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Learning from the History of Political Philosophy
The theory of justice that John Rawls developed and elaborated across his major writings is widely acknowledged to be a boldly original work of creative power. Yet no one who studies the theory can come away without feeling Rawls's deep sense of indebtedness to his predecessors in the annals of Western moral and political philosophy. Rawls learned from great writings in the history of political philosophy and moral philosophy – incorporating, developing, refining, correcting, contrasting with and situating his own work in relation to them. Attention to Rawls's explicit use of works in the history of political philosophy, and particularly to his teaching lectures on those works, reveals the absolutely staggering depth of his understandings of the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Mill and Marx, among others. Not content with textbook accounts of these figures, Rawls worked through his own, in many cases quite original, interpretations of their writings, employing his own method of contextually situated and charitable interpretation.
In this chapter I offer support for three distinct but related claims about the significance of Rawls's attention to the history of political philosophy: that such attention offers the most fecund approach to questions of contemporary political philosophy, that it is not objectionably conservative, and that neglecting to learn how Rawls understood the great systems of the past places one at a severe disadvantage in interpreting Rawls's own theory of justice. In the course of making this case I offer brief general introductions to Rawls's approach to the history of political philosophy, and his advice on how to learn from it through comparative study of complex systems; his views about the independence of political from other sorts of philosophy, and the relationship of his thinking to the social contract tradition and to the history of liberalism. I review some features of his interpretations of various historical political philosophies to show how knowing these is needed to guide proper interpretations of Rawls's own theory of justice.
Rawls taught that political philosophy was not the story of varying answers across time to a single question, analogous to ontology's question “What exists?” or epistemology's question “What can we know?” While it does find general themes in such topics as political legitimacy, political obligation, social stability and the public good, the various questions of political philosophy addressed by its major historical practitioners are often occasioned by practical problems and historical events, and reflect their understanding of the state of political philosophy when they were writing. Hobbes's revision of his inherited natural law tradition in order to provide a basis for social stability among many religious and political factions in the wake of the English civil wars could hardly be further from Marx's critique of the capitalist mode of production with its supporting contractarian ideology at the height of the Industrial Revolution. (Rawls's lectures on these authors to students at Harvard University from the 1960s through 1995 are collected in Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.)
Learning from historical works thus required particular attention to the context of those writings, even down to the evolution of the meanings of terms over time. Rawls evoked delighted laughter from his students whenever he recounted, in the context of introducing Hume's artificial virtues but also as a cautionary tale, the story of King Charles II's pronouncing Sir Christopher Wren's design for rebuilding the dome of St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666 to be “awful and artificial,” meaning, in the language of the time, “awe-inspiring and a work of human artifice,” a great compliment.
Rawls described his approach to interpreting works in the history of political or moral philosophy, and to teaching them, as involving two quite conscious efforts. The first was to understand the particulars of their respective projects:
One thing was to pose their philosophical problems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and political philosophy then was. So I tried to discern what they thought their main problems were. I often cited the remark of Collingwood in his An Autobiography, to the effect that the history of political philosophy is not that of a series of answers to different questions, or, as he actually put it, it is “the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it.” This remark is not quite right, but it tells us to look for a writer's point of view on the political world at that time in order to see how political philosophy develops over time and why.1
Despite the differences in earlier writers' projects and philosophical and historical contexts, Rawls insisted that there was much to be learned from them. Thomas Pogge rightly notes that “unlike other great philosophers in history, Rawls regarded his work neither as a revolutionary new beginning nor as the definitive treatment of a topic area. Rather, he studied his predecessors … very carefully and tried to develop their best ideas in his own work” (Pogge 2007). But doing so required both a stringent fidelity to the principle of charity in interpretation, and the mastery of several complex philosophical systems, the more the better, for purposes of comparative study. Referring to his method of interpreting and teaching the philosophies of past greats, Rawls wrote:
Another thing I tried to do was to present each writer's thought in what I took to be its strongest form. I took to heart Mill's remark in his review of [Alfred] Sedgwick: “A doctrine is not judged at all until it is judged in its best form” … So I tried to do just that. Yet I didn't say, not intentionally anyway, what to my mind they should have said, but what they did say, supported by what I viewed as the most reasonable interpretation of their text. The text had to be known and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form. Leaving aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending. If I departed from it – no harm in that – I had to say so … Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for example, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was … If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they [the philosophers] saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised; or wouldn't arise or be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or hadn't read … My task was to explain Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, or Hume, Leibniz, and Kant as clearly and forcefully as I could, always attending carefully to what they actually said.
(LHPP, xiii–xvi)2
Rawls scrupulously practiced this method of charitable interpretation, and required it of his graduate students as well. Despite its commonsense appeal, such a method is not without its critics. Some have suggested that without much more detailed knowledge of the historical and intellectual context of a written text than Rawls typically collected there is no way to make out what the writer “actually said.”3 Others have seen such a method as stunting philosophical creativity. This is one version of the charge of conservatism. One aspiring tastemaker reviewing LHPP opined that Rawls's “very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers.” Noting that “Rawls typically wrote in a gray bureaucratic prose,” he asserts that unlike the epic ambitions of the great philosophers, Rawls sought merely to “rationalize” the “dogmas and preconceptions” of his age (Smith 2007). Other commentators have worried that there may be a tension between Rawls's interpretive charity (insisting that a text must be read in its intellectually strongest form) and his interpretive humility (assuming that the canonical philosophers are smarter than he) (Frazer 2010).4 Most of those who knew Rawls personally would, I think, agree with Thomas Pogge's judgment: “Rawls's astonishing modesty was not due to ignorance. He knew very well that he had written a classic that would be read for decades to come, while most other academic authors fall far short of such achievement. But the comparison he found relevant was not to others, but to the task of political philosophy. And this comparison must always be in some degree humbling” (2007, ix).
