Anyone who has tried to work John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press, 1999) into an undergraduate course on global justice, human rights, and/or normative international relations will have faced the challenge of extracting and explaining the substantive content of, and relatively straightforward reasons for, the foreign policy he proposes as apropos to a modern liberal democracy, while steering clear of the larger and rather more difficult philosophical and methodological framework of thought that it presupposes and, on Rawls’s view, completes. (For example, see A Theory of Justice, 1971; Political Liberalism, 1993, revised edition 1996, expanded edition 2006.) This challenge frames the value of this slim, clearly written, and easily digested book by Neal Leavitt. Leavitt presents the central content and public political rationale for the foreign policy Rawls outlines in The Law of Peoples. But he does so without presupposing or bringing his readers to a command of either the general Rawlsian corpus or the larger field of contemporary work on global justice, human rights, and/or normative international relations. He also discusses some of Amartya Sen’s views on foreign policy, but he does so (as Rawls does, e.g., on famine or women’s rights) primarily to bolster Rawls’s conclusions and occasionally (as Rawls does not, e.g., on nuclear weapons) to challenge them.

The book is clearly written for students and perhaps the educated and interested citizen rather than political scientists, philosophers and theorists or foreign policy practitioners. Nevertheless, it will repay the latter with not only a teaching text but also a few insights and reminders worth the few hours of time required to read it. Leavitt plausibly reads Rawls as repudiating the long dominant tradition of realism in international relations and affirming the moral aspirations of and project sketched in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). And he draws attention to the uneasy relationship between Rawls’s foreign policy so understood and his defense of the necessity of maintaining a nuclear deterrence and of a “supreme emergency” exception to the prohibition on intentional targeting of innocent civilians in a just war. Most importantly, Leavitt effectively underscores how much remains still to be done in terms of reorienting the foreign policies of modern liberal democracies away from the past two centuries of largely unchecked realism, colonialism, imperialism, mercantilism, and corporate interference; these have ill-served the causes of peace, stability, justice, and human decency around the world.

The introductory chapter is perhaps the weakest. Apparently unable completely to resist the temptation to wade into the philosophical and methodological waters presupposed by Rawls’s The Law of Peoples, Leavitt gets in over his head. To be sure, he gets some things right. Rawls’s thinking is fundamentally oriented around an empirically informed but morally ambitious conception of justice as institutionally embodied respect, reciprocity, and reconciliation between persons through public or shared reasons. Modern liberal democracies must orient their foreign policies around such a conception of justice both to live up to their own commitments and to test, and with luck fulfill, their universal historical promise. But Leavitt gets several things wrong and leaves unmentioned a great deal essential to a complete understanding of The Law of Peoples. He characterizes Rawls’s contractualism as centered on a contract between citizens and their government, rather than on the constitution of a population as a people that might constitutionally appoint and be served by a government as its agent. He misunderstands the Rawlsian idea(l) of legitimacy, central to both Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, suggesting that a state is legitimate if those subject to it believe it is legitimate. Nevertheless, he does convey a central element of the spirit animating The Law of Peoples. Modern liberal democracies must overcome the conflicts between their domestic and foreign policies.

Of course, there has recently been a great deal of debate over how this should be done, with so-called cosmopolitan critics of Rawls generally arguing that the conflict is best overcome by extending principles of domestic justice to the international domain. Leavitt does not address this debate. Instead, he follows his chapter-length introduction with several often short chapters (Part I, Chaps. 1–6) devoted to “domestic policy” and then several more (Part II, Chaps. 7–9) devoted to “foreign policy.” The relationships between these chapters and thus the rationale behind the two-part structure of the book eluded me. Part I begins with a chapter titled “Interaction.” But it is never clear what the interaction is. Leavitt argues that the defining moment in The Law of Peoples is Rawls’s critique of realism in foreign policy as tending to undermine the stability of the liberal democracies whose foreign policy it is. This would seem to suggest that the “interaction” is between foreign and domestic policy and framed by the core Rawlsian idea(l) of stability for the right reasons. But Leavitt never brings this thought to the surface.

What he does, instead, is draw out an number of continuities between Rawls’s brief discussions of foreign policy issues in sections 56–58 of A Theory of Justice—the nature and permissibility of just war, civil disobedience, and so on—and themes running through The Law of Peoples. He rightly characterizes Rawls’s foreign policy convictions, even as revealed in 1971 in A Theory of Justice, as worlds away from those of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy and as more or less in line with those set out decades later in The Law of Peoples. It is never clear what this has to do with interaction or why it is tendered as the opening move in Part I, which is titled “Domestic Policy.”

