Thank you for that excellent exposition. I was unaware of Deneen’s book.

I maintain that Liberalism has contained mutual respect as an unacknowledged, yet functioning, ethic. It follows from a belief in human equality. It is present, one way or another, in Locke, Kant, Hegel, and utilitarianism, though always in the service of liberty as the predicate of justice (at least “always” once J.S. Mill wrote “On Liberty”).

Within Liberalism mutual respect limits liberty, setting its bounds at ‘an equal liberty for all’, ‘the person and property of any other’. It is also, I have determined, the ‘real’ ethic informing political democracy: everyone who is affected by choices effected in the political process (i.e. everyone in the community) must be allowed to participate in it. That is the rationale for freedom of political speech, open to all. Political rights can be justly restricted, but those restrictions, to be legitimate, must be universally applicable and universally applied.

I have further found that, seen in that light, unlike equality per se mutual respect can be efficaciously applied to the economy. I used political rights as a template for a “democratically distributed income.” It would not be paid to everyone, but would be available for an unlimited number of people. To be, like rights, free of cost, it would be created as needed, the total of it forming the supply of money (as currency) for the economy. The outcomes that that approach to supplying the economy with money can absolutely, positively guarantee are astonishing. [I do have an M.A. in economics.]

Finally, I have found that mutual respect can be shown to follow from observation within material existence, taking beliefs out of the equation. To base the structure and prescribed functioning of the political process of the community on beliefs is necessarily to impose particular beliefs on the community, which is inherently unjust according to Liberalism itself. Beliefs bring arbitrariness, which Locke correctly identified with injustice, into it.

I have given up on editors. I am now appealing to other writers to write about these ideas.

If interested, I do have a Web site, www.ajustsolution.com. (I have been informed that the link doesn’t work, so the address would have to be typed.) I have also published relevant essays here on medium.com, including “All We Need Is Equality,” “From Locke to Real Justice,” “Extending Democracy to Our Capitalist Economy to Transform Our Society,” “A Cure for the Ills of Capitalism,” and, comprehensively, ”People for Tolerance, Unite!” Those links do work. Most of those are brief (five minutes or less to read, says Medium).