Beyond his approach to interpreting texts, Rawls gave careful consideration to which texts he studied. The value of studying a philosophical system – a full and complete system, articulating and organizing each of the elements necessary to any such system – and in particular the value of comparatively evaluating multiple systems, could not be emphasized enough. In comparative study of complete political-philosophical conceptions we can see the working elements of any functional system in action. We can view the interaction and interdependence of the parts of a social system – law, education, family, associations both secular and religious, political rights and responsibilities – and, at least potentially, abstract from them a template for designing our own, new and improved, society. The philosophers Rawls selected for study tended either to have full systems worth mining, or to be ripe candidates for extending their thought into a fuller system. Rawls viewed political philosophy through the selective lens of “exemplars.” In line with this attitude, Rawls explained how he
followed what Kant says in the First Critique at B866. He says that Philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science and nowhere exists in concreto. So how can we recognize and learn it? “… we cannot learn philosophy, for where is it, who is in possession of it, and how shall we recognize it? We can only learn to philosophize, that is, to exercise the talent of reason in accordance with universal principles, on certain actually existing attempts at philosophy, always, however, reserving the right of reason to investigate, to confirm, or to reject these principles at their very sources.” So we learn moral and political philosophy, and indeed any other part of philosophy by studying the exemplars – those noted figures who have made cherished attempts – and we try to learn from them, and if we are lucky to find a way to go beyond them.
(LHPP, xiv)
Connecting this attention to comparative study of entire philosophical systems to his commitment to charity in interpretation, Rawls reveals:
The result was that I was loath to raise objections to the exemplars – that's too easy and misses what is essential – though it was important to point out objections that those coming later in the same traditions sought to correct, or to point to views those in another tradition thought were mistakes. (I think here of the social contract view and utilitarianism as two traditions.) Otherwise philosophical thought can't progress and it would be mysterious why later writers made the criticisms they did.
(LHPP, xiv)
Rawls regretted the tendency of much philosophical training to encourage students to attempt refutations of fragmentary arguments rather than to seek to understand the overall design of the philosophers' work, and to mine it for elements of truth useful in building our own theories.
An important part of the value of comparative study of philosophical systems, whether moral or political, lies in how it focuses our attention on the many elements, or moving parts crucial to a complete system and to the different ways of settling them. Human motivation, notions of goodness and principles of right, feasible institutions, a conception of law, and of political legitimacy, mechanisms for stability, the role of education, the ordering of public and associational or personal roles, the relation of political life to religion are a few of the elements systematized by the main political philosophies Rawls studied as exemplars. Rawls often explicitly commented on how the characterizations of these elements within Justice as Fairness differed from those of earlier systems.
Rawls emphasized the importance of comparative study of substantive moral systems and of the priority and independence of such study from other questions one might pursue within moral philosophy: questions of (moral) epistemology, the theory of meaning (of moral terms), and the philosophy of mind (e.g., the nature of personal identity). In his 1975 address to the American Philosophical Association on “The Independence of Moral Theory,” Rawls writes:
The fault of methodological hierarchies is not unlike the fault of political and social ones: they lead to a distortion of vision with a consequent misdirection of effort. In the case we have discussed, too many questions about the substantive structure of moral conceptions, and their comparative differences, are postponed.
(CP, 302)
The substantive structure of moral conceptions and the judgments on which they rely provide data, as it were, about the practice of moral reasoning. Rawls had already rejected as barren the approach of conceptual analysis, and saw the futility of trying to understand the practice of moral judgment apart from the known serious efforts to give substantive structure to our moral conceptions. The idea Rawls introduced as “reflective equilibrium,” a state in which our considered moral convictions had been brought into line (through a process of revision both of principles and practical judgments) with the best moral theory we have, was sometimes criticized as being too conservative to arrive at the truth about morality. Achieving coherence between our cherished judgments and our favored principles seemed to some merely to rationalize our parochial prejudices. Rawls addressed this worry with his notion of “wide” reflective equilibrium, which takes into account all competing moral conceptions we can imagine. But he would not accept his critics' notion that moral philosophy should or even could possibly be done without reliance on some or another moral theory systematizing moral judgments.
Although Rawls did not regard the history of political philosophy as a continuous debate on a single topic, he did see political philosophy as capable of performing a set of important functions, tasks, or as he termed them “roles” in a society's public political culture. These are set out in course lectures given over the 1980s and published as Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.5 The first role is that of investigating whether some underlying basis of moral or philosophical agreement can be found to bridge divisive political conflict over deeply disputed questions, or at least to narrow the gap enough that willing and mutually respectful social cooperation can be maintained. Such divisive conflict calls forth a need for political philosophy, and in answering that need philosophy may serve a practical role. Rawls offered as examples of works performing this role Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise and Letter on Toleration. In the American case he cited the debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over ratification of the constitution, and the discussions of slavery and of the nature of the union between the states called forth by the question of the extension of slavery that preceded the Civil War. Rawls saw his own theory of justice as addressing the practical need to adjudicate the conflicting claims of equality and liberty in our democratic tradition, a tradition which pits the liberties of the ancients, stressed by Rousseau, against the liberties of the moderns, traced to Locke, rooted in sharp disagreements over how the claims of liberty and equality are to be understood, weighed, and ordered.
Rawls termed the second role of political philosophy orientation, that of helping individuals to situate themselves as citizens within their own social and political institutions, and to think about their aims and purposes as members of a society with a history. This sort of orientation is distinguished from the way we ordinarily locate ourselves as members of families, or of churches or other associations. Philosophy, as an exercise of both theoretical and practical reason and reflection, orients us by showing how reasonable and rational ends – individual, associational, political and social – can be harmonized within a united framework of a just or reasonable society.
A third role of political philosophy is to reconcile us to our social world so that we may view it positively, rather than merely resign ourselves to it. In its role of reconciliation, stressed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right, “political philosophy may try to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us the way in which its institutions, when properly understood from a philosophical point of view, are rational, and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form.” Rawls continues, “This fits one of Hegel's well-known sayings: ‘When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back’ ” (JF, 3).
Rawls saw the dangerous potential for philosophy to abuse its role of reconciliation by instead providing ideological support for an indefensible social system, by encouraging the illusions and delusions citizens must embrace if such a system is to be stable (LHPP, 10). He offers as an example of the kind of vigilance we should maintain in examining the ideas of our own theories Marx's critique of classical political economy as an ideology obscuring the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Related to reconciliation is political philosophy's role of probing the limits of practical political possibility; in this sense, political philosophy should be “realistically utopian.” Is a just social world possible under reasonably favorable but still possible historical conditions? Social conditions vary across time, and the limits of the possible are not given by the actual, so judging the practicable is not a simple matter. But if, say, Justice as Fairness explains how a reasonably just democratic regime is realistically possible even given the fact of reasonable pluralism, it may serve to reconcile us to what we might otherwise have regretted as a sad loss of a simpler (if imagined) time in which society enjoyed consensus in values.
