I. Situating Rawls

From the moment TJ was published, readers attributed to Rawls special historical status and situated his interventions in wider historiographical narratives. Perhaps the most infamous concerned the fortunes of political philosophy itself: that Rawls, with TJ, revived a dormant discipline.Footnote ¹⁰ Here, Rawls's historical significance lay in his break with predecessors who held moral and political philosophy in contempt.Footnote ¹¹ Some contemporaries seemed relieved that the twentieth century finally had its own “big book”—one of “magisterial grandeur”Footnote ¹² no less—to contribute to the “canon” of political philosophy.Footnote ¹³ (They often recalled a near-two-decade wait: Rawls published his first work on ethics in 1951, sketched out his theory of justice in 1957 and circulated drafts of TJ throughout the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁴ A critical literature existed by the end of that decade and the initial reviews of TJ often referred back to those earlier debates.Footnote ¹⁵) Many early readers were confident that TJ's publication was a moment the future would reckon with, for better or for worse.Footnote ¹⁶ At the end of his excoriating review, R. M. Hare anticipated that Rawls's “book is likely to waste a great deal of a good many people's time.”Footnote ¹⁷ Writing in The Nation, the philosopher Hugo Bedau closed his review with a plea: “the spring of 1972 should not go unmarked by future historians of American intellectual life.” The reason? Rawls's failure to win that year's National Book Award, despite a nomination. “Fortunately,” Bedau predicted, “this is one error of judgment, not to say an injustice, which the unqualified esteem of serious readers everywhere will promptly rectify.”Footnote ¹⁸

TJ sold well and was reviewed in numerous newspapers, literary magazines and academic journals (usually by Rawls's friends and colleagues). In 1975, in the first collection of essays on Rawls's philosophy, Norman Daniels suggested that a major factor in explaining this “unusual reception” was familiarity.Footnote ¹⁹ “Many readers and editors,” he argued, “found in Rawls’ work a welcome return to an older tradition of substantive, rather than semantic, moral and political philosophy.”Footnote ²⁰ Such readers were quick to characterize Rawls, as did his reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, as continuing a tradition that would otherwise have ended with Mill and Sidgwick.Footnote ²¹ When the political theorist John Schaar took what he called “a broad historical perspective,” TJ became “the latest chapter” in attempts to “fulfil the promise of liberal contractarian and Enlightenment philosophers.”Footnote ²² (Schaar is somewhat forgotten now but in 1980 he was included—along with Rawls, Nozick and Robert Paul Wolff—in one of the first attempts at a history of postwar American political thought.Footnote ²³)

Some early readers went further. Rawls was not merely one of the “great thinkers”; he had surpassed them. Amidst his trenchant libertarian critique, Robert Nozick wondered if even Mill had matched the power, systematicity and subtlety of TJ.Footnote ²⁴ Distributive justice, said Hugo Bedau, was “historically the weakest structural concept in the framework of liberalism”; Rawls's book “has offered a theory of justice in the service of the liberal tradition which adds this keystone to the philosophical arch never fully completed by his predecessors.”Footnote ²⁵ This assessment chimed with Rawls's own presentation of his project: the “social-contract tradition” to which he appealed had particular forebears in Locke, Rousseau and Kant; his intervention would, he hoped, finally silence a then-dominant, and historically rooted, utilitarianism.Footnote ²⁶ (“The fact,” one early reviewer suggested, “that he can make such a claim without immodesty, and get away with it, will give some indication of the book's philosophical significance.”Footnote ²⁷)

Not everyone thought that Rawls had got away it. In 1974 the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet was happy to concede that Rawls “is, without question, a lineal descendent of Rousseau,” making TJ the “radical” egalitarian “successor to Rousseau's Social Contract.”Footnote ²⁸ But Nisbet was not implying that Rawls deserved a place in the tradition of philosophical thought. Rather, he put him—with Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet—in a line of “philosophe activity.” (“The difference as is known to all intellectual historians is very great.”Footnote ²⁹) Nisbet offered this alternative historical story as a rebuttal of Rawls's own claims about his debts to Kant and the “rapturous” reviews in the TLS and NYRB.Footnote ³⁰ One year later, in the American Political Science Review, Allan Bloom also sought to police the boundaries of philosophy properly speaking, insisting Rawls was no truth-seeker but either an “ephemeral ideologist” or a “deluded myth-maker.”Footnote ³¹ From his Straussian perspective, TJ's deficiencies were explained by Rawls's failure to understand and so to respond to “the writings of the greatest men in the philosophical tradition.”Footnote ³² To suggest that Rawls had any place in that tradition was to exacerbate an ongoing “loss of learning.”Footnote ³³ As Rawls's supporters marshalled “the tradition” to commend Rawls to the future, so his critics appealed to it in the hope that he would soon be forgotten.Footnote ³⁴

Did historians have anything to say about Rawls? While TJ would not, unsurprisingly, be the object of histories in the strict disciplinary sense for many years, as early as 1973 Patrick Riley discussed it in the Journal of the History of Ideas in a study of the coherence of the social-contract tradition.Footnote ³⁵ Rawls made his first appearance in the American Historical Review in 1976, though his reception there was deflationary. It came in a review of Contemporary Political Philosophers—a collection of essays whose other chapters focused on Arendt, Aron, DeJouvenal, Hayek, Macpherson, Marcuse, Oakeshott, Popper, Sartre, Strauss and Voegelin. The author—after objecting to the exclusion of Eastern European, “Third World” and radical left-wing thinkers—wondered how many of the book's subjects “will be remembered in a few decades … Certainly Sartre will still be widely read in the twenty-first century, but how many of the others will be studied, if at all, by curious historians seeking to map the culture of the age?”Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, in 1980 Stefan Collini was writing in the Historical Journal that “Rawls versus Nozick is already a heavyweight title contest as familiar as the time-honored Hobbes–Locke bouts.”Footnote ³⁷ As the 1980s went on, historians began to analyze Rawls in the context of what had elapsed of the twentieth century—and, very occasionally, used Rawls's terms of art as categories of historical analysis.Footnote ³⁸

Questions about how Rawls's views were influenced by, or otherwise related to, figures in the history of political thought would remain central to the reception of his thought.Footnote ³⁹ (“Kantian or Hegelian?” was long an animating question.Footnote ⁴⁰) But the early urge to historicize Rawls went beyond comparisons with the “tradition.” Readers in his lifetime were interested in how his work spoke to, and might be explained by, more immediate intellectual contexts. Was it a break with logical positivism on the one hand and linguistic philosophy on the other? Must it be understood primarily in relation to contemporary developments in game theory?Footnote ⁴¹ For Bedau, Rawls was notable for his “grasp of the literature of social science” (though the canon never slipped from view: “We must return to Keynes, Sidgwick or John Stuart Mill himself for a parallel.”)Footnote ⁴² In 1972, the conservative political economist James Buchanan expressed unease at what he found in TJ: Rawls's early essays had led him to think that there were affinities between Rawls's views and both his own and those of Rutledge Vining and Frank Knight (the Chicago economist and Buchanan's mentor) on models for “rules of the game.” “His approach,” Buchanan said, “now appears quite different from that which I shared in 1960.”Footnote ⁴³

By 1977, in the second book-length study of TJ, Robert Paul Wolff attributed what he regarded as “Rawls's failure” to his intellectual influences, specifically “his uncritical acceptance of the socio-political presuppositions and associated modes of analysis of classical and neo-classical liberal political economy.”Footnote ⁴⁴ For Stuart Hampshire, Rawls was speaking in the “language of the modern theory of rational choice.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In their 1990 book Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics, Chandran Kukathas and Phillip Pettit were even more specific: an opening chapter reconstructing “the background against which Rawls made an impact” suggested that Rawls's thought be understood not just in relation to what he drew from the works of both Kant and Hegel, but also in the context of postwar critiques of welfare economics, developments in Hayekian economics, Buchanan's own public-choice analysis, and the social-choice theories of Kenneth Arrow and Amartya Sen.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was not a detailed historical study, and it did not purport to be. It is, however, one of many examples from the “Rawls literature” as it emerged in the two decades after TJ's publication which shows that readers did not all think that the so-called “tradition” was that book's only relevant context. It also makes clear that when it came to contemporary assessments of TJ's contribution and its likely legacy, a choice between narratives of continuity or rupture with the past was often thought a false one.

