PREFACE

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN the English-speaking world today is largely concerned with a set of liberal ideas about justice, equality, and the obligations of individual citizens in capitalist welfare states. For the most part, it is also associated with a certain view of the tasks of political philosophy—how it works and what it aims to do. At other times and in other places in the history of political thought, political philosophy has served to legitimize political change by appealing to history or utopia, or to particular groups or actors as the motors of reform or revolution. Now, liberal political philosophers pass ethical judgments on the world by appealing to general moral principles designed to help us make sense of what justice requires of our politics and institutions. This dominant idea of political philosophy rests on a faith that the political world would be better off if it could be reformed in accordance with those principles. Its advocates conceive of themselves as engaged in a common intellectual project with a shared conceptual vocabulary. They hope that we can be guided by their philosophical vision of what social life could be like if institutions were more just and more equal.

In the middle of the twentieth century, it was less certain what political philosophy was and what it could do. There was no settled view of the moral principles at its core or of the terms of philosophical debate. Nor was there a consistent understanding of what kind of politics it envisioned, or what was required to implement that vision in the world. Sometime between then and the early twenty-first century, the very idea of political philosophy was transformed. A collection of ideas cohered into a doctrine known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Theories of egalitarian distributive justice became the dominant way of thinking about institutions. Even where they were challenged, they were taken as a referent.

This book is a history of the transformation of liberal political philosophy that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. It is about how one theory, born of the postwar era, became the dominant mode of theorizing in a different age, and continued to shape political philosophy in the Anglophone world in new historical circumstances, long after the moment of its birth had passed. In 1971, the American liberal analytical philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. There he laid out the apparatus of justice theory that became the dominant conceptual framework for subsequent theorizing about politics among philosophers and many political theorists in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. His account of a just society required its reorganization into a “property-owning democracy” where inequalities were heavily circumscribed and everyone had a stake.

The impact of Rawls’s theory on the landscape and language of political philosophy was immense. Only a decade after the publication of A Theory of Justice, one bibliography listed 2,512 books and articles engaging with Rawls’s thought.¹ For his followers, Rawls became a patron saint, the visionary behind an egalitarian dream of distributive justice. Among his critics, he was known as a neo-Kantian individualist who adapted the toolkit of rational choice and decision theory and viewed individuals as at once self-interested economic agents and autonomous moral persons. They saw him as providing a philosophical rationalization of a liberal welfare state or, worse, a defense of the conservative status quo that implicitly framed America as a land of liberty and civic freedom. Yet in his wake, political philosophy was remade. Philosophical liberalism became synonymous with Rawls, and political philosophy synonymous with a kind of liberalism born of postwar America. Even many who opposed it were shaped by it. By the late twentieth century, Anglophone political theorists operated in the shadow of justice theory.

When the story of this transformation is told, particularly by political philosophers themselves, it is usually presented as one of philosophical success. They give a narrative of philosophy’s midcentury death and its revival with the publication of Rawls’s Theory. On this reading, the Second World War had left philosophers unable to think about justice or utopia. Political theory was declared to be dead.² That all changed with Rawls: his book provided robust foundations for the revival of normative theory and the reinvention of political thought. For political philosophers, and often for historians of political thought, 1971 marked the date of the major philosophical event of late twentieth-century liberalism.³ It has, however, become hard to ignore that this date coincides with seismic events of the postwar order. For many historians, the 1970s mark the collapse of the social liberalism that surged to dominance after the war, enabled by the concrete political and economic successes of capitalist welfare states. In these years, those states faced profound fiscal and legitimacy crises. The rise of neoliberalism, as well as rights-based forms of individualism, overturned ideas about the public interest and fractured ideas of the common good.⁴ Against the backdrop of this broader transformation of social liberalism, the publication of Rawls’s theory—the great philosophical defense of the welfare state—came on the eve of its crisis. It hailed from a bygone era, the last gasp of a dying welfarist ideology.⁵