We can see all four of these roles being carried out in Rawls's political philosophy. Citizens find themselves born into ongoing societies. Because political society is not an association we freely choose to enter or exit – we are born into a political society and our exit options are typically quite limited and do not include the option of exiting political society altogether (where would we go to live outside the jurisdiction of some political society or other?) – we may feel trapped, or not free, by membership in our political society. In Justice as Fairness, we view political society as a system of fair social cooperation among free and equal persons and formulate principles of justice to order its basic structure. We can then reasonably view citizens living in a society the basic structure of which satisfies these principles as truly being free and equal citizens. Of course, such a society might not be realistic. Perhaps citizens living in such a society will find themselves too deeply divided over too many fundamental questions of religious or philosophical doctrine to sustain, especially to sustain democratically, fair and peaceful social cooperation. But suppose we can show that it is not unrealistic, notwithstanding the inevitability of such doctrinal diversity. Then Justice as Fairness can reconcile us to reasonable pluralism as a permanent feature of any free society that poses no necessary threat to its justice and even offers its own benefits. By so doing it can also orient us by showing us how to square our diverse individual aims and associational commitments with our basic end as citizens, organizing and maintaining political society as fair or just social cooperation. Knowing that the main religious, moral and philosophical doctrines likely to persist in a society well-ordered by Justice as Fairness could be part of an overlapping consensus on its principles of justice may provide us with the confidence we need to act responsibly as citizens in a democracy. Because the well-ordered society allows scope for the pursuit of a wide range of individual ends, and guarantees free choice of occupation and fair equality of opportunity to individuals, while holding individuals responsible for adjusting their ends to their legitimate expectations under that system, and allows us to view society as a social union of social unions, it becomes possible for us to orient and reconcile ourselves to our political society as a democratic union of free and equal citizens. Justice as Fairness harmonizes historically competitive values within a systematically worked out political conception of our freedom and equality as citizens.
Starting in the 1980s, Rawls began developing a view of the independence of political philosophy from moral philosophy (expressed in Political Liberalism) that was in some ways parallel to his earlier argument for the independence of moral theory from speculative philosophy. The political realm had its own distinctive set of political values, a conception of the person qua citizen, and its own norms of public reason. His presentation of Justice as Fairness as a “freestanding” political conception that, although not dependent on any comprehensive moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine, might nonetheless receive the support of an overlapping consensus among such doctrines seemed to some critics to divest his theory of its philosophical bona fides. The ideas that political philosophy serves as part of the general background culture of our society, that it should seek principles of justice whose application is limited to a pluralistic, democratic society such as our own, and that it relies on no deep roots in moral philosophy provoked indignant criticism from some. Again, the theory was accused of being too conservative.
Joseph Raz (1990) faulted Rawls for his “epistemic abstinence,” while Jean Hampton (1989) went so far as to insist that Rawls was not a philosopher at all, because philosophers want truth, while Rawls looked only for agreement among existing political opinion. Habermas led the charge: “Surely you, as a philosopher, must claim truth for your theory.” Rawls replied, “I think that we, as students of philosophy, should be allowed to claim for our theories whatever we think most appropriate.”6 Once Rawls had reclaimed political philosophy as an important field, his resistance to reducing it to a central but overly abstract organizing question, such as “What is justice?” for any and every object of consideration (and not just for organizing the basic structure of modern, industrial, democratic, pluralistic societies) frustrated those who saw philosophy's role as uncovering deep, timeless, universal truths. Those critics embracing a conception of cosmic justice according to which no one's distributive share in any context should reflect any morally undeserved characteristic thought Rawls's political liberalism so incomplete as to be inadequate even within its specified political sphere (G.A. Cohen 1997). Cosmopolitan critics of Rawls's refusal to extend Justice as Fairness to order international society expressed similar frustration with the perceived parochialism of Rawls's political liberalism (Buchanan 2000; Pogge 2004). It is too conservative, paying too much deference to the illiberal practices of decent but nonetheless nonliberal societies, depriving their members of full justice. A similar complaint reverberated throughout sectors of the feminist community: because justice as fairness respects, on grounds of freedom of conscience, association and exercise of religion the liberty of families and churches to order their internal life on less egalitarian principles than Rawls's own, it is too conservative to secure substantive justice for girls and women. It is ironic that some communitarian critics (mistakenly) objected to Justice as Fairness precisely on the ground that it would extend political principles of justice to internally order families, replacing the proper familial bonds of affection and benevolence (Sandel 1982).
In a nutshell, the downside to using existing practical judgments and influential historical moral theories as data in the development of our own theories is that doing so puts some conservative pressure on how large our leaps of moral imagination can be. But Rawls insisted that we cannot just make it all up.
As compared with the alternatives, Rawls's approach is defensible. Were we to ignore all prior moral beliefs on the ground that to take them into account would conserve prior biases, it would be difficult to know how even to begin the political philosopher's task. If it seems silly to begin by simply affirming the negation of all of our considered convictions, and repudiating all the historical systems we find most promising – and that really does seem ridiculous – Rawls's own approach merits serious scrutiny. Of course our best theories are likely to be wrong on many points, and certainly incomplete, and even considered judgments are not guaranteed to be true. But here it actually helps to defend against the charge of conservativism that we are seeking principles of justice to order the basic structure of a pluralistic society, in which the differences among citizens' considered convictions of, for example, the justice of denying marriage rights to homosexuals, or historically, the justice of Negro slavery, allow for the progressive evolution of our political culture.
Rawls announces in the opening paragraph of A Theory of Justice that it is his intention to generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract. The social contract tradition, which in its modern form had run from Hobbes through Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, had been eclipsed by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill and its absorption into twentieth-century economic and social theory. Utilitarianism had lost sight of the fundamental distinctness of persons, said Rawls, treating individuals as fungible receptacles of good. Social contract theory offered a more fitting framework for identifying a basic social structure to sustain the rights and liberties of individuals in an increasingly and permanently pluralistic society. By tying the justification of social arrangements, whether forms of political society or principles of justice to order them, to the agreements that properly informed, properly motivated, free and equal individuals deciding within a fair deliberative situation would make, contractarianisms promised a nonaggregative way of taking each person seriously. Unfortunately, existing social contract theories had not delivered on that promise, precisely because of faults in their characterizations of contractors and their situations.
