The cultural impact of printing and the trade in books was out of all proportion to its economic significance. The importation of white and brown paper for writing, printing and packaging probably generated more profit for its wholesalers than the total output of printed texts did for printers, booksellers, mercuries, bookbinders and related trades, put together. Yet although the British book trade in 1557 was unavoidably insular and parochial when compared with that on the Continent, it offered native writers a closed market which meant that a higher proportion of works in the vernacular were published than was the case abroad. Paradoxically, Britain’s off-shore position, which made it for the most part culturally dependent on the Continent for learned writing of all kinds, privileged the development of its own independent traditions within the ‘four kingdoms’. Printing dramatically accelerated the flow of information in the vernacular, and increasingly did so across class, cultural and national boundaries in the English-speaking world. It played a vital role in a world in which oral, visual, manuscript and printed texts all existed side by side, interacting with one another. Print did not replace manuscript circulation or production: as is the case today, the new technology supplemented earlier ones, partially or largely replacing them for some functions, reinforcing them for others.

Constitutionalism he idea of the subjectionthe idea of the subjection of even the highest political authority in a country to limits and requirements having the form and force of law he idea of the subjectionis a notion of normative political theory. Despite this notion's familiarity to us, theorists continue to puzzle over what, exactly, it means for it to be put into practice or how, exactly, its being put into practice may bear on the moral justifiability of political rulership. Our first general question in this chapter is about John Rawls's contributions to this branch of speculative inquiry.

From a lawyer’s standpoint, a “constitution” is an existent law or statute, the country’s highest-ranking one, which no other legal enactment, opinion, or decision may contravene. What lawyers call constitutional law is a body of learning to be used in specifying the content of this highest-ranking law or statute and applying it to disputed cases. Here, too, we find a field of long-standing debate about how judges and other officials ought to approach their tasks of construing and applying basic-law texts and precedents. The issues prove hard to resolve without getting into speculative questions concerning (a) the ends and reasons for which a country’s basic law imposes limits and requirements on ordinary political rule, and (b) the events and conditions by and under which such legal impositions may legitimately be decided and come into force.

JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice tells us what justice requires, what a just society should look like, and how justice fits into the overall good of the members of a just society. But it does not tell us much about the politics of a just society: about the processes of public argument, political mobilization, electoral competition, organized movements, legislative decision making, or administration comprised within the politics of a modern democracy. Indeed, neither the term “democracy” nor any of its cognates has an entry in the index to A Theory of Justice. The only traditional problem of democracy that receives much sustained attention is the basis of majority rule, which is itself addressed principally in the context of a normative model of legislative decisions with an uncertain relation to actual legislative processes. This relative inattention to democracy – to politics more generally – may leave the impression that Rawls's theory of justice in some way denigrates democracy, perhaps subordinating it to a conception of justice that is defended through philosophical reasoning and is to be implemented by judges and administrators insulated from politics.

So it comes as something of a surprise when Rawls says, in the preface to the first edition of Theory of Justice, that his conception of justice as fairness “constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.”To be sure, the idea that justice as fairness has a particularly intimate democratic connection is prominent from the 1980 Dewey Lectures forward.

In the Preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls observes that “[d]uring much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some formof utilitarianism” (TJ, p. vii/xvii rev.). Critics of utilitarianism, he says, have pointed out that many of its implications run counter to our moral convictions and sentiments, but they have failed “to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it” (TJ, p. viii/xvii rev.). As a result, Rawls writes, “we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism.” In the end, he speculates, we are likely to “settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints.” “Such a view,” he adds, “is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. But this is no reason not to try”(TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). Accordingly, what he proposes to do “is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.” Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one “which best approximates our considered judgments of justice.” His aim is to develop this theory in such a way as to “offer an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior . . . to the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition” (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.).

The allegation that liberals neglect the value of community has a long – some would say notorious – history. Rawls's A Theory of Justice, immediately acclaimed as the most systematic and sophisticated statement of liberal theory to date, must have confirmed the worst suspicions of those predisposed to believe that liberalism's emphasis on the individual implied its neglect of the formative significance of their social context and the moral significance of relations between them. For Rawls’s invocation of a hypothetical contract, whereby rational and disembodied individuals, deprived of all particularity and characterised simply as free and equal, are to agree on principles to regulate the distribution of benefits and burdens in society, seemed perfectly to illustrate the claim that liberalism commits a number of fundamental errors:

• Seeking an unavailable Archimedean point from which to construct an abstract and universally applicable blueprint for society;

• Assuming individuals to be fundamentally self-interested;

• Ignoring the fact that people are socially constituted;

• Positing an incoherent metaphysical essence of the person; and

• Claiming to be neutral while sneaking in strongly individualistic premises.

It is not hard to see why many of Rawls’s most influential critics formulated their objections in terms that pointed, in one way or another, to his failure to appreciate the value or significance of ‘community’, a shared line of attack that, despite important differences, earned them and their critique the label ‘communitarian’.