This book gives a different view. The story of philosophy’s death and revival is a tale of philosophical success. But it is also a ghost story, in which Rawls’s theory lived on as a spectral presence long after the conditions it described were gone. The late twentieth-century transformation of liberal philosophy begins with Rawls, but it does not begin in 1971. Rawls’s liberalism came from a different America. It was never straightforwardly a defense of the welfare state. It was also forged in an era when liberalism was full of contradictions. Even at its postwar peak, American liberalism remained limited and exclusionary.⁶ It also contained already many of the ideas that would characterize the transformation of political order that took place in the 1970s.⁷

Rawls’s theory had its origins in a forgotten world of ethics and in a set of ideological battles that his own shadow has long hidden from view—in part thanks to the move of philosophy, which he led by example, to “a higher level of abstraction.”⁸ When the intellectual architecture of contemporary liberal philosophy was first built, Rawls drew on decades of political and economic debates about liberalism—only some of which were concerned with the welfare state. The theory we now call liberal egalitarianism reflected a particular constellation of postwar liberalism and its afterlives. Yet the construction of that theory was not the work of one man alone. The sociological conditions that enabled its rise were set in the postwar years and in the 1960s, in part due to the impact of the Vietnam War on a younger generation of moral and political philosophers who worked in the Cold War university. In the 1970s and 1980s, it became the theory that mediated the relationship of political philosophers to politics.

Understanding this remaking of political philosophy involves returning to its historical origins, exploring which political events and ideas shaped philosophical debate, and determining how and when they did so. In the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship of philosophers to politics changed, thanks to the dominance of this distinctive approach to political philosophy—the liberal philosophy of “public affairs”—and the distinctive theory that became dominant within it, liberal egalitarianism. This book is about that change and its consolidation, and about the politics of that approach and that theory. It describes what that politics was and what it foreclosed, and how it became submerged in the period of philosophical reinvention and interpretation that followed the publication of Rawls’s book. The resurgent faith that philosophy could improve the world and the philosophical vision of what justice is and what social life could be were products of a specific historical moment and its constraints. What follows is the history of how that faith and vision emerged from a less familiar world, and how their rise has shaped our own.

This book begins in the midcentury United States, a period following the Depression and Second World War when debates over the nature of liberalism took a particular form. In the 1930s, many liberals had found common ground with labor and with progressives in support of state planning for welfarist ends, even as they fought over the extent of reform.⁹ By the end of the Second World War, trust in government was at a high.¹⁰ Yet totalitarianism abroad also made the state an object of suspicion.¹¹ In the postwar years, liberals who were skeptical of the expansion of the administrative state and the New Deal order saw the task for liberalism as securing the values of freedom and equality without the state intervention and political control that decades of state expansion had made a new norm. A range of political and economic theories that provided alternatives to state planning and intervention flourished: theories of political pluralism and civil society, constitutional theories that offered legal constraints on the state, Keynesian ideas that sought a stable rather than a planned economy, and visions of a limited state to secure only capital rights, which invoked the language of anti-statism to do so. After the New Deal and the Second World War, ideas of community, law, associational life, consensus, civil society, and morality were increasingly deployed in a turn away from the strong central state or in the name of a chastened or accommodationist liberalism.¹²

When Rawls first began to build his political philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s, it was these ideas he encountered. While few midcentury analytical philosophers were trying to construct theories of politics and society on a grand scale, many social scientists were analyzing social “systems” and developing general theories.¹³ Rawls shared their grander ambitions. He sought to justify a liberalism that preserved the ethical life of individuals and associations and to provide a theory that judged the morality of relations and social institutions at a general level. As a young man, he was initially drawn to a Protestant communitarian ethics of persons and a focus on moral worth and character.¹⁴ Soon he adapted from anti-statist, pluralist, and early neoliberal ideas, as well as with Wittgenstein and forms of conventionalism. His youthful skepticism of the state and group interest put his political orientation outside the mainstream liberal consensus. Yet at the height of Cold War anticommunism, Rawls moved left. He turned to theorize equality and institutions, finding inspiration in British debates about equality and social justice on the right wing of the Labour Party and also in American discourses of poverty.¹⁵ Gradually, Rawls assembled his theory of a just society out of the social democratic liberalism of the postwar moment.