Although Hobbes recognized reasonable constraints on human behavior in his laws of nature (requiring equity, gratitude, submission of disputes to arbitration, and generally, reciprocity in our dealings with others), his argument for the narrow rationality of accepting these reasonable constraints neither acknowledged nor deployed our social capacity for treating others fairly. What Rawls described in his own theory as our “highest order capacity to have and act from a sense of justice” is, on his interpretation of Hobbes, absent from Hobbes's view. Hobbes supplies a framework for the social contract, but his conception of human motivation proves inadequate. Locke does better on that front.
Rawls described Locke's political philosophy as largely right. Comparing Locke's work to Hobbes's Leviathan, Rawls wrote that “Locke's Second Treatise may be more reasonable, more sensible, in some ways, and one might think closer to being accurate, or true” (LHPP, 23). But Locke's contractarianism contained two difficulties. First, Locke specified no mechanism for the people to exercise their constitutive power to seat a new government. Once a government had put itself into a state of war with the people by, say, abusing its prerogative or taxing without consent, it became illegitimate and citizens were freed of any obligation to it. They could then “appeal to heaven” to favor their side in an armed insurrection to establish a new, legitimate government. This unsatisfactory suggestion to appeal to heaven had found an historical replacement in the American innovation of the constitutional convention. Rawls saw the constitutional convention as the appropriate method for the people's exercise of their constitutive power. There was no reason in principle why such a mechanism could not be accepted into Locke's political philosophy.
The second difficulty was much more serious. Locke's state of nature, in which the institution of money allowed for large differentials in private property holdings, permitted differences in economic bargaining power to affect the terms of the social contract. Those with more property could exact greater political rights, resulting in the 40 shilling freehold property qualification for voting rights. Rather than reflecting an illegitimate exercise of force, the agreement to afford voting rights only to those with significant property holdings was rational even from the point of view of those without property.7 It was perhaps rational, considering their inferior bargaining position, but not reasonable, precisely because reflecting their inferior bargaining position. Rawls's solution to this problem, which cannot be handled within Locke's own theory, is, of course, the original position with its veil over economic and all other bargaining advantages:
If we are unhappy with Locke's class state, and still want to affirm some form of contract doctrine, we must find a way to revise the doctrine so as to exclude the unwanted inequalities in basic rights and liberties. Justice as fairness has a way of doing this: it uses the original position as a device of representation. The veil of ignorance limits information about bargaining advantages outside that contractual situation.
(LHPP, 139)8
Rousseau's social contract introduces the idea of voting our judgments of what conduces to the public good, rather than merely voting our personal or associational interests. There is something appealing about the three aspects of generality of the general will Rawls distinguishes: Roughly, everyone votes, they vote on rules affecting everyone, and they vote their opinion on whether the rule serves the general good. But maintaining this strict discipline against the pull of private and associational interests poses a serious challenge, as Rousseau himself recognized in writing that if factions are inevitable, there should be lots and lots of them to counterbalance one another. Here again, Rawls's veil of ignorance in the original position enables contractors to abstract from rather than to hope to counterbalance private prejudices. Further, it makes rational the selection of a principle settling equal basic rights and liberties for all citizens, regardless of their membership in the majority opinion.
Along with the great works of social contract theory, Rawls taught Marx's critique of capitalism and of its underlying contractarian ideology. He accepted Marx's claim that class systems must rely for their stability on illusions about how those systems work, and delusions on the part of their participants about their own interests. In particular, if we think of labor contracts between owners of capital and owners only of their own labor power as free and as legitimating the resultant distributive shares, we will miss, as Marx said we would, the element of exploitation necessary for profit creation. In contrast, a system of reciprocal advantage, such as is Justice as Fairness, in which the greatest benefit of the least well-off in a system yielding unequal benefits of cooperation is required as a condition for the better off to enjoy that position, and especially against the background of genuinely fair equality of opportunity, immunizes citizens from exploitation. Rawls left undecided the question whether Justice as Fairness could best be realized by a system of private property democracy or by a system of democratic socialism, but he ruled out laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, and state socialism with a command economy.
Rawls's requirement of publicity meets Marx's complaint of ideological obfuscation head on. In the well-ordered society of Justice as Fairness the principles ordering its basic structure are known, and known to be known by all citizens; its institutions conform to those principles, and can be seen to do so. Most importantly, Rawls took seriously Marx's charge that liberal freedoms were almost purely formal. In the absence of material means to exercise them, they were worthless imaginary comforts. An adequate scheme of primary goods, including income and wealth, a guaranteed social minimum including health care, and assurance of the fair value of the political liberties, along with fair equality of opportunity, and income differentials constrained by the difference principle – all these play a part in eliminating the workplace bargaining disadvantage that feeds capitalist exploitation.
One may speculate that Rawls embraced some more positive ideas from his study of Marx. Marx's ideal of individual development of undetermined personal capacities finds expression in Rawls's insistence that we should not regret the limitedness of our capacities to develop our individual talents, but rather take satisfaction from living in a social world organized to allow us to participate in different social unions, and in our society as a “social union of social unions.”
Rawls's effort to refine the social contract tradition can be viewed as his way of pursuing the best method for advancing liberal political theory.9 Justice as Fairness lies squarely within liberalism, understood as a movement toward constitutional democracy accommodating pluralism. It is meant to defend principles of justice appropriate to order the basic structure of a modern, industrial, democratic but pluralistic society, where rights, liberties and opportunities are secured to every citizen, along with adequate material means to make use of those. Rawls identified the historical origins of liberalism in the acceptance of religious tolerance after the European wars of religion, the establishment of constitutionally limited regimes, and the rise of democracy. “Expressed in broad terms, the content of a liberal political conception of justice has three main elements: a list of equal basic rights and liberties, a priority for these freedoms, and an assurance that all members of society have adequate all-purpose means to make use of these rights and liberties” (LHPP, 12).
Rawls saw Justice as Fairness as building on the liberal tradition, but also recognized that no existing liberal democracy comes anywhere close to implementing its requirements. His enumeration of several of the reforms still needed in the United States to bring its liberalism closer to the ideal (a prescient list in today's political climate) included:
Campaign finance reform to overcome the present system of money buying access to power; fair equality of educational opportunity; some form of assured health care for all; some form of guaranteed and socially useful work; and equal justice for and equality of women. These reforms would greatly mitigate if not remove the worst aspects of discrimination and racism.
