Description:

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.
Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Review

Half a century after its publication, A Theory of Justice remains the book that no serious political philosopher can avoid. It has been called the most important work of political philosophy in the English language since Mill, and the scale of the claim is not hyperbolic. What Rawls attempted — and, on any honest reckoning, largely achieved — was to make systematic normative argument about justice respectable again after a long positivist interregnum that had declared such work impossible. He did it not by reviving the old natural-law scaffold or appealing to revolutionary fervor but by building a contractarian architecture of such relentless internal discipline that it could meet its chief rival, utilitarianism, on its own ground of clarity and system and emerge as the more compelling contender. The book is not an easy read. It is vast, recursive, and in places numbingly formal. But the edifice has an integrity that repays the effort: it is one of the few books in political thought where every major claim is cross-braced to every other, and where the method itself — reflective equilibrium — is enacted sentence by sentence as Rawls adjusts the description of his initial situation until the principles it yields answer to our considered moral convictions.

The core argument is deceptively simple to state. Principles of justice are whatever free and rational persons would agree to under conditions that are themselves fair. Fairness is secured by placing the parties behind a veil of ignorance that strips away knowledge of their class position, natural endowments, conception of the good, and even the generation they belong to. From this original position, Rawls argues, the parties would choose two principles in strict lexical ordering: a principle of equal basic liberties, and a second principle regulating social and economic inequalities so that they must attach to positions open under fair equality of opportunity and benefit the least advantaged — the difference principle. The argument's engine is that under radical uncertainty about who you will turn out to be, gambling on aggregate gains becomes irrational because the worst-case outcome of a utilitarian arrangement — being part of the sacrificed minority — is unacceptable. "The maximin rule tells us to rank alternatives by their worst possible outcomes: we are to adopt the alternative the worst outcome of which is superior to the worst outcomes of the others." The two principles are the maximin solution to the problem of justice.

What makes the theory so powerful is not the intuitive appeal of the veil of ignorance — that is an old idea, dressed here in new formal clothing — but the way Rawls refuses to let any single move do all the work. Chapter II, which remains the most widely taught part of the book, stages a remarkable dialectical progression through four interpretations of the second principle. He begins with the system of natural liberty, where careers are open to talents but background inequalities are unchecked. That interpretation cannot be accepted once we notice that social class and family position are "arbitrary from a moral point of view." Liberal equality adds fair equality of opportunity — education, the policing of barriers — but still allows the distribution of natural talents to govern outcomes. Yet why should the natural lottery be any less arbitrary than the social one? Natural aristocracy, which requires the better-endowed to benefit the worse-off but refuses to treat talents as a common asset, proves unstable for the same reasons. Only democratic equality with the difference principle remains standing: "the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society." The argument does not so much defend the difference principle directly as show that every retreat from it collapses under the weight of its own premises. It is an elimination proof disguised as a survey, and it is, within its own terms, extremely hard to resist.

Chapters III and IV convert the informal sketch into a formal apparatus. The original position gets its full specification — the five formal constraints of the concept of right (generality, universality, publicity, ordering, finality), the circumstances of justice borrowed from Hume but stripped of their empirical psychology, the rationality of the parties, and the maximin heuristic — and the contrast with utilitarian reasoning is sharpened to a point. Rawls's diagnosis of the utilitarian error has become justly famous: "Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons." The charge is not that utilitarians are callous but that their conceptual structure — extending the principle of rational choice for a single individual to society as a whole through the device of the impartial sympathetic spectator — literally erases the separateness of persons. The contractarian alternative defines impartiality "from the standpoint of the litigants themselves" rather than from the standpoint of a benevolent observer who conflates all desires into one system. "The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality." This is a genuinely deep criticism, and it is explored with a precision that leaves classical utilitarianism permanently altered as a going concern. The treatment of average utilitarianism in sections 27 and 28 is equally devastating: Rawls derives Harsanyi's Bayesian version of the veil-of-ignorance argument, then shows it rests on the principle of insufficient reason — the assumption that not knowing the probabilities entitles you to treat all outcomes as equally likely — and on a conception of the person as a "bare-person" with no determinate final ends. The expectation it generates is "a purely formal expression … one that lacks an appropriate meaning." This is philosophical demolition of a high order.