The theory Rawls built transformed the conceptual vocabulary of political philosophy to an unprecedented degree. When Rawls began to construct this theory, postwar philosophers were using novel ideas of hypothetical choice, rules, practices, and principles, and Rawls was no exception. He used these ideas to develop a new language for liberalism and to forge the conceptual apparatus for his institutional theory of justice. His theory included new methods for ethical decision-making, like his famous “original position.” It also included novel concepts like the idea of the moral person or “the basic structure,” an abstraction designed to capture the concrete realities of individuals and the state after the war. Rawls invented an entire language, and by the end of the twentieth century countless books were dedicated to the elaboration of its terms: “the veil of ignorance,” “reflective equilibrium,” “overlapping consensus,” “the difference principle,” “ideal and non-ideal theory,” and “liberal egalitarianism” itself.

Subsequent generations of political philosophers would contest Rawls’s methods and concepts, but for many they would later take on the appearance of common sense. Yet they relied on a particular set of assumptions about the nature of social and political life in postwar America. For Rawls’s theory was born in the 1940s and 1950s—a product of the Second World War, not the Great Society, as is often assumed. Many of his ideas lasted a lifetime but were first formed in the early postwar years. It is conventional to see Rawls’s work as characterized by a turn in his later life.¹⁶ But ideas that feature centrally in A Theory of Justice and then in Political Liberalism (1993) had earlier roots, such as the idea of property-owning democracy, as well as his account of democratic deliberation, stability, and overlapping consensus. A Theory of Justice was in many respects a snapshot of Rawls’s ideas at the time of publication. Later, he would look back to ideas he had left behind.

At the end of the 1950s, Rawls had most of his theory in place. Yet he delayed the publication of his mature theory of justice for over a decade, during which time he did not update his core assumptions. In the interim years, the postwar social and political theories that the young Rawls had read or drawn from were overthrown. The system-building ambitions of social scientists were criticized. First the New Left, civil rights, and radical protests of the 1960s and then the material crises of the 1970s called into question theories of growth and modernization, consensus, and pluralism.¹⁷ Rawls’s theory survived this turbulence unscathed. That meant that a particular variety of postwar liberalism was preserved in philosophical amber for the duration of the 1960s. Moreover, during this decade, a different set of conditions that made for the enthusiastic reception of Rawls’s book also developed.

During the 1960s, in debates about civil disobedience, obligation, war, and responsibility, a new generation of socially liberal philosophers began to explore ethical problems raised by contemporary political predicaments. The agenda and preoccupations of modern Anglo-American liberal philosophy were forged in the moral crisis of that decade. Thanks to conscription, the war in Vietnam intruded into the universities. Philosophy and politics became synchronous: liberal philosophers began to engage directly with political events, and the pace and drama of those events helped set the agenda and nature of philosophical debate.¹⁸ These years were a turning point in the larger transformation of political philosophy. A circle of liberal legal, moral, and political philosophers around Rawls began to meet. It included T. M. Scanlon, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer. Along with others, they initiated the philosophical study of “public affairs” and the ascent of “applied ethics.” They were concerned as much with moral agency as with the justice of institutions. With the rise of ideas of rights and judicial power associated with the Warren Court, political philosophers came to engage more with constitutional law and rights-claims. In response to the civil rights movement and antiwar protests to their left, they developed new theories of civil disobedience and responsibility. They also turned their attention from the moral limits of the state to the moral limits of political action and war. Walzer’s just war theory, as well as Rawls’s account of civil disobedience, which has dominated liberal philosophy ever since, emerged here. It was also these debates that provided the sociological and intellectual conditions for the subsequent debates about Rawls’s theory, as well as the transformation of philosophy in its wake.

When A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, it was at a moment of disorder.¹⁹ Many were looking for the kind of stability that Rawls had searched for in the aftermath of the war two decades earlier. Rawls’s readers saw his advocacy of social democracy and racial liberalism as fitting the needs of a new era. Amid the crises of the 1970s, liberal political philosophers developed a particular interpretation of Rawls’s theory as distributional and institutional in focus. Its key political assumptions were entrenched, and its categories naturalized. Over the course of the decade, the theory became a doctrine. Liberal egalitarianism was born.

