Thank you for that edifying essay. I hadn’t thought about “social cohesion” as a value per se, but given humanity’s social nature, it might in the end be the most important one.

I would argue that justice is the ultimate source of ‘positive’ cohesion. I have argued that the current crisis of Liberal societies is a crisis of justice.

Justice requires an ethic. Neither liberty nor equality is an ethic. Equality does, however, imply an ethic: mutual respect (most broadly, people taking one another into account). Recognizing mutual respect as the ethic of justice provides a way of resolving the crisis of cohesion Liberal societies are facing.

At 67, I have spent my adult life exploring the implications of mutual respect as the ethic of justice. Though an amateur, I did earn an M.A. in (non-Marxist) political economy along the way (1988), and my Thesis included a Review of the Literature of the academic debate concerning ‘distributive justice’ initiated by the publication John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.

Should you be curious, I think “Re-thinking Individualism” here in Medium would address most directly the issues related in your stimulating essay.