened. Where Rawls had

not used the phrase “human rights” in A Theory of Justice, after 1977 his followers

immediately began to do so.38 More important, the high tide of the NIEO in the context of

which Beitz first imagined a global social contract in 1973-75 passed. While faithful to both

of his original arguments, Beitz worked to present them much more clearly as an alternative to

rather than a regrounding of the NIEO’s radical — and statist — claims.

Beitz now turned to a fascinating indictment of what he called “the morality of states”

central to NIEO ideology. In his original article, Beitz appended a passage referring to a

people’s right to self-determination favorably — noting its violation in America’s

interference with Salvador Allende’s Chilean experiment. He also suggested that global

justice provided reasons that Rawls’s non-interventionist approach could not for the

international community to defend global rights, including that of popular self-

determination.39 Beitz’s mature text, however, took as its central purpose not simply the

plausibility of global justice but a version of it in which self-determination became the

unworkable alternative. After all, Beitz wrote, “it is the interests of persons that are

fundamental, and ‘national interests’ are relevant to the justification of international

principles only to the extent they are derived from the interests of persons.”40

Not only did Beitz reject the premise of the autonomy of states as a moral matter

just as he rejected it as an empirical matter in the name of interdependence; he also engaged

with the principle of self-determination that had made its way through UN history into the

NIEO declarations. Vague in exactly what its rejection of colonialism entailed, Beitz

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concluded, the principle of self-determination survived philosophical scrutiny only as “a

means for promoting conformity with principles that would be agreed to in a hypothetical

social contract… Self-determination is the means to the end of social justice.” And this

meant if it cut against empires, and South African apartheid, it was because it cut against any

claim of non-intervention supporting unjust regimes, including potentially the new states

themselves. “While colonial government is usually illegitimate according to these principles,”

Beitz observed, “there is no assurance that successor governments will be any more

legitimate according to the same principles.”41

The addition of these materials as a preliminary to a case for the rule of globally

scaled principles of social (including distributive) justice not only differed starkly from the

still statist premises of the NIEO; it reflected a widespread feeling in the West, crystallizing

at just this moment, that postcolonial self-determination claims had gone too far and

provided insufficient foundations for global order. I have no specific evidence to show this

feature of Beitz’s argument was precipitated in response to the NIEO specifically, but it did

fit perfectly in the turn against third-world nationalism that marked the human rights

revolution as deeply as any other factor. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it in 1977, the

breakthrough year for human rights, “states may meet all the criteria of national self-

determination and still be blots on the planet. Human rights is the way of reaching the

deeper principle, which is individual self-determination.”42

Even more significant was Beitz’s evolution with respect to dependency economics

and charges of structural imperialism it authorized. Retooling his discussion of economic

interdependence in his case for a global original position, Beitz updated his reference to the

literature but also departed subtly from his earlier empirical assumptions. Now Beitz offered

a much less emphatic diagnosis about the role of multinational corporations in promoting

18
global misery. And he detached his account from his reliance a few years before on the

radical economics that afforded the NIEO intellectual underpinnings.43 In his discussion of

“economic self-determination” central to the NIEO (and to which he relocated the relevant

original discussion of North-South economic relations), Beitz reconsidered the radical

charges as empirically controversial. He now argued that, from a normative perspective, the

crucial step was to shift to a new framework in which it was not disempowerment of

collective state economies but violations of individual rights that mattered. “It is especially

unfortunate,” Beitz wrote, “that criticisms of dependence have been framed in terms of

deprivation of national autonomy.” To be clear, Beitz’s essential point was that not so much

that the worst allegations of dependency theory were false, though he certainly now detached

himself from his clear allegiance to them before. Rather, it was that, even if they were true, it

would make more philosophical sense to articulate them as violations of individual rights

rather than state prerogatives. After all, “the objectionable features of dependence —like

excessive exercises of state power or large internal distributive inequalities — might be

reproduced by an apparently autonomous state.”44

With global justice, Beitz certainly offered an alternative to conservative American

observers of the NIEO like Robert W. Tucker who worried that liberal elites were betraying

the national interest and Western hegemony out of good-hearted humanitarian sentiment

positing cosmopolitan obligation. The pressure of expansive solidarity suddenly considered

