With the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice fast approaching, John Rawls’s contributions to political theory increasingly appear to us through the rear-view mirror. Many scholars now see them neither as a framework within which to work nor as a foil against which to react, but as a particular episode in intellectual history whose origins and character need to be understood in context. These books are pioneering efforts in this latest wave of Rawlsian scholarship. Both are meticulously researched and grounded in unpublished archival sources that are only now starting to be carefully studied.

Andrius Gališanka’s book is focused more narrowly on the gestation of Rawls’s theory from his undergraduate days to 1971, although he draws some very illuminating connections with the later “political” turn in Rawls’s thought. With great care and subtlety, Gališanka details Rawls’s successive engagements during this period with Protestant theology, logical positivism, classical utilitarianism, game theory, the later Wittgenstein, and the Kantian tradition. Although it does not give us a radically revisionary picture of Rawls’s thought, Gališanka’s book nonetheless sheds considerable fresh light on its character while successfully correcting several stereotypes that still distort its critical reception. The Rawls who emerges from Gališanka’s treatment is a theorist who consistently acknowledged the essential plurality of the grounds for assessing alternative visions of justice; who accorded affect and emotion a crucial role in ethical judgment (pp. 118–26); who fully recognized that philosophical argumentation should not limit the discretion that democratic publics enjoy to order their own affairs (pp. 112–14, 182–88); and to whom respect for persons in the end mattered more than political agreement.

The central theme of Gališanka’s reconstruction is Rawls’s determination to vindicate the “objectivity” or “universalism” of ethical reasoning within a basically positivist philosophical framework. The importance of positivism in Rawls’s thought has not received much emphasis, and one of the achievements of this book is to move it back to center stage. As Gališanka shows, however, Rawls’s positivism was highly distinctive, particularly in denying the claim (associated above all with emotivism) that ethical judgments are unfalsifiable. Certainly, it shared the standard positivist disavowal of any “metaphysical” commitments and embraced a version of Quine’s “meaning-holism” (the view that conceptual meanings are completely interdependent rather than specifiable apart from other concepts). Yet, against the drift of standard positivist views, Gališanka’s Rawls nonetheless held that an empirically based science of ethics, one that roots ethical judgment in common moral feelings, is possible (pp. 67–81). He conceived it as a search for a minimal set of practical reasons on which all reasonable persons do in fact agree. Although he acknowledged that such a set is exiguous and “logically loose,” Rawls believed that its conceptual integrity could be shown through empirically informed philosophical reflection and that it was rich enough to justify at least some nontrivial conclusions about the contours of a just society. Gališanka convincingly argues that Rawls’s engagement with the later Wittgenstein and formal game theory were of a piece with this larger effort to demonstrate that reasonable persons moved by ordinary moral psychology do, in fact, agree on enough to make reasoned political criticism possible.

As Gališanka is at pains to emphasize, Rawls did not (as Richard Rorty claimed) avoid making any assumptions about normal human motivation that remain constant across history and culture (pp. 118–26). Nor, properly interpreted, need his efforts to “objectively” validate a range of sound ethical judgments prematurely foreclose democratic debate, as many more recent “realist” critics have complained (pp. 112–14, 182–88). Against Rorty, Gališanka’s work establishes that Rawls’s position was informed by a sophisticated, and wholly naturalistic, account of moral psychology. He quite rightly emphasizes that it does not follow from the fact that Rawls intended that account as non-metaphysical that he understood it as in any sense historically or culturally parochial. Against the realists, Gališanka emphasizes the modesty of Rawls’s hopes for political consensus and his explicit acknowledgment that “moralizing and preaching” (p. 91) will rarely, if ever, change the mind of even the most reasonable person.

Although it is unlikely to wholly silence these and other critics, this book nonetheless gives them and others much to think about. It also serves as a timely reminder that the caricatures thrown up in the course of scholarly debate often impose what Katrina Forrester in her book aptly calls “imaginative limits” (p. 71) on thinkers we thought we knew. Anyone seeking a deeper, more sophisticated engagement with Rawls’s ideas will profit from Gališanka’s exemplary discussion.

Forrester also discusses (much more briefly) the origins of Rawls’s thought, but her ambitions are far broader. She wishes to characterize the uptake of Rawls’s theory by sympathizers and critics after 1971, with a view to gaining critical distance on the whole “construction of modern liberal political philosophy” and “its relationship to politics” (p. xviii). Forrester hopes to show that those who participated in that construction have, partly because of Rawls’s influence, made “conceptual choices” (p. xix) that have “squeezed out possibilities for radical critique” (p. xvii). Apart from Rawls’s own views, Forrester discusses Vietnam War-inspired debates over civil disobedience and responsibility for war crimes from the 1960s and ’70s (chapters 2 and 3); the struggle to defend the welfare state and various forms of “liberal egalitarianism” against attacks from Nozick and the New Right (chapters 4 and 7); the cosmopolitan turn in political philosophy initiated by Brian Barry and Charles Beitz (chapter 5); the future-oriented discussion of population ethics inspired by Derek Parfit’s work (chapter 6); and some of the more methodological critiques of Rawlsian political philosophy offered in the 1980s by figures like Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer (chapter 8). From a purely expository standpoint, Forrester’s mastery of these literatures is beyond doubt, and she manages to be faithful to their intricacies without sacrificing a sense of their political import.

