Alan Thomas & Martin O’Neill Thomas Nagel (Draft version) – forthcoming in David Reidy and Jon Mandle, eds., The Rawls Lexicon, (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Cross references: equality; freedom; self-interest; institutions; G. A. Cohen; two principles of justice; liberalism; basic structure of society; economy; taxation; property; Law of Peoples; property-owning democracy; social minimum Thomas Nagel (born 1937), Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of Rawls’s most important philosophical interlocutors, and is the author of a number of influential papers about Rawls’s political philosophy (Nagel, 1973, 2003). His most significant engagement with Rawls’s ideas is in Equality and Partiality (Nagel, 1991). In that book, Nagel uses his central distinction between objective and subjective ways of conceiving of the world to address the feasibility of Rawls’s egalitarianism. Liberalism must leave us with enough personal space to realise the Dzsubjectivedz values of our own lives. There is, however, a complementary objective discipline to ethical and political thought, namely, the impersonal demands of others as mediated via political institutions. Influenced by G. A. Cohen’s claim that Rawls’s egalitarianism focuses on the institutions of the basic structure of society to the exclusion of personal choice, Nagel seeks to ameliorate the conflict between personal values and the impersonal demands of equality (see Cohen, 2008). The latter are realized in an institutional scheme; we aim, by contrast, to give subjective values sufficient free play within the scope of the personal, beyond those institutions. Nagel is, however, pessimistic as to whether there is a satisfactory resolution of this tension between the personal and the institutional, because of our commitment to a free market. Market motivations will see individual support for just institutions eroded, and generate pressure towards an expedient society that accepts substantial inequality in return for efficiency and prosperity. Nagel argues that while our goal should be a Rawlsian egalitarianism that rest on a Dzgeneral suspicion of inequalities owing to class or talentdz, that does not seem realistic taking people’s psychologies as they are (Nagel, 1991, p.121). Our most feasible egalitarianism, then, falls short of Rawls’s view. It will combine equal basic liberties and equality of opportunity with a decent social minimum. Any more radical changes of individual motive require a transformatory change within the personal comparable to that envisaged in Cohen’s Dzethos of justicedz. Nagel is pessimistic as to whether this development is feasible. He concludes that we cannot devise any theoretically satisfactory reconciliation of the demands of the personal and the impersonal within politics. Nagel’s overall appraisal of the feasibility of Rawlsian egalitarianism is negative: we are confronted by an insuperable practical paradox when we try to reconcile the subjective and the objective in this domain. However, his arguments also ground a limited optimism: welfare state capitalist societies are the most feasible arrangement that can currently be justified, taking people’s psychologies as they are. It is noteworthy that in his own discussion Nagel does not engage with Rawls’s account in Justice as Fairness of the choice between fundamental economic systems. Rawls there rejects residual welfare state capitalism and argues that the only two economic systems that can realize his principle of reciprocity are a property-owning democracy or liberal market socialism. Where Nagel does more to engage with the institutional dimensions of a just society is in his book on justice and taxation co-authored with Liam Murphy, The Myth of Ownership (Nagel and Murphy, 2002). The argument of this book proceeds from a fundamentally Rawlsian starting-