“a necessary truth that needs no defense,” Tucker stormed angrily, was “something that was

foreign to men’s imagination prior to the postwar period … The material issue is not

whether any modern social ethics could pretend to provide enduring justification of existing

inequality in international income distribution, but whether there is any modern social ethic

that has sought seriously to justify income redistribution beyond the confines of the state. In

19
this regard, it is perhaps significant that the most widely discussed ‘theory of justice’ to

appear in the West in many years has scarcely a word to say on the subject.”45 Yet in

breaking with statism that, even in Rawls, had shortly before been the conventional wisdom,

Beitz moved to a specific “cosmopolitanism.” And he ultimately elevated into a matter of

abstract principle the argument that critics of the NIEO like Tucker offered when they

insisted that the alliance’s first and foremost goal was to achieve geopolitical change in the realm

of power rather than individual justice in the realm of norms alone.

In another stormy passage, for example, Tucker wrote: “However the state system is

defined that is held responsible for present global inequalities of wealth and power, it is not

the state system per se that is condemned. On the contrary, it is primarily through the

institution of the state — and, of course, cooperation among the new states — that the

historically oppressed and disadvantaged are to mount a successful challenge to persisting

unjust inequalities.”46 Where Tucker inferred from this point that calls for global welfare

concealed a dangerous power play under the mask of high principle, Beitz took from it the

need to replace the NIEO’s call for interstate equity with one for interpersonal equity. For Tucker,

“a new international hierarchy is not to be mistaken for the disappearance of hierarchy; and a

global redistribution of income and wealth is not to be equated with a ‘new beginning’ in

history if this redistribution is largely effected by, and in the name of, states.”47 For his part,

Beitz wrote in an especially clear formulation in a related essay, “The effect of shifting from

a statist to a cosmopolitan point of view is to open up the state to external moral assessment

(and, perhaps, political interference) and to understand persons, rather than states, as the

ultimate subjects of international morality.”48 The respective doubts about states claiming

moral equity (and presumably the collusion of subaltern states the NIEO involved) clearly

differed — but overlapped too.

20
 To be clear, there is nothing about Beitz’s work that forbade the normative validity

of a state-based order; but it did change the rationale for it, reducing states to intermediaries,

with no moral standing in themselves, between global principles and deserving individuals.

In his book and later, Beitz made absolutely clear that the persistence of an interstate rather

than global organization might institutionally satisfy global justice.49 And when he turned in

Political Theory and International Relations to spell out more fully the implications of the

normative move above states for the world as it stood, the results were (as in Rawls’

domestic setting) familiar in policy terms, however revolutionary compared to existing reality.

As a normative thinker, Beitz was primarily committed to a novelty and rigor in the way he

reached his call for foreign aid as an obligation of justice rather than charity. But the

subaltern internationalism of the NIEO had no role in Beitz’s global justice, which generally

went silent when it came to agency.

As late as 1981 — two years before the global debt crisis that would definitively

undo its dreams — the NIEO still elicited some sympathy from Beitz within severe limits.50

But he mainly shifted to emphasize that development of “largely indigenous processes” of

growth would prove most important.51 Beitz ruefully concluded that “massive cash transfers

may succeed only in removing incentives for increasing indigenous food production, and

even institutional reforms like those of the New International Economic Order may only

reinforce the structural inequalities found in many poor societies.”52 In his rejection of its

state-based ethics and its plans for institutional reimagination of the world order alike, Beitz

had moved rather definitively beyond the NIEO to secure the moral stature of individuals in

a global economic order — thereby inventing a school of thought which may make a

difference someday.53

21
 Conclusion

Initially an American invention, global justice appeared not merely against the

backdrop of but in response to an anticolonial revolt of sovereign but subaltern nation-states

— a configuration that has not figured prominently in global theory and practice since. As if

the NIEO had never been, the main conceptual alternative to global justice in today’s

academy, in the work of David Miller, Michael Walzer, and others, has remained a defense

of the moral relevance of states generally (rather than poor states specifically either on their

own or in alliance).54 Surveys of the field unfailingly report a dichotomy of “statism” and

“cosmopolitanism” as if the latter had not been born rebutting an alternative version of

global justice combining a commitment to state prerogatives with a demand for global

reordering.

