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The Theodicy of Growth: John Rawls, Political Economy, and Reasonable Faith

Part of: The Historical Rawls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Stefan Eich
Stefan Eich*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Georgetown University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Rediscovery of John Rawls's early interest in theology has recently prompted readings of his philosophical project as a secularized response to earlier theological questions. Intellectual historians have meanwhile begun to historicize Rawls's use of contemporary philosophical resources and his engagement with economic theory. In this article I argue that what held together Rawls's evolving interest in postwar political economy and his commitment to philosophy as reconciliation was his understanding of the need for secular theodicy. In placing Rawls in the intellectual context of a postwar political economy of growth as well as in relation to the history of political thought, including his reading of that history, I defend two claims. First, I argue that Rawls's philosophical ambition is best understood as providing a secular reconciliatory theodicy. Second, I suggest that Rawls's theodicy was initially rendered plausible by the economic background conditions of economic growth that were fractured and fragmented just as Rawls's book was published in 1971. This divergence between text and context helps to account for Rawls's peculiar reception and his own subsequent attempt to insist on the applicability of his theory under radically altered circumstances.

Type
Forum: The Historical Rawls
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 984 - 1009
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Necker, Jacques, De l'importance des opinions religieuses (Paris, 1788), 49Google Scholar, my translation. I first encountered the passage thanks to Michael Sonenscher's brilliant excavations of eighteenth-century political thought. See his Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007), 302–3. Necker had been appointed directeur général des finances in 1777. Due to his Protestant faith, he could not be formally named contrôleur général des finances, the more senior title. De l'importance des opinions religieuses was the first fruit of his forced retirement in 1781 after his scandalous publication of the public accounts—a forced retirement that was about to be interrupted by the calling of the Estates General and his brief return to the public finances until the fall of the Bastille in July 1789. Harris, Robert D., Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien Régime (Berkeley, 1979), 217–35Google Scholar.

2 Jacques Necker, The Importance of Religious Opinions, trans. Mary Wollstonecraft (London, 1788).

3 Forrester, Katrina, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019)Google Scholar; Gališanka, Andrius, John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Teresa Bejan shows in her contribution to this issue, these traditions included not least the tradition of political philosophy itself.

4 I understand theodicy in this context as the attempt, originally developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to reconcile the existence of God with the existence of evil. Secular theodicy is in this sense the attempt to reconcile one's own existence with the existence of injustice in the world. I expand on this in Sections IV and VI below.

5 I am here indebted to Paul Weithman's reading of Rawls's theory of justice as a “naturalistic theodicy.” See Weithman, Paul, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls's Political Turn (Oxford, 2010), 8Google Scholar. On the relation of liberalism to theodicy see also Nelson, Eric, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Cambridge, MA, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Where Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska recover in their contribution to this issue Rawls's engagement with postwar welfare economics and game theory, I emphasize Rawls's indebtedness to postwar growth economics—as well as his problematic subsequent attempt to distance himself from it.

7 Grewal, David, “The Political Theology of Laissez Faire from Philia to Self-Love in Commercial Society,” Political Theology 17/5 (2016), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coleman, Charly, “The Vagaries of Disenchantment: God, Matter, and Mammon in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Intellectual History 14/3 (2016), 869–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sonenscher, Michael, “Physiocracy as a Theodicy,” History of Political Thought 23/2 (2002), 326–39Google Scholar; Sheehan, Jonathan and Wahrman, Dror, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 21–38, at 37. Rawls himself stressed, of course, his philosophical indebtedness to the eighteenth century, in particular in and through his lectures on the history of moral and political philosophy. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA, 2008). See also Christopher Brooke, “Rawls on Rousseau and the General Will,” in James Farr and David Lay Williams, eds., The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept (Cambridge, 2015), 429–46.

9 Allan Bloom, for example, voiced this frustration shortly after A Theory of Justice was published: “Simply, historicism, whether that of Marx or that of Nietzsche and the existentialists, has made it questionable whether an undertaking such as Rawls's is possible at all; yet he does not address himself to these thinkers. He takes it for granted that they are wrong, that they must pass before his tribunal, not he before theirs.” Bloom, Allan, “Justice: John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” American Political Science Review 69/2 (1975), 648–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 648.

10 For a sustained examination of the way in which Rawls's normativity depended on history even where it eschewed it see Richard Bourke, “History and Normativity in Political Theory,” in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, eds., History in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Cambridge, forthcoming).

11 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 587; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 514. Hereafter, I will give page numbers first in the original and then in the revised edition.

12 Ibid., 587; 514.

13 Ibid., 587; 514. Rawls himself famously walked back part of this claim when shifting from “a moral doctrine of justice general in scope” to “a strictly political conception of justice.” John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), xv.

14 See in particular Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 1–71; Bok, P. Mackenzie, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2016), 1–33Google Scholar; Bok, “‘The Latest Invasion from Britain’: Young Rawls and His Community of Ethical Theorists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 275–85; Gališanka, John Rawls.

15 Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 8–9; 31.

16 Ibid., xiii.

17 Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History (Basingstoke, 1997), 201.

18 Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford, 2000).

19 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994), 286. As cited in Fielding, Steven, “Activists against ‘Affluence’: Labour Party Culture during the ‘Golden Age,’ circa 1950–1970,” Journal of British Studies 40/2 (2001), 241–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 242.

20 Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, 2016). See also David Singh Grewal and Jedediah Purdy, “Inequality Rediscovered,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 18/1 (2016), 61–82.

21 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, 1958).

22 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 144, 530–40; 124, 464–73.

23 In speaking of “institutional agnosticism” I have in mind Rawls's openness toward any kind of institutional arrangement that satisfies the two principles of justice. From this flowed both a refusal to elaborate on whether or not capitalism was compatible with the difference principle and a relative lack of attention to concrete political institutions, be it legislatures, parties, or central banks. See Rainer Forst, Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, 2014), 27 n. 33; and Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 3, 20, 288. Only toward the very end of his life did Rawls briefly gesture at how the difference principle might map onto more concrete institutional proposals. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 136–8.

24 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

25 Eager to take an aggressive stance on domestic stimulus (he regarded inaction by the Federal Reserve in 1960 as having cost him his first presidential bid against John F. Kennedy), Nixon surprised his Western allies by unilaterally closing the gold window. Christoffer L.P. Zoeller and Nina Bandelj, “Crisis as Opportunity: Nixon's Announcement to Close the Gold Window,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (2019), 1–14; Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford, 2015).

26 Rawls's preface to the original edition of A Theory of Justice is dated “August 1971.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, xii; xxii.

27 As Jan-Werner Müller remarks in pointing to the Hegelian temporality of Rawls's argument, “certain owl-related clichés could easily come to mind.” Jan-Werner Müller, “Rawls, Historian: Remarks on Political Liberalism's ‘Historicism’,” Revue internationale de philosophie 237/3 (2006), 327–39, at 329; Grewal and Purdy, “Inequality Rediscovered,” 66. See also the contributions by Sophie Smith and Teresa Bejan in this issue.

28 This claim has been defended most fully in Jeffrey Bercuson, John Rawls and the History of Political Thought: The Rousseauvian and Hegelian Heritage of Justice as Fairness (New York, 2014), 3, 25, 30–61. By the end of the 1950s, Forrester summarizes Rawls's intellectual development, “he used Wittgenstein to explain that morality was social, defined by its use—there in the world to be discovered, not chosen. Having a morality was like having a sense of humor. It was part of what it meant to be human, part of a ‘form of life’. The phrase was Wittgenstein's, but Rawls recognized that it was a ‘Hegelian notion’.” Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 9. Citing from John Rawls, “Topic VII: Concept of a Morality,” Folder 1, Box 35, John Rawls Papers (HUM 48), Harvard University Archives (henceforth Rawls Papers), 1.

29 John Rawls, “Is Political Philosophy Dead? (April 1964),” Folder 10, Box 35, Rawls Papers.

30 Ibid.

31 One could equally say that Rawls's right-Hegelian stamp of approval for the broad redistributive contours of the postwar political and economic system flipped over into a left-Hegelian plea for radical change.

32 Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 147.

33 Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 14–15, xi.

34 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1976), 238–9. Alongside the implosion of growth, the national framing of Rawls's project soon appeared similarly outdated. The collapse of the postwar economic frame was mirrored by a broader disillusionment with national politics. Instead, the early 1970s witnessed the emergence of “the global”—be it in the form of a new awareness of economic interdependencies, the world food crisis, debates about population growth, or a nascent global environmental consciousness. Katrina Forrester, “War and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political Philosophy 1960–1975,” Historical Journal 57/3 (2014), 773–801; Moyn, Not Enough, 147–72.

35 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, xv–vii; Samuel R. Aybar, Joshua D. Harlan, and Won J. Lee, “John Rawls: For the Record” (interview), Harvard Review of Philosophy 1/1 (1991), 38–47, at 44; John Rawls, “My Teaching” [1993], Folder 12, Box 42, Rawls Papers; Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York, 2007), 6–7; Forrester, “War and the Origins of International Ethics,” 794.

36 John Rawls, “Distributive Justice (Summer 1959). Lecture XXII: Distributive Justice and the Conflict of Criteria,” Folder 8 (Multiplicity of Criteria and Distribution of Income and Wealth, 1959), Box 35, Rawls Papers.

37 Jeffrey Bercuson has most extensively stressed the Hegelian debt of Rawls's position. See Bercuson, Rawls and the History of Political Thought, 25.

38 Rawls, “Distributive Justice (Summer 1959).” See also John Rawls, “Lecture 2: The Nature of Political and Social Philosophy and Outline (1960),” Folder 10, Box 35, Rawls Papers. As cited in Bejan, this issue.

39 John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77/9 (1980), 515–72, at 516; reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 303–58, at 304.

40 Ibid., 516; 304.

41 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 3.

42 Ibid.

43 Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, 343.

44 Drawing on Éric Weil, Müller has described Rawls's stance as that of a “post-Hegelian Kantian.” Müller, “Rawls, Historian,” 339.

45 Brooke, “Rawls on Rousseau and the General Will”; Rob Jubb, “Rawls and Rousseau: ‘Amour-Propre’ and the Strains of Commitment,” Res Publica 17/3 (2011), 245–60; Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford, 2008).

46 John Rawls, “On My Religion,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 259–70. On Rawls's Christian ethics see Eric Gregory, “Before the Original Position: The Neo-orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35/2 (2007), 179–202; David A. Reidy, “Rawls's Religion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31/2 (2010), 309–43; Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again”; Nelson, Theology of Liberalism, 49–72; Paul Weithman, Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith (Cambridge, 2016), 213–41.

47 Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, “Introduction,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry, 1–23, at 1.

48 Ibid.

49 Rawls, “On My Religion,” 263–4.

50 Cohen and Nagel, “Introduction,” 5.

51 Rawls's hand-dated copy from 25 Sept. 1995. As cited in Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, 368.

52 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 128.

53 Rawls, Political Liberalism, lxii.

54 Ibid.; as well as Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 128. For other discussions of “reasonable faith” beyond these invocations see also Rawls, Political Liberalism, 101, 172; John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7/1 (1987), 1–25; reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, 421–48, at 448. See also Weithman, Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith, 31–2; and Bourke, “History and Normativity in Political Theory.”

55 Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?, 8, 14. Jan-Werner Müller has similarly referred to “Rawls's liberal, godless theodicy of reconciliation with our world.” Müller, “Rawls, Historian,” 336.

56 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [anon.], Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme, et l'origine du mal (Amsterdam, 1710); Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Lasalle, 1985). See Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge, 1995).

57 Leibniz's first use of the term was in a short text in Latin from 1697. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Textes inédits d'après de la bibliothèque provinciale de Hanovre, ed. Gaston Grua, 2 vols. (Paris, 1948), 1: 370. See Steven M. Nadler, The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason (Princeton, 2010), 263.

58 Leibniz, Theodicy, 131. See Larry M. Jorgensen and Samuel Newlands, eds., New Essays on Leibniz's Theodicy (Oxford, 2014); as well as Nadler, The Best of All Possible Worlds, 78–107.

59 Voltaire, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Geneva, 1759).

60 Sam Duncan, “Moral Evil, Freedom and the Goodness of God: Why Kant Abandoned Theodicy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20/5 (2012), 973–91; Johannes Brachtendorf, “Kants Theodizee-Aufsatz: Die Bedingungen des Gelingens philosophischer Theodizee,” Kant-Studien 93/1 (2002), 57–83.

61 Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge, 2001), 335–452; Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge, 1991), 41–53, 221–34. See also Duncan, “Moral Evil, Freedom and the Goodness of God,” 975.

62 Immanuel Kant, “Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee,” Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin, 1791), 194–225; Kant, “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, 24–37. See also Mara van der Lugt, “The left hand of the Enlightenment: Truth, Error, and Integrity in Bayle and Kant,” History of European Ideas 44/3 (2018), 277–91.

63 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett, 2002; first published 1788), 144–6.

64 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, 2015), 67–70.

65 Box 59, Rawls Papers. Some of the other note cards in the box contain notes on Hegel and Weber.

66 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 101; Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 309–25; Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” 448; John Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” in Eckart Förster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three “Critiques” and the “Opus Postumum” (Palo Alto, 1989), 81–113, at 94; reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, 497–528, at 509.

67 Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” 448.

68 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 101, 172.

69 See, for example, Susan Meld Shell, “Kant's Secular Religion,” in Oliver Thorndike, ed., Rethinking Kant, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2011), 2: 20–32; and George Gilbert Huxford, “The Scope and Development of Kant's Theodicy” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King's College London, London, 2015).

70 Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 191–250. David James, Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity (Cambridge, 2013), 52–7, at 52; Karl Ameriks, Kant's Elliptical Path (Oxford, 2012), 260–80; and Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love, 2 n. 1. In the editorial note to the Pléiade edition of the Second Discourse, Jean Starobinski similarly highlights the point. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964), 3: lix.

71 McKean prefers Rawls's own term of “reconciliation” to theodicy to capture his redemptive ambition and contrasts it with a narrow view of theodicy. Benjamin L. McKean, “Ideal Theory after Auschwitz? The Practical Uses and Ideological Abuses of Political Theory as Reconciliation,” Journal of Politics 79/4 (2017), 1177–90.

72 Weithman, Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith, 213.

73 Already during his early theological days Rawls had held an interpretation of faith as being sustained by the character of members of community, not (merely) fear of punishment or submission to authority. Rawls, A Brief Inquiry, 127.

74 Even Samuel Freeman—who insists on the thoroughly secular character of Rawls's thought—has emphasized Rawls's disappointment with traditional theodicy as one of the central inspirations for his search for a secular alternative. Freeman, Rawls, 8–28.

75 For an account of the postrevolutionary need for political economy see Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead (New York, 2017), 191–201, 379.

76 Grewal, “The Political Theology of Laissez Faire,” 1–17. See also Lisa Hill, “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 8/1 (2001), 1–29.

77 Michael Sonenscher, “Physiocracy as a Theodicy,” History of Political Thought 23/2 (2002), 326–39, at 334.

78 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain (Paris, 1795); Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (London, 1955), 192. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York, 2008), 43; and Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 195–217.

79 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, 1991), §189. See also Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, 191. As Hegel realized, this approach produced its own aporia in the form of a new kind of poverty. Frank Ruda, Hegel's Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel's Philosophy of Right (London, 2011).

80 Aybar, Harlan, and Lee, “John Rawls: For the Record,” 39.

81 Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33/4 (2012), 701–25, at 714; Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 17.

82 Jackson and Stemplowska, this issue. See also Andrew Lister, “Markets, Desert, and Reciprocity,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16/1 (2017), 47–69; Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 12–13, 292.

83 Raised religiously, Knight came to reject organized religion during the 1940s but nonetheless retained a lifelong interest in theology and its relation to economics. Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001), 121; Richard Boyd, “Frank Knight's Pluralism,” Critical Review 11/4 (1997), 519–36; David Cowan, Frank H. Knight: Prophet of Freedom (London, 2016), 225–46; as well as Ross Emmett, “Economics and Theology after the Separation,” in Paul Oslington, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Economics (Oxford, 2014), 135–52.

84 Ross B. Emmett, Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics (London and New York, 2009), 169. Robert H. Nelson has described Knight's moral philosophy as a form of “secular Calvinism.” Robert H. Nelson, “Frank Knight and Original Sin,” Independent Review 6/1 (2001), 5–25, at 15.

85 Boyd, “Frank Knight's Pluralism,” 533–4; Nelson, Theology of Liberalism, 205.

86 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York, 2004), 255–76; Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford, 2004), 218–35.

87 Pratap Bhanu Mehta has rightly stressed this point in his analyses of both eighteenth-century political economy and contemporary Indian politics. The underlying relationship between secular temporality and theology is, of course, fiercely contested. One does not have to go as far as to argue that modern historical consciousness is tout court derived from Christianity (as Karl Löwith arguably did) to appreciate the ways in which certain aspects of the eighteenth century's novel temporal structure were marked by a secularized theological logic. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, 1988), 109; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1949).

Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 109.

88 Collins, More, 40–67.

89 John Rawls, “Distributive Justice,” in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society, third series (Oxford, 1967), 58–82, at 81; reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, 130–53, at 152.

90 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 237–8; Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge, 2016), 342–3.

91 For a more detailed analysis of the problem of envy see Jeffrey Edward Green, “Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged: In Defense of Reasonable Envy toward the Superrich,” American Political Science Review 107/1 (2013), 123–38; as well as Daniel Luban, “Rawls and Envy,” working paper (forthcoming).

92 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 143; 124. John Rawls, “Fairness to Goodness,” Philosophical Review 84/4 (1975), 536–54, at 546; reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, 267–85, at 277.

93 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 530–41; 464–74.

94 Ibid., 531; 466.

95 Ibid., 534; 468.

96 Ibid., 535; 469.

97 Ibid., 533–4; 467–8.

98 Ibid., 536; 470.

99 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 71.

100 Ibid., 72.

101 While Galbraith insisted that all this pointed to the gradual subsiding of envy, he conceded that wants and emulation were now increasingly cultivated by producers and advertising themselves. Instead of production fulfilling consumers’ wants, this meant that production “only fills a void that it has itself created.” Ibid., 124–5. Emulation was no longer fed by preexisting envy but instead stirred by the new forces of advertising. Ibid., 194.

102 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989; first published 1962), 234.

103 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 285–6; 252–3.

104 My thanks to Stephen Marglin for discussion of this point.

105 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 287; 253. This argument hinged on Solow's seminal findings that the rate of growth was largely unaffected by the rate of savings. Robert M. Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 70/1 (1956), 65–94. See also Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 202.

106 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 286 n. 21; 252 n. 20.

107 Julie Rose, “On the Value of Economic Growth,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19/2 (2020), 128–53; Guido Erreygers, “Hotelling, Rawls, Solow: How Exhaustible Resources Came to Be Integrated into the Neoclassical Growth Model,” History of Political Economy 41/5 (2009), 263–81.

108 What remained “steady” in these growth models was thus the rate of growth and the capital–output ratio.

109 Robert M. Solow, Growth Theory: An Exposition (Oxford, 1970), 4; as cited in Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 286 n. 21; 252 n. 20. Crucially, as Solow stressed in revealing the optimism of the model, once countries hit their stride, “divergences from steady-state growth appear to be fairly small, casual, and hardly self-accentuating.” Solow, Growth Theory, 11. See also Mauro Boianovsky and Kevin D. Hoover, “In the Kingdom of Solovia: The Rise of Growth Economics at MIT, 1956–70,” History of Political Economy 46/S1 (2014), 198–228.

110 Boianovsky and Hoover, “In the Kingdom of Solovia”; Edmund Phelps, “The Golden Rule of Accumulation: A Fable for Growthmen,” American Economic Review 51/4 (1961), 638–43; and Katrina Forrester, “The Problem of the Future in Postwar Anglo-American Political Philosophy,” Climatic Change 151/1 (2018), 55–66; Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 177–8, 336 n. 34. For the correspondence see Folder 7, Box 19, Rawls Papers. Many thanks to Robert Cheah for this.

111 Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 178. As Edmund Phelps consequently pointed out in the course of the 1970s, it was a profound misunderstanding to think that Rawlsian maximin was somehow “antigrowth.” E. S. Phelps and J. G. Riley, “Rawlsian Growth: Dynamic Programming of Capital and Wealth for Intergeneration ‘Maximin’ Justice,” Review of Economic Studies 45/1 (1978), 103–20.

112 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 287; 255.

113 As Forrester summarizes, “The point of the savings principle was to secure growth until that society was reached, and to maintain affluence once it had been.” Forrester, “The Problem of the Future,” 59.

114 One way to frame the problem is thus to point to the apparent tension between the difference principle and Rawls's subsequent contention that justice as fairness does not require economic growth. Rose, “On the Value of Economic Growth,” 134–8.

115 William Nordhaus and James Tobin, “Is Growth Obsolete?”, in Nordhaus and Tobin, Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect, vol. 5, Economic Growth (New York, 1972), 1–80, at 1.

116 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1848), Bk IV, Ch. 6.

117 John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 316, original emphasis. See also Forrester, Shadow of Justice, 202.

118 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 7 n. 5.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid.

121 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 107.

122 Ibid., 107 n. 33.

123 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 63; the point was repeated almost verbatim at 159 and listed in the book's index as “Difference principle: does not require continual economic growth.”

124 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” Essays in Persuasion (London, 1963), 358–73.

125 Ibid., 372.

126 We can detect some of these consequences in the radically reworked account of stability in Political Liberalism, where Rawls made his reconciliatory ambition for political philosophy more explicit.

127 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 11–23.

128 Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 11. Conditions, in other words, “allowed by the laws and tendencies of the social world.” Ibid.

129 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 7.

130 John Rawls and Philippe 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, at 9.

131 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 97 (on Rawls, 310–14); Kerstin Budde, “Unreasonable or Evil?”, in Bruce Haddock, Peri Roberts, and Peter Sutch, eds., Evil in Contemporary Political Theory (Edinburgh, 2011), 81–100; as well as Nadler, The Best of All Possible Worlds.

132 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), 20: 455; Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, 1988), 18. Raymond Geuss has in this light similarly stressed the centrality of theodicies to modern philosophy and the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of escaping this need. Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), 89. See also the passing remark in Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith's History of Laws and Government as Political Theory,” in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge, 2009), 131–71, at 133 n. 7.

133 Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtungen: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung,” in Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, series I, vol. 19, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, Schriften 1915–1920, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer and Petra Kolonko (Tübingen, 1989), 479–522; translated as Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford, 1946), 323–59.

134 Max Weber, “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Einleitung,” in Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, 1–26, at 7; translated as Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, 267–301, at 275. In “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), Weber similarly mentions at one point “the age-old problem of theodicy.” Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 77–128, at 122.

135 Weber, “Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen,” 7; Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 275.

136 Weber, “Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen,” 7; Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 275.

137 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1996; first published 1966), 63–72; Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 54–61. See also Styfhals, Willem, “Modernity as Theodicy: Odo Marquard Reads Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80/1 (2019), 113–31CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

138 Blumenberg directed this critique primarily at Odo Marquard, who had not only detected in German idealism's emphasis on the autonomy of the subject a kind of “theodicy in disguise,” but also arrived at the sweeping conclusion that “[w]here theodicy is, modernity is; where modernity is, theodicy is.” Odo Marquard, “Entlastungen: Theodizeemotive in der neuzeitlichen Philosophie,” in Marquard, Apologie des Zufälligen (Stuttgart, 1986), 11–29, at 14. As cited in Styfhals, “Modernity as Theodicy,” 115. See also Marquard, Odo, “Idealismus und Theodizee,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 73 (1965), 33–47Google Scholar.

139 Indeed, Rawls might have recognized himself in Blumenberg's self-description as a “pious atheist.” As cited in Styfhals, “Modernity as Theodicy,” 130.

140 Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 142.

141 Nelson, Theology of Liberalism, 1–48.

142 Ibid., 205.

143 Forrester captures this ambivalence through the recurrent image of the “shadow” of Rawls's theory, which came to acquire a “spectral presence.” Forrester, Shadow of Justice, xi. See also Stefan Eich, “Review of Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, H-Diplo, roundtable forum with an introduction by Samuel Moyn (January 2020). https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-24.

144 Sophie Smith, “Imagining Politics: Poetry and the Origins of Political Theory,” 2017 Quentin Skinner Lecture, University of Cambridge, 9 June 2017; Bourke, “History and Normativity in Political Theory.”

145 Mills, Charles W., “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia 20/4 (2005), 165–84Google Scholar. Brandon Terry also expands on this danger of ideal theory as reconciliation in his contribution to this forum, even where he disagrees with Mills's reading of Rawls on race.

146 Hayek, F. A., “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” University of Chicago Law Review 16/3 (1949), 417–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 432; reprinted in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 10, Socialism and War, ed. Bruce Caldwell (London, 1997), 221–37, at 237.

147 Justice as Fairness was, of course, compiled of Rawls's lecture material for his class on social justice and edited by Erin Kelly.

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

149 Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.