Readers both inside and outside the academy also immediately offered views about the appropriate political context into which TJ should be situated, and so thought about how the book related to political history as it was then unfolding. Assumptions that Rawls was responding to the civil rights movement and to anti-Vietnam War protests were common.Footnote ⁴⁷ So too were claims that he was providing justification for varieties of welfarism, though the contours of that argument were often vague: from the left, Hugo Bedau said that George McGovern's tax reforms were a “rough approximation” of the system of transfers of wealth that Rawls by 1971 seemed to endorse.Footnote ⁴⁸ From the right, Aaron Wildavsky positioned TJ as a justification for the Great Society, a “gloss on the domestic programs of the 1960s.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At a moment when (for neither the first time nor the last) liberalism was perceived as in crisis, many of Rawls's first readers saw TJ as an ideological intervention on behalf of what Norman Daniels called in 1975 a waning “egalitarian liberalism.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In the New York Times Marshall Cohen brought together a claim about Rawls's political aims with one about his place in the tradition: like “all the great political philosophies of the past—Plato's, Hobbes's, Rousseau's”—Rawls's responded “to the realities of contemporary politics.”Footnote ⁵¹ He wanted to rescue “the principles to which our public life is committed” just as they were “persistently being obscured and betrayed.”Footnote ⁵² (Cohen would have known something about Rawls's views: both men were members of SELF—the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy, founded in the late 1960s by Thomas Nagel and Robert Nozick “with Rawls's encouragement”—where Cohen read drafts of TJ before it was published.)Footnote ⁵³

Others were more ambivalent about TJ's ideological agenda, and so its historical context. Norman Daniels insisted that like other “works in the substantive tradition Rawls writes,” TJ had “great ideological importance.” Rawls intended to “reveal the principles of justice which underlie the dominant moral and political views of our period” and “produce a persuasive, coherent framework” for “egalitarian liberalism.” But, Daniels cautioned, Rawls should not be read as “merely a polemicist for the status quo.”Footnote ⁵⁴ TJ, on Daniels's view, was at once radical and reactionary: a serious challenge to many existing institutions and yet also compatible, as Rawls wished it to be, with a set of both capitalist and socialist worldviews.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1972 Daniel Bell (the self-proclaimed “cultural” conservative sociologist, who had, a decade before, announced the “end of ideology”) thought he saw straight through this ambivalence: TJ was “the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialist ethic.” (He also predicted that Rawls's “political philosophy” would “shape the last part of the 20th century, as the doctrines of Locke and Smith molded the 19th.”)Footnote ⁵⁶ One year later, in 1973, Friedrich Hayek insisted that Bell was “wrong” to read Rawls as “lending support to socialist demands”: the differences between Rawls's “important” work and Hayek's own views were “more verbal than substantial.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Early responses on the left, then as now, found in Rawls an imaginatively limited defense of capitalism or, sometimes, a potentially radical resource.Footnote ⁵⁸ For C. B. Macpherson, the publication of TJ consolidated a problematic vision of politics that had been implied by Rawls's articles from the late 1950s and the 1960s: “an advanced version of the current capitalist welfare and regulatory state.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Stuart Hampshire saw in TJ neither “the moral philosophy of communism” nor that of “high capitalism” but rather “the model of social justice that has governed the advocacy of R. H. Tawney and Richard Titmuss and that holds the [British] Labour Party together.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Controversy about where Rawls's theory sat in relation to contemporary political debates and social movements—in terms of both the politics it might effect and the politics to which it was a response—began right from the start.

II. Standing back from Rawls

By the late 1970s some of Rawls's fellow travelers were absorbing his interventions into revised histories of liberalism, positioning themselves, as Katrina Forrester puts it, as “inheritors of a long New Deal tradition.”Footnote ⁶¹ Rawls's critics were also turning to history. In particular, many were complaining about what they saw as Rawls's attempt to put his theory outside both history and politics.Footnote ⁶² In 1975 Benjamin Barber accused TJ of being “insufficiently political” and “egregiously ahistorical,” pointing out that “Terms suggestive of modern man's political dilemmas—racism, alienation, nationalism, socialization, indoctrination—are hardly to be found; nor does the material face of politics characterized by power, command, authority and sanction (as against the ideal face described by legitimacy, obligation and justice) show itself.”Footnote ⁶³ For Barber the problem was not merely that TJ could not speak to the realities of contemporary politics, nor that it showed little understanding of the forces that had shaped the present; he can also be read as worrying about the kind of theoretical work it would incentivize. Reflecting a decade later he argued that “philosophy has flourished while politics has wilted.”Footnote ⁶⁴

While the question of the historicity of Rawls's theory is distinct from the question of how to historicize Rawls, during the 1970s and 1980s the two issues came to be connected. In particular, worries that Rawls gave insufficient attention either to history or to politics came to motivate arguments that Rawls's theory functioned ideologically. Such arguments often rested on claims about the past from which TJ emerged and about the broader historical narratives of which it was said to be a representative; in turn they grounded predictions about the future it might facilitate.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some of these ideology critiques of Rawls, and the responses they prompted, should be included in the history of historicizing Rawls—not least because they complicate assumptions that some contemporary historians have about Rawls's reception. We find in this period many voices who resisted any assimilation of political philosophy to Rawls's categories, even, as we shall see, amongst those who were broadly signed up to a project of using analytical philosophy to think politically.

In 1977 Robert Paul Wolff offered a paradigm statement of ideology critique. From Wolff's broadly Marxist perspective, Rawls's devices—the original position, the veil of ignorance—“raise the discussion to so high a degree of abstraction that the empirical specificity needed to lend any plausibility to it are [sic] drained away. What remains, it seems to me, is ideology, which is to say prescription masquerading as value-neutral analysis.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Behind Wolff's analysis was a claim about Rawls's proper forebears; he was to be placed “historically in the tradition of utopian liberal political economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”Footnote ⁶⁷

When Brian Barry—who coined the phrase “the Rawls industry” in 1973—reviewed Understanding Rawls he had little truck with Wolff's analysis but no objection in principle to a broader project of historicization.Footnote ⁶⁸ Responding to Wolff's book prompted Barry to delineate “three phases” of the reception of Rawls and to attempt to direct its future. (Evidence, perhaps, that even those deep in the “Rawls industry” were aware of it as a historically contingent process that they might themselves shape.) The first wave included the “rather uncritical enthusiasm” of the initial reviews; the second was devoted to “forensic” examinations of TJ's internal consistency. The third wave of Rawls reception, just emerging, should include, Barry said, historians of political thought. TJ “deserves and would benefit from the kind of sympathetic reading, with the object of revealing the work's inner coherence and the relation of its parts, that is characteristic of the best writing by historians of political thought but has been missing from the predominantly forensic style of the second phase.”Footnote ⁶⁹ But Barry did not think that all historians had to offer was charity:

In this case it is less clear that history would serve a sympathetic agenda. What did Barry think might be revealed when readers stood back and treated TJ as a social document? At this point, he said no more.

