¹ “War Motif Emphasized in ’41 Beer Suit Design,” Daily Princetonian (hereafter Princetonian), 21 March 1941, 1. See also “A Century after Their Debut, Beer Jackets Are Still in Style,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 2012, at https://paw.princeton.edu/article/century-after-their-debut-beer-jackets-are-still-style.

² Rawls, John B., “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” Nassau Literary Magazine 99/6 (1941), 46–54Google Scholar. I follow the student body in referring to the journal hereafter as “the Lit.” The exact publication date of Rawls's essay is unclear, but this issue of the Lit—and Rawls's article—were discussed in the Princetonian by one of its editors on 9 June 1941. See David Fowler, “‘Lit’ Bears Mark of Current Events; Only Poetry Keeps Introspective Tenor,” Princetonian, 9 June 1941, 1.

³ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48.

⁴ John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge, 2009). The thesis was first publicly discussed by Eric Gregory in his “Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35/2 (2007), 179–206.

⁵ Andrius Gališanka, John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 18.

⁶ Harold W. Dodds, “Text of President Dodds's Address Given at Opening Exercises,” Princetonian, 18 Sept. 1939, 5–6.

⁷ Edward A. Purcell Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, 1973), 139–53, at 152. See e.g. Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, 1936); and Mortimer Adler, “God and the Professors,” Chicago Maroon, 14 Nov. 1940, 3–4.

⁸ Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 139–98; see also Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, 2015), 27–40.

⁹ Adler, “God and the Professors,” 4.

¹⁰ Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2015), esp. chs. 1–2; and 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, at 169–77. Purcell discusses Maritain only very briefly, in Crisis of Democratic Theory, 179–80; but see Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Basingstoke, 2013), 25.

¹¹ Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 221.

¹² Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 164. This is a significant omission. The discourse on naturalism has been well studied in the history of American social science since Purcell's Crisis, which has informed standard works, e.g. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991); Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible (Durham, NC, 1994); David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 2006), esp. 183–90; and Greif, The Crisis of Man, 16.

¹³ Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (Chicago, 2021), 231–3. My thanks to Modern Intellectual History's anonymous Reader D for this recommendation.

¹⁴ Thomas, arriving in 1940, was not a part of the original group of Princeton humanists, but he was hired to assist with their projects. See Bryan McAllister-Grande, “The Inner Restoration: Protestants Fighting for the Unity of Truth, 1930–1960,” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 2017), e.g. 21–2, 59–64.

¹⁵ George F. Thomas, Religion in an Age of Secularism (New York, 1941), 20–21.

¹⁶ Ibid., 11.

¹⁷ Princeton Group, “The Spiritual Basis of Democracy,” in Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium (New York, 1942), 251–7, at 252, 255. John Dewey, “Antinaturalism in Extremis,” in Yervant H. Krikorian, ed., Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York, 1944), 1–16, at 7. At least three of Rawls's professors contributed: Thomas, the philosopher Theodore Greene, and reformation historian E. Harris Harbison.

¹⁸ Gališanka, John Rawls, 199.

¹⁹ W. T. Stace, The Destiny of Western Man (New York, 1942), 202; for comments showing that the writing was completed by summer 1941 see ibid., x, 214. And see, e.g., “Third Elective,” Princetonian, 2 Oct. 1940, 4, and equivalent entries every Wednesday until 4 Dec. 1940.

²⁰ For Thomas, by contrast, this is a peripheral problem; see Religion in an Age of Secularism, 9–10. Compare Rawls, Sin and Faith, 107.

²¹ Stace, Destiny, esp. vii–viii, 89–103, 271–80.

²² Ibid., 266.

²³ Ibid., 189. Some literature (e.g. Samuel Freeman, Rawls (London, 2007), 13) treats Stace as a Hegel scholar, as he wrote on Hegel early in his career. However, Stace was “far from happy” about this association and continuing to treat him as a Hegelian obscures his influence on Rawls. See Smith, James Ward, “Walter Terence Stace 1886–1967,” Proceeding and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 41 (1967–8), 136–8Google Scholar, at 137.

²⁴ Stace, Destiny, 176–7, 196.

²⁵ Ibid., vii.

²⁶ Ibid., 163.

²⁷ Ibid., 166.

²⁸ Ibid., 162, 264; Isaiah 1:18.

²⁹ Stace, Destiny, viii, 284, also 13–17.

³⁰ Ibid., x.

