What comes after Rawlsianism—and what can, and should, political philosophy be in its wake? This is one of the many provocative questions opened up by Forrester's beautifully argued and deeply researched book. It is a question she poses, in part, by telling the story of how we came to be able to speak of “Rawlsianism” at all—as delimiting a coherent and particularly influential set of philosophical ideas, an orientation to politics, and a mode of political theorizing. Forrester's book aims to “denaturalize and defamiliarize” (275) the Rawlsian framework—the Anglo-American tradition of liberal egalitarianism that rose to prominence through the mid- and late-twentieth century, eventually redefining the field of political philosophy as a whole. That is, In the Shadow positions Rawls and his interlocutors firmly within their own historical, political, and ideological contexts in order to question what relationship their theorizing (and their world) has to our own. Liberal egalitarians inhabited, she contends, “a discursive ‘problem-space’ that is at some distance from our own, even if our own emerged from it” (xxii). In so doing Forrester illuminates the stakes and contours of Rawlisanism in a new way, while making space for the forms of inquiry and avenues for politics ruled out by it.

Critics of Rawls and Rawlsianism have long pointed to its disconnection from politics and history, rooted in its commitment to ideal theorizing as well as the figuration of individuals as abstract and free-floating selves, reasoning their way to abstract principles of justice.Footnote ¹ While Forrester engages specifically with these critiques in chapter 8 to reveal how they remain within the shadow of liberal egalitarianism, the book as a whole demonstrates that this well-worn line of criticism in fact misunderstands its object. The story of Rawlsianism is not that it left politics behind; rather, it was shaped by when, and with what tools, philosophers decided to engage with questions of political practice—and the alternatives that these choices foreclosed. The book speaks to how thoroughly liberal egalitarian philosophy has been shaped by the historical, political, and economic settings in which it arose; by particular concrete contexts of conversation and debate; by particular (descriptive and historical) visions of existing constitutional democracy; and by Rawls's own commitment to—as Forrester puts it—“what was already there” (29).

The peculiar shape and undeniable reach of the theory, its capaciousness as well as its limitations, was set as much by its orientation toward natural duty and an ideal of justice as its identification of each with the stability of existing institutions. As she writes, it was through his “appeal to individual morality—the morality of natural duties outside of institutions and the sense of justice within their bounds—[that] Rawls at once emphasized the importance of individual action and the capacity to justify changing the status quo” (69). At the same time, Forrester argues, the dual role of individual moral duties to both “uphold institutions and protect stability” while also serving as the mechanism for “incremental change” limited the bounds of legitimate transformation as much as it enabled it. Even as Rawls “made new claims for the individual, he shored up the stability of the system as a whole” (69). In distinction, then, to those who decry Rawlsianism for its retreat from the world into ideal theorizing, Forrester shows that it is not so much the abstractions of Rawlsian theory but a peculiar form of idealization set within already existing institutions that made it both flexible and enduring and, at the same time, limited and limiting.

Rawls, in many ways, is not really the protagonist of Forrester's story; his A Theory of Justice is. And so much the better, in my view: what Forrester is able to capture, with great nuance and sensitivity, is the way in which the shadow cast by Rawls's book—a shadow which encompassed and shaped what liberal egalitarian philosophy would become, and set the terms of this philosophy's interventions into “public affairs”—encompassed Rawls as much as anyone else. He, too, became captive within the contours of the theory. Once “established and well developed,” A Theory of Justice “took on a life of its own: it imposed constraints on what Rawls [himself] was willing to argue, justify, and legitimize,” and “inject[ed] a status quo bias into his social vision” (69)—one that did not always sit well with even Rawls's own commitments, ideas about political issues, or sense of the scope and constraints of the theory he had created. All of this is only to articulate what might seem an ordinary point: Rawls was not fully sovereign over the thing that he created, as none of us really are. The effect of his work on the discipline of political philosophy was only in part about him and what he thought he was doing. We cannot make sense of its effect without telling a story that is, in large part, not about Rawls but about what other figures saw in his work: how they engaged in and with it; what problems in the world they saw it as useful (or useless) for theorizing and addressing; what problems appeared as problems at all in its lights. Rawls made his own theory, we might say, but he did not make it as he pleased, under self-selected circumstances.

For this reason, and although Forrester employs the metaphor of the “shadow,” throughout the book I thought about the development of liberal egalitarian philosophy as a kind of gravitational field, with A Theory of Justice at its center. Like a particularly large celestial body, Justice exerted a force all its own on the figures and ideas that circulated around and near it—pulling some things into its orbit, shifting the trajectories of other passing bodies, and itself changed and reconfigured by the happenstance of collision with particular current events and specific sets of critiques and applications. In this process, the gravitational force of liberal egalitarianism subtly pulled and stretched the spacetime—the very conception of politics—made comprehensible within the bounds of Anglo-American political philosophy. Within this field, the proper orientation for liberal theory, or perhaps political philosophy more broadly, appeared hypothetical in form, egalitarian and institutionalist in content, nonhistorical in scope, and defined by a bifurcation between the questions of domestic distribution and those of international responsibility (130–32). It was these analytic and political choices, Forrester shows, that enabled liberal egalitarians to discount questions of colonization, white supremacy, reparations, and global political economy as central ones for political philosophy.