A recovery of the prominence of the NIEO in the origins of global justice poses the

question whether “cosmopolitanism” should be regarded as accidentally concurrent with or

unhappily complicitous in the erosion of national welfarist ideals, even as no global

welfarism has followed in compensation. A causal rather than conjunctural thesis about the

relationship of human rights and so-called neoliberalism might well start with their shared

individualism and antistatism, which unites them in their historical companionship across an

otherwise significant divide. (And it is also true that early neoliberals, indeed far more so

than their Doppelgänger cosmopolitans, targeted the NIEO for wrath and destruction.)55 But it

seems to me that it was really the failure of global justice to theorize the conditions of its

own historical origins and future enactment that marked and marks it out most clearly for

the fate to which it has been condemned so far of mutely witnessing reversals in our

progress towards the very ideals it announces (with some notable exceptions at the global

level thanks mainly to Chinese marketization).

22
 Consider, to begin with, that global justice emerged as a Rawlsian reinterpretation of

an already extant political project, not an exercise in unworldly dreaming. Its initial

prescriptive outcomes were simply NIEO’s program, and if they had not been supplied from

the outside there would have been nothing to normatively justify in Rawlsian terms in the

first place. It mattered greatly that Beitz was one of the few Rawlsians then or since trained

not solely as a philosopher but also — actually mainly — in political science and

international relations and exquisitely aware of then contemporary realities, the NIEO first

of all. There is a great deal to say about the relationship between abstract normative

theorizing and enacted political agendas, but it does seem incontestable that without the

NIEO global justice would not have come into being, at least not at the time and possibly

not in the version we have come to know.

Second and more important, it is crucial to reckon with the fact that after its

invention as a body of pure normativity, global justice saw history make a mockery of its

egalitarian demands. Of course, the same is true of the difference principle within national

welfare states, with Beitz, like Rawls himself, looking as if they planned on opening a new era

when they actually let loose an owl of Minerva on partial achievements their thought has

apparently done nothing to extend. Indeed, our theories of justice and global justice alike

were announced precisely when the difference principle, though still utopian, were in some

respects much closer to a reality both within states and on the world stage than after that

principle was announced. Philosophy’s fuction was to memorialize an egalitarian utopia, as it

departed the world.

One response to the tragic fate of these philosophers is simply to conclude that it

was not their fault if, just at the moment they hit on the best available justificatory principles

for distribution locally and globally, history went the other way — and rather dramatically so.

23
But it seems fair to wonder if the relationship between normative claims and historical

projects matters far more than they have been generally willing to acknowledge or consider.

One reason that loss of national welfarism has been felt less acutely is that, even as

expensive local solidarity fissured from within, new horizons opened for an aspirational but

ineffectual global solidarity. The career of global justice has been one marker of this

development, and the one that chiefly matters within the prestigious circles of professional

philosophy. In this light, Beitz’s criticism of the NIEO seems especially troubling because it

does not seem like better agents than the subaltern states themselves have since appeared on

the scene.

Rawls’s dissident students aiming at global justice have been companions of market

fundamentalism worldwide in developing a form of thought — which goes back to Beitz’s

invention of the field — that neglects not only the formative conditions of their own

thought but especially those for its prospective institutionalization. For not only have

theories of global justice generally failed since the NIEO to assist any movement to resist the

real victory of galloping local and global inequities. More important, it is hard to imagine that

either individualist norms on paper, or the sort of human rights regime and advocacy so far

developed, can provide the sort of agency for the structural reform that inequality makes so

plainly necessary. Where decolonization changed the world, and the NIEO called for

completing that reform, so far global justice seems ineffective, as if its promise of happiness

were a merely theoretical alternative produced out of the world-historical dynamics that have

left any practical ones unavailable — at least for now. Perhaps, then, we need another form

of thought than contemporary normative theory provides, and another form of politics than

human rights, for all their contributions, have brought to the world in defining our time so

deeply.

