Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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bility. In this role, we view political philosophy as realistically utopian. Our

hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world

allows at least a decent political order, so that a reasonably just, though not

perfect, democratic regime is possible. So we ask: What would a just demo-

cratic society be like under reasonably favorable but still possible historical

conditions, conditions allowed by the laws and tendencies of the social

world? What ideals and principles would such a society try to realize given

the circumstances of justice in a democratic culture as we know them?

§3. Main Ideas of Liberalism: Its Origins and Content

1. Since a good part of these lectures will be concerned with concep-

tions of liberalism and four of its main historical ﬁgures and one of its

greatest critics, I should say something about how I understand it. There is

no settled meaning of liberalism; it has many forms and many features, and

writers characterize it in different ways.

Liberalism’s three main historical origins are the following: the Refor-

mation and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

ending with the, at ﬁrst, reluctant acceptance of the principle of toleration

and liberty of conscience; the gradual taming of royal power by the rising

middle classes and the establishment of constitutional regimes of limited

monarchy; and the winning of the working classes to democracy and ma-

jority rule.

These developments occurred in different countries in Europe

and North America at different times; yet thinking of England, it is roughly

true that liberty of conscience was well on its way to being won at the end

of the 17th century, constitutional government during the 18th, and de-

mocracy and majority rule with universal suffrage during the 19th. This

movement is not, of course, complete. Important aspects of it have not yet

been won even today, and some still seem a long way off. All existing alleg-

edly liberal democracies are highly imperfect and fall far short of what

democratic justice would seem to require.

For example, ﬁve reforms needed in the United States are indicated

here: campaign ﬁnance reform to overcome the present system of money

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Remarks on Political Philosophy

9. This is a philosopher’s schematic version of speculative history, and to be recog-

nized as such.

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buying access to power; fair equality of educational opportunity; some

form of assured health care for all; some form of guaranteed and socially

useful work; and equal justice for and equality of women. These reforms

would greatly mitigate if not remove the worst aspects of discrimination

and racism. Others will have their list of essential reforms whose impor-

tance is also undeniable.

2. Expressed in broad terms, the content of a liberal political concep-

tion of justice has three main elements: a list of equal basic rights and liber-

ties, a priority for these freedoms, and an assurance that all members of so-

ciety have adequate all-purpose means to make use of these rights and

liberties. Note that the liberties are given by a list. Later we try to make

these elements more deﬁnite.

To give the general idea: the equal basic liberties include the equal po-

litical liberties—the right to vote and to run for public ofﬁce, and the right

of free political speech of all kinds. They include also the civic liberties—

the right of free non-political speech, the right of free association and, of

course, liberty of conscience. Add to these freedoms equality of opportu-

nity, freedom of movement, the right to one’s own mind and body (integ-

rity of the person), the right of personal property, and ﬁnally, the liberties

covered by the rule of law and a right to a fair trial.

This list of the basic liberties is, of course, familiar. The difﬁcult part

lies in specifying them more exactly and in ordering them in relation to one

another when they conﬂict. At the moment the essential thing is to stress

the great signiﬁcance that liberalism attaches to a certain list of liberties,

rather than to liberty as such. With this in mind, the second element of the

content of liberalism is that the liberties are assigned a certain priority, that

is, a certain force and weight. This means, in effect, that they cannot nor-

mally be sacriﬁced in order to gain greater social welfare, or for the sake of

perfectionist values; and this restriction is, practically speaking, absolute.

The third element of liberalism’s content is that, as indicated above, its

principles assign to all members of society claims to adequate all-purpose

material means to make use of their freedoms, as detailed and given prior-

ity by the preceding elements. These all-purpose means fall under what I

shall call primary goods. They include, in addition to the basic liberties

and equal opportunities: income and wealth, and as appropriate, claims to

goods in kind, for example, to education and health care.

By saying that the content of liberal views has these three elements I

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mean that the content of any familiar liberal view would more or less ﬁt

this broad description. What distinguishes different liberalisms is how they

specify these elements and the general arguments used to do this. There are

views, often described as liberal, for example, libertarian views, that don’t

exemplify the third element of assuring to citizens adequate all-purpose

means to make use of their freedoms. But the fact that it does not is,

among other things, what makes a view libertarian and not liberal. Liber-

tarianism doesn’t ﬁt the third element. Of course, this is not an argument

against it, but simply a comment about its content.

§4. A Central Thesis of Liberalism

1. There are, no doubt, several candidates for the central thesis of liber-

alism—the securing of the basic liberties is certainly one of them—and

writers will differ on this. One central element is certainly the following:

A legitimate regime is such that its political and social institutions are

justiﬁable to all citizens—to each and every one—by addressing their rea-

son, theoretical and practical. Again: a justiﬁcation of the institutions of the

social world must be, in principle, available to everyone, and so justiﬁable

to all who live under them. The legitimacy of a liberal regime depends on

such a justiﬁcation.

While political liberalism (of which justice as fairness

is an example)

does not reject or question the importance of religion and tradition, it in-

sists that political requirements and obligations imposed by law must an-

swer to citizens’ reason and judgment.

