Today is the the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Rawls, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Rawls was a key figure in the revitalization of moral and political philosophy. This year, his most important work, "A Theory of Justice," marks its 50th anniversary.
It goes without saying that Rawls was a shaping influence on the development of political philosophy. Rawls's work held center stage in academic debates and penetrated public discourse to an unprecedented degree. Even today, 18 years and some months after his death, Rawls remains at the center of many of the most important debates in political philosophy, although technical debates in political philosophy are now removed by many layers of dense argumentation from Rawls's original ideas and arguments. If I might make a prediction for which I cannot be held to account, it is my belief that Rawls will be read, studied, discussed, and debated for centuries.
A Theory of Justice was a big book, with many important ideas. Some of these have made their way into the everyday lexicon of moral and political philosophy and normative legal theory. Among these are reflective equilibrium, the original position with its veil of ignorance, and of course the two principles of justice, the equal liberty principle and the difference principle. Other ideas, such as the concept-conception distinction and the notions of ideal and nonideal theory remain hugely influential. More broadly, "A Theory of Justice" put distributive justice at the center stage of political philosophy for decades. "A Theory of Justice" bracketed questions about race and gender--and that omission itself gave rise to an important body of work that criticized Rawls but used Rawlsian ideas to remedy the lacunae in Rawls's own work. "The Racial Contract" by Charles Mills and "Justice, Gender, and the Family" by Susan Moller Okin are just two of many critiques that spawned entire bodies of scholarship. The critique of Rawls should be seen as one of his most important contributions to modern thought.
Because this is the Legal Theory Blog, I want to make special note of his influence on law and especially normative legal theory. I first became aware of the importance of Rawls for the law as a high school student in the early 1970s, when I realized that "A Theory of Justice" (TJ) was being read by law professors and was sometimes assigned as the central text in courses on jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. I vividly remember browsing the UCLA law school bookstore in the mid-1970s, long before I was a law student, and discovering that "A Theory of Justice" and "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" by Robert Nozick had been assigned as the principal text for the introductory Jurisprudence course. These two books were also frequently paired in undergraduate political philosophy courses. I later studied Rawls at UCLA as an undergraduate, with Jean Hampton the fierce and brilliant political philosopher, who had been his student. As a law student in the early 1980s, I sat in on Rawls's undergraduate course on the history of political philosophy--a version of that course was compiled by Samuel Freeman into "Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy."
As a very young law professor, I attended Rawls's lectures on public reason at the University of California, Irvine. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, I asked a challenging question, suggesting that the use of religious reasons by Lincoln and the abolitionists in their critique of slavery was appropriate, and that this suggested that Rawls's ideal of public reason ought to be modified to become a principle that required the inclusion of public reasons in due course and not a principle that excluded public reasons from public political debate. This lead to a lengthy exchange of letters of Rawls. As a very junior scholar, the receipt of the letters was thrilling and multiple citations in Rawls's "Political Liberalism" (PL) rank among the accomplishments of which I am the most proud. Rawls later gave another version of the lectures at UCLA. I vividly remember Philippa Foot's introduction of Rawls, which analogized "A Theory of Justice" to a mighty castle or cathedral. Foot then noted that Rawls had not been content to defend "A Theory of Justice," adding a turret here and a moat there. Instead, Foot opined, Rawls had bravely begun a major new work that preserved much of TJ, but created whole new theoretical structures including the ideas of public reason and overlapping consensus. The new work acknowledged a serious problem in the positions took in the last part of TJ. Rawls was famous for his willingness to listen to thoughtful critics and modify his position in response--a trait that all scholars should emulate.
More fundamentally, Rawls's second book offered a new way of understanding Rawls's project as "political liberalism." In a society in which there are many competing conceptions of the good and radical disagreement about fundamental questions, political philosophy can move forward taking the fact of pluralism into account and relying on public reasons to craft positions that could become the subject of an overlapping consensus.
Rawls's ideas made their way into normative legal theory through a variety of direct and indirect routes. Rawls was studied in the law schools, but his ideas also made their way into legal theory via the work of Ronald Dworkin. The method of reflective equilibrium is the method employed by Dworkin's fictional judge Hercules, who determines legal content by constructing the moral theory that best fits and justifies legal practice as a whole. Although there are not as many self-identified Dworkians as in days of yore, the influence of Dworkinian ideas remains profound, even when his Rawlsian ideas have been absorbed unconsciously by contemporary scholars who are only dimly aware of Dworkin's body of work and are completely unaware of the connection with Rawls.