(LHPP, 12)
This leads us to consider what role Rawls thought political philosophy could realistically play in democratic politics. The role he assigns to it, as serving an educational role as part of the “background culture,” has been criticized as underambitious. Surely, philosophy should play a grander role in public life. But, says Rawls, unless citizens come to democratic politics with fundamental conceptions and ideals of justice, equality, basic rights and liberties of the sort political philosophy provides – ideals that endorse and strengthen their democracy's basic political institutions – their democracy may not last long. Rawls suggests that among the reasons the Weimar constitution failed was that the leading German philosophers and intellectuals were not willing to defend it (LHPP, 6). This, then, is quite a significant role. Furthermore, in a constitutional democracy, philosophers may play a more direct role by seeking to influence the deliberations of the Supreme Court. Rawls himself participated in one such project as signatory to “The Philosopher's Brief” to the Supreme Court in 1996 concerning assisted suicide. A Theory of Justice contained clarification and justification for the practices of conscientious refusal and civil disobedience, a topic with great practical importance during the Vietnam War era. On the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Rawls appealed to his conception of a decent democratic society to support constraints on the just conduct of war that condemned that bombing. These exceptions aside, Rawls usually resisted requests that he apply his theory of justice to settle practical political disputes. He would say that he had enough on his plate just to think through and work out the theory itself – applying it would have to be left to others with the time and ability to gather and sort all the relevant facts and so on.
John Locke, himself a political activist during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681, sought to justify resistance to a crown attempting to exercise unlimited rule within a mixed constitution in which the crown enjoys a share of legislative authority. The fear of the Earl of Shaftesbury (Locke's patron), the Whig party, and of Locke with them was that were the Catholic James to succeed Charles II, he would attempt to restore Catholicism and to establish royal absolutism in England. Locke's project in Two Treatises of Government was to demonstrate the illegitimacy of royal absolutism as a form of regime, hence justifying resistance to it, by arguing that it could not have been agreed to by free and equal people without irrationality, coercion, or violation of their duties to God under the Fundamental Law of Nature. Locke's intense engagement with Sir Robert Filmer's defense of divinely authorized royal absolutism clears the deck for his own positive accounts of political legitimacy and political obligation. These accounts are distinct on Rawls's interpretation of Locke's view: a person is obligated to obey a regime only if (a) it is of a legitimate form, and (b) he or she has actually consented, whether expressly or tacitly, to do so; while a form of regime is legitimate only if it could have been contracted into from the Lockean state of nature. Joining consent is necessary for political obligation, but even consent cannot bind one to obey an illegitimate form of regime.
Rawls speculated that the missing middle section of Two Treatises referred to by Locke in his preface to the work may have contained “constitutional doctrines that might have cost him his head.”
A list of books in Locke's library suggests that to mislead the King's agents he may have called the whole work De Morbo Gallico (the French disease), in those days a name for syphilis. Locke and Shaftesbury did think of royal absolutism as a French disease, and certainly the French had a bad case of it under Louis XIV.
(LHPP, 108–109)
Although Locke, like Hobbes, spent time in self-imposed exile for the sake of his safety, Hobbes was with the court of the future Charles II, while Locke became a fugitive after the discovery of the Rye House (Assassination) Plot. Recounting Locke's political activism, Rawls noted “it is quite remarkable that anyone could write such a reasonable work, one of such imperturbable good sense, while actively engaged, at great personal risk, in what may have been treason” (LHPP, 108).
Rawls viewed David Hume as a naturalist observing the role of moral concepts, judgments, and feelings or sentiments within the human institutions and practices regulating our conduct. Hume brings an experimental or scientific explanatory model to bear on the subject of morality, understood in his time to include psychology and social theory. Rawls described the utilitarian tradition in which Hume participated as “probably the most impressive tradition in moral philosophy” and “perhaps unique in its collective brilliance” (LHPP, 162). Broadly concerned with organizing society to secure the general well-being of the people, utilitarianism lacked the backward-looking dimension of a social contract theory like Locke's. In his essay “Of the Original Contract” Hume argues that while consent might in principle found a government, virtually no existing governments came into being this way, and it is not as if those of us currently living under governments could refuse our “consent” without suffering hardships so extreme that such coerced consent would not create bonds of obligation. More to the point, consent theories introduce an otiose element in their account of political obligation, because the explanation for why we ought to honor our consent, that is, keep our promises, is the social utility of the practice of doing so, the very same ground for submitting to political authority. “Society cannot possibly be maintained without the authority of magistrates,” Hume maintained. Rawls characterized Hume's critique of Locke's view as imposing an “unnecessary shuffle” that obscures the fact that considerations of utility underlie all artificial duties. He judged this critique only partially successful against Locke, because it does not touch Locke's criterion for political legitimacy, but only his criterion for political obligation to a legitimate regime. Nevertheless, as a historical matter, Rawls noted that Hume's essay, along with Bentham's work, successfully weakened attachment within England to the social contract view.
John Stuart Mill, in what Rawls described as his “incessant lofty style and sermonizing tone untroubled by self-doubt,” developed arguments to encourage expansion of opportunity to more of society's members and to propel progressive innovation. He saw himself, Rawls thought, as an educator of enlightened opinion trying to articulate the fundamental principles for an “organic” as opposed to “critical” age – an age in which society would be secular (without a state religion), democratic, and industrial. He was trying to sway those who had political and social influence, accounting for his nonscholarly, easy-reading and seemingly nonpioneering writings. Rawls expressed some skepticism that Mill's self-proclaimed utilitarianism really preserved the essential elements of the classical tradition. At times Mill sounded more like a perfectionist than a utilitarian. In contrast with Bentham's narrow psychological egoism, Mill built on Humean ideas of natural sympathy and a primitive form of fellow-feeling to imagine how an interest in pursuing utilitarian moral principles could be incorporated into the motivation of moral agents. Mill expanded the place of individual liberties as a higher-order, or at least longer-run method for pursuing the greatest good. Mill paid attention to pluralism and trumpeted the value of people's conducting experiments in living. Importantly, Mill sought to expand the rights of women. He did so not only through his writing, but also during his term as a Member of Parliament. He pressed for voting rights for women, rights within marriage and to divorce, rights to control their own money and reproductive activity, and rights to education and to compete for employment. Rawls accepted Mill's contention that the family is the first school of social justice, and wrote that “except for the great John Stuart Mill, one serious fault of writers in the liberal line is that until recently none have discussed in any detail the urgent questions of the justice of the family, the equal justice of women and how these things are to be achieved.”10 Rawls continued till the end of his life to think through the practical implications for a just political society of how to make women's equality real.