The book's middle sections — on equal liberty, distributive shares, and the theory of duty and obligation — are where the abstract framework meets institutional reality. Rawls's treatment of liberty of conscience is particularly fine, and the argument for why parties behind the veil cannot "take chances" with their religious or moral obligations is a permanent contribution to liberal theory. Toleration is not a pragmatic concession to pluralism but a direct consequence of the equal liberty principle. "Toleration is not derived from practical necessities or reasons of state. Moral and religious freedom follows from the principle of equal liberty." The discussion of the intolerant — what to do with those who would use their liberty to destroy liberty — is characteristically careful: the tolerant have a right to curtail intolerance only when it genuinely threatens the security of equal liberties, not merely because they disapprove. The chapter on distributive shares contains the book's most potent political idea, property-owning democracy, which Rawls distinguishes sharply from the welfare state. A welfare state redistributes income at the end of the process while leaving the underlying distribution of capital and land concentrated; a property-owning democracy disperses wealth from the beginning, so the fair value of political liberties is not hollowed out by concentrations of private economic power. This is where the theory becomes a concrete political program, and the 1990 preface's emphasis on this distinction signals that it was never merely an academic exercise. The chapter on civil disobedience, meanwhile, defines the concept with a clarity that has structured every subsequent discussion: "a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government." Rawls argues that civil disobedience, properly constrained, stabilizes rather than subverts a nearly just constitutional democracy — it is a corrective mechanism for the sense of justice of the majority, not a prelude to revolution. The argument is elegant, but the limitation of the theory to "nearly just" regimes is also one of its most obvious vulnerabilities: what guidance does it offer when the society is not nearly just?

Part Three, on the theory of the good, is the most contested and, in some respects, the weakest part of the book. Rawls needs an account of the good to define primary goods — those things every rational person is presumed to want, whatever else they want — without importing a comprehensive moral ideal that would undermine the priority of the right. The thin theory of the good (goodness as rationality, the Aristotelian Principle that "human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities … and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity") serves this purpose reasonably well. But the full theory, elaborated across Chapters VII through IX, attempts something far more ambitious: it argues that in a well-ordered society the right and the good are congruent — that having an effective sense of justice is part of one's own good, not a costly constraint on it. This is the stability argument in its deepest form. A well-ordered society is "a social union of social unions" in which citizens share the final end of cooperating under just institutions, and the collective activity of upholding justice becomes a form of human flourishing. Rawls draws on Aristotle, Kant, Royce, and an intricate moral psychology of three developmental stages governed by reciprocity laws to make this case. The ambition is staggering, but the execution is strained. The argument that the desire to act justly and the desire to express one's nature as a free and equal rational being "turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire" is asserted rather than demonstrated. Rawls concedes that the congruence is only "more probable" than on the utilitarian view, and the repeated appeals to what citizens in a well-ordered society "would want" or "would come to see" have an air of wishful retrofitting. The entire edifice of Part Three works beautifully if you already accept that the well-ordered society is as Rawls describes it. If you do not — if, for instance, you think that a sense of justice might genuinely conflict with some people's good, or that the Aristotelian Principle is more culturally specific than Rawls acknowledges — the stability argument looks less like a proof and more like a promissory note.

This is, in microcosm, the book's characteristic difficulty. Rawls's method of reflective equilibrium requires that we go back and forth between principles and considered judgments until they cohere, but at crucial junctures the "considered judgments" that do the adjusting are themselves artifacts of the very liberal-democratic sensibility the theory is supposed to vindicate. The original position is not a neutral device; it is a construct designed to yield a specific result. The veil of ignorance excludes knowledge of one's conception of the good — but that already presumes that conceptions of the good are things one can bracket while choosing principles, rather than constitutive of the chooser's identity. The parties are modeled as mutually disinterested, rational agents — but that already rules out conceptions of justice grounded in solidarity, care, or recognition. The formal constraints of the concept of right (generality, universality, publicity, ordering, finality) are presented as conditions on any moral conception, but they look suspiciously like conditions that utilitarianism and intuitionism would also endorse, and they do little to narrow the field. The argument is less that the two principles are uniquely rational than that, under the constraints Rawls has built into the original position, they defeat the specific rivals he considers. That is no small achievement — most political philosophy does not get even that far — but the residual unease is that the system's coherence is purchased at the price of parochialism.

The canonical position of A Theory of Justice is, by now, secure: it belongs to the liberal tradition as its most systematic twentieth-century expression, carrying the social contract of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant "to a higher order of abstraction." Rawls himself is explicit about this lineage, and the book's relationship to Kant is especially intimate. The Kantian interpretation of the original position in section 40 is one of the most intellectually thrilling passages Rawls ever wrote: it recasts Kant's noumenal self and categorical imperative as a procedural apparatus that sidesteps the metaphysical dualisms that made Kant's ethics so vulnerable. The original position, Rawls argues, supplies the missing concept of "expression" — acting from principles that free and equal rational beings would unanimously choose is what it means to express one's nature as free and equal. Sidgwick's objection that Kant cannot explain why the saint expresses his true self more than the scoundrel finds its answer: the scoundrel's principles could not be chosen collectively. The book is equally in dialogue with the utilitarian tradition from Bentham through Sidgwick to Edgeworth and Pigou, and with the intuitionism of Ross, Moore, and Prichard that had dominated mid-century British moral philosophy. Rawls borrows from all of them — Ross's prima-facie distinction, Sidgwick's deliberative rationality, Mill's arguments for free institutions — while subordinating each to his own framework. The cross-references are encyclopedic: Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Pareto, Wicksell, Musgrave, Meade, Sen, Arrow, Harsanyi, Nozick, Hart. The range of interlocutors is itself a philosophical statement — a refusal to partition moral philosophy from political economy, developmental psychology, or decision theory. This intellectual catholicism, combined with the analytic tradition's demand for precise argument, is the book's most durable methodological legacy.