24
 Beitz himself understood the challenge concerning agency that the NIEO posed; but

while he also characteristically insisted on a relevant kind of political theory, he must have

also concluded that the sort of intellectual activity he could defend offered normative criteria

alone, even though it was perfectly clear to him too that the actualization of ethical principle

depended on the world of power: “A complete analysis of the prospects for the NIEO

would end in an area that may be quite unexpected: in the domestic politics and economic

structures of the rich countries,” he concluded realistically in 1981, having seen the NIEO’s

challenge quickly contained. “The real dilemma, and ultimate uncertainty, of global

egalitarianism is whether a political coalition can be mobilized within the rich countries for

completing the picture of which NIEO is only a partial outline. It is hard to be optimistic

about the prospects.”56 It still is, as the age of human rights — and global justice —

continues.

Notes

This essay was presented as the Cyril Foster Lecture in International Relations for 2013 at
1

the University of Oxford. I am grateful to James Kloppenberg for help. Sanford Diehl provided
extraordinary research support for this project that went so far beyond the norm that he helped me
not simply gather materials but verify my conclusions about them.
2 These claims are defended in Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

(Cambridge, Mass., 2010), esp. chap. 2, as well as “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 365-84.
3 Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

4 For discussion of the literature in these terms, see my “A Powerless Companion: Human

Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Law and Contemporary Problems 77 (2014): 101-24.
5 This essay thus concurs with Duncan Kelly’s examination elsewhere in this volume of how

statist and nationalist liberalism has been in modern history until recently. It is true that there was one
German baron who may have imagined a global social contract during the French Revolution; and he
made a serious impact on American culture at the very least in the form of Herman Melville’s Moby-
Dick, where the motley humanity assembled on shipboard is designated an “Anarcharsis Clootz
deputation from … all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
world’s grievances before [the] bar.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York, 2001),
132.

25

Martha Nussbaum, The Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership
6

(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), esp. chap. 4.

7 Sheldon Pollock, The Languages of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in

Premodern India (Berkeley, 2006), 280. See also Carol A. Breckinridge et al., eds., Cosmopolitanism
(Raleigh, 2002), in which Pollock’s chapter provides a brief overview of his theses.
8 For brilliant detail, see Katrina Forrester, “Citizenship, War, and the Origins of

International Ethics in American Political Philosophy, 1960-1975,” Historical Journal 57, no. 3
(September 2014): 773-801.
9 Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, Box 34, Folders 5-14, Lectures on the

Law of Nations, 1967-69.

10 See Geoffrey Barraclough, “The Great World Crisis,” New York Review of Books, January 23,

1975; Herbert Marx, ed., The World Food Crisis (New York, 1975); Sayed Marei, ed., The World Food
Crisis (London, 1976, 1978); and esp. Christian Gerlach, “Die Welternährungskrise 1972-1975,”
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31, no. 4 (October 2005): 546-85.
11 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3

(Spring 1972): 229-43.

12 Onora Nell [O’Neill], “Lifeboat Earth,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, no. 3 (Spring 1975):

273-92, and later O’Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and Development (Boston, 1986).
13 Henry Shue, “Food, Population, and Wealth: Toward Principles of Global Justice” (paper

delivered in September 1976 at the American Political Science Association), Proceedings of the American
Political Science Association (1977); Thomas Nagel, “Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough,”
in Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue, eds., Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and
Death Choices (New York, 1977), 54.
14 Charles R. Beitz, “Justice and International Relations,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, no. 4

(Summer 1975): 360-89; Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, 1979). I am
exceptionally grateful to Chuck Beitz for several conversations (and factual corrections).
15 Samuel Scheffler, “The Idea of Global Justice: A Progress Report,” Harvard Review of

Philosophy 20 (2014): 17-35.