Rawls’s institutional justice theory became a framework for subsequent philosophical debate about politics. “Political philosophers,” Robert Nozick wrote in 1974, “now must either work within Rawls’s theory, or explain why not.”²⁰ It provided a philosophical system in an age when system-building was on the way out. As was the case with his German counterpart Jürgen Habermas, Rawls’s universalist and normative aspirations outlasted the challenges of poststructuralism and post-Marxist critical theories (though since he never engaged explicitly with those traditions, he had far fewer challenges to endure than Habermas; and unlike Habermas, when Rawls engaged with the socialist left, it was from a starting point outside it).²¹ In the decade after his theory was published, Rawls’s colleagues, students, and followers objected to its discrete parts, but many came to accept the “Rawlsian” framework as a whole. For large numbers of his readers, the theory signified and re-presented civil rights and Great Society liberalism. As a work of theory, it became a vehicle for the overcoming of old intellectual divisions. Economics was made ethical, and analytical philosophy was made political. Political philosophers adapted tools from across the social sciences to deal with distributive challenges. Soon, some tried to update the theory for a different political moment. Political philosophers like Charles Beitz and Brian Barry tried to stretch the framework of justice theory across space and time, to accommodate the world and the future in the different climate of 1970s internationalism. In these efforts, global justice theory and intergenerational justice theory were born.

These debates altered the relationship of political philosophy to politics. In the 1950s, Rawls had begun to build a theory by abstracting from his postwar realities. In the 1960s, moral and political philosophers responded rapidly and deliberately to political events. They also looked to develop general ethical principles that could apply to any situation. This involved their own institution-building: many journals, institutes, and associations of political philosophy, political theory, and applied ethics were founded in the Vietnam years. After Rawls’s theory became available, his followers looked to his theory first, and then applied it to different political circumstances, adjusting it as they saw fit. They also looked to preformulated general principles. As liberal egalitarianism was constructed, the relationship of philosophy to politics was inverted. Political philosophers explored new political problems, including population growth, environmental crisis, international inequality, and the rise of the New Right. But often they brought Rawls’s theory with them and used his abstractions as guides. That theory now mediated the encounters of political philosophers with politics. It had its own logic, which helped determine what ethical and political problems would count as sufficiently puzzling to warrant philosophical concern. That logic also had a political dimension, which in turn helped to shape philosophy’s political preoccupations.

For Rawls’s liberalism came with the theory. At certain moments, liberal philosophers invoked his philosophical ideas to attack political and ideological alternatives. Over the course of the 1970s, they defended liberal egalitarianism against libertarianism to its right and forms of anticolonialism and socialism to its left. Many also tried to accommodate these ideas within Rawls’s framework without destabilizing it. With the advance of a vibrant academic left, some drew from Marxism. Others looked to human rights discourses or neoliberal social and economic theories to deploy ideas of markets, rights, and humanity in their theories of justice and equality. They did so in ways that ultimately reinforced the logic of liberal egalitarianism or of the new political philosophy more broadly. By the 1980s, liberal egalitarianism had become the dominant theory within Anglo-American political philosophy. Liberal political philosophers were now deeply engaged with applied ethics, distributive justice theory, constitutional law, and welfare economics.

Yet even as this new liberal paradigm triumphed, there were persistent disagreements among philosophers, and aspects of the new political philosophy came apart. In certain respects, philosophers changed with the times. Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, and others sought to meet the New Right on its terms and in ways that led to departures from Rawls’s ideas. As the institutions of the welfare state were hollowed out by neoliberal policies, a kind of disembedding of the Rawlsian project seemed under way. But these ideas also signaled a different form of abstraction, one that was less institutional, yet potentially more politically radical. Nonetheless, Rawls’s theory continued to grip the philosophical imagination. Few political philosophers tried to overhaul liberal egalitarianism to grapple with the concrete changes of the state and capitalism in an era of increasing privatization and financialization.²² Older categories remained in place. Moreover, the overreach of the distributive framework prompted a backlash. A number of influential critics, such as Bernard Williams, Judith Shklar, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, challenged liberal philosophy by appeal to psychology and community. They often, however, returned to the ideas that had been left out or left behind at midcentury. These critics thus provided a mirror image of the political ideas they criticized. The capaciousness of liberal philosophy squeezed out possibilities for radical critique. Rawls’s theory spawned a discipline. It also shaped the ideas of those many political theorists and philosophers who became conscripted to liberal philosophy, whether they liked it or not.²³ They continued to live in the shadow of justice theory.

