In the Shadow of Justice offers a superb history, at once meticulous and sweeping, of the Rawlsian liberal tradition in political philosophy, putting the period of its dominance in invaluable perspective as that era comes to a close. Although tightly focused on the work of John Rawls and his many and varied interlocutors—analytical Marxists, communitarians, libertarians—the book implicitly poses major questions for political theory in a transitional moment. In showing how these particular political philosophers construed political thought in the recent past, Forrester's book prompts reflection on the broader question of what else political thought could, and should, do in the future.

The Rawlsian tradition has long had its critics, but what makes Forrester's book so effective is its faithfulness in tracking the internal logic of the field which blossomed from A Theory of Justice even as it situates its arguments in response to broader political developments. Although Rawlsians are often characterized by critics as detached from “real politics,” Forrester shows them to be deeply attuned to what they call “public affairs,” even appearing mercurial as they respond to each new problem that appears on the horizon. The civil rights movement prompts considerations of civil disobedience; Vietnam, of just war; decolonization, of global justice. Yet if philosophers were motivated by concrete problems, their methods took those problems out of context, abstracting from specifics in order to articulate a set of presumably universal principles. Abstract claims nevertheless have, and set, constraints; and increasingly, philosophers engaged only those issues which fit existing frameworks.

Forrester's book stands alongside a growing body of work on the “historical Rawls” situating this (in)famously ideal theory in the concrete conditions of its production.Footnote ¹ Notably, A Theory of Justice was initially received by many as a historically specific text reflecting midcentury social democratic values. With the development of the liberal egalitarian apparatus, however, its claims were able to circulate free from their historical moorings. By scrupulously tracing how this apparatus was constructed, Forrester shows how tools forged in a particular historical moment shaped what later thinkers were able to imagine. As a result, this history of political thought often reads like a history of science, with similarly discomfiting effects as the search for a stable ground of truth on which to rest ethics and politics reveals only shifting terrain. For Forrester, “Rawls sought to construct a system of objective standards for judgment that would stand without a God, or a state, to ground it” (5), a system which would “dull the force of class and group conflict, ideology, prejudice, and passion” (18). Yet many of the moves Rawls made in the process—the substitution of “interests and institutions” for “passions, ideologies, and solidarity,” the replacement of class struggle with civil society, the prioritization of consensus over conflict (10)—rendered politics a matter of argument rather than struggle. Those engaging on his terms followed suit. Thus, Forrester convincingly argues, most challenges to liberal egalitarianism were ultimately “domesticated” by it (xx, 60, 207, 275).

The overarching claim that Rawlsian liberalism successfully contained its critics rests in part, however, on its own choice of subject matter. A subtle line of argument throughout the book highlights the ways that antiracist, feminist, and postcolonial thought were sidelined. But these alternative traditions necessarily appear around the margins: only arguments made on, or posed explicitly against, Rawlsian terms can be part of the story of this particular lineage of political philosophy. In the Shadow is a history of Rawlsian liberalism, not of twentieth-century political thought writ large, and covers a remarkable range. Yet the paradox is that the book at times performs elements of what it critiques, reinscribing the centrality of Rawlsian approaches even as it aims to question them. That others have posed similar questions about how Forrester situates Rawlsian liberalism in relation to other traditions speaks to the success of her critique: those convinced by her suggestion that Rawlsian thought has reached a dead end may hope to recover alternative pasts in service of imagining possible futures.Footnote ² In considering where political theory might go as the shadow of justice recedes, then, I focus on two related but distinct questions of method. The first concerns the animating principle of Rawlsian liberalism—justice—and its relationship to ideal theory. The second concerns the relationship of concrete historicity to theoretical abstraction.

Rawlsian justice is generated by recourse to ideal theory—an explicitly ahistorical attempt to describe what ought to be. Forrester builds a powerful argument that visions of better worlds, however carefully constructed, are doomed to failure if they set aside the questions of power, domination, and history. Liberal egalitarians’ visions did not go unrealized because they failed to work out all the theoretical kinks. To the contrary, as Raymond Geuss has noted, the liberal egalitarian apparatus grew stronger even as the political and economic tide moved in the opposite direction.Footnote ³ Forrester argues that this was not a coincidence: Rawls's thought triumphed not despite but because of the fact that it emerged at the end of the age it took for granted, appearing to offer a robust defense of a welfare state then increasingly under fire. The libertarian Robert Nozick, by contrast, was comparatively isolated within political philosophy; yet as Forrester points out, Anarchy, State, and Utopia anticipated much of the emerging neoliberal order. Ultimately, many philosophers adapted to the arguments of the New Right rather than the other way around (204–8).

