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Historicizing Rawls

Part of: The Historical Rawls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Sophie Smith
Sophie Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The opening, in 2004, of John Rawls's personal archive prompted a new wave of Rawls scholarship. This work has deepened our understanding of the development and impact of Rawls's ideas and of the broader contours of twentieth-century analytical political philosophy. This article places these recent archival histories, for the first time, in the context of the longer history of attempts to historicize Rawls, beginning with the publication of A Theory of Justice fifty years ago. Doing so does three things. First, it shows that early readers were more interested in how to think historically about Rawls than is sometimes assumed. Second, it reveals that partisan accounts of Rawls's place in history, popularized by those close to him, have sometimes made their way into the archival studies. Third and finally, it offers an opportunity to rethink how the twentieth-century history of political philosophy and political theory is often told.

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Forum: The Historical Rawls
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 906 - 939
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 While Milton added the date 1630 to his “Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare,” it was first published in the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare's plays. See Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, The Life of John Milton (Oxford, 2003), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Frazer, Michael, “John Rawls between Two Enlightenments,” Political Theory 35/6 (2007), 756–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Teresa Bejan, this issue.

3 In a letter to Susan Neiman, Rawls wrote, “as I had gotten older I had tried to see and act towards graduate students as the next generation, as those who I saw coming after us to continue the tradition of philosophical thought.” John Rawls to Susan Neiman, 24 Feb. 1996, Folder 17, Box 40, John Rawls Papers (HUM 48), Harvard University Archives (henceforth JRP). For reflections on Rawls's teaching see Samuel Freeman, “Editor's Foreword,” in John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2007), ix–xvi

4 While tempting to see Rawls as trying to self-canonize, it is unclear an author can do such a thing or indeed be canonized in their time. My thanks to Alison McQueen for a stimulating conversation about the temporality of canonization.

5 Samuel Freeman, “Editor's Preface,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA, 1999), ix–xii, at ix; Freeman, “Editor's Foreword,” xv.

6 Aybar, Samuel R., Harlan, Joshua D., Lee, Won J., and Rawls, John, “John Rawls: For the Record,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 1/1 (1991), 38–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 38.

7 John Rawls, “Some Remarks on My Teaching,” quoted in Freeman, “Editor's Foreword,” xiii–xvi.

8 Rawls, “Some Remarks,” xvii. For “basic” questions see Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 103.

9 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA, 1971), 571Google Scholar (henceforth TJ).

10 In what became the hook upon which countless publications would be hung, Peter Laslett declared in 1956 that “for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.” Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society: First Series (Cambridge, 1956), vii–xv, at vii. For a precedent see Cobban, Alfred, “The Decline of Political Theory,” Political Science Quarterly 68/3 (1953), 321–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Laslett's claim was immediately challenged: Plamenatz, John, “The Use of Political Theory,” Political Studies 8/1 (1960), 37–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Germino, Dante L., “The Revival of Political Theory,” Journal of Politics 25/3 (1963), 437–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barry, Brian, “The Strange Death of Political Philosophy,” Government and Opposition 15/3–4 (1980), 276–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Laslett retracted the claim after TJ's publication. See James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Fishkin and Laslett, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society: A Collection (New Haven, 1979), 1–5, at 1–2.

11 For discussion see Nikhil Krishnan, this issue.

12 Benjamin Barber in the otherwise critical “Justifying Justice: Problems of Psychology, Politics and Measurement in Rawls,” American Political Science Review 69 (1975), 663–74.

13 Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”, in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series (Oxford, 1962), 1–33. For TJ as the “big book” readers awaited see Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics (Stanford, 1990), 6; Jon Mandle, Rawls's A Theory of Justice: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2009), 1; Alan Ryan, “John Rawls,” in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), 101–19, at 104.

14 For one of many examples see Peter Caws, “Changing Our Habits,” New Republic, 13 May 1972, 24–7, at 24. Several versions of “Justice as Fairness” appeared, in 1957, 1958, 1961 and 1962.

15 Fullinwider, Robert K., “A Chronological Bibliography of Works on John Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” Political Theory 5/4 (1977), 561–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 W. G. Runciman, “The Contractarian Case,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 Jan. 1974, 17; Bernard Williams, “Rawls's Principles and the Demands of Justice,” The Spectator, 24 June 1972, reprinted in Williams, Essays and Reviews (Princeton, 2014), 82–7.

17 Hare, R. M., “Review: Rawls's Theory of Justice—II,” Philosophical Quarterly 23/92 (1973), 241–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 252. For Hare's response in context see Krishnan, this issue.

18 Hugo A. Bedau, “Founding Righteousness on Reason,” The Nation, 11 Sept. 1972, 180–81. The award was won instead by Martin E. Marty's Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970).