16 See Chris Brown, “The House That Chuck Built: Twenty-Five Years of Reading Charles

Beitz,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 2 (March 2005), 371-79; Anthony Simon Laden, “The
House that Jack Built: Thirty Years of Reading Rawls,” Ethics, 113, 2 (January 2003): 367-90.
17 Rawls thanks Terrell for multiple rounds of response in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,

Mass., 1971), xxii.

18 Beitz, “Hail Hunt Terrell,” The Colgate Scene, 27, no. 1 (July 1998).

19 This remark is not meant to forestall further work on the topic, only to doubt that

Terrell’s roots in mainline Protestantism are helpful in understanding Beitz’s activities later. See
David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton,
2013).
20 Beitz and Theodore Herman, eds., Peace and War (San Francisco, 1973), xi.

21 Beitz and Michael Washburn, Creating the Future: A Guide to Living and Working for Social

Change (New York, 1974), 392-95, 408.

22 Ibid., 3.

23 Beitz, “Justice,” 362.

24 See Giuliano Garavini, “Completing Decolonization: The 1973 ‘Oil Shock’ and the

Struggle for Economic Rights,” International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011), 473-487 and esp. Vanessa
Ogle, “The ‘New International Economic Order’ at the United Nations: The Struggle over Aid,

26

Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962-1981,” Humanity 5, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 211-34. In broader
context, see John and Richard Toye, The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance, and
Development (Bloomington, 2004), chaps. 8-10 and Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an
Idea (New York, 2012), chap. 12. In a committed vein, see Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible
History of the Global South (New York, 2012). For unvarnished critical analysis, see Stephen D.
Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley, 1985).
25 What Now: Another Development (The 1975 Dag Hammerskjöld Report) (New York, 1975), 6.

26 Flora Lewis, “Giscard Asserts World Is In Grip of Fiscal Crisis,” New York Times, October

25, 1974.
27 See Branislav Gorovic and John Gerard Ruggie, “Origins and Evolution of the Concept,”

International Social Science Journal 28, no. 4 (1976): 639-46; Jagdish N. Bhagwati, The New International
Economic Order: The North-South Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Karl P. Sauvant and Hajo
Hasenpflug, The New International Economic Order: Confrontation or Cooperation between North and South?
(Boulder, 1977) — the leading edge of a much larger responsive literature into the next decade.
28 Cited in Mazower, Governing the World, 299.

29 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 7-8, 115, 336, 378-79, and The Law of Peoples (Cambridge,

Mass., 1999). See Rawls Papers, Box 14, Folder 2, for Beitz’s commentary on a draft of the latter and
their ensuing correspondence. See also Beitz, “Rawls’ Law of Peoples,” Ethics 110, no. 4 (July 2000):
669-96.
30 There are four responses of which I am aware, but all were in the nature of passing

comments or brief discussions: Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice: A Critical Examination of the
Principal Doctrines in “A Theory of Justice” by John Rawls (Oxford, 1973), 128-33; Seyom Brown, New
Forces in World Politics (Washington, 1974), 206; Peter Danielson, “Theories, Intuitions, and the
Problem of World-Wide Distributive Justice,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973): 331-40; and
Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr., “Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 5
(May 1973): 1020-69 at 1066-67.
31 Beitz, “Justice,” 376, 383.

32 Rawls’s “theory of international justice bears a striking resemblance to that proposed in

the Definitive Articles of Kant’s Perpetual Peace,” Beitz wrote, before moving on to criticize that
theory. Ibid., 366. He also alluded to others like Christian Wolff whose civitas maxima imposed statist
limits Beitz hoped to overcome. Ibid., 372n, updated in Political Theory, 143n. It is true that Beitz cited
a separate passage in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice concerning international economics, but it
would be wrong to say that Kant got very far in this respect. Beitz, “Justice,” 366, 373. On Kant’s
deeply statist cosmopolitanism, see now Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical
Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge, 2011), esp. chap. 5 on economics.
33 Beitz, “Justice,” 371 and n.