Other philosophers wanted readers to stand back from Rawls. In a 1980 review of left responses to Rawls Kai Nielsen also addressed the “Rawls industry.”Footnote ⁷¹ While much was “still in dispute,” Nielsen saw the emergence of “something approaching a consensus concerning both the strength of Rawls's account and its problematic features.”Footnote ⁷² But, he went on, even this apparent consensus was, for some, controversial. Those who dissented from it were not only “Marxist” and “quasi-Marxist” critics like Wolff; some were “without any distinctive Marxist orientation” at all. These critics were united by three commitments: first, to outlining “a more egalitarian conception of justice than Rawls's”; second, they were “more sensitive to the import of ideological distortions and to the social formation of knowledge”; and third, they were “more skeptical than both Rawls and many of his non-Left critics” of Rawls's “rather formal philosophical method.” Taken together, these critics

It was not, then, only Marxist critics who were interested in questions about how TJ functioned ideologically. For his part, Nielsen agreed that Rawls's faults lay partly in his willingness to abstract “too severely from the thick texture of social life.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As a result, his theory was not fit for the politics or indeed the injustices that characterized the times: “A more adequate normative ethical theory will not be so innocent of political sociology, so ahistorical and in intention so apolitical.”Footnote ⁷⁵

So why continue to engage with Rawls's theory? For Nielsen it was explicitly not because there existed a “Rawls industry” beyond which many philosophers could not see.Footnote ⁷⁶ Rather it was to confront the best version of one's enemy:

On Nielsen's view the problem was that liberalism was a powerful—even hegemonic—ideology and Rawls amongst its most sophisticated proponents. As a result, non-liberal political philosophers faced the task of putting beyond question why “justice as fairness” was obfuscating:

A historian might rightly be bothered by whether or not Nielsen was onto the correct debunking story when he posited Rawls's theory as the ideology of welfare-state capitalism.Footnote ⁷⁹ But it is of serious historical significance that he and others had this debunking story at all. Nielsen was no marginal figure in analytical political philosophy. He and the group of critics he identified were clear that Rawlsianism represented but one way of doing things. Taking their historical perspective would reveal that Rawls's theory was less innocent than many assumed.

By the mid-1980s Rawls's feminist critics had turned to similar historical concerns. The history into which Rawls's theory was placed was an androcentric one in which, as Mari Matsuda put it in 1986, “scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women.”Footnote ⁸⁰ What were by then familiar criticisms of TJ—its abstraction, ahistoricity and apoliticality—were now offered from the perspective of the long history of exclusion of women, and especially, in Matsuda's pathbreaking essay, of women of color, from both academic political philosophy and from justice.

Matsuda, by no means an unsympathetic reader of Rawls, placed his work in a history of jurisprudence wherein abstractions served to obscure the real subject: the self-conception of the elite white man. What would a book like TJ look like, she asked, when put in the context of a completely different tradition of political thought, one that included the Combahee River Collective, Catharine MacKinnon, Audre Lorde and Donna Haraway? (For one thing, she implied, it might force readers to focus on the academic practices and assumptions behind the “Rawls phenomenon,” in which single authors were given the status of great men revealing deep truths: “it would be somewhat unfeminist for one woman to write a book called The Feminist Theory of Justice” given “the feminist idea of collective effort.”Footnote ⁸¹ Here Matsuda was bringing to her readers’ attention the way in which canonization could itself be a patriarchal process.Footnote ⁸²) The broader lesson of the feminist tradition on which Matsuda drew was, she argued, that TJ “rests on ideology, on air, on faith.”Footnote ⁸³ From this followed a concern, again, about how Rawls's theory functioned. Matsuda drew on scholarship that suggested that theories be evaluated not simply according to what they argue, but according to what they are used to rationalize, especially in the context of the actual history of race- and sex-based discrimination in the US.Footnote ⁸⁴ Furthermore, she worried, “by limiting the sphere of the possible Rawls creates a gridlock in which escape from liberalism is impossible.” The problem was not simply Rawls's relation to a particular past, nor the attempts of contemporaries to historicize him in a particular way, but the constraining effect that his theory might have on the future of political action and on the future of political philosophy. “We need,” Matsuda concluded, “to return to concrete realities, to look at our world, rethink possibilities, and fight it out on this side of the veil, however indelicate that may be.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Another feminist reader who took a historical perspective on Rawls was Susan Okin. In the late 1970s Okin argued that many of the so-called “great thinkers” in the history of political thought were responsible for naturalizing certain contingencies—not least the patriarchal family and its oppressive gender roles—which in turn bolstered a political order that served men. In 1987, she published the first of many pieces that turned her historical gaze onto Rawls.Footnote ⁸⁶ For Okin, Rawls's theory betrayed all too many similarities with this patriarchal past, and she made it her life's work to convince him to make a decisive break with it. Historicizing Rawls led her to engage with him, partly out of a concern for how history would be written, and political philosophy would be practiced, in the future: Okin hoped to change the arc of both.Footnote ⁸⁷ She was quickly disappointed with the response. By the early 1990s she was expressing worries similar to Matsuda's about function: did Rawls's theory, she asked, allow liberal men to appear to care about equal justice without engaging with feminism? Did its idealism disincentivize political philosophers from thinking hard about why gender injustice exists, and what might be done to bring it to an end?Footnote ⁸⁸

Questions about whether Rawls's theory functioned to sideline certain questions as well as certain histories were taken up in relation to racial oppression in the early 1990s by the philosopher Charles Mills (who was always clear about his own debts to a feminist tradition that included Okin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Chandra Mohanty, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins).Footnote ⁸⁹ For Mills, the ideology critique developed by Rawls's Marxist and left-wing critics was an inspiration, though like Nielsen he argued that his analysis did not require a commitment to the “Marxist anti-capitalist project.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Across two 1994 articles he laid the foundations for a critique he would elaborate over the next quarter-century.Footnote ⁹¹ Here he connected the ahistoricity of Rawls's theory up to what he saw as a political project of denial with deep historical roots: “It will certainly be noticed [by black readers of TJ] … that U.S. slavery and its aftermath barely appear. The only slavery Rawls mentions is that of antiquity … So the focus on ‘ideal theory’ [in Rawls] here will seem in part ideological, a steering away from disquieting questions and unresolved issues.”Footnote ⁹² For Mills, Rawls and other white liberal egalitarian philosophers needed to be placed in a global history of imperialism and white supremacy. The pressing historical question became: why has political philosophy developed in a way that encouraged such a deep divide between what Mills named “white,” “establishment,” and “mainstream theory” on the one hand and “black/Third World theory” on the other?Footnote ⁹³ On Mills's view, which he developed further in The Racial Contract (1997), the very social-contract “tradition” which so many of Rawls's first (white male) readers praised him for continuing functioned to at once facilitate European imperialism and to occlude its effects.Footnote ⁹⁴ Mills wrote,

