This opening chapter introduces the chapters included in this conference volume, explains why they are grouped as they are, and highlights the many fascinating thematic continuities among them.

Rawls’s Original Position, the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, cannot be the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. The Original Position cannot satisfy Rawls’s own publicity condition, which requires justifications that are accessible to all citizens. I hypothesize that over time Rawls weakened his publicity condition because he saw this tension, but that he could not resolve it. However, Rawls’s work contains a justification for justice as fairness that is publicly accessible: that in a well-ordered society, all citizens can have self-respect. I set up this discussion with Rawls’s critique of meritocracy, which, Rawls fears, sets citizens against each other in a zero-sum competition for self-respect. In a meritocracy, elites display their power and wealth, while the less fortunate may fall into resentment, rancor, and possibly a destructive racial nationalism. A Rawlsian society of self-respect offers a more just and stable model of social unity.

This chapter explores Rawls’s suggestion that seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes may have been the first political liberal, by investigating whether Hobbes’s system makes room for a notion of the reasonable not reducible to instrumental rationality.

Rawls’s argument that a well-ordered society would be a social union of social unions is crucial to his larger argument for stability. The former argument depends upon what I call “the security assumption.” I contend that reasonable religious pluralism casts doubt on the assumption and on the argument which appeals to it. Seeing why the dubitability of the security assumption makes the idea of a social union of social unions non-viable, we can come to a better understanding of the development of Rawls’s thought. Equally if not more important is the relevance of the security assumption for contemporary politics. That assumption identifies a condition that must be satisfied if members of a liberal democracy are to find their collective activity as citizens inherently valuable. Failure to satisfy that condition suggests why some members of liberal democracies as we know them deny the inherent value of relations with their fellow citizens.

The concept of justice that A Theory of Justice theorizes is, as Rawls puts it early on, “the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.” Shortly thereafter, he comments, “Now this approach may not seem to tally with tradition.” The topic of this essay is the difference between Rawls’s concept of justice and the traditional one. My main observation is that the significance of injustice in Rawls’s sense is very different from the significance of injustice in the traditional sense. Traditional injustice entails that someone has been wronged in a way that warrants resentment, guilt, and indignation. Injustice in Rawls’s sense does not entail this.

In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.

I explain how I understand the practice of political theology, treating it as a dimension of moral theology and emphasizing that I undertake it in the analytic mode. I clarify my understanding of states and of nations and nationalism. I emphasize the importance of a constrained view of providence for my project, reject theistic voluntarism as an account of value and obligation, emphasize the importance of a Logos theology for my approach, and briefly indicate some reservations about social trinitarianism, especially as a basis for political theology. I suggest that we should view ethics as concerned with creational flourishing and spell out a corresponding account of practical judgment. I offer brief remarks about how we might think about possessions. I provide an overview of the book’s arguments before beginning to explain why Christians might be doubtful that democracy is the solution to the problems I identify with the state.

Attempted justifications for state authority sometimes appeal to the notion of the common good. We can understand the common good as the genuine and important good of just social order, which enables the pursuit of the varied ways of flourishing embraced by diverse people. Historical examples, theoretical models, and contemporary experiments point to the possibility of institutions that contribute to the maintenance of this good without seeking to rule without consent, to exclude alternatives, or to represent territorially defined populations. “Consociationalism” can be used to name several approaches to rooting decision-making and the fostering of social order in sets of associations. I propose a radical consociationalism in which the associations responsible for protection and adjudication are detached entirely from particular territories. I consider the role of the church in maintaining social order in a radically consociational world. And I explain why I believe radical consociationalism is preferable to global democracy.

Gary Chartier is Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. A theologian, philosopher, legal scholar, and political theorist, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of current or forthcoming books including Loving Creation: The Task of the Moral Life (Fortress, 2022), Understanding Friendship: On the Moral, Political, and Spiritual Meaning of Love (Fortress, 2022), and The Analogy of Love: Divine and Human Love at the Center of Christian Theology (2nd ed., Griffin, 2017, 2020). His byline has appeared over forty times in journals including Religious Studies, the Anglican Theological Review, and the Heythrop Journal, and he served as editor of a 2012 symposium in the Griffith Law Review. He presented a keynote address at the 2015 conference of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy and received La Sierra’s triennial Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2010. He has guested on a wide range of broadcasts and podcasts, including Stossel, Reason TV, and The Young Turks. He is a member of professional associations including the Society for the Study of Theology, the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, the Society of Christian Philosophers, and the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. He serves as a member of the board of directors of the Molinari Institute and as a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society.