- Length
- 624 pagesHarvard University Press, revised edition 1999
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
A Theory of Justice
The book that brought political philosophy back from the dead. Rawls asked what rules people would pick if they did not know their own place in the society those rules would govern, and the answer reorganised a discipline that had spent decades declaring the question meaningless.
- Date
- 1971
- Author
- John Rawls
- Region
- Harvard, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 3 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 182 years
Revived political philosophy as a field almost single-handedly, and remains the book every position in it is defined against.
What the book says
An attempt to say what a just society would look like, by asking what principles people would choose if they did not know who they were going to be. Rawls revives the social contract as a thought experiment rather than a history. Imagine parties choosing the basic terms of their society from behind a veil of ignorance: they know general facts about economics and psychology but not their own class, talents, race, sex, generation or conception of the good. Nobody can rig the rules in their own favour because nobody knows what their favour is. Rawls argues that parties so placed would choose two principles, in order. First, each person gets the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with the same for everyone, and this cannot be traded for economic gain. Second, inequalities are permitted only if attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged - the difference principle. The rest of the book examines institutions that would satisfy this, the sense of justice that would sustain it, and why a society so arranged would be stable.
What it argues
That justice is what free and equal people would agree to under conditions that exclude bargaining advantages, and that the conditions are the argument. The veil of ignorance is not a claim about human nature but a device for modelling fairness: since the reasons for favouring one's own position are exactly the information the veil removes, whatever survives is a principle nobody could reasonably reject. Rawls holds that the parties would not gamble on ending up well placed, and would secure the worst position they might occupy - which yields the priority of basic liberties and the difference principle. The method is as important as the result: reflective equilibrium, a process of adjusting principles and considered judgements against each other until they cohere, which makes moral theory answerable to what we actually think without simply ratifying it.
What it answered
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789Jeremy Bentham
Utilitarianism, and behind it the mid-century assumption that questions about justice were not properly philosophical at all. When Rawls began, Anglophone moral philosophy was largely occupied with the meaning of moral terms, and political philosophy had been pronounced dead more than once. He answered by writing a substantive theory of the kind that had supposedly become impossible, and by taking the contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau and Kant seriously as a method rather than as history.
What answered it
Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1974Robert Nozick
Nozick in 1974, from the libertarian side, arguing that patterns cannot be maintained without continuous interference with liberty. Communitarians - Sandel, MacIntyre, Walzer, Taylor - argued through the 1980s that the parties behind the veil are stripped of everything that makes a person capable of moral judgement, so the device presupposes a self that does not exist. Feminist critics, Okin foremost, pointed out that the family is left almost entirely outside the theory although it is where most inequality begins. Sen and Nussbaum objected that primary goods are the wrong measure, since people differ in what they can do with the same resources. Rawls answered several of these in Political Liberalism.
How it argues
By construction, at length, with every objection anticipated. Rawls builds a device, derives principles from it, and then spends two-thirds of the book on institutions and stability, which is the part fewest readers reach. The argumentative style is patient to the point of slowness and almost entirely without rhetoric; he states positions he rejects with great care and concedes ground readily. The book is long because it is trying to do at one go what a research programme normally does over decades, and it succeeded in launching one.
The moment
Harvard in the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and arguments about conscription and civil disobedience running through the university. Rawls had served in the Pacific as an infantryman, had seen Hiroshima shortly after the bombing, and rarely spoke about either. He worked on the book for twenty years, taught constantly, and was by every account an unusually careful and unassertive man who produced the most assertive book in his field.
How it travelled
Into an entire discipline. Within a decade political philosophy had reorganised itself around the book, and the positions that defined themselves against it - libertarian, communitarian, feminist, capabilities-based - are the map of the field. Its vocabulary escaped philosophy: the original position, the veil of ignorance and the difference principle are used in law, economics, public policy and bioethics by people who have never read it.
The strongest objection
Nozick's, because it goes to the shape of the theory rather than to any particular principle. Rawls asks what pattern a just distribution would exhibit; Nozick replies that justice in holdings is historical - it depends on how things came to be held, through legitimate acquisition and voluntary transfer - and that if a distribution is just, then whatever people freely do from it is also just, however unequal the result. Maintaining any pattern therefore requires continuous interference with voluntary exchange. Rawlsians answer that the basic structure of a society is not a set of private transactions and that the entitlements Nozick appeals to are themselves defined by institutions the theory has to justify. The exchange has continued for fifty years without resolution, which is a mark of how well both sides were stated.
Why read it
Not all of it. The first three chapters set out the device and derive the principles, and that is what almost everyone means by Rawls. The sections on civil disobedience and on the priority of liberty repay reading. Part three, on moral psychology and stability, is the least read and the part Rawls thought essential.
- First printed
- 1971
- First in English
- 1971
- Digitised
- No
The 1999 revision changes the text in numerous places; citations should specify which edition. Political Liberalism of 1993 abandons the claim that the theory rests on a comprehensive doctrine and recasts it as one that citizens with different worldviews could share.
Written in English and translated into more than thirty languages. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and dominant. Whatever position a contemporary political philosopher holds, it is stated in relation to this book, and the secondary literature is larger than for any other twentieth-century work in the field.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the parties behind the veil would in fact choose Rawls' principles rather than gamble is disputed, and the argument from the worst outcome has been challenged on decision-theoretic grounds since the 1970s. Whether the difference principle follows from the device or is imported into it is argued. How far Political Liberalism revises rather than restates the theory divides interpreters. And the near-absence of the family, of disability and of the international sphere from the original book has generated three substantial literatures, each arguing about whether the framework can be extended to cover them or has to be replaced.