³¹ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918–22), trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York, 1926–1928), 1: 104. A good recent summary of Spengler's thought and significance can be found in Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (New Haven, 2021), esp. ch. 1.

³² Spengler, Decline, 1: 21.

³³ For an account of Decline as a “metaphysical history of reason” see Julian Potter, “The Spengler Connection: Total Critiques of Reason after the Great War,” in Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs, and Jack Reynolds, eds., 100 Years of European Philosophy since the Great War: Crisis and Reconfigurations (London, 2017), 83–103, esp. 87–90.

³⁴ Spengler, Decline, 2: 103, 400–16.

³⁵ Ibid., 497–507; see also, Greif, Crisis of Man, 47–51.

³⁶ Spengler, Decline, 2: 311.

³⁷ Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. edn (Middletown, 1983), 241.

³⁸ Spengler, Decline, 2: 447–64.

³⁹ Ibid., 442.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 455, 447.

⁴¹ Ibid., 443.

⁴² Ibid., 506–7.

⁴³ Udi Greenberg, “Revolution from the Right: Against Equality,” in Peter E. Gordon and Warren Breckman, eds., The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (Cambridge, 2019), vol. 2, 233–58, at 235–7. For a recent account of Spengler's significance to the resurgent the far right see Rose, World after Liberalism.

⁴⁴ Petri Kuokkanen, “Prophets of Decline: The Global Histories of Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee in the United States 1896–1961” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Tampere, 2003), 65–82; “Spengler Speaks,” Time, 12 Feb. 1934, 63–4.

⁴⁵ Greenberg, “Revolution from the Right,” 253. Much recent work on Spengler has emphasized his break with Hitler, aiming to retrieve a thinker who should not be tarred as a Nazi. See, e.g., David Engels, “Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West,” in Mark Sedgwick, ed., Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 2019), 3–21, at 6, 14; and John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton Rouge, 2001), esp. 236–40 and conclusion. I cannot respond to this at length here, but see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 3, for an account that emphasizes Spengler's contributions to, and similarities with, the ideology of National Socialism.

⁴⁶ Kuokkanen, “Prophets of Decline,” 83–4.

⁴⁷ See e.g. Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville, 1988).

⁴⁸ Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge, 1993). For background see Thomas A. Underwood, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton, 2000); this biography, unfortunately, ends before Tate's arrival at Princeton.

⁴⁹ No studies have set out to chart Tate's use of Spengler, and it is often difficult to tell when Tate derives an idea from Spengler rather than from other conservative sources—e.g. T. S. Eliot or Charles Maurras. Many scholars, however, mention Agrarian engagement with Spengler. Mark G. Malvasi notes the relevance of Spengler to Tate's politics in The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson (Baton Rouge, 1997), 98 ff. Dupree argues that Tate's understanding of time, science, and history is indebted to Decline; see Robert S. Dupree, Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination: A Study of the Poetry (Baton Rouge, 1983), 26–30, 42–50. See also Peter Nicolaisen, “The Southern Agrarians and the European Agrarians,” Mississippi Quarterly 49/4 (1996), 683–700.

⁵⁰ See Allen Tate, “Fundamentalism,” The Nation, 5 Dec. 1926, 532–4; and Tate, “Spengler's Tract against Liberalism,” American Review 3 (1934), 41–7.

⁵¹ Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (New York, 1936), 176.

⁵² Tate, “Spengler's Tract,” 46–7; see also Allen Tate, Reason in Madness (New York, 1941), ix, 3–10, 220.

⁵³ Thomas Daniel Young and John J. Hindle, eds., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate (Lexington, 1981), 166–7, at 167.

⁵⁴ Huntington Cairns, Allen Tate, and Mark van Doren, Invitation to Learning (New York, 1941), 401, 420; Tate, Reason in Madness, 205.

⁵⁵ Peaslee, David, “Science vs. Art in the Lit,” Lit 100/3 (1942), 97–104Google Scholar, at 99.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Niemeyer, Gerhart, “Today and Destiny,” Lit 99/1 (1940), 57Google Scholar; see, for example, Dunklin, Gilbert T. “Literature as Taught,” Lit 99/2 (1940), 20–22Google Scholar; and Bennett, J. D., “Literature and the Undergraduate,” Lit 99/2 (1940), 24–6Google Scholar; Peaslee, D., “Selected Poems. By J. P. Bishop,” Lit 99/4 (1941), 59–63Google Scholar; and Bennett, Joseph D., “Green Centuries: By Caroline Gordon,” Lit 100/4 (1941), 43–5Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Peaslee, “Science vs. Art,” 97–8; cf. Spengler, Decline, 2: 462, 502.