Putting Rawls's theory in historical context meant recognizing that TJ was written at a time when there was an “abstract/formal extension of previously color-coded principles to the nonwhite population” but a corresponding failure to ensure any of the material conditions necessary for the realization of these principles. In this context, Rawls's “failure to pay theoretical attention” to the history of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy led him to construct a theory that did not “confront white supremacy” and “by ignoring it … will just incorporate it, through silence, into the conceptual apparatus.”Footnote ⁹⁶ To make these arguments Mills drew on a new wave of historical scholarship that came to be known as whiteness studies.Footnote ⁹⁷ He ended his essay with his own call to the future: “for black philosophers in political theory—or rather all philosophers interested in the elimination of racism, and in bringing mainstream philosophy down from its otherworldly empyrean musings—to take global white supremacy as a political system, and begin to map its contours.”Footnote ⁹⁸

In the critical historicizing visions of Matsuda, Okin and Mills the focus on Rawls was not biographical, nor on explaining how and when bits of his theory developed as they did. The concern was to bring into view what his theory might preclude or effect, where the conceptual and the practical were seen as two sides of the same coin. How would this theory—with its particular categories, abstractions and arguments—shape a discipline, and indeed a world, that had such deep historical problems with racial and gender injustice? How would it restrict the political imaginations of its readers, and, possibly too, what kind of law or policy would it encourage or rationalize?

While these theorists were developing an account that put Rawls's theory in a particular history of oppression and injustice, Rawls was coming to elaborate his own view about his theory's place in history. In the introduction to Political Liberalism (1993) “justice as fairness” was presented as a part of a history of liberal progress with roots in the sixteenth-century European wars of religion, and so as a contribution to a hopeful tradition of political liberalism.Footnote ⁹⁹

III. Memorializing Rawls

By the late 1980s it seemed to some political philosophers that despite Rawls's impact on the discipline, the “Rawls industry” was in terminal decline. In 1984 Brian Barry—by this point an editor of Ethics—had suggested that journal editors would be able to “beat back” any possible resurgence.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He noted a “complete cessation” of Ph.D. theses on Rawls, and this, Barry thought, was no bad thing: “A Theory of Justice was an opportunity for those of us who got in early and a trap for those who came along later.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ By 1989 Rawls's former student Thomas Pogge observed that political philosophy was “well beyond the stage when, in Robert Nozick's words, ‘political philosophers must now either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not’.” Pogge reported “a widespread sense that Rawls's work is in a shambles,” with new authors volunteering to “set the agenda for the dawning post-Rawlsian era.” However unfair their assessments from a philosophical perspective, as a “matter of academic politics,” Pogge concluded, “Rawls's work is in decline.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Rawls for his part spent the 1980s responding to his critics, and the 1990s saw the publication of further clarifications and extensions of his views: not least in Political Liberalism (1993), “The Law of Peoples” (1993, expanded in 1999), “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997) and the revised edition of TJ (1999). From 1987 through until his retirement from the classroom in 1995 Rawls was regularly teaching the manuscript of what would eventually become Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001).Footnote ¹⁰³

Against this backdrop some of Rawls's colleagues, many of whom were former students, embarked on a different kind of historical project. Towards the end of his life and in the first years after his death in 2002 a flurry of publications assessed Rawls's influence and pronounced on his legacy. In 1997—after he had survived his first stroke and a near-fatal attack of pancreatitis—a group of philosophers who studied with Rawls published Reclaiming the History of Ethics, an essay collection based on an event at Harvard for his seventy-fifth birthday.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1999, with Rawls's reluctant permission, Samuel Freeman, a friend and former Ph.D. student, collected and introduced twenty-six of his published papers and a rare interview.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the same year two other former students, Henry Richardson and Paul Weithman, published The Philosophy of Rawls, which, over five volumes, reprinted a selection of essays on Rawls reaching back to the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Lectures that Rawls gave on moral and political philosophy at Harvard between 1962 and 1995 were published for the first time: in the year 2000 on the history of moral philosophy, edited by Barbara Herman (another former student) and in 2007 on the history of political philosophy, edited again by Freeman with the help of Margaret Rawls.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In 2009 Rawls's undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith”—was released, along with an essay “On My Religion” (found on his computer before his archive was opened), edited by Thomas Nagel with an introduction cowritten with Joshua Cohen, both Rawls students.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

At roughly the same time, a number of books appeared offering introductions to Rawls's thought and its reception.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Once again, those close to Rawls were centrally involved. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Freeman and conceived in the late 1990s (archived letters show at least one contributor writing to Rawls about their essay) was published weeks before his death in November 2002.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 2007 Thomas Pogge's John Rawls: His Life and His Theory of Justice was translated into English, with a biographical chapter based on hours of recorded interviews.Footnote ¹¹¹ The same year saw Samuel Freeman's Rawls: a five-hundred-page account of Rawls's life and thought, which drew on at that point unreleased archival sources, including a brief autobiographical sketch: “Just Jack.”Footnote ¹¹²

We might understand this period in the reception of Rawls in early modern terms: as one of monument building.Footnote ¹¹³ This would chime with Rawls's own view of the history of political thought: in a lecture on the “Nature and Limits of Political Philosophy” in 1966 he referred to the genre of “the history of political ideas or monuments.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ So too would it echo the responses of reviewers to this literature: “a monumental study of a monumental theorist,” Jeremy Waldron wrote of Freeman's Rawls.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In this literature we often find the same set of facts about Rawls's “impact”: the number of copies of TJ sold by Rawls's death (approximately 300,000 in the US and 1,000,000 worldwide); the number of languages into which TJ was translated (twenty-seven); the number of books and articles on Rawls's thought (over 2,500 by 1982). These statistics were repeated in the reviews of these books, which were again often written by Rawls's friends and students.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This desire to memorialize Rawls is understandable. He was widely reported as a kind, humble teacher, and several professional philosophers credit their careers to his influence and support (including many women trying to enter what remains a hostile discipline).Footnote ¹¹⁷ But, like all monuments, those erected to Rawls advertised to the future a particular perspective on the past.

This is not to say that these publications were ahistorical; indeed, they often encouraged readers to think about Rawls's theory as a historical entity that changed over time.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The publication of Rawls's undergraduate thesis prompted debates about the correct interpretation of Rawls's early theology and its impact on his later theory. These books also emphasized Rawls's deep and long-standing interest in the history of philosophy (that, they revealed, stretched back at least to a 1942 undergraduate class with Norman Malcolm in which Rawls studied Plato and Augustine), and publicized his views on how it should be practiced.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this way they provided historians with new material and promising leads; in the case of unpublished material they saw themselves, as one reader put it, as “providing a definitive version for posterity.”Footnote ¹²⁰

At the same time, these memorializing publications consolidated partial narratives about Rawls's significance. The familiar story of political philosophy's death and revival at his hands was widely repeated, though usually without recognition of that account's limits.Footnote ¹²¹ As we have seen, while Rawls's earliest readers connected him back to “the tradition,” they were also interested in more local political and intellectual contexts. In much of the memorializing literature, that pluralism vanished. Freeman, for example, confidently stated that “though raised within the Anglo-American analytic tradition in philosophy, Rawls is mainly responding to problems set forth by the major moral and political philosophers since Hobbes.”Footnote ¹²² Historical claims were presented as so self-evidently true that they needed no evidence. “Almost immediately upon publication,” Herman, Korsgaard and Reath announced, Rawls's theory “became the starting point for subsequent work in political philosophy.”Footnote ¹²³ Where disagreement might have existed, they said, there was “little dispute that [Rawls's] are the central issues and the appropriate terms of discussion.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The opening sentence of Shaun Young's collection of essays on Rawls's legacy summed up the view: “The work of John Rawls cast an immense shadow over the discipline of political philosophy.”Footnote ¹²⁵

