Review of *In the Shadow of Justice*

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (TOJ) breathed new life into the field of political philosophy following its publication in 1971.  Once a revivifying force, Rawls’s theoretical framework has become a narrowing one, or so Katrina Forrester maintains in her In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2019; paperback, 2021).

Well before TOJ’s publication, Rawls was a star in academic circles, especially among those interested in applying the methods of analytic philosophy to the moral dimensions of political, economic, and related issues.  Although Rawls developed the main ideas of TOJ mostly in the 1950s, his book did not appear until the tail end of “the long 1960s.”  Greeted with acclaim in many quarters, it was roundly criticized in others.  Even its critics, though, acknowledged TOJ’s scope and ambition.  And it set the terms of debate for many Anglophone political philosophers for more than a generation.

Forrester’s sweeping narrative, an outgrowth of her Cambridge doctoral dissertation, has a roughly chronological shape, but it is driven less by chronology than by thematic concerns.  One theme is the relation of Rawls’s theory to its historical context, i.e., to the circumstances that helped produce it and make it so influential.  She emphasizes – indeed, overemphasizes – how much Rawls’s interest in uncovering consensus on basic principles reflected the intellectual environment of the postwar era.  Another theme is broader and runs through the whole book: the fraught relationship between political philosophy and politics, and how philosophers have alternately tried to understand, change, or escape from the problems and constraints, perceived or actual, of “the real world.”  Forrester criticizes a number of theorists for their inattention to means as opposed to ends, their slighting of the strategic and practical question of how to achieve the sort of social arrangements they favored.  She observes, for example, that Rawlsians “rarely joined their demanding egalitarian institutional vision to the kind of account of collective politics in a class-divided society that might have enabled it.” (p. 237)

All this would make for a complicated story even in the hands of a writer willing to minimize or gloss over some complexities in the service of advancing an overarching thesis.  Forrester is not that kind of writer.  Her book is more like a pointillist painting than a Mondrian abstraction, with the picture emerging from an enormous number of details rather than a few lines.  Abundantly documented and displaying an impressive grasp of the history of several fields, the book is packed with discussions and exegeses of numerous philosophers and political theorists, with some economists and sociologists getting attention as well.  Because In the Shadow of Justice covers such a wide terrain, a fairly short review must be selective.

Forrester begins, fittingly enough, with the story’s protagonist.  Born in 1921, John Rawls fought in the Pacific theater in World War II (after graduating from Princeton), and the liberalism of the period immediately after the war formed the context for the development of his ideas.  In Forrester’s description, American postwar liberalism tended to be wary of the centralized administrative state and economic planning, uncomfortable with appeals to group or class interests, and, notwithstanding the horrors of then-recent history, confident about what one theorist called the “rationality of the common man” (p. 5).  Optimism, faith in rationality, and conviction that spreading affluence was the wave of the future were the keynotes of this worldview, which sought technical confirmation in the relatively new fields of game theory and social choice theory.

In gradually working out his ideas, Rawls was attuned to diverse sources.  His early writings and lectures suggested, at least in Forrester’s reading, that he was on the “anti-statist” side of the liberal spectrum (pp. 14-15), but influenced by the Labour Party “revisionists,” to whose ideas he was exposed during a year at Oxford, Rawls “grafted their commitment to equality onto his early barebones liberalism,” thereby giving the notion of “a property-owning democracy” a “new ideological valence” (p. 29).

The view that Rawls eventually laid out in A Theory of Justice had a distinctly egalitarian character.  Not only did his approach in TOJ rule out inequalities except those that benefited the least advantaged; a just or nearly just society had to assure all its members, among other things, “a fair opportunity to take part in and to influence the political process” (TOJ, first ed., p. 224), which meant that the wealthy should not be able to use their resources “to control the course of public debate.” (TOJ, p. 225)  In Forrester’s words, Rawls’s principles of justice structured “the rules of a social game that, if set up correctly, would allow for fair equality of opportunity, the wide dispersal of capital, and a collective political life in which citizens participated as equals and politics could not be bought.” (In the Shadow of Justice, p. 39)

The main ideas of A Theory of Justice, including the famous thought experiment of the original position, were intentionally pitched at a high level of abstraction.  However, the upheavals of the 1960s led philosophers and political theorists, especially those working at several elite universities in the U.S. and Britain, to focus their attention on what philosophy could say more concretely about “public affairs.”  In these years, both the Vietnam draft and the civil rights protests raised the question of how much authority governments could legitimately exercise over their citizens, and also what sorts of laws could be justifiably disobeyed.  The responsibility of soldiers, officers, policymakers, and citizens for the Vietnam War and its conduct also was widely debated.