And yet justice is not only the province of ideal theory—it is the lingua franca of today's most potent political movements. So how might justice be engaged out of Rawls's shadow? Consider, for example, the idea of “environmental justice,” developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Black communities in the United States as a critique of disparate exposure to pollution and toxic waste, falling along lines of race and class.Footnote ⁴ Liberal egalitarians did not address environmental justice on these terms at the time, instead responding to mounting environmental concern in the 1970s and ’80s in terms of the intergenerational distribution of resources and analyses of population (see chapter 6). As Forrester argues, the engagement in population debates long after they were politically defunct shows how the discipline's inquiry was increasingly driven by its own tools—most notably, an interest in the status of persons, following the work of thinkers like Derek Parfit (185–200). And yet many movements’ invocations of environmental justice are not so distant from the basic liberal egalitarian model in their assumption that environmental goods and “bads” should be distributed more or less equally among persons (and, in an important departure, groups).Footnote ⁵ Climate change, moreover, is a deeply historical problem, and many activists have called for climate reparations. Such demands intriguingly echo longstanding debates in political philosophy over historical reparations, in this context defended by libertarians like Nozick, and dismissed by left-liberal egalitarians like Brian Barry (132–35, 160–62). But what would it mean to seriously engage such movement claims from the perspective of political theory without “domesticating” them? Comparing movement and formal conceptions of justice can be clarifying, but threatens to lead back down the paths Forrester traces. Perhaps philosophers could simply treat these arguments as one resource among many, informing projects rather than constituting them.Footnote ⁶

Yet attention to power and history might also point in a different direction. Rather than refining the terms of justice, even in colloquial use, theorists might consider how movements use the language of justice to mobilize supporters and make claims; or even set aside “justice” altogether to focus on strategies for building power or exerting leverage. This leads to my second question, concerning the relationship between the concrete and abstract in political thought.

The recent move, amongst some political theorists, to engage seriously with “actually existing politics” constitutes a major methodological reorientation toward the concrete, with which the field has only begun to grapple.Footnote ⁷ To think about strategy, power, and struggle requires attending to specific cases and historical conditions; it requires thinking from particular perspectives about distinct objectives and how they might be achieved given a certain set of resources and constraints. Engaging texts produced by or in conversation with movements poses similar challenges. Thinking more seriously about political action might in turn demand reflection on the political work that our own thinking does.

But conversely, how else might we think about abstraction in political thought? Forrester observes that political philosophy has resisted the “denaturalizing, anti-essentializing, and particularizing intellectual movements” of the late twentieth century (278). But as she hints, philosophy at its best can be a denaturalizing project in its own right. Indeed, it is among this book's virtues that it manages to engender sympathy for aspects of the Rawlsian project—namely, the effort to interrogate moral principles and ground normative claims—even as it systematically reveals its flaws. And although liberal egalitarianism is a particularly systematizing project, theory by nature makes some claim to abstraction or systematicity. We would all do well to reflect on the kinds of questions that our chosen traditions permit and preclude. “Particularizing intellectual movements,” moreover, have often critiqued universalist tendencies in service of constructing a better universalism, a more complete view of the whole. The veil of ignorance behind which the Rawlsian individual imagines just principles, for example, is the precise opposite of Donna Haraway's idea of “situated knowledges”—yet Haraway's goal was not to undercut the possibility of shared projects, but to put them on better footing.Footnote ⁸ In a similar vein, the project of constructing a better systematicity is an important one for political theory, one made more possible but also more difficult by the absence of a central organizing tradition or framework.

What is certain is that all of our work, like that of Rawlsian liberals, will be inevitably constrained by history and circumstance, in some ways already apparent to us and others only to be revealed in time. We can, at least, be more honest with ourselves about that fact, and more clear-eyed about what our work can do—and what it cannot.