I suspect that the interaction and the link to domestic policy Leavitt has in mind is to be found elsewhere. He argues that on Rawls’s view, the causes of international conflict and war stem largely from domestic hierarchical class structures that enable some within a state exclusively to capture the potential benefits, and largely externalize on to their compatriots the risks and costs, of international aggression. To be sure, Rawls does conjecture that the domestic structures of modern liberal democracies provide the best explanation of the so-called democratic peace thesis. But Rawls does not condemn all states with hierarchical class structures. He conjectures that there may be nonliberal, nondemocratic, but nevertheless “well-ordered” and nonaggressive “decent” peoples, and that if there are, then liberal democracies should extend to them mutual recognition and respect. Rawls offers a fictional “Kazanistan” as just such a state. It is a “decent, consultation hierarchy,” the domestic structure of which is fundamentally hierarchical, though it secures basic human rights and its politics is still inclusive and participatory. Thus, Rawls seems to suggest that liberal democracies may not be the only states reliably generating social forces that tend toward peaceful and reasonable international relations. To be sure, Leavitt may still be right that Rawls thinks that robustly inegalitarian states, especially those with deep divisions between an elite in control of the military and hoi polloi, are major sources of international conflict. But his discussion lacks the attention to detail needed to sort matters out clearly.

Leavitt devotes the remainder of Part I to showing, in separate chapters, the fundamental importance of elections, basic health care, public and inclusive primary education, and full employment policies. While mostly familiar material, there are a few valuable insights here. For example, with a hat tip to Sen, Leavitt draws attention to the ways in which securing primary education for girls is linked not only to other basic human rights but also to a more general ideal of sustainability, a steady state economy of both production and reproduction. He concludes Part I with a claim that “diminishing extreme inequality in the international system is a critical goal in Rawls’s analysis” (p. 79). This is no doubt true. But it is also somewhat uninformative and misleading. Rawls most certainly seeks a world free of extreme poverty and within which all persons enjoy basic human rights. But his views on permissible economic or material inequalities between states, all free of absolute poverty, is another matter. So, too, is his view about the extent of economic or material inequality within states meriting recognition and respect on the global stage as legitimate if not just polities. Leavitt explores none of this.

In Part II, the author argues that Rawls orients the foreign policy of liberal democracies around the UDHR. He rightly notes that the UDHR is an aspirational resolution, not a legally binding treaty, and that it commits signatories to the “progressive realization” of human rights through education and diplomacy, rather than hard or soft coercion. So understood, Rawls does indeed largely orient the foreign policies of liberal democracies around the UDHR, a point often overlooked by his critics. But as those critics emphasize, Rawls also claims that only Articles 3–18 of the UDHR (and perhaps their obvious implications) figure as “human rights proper,” conditions necessary to recognition and respect on the international stage as a legitimate state with a presumptive right to nonintervention. Leavitt provides no discussion on this point.

In chapters devoted to “reciprocity and assistance,” “political economy,” and “defense,” the author argues in favor of advancing UDHR goals through free and fair trade, internationally recognized constraints on domestic military spending, and an Arms Trade Treaty. Following Thomas Pogge, Leif Wenar, and others, he condemns trade (in the worst case, guns for natural resources) with kleptocratic military dictators. Following Sen, he argues that history shows that high military expenditures rarely improve security and that liberal democracies ought to aim at the elimination of nuclear weapons rather than mere nonproliferation. The discussion here is thoughtfully and effectively informed by history in a manner accessible to undergraduates and ordinary citizens. And it brings to the surface some of the most difficult questions: What stance should liberal democracies take toward nuclear weapons? Does not the same realism that seems to require their retention (as a deterrent against aggressive outlaw regimes) also count against their retention (why think any human or state immune to the temptations associated with possessing nukes)?

Overall, it is easy to recommend Leavitt’s book as a resource for those teaching The Law of Peoples in a lower-division undergraduate course on normative international relations or as a snapshot for ordinary citizens of an alternative to a realist stance in international relations. For research scholars, this book, easily and quickly read, repays with not only some valuable foreign policy insights but also an important reminder of the historical and political context and concerns that ought to frame and inform foreign policy research.