In the Shadow of Justice is an account of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. It explores the origins of Rawls's theory and traces its triumphant reception, consolidation, and canonization, showing how liberal egalitarianism became the dominant theory of US liberalism. It explains how a form of liberal political philosophy that can usefully be termed neo-Rawlsianism—encompassing Rawlsianism, the philosophy of public affairs, applied ethics, and liberal egalitarianism and its offshoots—emerged from the post–Second World War order and became institutionalized even as this order fractured.

One aim of the book is to tell a political story about the changing relationship of theory and politics. It asks how we might understand the relationship of liberal egalitarian theory to the ideological configuration of postwar liberalism and the political dynamics of the welfare state settlement. I argue that the story of Rawlsian liberalism is a “ghost story”: Rawls's theory lived on as a spectral presence long after the material and ideological conditions it described, and under which it emerged, were gone. Rawls's ideas, mostly developed in the 1950s, reflected the ideological and philosophical assumptions of postwar US liberalism. The success of his theory in the different moment of the 1970s and beyond was in part a product of lucky timing: its dominance was secured not in spite of the welfare state's crisis, but because of it. Rawls's thought both legitimated and aimed to reform a social world that was coming apart, providing a sense of philosophical order amid disorder—a ground for a new liberal consensus and a novel accommodationist politics.

In the Shadow explores how, in this context, Rawls's thought gave rise to novel liberal frameworks for political analysis. It charts how liberal philosophers engaged with political problems through the conceptual apparatus of liberal egalitarianism and the lens of the philosophy of “public affairs.” Rawlsians conceived the domain of politics in terms of social institutions and distributive justice, and of political action in terms of individual moral responsibility. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Warren Court, what counted as a public affair was shaped by liberal commitments about what made a political event worthy of philosophical study. Politics came to mean problems of institutional regulation, constitutional questions in the courts, and issues that could be analyzed under the cover of “applied ethics.”

This resignification of the political had a range of effects. Over the course of the late twentieth century, political philosophers justified incremental change and institutional adaptation from a baseline of postwar social liberalism, in which the institutions that mattered were the juridical-legislative institutions of the state. Consensual forms of democratic politics were prioritized, while more antagonistic forms were diffused or removed from consideration altogether. These priorities justified the exclusion of a wide variety of alternative political theories. Rawlsian liberalism therefore came to function as a constraint on the scope of political philosophy, limiting its focus and domesticating alternative political visions. Indeed, I argue that the distinctiveness and dominance of liberal egalitarianism should, in part, be understood in terms of its capaciousness, flexibility, and capacity to engage and domesticate its alternatives and rivals. It is the story of this distinctive form of philosophical liberalism—and what it has meant for the analysis of politics since its emergence—that In the Shadow seeks to explain.