⁵⁹ Jancovich, New Criticism, 45–54, 71–80, esp. 80.

⁶⁰ Peaslee, “Science vs. Art,” 100.

⁶¹ Bok, “Inside the Cauldron”; Gališanka, John Rawls, 18–20.

⁶² These divergences among antinaturalists are not noted by Purcell (see Crisis of Democratic Theory, 221) but were perfectly clear to Tate. In 1941, he wrote dismissively to a friend of the work of Theodore Greene, a professor of Rawls's closely associated with George Thomas. See Alphonse Vinh, ed., Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933–76 (Columbia, 1998), 79–83. On Greene see Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 159–63.

⁶³ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 47.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 48–9; Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism, 136–45; Jason Scott Smith, A Concise History of the New Deal (Cambridge, 2014), 142–8; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade against the New Deal (New York, 2010), ch. 1.

⁶⁵ James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, or What Is Happening in the World Now (London, 1941). Tate is the likeliest source of Rawls's use of Burnham. Though Tate never mentions Burnham, both drew on Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York, 1933), to argue that capitalism and socialism alike would tend towards the centralization of economic and political power in the hands of a managerial class. Rawls cited him in “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 54, but largely ignored the Soviet Union. For a very similar analysis, also drawing on Berle and Means, see Allen Tate, “Notes on Liberty and Property,” in Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, eds., Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (New York, 1936) 80–93, esp. 86–7.

⁶⁶ “Princeton's Ballot Puts Willkie Ahead by Decisive Margin,” and “Roosevelt–Willkie Forum Hears Thomas Supporter,” Princetonian, 1 Nov 1940, 1. Willkie went on to lose by ten points. See e.g. Gareth Davies, “The New Deal in 1940: Embattled or Entrenched?”, in Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., America at the Ballot Box (Philadelphia, 2015), 153–66. Rawls's parents—historically Baltimore Democrats—also deserted the Democratic Party in the election of 1940, significantly because of the court-packing controversy, according to Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford, 2007), 5.

⁶⁷ Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (London, 2013), 336–7.

⁶⁸ See e.g. Hutcheson, J. S., “It's the People's Responsibility!”, Lit 99/3 (1941), 40–43Google Scholar; and Murchison, Wallace C., “A Totalitarian America,” Lit 99/4 (1941), 11–13Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ See e.g. Princetonian, 10 May 1940, 2. Rawls did not return to the Princetonian after the summer of 1941.

⁷⁰ “The Debate Is Over,” Princetonian, 30 May 1941, 1.

⁷¹ Laurence B. Holland and George B. Baldwin, “War Views,” Princetonian, 2 June 1941, 2, my emphasis. See e.g. “Undergraduates Favor Aid-to-Britain Bill by Two-to-One Majority in Campus Poll,” Princetonian, 7 March 1941, 1.

⁷² Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48, 54.

⁷³ Ibid., 46.

⁷⁴ Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship (Portland, ME, 1923), 6–7. Stace is the likeliest source of this reference. He would later cite an adjacent section of the text in his controversial “Man against Darkness,” New Republic, Sept. 1948, 53–8, at 53, which declared that moral philosophy needed to be remade to do without religion. There is no mention of Russell in Stace's Destiny, but this essay may have been mentioned to Rawls in lectures or conversation.

⁷⁵ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 46.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 47.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 46.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Stace, Destiny, 166.

⁸² All quotations in this paragraph are from Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48; and Spengler, Decline, 2: 461.

⁸³ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48. Rawls cites from the Reynal and Hitchcock edition prepared and heavily annotated by German émigré scholars under the direction of Alvin Johnson at the New School for Social Research. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York, 1939), 234. For details on this translation see James J. Barnes, Hitler's Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History, 1930–39 (Cambridge, 1980), esp. 82–6.

⁸⁴ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48.

⁸⁵ “Europe Today!”, Princetonian, 9 March 1939, 2.

⁸⁶ E.g. Stace, Destiny, 205–6, 224.

⁸⁷ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48, emphasis mine.