PRELIMINARIES

John Rawls's published works extend over fifty years from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. During this period his writings have come to define a substantial portion of the agenda for Anglo-American political philosophy, and they increasingly influence political philosophy in the rest of the world. His primary work, A Theory of Justice (TJ), has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Only ten years after Theory was published, a bibliography of articles on Rawls listed more than 2,500 entries. This extensive commentary indicates the widespread influence of Rawls's ideas as well as the intellectual controversy his ideas stimulate.

From the outset Rawls’s work has been guided by the question, “What is the most appropriate moral conception of justice for a democratic society?” (TJ, p. viii/xiii rev.). In Theory he pursued this question as part of a more general inquiry into the nature of social justice and its compatibility with human nature and a person’s good. Here Rawls aimed to redress the predominance of utilitarianism in modern moral philosophy. As an alternative to utilitarianism, Rawls, drawing on the social contract tradition, developed a conception of justice “that is highly Kantian in nature” (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). According to this conception, justice generally requires that basic social goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self – respect – be equally distributed, unless an unequal distribution is to everyone’s advantage ((TJ, p. 62/54 rev.). But under favourable social conditions a special conception, “justice as fairness,” applies; it requires giving priority to certain liberties and opportunities via the institutions of a liberal constitutional democracy.

I spoke here approximately five years ago. Then I spoke on Frege and Wittgenstein, [and] so I thought I would continue the series by now talking about Rawls. Some might think there is no connection between Frege and Wittgenstein, on [the] one hand, and Rawls, on the other. For me there is a very close connection, and I hope to bring it out implicitly if not explicitly today.

Everyone knows that in 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, which is very widely considered the most important work in political philosophy and perhaps even in moral philosophy since the end of World War II, and many think the most important work in political philosophy since the writings of John Stuart Mill. But what is not so widely known is that in 1993 Rawls brought out a second book, Political Liberalism, which a few of us believe is even more important. This book did not receive much praise upon coming out and has had [much less] attention paid to it. That I should like to change. (As I told Rawls yesterday afternoon just before I came out here, I view myself as an apostle going west.)

Few components of John Rawls's political philosophy have proven so epoch-making as what he somewhat oddly called the “difference principle.” None has exercised as great an influence outside the circle of academic philosophers. And hardly any has given rise to so many misunderstandings or generated such heated controversies.

The core of the principle is a simple and appealing idea: that social and economic inequalities should be evaluated in terms of how well off they leave the worst off. The idea is simple; it amounts to asking that the minimum of some index of advantage should be maximised. To many, it is also appealing, for the demand that the advantages enjoyed by the least advantaged should be as generous as (sustainably) possible provides a transparent and elegant way of articulating an egalitarian impulse and a concern for efficiency. For it avoids, at the same time, the absurdity of equality at any price and the outrageousness of maximising the aggregate no matter how distributed.

Thus understood, the difference principle bears some undeniable resemblance to the justification of economic inequalities by reference to some notion of the general interest, as in the utilitarian tradition. But aggregate social welfare is not quite the same as the interest of the least advantaged. The idea of using the latter as the benchmark for assessing inequalities had never been given, before Rawls, a powerful explicit formulation that could capture the scholarly imagination. But it had occurred to others before him.

Because John Rawls's work on justice has such fundamental importance, feminists have scrutinized it with particular care and have made many criticisms. Rawls himself has become deeply concerned with these criticisms – in some cases seriously revising his theory in response. In general, he continues to insist, the various feminist objections do not invalidate a liberal approach to the theory of justice: in fact, liberal theories can answer feminist concerns better than other theories. Nor, he believes, is his particular liberal theory wanting: he doubts that it could be shown that justice as fairness does not have the resources to deal with the problems raised by the women's movement. Nonetheless, he concedes, liberal theories of justice have a great deal of work yet to do if they are to make good on this promise, particularly in the area of family justice:

One of Rawls's guiding aims in the development and revision of his work has been to show how a well-ordered society of justice as fairness is realistically possible. Rawls thinks establishing the feasibility, or “stability,” of a conception of justice is essential to its justification. My aim is to discuss the role and import of Rawls's stability argument. To do so, I will concentrate primarily on the second part of Rawls's discussion of stability in Theory of Justice, the argument for the “congruence of the right and the good.”This argument particularly exhibits Rawls's indebtedness to Kant in the justification of his view. After discussing the purpose of congruence (in Sections I and II), I outline in detail what the argument is (III and IV), emphasizing the role of the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness. Then in Section V, I discuss how problems with the Kantian congruence argument led Rawls to political liberalism.

STABILITY AND CONGRUENCE: OUTLINE OF ISSUES

Rawls’s congruence argument has been widely neglected in discussions of his work. Reasons for this neglect are several. First there is sheer exhaustion. The congruence argument begins in Part III of Theory of Justice (TJ), is developed for over 200 pages, and culminates (in Section 86) at the end of a very long book. Second, there is Rawls’s uncharacteristic lack of clarity in setting out the congruence argument: it is interrupted and intertwined with other arguments Rawls simultaneously develops. Finally, there is the feeling among some of Rawls’s main commentators that the argument is a failure.

John Rawls's writings across the last three decades advance the best-known form of Kantian constructivism. During this time his understanding of the terms constructive and Kantian has changed in various ways, which I shall trace in this chapter and contrast with the formof “Kantian constructivism” which (I argue) can most plausibly be attributed to Kant himself.