19 Rawls similarly presented TJ as “familiar.” TJ, 11.

20 Norman Daniels, “Introduction,” in Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls' A Theory of Justice (New York, 1975), xi–xiii, at xi. See too Stuart Hampshire, “A Special Supplement: A New Philosophy for the Just Society,” New York Review of Books 18/3 (1972), at www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/02/24/a-special-supplement-a-new-philosophy-of-the-just-.

21 “It is convincing refutation if one is needed, of any lingering suspicions that the tradition of English-speaking political philosophy might be dead,” acknowledging the prevalence of Laslett's claim without endorsing it. Anon., “The Good of Justice as Fairness,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1972, 505–6. See too Marshall Cohen, “The Social Contract Explained and Defended,” New York Times Books Review, 16 July 1972.

22 John Schaar, “Reflections on Rawls's Theory of Justice,” Social Theory and Practice 3/1 (1974), 75–100, at 96–7.

23 Philip Abbott, Furious Fancies: American Political Thought in the Post-liberal Era (Westport, 1980). Abbott thanks Rawls for corresponding about his chapter on TJ. For Schaar see Emily Hauptmann, “A Local History of ‘the Political’,” Political Theory 32/1 (2004), 34–60.

24 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford, 1974), 183.

25 Bedau, “Founding Righteousness,” 180; anon., “Good of Justice,” 1.

26 Rawls, TJ, viii.

27 Caws, “Changing Our Habits,” 24.

28 Robert Nisbet, “The Pursuit of Equality,” Public Interest 35 (1974), 103–20, at 107–8.

29 Ibid., 107.

30 Ibid., 107 n. 1.

31 Allan Bloom, “Justice: John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” American Political Science Review 69/2 (1975), 648–62, at 648.

32 Bloom, “Justice,” 662. As Bejan, this issue, suggests, Bloom's review reveals the swift cooption of TJ into the “academic culture wars.”

33 Bloom, “Justice,” 662. See too Irving Kristol, “About Equality,” Commentary, Nov. 1972, 41–7, at 41. Kristol charged TJ with casting “a pall of illegitimacy over the entire political history of the human race.”

34 Nisbet predicted that “there is excellent reason to believe that the almost ecstatic response to [TJ] will shortly abate among professional philosophers,” although, he thought, “it will be for a long time to come the central work in moral philosophy for the clerisy of power.” Robert Nisbet, The New Despotism (Menlo Park, 1976), 21.

35 Patrick Riley, “How Coherent Is the Social Contract Tradition?”, Journal of the History of Ideas 34/4 (1973), 543–62, at 554.

36 Neal Wood, “Contemporary Political Philosophers by Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue,” American Historical Review 81/3 (1976), 564–5.

37 Stefan Collini, “Political Theory and the ‘Science of Society’ in Victorian Britain,” Historical Journal 23/1 (1980), 203–31, at 203.

38 For the former: Skinner, Grand Theory; Charles R. Morris, A Time of Passion: America 1960–1980 (New York, 1984); Thomas L. Haskell, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the ‘Age of Interpretation’,” Journal of American History 74/3 (1987), 984–1012. For the latter: Nancy S. Struever, “Pasquier's Recherches de la France: The Exemplarity of His Medieval Sources,” History and Theory 27/1 (1988), 51–9; Edward W. Stevens Jr, Literacy, Law, and Social Order (DeKalb, 1988).

39 A full bibliography on Rawls and the “canon” would run to many pages. The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon contains entries under Aquinas, Aristotle, Dewey, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Marx, Mill, Rousseau, Sidgwick.

40 Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice (Princeton, 1977), Part 3; Jeffrey Bercuson, John Rawls and the History of Political Thought: The Rousseauvian and Hegelian Heritage of Justice as Fairness (New York, 2014).

41 Wolff, Understanding, 142–79.

42 Bedau, “Founding Righteousness,” 180. Cf. Daniels, “Introduction,” xxxiv.

43 James M. Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” Public Choice 13 (1972), 123–8, at 123. For Knight, Buchanan and Rawls see Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska, this issue.

44 Wolff, Understanding, 210.

45 Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

46 Reflecting on reading “Justice as Fairness” in 1962 Robert Wolff noted, “I have always believed … that Rawls saw himself as undertaking something akin to what Kenneth Arrow achieved in … Social Choice and Individual Values.” Robert P. Wolff, A Life in the Academy, 3 vols., at https://app.box.com/s/n72u3p7pyj/file/702150698, 2: 93. On Sen see Kukathas and Pettit, Rawls, ix, and Ch. 1.