The resulting philosophical work on topics like war crimes and civil disobedience, which Forrester deals with in the second and third chapters, helped shape the intellectual climate surrounding TOJ’s reception.  Among the many theorists discussed in these chapters are Marshall Cohen (who, with Thomas Nagel and T.M. Scanlon, founded the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs), Ronald Dworkin, Hanna Pitkin, Michael Walzer, Joel Feinberg, Brian Barry, Richard Wasserstrom, Judith Shklar, and Elizabeth Anscombe.  Philosophers and political theorists were not talking only among themselves in this era, but also with scholars of international law such as Richard Falk, experts on international relations such as Hans Morgenthau, as well as politicians, activists, religious leaders, and others.  The felt urgency of the issues gave the debates more than a purely academic resonance.  But Forrester contends that “[j]ust at the moment when philosophers were becoming most engaged in politics, their theories took a depoliticizing turn,” focusing more on “powerful individual agents” faced with “dramatic” choices (p. 101) and less on the contexts within which they acted.

Forrester argues that Rawls’s views on civil disobedience reflected an “element of status quo bias” in his thought. (p. 69)  She notes that Rawls justified civil disobedience only in cases of protest against what he called “violations of the equal liberties that define the common status of citizenship” (quoted, p. 67), not in cases of protest against economic injustice.  Drawing on Brandon Terry’s work, Forrester writes that Rawls had “a particular ‘romantic’ understanding of the civil rights movement” (p. 66), seeing it as “a movement for incremental inclusion in a basic structure that was nearly just in its constitutional essentials.” (p. 67)

Nowhere, however, does Forrester quote Rawls as saying that the U.S. in 1966 or 1969 or 1971 was “nearly just” in its constitutional essentials or in other respects; indeed, she quotes him as saying in a 1973 talk that the U.S. in terms of its basic institutions was not just or “nearly just” (p. 126 and p. 322, note 127).  Rawls might have “remained fundamentally a liberal optimist” (p. 70) who believed that things were slowly moving in the right direction, but that kind of optimism is compatible with advocacy of radical reforms.  Rawls “refused the characterization of his theory as confirming the status quo” (p. 125), and on that point he was right: his theory did not confirm the status quo.  Nor did his theory apotheosize an airbrushed version of 1950s America, though a reader encountering Forrester’s reference to “[t]he consensual core of Rawls’s theory, born of his idealization of midcentury American civil society” (p. 225) might come away with the misimpression that it did.

After dealing with the impact of the Vietnam era on liberal political philosophy, Forrester turns to what happened in the 1970s and beyond.  Catalyzed by Robert Nozick’s case for a minimal-state libertarianism in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Rawls’s followers coalesced around a set of “basic tenets” (p. 129).  The first of these was an emphasis on the basic institutions of a society, “the basic structure” in Rawls’s terminology; the second, a commitment to, in Ronald Dworkin’s words, a “certain conception of equality” as “the nerve of liberalism” (p. 130 [quoting Dworkin]); and the third was a neglect of history and “historical argument” (p. 131).

The rest of the book shows how Rawls’s theory was extended into new areas and criticized in new ways.  As Forrester puts it, liberal egalitarianism was extended in space, resulting in discourses about global justice (chap. 5), and also in time, resulting in debates about intergenerational justice, overpopulation, ecological ethics, and generally “the problem of the future” (chap. 6).

Chapter 7 deals with a variety of issues raised by analytical Marxists and market socialists, among others.  Here leftist theorists tried to turn the conservative (or neoliberal) emphasis on markets and personal responsibility to their own purposes, with mixed results.  Finally, chapter 8, “The Limits of Philosophy,” addresses, among other things, the communitarian critiques of Rawls that became influential in the 1980s.

The book’s epilogue suggests that Forrester’s attitude to liberal egalitarianism is somewhat ambivalent, though the weight of the preceding chapters is largely critical, including a favorable reference to Rawls’s feminist critics (see p. 121).  Ultimately she argues that new times demand new theories and approaches.  Changes in “the nature of the state” and “of agency under capitalism,” and renewed concern with “gendered power and racial inequality” (p. 279), are only some of the developments that make the Rawlsian framework, in Forrester’s view, outdated in important respects — “a spectral presence,” as she writes in the preface, that has outlasted “the conditions it described” (p. xi).  Nonetheless, a theory that foregrounds fairness, reciprocity, social cooperation on a basis of equality, and the notion that “the self is realized in the activities of many selves” (TOJ, p. 565) – ideas that are just as important in Rawls as the concern about consensus – has not lost its relevance, especially not in view of the current set of global crises and problems.

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice demands a lot from its readers; in its own way, In the Shadow of Justice does too.  At points it could have benefited from a firmer editorial hand.  But it will give serious readers who are up for the challenge a provocative and often insightful view of Anglophone political philosophy’s development in the latter half of the twentieth century.