According to a possibly apocryphal story, one crusty political theorist wondered to another whom they should hire next, having lived through two successive trends in their field. One wave had brought the history of political thought from the Greeks through World War II to a new level. The other had made an academic industry of John Rawls, the great American philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) did more than any other book to define the terms of political thought in our time. “It’s obvious what comes next,” his friend replied. “The history of Rawls!”
And, in fact, two young Harvard political theorists have come out simultaneously with two of the best treatments imaginable of the context and meaning of Rawls’s epoch-making book. But the two could not be more different. In the Shadow of Justice, the exciting new leftish history by Katrina Forrester, suggests that, for all his abstraction, Rawls was offering a metaphysical gloss on the program of the right wing of the British Labour party of the 1950s, when it was seeking an increasingly market-friendly vision of socialism, one that would eventually devolve into neoliberalism. For her right-leaning colleague Eric Nelson, by contrast, Rawls is a failed early-modern theologian, whose legacy is to leave liberals without a good reason to believe that justice requires even modest redistribution.
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