47 David L. Schaefer, “Ideology in Philosophy's Clothing,” Politics and Policy 4/2 (1976), 35–57. Bernard Williams notes that Rawls “been working for a long time before recent political developments, though [TJ] is by no means unmarked by them.” Bernard Williams, “The Moral View of Politics,” Essays and Reviews, 119–24, at 119. For the persistence of this view see Stephen Holmes, “The Gatekeeper,” New Republic, 11 Oct. 1993, 39–47.

48 Bedau, “Founding Righteousness,” 181.

49 Aaron Wildavsky, “Government and the People,” Commentary, Aug. 1973, 25–32.

50 Daniels, “Introduction,” xiv. Bedau, “Founding Righteousness,” 180; Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice: A Critical Examination of the Principled Doctrines in a Theory of Justice by John Rawls (Oxford, 1973), 4; Steven Lukes, “An Archimedean Point,” Observer Review, 4 June 1972, 32; Stuart Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

51 Cohen, “The Social Contract Explained,” 1.

52 Ibid.

53 Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969–1994 (Oxford, 1999), 6. Though the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs is often assumed to be a product of this group, Nagel here suggests that he, Tim Scanlon and Marshall Cohen established it also in the late 1960s, even though the first issue did not appear until 1971.

54 Daniels, “Introduction,” xv.

55 Ibid., xiv–xvi. Cf. Michael Lessnoff, “John Rawls's Theory of Justice,” Political Studies 19/1 (1971), 63–80, at 80.

56 Daniel Bell, “On Meritocracy and Equality,” Public Interest 29 (1972), 29–68, at 57.

57 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Routledge, 2012; first published 1973), xx, 335 n. 44. See too Arthur DiQuattro, “Rawls versus Hayek,” Political Theory 14/2 (1986), 307–10.

58 For the left responses to Rawls on both sides of the Atlantic see Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019), 119–27. William A. Edmundson, John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge, 2017); Ed Quish, “John Rawls, Socialist?”, Jacobin, Aug. 2018, at https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/john-rawls-reticent-socialist-review-theory-of-justice; Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Oxford, 2012).

59 C. B. Macpherson, “Rawls's Model of Man and Society,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3/4 (1973), 341–7, at 343.

60 Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

61 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 106. For an example: Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Stuart Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge, 1978), 113–43.

62 John G. Gunnell, Between Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory (Amherst, 1986), 33–4.

63 Barber, “Justifying Justice,” 310.

64 Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton, 1988), 3. Barber was not alone in worrying about the possible effects of ahistoricity and apoliticality in Rawls's theory. See Milton Fisk, “History and Reason in Rawls's Moral Theory,” in Daniels, Reading Rawls, 53–80; Williams, “The Moral View,” 119–24. Bloom, “Justice,” 648. For an analysis of Rawls's “strategy of depoliticization” see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, 1993), Ch. 5.

65 See too David Gauthier, “The Social Contract as Ideology,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6/2 (1977), 130–64; Schaefer, “Ideology.”

66 Wolff, Understanding, 195.

67 Ibid.; Barry, “Critical Notice of Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8/4 (1978), 753–83, at 757.

68 Barry, “Critical Notice,” 757. Barry disputed Wolff's historicization, suggesting instead that the “economic parts” of TJ were best situated in the “Cambridge School of welfare economists running from A. C. Pigou to J. E. Meade.” For Barry's coinage see Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 107.

69 Barry, “Critical Notice,” 779–80. Barry's article was published in the same year as The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, but his understanding of the history of ideas was less Quentin Skinner and more David Gauthier. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8/1 (1969), 3–53.

70 Barry, “Critical Notice,” 780.

71 See too Arthur DiQuattro, “Rawls and Left Criticism,” Political Theory 11/1 (1983), 53–78.

72 Kai Nielsen, “Rawls and the Left: Some Left Critiques of Rawls's Principles of Justice,” Analyse & Kritik 2/1 (1980), 74–97, at 74.

73 Ibid., 74.

74 Ibid., 87.

75 Ibid., 91–2, original emphasis. See too Williams, “Moral View,” 120.

76 Nielsen, “Rawls,” 75.

77 Ibid., 75.

78 Ibid.

79 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 232–3, rejects such a debunking story.

80 Mari Matsuda, “Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted Visions of Human Nature: A Feminist Critique of Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” New Mexico Law Review 16 (1986), 613–30, at 617.

81 Ibid., 621–2.

82 See too bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1991), 62–3. Thanks to Cécile Laborde for discussion on this point.

83 Matsuda, “Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted Visions of Human Nature,” 621.

84 Ibid., 621.

85 Ibid., 624.

86 Susan Okin, “Justice and Gender,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987), 42–72.

87 See too Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988), Ch. 3.

88 Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1992; first published 1979), afterword.

89 Charles W. Mills, “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” Teaching Philosophy 17/3 (1994), 223–43; Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies: Theorising White Supremacy,” Social and Economic Studies 43/3 (1994), 105–34.