Still, taking on so many debates only underlines just how difficult—and perhaps ultimately misguided—it is to give a synoptic diagnosis of the entire ensemble. Inevitably, Forrester struggles to thematize the critical upshot of her account very clearly and tends to fall back on clichés—especially the complaint that a “liberal” or Rawlsian paradigm has enjoyed undue prominence among Anglophone philosophers in the years since 1971. That complaint has been around for as long as I can remember (I began following these debates in the late 1980s); indeed, it has become so completely institutionalized that it now powerfully shapes the self-perception of very many of my colleagues. Although Forrester adds a gold mine of narrative detail, her laudable effort to use intellectual history as an agent of “defamiliarization” rarely extends to the assumptions underlying this still regnant “liberalism and its critics” paradigm. Accordingly, few readers steeped in that paradigm will find that their pre-Forrester sympathies with or hostility to “Rawlsian liberalism” come under much pressure in this book.

Committed anti-liberals will applaud warmly; self-described “liberals” will rally to Rawls’s defense, and the scholastic games will proceed as usual. In this sense, Forrester’s book is a missed opportunity: I wish she had chosen to interrogate, rather than to reinforce, standard oppositions between (especially) a consensualist, “depoliticizing” (p. 273) egalitarian liberalism of closure and “ideal speech” (p. 273) and a vaguely articulated “realist,” “agonist,” or “non-ideal” (p. 276) alternative. Unfortunately, just as Rawls was a child of his time, so Forrester is of hers.

For example, consider her claim that, because Rawls’s theory was “born of his idealization of midcentury American civil society” (p. 225), it, along with its “liberal egalitarian” descendants, uncritically inherited from the heady days of postwar reconstruction a naïve expectation of political consensus. On Forrester’s account, the adventitious political convergence in the years immediately after 1945 was too brittle to survive long, and in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, the successive blows of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the fiscal crisis of the state, and the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan inevitably shattered it. On the strength of this historical narrative, Forrester concludes that the “liberal egalitarianism” that ensconced itself in the philosophy departments of Britain and the United States during this period was politically stillborn at the very moment of its academic triumph, its consensualist legs undercut by intervening events. Forrester’s implication seems to be that, in the aftermath, the hope for a consensus around some common expectations of distributive justice has been exposed as vain and pointless: as “the persistence of division has everywhere been revealed,” the “aim of agreement and consensus look[s] out of touch” (p. 277).

No doubt, the polarization, mistrust, and intransigence plaguing public discourse today make the prospects of political consensus very dim. But why is that to the detriment of the underlying aspiration? Sometimes, after all, being out of step with the times is a virtue; surrender is not the only possible response to what has become pervasive. Forrester could also have done more to engage with those followers of the later Rawls, like Gaus and Vallier, who respond to radical pluralism by rejecting any strong expectation of “consensus” in favor of a more modest requirement of “convergence.” She moreover discounts the possibility, highlighted well by Gališanka, that even the early Rawls fully recognized the narrowness and open-endedness of any achievable political consensus.

More generally, why does the neoliberal drift away from welfare-state egalitarianism not make the Rawlsian message, with its radical prioritization of the least advantaged, more rather than less pertinent? Given the mounting public recognition that economic inequality in capitalist societies has become excessive, even obscene, is this the moment for theorists to declare recent philosophical egalitarianism passé? Forrester herself seems to hesitate on this point, conceding toward the end of the book that “there is much to be saved” in “liberal egalitarianism” and that it potentially provides “grounds for a radical indictment of injustices and inequalities” (pp. 276, 278). As a general point, few would disagree, but who decides (and on what basis) which bits to keep and which to drop? Are we justified in simply imposing the parts “we” like even when others reasonably disagree—because “we” know better which egalitarian desiderata are worth saving? Rawls at least recognized these crucial questions and attempted an answer to them. Readers hoping to extract from Forrester’s historical analysis a clear and fresh alternative to his approach will, however, come back from this book less than fully satisfied.

Both of these works represent significant achievements and provide a wealth of insight and information. My reservations about Forrester’s book largely concern the spin she puts on the intellectual history she has uncovered; fortunately, the narrative richness of her story outshines her—indeed any—efforts to definitively frame the whole. Still, it is important to remember that what is past need not be stale and that sometimes, as my driving instructor never tired of reminding me, the rear-view mirror tells us as much about how to proceed now as it does about what we have left behind.