At one level, this is the story of the triumph of a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. It is a story that includes few women, except at the margins, and fewer people of color. Not all its protagonists are British or American, but they all worked in Britain or the United States. With the help of economists, lawyers, and political theorists, they constructed a universalizing liberal theory that took on a life of its own. They began from where they were. They focused almost entirely on North American and Western European welfare states, except in their imagination of the global. They were Anglophone in their philosophical orientation (though when it came to the history of philosophy, they read an anglicized Kant and Hegel as much as Hume and Smith). Yet they wanted their political philosophy to have a broader reach. They tried to expand their theories across space to encompass wider communities, nations, the international realm, and ultimately the planet. They also moved across time, drawing on the past to reimagine the future and to make political philosophy as universal and unconstrained as possible. At stake at every stage of their efforts was the question of what kind of liberalism their theories entailed, and what forms of politics it legitimated. Their debates about the principles of justice and the institutions they judged also had implications for another set of concerns that operated at a deeper level: about the nature of personhood and the individual, about what people were like, and what institutions should do to help them to cope with the uncertainties of modern life. In their institutional theories, much else was at stake: the nature of agency, desert, merit, responsibility, and the relevance of these to politics; the relationship of luck to morality; the place of the future and the past in political thinking; and the question of what kinds of choices people can make and what kind of control they can take over their lives.

The history told here is, at least in part, about the success of these ideas. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the political philosophers who are the main protagonists of this book became globally influential. They founded a field of inquiry with a vast academic reach and accessed political power through the economists, lawyers, and policy experts who read them—and more indirectly, through the thousands of elite students they taught. Over time their ideas became more technical and difficult for outsiders to grasp. In the early years of the Cold War university, when certain disciplinary boundaries were porous or unformed, political philosophers debated with a range of theorists within and beyond departments of philosophy.²⁴ By the last quarter of the century, they debated more among themselves. And there were more of them—mostly in philosophy departments, but also in departments of political science and law schools. They increasingly distinguished themselves from other kinds of philosophers and from political theorists.²⁵ Political theory as a subfield of political science had its own identity and distinct traditions, which included conservative followers of Leo Strauss, critical theorists, historians of political thought, and New Left and post-Marxist theorists of democracy and, later, agonism, who followed Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin.²⁶ Yet after its rise, many political theorists came to define themselves against Rawlsianism. This was sometimes a disciplinary distinction, or a local institutional one, about where individuals worked or in what discipline they trained. But the moniker of “political philosopher” also became a signal of sympathy for Rawlsian ideas or the philosophy of public affairs, wherever they might be found.

This book is about the construction of modern liberal political philosophy, but it is also about its relationship to politics. To many critics, that relationship is best described as an ever-widening chasm.²⁷ Political philosophers seemed to grow increasingly detached from politics, even if they moved closer to policy. Perhaps this was the price paid for high-level philosophy, or an inevitable outcome of the path dependence of expertise typical across the human sciences as much as the hard sciences, which has made the inaccessibility of scholarly debate unavoidable. But expertise does not exist in a political vacuum. At the end of the Cold War, when liberalism was without rival and commentators declared that history had ended, the liberal egalitarian tools for finding technical solutions to distributional problems seemed to complement the centrist technocratic liberalism that had become dominant.²⁸ The universalizing vision of liberal philosophers was far more egalitarian than this technocratic counterpart and in practice had little in common with it. But it seemed similarly optimistic about the possibilities of rising above politics.

