Contracts and constructions

The publication of John Rawls's Political Liberalism surprised many of his admirers. It defended the same substantive principles of justice that Rawls had put forward in A Theory of Justice in 1971, but introduced major changes in the arguments by which they were supported. There is of course nothing wrong about offering distinct considerations in support of a single set of claims, yet it startled many readers to find Rawls proposing such large revisions in justification of substantive claims about justice that he had put forward for many years. Here I shall reflect on some of the innovations and the continuities in Political Liberalism that seem to me of most interest, and address some of the problems that I think it leaves unresolved.

From the time of writing A Theory of Justice, Rawls saw his work as continuing the social contract tradition, while aiming to avoid its recurrent problems. In the preface to A Theory of Justice he writes that he aims to carry ‘to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau and Kant’ (TJ viii) and in the opening paragraph that he aims to offer ‘a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract’ (TJ 3). But whereas in A Theory of Justice Rawls had mainly described his work as contractarian, in Political Liberalism the metaphors of the social contract tradition were mostly replaced by the idea that principles of justice can be constructed by reasonable procedures. The approach taken in Political Liberalism defends a form of political constructivism that seeks to identify principles of justice that would be reached by citizens who reasonably deliberate together, where reasonable citizens are seen as proposing and abiding by fair terms of social cooperation among equals (PL 93ff.).

This specific focus on citizens and their deliberation had not been prominent in A Theory of Justice, but can be seen as developing rather than replacing the earlier approach. A Theory of Justice proposes a theory of justice for a society that is thought of as ‘a more or less self-sufficient association of persons’ (TJ 4) and ‘as a closed system isolated from other societies’ (TJ 8).