The memorializing texts sometimes treated as settled issues with which Rawls himself was still grappling at the end of his life. It is striking to find him, just a year before his death, raise the following worry:

As Stefan Eich points out, Rawls never answered these questions.Footnote ¹²⁷ And they were not taken up in the monuments which, while never presenting him as without critics, consistently addressed a remarkably uniform list: Hart, Hare, Dworkin, Nozick, Beitz, Sandel, Cohen. These books operated with a clear sense of Rawls's “most important interlocutors”; in the process they sidelined or ignored arguments which, in the case of feminist objections to his work, Rawls took far more seriously than the memorializers suggested. One example is the treatment of his engagement with Susan Okin; a debate which both participants recognized at the end of their lives as to some degree “unfinished” tended to be written about in these books, when it was written about at all, as easily resolved by Rawls.Footnote ¹²⁸ As Charles Mills has noted, Rawls's memorializers never admitted him or other critical race theorists into their canon of critics.Footnote ¹²⁹

The memorializing approach to Rawls's theory, and the triumphalist account of its place in history, were by no means uniformly held by philosophers and theorists in the late 1990s and the 2000s.Footnote ¹³⁰ Criticism and revisionism continued, from old foes and new. This is the period during which the trope of the “owl of Minerva” appeared as a way of expressing the distance between the world in which Rawls theorized and the world into which his theory was flung.Footnote ¹³¹ It is also when the “realist” respondents to high liberalism came to have a sense of themselves as offering a worked-out alternative to Rawls.Footnote ¹³² But these memorializing books on Rawls did, in some quarters, take on a quiet authority, and came occasionally to shape the archival histories.

IV. The historical Rawls

Between 2004 and 2010, Rawls's main archive opened.Footnote ¹³³ Before the first publications a manuscript culture developed, with materials and early drafts circulating online and privately.Footnote ¹³⁴ Here I survey some of the themes that have emerged from this new and more explicitly historical literature on Rawls, noticing the questions the archive has settled and those it has provoked. I also keep one eye on the longer history I have begun to trace here, and on the echoes and continuities amidst all the novelty. This is not to say that there are no, as Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka put it, “folk histories” that can now be rightly set aside. But it is to caution against interpreting all previous historicizing claims merely as “past political posturing” (and against assuming that archival studies cannot themselves be “political”).Footnote ¹³⁵ Sometimes the archives have offered support for previously articulated views. In these cases, historians should be wary of redescribing confirmatory evidence as revelation.

In the introduction to the first collection of archivally informed essays in the Journal of the History of Ideas Bevir suggested that the documents from Rawls's pre-Harvard years were “perhaps the most interesting.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Much archival work has now focused on the period before 1962. Scholars have explained features of Rawls's later theory via early intellectual commitments and in some cases suggested that those commitments remained significant long after Rawls renounced the associated views. The publication of Rawls's undergraduate thesis meant that other early work focused on a theme that did not preoccupy his first readers: religion.Footnote ¹³⁷ The nature of Rawls's youthful Protestantism, the impact of theologians at Princeton on the development of his views, and the possible relationship between his religiously inflected commitments and the development of justice as fairness have all been explored.Footnote ¹³⁸ Here too tensions exist concerning the balance of influence between contemporary interlocutors and the “tradition.” Robert Adams emphasizes the importance for Rawls's theology of neo-Orthodox Christian theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Philip Leon. Eric Nelson contends that the crucial text for understanding the character of Rawls's youthful anti-Pelagianism was Marx's On the Jewish Question (1844).Footnote ¹³⁹ Inferences drawn from new material published before the archive's opening were called into question once it was. Rawls's essay “On My Religion” led many to accept, for example, his recollection that he “lost his faith” after the war. As Bok argues, “the archives tell a subtler story.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ So, too, where Adams and Eric Gregory emphasized the neo-Orthodox dimensions of Rawls's undergraduate thesis, Bok, on the basis of archival papers, reconstructed a Rawls committed to liberal Protestant convictions and part of a community of theorists—including Roderick Firth and William Frankena—looking to philosophy for alternative grounding for their views.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Work on Rawls's religious views has raised broader disciplinary questions, problematizing standard narratives about “secularization” and postwar ethics.Footnote ¹⁴²

