John Rawls: an interpretation

Abstract

This article raises some structural and theoretical problems in comprehensively reading Rawls. The first part divides Rawls’s oeuvre into two periods: the period marked by his most significant work A Theory of Justice (1971), and the period represented by Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999). The article examines ideas from all three books. The author first tries to show the continuity of Rawls’s liberalism, the best example being the development of the idea of the priority of right over the idea of the good, and the development of the ideal of equality. The second aim is to explain the idea of public reason, introduced in Rawls’s second period, and related objections, while examining three basic forms of justification in Political Liberalism.