In that context, his theory provided a kind of solace to liberals as that world was attacked. He became more optimistic about the future of liberalism.īy the time A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, the postwar liberal settlement that Rawls’s theory legitimated - but also hoped to reform - was under pressure.

Rawls was initially skeptical of government intervention and political control of the economy, but he gradually came to see that more state action would be necessary to secure distributive justice. Johnson’s Great Society, but his political vision had origins in earlier debates - about planning, welfare, Keynesian stabilization, and pluralism - and in his engagement with the right wing of the British Labour Party, and their redefinition of socialism as the search for equality and social justice. Rawls’s philosophy was often seen as a product of Lyndon B. The point of Rawls’s theory, in this sense, was to provide standards for judging institutions: where a society’s institutions fell short of those principles and failed to provide the basis for egalitarian social relations, they did not meet the standards of justice - and they should be reformed. Rawls said you would choose to set up social institutions in accordance with his two principles of justice - one of liberty and one of equality.

The basic idea was to imagine what kind of society you would want to set up, if you didn’t know where you would end up in it, or who you would be. The most famous argument that Rawls provided to support this vision was his idea of the “original position,” where people meet behind a “veil of ignorance” (which denies them all sorts of information about themselves - gender, class, race) to choose the principles that will regulate society. The society Rawls described was pretty close to the United States in terms of its organization - it was a liberal society with legislatures, courts, a constitution, and so on - but he wanted to limit inequality. His philosophical vision of a just society, which embodied the postwar liberal dream of a more perfect America, became the basis for a philosophy known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Rawls was best known for his work A Theory of Justice (1971), a book that transformed how political philosophy was done for a generation. In the mid-century, postwar United States, a particular form of liberalism became a dominant political ideology John Rawls was its greatest philosopher.

John rawls a theory of justice 1971