90 Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies,” 117.

91 For background to his later work on liberalism and ideology see Mills's early discussion of emancipation, coercion and the imagination: “Red Peril to the Green Island: The ‘Communist Threat’ to Jamaica in Genre Fiction, 1955–1969,” Caribbean Studies 20 (1988), 1–23.

92 Mills, “Non-Cartesian,” 226. See further Charles W. Mills, “The Racial Polity,” in Mills, Blackness Visible (Ithaca, 1998), 119–38; Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia 20/3 (2005), 165–84; Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123/5 (2008), 1380–97; Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 47/S1 (2009), 161–84.

93 Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies,” 106–8.

94 For a critical engagement with this analysis based on archival discoveries see Brandon Terry, this issue.

95 Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies,” 119.

96 Ibid., 120. For the erasure of the history of European imperialism from the story of modernity offered by Rawls and many other theorists and philosophers see Iris Marion Young and Jacob T. Levy, “Introduction,” in Jacob T. Levy and Iris Marion Young, Colonialism and Its Legacies (Lanham, 2011), xi–xvii, at xi–xii; Charles W. Mills, “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy,” New Political Science 37/1 (2015), 1–24, at 17.

97 Citing George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy (1981), David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991), David Stannard's American Holocaust (1992), Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race (1994) and older studies by Winthrop D. Jordan, Lewis Hanke and Victor Kiernan. For the importance of scrutinizing the historical sources philosophers draw on see Murad Idris, this issue.

98 Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies,” 131.

99 Rawls gestured at this history in his 1981 Tanner lecture, first published in 1983. There, however, he only briefly alluded to liberalism's “origin” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; by Political Liberalism he had an extended analysis of the “three historical developments” that explained the nature of “modern” moral and political philosophy and claimed that “the historical origin of political liberalism (and of liberalism more generally) is the Reformation and its aftermath.” John Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 3 (Salt Lake City, 1982), 3–87, at 17; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Cambridge MA, 1993), xxiv–xxvi. See too Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge MA, 2002), 1.

100 Brian Barry, “Review of John Rawls and His Critics,” Ethics 94 (1984), 351–3.

101 Ibid., 353.

102 Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, 1989), 2.

103 “Justice as Fairness: An Outline with Comments and Replies’, Box 31, Folder 1, JRP. Rawls formally retired in 1991 but continued teaching.

104 Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard, eds., Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge, 1997). Rawls discussed the stroke and its effects in private letters and publicly in John Rawls, “Afterword: A Reminiscence,” in Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh, eds., Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (Oxford, 2001), 417–28, at 424–5.

105 Samuel Freeman, “Editor's Preface,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge MA, 1999), ix.

106 Henry Richardson and Paul Weithman, eds., The Philosophy of Rawls, 5 vols. (New York, 1999).

107 Freeman was a graduate TA for the course (Philosophy 171). Charles Larmore reports that the lectures had been circulating for years in unpublished form. Charles Larmore, “Lifting the Veil,” New Republic, 5 Feb. 2001, 32–7, at 33. See too Barbara Herman, “Editor's Foreword,” in John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2000), xiii.

108 John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: With “On My Religion”, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge MA, 2009). Rawls's Ph.D. thesis, “A Study in the Grounds of Ethical knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgements on the Moral Worth of Character,” Princeton University, 1 Feb. 1950, remains unpublished.

109 Robert B. Talisse, On Rawls (Belmont, 2001); Catherine Audard (Rawls's French translator), John Rawls (Abingdon, 2007); Shaun Young, Reflections on Rawls: An Assessment of His Legacy (Farnham, 2009), with essays by many former students; Frank Lovett, Rawls's A Theory of Justice: A Reader's Guide (London 2011); Mandle (with whom Rawls had much correspondence), Rawls's A Theory of Justice; Sebastiano Maffettone, Rawls: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2010); Jon Mandle and David A. Reidy, A Companion to Rawls (Chichester, 2014).

110 Martha Nussbaum to John Rawls, Folder 21, Box 40, JRP.

111 First translated as “A Brief Sketch of Rawls’ Life” in Richardson and Weithman, The Philosophy of Rawls, 1–15, at 1.

112 John Rawls, “Just Jack,” Folder 12, Box 42, JRP.

113 Early modern authors drew on Horace's dictum that poets created lasting memorials with their texts to argue that writers could raise monuments to themselves and to others. The responses of posterity to past authors were also conceptualized as “monuments” (and sometimes compared favorably to statues, tombs and other physical structures).