Early archival scholarship also contextualized Rawls in relation to trends in early twentieth-century philosophy.Footnote ¹⁴³ Where Norman Daniels assumed continuity between Rawls and what he loosely called the “technical tradition in philosophy,” historians have focused on where these lines of continuity might be. As Bevir and Gališanka argue, the story is a complicated one: logical positivism, for example, “helps to explain several crucial concepts” in TJ, and yet other features of that book—its moral psychology and holistic justification—result from Rawls's turn against positivism. Here archival work at once vindicates and complicates some early historicizing assumptions.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Revelations about Rawls's philosophical debts have ranged from technical detail to general influence. Joel Isaac reconstructed connections between Rawls and G. E. M. Anscombe, J. L. Austin and John Searle.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Daniele Botti argued that Rawls sought in his early work to overcome some of the dichotomous thinking which, for Botti, characterized Ayer's emotivism and G. E. Moore's intuitionism; elsewhere, on the basis of reading notes and marginalia, Botti insists that the long-held view that Rawls had no relation to American pragmatism is false.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In an act of swift revisionism, Bok overturned the archivally informed account of Rawls's early Wittgensteinianism offered by Gališanka and Bevir—in the process she transformed our understanding of when Rawls first read Wittgenstein, and of the different Wittgensteins that came to be important to him (a reminder that the archive doesn't always give up its secrets on first inspection).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Rawls's engagements with Wittgenstein reveal a previously unrecognized naturalism, a fact which these scholars argue helps to explain central assumptions of his justice theory. Taken together these intellectual histories chart the course from Rawls's very early theological views to his postwar philosophical investigations and are the basis for what both Bok and Gališanka have called “the path to a Theory of Justice.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Rawls's readers long suspected that place mattered for the development of his views. Archival historians have shown how and why. Rawls, for example, spent 1952–3 on a Fulbright fellowship in Oxford. For Reidy his encounters there led him to justice theory from a kind of Millian utilitarianism; for Bejan, it was where his interest in the history of political thought deepened; for Forrester, it introduced him to the right wing of the British Labour Party, whose worldview he would come to think compatible with his own developing theory of justice.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Gališanka points out that Harvard's importance began before Rawls's permanent appointment, tracing the impact of his encounter with Quine's naturalism and nonfoundationalism from his visiting professorship in 1959–60.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Scholars in the archive have also reassessed Rawls's links to philosophers in the so-called tradition. Reading notes, unpublished lectures and letters have prompted new debate about old themes: Rawls's “turn” to Kant is one example.Footnote ¹⁵¹ New connections have also been established. Forrester shows that in 1951, while in Princeton, Rawls was using Tocqueville to flesh out his incipient thoughts on society and associational life.Footnote ¹⁵² Bejan explores how Rawls himself engaged in the “death-of-political-philosophy” debate as he developed his own undergraduate teaching.Footnote ¹⁵³ As we've seen, Rawls's readers long speculated about which “tradition” of political philosophy might best explain his views. Using Rawls's reading notes, Stefan Eich makes a novel and compelling case for placing Rawls in a late eighteenth-century tradition of secular theodicy. Eich further reveals that what some suggested was a late-stage invocation of Hegel in Rawls's account of the “tasks” of philosophy in Justice as Fairness (2001) was in fact present in archival formulations in 1959. This is a neat example of how publications alone can offer misleading chronologies.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Much scholarship on Rawls's debts to mid-century thought has focused on the development of his early conceptualizations of society and the “persons” who inhabit it. Bok argues that the notion of “community”—inflected by Wittgenstein—was far more important to the early Rawls than is often imagined. Questions have been raised about the relationship between Rawls's conception of philosophy and his commitment to democracy: was he committed to an expanded place for democratic deliberation or a constraining view of the correct conclusions democrats should reach?Footnote ¹⁵⁵ From a different direction, Gališanka has explored the connection between the early Rawls's notion of society as a game and the game theory of two men Rawls encountered at Princeton: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Here we see another way in which the archival literature at once vindicates and complicates some early assumptions about Rawls's debts: in Anne Kornhausers's view the development of Rawls's justice theory went hand in hand with his reading of Neumann and Morgenstern through to R. Duncan Luce, Howard Raiffa and R. B. Braithwaite, even as he rejected its pessimistic anthropology.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Gališanka argues, however, that where game theory suggested to Rawls a fruitful analogy between reasoning and games and led him to emphasize values he might not have otherwise, it should not be read, pace both Kornhauser and some of Rawls's early readers, as underpinning any of his substantive commitments.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Investigating influences on Rawls's ideas about society and the state have led many to mid-century economics.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The Chicago economist Frank Knight's The Ethics of Competition (1935) and its discussion of business as a competitive game has repeatedly been emphasized as important—just as Knight's mentee James Buchanan first suspected.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In 2014, Daniel Little drew on archival sources and his own reconstruction of the references in Rawls's publications to argue that in the 1950s Rawls was far more interested in the economic thought of contemporaries than he was in that of the “tradition.” Within Rawls's interest in contemporary economic theory, Little suggested clear preferences for welfare economics, social-choice theory and game theory. Keynes, he points out, barely appears. Little argues that over the course of his career Rawls's skepticism of capitalism—the inequalities it creates, the pursuit of growth, the psychological effects—took on new force.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Forrester offers an archivally informed explanation for Rawls's seeming early disinterest in Keynes, arguing that the early Rawls was to the right of Keynes and that it was only by the late 1950s that he had moved his views in line with what were then Keynesian commonplaces.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Drawing on both Rawls's and Buchanan's archives, Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska caution against reading the early Rawls through the polarized divide between social democrats and neoliberals that emerged in the late 1970s. To do so, they suggest, is not only to miss the time it took for the difference between Rawlsian liberalism and neoliberalism to emerge, but also to occlude the early shared influences and assumptions between the central protagonists.Footnote ¹⁶² Eich has extended the focus on Rawls's economic presuppositions from his first writings to his last, revealing Rawls's changing assumptions about the necessity of growth for a just society.Footnote ¹⁶³

Finally, archival historians have addressed the political debates that Rawls encountered when he returned home from war. These histories take on directly what we have seen was an old question concerning the political worldview that Rawls was theorizing. Was it the Great Society? The postwar welfare state? What kind of liberal was Rawls, and what vision of politics was he defending? In 2015 Kornhauser placed Rawls in the context of postwar anxieties about the legitimacy of the liberal administrative state. As liberal antistatists worried about informal rule and emergency politics, and critical statists privileged administrative rule making over legislatures, Kornhauser argued that Rawls “carved out a middle way” between respecting autonomy and individual liberties, and an administrative state that many worried would undermine them.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ On this reading Rawls's critique of the administrative state dovetailed with his critique of utilitarianism: both erroneously made justice a matter of efficiency and a problem of administration. Rawls emerges as a “constructive critic of statist liberalism” with deep anxieties about “the coerciveness of the centralized state.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Here Kornhauser explicitly challenged Michael Sandel's historical claim (offered in the early 1980s) that Rawls was “just another New Deal statist liberal.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ By contrast, Kornhauser argued, the archive reveals that Rawls's vision “ruled out many of the standard operating procedures of the American administrative state.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

In 2018 Samuel Moyn put Rawls in a broader political-economic context: “the transformation from the era of the welfare state to that of neoliberal economics.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Here again TJ was presented as a book of the mid-1940s that “reflected many premises of the dream of national welfare during World War II and after.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ And, as for earlier readers, so too for Moyn: Rawls “ironically … let loose the owl of Minerva on the achievements of the best liberal welfare states.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ His justice theory was a “swansong” for national welfare policies that “memorialized hopes for their further extension when they were about to be eroded by a neoliberal revolution.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ With TJ, Rawls made a monument to a world that, if ever really in reach, was swiftly slipping from view. This, for Moyn, explains the limitations of Rawls's theory: the political and ideological changes of the 1960s and 1970s “challenged” the “self-evidence” of Rawls's analysis, rendering it out of touch for the era it claimed to guide. On this view, amongst Rawls's first memorializers were those readers who insisted from the 1970s to the 1990s that its hopes were realistic. For Moyn, philosophy in this period—Rawls's included—“had the power on its own to memorialize unavailable egalitarian utopias in a neoliberal age.”Footnote ¹⁷²

One year later (though in progress long beforehand) Katrina Forrester shed new light on Rawls's economic, philosophical and political contexts. Forrester's account of Rawls's early thought and its trajectory stresses a different irony: that Rawls's theory was “born in part of anxiety about the New Deal state” but came nonetheless to be “written into a narrative of liberal egalitarian progress that claimed the New Deal as its victory.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Again, the archive has prompted debate: where Forrester agrees with Kornhauser and Moyn that the political origins of Rawls's justice theory were in the 1940s, she disagrees about where the emphasis should lie; less deeply preoccupied with postwar welfarism than Moyn's Rawls, and less a figure of compromise than Kornhauser's Rawls, Forrester's early Rawls is much closer to antistatist pluralism and its attacks on concentrated state power.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Forrester nonetheless shares with Moyn (and so, too, some theorists in the 1980s and 1990s) a preoccupation with the reception of Rawls's theory, and with how that reception shaped the practice of political philosophy over the next decades. Here the archive becomes a resource not only for origins, but also for influence. Forrester's book offers the first deep political history of Rawlsianism, and its relation to the development of libertarianism, communitarianism and analytical Marxism, as well as to varieties of liberal egalitarianism itself. Rawls's theory appears not as an owl but as a ghost, continuing to haunt political philosophy from a lost world.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