⁸⁸ This is not just an assessment of his character. In a footnote, Rawls alludes to Brinton's distinction between “gentle” and “tough” Nietzscheans. Brinton claimed that gentle Nietzscheans distorted Nietzsche beyond recognition. While Rawls acknowledged that Nietzsche's ambiguity made him an easy source for Nazi propagandists, he seemed to disagree. See Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 184–5. For an account of Brinton's role in Nietzsche's American reception see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, 2012), 241–3. On Rawls's opposition to Nietzsche, see Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 173 n. 69.

⁸⁹ All quotations in this paragraph are from Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 54.

⁹⁰ Spengler, Decline, 2: 453–4.

⁹¹ Ibid., 453.

⁹² Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 47.

⁹³ Ibid., 51–3.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 48, 51.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 53.

⁹⁶ Pogge, John Rawls, 9.

⁹⁷ Anne M. Kornhauser, Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia, 2015), 178–9.

⁹⁸ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 48.

⁹⁹ Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice (Princeton, 2019), ch. 1.

¹⁰⁰ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 47, my emphasis.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² Ibid., 54; Robinson Jeffers, “Theory of Truth” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, vol. 2 (Stanford, 1988), 608–10, at 608.

¹⁰³ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 107.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 107.

¹⁰⁵ See Paul Weithman, “On John Rawls's A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith,” in Weithman, Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith (Cambridge, 2016), 3–26.

¹⁰⁶ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 184.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 180.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., e.g., 220.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 206–7.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 251.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 122, 245–7.

¹¹² Ibid., 123.

¹¹³ Ibid., 211 n. 45.

¹¹⁴ See Ibid., 107 for the most forceful statement.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 230; see also Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 49–72.

¹¹⁶ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 123.

¹¹⁷ See e.g. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London, 1989), 98–105. Rawls cited Kierkegaard on despair in Sin and Faith, 208. Confusingly, Rawls cites Kierkegaard's account of despair in his discussion of “aloneness.” This was first pointed out in Robert Merrihew Adams, “The Theological Ethics of the Young Rawls and Its Background,” in Rawls, Sin and Faith, 24–101, at 69.

¹¹⁸ Rawls cited Peter Drucker's End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York, 1939) in this section, which likewise drew on Kierkegaard to cast Nazism as a response to despair bred by capitalist and communist “theories of economic man.” See Rawls, Sin and Faith, 211 n. 45; he repeats this framing without reference to Drucker at 218. See also McNeely, Ian F., “Peter Drucker's Protestant Ethic: Between European Humanism and American Management,” Modern Intellectual History 17/4 (2020), 1069–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁹ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 211.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 196–9.

¹²¹ Ibid., 201, 211. Drucker, End of Economic Man, 6–9, explicitly rejected attempts to explain Nazism with reference to effective propaganda as “stupid” and “dangerous.”

¹²² Rawls, Sin and Faith, 218.

¹²³ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 211–13; compare Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 46.

¹²⁴ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 210.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 221.

¹²⁶ This is consistent with his dilemma of becoming either “Christian” or “pagan” which Rawls adopts from T. S. Eliot in “Christianity and the Modern World,” 149. Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 186, attributes this formulation to Maritain despite Rawls's explicit reference to Eliot as the source, which may indicate his continuing engagement with forms of reactionary social critique promoted at Princeton by Tate. See T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London, 1939), 8–13.

¹²⁷ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 108.

¹²⁸ Brunner was not alone among neo-Orthodox theologians in treating Spengler this way. See e.g. Paul Silas Peterson, The Early Karl Barth: Historical Contexts and Intellectual Formation, 1905–1935 (Tübingen, 2018), 179–81; and Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Chicago, 1929), 132–3.

¹²⁹ Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia, 1939), 33–4, 181.

¹³⁰ Ibid., 172–81, 191; see also Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 98.

¹³¹ Emil Brunner, Theology of Crisis (New York, 1931), 1.

¹³² Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 91.

¹³³ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 234. This pattern of conversion is a familiar feature of the Lutheran tradition, to which Kierkegaard belongs and with which Rawls identified himself, despite recent work which has highlighted Rawls's ambivalent relationship with reformation theology, e.g. Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 165–6. See Marilyn Harran, Luther on Conversion: The Early Years (Ithaca, 1985).

¹³⁴ Rawls himself uses these terms in “On My Religion,” in Rawls, Sin and Faith, 259–69, at 261. I would like to thank the anonymous readers at Modern Intellectual History for drawing my attention to the need for this clarification.