Rawls himself spoke at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in New Orleans. As chair of the Section on Jurisprudence, I was thrilled when Rawls accepted my invitation to speak. Cass Sunstein and Sharon Lloyd shared the stage. Sunstein and Rawls engaged in an important exchange on the relationship between the ideas of public reason and overlapping consensus and Sunstein's similar notion of incompletely theorized agreement. After the lunch following the lecture, I remember that Rawls expressed a desire to gamble but no one else wanted to go! This moment haunts me still--surely I could have found time to accompany Jack (as he was known to his friends) to the Riverboat Casino for a few hours.
Time passes. It is now the 100th anniversary of John Rawls birth and the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice. Rawls was famous as a mentor, but today even his students are mostly in the late stages of their careers. That group includes luminaries such as Elizabeth Anderson, Joshua Cohen, Barbera Hermann, Christine Korsgaard, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon. Erin Kelly, one of Rawls's last students, is in the third decade of her career. Samuel Freeman, who has played an especially important role in the preservation of Rawls's legacy, is in his fifth decade as a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Freeman is a very important political philosopher in his own right, but the world of philosophy owes him a very great debt for the sacrifices he has surely made to make much of Rawls's unpublished work available. His book, Rawls, is essential. Erin Kelly also played a key role in enabling Rawls's late works to be published; we owe her thanks as well.
I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that many, likely most, young legal scholars are only dimly aware of Rawls's work and ideas. I am quite sure that many a young scholar has used the "veil of ignorance" or "overlapping consensus" without actually reading Rawls. Normative legal theory has never been more important in the legal academy. Much water has passed under the bridge since the writing of A Theory of Justice. There are many new and important voices and ideas. The tendency of each generation of scholars to focus on the new is not only understandable; it is something to be cherished and celebrated. But relishing the new is not an excuse for neglecting history. Jumping on the latest trend is consistent with deep immersion in the classic works that have shaped contemporary legal theory.
And another thing. Despite the fact that Rawls was the most famous and widely read political philosophers of his era, he was frequently misunderstood--often quite badly. And it is apparent that many articles written about Rawls were authored by scholars who had not bothered to read the original at all, much less closely. If you have read that Rawls said such and such or so and so, do not assume it is true. One example of this is the often repeated criticism that asserts that the description of the representative parties behind the veil of ignorance in the original position somehow commits Rawls to a theory of actual human persons that strips them of their life histories and concrete identities: this critique is bewildering to anyone who actually has read Rawls himself.
So, read Rawls. Read A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Don't put it off. Put these books on your reading list. Read them this summer, not "sometime when I get to it." You will not regret it. Even if you are completely unsympathetic to Rawls and his project, you will learn so much about how to construct an argument and advance a big project. Trust me on this. Rawls is worth your time.
And take this piece of advice if you can. Rawls encouraged younger scholars to engage the truly important ideas and thinkers. It is easy to be drawn into a debate that involves the latest wrinkle, the most recent countermove, the most fashionable new idea. I believe that if Rawls were alive today he would qualify his advice by embracing the idea of an expanded canon that looks beyond the thinkers that dominated Rawls own intellectual world. Rawls urged us to focus on what is really important. If you have a big idea, do not let it go. Nourish it. Invest in it. Give it the time that it needs to be the best version of itself. That may be years. Or it may be decades, as was the case with A Theory of Justice. But if your idea is truly important, it is worth more than a summer and a few weeks in the fall.
Rawls, the human, was generous and kind--perhaps to a fault. He was unfailingly modest in public, but he was well aware of the importance of his work. He was a megalopsychos, a great-souled human, and, I think, a phronimos, a person who possessed the rare and essential virtue of practical wisdom. But above all he had another intellectual virtue, sophia, theoretical wisdom. He was a philos of sophia--a lover of wisdom, a philosopher.
Happy birthday, John Rawls! Happy anniversary, A Theory of Justice!
Thank you, Jack! I miss you more than I can say. You remain in my heart. You appear in my dreams.
And here he is, as a high school senior in 1937.