* * *

One upshot of Moyn's and Forrester's stories—of a theory whose valences shifted with a changing economic and social reality—will be, for some, familiar. Thinking about the history of the reception of Rawls in 1999, Charles Mills lamented the rightward shift in US politics, and the lack, as he saw it, of any thriving US left liberalism or social democracy at the turn of the century. The “restriction of possibilities” engendered by neoliberalism changed how Rawls could be read: “In the 1970s, John Rawls's welfarist A Theory of Justice was seen by many on the left as bourgeois reformism, a book to be militantly critiqued and exposed. Now, of course, it represents a radical vision far outside the spectrum of political possibility.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In charting the ways that Rawls's arguments had “ideological and political meanings that transformed over time,” and in the further suggestion that the theory foreclosed certain possibilities, we might think that the archive is leading some historians to elaborate (and perhaps vindicate) critiques whose origins are in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This is not to say that the new histories have nothing to teach us on these points, not least about how best to characterize the shifts in how TJ signified politically and about the background dynamics that explain those shifts.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ As Forrester argues, thinking of TJ as merely “welfarist” is to miss Rawls's early unease with the welfare state.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Rather, it is to suggest that if Moyn and Forrester are right about what history reveals, then their many discoveries could be put in productive conversation with this earlier generation of critics.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

In many cases the archive has indeed helped to overturn prevailing “folk histories.” The contextualist studies show decisively, for example, that TJ cannot be read—at least not primarily—as a response to the 1960s: Rawls was not simply theorizing the Great Society even if he was revising his theory just as debates about civil disobedience amongst both civil rights activists and philosophers were reaching a peak.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The crucial decades for its emergence were the 1940s and 1950s (though, as we have seen, the archive has pulled historians in different directions on the question of what, in this period, Rawls was reacting against).

But not all “folk histories” were quite as dominant as some make it seem. Much of the contextualist literature decenters Rawls and revives, in Bok's phrase, an “entire community” of thinkers mining away at similar problems.Footnote ¹⁸² In exploring such links Bevir and Gališanka suggest that the opening of the Rawls archives allows historians finally to debunk the “widespread narrative” whereby Rawls draws on and engages “nobody other than canonical philosophers.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Was this a widespread view? Perhaps in some quarters, but, as we have seen, many of Rawls's readers were clear that he was also in conversation with those in his immediate intellectual milieu. The opening of the archives—both Rawls's and his contemporaries—has confirmed this intuition while exposing the relevant individuals and connections.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Indeed, we might think that this narrative, wherein Rawls cared only about the “tradition,” was consolidated in part by the selective focus of the memorializing literature. It is striking that Gališanka, for example, when explaining his book as a corrective to the view that Rawls engaged only with the tradition, offers just one source: Samuel Freeman's Rawls.

The early archival focus on Rawls's formative years might have been a reaction against assumptions about Rawls's influences in the memorializing literature. But some initial silences in the historical literature mimicked those in the monuments to Rawls. As Brandon Terry notes, Thomas Pogge “side-lined the extent of Rawls's thinking about racial injustice.” But so, too, Terry's work shows, have the archival historians, who had at their disposal much material with which to rethink received narratives about Rawls and race, including those narratives found in the work of earlier critical historicists like Charles Mills. Thinking about Rawls as silent on racial injustice, as Mills does, is to occlude, Terry suggests, the ways that some of Rawls's “radical formulations” bear the imprint of his engagement with the history of white supremacy. Rather than a complete departure from the critical historicists, however, Terry offers a reorientation: in the place of “ideal theory as ideology” he proposes “reconciliation as ideology.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Murad Idris also uses the archive to raise an issue the memorializers never spoke of in a text historians have not yet addressed: the politics of knowledge production in Rawls's construction of his fictional Muslim state—Kazanistan—in The Law of Peoples.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In so doing, Idris elaborates on the conversation begun in the 1970s about the ideological underpinnings of Rawls's theory, while extending it to include a concern for what he calls the “politics of comparison.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ So too feminism: none of the earliest archival histories noted that Rawls's archive contains pages of letters, notes and lectures on feminism that are in many ways revelatory, and go far beyond anything he ever published.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The archival histories are, of course, still young. Yet it is striking—and it perhaps speaks to the politics of knowledge production today—that these materials have waited the longest for attention.

Another shibboleth of the memorializing literature that persists in the new histories concerns characterizations of Rawls's “impact.” The “death-and-revival” narrative still appears in archival histories, despite, elsewhere, increasingly being called into question.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Historians repeat some of the claims popularized by the memorializing literature, not all of which may turn out to be accurate.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ We still know relatively little about Rawls's impact beyond a relatively limited group of mainly US-based analytical, and primarily liberal, philosophers, despite unsubstantiated claims about his international influence.Footnote ¹⁹¹ What we do know suggests something more complicated than hegemony.Footnote ¹⁹² A trope like “the Rawls industry”—developed to describe a period of a few years—has been extended to cover decades. In the process, a sense of disciplinary flux that, as we have seen, was clear to some contemporaries, has been flattened out. Every now and then some suggest that Rawls, as some of his first readers predicted, did have an impact on practical politics, and in particular on the politics of the Democratic Party, though there is little by way of evidence.Footnote ¹⁹³

Substantiating some of these impact claims would require something closer to a cultural history of the postwar academy—and of liberal egalitarianism—which would draw on syllabuses, hiring patterns, Ph.D. and article topics, journals (in both political philosophy and beyond it), and professional associations, including but not limited to the APA, APSA, APT and CSPT (membership, papers presented at meetings, affiliated groups) and the multiple think tanks founded in this period.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ There are deeper stories to be told about why certain bits of Rawls were taken up and used, and other bits were not. There is also, surely, a sociological story—and presumably a psychoanalytic one—to tell about the desire of so many political philosophers in the mid-century for a “big book,” and about the persistence of claims about its elegance, even as its many ambiguities and inconsistencies were made clear.

V. What history shows

Throughout its life Rawls's justice theory has been repeatedly read in the context of anxieties about liberalism. TJ was forged during liberalism's postwar crisis and published, as early readers recognized, just as the liberal project was taken to be splintering.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The current crisis of liberalism now informs the first two book-length histories of Rawls's thought.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ As we've seen, for these and many other archival studies, writing the history of Rawls is not simply a matter of better understanding the character of one philosopher's thought, but an opportunity to reflect on what practicing theorists should think about Rawls's work and its legacies. (It is perhaps relevant that many of those writing archival histories identify as political theorists.) For some, historicizing Rawls can help readers rethink challenges to Rawlsian liberalism from the inside: Gališanka argues that the archival Rawls offers a vision of respect for persons which might be a starting point for contemporary political philosophers.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ For others, the theoretical upshot of historicizing Rawls is to unsettle us. This is true, in different ways, of both Nelson and Forrester, and it is on their arguments that I will close.

Nelson places Rawls in a history where liberalism “began as a theodicy.” Early liberal thinkers were Pelagians, rejecting original sin and endorsing a view of human freedom and autonomy on which men could save themselves. Rawls stands out for his youthful anti-Pelagianism, which, Nelson argues, remained a “habit of mind” well after his loss of faith.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Drawing on Rawls's undergraduate dissertation and his archived library, Nelson suggests that this anti-Pelagianism underpinned Rawls's insistence that the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages is morally arbitrary, and so explains at least two related tensions in Rawls's theory. First, between a commitment to the fundamental dignity of persons as autonomous choosers and the insistence that “because the internal contribution to human action is so vanishingly small, it cannot in principle ground any claims to merit or desert.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ And second, between the rejection of preinstitutional desert in the realm of distributive justice and the reliance on preinstitutional desert in the realm of retributive justice.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Insofar as modern liberals endorse both sides of these tensions, they are “in the shadow of a theological claim” and “unwittingly taking up untenable positions” in a much longer debate between Pelagians and Augustinians.Footnote ²⁰¹ Once we see that Rawls retained an anti-Pelagian account of human agency we will “reassess the attractiveness of that theory as a whole.”Footnote ²⁰²

Nelson's argument is not that the origins of Rawls's “pattern of thought” in Christian apologetic itself undermines his theory (and so it avoids any genetic fallacy). He also acknowledges that the tensions he identifies are known to philosophers. Rather, his story is meant as a new explanation for these tensions. While this new explanatory story might help readers to get clearer on the philosophical issues, we might still ask what Nelson thinks philosophers should take from his new account? Even with this new explanation in hand they seem still to be much where they were before, facing a tension and so a choice: work out how to overcome it, or abandon Rawls's theory.