¹³⁵ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 124; at 125 he writes, “restoration to community is called conversion.”

¹³⁶ Ibid., 234, my emphasis.

¹³⁷ Princeton Group, “Spiritual Basis,” 255; Bok, “Inside the Cauldron.”

¹³⁸ Rawls, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” 54.

¹³⁹ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 250–51. The dualism of the “rational and irrational” was meant to be superseded by Rawls's contrast between the personal and the natural; see ibid., 118–19.

¹⁴⁰ Rawls describes, for instance, a state of emotional unease that precedes conversion and has, on the face of it, nothing to do with democracy. Ibid., 222–3.

¹⁴¹ Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, “Introduction,” in Rawls, Sin and Faith, 1–23, at 20.

¹⁴² See e.g. Bok, “Inside the Cauldron,” 165–9; Reidy, David, “Rawls's Religion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31/2 (2010), 309–43Google Scholar, at 333–4.

¹⁴³ Rawls, Sin and Faith, passim, but esp. 250–51, emphasis mine.

¹⁴⁴ Ibid., 155, also 224.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid., 252.

¹⁴⁶ Rawls includes a brief discussion of Nazi propaganda in Sin and Faith, 219–20.

¹⁴⁷ Paul Weithman, “Does Justice as Fairness Have a Religious Aspect?”, in Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith (Cambridge, 2016), 213–41.

¹⁴⁸ Rawls, Sin and Faith, 239.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid., 234.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., 251.

¹⁵¹ Gališanka, John Rawls, 18.

¹⁵² Rawls, Sin and Faith, 194–5.

¹⁵³ Nelson, Theology of Liberalism, 49–72. On this point I follow Bok; see “Inside the Cauldron,” 174 n. 72.

¹⁵⁴ T. W. Adorno, “Spengler Today,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9 (1941), 305–25, at 306. Adorno's first job the United States was with the Princeton Radio Research Project. The project was based in Newark, NJ and there is little reason to think Adorno spent much, if any, time in Princeton. See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, 2005), 234–55.

¹⁵⁵ Adorno, “Spengler Today,” 325, 308, 310.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid., 306, 324–5.

¹⁵⁷ Ibid., 325.

¹⁵⁸ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1979).

¹⁵⁹ For a paradigmatic example see Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, 2008), 89–94.

¹⁶⁰ E.g. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 3–4. It important to observe the distinction between the projects of reconciliation and reasonable faith. Only on the Hegelian interpretation of Rawls's project is he committed to defending the institutions of an actually existing society, and so this task, he acknowledged, opened his theory to the accusation of ideology. Rawls, however, never set out the relation between these tasks, and Weithman makes no mention of the Hegelian passages in Rawls's work. To appeal only to the project of reasonable faith to defend Rawls from Geuss's critique, as Weithman does, therefore risks missing the issues at stake. See Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls's Political Turn (Oxford, 2010), 365–6. For an account of how Rawls “inhabited the resulting ambiguity between Kant and Hegel,” see Eich, Stefan, “The Theodicy of Growth: John Rawls, Political Economy, and Reasonable Faith,” Modern Intellectual History 18/4 (2021), 984–1009CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 990–96.

¹⁶¹ See e.g. Eich, “The Theodicy of Growth,” 1008–9.

¹⁶² McKean, Benjamin L., “Ideal Theory after Auschwitz? The Practical Uses and Ideological Abuses of Political Theory as Reconciliation,” Journal of Politics 79/4 (2017), 1177–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1185.

¹⁶³ John Bordley Rawls, “A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1950), 15.

¹⁶⁴ See e.g. Stevenson, C. L., “Persuasive Definitions,” Mind 47/187 (1938), 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, 1944), 243–52.

¹⁶⁵ John Rawls, “Remarks Concerning Justification and Objectivity” (1966), Folder 6, Box 5, John Rawls Papers (HUM 48), Harvard University Archives (henceforth Rawls Papers), 5a.

¹⁶⁶ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 514, 253. Many of these concerns, as these citations show, find their way into the stability argument. The relationship of stability and method in Rawls's thought is beyond the scope of this article.

¹⁶⁷ John Rawls, “Remarks Re Analytic Questions” (1966), Folder 6, Box 5, Rawls Papers, 3b; the continuities between Rawls's Christian beliefs and his metaethics are gestured at in Bok, P. MacKenzie, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 153–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶⁸ See e.g. Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, 2015); Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford, 2012).