Rawls wrote of the self-taught Karl Marx that “his achievement as an economic theorist and political sociologist of capitalism is extraordinary, indeed heroic” (LHPP, 319). Marx demonstrated the inadequacy of merely formal freedoms to secure human well-being, criticized liberalism's securing only negative and not positive liberty, and exposed the alienating, dehumanizing effect of production under a capitalist division of labor. Marx unmasked the exploitation inevitable in an unconstrained market system operating with a merely formal notion of equality of opportunity. Taking these criticisms of liberalism seriously, Rawls explained how features of justice as fairness provided a response. In a well-ordered property-owning democracy (or democratic socialism) securing the fair value of the political rights and liberties, along with fair equality of opportunity, the difference principle, and an adequate material minimum needed to exercise the equal basic rights and liberties, Marx's objections will not arise.
Seeing what Rawls learned from his study of the history of political philosophy is tremendously helpful in grasping central ideas in Rawls's own philosophy. I'll illustrate this with examples drawn from his interpretations of Hobbes and Rousseau.
Knowing how Rawls interpreted what he called “Hobbes's secular morality” proves crucial to understanding Rawls's own approach in Justice as Fairness to public reason, to the depth of the problem of stability, and to the need for a political rather than comprehensive liberalism. Hobbes's project was to address the internal sources of disruption and corruption that, considering human nature and human circumstance, are apt to lead to divisive social conflict. Writing in the time that he did, Hobbes viewed factional religious disagreement and competition for authority over Christian subjects between secular and religious authorities as prominent among those sources of discord and instability. Rawls contextualized Hobbes's political philosophy by noting that Hobbes
is concerned with the problem of civil war between contentious religious sects, made worse by conflict between political and class interests. In his contract doctrine Hobbes argues that everyone has sufficient rational grounds, rooted in their most basic interests, for creating, by agreement among themselves, a state, or Leviathan, with an effective sovereign with absolute powers, and for supporting such a sovereign whenever one exists. These basic interests include not only our interest in preserving ourselves and obtaining the means of a commodious life, as Hobbes says, but also, and this is important for Hobbes, who was writing in a religious age, our transcendent religious interest in our salvation. (A transcendent religious interest is one that may override all secular interests.) Taking these interests as basic, Hobbes thinks it rational for everyone to accept the authority of an existing and effective absolute sovereign. He views such a sovereign as the only sure protection against destructive civil strife and the collapse into the state of nature, the worst condition of all.
(LHPP, 105)11
Comprehensive religious or moral doctrines often take the form of transcendent interests, which means that those holding them afford them priority over mundane interests in political stability or perhaps even fairness. They are not reliably contained by mere exercise of force, and so those who hold them must be given reasons in terms of those interests for supporting political arrangements if the society is to remain stable over time and not to be, in Rawls's phrase, a mere “modus vivendi.” Those with transcendent interests in satisfying the requirements of their comprehensive doctrines must be able to form a principled attachment to the principles of justice ordering their society if it is to remain stable; and that attachment requires a showing that their comprehensive doctrine affirms those principles, or at least that it is not incompatible with them.
However, when different groups hold divergent doctrines transcendently, they may not all affirm the same principled reason to adhere to common principles of justice (or in Hobbes's case, of political obligation). This is why the basic or common argument for such principles must be “freestanding” of sectarian doctrines, and rely only on the shared premises of a “secular morality.” Hobbes's laws of nature, the core of which is a principle of reciprocity requiring that we do not reserve to ourselves any right we are not willing to allow to all others, are reasonable principles, rationally justified, according to Rawls. He terms them “articles of civic concord” and they “define a family of reasonable principles so far as their content and role discern, the general compliance with which is rational for each and every person” (LHPP, 64). Rawls took Hobbes's primary argument for these reasonable principles to be that rational parties would affirm them as the basis of social cooperation. That argument relies only on a partial, political conception of human nature: “Hobbes's psychological and other assumptions need not be strictly true of all human conduct … On the interpretation proposed, Hobbes's secular moral system is meant as a political doctrine; and as such, it is appropriate that it stress certain aspects of human life” (LHPP, 50–51). But of course, because the cooperative principles adopted need to enjoy principled compliance from actual citizens with potentially transcendent comprehensive doctrines if the society is to remain stable, Hobbes must establish the possibility of something like an overlapping consensus on those principles. This is what Hobbes attempted in the second half of Leviathan, and although his approach to doing so differs significantly from Rawls's (Lloyd 1992, 271–280), Hobbes's insight struck Rawls as clearly correct, and his evolving interpretation of Hobbes's strategy affected his development of the idea of overlapping consensus as the best means of securing stability in a pluralistic society.
It also affected Rawls's discussion of the requirements of public reason. Initially, Rawls held that public discussions of questions of basic justice and constitutional essentials ought (morally though not legally) to exclude sectarian considerations based on comprehensive doctrines. He subsequently modified his position so as to allow arguments based on sectarian considerations provided that “in due course” arguments to those same conclusions were provided in terms of purely public reasons. Why did Rawls revisit his views on public reason? And why did he limit “wide public reason” (JF, 90 n12) the way he did?
Part of the answer to the first question has to do with his appreciation of instances in which important advances in the justice of American society had been driven by religious public discourse – for instance the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and also a desire to avoid inauthenticity and factional frustration in public discourse. Why then insist that every conclusion reached on the basis of argument from a comprehensive doctrine also be reachable from an argument based solely on public reasons? If you're going to include sectarian arguments because of their efficacy, or to avoid inauthenticity, or frustration, why not go in all the way?