For Katrina Forrester, contemporary political philosophers have been “in the shadow” of Rawls since the end of the Cold War, when liberal egalitarianism became “hegemonic,”Footnote ²⁰³ and the Rawlsian framework was “naturalized” into “a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ For Forrester, history can “denaturalize and defamiliarize” the Rawlsian framework, revealing it as contingent.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Philosophers can then “begin … anew” the search for “abstract fundamentals” and can ask “different kinds of question and focus on some of the social and political transformations—in the nature of the state, of agency under capitalism, of gendered power and racial inequality—that have taken place since the moment when Rawls constructed the framework that put those questions beyond investigation.”Footnote ²⁰⁶

I am in deep agreement with Forrester's assessment of the questions that theorists of contemporary politics should ask. But her view of Rawls's influence chimes with that of his memorializers, for whom political philosophy has been, since the 1970s, in Rawls's shadow. I am less convinced than Forrester that the history of political philosophy in the twentieth century reveals that Rawls's theory—or even the more general (and capacious) phenomenon of liberal egalitarianism—was ever, for philosophers or theorists, simply a naturalized phenomenon. To doubt this is consistent with affirming that Rawls was prominent, even dominant, in many contexts, and with noting that Rawls was required reading for those who studied politics in anglophone philosophy departments. (This was true, too, of many politics departments, though not all.) It is also consistent with acknowledging the continued popularity of an “analytic” approach to political philosophy, for one can think “analytically” about politics without being indebted to Rawls.

My skepticism about the naturalization of Rawlsian liberalism stems first from the fact that so many political philosophers self-consciously celebrate him for saving their discipline. Accuracy notwithstanding, this death-and-resurrection story emphasizes rather than occludes the contingency of the Rawlsian enterprise.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Second, as we have seen, there have been attempts to debunk Rawls, especially by historicizing him, from the very beginning. Critical historicizers in the 1970s and 1980s wrote precisely to ensure that Rawls and his categories would not be naturalized. Against this background, presenting Rawls as naturalized risks occluding quite how rich and continuous was this tradition of dissent, which in some cases made criticisms of both Rawls and liberal egalitarianism that resonate with Forrester's own. It also risks exculpating those who, in their theorizing, chose to ignore that dissent; liberal egalitarianism becomes something that was merely thrust upon unwitting theorists. But the history suggests that a great number of people chose Rawls.

My point here is not that Rawls's non-liberal critics shared his disciplinary prominence, nor is it to deny that liberalism was and is the dominant ideology across many academic disciplines in US universities. To say that many theorists chose Rawls is not to say that those choices, especially by those at the start of their careers, were not shaped by sometimes coercive disciplinary expectations, demands and incentives. If by the “hegemony” of Rawls or liberal egalitarianism we are simply referring to this structure of expectations, demands and incentives in elite philosophy departments—the structure that shaped and continues to shape access to academic goods like jobs in certain institutions and publications in particular journals—then it might be true to say that Rawls-inspired liberal egalitarianism has been hegemonic. But if by the “hegemony” of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism we mean to say that the Rawlsian framework set the horizons of thinkability in the discipline, then it is not true that Rawls or even liberal egalitarianism were, or are, hegemonic. People did not choose Rawls or liberal egalitarianism because there was no other way of thinking available to them. Instead, many chose to adopt a Rawlsian framework because it was the most prestigious, institutionally validated approach; other approaches may have been professionally risky or even potentially ruinous, but they were not unthinkable or unavailable. Of course, many chose to think with Rawls because they thought his arguments made good sense, perhaps in part because Rawls systematized the egalitarian liberal worldview to which many academics, because of their class position, are intuitively attracted. In both cases—where Rawls was a choice taken because of the institutional marginalization of alternatives, or where Rawls was a choice that flowed naturally from an antecedent political outlook—there were other choices to be made.

Finally, my skepticism that Rawlsian liberalism was ever naturalized is driven by the fact that the last fifty years—the period of analytical liberalism's rise—have seen much theorizing about politics that is not beholden to a Rawlsian, or even a liberal, framework: theorizing that would appear to be justly called political philosophy. Such theory, produced by feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial theorists, critical race theorists, Marxists, Foucauldians and many others, has addressed precisely the questions that Rawls's theory has been said to put beyond investigation: of racial and gendered domination, of the nature of the state, of the limits of capitalism.Footnote ²⁰⁸ While many of these theorists may have been, in the US academy at least, marginalized in philosophy or political-science departments, they made homes instead in departments of law, African American studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology and comparative literature, among others. As Charles Mills has suggested, throughout the period of the Rawlsian resurgence, “grand theory was indeed still being produced—it was just that it was saying things mainstream right-wing liberal theory didn't want to hear.” Indeed, for Mills, the trope of death and revival was all too frequently used to draw a “white and Eurocentric picture” of political philosophy.Footnote ²⁰⁹

No doubt some political philosophers—especially those in philosophy departments in elite anglophone universities—will wish to withhold the honorific “philosophy” from these theorists of politics. (Michael Walzer recalls that the members of SELF also referred to themselves as the “Society for the Elimination of Lousy Philosophy.”Footnote ²¹⁰) Many twentieth-century philosophers were quite happy to make “Rawlsianism” or “liberal egalitarianism” a metonym for “political philosophy.” But historians should be cautious of replicating this exclusionary manoeuvre—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 ²¹¹

Crucial here is the contested distinction between political philosophy and political theory.Footnote ²¹² Telling the twentieth-century history of either of these terms is inevitably to take a stand in the ongoing debate about their proper application.Footnote ²¹³ Rawls himself experimented with different options. In 1968 he described justice as fairness as “an approach to the study of politics, or political theory”; in 1975 he called it a “moral theory”; in notes on student essays in the early 1990s he elaborated on his view that justice as fairness was political philosophy and not political theory.Footnote ²¹⁴ Rawls's first readers ranged further; TJ was, variously, the most important piece of moral theory, philosophical ethics, moral philosophy, political philosophy and social theory to have appeared after the war.Footnote ²¹⁵ On one understanding, political philosophy and political theory are coextensive, or at least not usefully distinguished; in which case, the history of political philosophy since Rawls far exceeds his shadow. Even if we concede that political philosophy just is a much narrower enterprise than political theory, it is misleading to suggest that contemporary political philosophers who really want to engage with pressing political problems must start anew. Saying so risks incentivizing a form of political philosophy that proceeds as if no one has tackled questions of misogyny, racism, work, state oppression, economic exploitation or carceralism, with analytical clarity and political insight. Rather than start anew, political philosophers need only look sideways, at the vast body of political theory that has begun the work of addressing the very questions they might wish to ask.Footnote ²¹⁶ If some philosophers do not wish to engage with this literature, then, we might think, so much the worse for political philosophy.