What the book does not do well must be said plainly. It is almost unreadable in places, with sentences that unspool across half a page and a numbering system so intricate that flipping between sections feels like navigating a legal code. The prose is precise but rarely beautiful; it has the plain-gray functionality of a well-engineered bridge. The theory is, by design, ideal theory — it assumes strict compliance, a closed society, and reasonable pluralism only within narrow bounds. Critics have argued that this makes it largely silent on the deepest injustices of the actual world, where power relations are not given by the basic structure alone but by histories of conquest, slavery, and patriarchy that the original position is not well-equipped to theorize. The would-say-about extraction for gender indicates that Rawls treats sex-based inequalities as unjust when they cannot be justified to women — but the mechanism by which the original position's genderless parties would address a patriarchal structure that shapes their very self-understanding remains underspecified. The book's relegation of the family to a footnote in which Rawls concedes it may "be a barrier to equal chances" is an evasion that feminist critics have been pointing at for decades. The theory of the good is the weakest link: the argument that self-respect is "the most important primary good" and that justice as fairness best supports it is central to the whole architecture but rests on psychological claims that are stipulated rather than demonstrated. And the stability argument of Part Three, for all its ingenuity, never fully escapes the suspicion that it is a rationalization of the conclusion Rawls wanted to reach — that justice and self-interest can be made to converge if only we adopt the right conception of the self.

These are serious weaknesses, but they are weaknesses of a book that attempted something genuinely difficult, not of one that took the easy way out. A Theory of Justice is a book for readers who want to see what political philosophy looks like when it refuses to take shortcuts. It is not a book that will lend comfort to any single political movement — it is too demanding for the self-satisfied liberal, too focused on institutional design for the revolutionary, too egalitarian for the libertarian, too contractarian for the communitarian. What it offers instead is a model of how to do normative argument at scale: build the strongest possible version of your opponent's position, present your own framework as a constructive alternative rather than a set of objections, and follow the implications wherever they lead, even when they lead — as they did for Rawls himself, in the decades after this book — to a substantial revision called Political Liberalism. The book's final methodological word is also its most honest: "Justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view." That is a modest claim for a book so ambitious, but it is also an invitation. The edifice Rawls built is not a fortress to be defended but a research program to be extended, contested, and sometimes dismantled. Half a century of exactly that work has not made it obsolete. It has made it, in the only way that matters for philosophy, alive.

Notable Quotes

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

Rawls's foundational statement of what distinguishes justice as fairness from utilitarianism: individual rights cannot be sacrificed for aggregate benefit. — individual rights, anti-utilitarianism, inviolability, justice

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.

The first principle of justice, establishing the priority of equal basic liberties as the bedrock of a just society. — liberty, equality, first principle, basic rights

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

The second principle of justice in its initial formulation, later refined into the difference principle and fair equality of opportunity. — inequality, difference principle, equal opportunity, second principle

All social values -- liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect -- are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage.

The general conception of justice from which the two principles are a special case, establishing equality as the baseline from which departures must be justified. — equality, distribution, primary goods, general conception

Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.

Rawls's concise definition of injustice, following directly from the general conception of justice. — injustice, inequality, reciprocity

No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like.

Describing the veil of ignorance in the original position, the device that ensures the principles chosen will be fair to all. — veil of ignorance, original position, fairness, impartiality

The idea of the original position is to set up a fair procedure so that any principles agreed to will be just. The aim is to use the notion of pure procedural justice as a basis of theory.

Rawls explaining the methodological purpose of the original position as a thought experiment in pure procedural justice. — original position, procedural justice, fairness, method

Those who have gained more must do so on terms that are justifiable to those who have gained the least.

The intuitive core of the difference principle: inequalities are legitimate only when they can be justified to the worst-off members of society. — difference principle, justification, reciprocity, inequality

The priority of liberty means that whenever the basic liberties can be effectively established, a lesser or an unequal liberty cannot be exchanged for an improvement in economic well-being.