At another level, politics proved to be inescapable. Political philosophers were frequently confronted by political constraints, which operated in a variety of ways. Liberal egalitarianism had a paradox at its heart. On the one hand, Rawls’s theory provided a distinctive and fairly fixed vision of justice and social liberalism. On the other, it implied a capacious and flexible view of philosophy and a great confidence in its capacities. But the combination of a fixed political vision and a flexible view of philosophy was hard to sustain. At times, the latter threatened the former: could philosophers expand their theories in every direction and still retain their core political commitment to a liberal egalitarianism? They insisted they could. But that was not always clear in practice. In the 1980s, for instance, philosophers borrowed ideas of markets, choice, and responsibility from the New Right in the service of egalitarianism, in ways that risked undermining their commitments to community and reciprocity. Amid debates in the 1970s about global redistribution in the context of decolonization, some insisted that it was possible to commit to ideas of both humanity and justice despite these having rival implications in current public debates. When faced with the abandonment of socialist ideas of common ownership for equality on the British left, in the 1950s and again in the early 1980s, philosophers insisted that arguments for equality and socialism were conceptually coherent and compatible, avoiding the fact that in each conjuncture this coherence did not translate simply into political compatibility. As certain arguments recurred or were redeployed in different contexts, they took on new meaning. With the political center of gravity moving to the right, some philosophers moved with it. And as the center shifted, so did the valence of liberal ideas. Overall, liberal egalitarianism looked increasingly like a philosophy of the liberal left, especially at a time of growing inequality. A theory that began by borrowing from the anti-statist right moved left and was reinvented as the philosophical legacy of New Deal liberalism. It became the liberal egalitarianism that continues to grip the philosophical imagination.

There have been other times when the fixed political vision of these theories threatened the flexibility of philosophy. After Rawls’s theory—itself tied to a postwar liberal vision—became a new baseline, ideas that were incompatible with it were set aside or taken out of philosophical discourse altogether. Liberal philosophers dispensed with older arguments—about the nature of the state, political control, collective action, corporate personality, or appeals to history. Their conceptual choices often had political implications. The choice of certain theories or the prioritizing of certain values or arguments could mean giving up on others. This was the case regardless of the political motivations of particular individuals, who sometimes became trapped in conceptual structures of their own collective making. Removing certain kinds of perspectives and arguments from view had unintended consequences, which limited the ideological flexibility of political philosophy. For instance, putting coercive claims outside of deliberative procedures could entail putting aside labor politics. Rejecting the normative relevance of certain historical processes and structures at times involved portraying as irrelevant those actors and forces that brought about the modern world, whether social movements, states, empires, or capitalism. Moreover, many political disagreements were explained, legitimated, or suppressed by such philosophical choices. Just as often, rival political visions or arguments were not rejected outright, but domesticated and accommodated within the liberal egalitarian paradigm—often in a way that diffused their force. As subsequent generations built on the arguments of their forebears, a philosophical paradigm took on a political shape that none of its discrete theorists might have intended.

The fixed politics constrained the reach of liberal theories in other ways too. Rawls may have intended his theory to be dynamic, but in practice it was haunted by the ghosts of postwar liberalism. Assumptions about the nature of politics that were formed in midcentury liberal debates were built into this theory and remained largely uncontested, even as the world changed. Past ideas mediated the relationship of theory and practice and exerted a destabilizing pull on the present. Sometimes philosophers directly addressed this difficulty—for instance, when theorists of global justice tried to update Rawls’s theory for a new era of international interdependence. At other times, the dominance of Rawls’s concepts made it hard for philosophers to respond adequately to new developments. It was not always clear what updating Rawls might entail. For instance, the broad contours of both his view of the state and his account of those for whom his principles of justice worked continued to be accepted even as the state and the constituencies and composition of democratic politics were transformed. Rawls’s account of justification itself encouraged philosophers who followed him to constantly update their arguments, but the main conceptual building blocks of his theory, like the idea of the basic structure, remained in place. Many also continued to uphold a premise of Rawls’s theory that was drawn from a postwar idea: that deep down, social life rested on the possibility of consensus and ethical agreement. This vision idealized a moment from the midcentury American past when liberalism was triumphant against the right and left. Liberal philosophers never gave up on this consensual vision of politics. It was what enabled their confidence in philosophy.

