A Theory of Justice

"Yes, though we have to say what’s meant by ‘the most read’ because if it’s ‘the most read pages as a proportion of the whole’ it’s probably one of the least-read books in political philosophy. Rawls has this intriguing phrase in the preface, “This is a long book, not only in pages.” I still don’t entirely know what that means, but there’s something suggestive about it. It’s 500 or 600 pages of closely printed text. In those days, of course, there were no word processors and writers had less idea how long their works were. Apparently, when Rawls sent it off to the publisher, he imagined it would come to about 200 pages. He was appalled to see he had accidentally written a book that was three times as long as he intended. It’s a strange book. For a beginner in philosophy, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. Rawls is not a fantastically stylish writer in an ordinary sense although, in another sense, he is. He’s not a flashy writer, he doesn’t use examples, he doesn’t take you through things step-by-step. He’s a very dense writer. You can read a page and not think very much of it and then ten years later come back to it, having thought about the issue yourself, and see Rawls has completely understood the issue, set out all the possibilities, and shown why only one of them is right. Reading through the first time, without knowing the background, you can’t possibly know all of what is going on. I heard Hilary Putnam once say that you can tell a work of philosophical genius because “the smarter you get, the smarter it gets.” I think this is exactly what happens with Rawls. Yes. Another way of putting it is that Rawls wants you to think about how you would design society if you didn’t know what place you’d play in it. Imagine you didn’t know whether you were going to be a man or a woman, you didn’t know whether you were going to be disabled or able-bodied — Rawls didn’t use these examples but we can extend his method — if you didn’t know whether you were going to be white or black, strong or weak, have film star good looks or be ugly. If you didn’t know any of those things about yourself, how would you like society to be? At one point Rawls says, “Imagine your place in society is going to be determined by your enemy.” How would you like your society to be if your enemy was going to assign you your place in it? You’d think, “Well I wouldn’t want any really bad positions. I’d want to make sure the worst thing that can happen to me is as good as it could be.” That is Rawls’s big idea — that if you were to design society not knowing your place in it, you’d want to make sure the worst positions in society were as good as they could be, therefore — and it’s a big therefore which needs lots of intermediate steps — a just society is one that makes the worst off as well off as possible. This book was published in 1971. What’s was so important about it is that in the 1950s, political philosophy had pretty much been declared dead. There is a preface to a book that supposedly collected together the cream of work in political philosophy, and in it the editor Peter Laslett, who was an important historian, says that for the moment we can declare political philosophy dead. As a way of advertising the papers and the book that you’ve just edited, this is not a great sales pitch, but political philosophy was in crisis because of, first, the legacy of logical positivism, second, and the upset of World War II which demonstrated the limited impact liberal political philosophy had had on human behaviour, and third the rise of Marxism, which reduced political philosophy to mere ideology. Political philosophy lost its confidence and became very introspective. For a long time in the 1950s and part of the ‘60s — and we may be going through a similar period now — the main questions in political philosophy were “How do you do political philosophy? What is political philosophy? What is the subject doing?” Anthony Quinton even said that when we understand what political philosophy really is, we realise that most of Hobbes’s Leviathan is not political philosophy, it’s something else: sociology, or politics. It’s a very peculiar thing to say about one of the absolute, undisputed classics of political philosophy. You might think Quinton must have the wrong definition, if that’s the consequence. But in the ‘60s, political philosophy was inward-looking and rather snotty about the history of political philosophy. There are papers claiming that Locke didn’t understand the grammar of the term ‘sovereignty’, or that Hobbes was confused. You read these accusations but you’re never given the details or told what the right thing is; you’re just told all these other people got it wrong. Hardly anyone was advancing a substantial thesis or a positive methodology, and then Rawls came along. In one way, he was methodologically unselfconscious because he didn’t ask the question ‘How do you do political philosophy?’ In another way, he was incredibly methodologically self-conscious because he laid out the methodology of the original position; of ‘the veil of ignorance.’ It was very exciting because Rawls produced a methodology, and he argued for political principles: what he calls the liberty principle (roughly speaking we should all have equal and extensive basic liberty), the fair opportunity principle, and the so-called difference principle which says we should make the worst off as well off as possible. So there are immediately three types of discussion. One was: are these principles just? A second was: would these principles actually be chosen from the original position? And the third was: is the original position a good way of doing political philosophy? So Rawls drew in people who are interested in political principles, as well as people who are interested in decision theory, and finally people who are interested in the methodology of political philosophy. They all suddenly had something to talk about, and they were all talking about the same thing. Even though this book was written in 1971, Rawls created the world of contemporary political philosophy that we still live in now. So it has been said. I’ve tried to argue this myself and I’m not sure how completely convinced I am. If you go back to, say, how the civil service operated in the UK or elsewhere immediately after World War II, there was great interest in social justice. But I think that gave way to a much more technocratic approach, where policies were looked at from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis. This is essentially a utilitarian approach: what type of policy gives us the greatest net benefit for our limited resources? In the ‘60s and ‘70s, certain types of distributional questions were not being asked as a matter of routine — although, obviously, in politics, they were of great public interest. I think once Rawls was understood in the late ‘70s and in the ‘80s, he certainly affected the way in which civil servants — not necessarily governments themselves, but the people who are thinking about implementation of policy — thought. They began to pay special attention to how policies would affect the worst off. Many people on the fringes of government were thinking about Rawlsian themes. Whether, though, historians will be able to document this, I’m not sure. There’s a story I was told in the ‘80s, that the Social Democratic party were considering officially adopting Rawls’s theory as their political philosophy. This was voted down on the grounds that the electorate would not be able to understand it, which may be unfair on both sides and a shame because the Social Democrats could actually have made very good use of Rawlsian ideas. Also striking is that Stuart Hampshire, in 1971 when the book came out, said that the Rawlsian position was a perfect articulation of the ideals of the British Labour Party. There was this idea that Rawls had finally understood what social democracy was. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Rawls main innovation concerned inequality. It was common in the ‘40s and ‘50s for politicians on the Left to say that if inequalities exist then they have to benefit everyone. We can allow inequalities but only if everyone is made better off. Rawls modified that and said it’s not good enough that they make everyone better off, they’ve got to make the worst off as well off as possible. It’s amazing to think that after two and a half thousand years of political philosophy, Rawls was probably the first person ever to write that down or say it. Rawls is one of the most humble and modest philosophers you can think of and virtually every idea in the book he tries to attribute to an earlier thinker. But, as far as I can see, he couldn’t find anyone to pin that on. So we have a truly original movement there from Rawls. I don’t know enough of the sayings of Jesus Christ, but it’s true that Rawls took religion very seriously. I think the last published work of Rawls — long after he had died — was his senior thesis that he wrote as an undergraduate. It was on a religious theme and he got the highest possible mark for it. He was very influenced by religion as a young person, but I don’t think you would know that from reading his political philosophy. I don’t think it particularly comes through, or at least it didn’t come through to me when I was reading it."