114 Rawls, “Lecture: I: Nature and Limits of Political Philosophy” (1966), in Folder 10, Box 36, JRP, 1.

115 Jeremy Waldron cited in Samuel Freeman, Rawls (Oxford, 2007), i. See too Glen Newey, “Floating on the LILO,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 Sept. 1999, 9–10, at 10; and Anthony Simon Laden's review of The Philosophy of Rawls: “The House That Jack Built: Thirty Years of Reading Rawls,” Ethics 113/2 (2003), 367–90.

116 Martha Nussbaum, “Conversing with the Tradition: John Rawls and the History of Ethics,” Ethics 109/2 (1999), 424–30; Thomas Nagel, “Justice, Justice, Shalt Thou Pursue,” New Republic, 25 Oct. 1999, 36–41.

117 For philosophers taught by Rawls see Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, trans. Michelle Kosch (Oxford, 2007), 24. While a professor at Columbia in the mid-1990s, Pogge was accused of sexual harassment, for the first time, by a woman student. See Katie J. M. Baker, “The Famous Ethics Professor and the Women Who Accused Him,” Buzzfeed, 20 May 2016, at www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/yale-ethics-professor.

118 E.g. Jeremy Waldron's review of The Collected Papers: “The Plight of the Poor in the Midst of Plenty,” London Review of Books 21/9 (1999), at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n14/jeremy-waldron/the-plight-of-the-poor-in-the-midst-of-plenty; Frazer, “John Rawls.”

119 Pogge, John Rawls, 11; S. A. Lloyd (another Rawls student), “Learning from the History of Political Philosophy,” in Mandle and Reidy, A Companion to Rawls, 526–45; Michael Frazer, “The Modest Professor: Interpretative Charity and Interpretative Humility in John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy,” European Journal of Political Theory 9/2 (2010), 218–26.

120 Larmore, “Lifting the Veil,” 33.

121 E.g. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard, “Introduction,” in Reath, Herman and Korsgaard, Reclaiming the History of Ethics, 1–5, at 1–2. For notable exceptions see Paul Weithman, “John Rawls: A Remembrance,” Review of Politics (2003), 5–10, at 5; Henry S. Richardson, “Volume Introduction,” in Richardson and Weithman, The Philosophy of Rawls, 1: ix–x.

122 Freeman, Rawls, 28.

123 Reath, Herman and Korsgaard, “Introduction,” 1.

124 Ibid., 1.

125 Young, Reflections, xiii.

126 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 4 n. 4.

127 Stefan Eich, this issue.

128 These texts took one of three approaches to feminist objections: to ignore them; to address them fleetingly, but, unlike equivalent discussions of other objections, not mention any feminist author by name; or to treat the objections as satisfactorily answered by Rawls. An exception is Martha Nussbaum's “Rawls and Feminism” in Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge, 2003), 488–520. For further detail see Sophie Smith, “A Just Theory? Okin, Rawls and the Politics of Political Philosophy,” MS in progress.

129 Mills, “Rawls on Race,” esp. 161–2.

130 Raymond Geuss, “Neither History Nor Praxis,” European Review 11/3 (2003), 281–92.

131 Perry Anderson, who in 1994 had commented of Political Liberalism that “the social polarization of the last twenty years might never have occurred,” in 2004 turned his critical attention to what he called the “wishful thinking” of Rawls's later texts. Perry Anderson, “On John Rawls,” Dissent, Winter 1994, reprinted in Anderson, Spectrum (London, 2005), 103–12; Anderson, “Arms and Rights: Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an Age of War,” New Left Review 31/1 (2005), 5–40. “In typical Owl of Minerva fashion,” the liberal conception of the state and society “received its most systematic exposition in A Theory of Justice, which was written in 1971. This, of course, is the very time when it might be argued that its utility as a charter of a politically organized society … was becoming increasingly problematic.” Brian Barry, “The Limits of Cultural Politics,” Review of International Studies 24/3 (1998), 307–19, at 307. See too Jan Werner Müller, “Rawls, Historian: Remarks on Political Liberalism's ‘Historicism’,” Revue internationale de philosophie 3/237 (2006), 327–39, at 328–9. Rawls himself invoked the “owl of Minerva” in a 1960 lecture, though with a very different purpose; see Bejan, this issue.

132 Bernard Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, 2005); Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, 2009); Glen Newey, “Ruck in the Carpet,” London Review of Books 31/13 (2009), at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/glen-newey/ruck-in-the-carpet; William Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9/4 (2010), 385–411; Matt Sleat, “Bernard Williams and the Possibility of a Realist Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9/4 (2010), 485–503; Christoph Menke, “Neither Rawls Nor Adorno: Raymond Geuss' Programme for a ‘Realist’ Political Philosophy,” European Journal of Philosophy 18/1 (2010), 139–47; Enzo Rossi, “Reality and Imagination in Political Theory and Practice: On Raymond Geuss's Realism,” European Journal of Political Theory 9/4 (2010), 504–12.

