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John RawlsJustice as Fairness: A Restatement
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
John Rawls
John Rawls was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century and the most significant contributor of that century to the philosophy of liberalism. Born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, Rawls initially considered a career in the Episcopalian priesthood, but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Experiencing the horrors of war, especially seeing the city of Hiroshima shortly after the US atomic bombing, convinced Rawls to become an atheist, and he shifted his focus from theology to philosophy. Following the war, he received his PhD from Princeton University and then taught at Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before arriving at Harvard, where he taught for nearly 40 years until his death in 2002.
Rawls’s career and life overlapped with a critical period in the history of liberalism. The classical liberalism of the Enlightenment sought to limit the powers of government and carve out the widest possible space for individuals to exercise their talents freely. With the Industrial Revolution, liberal governments lacked the power to regulate powerful businesses, leading to tremendous inequalities that belied the promise of liberty for all. Socialism then emerged as the great challenger to liberalism, proposing a much more expansive government to ensure basic levels of social equality. After the Second World War, half of Europe fell under the control of the Soviet Union, which was calling for socialist revolution in the other half. In response, liberal governments developed a more robust social safety net, both to hasten postwar recovery and inoculate citizens against more radical demands. However, a more expansive state prompted a new challenge in the form of conservatism, which held that an overly powerful government would ultimately succumb to tyranny. Rawls’s book A Theory of Justice came out at a major point in the conservative reaction, with President Richard Nixon soon to achieving reelection with 49 out of 50 states in the Electoral College. For the rest of his career, he would seek a reconciliation of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism within a more fundamental understanding of justice itself, so that partisans of all positions could nonetheless recognize one another as equal and free citizens.
John Stuart Mill
Rawls assumes that a liberal society is the preferred social model, and so he spends very little time discussing illiberal philosophers, except for responding to some of Karl Marx’s critiques of liberalism. Within the universe of liberal political philosophy, Rawls considers his main rival to be the 19th-century English philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, widely regarded as one of the great champions of utilitarianism. Mill’s father, the philosopher James Mill, subjected Mill to rigorous philosophical training from a young age, and Mill began his own philosophical writings while still a teenager. He spent most of his life as an employee of the East India Company, which at the time was responsible for managing British imperial interests in India. In his later years, he served as a member of the House of Commons for Westminster.
Among Mill’s many contributions to philosophy, one of his most significant is On Liberty (1859), which provides the clearest statement of his utilitarian principles. Mill makes a passionate argument for freedom of speech and conscience, holding that individual freedom should extend to the point that it harms another or interferes with the exercise of their rights. This is clearly an early statement of the “reasonable pluralism” that forms an important part of Rawls’s just society. The main difference between Rawls and Mill is that Mill is much more individualistic, and he focuses on a person’s happiness as the supreme good. While the individual needs society to be happy, the best that a society can achieve is creating as much good for as many individuals as possible. While Rawls similarly cares about individual rights, he focuses on justice rather than happiness and on what steps a society needs to take in order to advance the interest of society itself.
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By John Rawls
