I want first to thank Alyssa Battistoni for organizing the panel of critics. I am grateful for this opportunity to be in conversation with Battistoni, Jason Frank, Murad Idris, and Erin Pineda, and for their illuminating comments on my account of the transformation of liberal political philosophy under the influence of Rawls.

One of my aims in writing this book was to show how liberal ideologies shaped political philosophy and constrained how philosophers understood what counted as politics—thus foreclosing analyses of phenomena that exceeded liberal democratic institutional settings (such as the politics of labor, sexuality, empire, or capitalism). To do so, I stuck closely to the ideological constellation I called postwar liberalism—a collection of beliefs about the nature of society and the state that emerged as the legitimating ideology of the postwar United States. The first line of criticism raised in the comments that I would like to address is about the scope of this history of liberalism. Idris asks what alternative stories particularly about philosophical liberalism's configuration of “international politics, race, and difference” I might have told had I chosen a different frame. My account begins with Rawls's postwar career, but its historical baseline was the New Deal. I suggested that Rawls—and, indeed, postwar US liberalism in general—should be understood in the context of liberal reactions to the New Deal state. Rawls's liberalism was defined, in part, by antitotalitarianism, but also by a parochialism enabled by US hegemony. The twin moves of assuming US primacy while downplaying US imperialism is clear in his Vietnam-era writings on war, which show little concern for empire or decolonization. Only when anticolonial claims were translated into an institutionalist internationalism at the UN in the 1970s did they percolate into liberal egalitarianism.

Had I extended the book's chronology and given more space to “The Law of Peoples” (1993), an additional story might have emerged—of how Rawls inherited a liberal internationalism marked by imperial assumptions about civilizational hierarchies. An account of this inheritance may well be complementary to my characterization of Rawlsianism's trajectory, though it predates and exceeds my domestic-focused periodization of the twentieth-century United States. As Idris suggests, I might also have said more about the relationship of Rawlsianism to social scientific liberalism in the universities, with its Cold Warrior commitments to developmentalist visions of modernization. What was the place of philosophical liberalism—both its substantive commitments and its accommodationist, consensus-seeking style—in the academic division of labor? What was its relationship to the racialized and imperial structures of knowledge that mark Anglo-American social science? Integrating the history of philosophy into histories of Cold War social science, policy, and law would help to explain how political philosophy became handmaiden to the liberal social sciences, rather than an ally of the subversive disciplines that have defined themselves as antagonistic to liberalism.Footnote ¹ There is certainly more work to be done on the other liberalisms that haunt liberal egalitarianism.Footnote ²

This leads to a second line of criticism, concerning my interpretation of the dominance of liberal egalitarianism. Pineda worries that I overinflate Rawlsianism; Battistoni suggests that my book at times “reinscrib[es] the centrality of Rawlsian approaches even as it aims to question them” (429). Idris points to the contrapuntal histories contained in the footnotes, and questions what kind of exclusion this act of relegation performs.Footnote ³ I struggled with these narrative choices: how to reckon with alternative traditions of political theory and to acknowledge their force. I made a choice to focus on political philosophy, which I defined, in this late twentieth-century context, very specifically as a practice of professional philosophers that was characterized, in part, by its allegiance to neo-Rawlsianism. By contrast, I portrayed political theory as a non-Rawlsian enterprise of theorists in political science departments and beyond. This led to my accepting, in places, the Rawlsian account of what counts as political philosophy, thus downgrading other traditions from the role of central protagonists. My solution to the problems introduced by this choice was, as Idris notes, the contrapuntal narrative. The footnotes are where these alternative traditions, as well as my own normative commitments and positions on historiographical debates, are found. I did not provide a history of these alternatives (many schools of late twentieth-century political thought await their critical and disciplinary historians). The hope was that in presenting them—often at the margins of my narrative to mirror the blindspots of philosophers—they would remind readers of what might have been. My aim was to understand the political effects of the choices philosophers made and to illustrate that, despite the structural tendencies that made liberalism an obvious ideological choice for philosophers in elite universities, it was not a product of common-sense intuition. Rawlsianism was a consequence of choices about what languages of politics to adopt and which to ignore—choices that, over time, were naturalized as inevitable (xx).