133 The major collections of Rawls papers are at Harvard; Princeton and Cornell also have holdings. The Harvard papers were acquired through five separate accessions from March 2004 to March 2010 and were available immediately after donation. The papers were first consulted in October 2005. In 2011, Harvard University Archives staff processed the five sets of papers that had been received to produce a single collection guide, at https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/4/resources/4319. My thanks to the reference staff at the Pusey Library, Harvard University Archives, for this information.

134 Some groundbreaking early work remains unpublished, though its influence is widely felt, especially that of P. MacKenzie Bok, who wrote an undergraduate dissertation on the Rawls archives in 2011, an M.Phil. in 2012 and a Ph.D. in 2015. See too Joel Isaac, “Historicizing Rawls,” unpublished MS, 2012; David. M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Efficiency or a ‘Fair’ Game: John Rawls contra Lionel Robbins,” working paper, 27 Nov. 2007, at www.researchgate.net/publication/237278013_Efficiency_or_a_Fair_Game_John_Rawls_Contra_Lionel_Robbins. For MS circulation see Eric Schliesser, “Rawls, Robbins, and Blaug,” New APPS, at www.newappsblog.com/2011/11/rawls-robbins-and-blaug.html. Some correspondence was published: John Rawls and Phillipe van Parijs, “Three Letters on the Law of Peoples and the European Union,” in Autour de Rawls, special issue, Revue de philosophie économique 7 (2003), 7–20; Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism (Ann Arbor, 2008).

135 Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33/4 (2012), 701–25, at 701–2.

136 Bevir, “Introduction,” 256.

137 Eric Gregory, “Before the Original Position: The Neo-orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35/2 (2007), 176–206; Paul Weithman, Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith (Cambridge, 2016), Ch. 1.

138 Jürgen Habermas, “‘The “Good Life’—A ‘Detestable Phrase’: The Significance of the Young Rawls's Religious Ethics for His Political Theory,” European Journal of Philosophy 18/3 (2010), 443–54; P. MacKenzie Bok, “Inside the Cauldron: Rawls and the Stirrings of Personalism at Wartime Princeton,” in Sarah Shortall and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds., Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge, 2020), 158–88.

139 Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Cambridge MA, 2019), 54–7.

140 P. MacKenzie Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 153–85, at 155.

141 Ibid.

142 Ibid., 155; Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism; David A. Reidy, “From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory: Early Postcards from an Intellectual Journey,” in Mandle and Reidy, A Companion to Rawls, 9–30.

143 Rawls's Ph.D. thesis remains comparatively underinvestigated. See Ville Päivänsalo, Balancing Reasonable Justice (Ashgate, 2007), Ch. 1; Robert Cheah, “Moral Psychology and Reflective Equilibrium in the Work of John Rawls, 1950–1971” (unpublished M.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2019).

144 Nikhil Krishnan's work on the early Rawls and varieties of contemporary positivism shows how carefully revisiting published sources can also be illuminating. See Krishnan, this issue.

145 Isaac, “Historicizing Rawls,” 8.

146 Daniele Botti, “Rawls on Dewey before the Dewey lectures,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 287–98, at 290–93; and Botti, “John Rawls, Peirce's Notion of Truth and White's Holistic Pragmatism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35/2 (2014), 345–77. See too Botti, John Rawls and American Pragmatism: Between Engagement and Avoidance (Lexington, 2019).

147 P. MacKenzie Bok, “‘The Latest Invasion from Britain’: Young Rawls and His Community of American Ethical Theorists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 275–85; Bevir and Gališanka, “Rawls”; Botti, “Holistic Pragmatism”; David A. Reidy, “Rawls's Religion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31/2 (2010), 309–44.

148 Or in Reidy's alternative, “From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory.”

149 Bejan, this issue; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 18–24.

150 Andrius Gališanka, John Rawls: The Path to A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2019), Ch. 7.

151 Ibid., Chs. 4, 8. Cf. Bok, “To the Mountaintop.”

152 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 11.

153 Bejan, this issue.

154 Eich, this issue.

155 David A. Reidy, “Rawls on Philosophy and Democracy: Lessons from the Archived Papers,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 265–74. See Anne M. Kornhauser, Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia, 2015), 182, which points out that in his Ph.D. thesis Rawls aspired for his moral theory to be a contribution to democratic theory.

156 Kornhauser, Debating the American State, 186–202.

157 Andrius Gališanka, “Just Society as a Fair Game: John Rawls and Game Theory in the 1950s,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 299–308.

158 For another revealing non-archival study see Jens van ’t Klooster, “Central Banking in Rawls's Property-Owning Democracy,” Political Theory 47/5 (2019), 674–98.

