John Rawls was arguably the greatest liberal philosopher of the twentieth century. But by the end of his life — he died in 2002, at the age of eighty-one — he had become a persistent critic of capitalism.

In his 2001 book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls argued that competitive capitalism, and even an extensive Nordic-style welfare state, didn’t meet the requirements of a just society. “Welfare state capitalism,” he wrote, “permits a small class to have a near monopoly of the means of production,” which undermines two of the core principles of justice: that political liberties are held equally by all and that the social order works to the greatest advantage of the least well-off.

Rawls’s preferred alternative was a social order — either a “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialist regime” — that would “set up a constitutional framework for democratic politics, guarantee the basic liberties with the fair value of liberties and fair equality of opportunity, and regulate economic and social inequalities by a principle of mutuality.” Firms would be democratically managed, but would still “carry on their activities within a system of free and workably competitive markets” with “free choice of occupation” also guaranteed. Unfortunately, he passed away without providing much more in the way of details.