This narrative choice had consequences for my portrayal of Rawlsian dominance. I stand by my claim that the flexible character of Rawlsianism allowed it to become the presiding liberalism of philosophers. Indeed, the book does not claim that Rawlsianism was the uncontested hegemon—hegemonies, in any case, are always contested—but that at the so-called end of history, liberalism appeared hegemonic, and that Rawlsianism was its dominant philosophical language (270). But I concede that the contrapuntal narrative bolstered that dominance. It also risked relegating outsiders to the status of marginalized (which they may or may not have had), while reproducing a binary, as Pineda notes, between liberal egalitarianism as “political theory proper” and other radical traditions as “merely resources for particularity, specificity, and practice” (439). Battistoni raises a further challenge about whether a proper inclusion of these traditions would unsettle my claim that every critique of Rawlsianism remained in Rawls's shadow. My aim in making this claim was to show that, in many instances, the act of critique served to consolidate Rawls's authority; I did not mean to suggest that every critique of Rawls was necessarily contained in his shadow. Although I showed that liberal philosophers performed acts of translation—domesticating alternative languages of politics—a sustained account of the costs of engagement borne by others (one that addresses the question of what is lost through assimilation) is yet to be written.

The final set of comments I want to address are about the critical commitments implied in the book, and about the compatibility of those commitments with the claims I made about the prospects for political philosophy in the epilogue. Frank points out that my commitments are visible in my preference for theories that engage, for example, “collective action . . . over reasoned debate and individual choice” or “social conflict and crisis over reasonable pluralism and moral justification” (425). But he rightly asks for further clarification. In the epilogue, I called for political philosophy to begin anew from “social theory, history, and political struggle” (279). I sometimes wish I had developed further what I meant in pointing to these alternatives, since despite this call for renewed engagement with social theory, I have been criticized for not foregrounding the work of recent political theorists who draw from the social-theoretic traditions of Marxism, feminism, and anticolonial and Black radicalism (traditions born of the struggles I called for philosophers to turn towards).Footnote ⁴ Were I to extend my argument today, I would suggest, in a move indebted to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi's recent methodological discussions, that normative and political theory should be more closely aligned with a critical social theory that begins from a critique of capitalism like that found in these traditions.Footnote ⁵

But there are political reasons why liberal philosophers in elite universities have not taken up such alliances. In practice, these philosophers have been just as likely to police the legitimacy of these struggles as to advocate significant redistribution.Footnote ⁶ And yet, I conclude the book with an optimistic gesture, calling on them to do so. Part of me regrets doing so, for reasons Pineda and Idris point towards: it does not fit with the book's historical argument, nor my political commitments. I did so as part of my attempt to evaluate what liberal egalitarianism still has to offer—and to acknowledge that while Rawlsianism may have been a conservative academic force, the kinds of schemes that Rawlsians justify are desirable improvements on the status quo that may be useful, particularly to policymakers (as a new wave of Rawlsian socialists have argued). In searching for emancipatory moments in egalitarianism's universalizing aspirations, I was also trying to gesture at the limits of my own historicism, by clarifying that I do not share the historicist skepticism of abstraction and systematicity that I describe in chapter 8. Ultimately, however, I believe that only a theory that begins from a critique of existing political and social arrangements can be emancipatory, and that it is difficult to imagine an egalitarian theory that draws from the Rawlsian tradition a tradition that largely affirms existing arrangements that would not remain in Rawls's shadow. This is true even for those who extend egalitarian principles into new domains, so long as they leave in place Rawls's postwar liberal assumptions. Satisfactorily remaking political philosophy would require exorcising the ghost of liberalism as much as the ghost of Rawls.

But is remaking political philosophy anew a desirable project? The ambiguity of my epilogue, as Pineda notes, ultimately turns on an unstable understanding of what is meant by the category of political philosophy. One way out of Rawls's shadow might entail rejecting the narrow Rawlsian understanding of political philosophy and expanding what and who gets to count. By including a wider range of theoretical work as political philosophy,Footnote ⁷ or as resources for philosophical argument,Footnote ⁸ the problem of Rawlsian dominance might be minimized or provincialized. Such a move restores to political philosophy the sense that its authority is always contested. But another way out might be to resist the seductions of philosophy altogether. This might mean embracing an intellectual pluralism that includes many modes of critique. Yet if liberalism is so rooted in contemporary philosophy that, as Bo Harvey writes, its ideological function is one of “obfuscation,” then perhaps the political project of claiming the authority of philosophy is not worth pursuing in a deeper sense.Footnote ⁹

Neither route fundamentally addresses the problem of liberalism's dominance—the fact that, in the end, what gave Rawlsianism force was its alliance with the hegemony of American liberalism. But I think the second comes closer. One of the claims of my book that Battistoni highlights is that “visions of better worlds, however carefully constructed, are doomed to failure if they set aside the questions of power, domination, and history” that shape the world we actually live in (429). In the end, what matters is the practice of criticism—in whatever form it takes.