Hobbes held that such a limitation on public reasons is the only way to have confidence that sectarian reasons are not strictly incompatible with the minimal secular morality supporting the principles ordering our political life. Hobbes offered a robust argument that reasons based on alleged divine personal revelations should be discounted in public discourse unless they could also be supported by natural reasoning on the basis of the laws of nature. It was relatively easy for Hobbes to show this because he could tap his readers' confidence in the unity of practical reason – that because of God's design, all practical truths – prudential, moral, and religious – must cohere. Rawls dealt with this threat of strict incompatibility by counting appeals to comprehensive doctrines outside his limits of wide public reason as unreasonable. It is unreasonable to attempt to use the coercive power of the state (which is, for both Rawls and Hobbes, the power of citizens collectively) to enforce disadvantageous rules on others on grounds not justifiable to them.
Turning now to Rawls's interpretation of Rousseau, we can see how it influences his inclusion of “the social bases of self-respect” in his list of primary social goods, and why he gives that good such an important place. Many have found this puzzling. His interpretation of Rousseau also sheds light on Rawls's insistence on distinguishing three points of view – ours as philosophers designing the theory, the point of view of parties in the original position, and the point of view of citizens in the well-ordered society of justice as fairness.
Rawls said that, taken together, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's On the Social Contract, Second Discourse, and Emile might reasonably be claimed to be the greatest work of political philosophy in French, on a par with Hobbes's Leviathan in English. But Rousseau's project was much broader than those of Hobbes or Locke:
[Rousseau] seeks to diagnose what he sees as the deep-rooted evils of contemporary society and depicts the vices and miseries it arouses in its members. He hopes to explain why these evils and vices come about, and to describe the basic framework of a political and social world in which they would not be present. Rousseau, like Hume, is of another century than Hobbes and Locke. He represents the generation that … prepared the way for the coming French Revolution. Established traditions were being questioned, and the sciences were developing rapidly.
(LHPP, 192)
Rawls saw Rousseau's work as performing one of the historic tasks of political philosophy: providing a template for the design of a realistic utopia and reassurance that there is nothing in human nature that precludes our realizing a system that depends on humanity's potential for goodness. Rousseau's work stressed the values of authenticity and integrity, and, Rawls thought, laid a foundation for Mill's justifications of the liberties of thought and conscience (LHPP, 194), as well as Marx's attention to the problem of alienation.
Rousseau's idea that people are naturally good and become less so under the influence of malformed social institutions, along with his confidence in the possibility of structuring a social system that would not have this degrading effect, should give us some hope. One of Rawls's significant innovations in the interpretation of Rousseau was to distinguish between “proper” and “improper” forms of amour-propre, as opposed to simple amour de soi. Improper amour-propre, or vanity, demands that others acknowledge our superiority over them, and our natural dominance or excess of excellence. The proper form of amour-propre acknowledges our need to secure equal standing with others in our society, and is thus open to the requirements of reciprocity – of accepting fellowship on equal terms with others. It is not unnatural to see ourselves through the eyes of others; on Rawls's account of moral learning it is all but inevitable. The healthy way of doing this is by requiring that others regard us as equals. The corrupt and unhealthy way is by insisting that they acknowledge our superiority, or accede to our dominance.12 This idea is evidently at work in Rawls's counting the social bases of self-respect as among the primary goods. These social bases include the fact that citizens recognize the fact that all enjoy equal basic rights and that everyone endorses the principle of reciprocity represented by the difference principle. This is a structural rather than psychological good, but it does support the attitude of self-respect.
Rousseau's famous solution to the problem of how we may “find a form of association that defends and protects the person and good of each associate” while “each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before,” namely, the social contract, stressed the idea of equality at the highest level of how political society itself is to be understood, of the equality of citizens in virtue of their fundamental capacities for moral and civil freedom and their fundamental interests, and of general laws to preserve the conditions for personal independence by moderating lower-level inequalities. These measures provide social bases for self-respect.
But some of what Rawls learned from Rousseau shows up more specifically in his insistence on distinguishing three distinct points of view in the reasoning supporting his version of social contract theory. Many critics have conflated the points of view of parties in the original position with those of citizens in society.13 They find his separation of these deliberative perspectives mysterious. Yet if we read Rawls's interpretation of Rousseau, this segregation seems to have been partly intended to remedy a problem in Rousseau's own theory. Any citizen occupies multiple roles, as a private person, as a member of various associations, and as a citizen responsible for deliberating about the general good of the society. Rousseau required an act of will on the part of the individual to don the proper hat for the deliberative question at hand. Ideally, citizens would preclude their personal and associational perspectives from their deliberations on matters of the public good. But Rousseau recognized that weak as we are, these lines will be blurred, and thus recommended that if public deliberations are to be corrupted by factional interests, they should be corrupted by as many factional interests as possible – the more the merrier.
Rawls devised a better solution to the problem of the infection of our public reasoning by personal and associational interests. Impose informational constraints that force deliberators to wear the proper hats. Parties in the original position pursue the personal interests of those they represent but have no possibility of doing so in a way that compromises the fair terms of social cooperation that comprise the general good in a just society. Citizens in the well-ordered society pursue their associational interests against the background of a just basic structure that prevents them from corrupting fair terms of cooperation. You and I deliberate directly over fair terms of our political cooperation and, taking a philosophical perspective, collectively design the deliberative process that justifies Justice as Fairness. Recognizing our various roles in political life, Rawls introduces a four-stage sequence – from the original position designed to pick out first principles of justice to constitutional, legislative and judicial stages at which the first principles are applied to and embodied in institutions. At each stage Rawls allows reasoning from a wider range of available facts since the results reached at earlier stages remove some of the risk of unfair biases distorting our reasoning. Constrained by a constitution that itself adheres to first principles of justice, legislators may be allowed to draw in their reasoning on a wider range of facts than would be appropriate for parties settling on first principles of justice. Rawls's idea here, that we each wear or may be called to wear multiple hats in political life, is best understood, perhaps only understood, in light of his interpretation of Rousseau. Many more examples could be produced to support the claim that to try to understand Rawls without understanding Rawls's understanding of the exemplars in the history of political (and moral) philosophy is to decipher without a key.