159 Levy and Peart, “Efficiency or a ‘Fair’ Game”; Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska, “On Frank Knight's ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’,” Ethics 125/2 (2015), 552–4; Gališanka, Rawls, 90, 226; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 12–13.

160 Daniel Little, “Rawls and Economics,” in Mandle and Reidy, A Companion to Rawls, 504–25, at 520.

161 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 14. Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton, 2016), 272, argued that Rawls was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and “withdrew” in 1971, just before TJ was published. Leif Weinar has shown that the archival evidence they cite does not support the claim that he withdrew, nor that he ever knew he was on the rolls. See Leif Weinar (@LeifWeinar), Twitter, 28 May 2020, at https://twitter.com/LeifWenar/status/1266128190449176576, and 19 November 2020, at https://twitter.com/LeifWenar/status/1329547637440212992.

162 Jackson and Stemplowska, this issue.

163 Eich, this issue.

164 Kornhauser, Debating the American State, 178.

165 Ibid., 183, 190.

166 Ibid., 187, quoting Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1982).

167 Kornhauser, Debating the American State, 181.

168 Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018), x.

169 Ibid., 147.

170 Ibid., 39.

171 Ibid., 147.

172 Ibid., 147.

173 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 130–31.

174 Ibid., Ch. 1. See too the discussion in Eich, this issue.

175 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, x–ii, Chs. 1–2, esp. 30, 40–41.

176 Charles W. Mills, “European Spectres,” Journal of Ethics 3/2 (1999), 133–55, at 153.

177 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 271.

178 See too Eich, this issue. For Rawls's own changing view of the politics of his theory see Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 271.

179 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 14–15; see too Eich, this issue.

180 Neither Forrester nor Moyn notes the echoes between lessons they draw from their histories and the arguments made by those I'm calling “critical historicists.” For use of the Rawls archive to reflect on ideology critiques of the 1970s–1990s see Eich, this issue; Terry, this issue.

181 For the first archivally informed rejection of Rawls as a Great Society thinker see Bevir and Gališanka, “Rawls,” 724. For the revisions in the 1960s see Katrina Forrester, “Citizenship, War and the Origins of International Ethics,” Historical Journal 57/3 (2014), 773–801, esp. 776–9. For Rawls's engagement with the racial injustice of the draft see Terry, this issue.

182 Bok, “The Latest Invasion from Britain,” 285. See too Bok, “To the Mountaintop,” 184.

183 Mark Bevir, “John Rawls in Light of the Archive: Introduction to the Symposium on the Rawls Papers,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 255–63, at 255.

184 For the importance of looking at archives beyond Rawls's own in reconstructions of the impact of his thought see Jackson and Stemplowska, this issue.

185 Terry, this issue. See too Brandon Terry, “Rawls, Race, and Romance: A Critique of Civil Rights Exemplarity” (MS in progress).

186 Idris, this issue.

187 Murad Idris, “Political Theory and the Politics of Comparison,” Political Theory (2016), online first, at https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716659812.

188 As well as Rawls's exchanges with Okin, there are detailed notes on abortion, and on other feminists, including Catharine MacKinnon, whose work Rawls taught. See Smith, “A Just Theory?”; Eileen Hunt Botting and Patrick Aimone, “The Splintering Force of Abortion: The Philosophical Impact of Okin's Intervention in Rawls's Abortion Politics,” MS in progress.

189 Jacob Levy sounded a note of caution immediately after Rawls's death. See Jacob Levy, “Monday 25 November, 2002,” at http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2002_11_24_archive.html. For extended investigations see Bikhu Parekh, “Political Theory: Traditions in Political Philosophy,” in Robert E. Gooding and Hans-Dieter Klingeman, eds., A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford, 1996), 503–18; R. Bruce Douglass, “John Rawls and the Revival of Political Philosophy: Where Does He Leave Us?”, Theoria 59 (2012), 81–97; Matt Matravers, “Political Philosophy,” in Dermot Moran, ed., The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (New York, 2008), 883–912; Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, “Remaking Political Theory,” in Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir and Shannon C. Stimson, eds., Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton, 2007), 209–33; Krishnan, this issue.

190 Brian Barry estimated that in one bibliography nearly a quarter of the entries were “redundant” because they merely cited Rawls as “someone who spoke about justice” or for ideas that were not his but for which he was given credit because “for so many of his readers his book was the only thing of the kind they had read—ever, or at least since leaving graduate school.” Brian Barry, “Review of John Rawls and His Critics,” Ethics 94/2 (1984), 351–3, at 351.

191 Pogge, Rawls, 3, asserts that TJ has become “an inspiration to many in Latin America, China, and Japan.”

192 See the essays on the reception of Rawls in Europe in European Journal of Political Theory 1/2 (2002); Satoshi Fukuma, “Rawls in Japan: A Brief Sketch of the Reception of John Rawls’ Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 64/4 (2014), 887–901; Mathieu Hauchecorne, La gauche américaine en France: La réception de John Rawls et des théories de la justice (Paris, 2019).