Rawls's lexical ordering of the two principles, establishing that freedom cannot be traded for material advantage once a certain threshold of development is reached. — priority of liberty, lexical ordering, freedom, economic welfare

Racial and sexual discrimination presupposes that some hold a favored place in the social system which they are willing to exploit to their advantage. From the standpoint of persons similarly situated in an initial situation which is fair, the principles of explicit racist doctrines are not only unjust. They are irrational.

Rawls arguing that behind the veil of ignorance, no rational person would endorse discrimination since no one knows their own race or sex. — discrimination, racism, rationality, veil of ignorance

In an association of saints agreeing on a common ideal, if such a community could exist, disputes about justice would not occur. Each would work selflessly for one end as determined by their common religion, and reference to this end would settle every question of right. But a human society is characterized by the circumstances of justice.

Explaining why justice is the virtue needed specifically under conditions of moderate scarcity and conflicting interests -- the conditions that actually characterize human societies. — circumstances of justice, conflict, scarcity, human nature

Property-owning democracy avoids this, not by redistributing income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital at the beginning of each period.

Rawls distinguishing his preferred institutional form from the welfare state, emphasizing ex ante distribution of productive capacity over ex post redistribution of income. — property-owning democracy, welfare state, distribution, institutions

To deny justice to another is either to refuse to recognize him as an equal, or to manifest a willingness to exploit the contingencies of natural fortune and happenstance for our own advantage. In either case deliberate injustice invites submission or resistance.

In the discussion of civil disobedience, explaining what injustice communicates to those who suffer it and why resistance can be a legitimate response. — injustice, equality, civil disobedience, recognition

Civil disobedience used with due restraint and sound judgment helps to maintain and strengthen just institutions. By resisting injustice within the limits of fidelity to law, it serves to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur.

Rawls's argument that civil disobedience is a stabilizing device within constitutional democracy, not a threat to it. — civil disobedience, stability, constitutional democracy, fidelity to law

The final court of appeal is not the court, nor the executive, nor the legislature, but the electorate as a whole.

On the ultimate source of democratic authority in settling questions of justice, affirming popular sovereignty as the foundation of legitimate government. — democracy, popular sovereignty, constitutional authority, political legitimacy

Acting autonomously is acting from principles that they would acknowledge under conditions that best express their nature as free and equal rational beings.

The Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, where moral autonomy consists in living by principles one would choose under conditions of freedom and equality. — autonomy, Kant, freedom, moral agency

Thus to respect persons is to recognize that they possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. It is to affirm that the loss of freedom for some is not made right by a greater welfare enjoyed by others.

Rawls articulating what respect for persons means within justice as fairness, connecting it to Kant's idea that persons have a dignity beyond all price. — respect for persons, inviolability, Kant, individual rights

A well-ordered society, corresponding to justice as fairness, is itself a form of social union. Indeed, it is a social union of social unions.

Rawls's vision of how a just society constitutes a community, not through a single shared conception of the good but through the shared commitment to just institutions. — social union, community, well-ordered society, cooperation

The collective activity of justice is the preeminent form of human flourishing.

Rawls's striking claim that cooperating to maintain just institutions is itself the highest expression of human nature, drawing on the Aristotelian Principle. — flourishing, justice, Aristotelian Principle, community

The division of labor is overcome not by each becoming complete in himself, but by willing and meaningful work within a just social union of social unions in which all can freely participate as they so incline.

Rawls's response to the problem of human incompleteness: no individual can realize all human capacities, but through just cooperation we participate in the full range of human excellence. — division of labor, social union, human nature, cooperation

When institutions are just, those taking part in these arrangements acquire the corresponding sense of justice and desire to do their part in maintaining them.

The stability thesis: a just society generates its own motivational support through the psychological development of its members. — stability, sense of justice, moral psychology, institutions

The acceptance of the principles of right and justice forges the bonds of civic friendship and establishes the basis of comity amidst the disparities that persist.

On how shared principles of justice enable social cohesion despite the inevitable disagreements that remain in a pluralistic society. — civic friendship, pluralism, social cohesion, comity

Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

The closing lines of the book, where Rawls describes what it would mean to fully inhabit the moral perspective defined by justice as fairness -- to see the human situation sub specie aeternitatis. — moral ideal, perspective, sub specie aeternitatis, virtue

A person is unjust to the extent that from character and inclination he is disposed to such actions.

Defining individual injustice in terms of character rather than isolated acts, linking it to the failure of judges and authorities to adhere to established rules. — injustice, character, rule of law, formal justice

We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

On the finality of moral principles: once claims of self-interest and existing social arrangements have been properly weighed in the system of justice, they cannot be reintroduced as further objections. — finality, moral principles, practical reasoning, authority of justice