With A Theory of Justice now more than 40 years old, still widely taught and with a steady stream of new volumes devoted to discussion of it, we can safely say that the political philosophy of Rawls belongs to the canon of Western political thought. It is not just that attention to his work has turned the corner from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, or that his work has been translated into at least 27 languages. Nor is it just that many of the generations of his students are still alive and teaching his work to their students, and teaching it in the way they learned it from Rawls. Since the publication of TJ it has often been said that we must either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not. Rawls dealt utilitarianism a formidable blow. Social contract doctrine has been corrected and refined. In the words of one of his expositors
A Theory of Justice was a formative event for twentieth-century philosophy. It showed how philosophy can do more than play with its own self-invented questions … that it can work thoroughly and creatively on important questions that every adult citizen is or should be taking seriously. Many thought, after reading this book, that it was worthwhile again to read, study, teach, and write philosophy. It became a paradigm, within academic philosophy, of clear, constructive, useful work, a book that made the profession proud, especially also because its author was such a thoroughly good and likeable person.
(Pogge 2007)
It is difficult to imagine Rawls's work ever becoming an obscure footnote in the history of political philosophy. It is almost certainly destined to become one of the “exemplars.” And if we adopt Rawls's approach to doing political philosophy – contextual and charitable interpretation in comparative study of prior systems of political and moral philosophy – as I have argued we should, we will be mining Justice as Fairness for insights into our own philosophical projects for a long time to come.
Notes
1 “Some Remarks about My Teaching” (1993). Nearly identical to his 1993 remarks are those in his 1997 paper “Burton Dreben.”
2 This and other extracts from LHPP reprinted by permission of the publisher from Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy by John Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pp. xiii–xiv, 11–12, 51, 64, 105, 108–109, 139, 162, 192, 319. Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
3 One well-known intellectual historian (who shall remain nameless) actually characterized Hobbes's Leviathan as “a particularly well-judged contribution to the ship money debate.” Contrast this deflationary assessment with Rawls's own description: “Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest single work of political thought in the English language … [T]aking everything together – including its style and its language, its scope and its acuteness and interesting vividness of observation, its intricate structure of analysis and principles, and its presentation of what I think is a dreaded way of thinking about society which almost might be true and which is a quite frightening possibility – adding all those together, the Leviathan makes, to me, a very overwhelming impression. Taken as a whole, it can have a very overwhelming and dramatic effect on our thought and feeling … There isn't anything [J.S. Mill] did that begins to have this overall effect. Locke's Second Treatise … lacks the scope and power of presentation of a political conception on the order of Hobbes” (LHPP, 23).
4 Frazer encapsulates his argument this way: “despite his commitment to interpretive humility in principle, Rawls often adopts a mode of interpretive charity which reveals a lack of interpretive humility in practice. Yet this thesis is not meant to accuse Rawls of a lack of humility as such. To the contrary, it is Rawls's great personal and political-philosophical humility which often leads him to practice an insufficient degree of interpretive humility” (2010, 219).
5 Rawls discusses these roles in JF, 1–5, and again in abbreviated form in LHPP, 10–11.
6 Oral exchange between John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, Harvard University, Oct. 1986.
7 Rawls credits Joshua Cohen with having demonstrated this in his essay “Structure, Choice and Legitimacy” (J. Cohen 1986).
8 Rawls continues, “Of course, other ways may be superior; or perhaps no revisions of the social contract view will prove satisfactory, once we have considered them thoroughly.”
9 Two helpful discussions of this topic are Nagel 2003 and Gutmann 2003.
10 Quoted from an unpublished manuscript of 1994 by Martha Nussbaum (2003). Nussbaum's paper carefully traces and assesses the development of Rawls's efforts to remedy this failure in the liberal tradition.
11 Interestingly, this characterization of Hobbes's project appears not in Rawls's lectures on Hobbes, but rather in his introductory lecture on Locke, by way of drawing attention to the quite different aims of their respective political philosophies. I speculate that this religion-heavy specification of Hobbes's project does not appear in the Hobbes lectures because those were transcribed from audio recordings of his lectures of 1983 in which he presents only Hobbes's secular arguments, whereas the description of Hobbes's project in his much later revised Locke lectures reflected a change in his thinking in the later 1980s from supervising a doctoral dissertation on Hobbes. Rawls's course outline (syllabus) from Spring 1983 assigns no readings from parts 3 or 4 of Leviathan, the half of the book in which Hobbes deals with his readers' transcendent religious interests. See LHPP, 459.
12 Elizabeth Anderson, also a student of Rawls, has written helpfully on the importance of the avoidance of relations of domination, and the good of the social bases of self-respect. See, e.g., Anderson 1999, 287.
13 Michael Sandel's claim that Rawls sees actual citizens as fundamentally “disembodied selves” because of the way he represents parties in the original position is a prime example of this sort of confusion (Sandel 1982).
Works by Rawls, with Abbreviations
“Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence” (1997), in Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (eds), Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Collected Papers (CP), ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
“The Independence of Moral Theory” (1975). In Collected Papers (286–302).
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JF), ed. Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (LHPP), ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Political Liberalism (PL), expanded edn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
“Some Remarks about My Teaching” (1993), unpublished but quoted in Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.
A Theory of Justice (TJ), rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Other References
Anderson, Elizabeth (1999) “What is the Point of Equality.” Ethics 109(2): 287–337.
Buchanan, Allen (2000) “Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World.” Ethics 110: 697–721.
Cohen, G.A. (1997) “Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26(1): 3–30.
Cohen, Joshua (1986) “Structure, Choice and Legitimacy: Locke's Theory of the State.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15(4): 301–324.
Frazer, Michael L. (2010) “Review Article: The Modest Professor: Interpretive Charity and Interpretive Humility in John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.” European Journal of Political Theory 9(2): 218–226.
Gutmann, Amy. 2003. “Rawls on the Relationship between Liberalism and Democracy.” In Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hampton, Jean (1989) “Should Political Philosophy Be Done without Metaphysics?” Ethics 99(4): 791–814.
Lloyd, S.A. (1992) Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nagel, Thomas (2003) “Rawls and Liberalism.” In Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha (2003) “Rawls and Feminism.” In Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pogge, Thomas (2004) “The Incoherence between Rawls's Theories of Justice.” Fordham Law Review 72(5): 1739–1759.
Pogge, Thomas (2007) John Rawls. New York: Oxford University Press.
Raz, Joseph (1990) “Facing Diversity: The Case for Epistemic Abstinence.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19(1): 3–46.
Sandel, Michael J. (1982) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Steven B. (2007) “Review of John Rawls's Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy.” New York Sun, May 11.