The economist Joseph Stiglitz has always occupied an odd position within the mainstream of his discipline. A recipient of the Nobel Prize who has pit himself against the neoliberal orthodoxies of some of its past winners; a former chief economist of the World Bank who decried the organization’s mismanagement of the Asian financial crisis and branded its staff “third-rank students from first rate universities” shortly after being booted out on the orders of Lawrence Summers, then US Treasury secretary; and, most recently, an advocate of freedom who has sought to wrest that term away from the libertarian and populist right.

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society is Stiglitz’s most recent offering. Although its title riffs on Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a book that warned of the encroachment of government power legitimized by World War II, Stiglitz’s project is one of reclamation. The rhetoric and symbols of freedom are visible everywhere on the US political right, from the branding of the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus to the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags on suburban homes to the countless iterations of the “Sorry if this offends” style of T-shirts and bumper stickers with which conservative Americans assert their right to do as they please. The Right, Stiglitz’s argues, should not have a monopoly on freedom, a notion that he thinks they fundamentally misunderstand.

The Road to Freedom takes as its jumping-off point a distinction between positive and negative freedom made popular by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, from whom the book takes its epigraph that the freedom for the wolf means death for the sheep. Stiglitz wishes to turn this maxim against the libertarian right, arguing that its vision of freedom — the liberty of each individual to pursue ends of their own choosing unfettered by collective restraints — is the freedom of the wolf. In focusing myopically on the freedom of the individual to follow their whims, he argues, the Right has blinded itself to the more urgent question of whether individuals actually have the ability to pursue their chosen ends. The vast inequality of a society like the United States, Stiglitz argues, only makes this problem more pressing. A more robust vision of freedom would correct these flaws, providing a road map to a society in which every individual can flourish.