D. F. McKenzie was the motive force behind this whole seven-volume project, and his was the informing mind in mapping out the shape of volume IV. He had seen and commented upon all but four of the chapters in this volume, in some cases proposing substantial revisions, most of which had been completed before his sudden and unexpected death in March 1999. Had he lived to read through the typescript once every chapter had been put together, he would undoubtedly have proposed further changes, corrections, revisions and improvements. He would also have co-operated in the writing of the Introduction. In all these ways this volume is the poorer: nevertheless, this volume stands, like the other projects he was involved with at his death, either on his own or in co-operation with others, as a testimony to the breadth of his vision as a scholar and to his ability to inspire those he taught and those with whom he worked.

Many of the points made in Lotte Hellinga's and J. B. Trapp's Preface to the preceding volume in this history about the scholarly and archival sources available to the book historian apply to this period. The Short-Title Catalogue (STC) and Wing's Catalogue (Wing) together give a degree of bibliographical control unique to printed books in English or manufactured in Britain.

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’.