Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.

Chapter 6, “Housing,” argues that the property-owning social democracy offered an alternative to Conservative housing policy. If the Conservative dream of a “property-owning democracy” envisioned a nation of homeowners, the property-owning social democracy sought economic, social, and spatial balance within a mixed housing system. This vision imagined not a universal public sector, but a dual tenurial system, including private owners alongside public renters. There was no “natural” state of housing: both the expansion of municipal housing after 1945, and the rise in owner-occupation after 1980, represented state achievements. Milton Keynes Development Corporation had always valued owner-occupation, but from 1976 that policy became a priority when spending cuts and policy shifts threatened the new town’s realization. MKDC began to prioritize housing sales, achieving such success that, by 1979, they could cast themselves as partners to the Conservative government. In time, however, this emphasis on private housing compromised the corporation’s ability to ensure balance across the city, producing patterns of socio-spatial polarization that foreshadowed national problems to come.