But it is here that we are left with a puzzle about what to do once we leave its shadow, or step beyond its pull—and a question about how Forrester's project relates to the traditions of political thought that were never within the Rawlsian orbit in the first place. The epilogue suggests that even as we move beyond Justice we should, nevertheless, keep its tools and insights ready at hand, part of a “useable past” (279) that may still provide powerful, egalitarian ideas in a starkly and violently unequal age. In particular, Forrester argues that despite the limitations of this tradition of theorizing as it unfolded, contingently and historically, liberal egalitarianism remains “an unparalleled resource for schemes to organize and justify property distribution and limit inequality” (278). Moreover, she suggests—in a bit of a twist—its disengagement from the “denaturalizing, de-essentializing, and particularizing intellectual movements” central to other disciplines leaves it uniquely well-positioned to “adjust its aims, drop some of its justificatory armor, and turn to critical or emancipatory programs” in line with its commitments to “universalisms and egalitarianisms” (278). Generous as this conclusion is, it does seem to sit uneasily with the upshot of the historical narrative that the book rather convincingly delivers: that the tools and concepts of this body of philosophizing took on, so to speak, a life of their own, producing patterns of exclusion, depoliticization, and naturalization that are precisely the things that limit liberal egalitarianism's ability to speak more convincingly to the present—and even to help us better understand the history of the present. If liberal egalitarianism's political, emancipatory limitations were produced in part by its disengagement with other orbits of theorizing, this insulation cannot now suggest its political, emancipatory power.

Moreover, liberal egalitarianism has never been the only tradition to propose new projects of universality.Footnote ² By its very design, and perhaps necessarily, In the Shadow does not take up—except obliquely—those traditions that neither engaged Rawlsianism nor were compelled to posit the dilemmas of ethics and politics in its terms. In this sense, the shadow of Justice is large, its gravitational pull powerful, but it never defined the universe of political theorizing nor delimited the scope of political possibilities, except perhaps in the imaginations of liberal egalitarians themselves. Though many “twentieth-century philosophers were quite happy to make ‘Rawlsianism’ or ‘liberal egalitarianism’ a metonym for ‘political philosophy,’” Sophie Smith astutely cautions, “historians”—and, I would add, political philosophers and theorists—“should be cautious of replicating this exclusionary maneuver—of reinforcing, that is, a partisan view of what counts as political philosophy. The politics of political philosophy has always been, in part, a struggle for naming.”Footnote ³

Thus, even as Forrester encourages a turn toward “social theory, history, and political struggle as much as to law and economics” (278) to reorient a new political philosophy suited for our own time, I worry that this demarcation of the field reproduces a binary between liberal egalitarianism—taking itself to be political theory proper—as the fount of universalism, idealization, and theorizing, and other traditions—those rooted in feminist, anticolonial, Black, and non-Western political thought—as resources for particularity, specificity, and practice. As Michael Hanchard has argued with respect to Black political thought, academic philosophy has often “misrecognized” its texts and thinkers as engaging in “‘description,’ ‘empiricism,’ or ‘high common sense’ rather than forms of conceptual or theoretical innovation,” missing (or dismissing) its ways of “view[ing] the past differently” and “normatively prescrib[ing] the movement of a black politics in an ongoing present.”Footnote ⁴ This form of misrecognition is central to the tradition of philosophizing whose history Forrester so convincingly reconstructs, as Rawls and his interlocutors took up (for example) the problem of civil disobedience raised by the actions of anticolonial and antiracist activists, while positioning those same activists as object lessons for liberal political philosophy, rather than as political thinkers in their own right.

Moving beyond Rawls and Rawlsianism, then, cannot just depend on the work of defamiliarization (though this is indeed central), but also on the work of provincialization—positioning liberal egalitarianism not as “a discrete chapter in the history of political thought” but as “one doctrine among many” (279). Forrester conjoins these two possibilities in her closing lines, but I suggest that we see them as distinct ways of responding to the question of what political philosophy might be outside of the Rawlsian orbit. While the former suggests, in linear fashion, that a chapter of a mutually shared past must draw to a close, the latter positions liberal egalitarianism within a world of alternative traditions, past and present—including those neither recognized by Rawlsianism as political philosophy nor defined by its conventions or terms of reference. In this sense, the question of what comes after Rawlsianism is perhaps best answered by engaging with alternative traditions that have been with us this whole time, and by asking who, in the first instance, counts as a political theorist.