34 Ibid., 373.

35 Ibid., 375 and n, citing André Gunder Frank and others.

36 Ibid., 385.

37 Ibid., 360; Beitz, Political Theory, 126.

38 See Moyn, The Last Utopia, 214-16. Like his teacher Scanlon, whom I emphasize there,

Beitz also participated with his University of Maryland working paper of November 1977 published
as “Human Rights and Social Justice,” in Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean, Human Rights and
U.S. Foreign Policy (Lexington, 1979) (arguing for supplementing the overwhelming focus in the
human rights revolution on personal rights with attention to economic rights).
39 Beitz, “Justice,” 387.

40 Beitz, Political Theory, 64.

27

Ibid., 99, 104, 102. By comparison, Richard Falk, for whose seminar Beitz had first
41

embarked on his project, signed on enthusiastically to the self-determination claims climaxing in the
NIEO of the era. See, e.g., Falk, “La Déclaration d’Alger et la lutte pour les droits de l’homme,” in
Antonio Cassese and Edmond Jouvé, eds., Pour un droit des peuples (Paris, 1978).
42 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Human Rights: How Far, How Fast?,” Wall Street Journal, March

4, 1977; and, for the larger picture, Moyn, The Last Utopia, chap. 3, as well as now Brad Simpson,
“The United States and the Curious History of Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4
(September 2012): 675-94.
43 The above passage about the effect of multinational corporations in making rich nations

richer was dropped in favor of a rosier account, notably with respect to growth and efficiency due to
foreign investment. Compare Beitz, “Justice,” 373 and n with Beitz, Political Theory, 145 and esp. nn.
For radical economics, compare the subtle differences between Beitz, “Justice,” 375n and Beitz,
Political Theory, 150n; cf. 116-19. For good and more explicit evidence of “egalitarianism” as a
theoretical framework intended as an alternative to “dependency,” see Beitz’s more popular essay,
“Global Egalitarianism,” Dissent 26, no. 1 (January 1979): 61-64.
44 Beitz, Political Theory, 119, 120.

45 Robert W. Tucker, The Inequality of Nations (New York, 1977), 139. See earlier Tucker, “A

New International Order?,” Commentary, February 1975 and “Egalitarianism and International
Politics,” Commentary, September 1975.
46 Tucker, Inequality, 64.

47 Ibid., 117.

48 Beitz, “Bounded Morality: Justice and the State in World Politics,” International Organization

33, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 409.

49 Ibid., and Political Theory, 182-83.

50 See Beitz, “Global Egalitarianism,” 64-67, for a rich and balanced discussion.

51 Beitz, Political Theory, 172-75, influenced on the last point by W. Arthur Lewis, The Evolution

of the International Economic Order (Princeton, 1978).

52 Beitz, “Bounded Morality,” 423, citing Lewis again.

53 In 1981, in an article reviving considerations from his dissertation but excised from the

book, Beitz concluded that “it is clear that international redistribution” along the lines of his theory
“is not in prospect. For the foreseeable future, the poor societies must operate with the expectation
that foreign contributions to domestic welfare will be marginal at best.” Beitz, “Economic Rights and
Distributive Justice in Developing Societies,” World Politics 33, no. 3 (April 1981): 323.
54 See, e.g., in response to Beitz, Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States: A Response

to Four Critics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 209-29 and David Miller,
“Defending Political Autonomy: A Discussion of Charles Beitz,” Review of International Studies 31, no.
2 (March 2005): 381-88, both pursuing the defense of the nation-state of their larger corpora. A new
edition of Beitz’s book in 1999 includes a new afterword that among other things engages Walzer’s
argument, to which he had initially responded in the following issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs. A
more recent tendency is to compromise between cosmopolitanism and statism in the work of
Michael Blake, Mathias Risse, and many others.
55 Jennifer Bair, “Taking Aim at the New International Economic Order,” in Philip Mirowski

and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
(Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
56 Beitz, “Global Egalitarianism,” 68.

28