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I had never heard an argument against socialism for which I did not (so I thought) already have an answer in my pocket. Then one day in 1972, in my room at University College, Jerry Dworkin nudged me. He began a process that, in time, roused me from what had been my dogmatic socialist slumber. He did that by hitting me with an outline of the antisocialist Wilt Chamberlain argument, as it was to appear in Robert Nozick’s then forthcoming Anarchy, State, and Utopia. My reaction to the argument was a mixture of irritation and anxiety. There was a would-be confidence that it depended on sleight of hand, alongside a lurking or looming fear that maybe it did not. 1

My reaction to Eric Nelson’s Theology of Liberalism is much the same. The arguments of the book are novel, intriguing, and unsettling, at least for those with egalitarian sympathies, or, more specifically, for those who believe that their egalitarianism is …