30 - Citizen

Summary

In TJ, the idea or role of a citizen, as opposed to that of a “moral person,” does not play a major role. The term does not appear in the index, and though it appears in the book several times, it is not a fundamental idea. This is not to say it is of no importance at all to the early Rawls. In particular, the idea of a citizen as setting an important role that people have appears on several occasions, including the idea of the “representative citizen,” who is used as a standard for evaluating the basic liberties (TJ 179, 211), and in the idea of “equal citizenship,” which is used as one of the relevant social positions in evaluating the two principles of justice (TJ 82). Important as these uses of the idea of a citizen are, however, they are not central to the argument and do not come in for sustained analysis in TJ.

All of this changes when we turn from TJ to PL. With the development of a political, as opposed to comprehensive, liberalism, Rawls moves the idea of a citizen to the center of his analysis. In fact, one of the best ways to understand the development from TJ to PL is to focus on Rawls’s shift from the idea of “free and equal persons” in TJ to the idea of “free and equal citizens” in PL. The increasing importance and centrality of the idea of a citizen in PL is both central to and indicative of the move to political liberalism. In TJ Rawls had envisioned a “well-ordered society” as one made up of people who see themselves as “free and equal moral persons” who not only take themselves to be sources of moral claims on others, but also “conceive of themselves as free persons who can revise and alter their inal ends and who give priority to preserving their liberty in this respect” (TJ 475). As Rawls came to realize, this conception of the person was not one that everyone in a democratic society could accept.