More than a decade-and-a-half ago, Anthony Kronman published an article on contract law and distributive justice that has “become something of a classic in the philosophy of private law.” Kronman's article has received a great deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and it has helped to sharpen the debate between libertarianism and other forms of liberalism. In the present essay, we shall seek to expose two major weaknesses in Kronman's arguments (after we briefly summarise them).

In his recent book, The Left and Rights, Tom Campbell argues that the concept of an individual right has no special or exclusive connection with the political philosophy of liberalism, or with the legal order of a liberal society. The belief that there is some such connection has been shared by both the revolutionary left and the libertarian right. Campbell argues that both groups falsely attribute to the concept of a right features that are contingently associated with the particular rights enforced in bourgeois society. A socialist society, he argues, would have good reason to accord and respect certain individual rights even though these might differ in content, and perhaps in form, from the classic rights of liberal individualism.