I intend, here, in reflecting on my life to see if, by taking what appear to me in retrospect to be three critical points of vantage from which to describe my situation, my intentions and the thought, if any, which lay behind them, I can be of service.

A market may be defined as a set of competitive relationships in which agents strive, within limits set by ground rules, to better their own economic positions, not necessarily at the expense of other people, but not necessarily not at their expense either. A degree of indifference to the market fates of others is, manifestly, an inevitable feature of the market practice, so defined. But though indifference is clearly logically endemic to markets, it has been denied that selfishness is necessarily involved in the raw competition of market activity. Thus, Hayek maintains that market behaviour is not selfish on the grounds that the market is a competitive non zero-sum ‘wealth-creating game’ in which individuals ‘use their own knowledge for their own ends’ in a system whose operations, via the ‘Invisible Hand’, also produce unintended benefits for others. But for behaviour to be selfish it clearly need not necessarily disbenefit other people; it is enough that it is pursued, or persisted in, regardless of its effects upon others. And this is precisely what the institutional ‘indifference’ of market activity amounts to. Admittedly individuals who understand the Hayekian logic of the market know (or believe) that the long-run chances of everyone's benefiting are maximized by acting in a rigorously competitive manner, and so they at least in one sense act with a ‘regard for others’. But ipso facto this category of market agents has an even stronger reason than the ignorantly selfish for disregarding the specific interests of all the particular individuals with whom they have economically to do. ‘Market selfishness’, the disregard for others' market interests, is thus a logically inevitable feature of market activity.

I begin with two quotations: one from Anthony Crosland's Socialism Now, the other from Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. Crosland says:

experience shows that only a small minority of the population wish to participate [in politics]. I repeat what I have often said—the majority prefer to lead a full family life and cultivate their gardens. And a good thing too … we do not necessarily want a busy, bustling society in which everyone is politically active and fussing around in an interfering and responsible manner, and herding us all into participating groups. The threat to privacy and freedom would be intolerable.

It is a distinctive and unprecedented feature of modern societies that the idea of equality should hold a central place in their political thinking. I want to begin my enquiry by considering why this should be and what its significance is. For if there is indeed an important sense in which egalitarianism is written in to contemporary conditions of life, it makes no sense to think of oneself as taking a stand for or against equality. Now to say this is not to deny the equally inescapable fact that the issue of equality rouses fierce ideological passions between those who might describe themselves on one side as its friends and on the other as its enemies. But my suggestion is that both sides may misunderstand their contest. Their conflict is not about the value of equality as such, but about competing specifications of that value, about different versions of what it means to treat people as equals.

Perhaps the most remarkable event in social thought of the last twenty years has been the resurgence of various strands of individualism as political doctrines. The term ‘individualism’ is a kind of general rubric that encompasses elements of nineteenth century classical liberalism, laissez-faire economics, the theory of the minimal state, and an extreme mutation out of this intellectual gene pool, anarcho-capitalism. The term libertarianism itself is applied indiscriminately to all of those doctrines. It has no precise meaning, except that in a general sort of way libertarianism describes a more rigorous commitment to moral and economic individualism and a more ideological approach to social affairs than conventional liberalism. I suspect that its current usage largely reflects the fact that the word with the better historical pedigree, liberalism, has been associated, in America especially, with economic doctrines that are alien to the individualist tradition.

A rough and tumble, we have had; though one quite lacking in impoliteness. I hope I do not go too far in supplying that deficiency.

Disagreement is endemic on political questions, both between and within ourselves. We do however come to conclusions, often strongly held. It may often be in doing so we are wholly irrational; but in so far as we are not, the philosopher should surely have something to contribute?

Our conclusions, so far as they are at all rational conclusions, will be based on some considerations or other: our premises. So, it may be thought, so far as we are rational we should be clear about what our premises are, how if at all they may be justified, and that our conclusions logically follow from them. Only if this is so are our conclusions justified.