This book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices. It explores how philosophers responded to political events, how they became constrained by their prior theoretical choices, and how those choices had wide-ranging effects on the history of twentieth-century thought. Its focus is on how the political orientation of liberal political philosophy took shape, what paths political philosophers did and did not take, and how the questions asked by philosophers and the answers they gave came to structure the tasks, priorities, and boundaries of political philosophy.²⁹

Chapter 1 begins with the young Rawls and the ideas that first motivated him. It explains how over the 1940s and 1950s these ideas shaped his theory of justice. Chapters 2 and 3 explain the broader transformation that took place in liberal political philosophy during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, first in debates about obligation and civil disobedience that began in the late 1950s and spanned the following decade, and then in debates about war and responsibility between 1965 and the early 1970s. Chapter 4 charts the initial reception of A Theory of Justice and the construction of liberal egalitarianism during the 1970s.

Chapter 4 is also a hinge in this book. The early chapters show the conditions for the creation of the body of work that came to be known as liberal egalitarianism, as well as the origins of applied ethics and the philosophy of public affairs. The remainder of the book explores the extension and contestation of that new body of theory, and what happened to political philosophy after the arrival of the new egalitarians. Chapters 5 and 6 show how liberal political philosophers extended these ideas in debates about famine, basic needs, the New International Economic Order, overpopulation, and environmental survival. These chapters explore the roots of international and intergenerational theories of justice, as well as influential alternative responses to new predicaments, like Derek Parfit’s population ethics. Chapter 7 charts the response of liberal egalitarians to challenges from their right and left. It traces the development of analytical Marxism and luck-egalitarianism and shows how ideas of the New Right permeated liberal philosophy in the 1980s. Chapter 8 explores some of the most influential critiques of the new philosophy of public affairs and how these critiques shaped liberal political thought at the end of the Cold War. It describes how much political theory, including many critics of liberal egalitarianism, continued to operate in the shadow of justice.

Chapters 1, 4, and 7 describe how Rawls’s theory of justice and modern distributive justice theory took shape. During the debates explored here, political philosophers encountered theories of the welfare state and neoliberal ideas in ways that prepared them for, but also made them susceptible to, the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Chapters 2 and 3 show the development of the broader approach to liberal philosophy among the philosophers of public affairs. The crucial formative events for the institutional construction of political philosophy was not the legitimacy crisis of the 1970s but the Vietnam War and the social movements of the 1960s. When it came to Rawls’s theory itself, however, what mattered was the Second World War and the political world created and foreclosed in its aftermath. The focus of this book is on how that political world shaped political philosophy in Britain and the United States, and more locally at Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton, the institutions in which these ideas circulated. It was at these universities that the practice and enterprise of modern Anglo-American liberal political philosophy was consolidated.³⁰

Overall, this book is more focused on philosophical responses to politics than on the place of Rawls and liberal egalitarianism within the longer history of political thought. As such, the book’s aim is less to understand Rawls’s reading of Kant or Hegel or Hume or Sidgwick, or to explicate his engagement with particular philosophical texts or traditions and challenge or confirm his place in a particular canon, or even to reconstruct Rawls’s intellectual biography and his conceptual, philosophical, and theological motivations.³¹ It tries instead to make sense of the political work Rawls’s theory and these acts of intellectual engagement were doing, both for him and for those who read him, and what their consequences were. It also begins from the assumption that Rawls and his contemporaries inhabited a discursive “problem-space” that is at some distance from our own, even if our own emerged from it. The problems they posed and believed were worth posing, and the stakes of the questions they asked, were distinctive and not always wholly familiar.³² To join political philosophy to its politics requires a form of intellectual history that pays close attention to the political world that philosophers inhabited and that looks to reconstruct their immediate ideological context. For Rawls, that context was the aftermath of the largest war and most significant expansion of state control in history, a period when few thought it possible or desirable to return to older forms of liberalism. It is here that this story begins.