In recent years cultural issues in one form or another have come to dominate the public agenda. Gays and Lesbians, women, ethnic and cultural minorities, religious communities, indigenous peoples, and others demand that society should recognize their identities, respect their differences, and take full account of these in its laws, political institutions, and public policies. This, what is generally called the politics of recognition, has attracted considerable opposition from every conceivable direction. For conservatives, it undermines national unity and social cohesion and is a recipe for chaos. For some liberals, it is collectivist, threatens individual liberty and personal autonomy, and subverts the great universalist heritage of the Enlightenment. For socialists and social democrats, it diverts attention from the great and urgent issues of social and economic justice. And for Marxists, it detracts from the class struggle, weakens working-class solidarity, and plays into the hands of the dominant class. In this chapter I concentrate on the last two groups, especially the socialists and social democrats. Following the current usage, I shall call their view the politics of redistribution.

The concern with redistribution has a long history going back to the early Greek democrats, and includes influential Christian thinkers, millenarian movements, socialists, Marxists, and egalitarian liberals. Drawing their inspiration from differently grounded egalitarian conceptions of justice, its advocates argue that all human beings have equal worth, dignity, or value, and are equally entitled to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives.