John Rawls wrote two very famous books. In what follows, I’ll discuss the second of these two books (the one first published in 1993 rather than the one first published in 1971) because in my view that is the one that has far-reaching consequences for what political philosophy as a field of intellectual endeavor is supposed to be, and that potentially puts out of business the conception of political philosophy I have sought to defend throughout this book. It seems outrageous to discuss the work of Rawls under the rubric of “the death of political philosophy.” My objective in this chapter is to defend my choice of this provocative rubric, and explain both why the key philosophical move that Rawls initiates with Political Liberalism (and the essays leading up to it) makes sense from within his own intellectual framework, and why it has quite damaging consequences for the conception of theorizing defended in this book.

Any discussion of Rawls must begin with his theory of justice, so that is where we’ll start. I don’t have the space to go into the technical details of Rawls’s theorizing, which are often quite intricate, and some of which Rawls repeatedly revised. Rather, I’ll content myself with trying to map out the broader vision that shapes both the content of Rawls’s political philosophy and his conception of what political philosophy is.