193 James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, 2011), 85–149; Paul Schumaker, “John Rawls, Barack Obama, and the Pluralist Political Consensus,” American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 5/4 (2016), 628–57; Linda Hirschman “Rawls Fatigue,” New Republic, 23 July 2007, at https://newrepublic.com/article/63043/rawls-fatigue; but cf. Jacob Levy, “July 26 2007,” at http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2007_07_22_archive.html; Kornhauser, Debating the American State, 182–3. There is more work to be done on Rawls's impact amongst lawyers; for an early skeptical analysis see Frank I. Michaelman, “Rawls on Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law,” in Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 394–425.

194 For an example see Jonathan Strassfield, “American Divide: The Making of ‘Continental’ Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History, online first (2018), at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244318000513. For related suggestions see Angus Burgin, “Review,” and Katrina Forrester, “Response,” at https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5704868/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-24-shadow-justice-postwar-liberalism-and#_Toc29596366.

195 Some also read it through perceived crises of liberalism in the 1980s and again at the turn of the century.

196 Gališanka, Rawls, 1; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 276–9.

197 Gališanka, Rawls, Epilogue.

198 Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism, 53.

199 Ibid., 66, original emphasis.

200 Ibid., 67–8.

201 Ibid., 158.

202 Ibid., 53.

203 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 270. Strikingly, Forrester cites Thomas Nagel—a close confidant of Rawls's—for this hegemony claim. Thomas Nagel, “Rawls and Liberalism,” in Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 62–85.

204 Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 107, 275.

205 Ibid., 275.

206 Ibid., 275, 278. See too Katrina Forrester, “The Future of Political Philosophy,” Boston Review, 17 Sept. 2019, at http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/katrina-forrester-future-political-philosophy.

207 This point is Amia Srinivasan's, made in a forum on In the Shadow of Justice, Oxford Political Thought Seminar, Oct. 2019. See too the awareness of even some broadly Rawlsian philosophers that Rawls was a product of his time, but for whom the only relevant question was whether the ideals were right or not: “Comments,” under Brian Leiter, “Geuss's Skepticism about Rawls” (2007), at https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/10/geusss-skeptici.html.

208 For related observations see Alyssa Battistoni, “Review,” at https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5704868/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-24-shadow-justice-postwar-liberalism-and#_Toc29596366.

209 Mills, “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy,” 4–6.

210 Walzer, Michael, “The Political Theory License,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013), 1–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

211 hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” esp. 2–5. For the marginalization of “public philosophy” by academic political philosophers see Brandon M. Terry and Tommie Shelby, “Introduction,” in Terry and Shelby, eds., To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 1–15, at 5. For the politics of political philosophy in a longer historical perspective see Smith, Sophie, “The Language of ‘Political Science’ in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80/2 (2019), 203–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

212 For a useful analysis primarily in a US context see Jacob Levy, “Political Philosophy and Political Theory,” at https://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/levy/theory-philosophy.html. Although Levy assumes that the site for political theory was and is primarily politics departments. This might exclude much which we would want to describe as “political theory.”

213 Griffin, Stephen M., “Political Philosophy versus Political Theory: The Case of Rawls,” Chicago–Kent Law Review 69/3 (1994), 691–707Google Scholar.

214 Seminar notes, Folder 15, Box 8, JRP; “The Independence of Moral Theory” (APA lecture 1974), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 286–302; comments on student essay, Folder 10, Box 50, JRP.

215 For TJ as “social theory” see P. Nowell-Smith, H., “I–A Theory of Justice?”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3/4 (1973), 315–29Google Scholar, at 315; as moral theory and philosophical ethics see Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

216 Katrina Forrester ends her book by exhorting political philosophers to look towards history and social movements to help them address some of the issues she thinks were overshadowed by the Rawlsian legacy. To my mind what is missing here—though I suspect Forrester would agree—is the recognition that many of the texts produced by those associated with social and political movements, and/or those outside elite anglophone philosophy or politics departments, are rightly understood as political philosophy/theory. For some explorations of this theme, see the essays in Terry and Shelby, To Shape a New World; Mills, “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy,” esp. 6-8; Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago, 2005), Ch. 3; Gooding-Williams, Robert, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar; Weeks, Kathi, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC, 2011)Google Scholar; Balfour, Lawrie, Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Ch. 1; Roberts, Neil, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooker, Juliet, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 199 on the need to raise questions about what is “legible” as political theory; Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019)Google Scholar, esp. Ch. 1; Sophie Smith, “A Change of World: Feminism as Political Theory,” MS in progress.