This requirement of a justiﬁcation to each citizen’s reason connects

with the tradition of the social contract and the idea that a legitimate politi-

cal order rests on unanimous consent. The aim of a contractual justiﬁcation

is to show that each member of society has a sufﬁcient reason to agree to

that order, to acknowledge it, on the condition that other citizens acknowl-

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Remarks on Political Philosophy

10. For a discussion of this matter, see Jeremy Waldron’s instructive essay, “The Theo-

retical Foundations of Liberalism,” Philosophical Quarterly, April 1987, pp. 128, 135, 146,

149.

11. Justice as fairness is the name I have given to the political conception of justice de-

veloped in A Theory of Justice and in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

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edge it as well. This yields unanimous consent. The reasons invoked must

be reasons from the point of view of each reasonable and rational person.

“Men being, as has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and indepen-

dent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political

Power of another, without his own Consent. The only way whereby any one

divests himself of his Natural Liberty and puts on the bonds of Civil Society is

by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a Community, for their

comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure

Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are

not of it.” Locke: Second Treatise on Government, ¶95.

In this passage from Locke it seems that consent is something citizens

actually do at some point; or at any rate this interpretation is not excluded.

In Kant we get a different idea. He says that we cannot assume the original

contract arises from an actual coalition of all private individuals existing, for

this cannot possibly be so.

[The original contract] is in fact merely an idea of reason, which none

the less has undoubted practical reality; for it can oblige the legislator

to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by

the united will of the whole nation. ...Thisisthetest of rightfulness

of every public law. For if the law is such that a whole people could

not possibly agree to it (for example, if it stated that a certain class of

subjects must be the privileged ruling class), it is unjust; but if it is at

least possible that a people could agree to it, it is our duty to consider

the law as just, even if the people is at present in such a position or at-

titude of mind that it would probably refuse to consent to it were it

consulted. Kant, Theory and Practice (1793): Ak:VIII:297 (Reiss, 79).

2. Now I note some distinctions that enable us to understand the mean-

ing of different social contract views and to separate them from one an-

other.

First, the distinction between actual and non-historical agreements: The

former is found, it seems, in Locke (we shall discuss whether this is so when

we come to Locke). The latter is found in Kant, who has in mind an agree-

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12. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss and H. B. Nesbit (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press), p. 79.

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ment that could arise only from a coalition of all wills; but since historical

conditions never allow for this, the original contract is non-historical.

Second, the distinction as to how the content is determined: whether

by the terms of an actual contract, or by analysis (that is, by ﬁguring out from

the situation of those making the contract what they could, or would agree

to), or by some combination of the two ways. In part, Kant calls the origi-

nal contract an idea of reason because it is only by reason—both theoretical

and practical—that we can ﬁgure out what it is possible for people to agree

to. In this case the contract is hypothetical.

A third distinction is whether the content of the social contract con-

cerns what people could do—or could not possibly do—or what they would

do. These are very different: often it is much harder to work out the content

of a hypothetical contract saying what people would do rather than what

they could do, or could not possibly do. Thus, when Locke is attacking

Charles II, he is mainly interested in showing that in setting up a form of

government, the people could not possibly have agreed to royal absolutism.

So the King’s behaving as a sovereign with such powers makes his con-

duct illegitimate. Locke need not show what the people would have agreed

to, other than inferring what they would not do from what they could not

possibly do. (Here he relies on: if we could not possibly do X, we would not

do X.)

A fourth distinction is whether the content of the social contract is seen

as specifying when a form of government is legitimate, or whether that con-

tent is seen as determining the (political) obligations that citizens have to

their government. The idea of the social contract can serve two distinct

purposes: either as yielding a conception of political legitimacy, or as giving

an account of citizens’ political obligations. Of course, a social contract doc-

trine may do both; but the distinction between the two is signiﬁcant: for

one thing, the idea of the social contract works differently in the two cases,

and can be quite satisfactory in one case but not the other.

I think Hume’s

critique of the social contract view is effective for Locke’s account of politi-

cal obligation,

but it doesn’t touch Locke’s account of legitimacy, or so I

believe.

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Remarks on Political Philosophy

13. Thus: could not do X implies would not do X; but, could do X does not imply

would do X.

14. On this point, see Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” pp. 136–140.

15. See Hume’s Of the Original Contract (1752).

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There are other distinctions and aspects of a social contract. For exam-

ple, who are the parties to the contract? Is it all citizens with each other, or

is it all citizens with the sovereign? Or are there two or more contracts: ﬁrst

citizens with each other and then citizens with the sovereign? In Hobbes

and Locke, the parties are all citizens contracting with each other; the sov-

ereign is not a party at all. There is no second contract. But this and further

distinctions can be considered as we proceed.

§5. Initial Situations

1. Every social contract doctrine needs an account of the situation in

which the social contract, whether historical or non-historical, is to be

made. Let’s refer to this situation as the initial situation. To develop a con-

tract doctrine at all clearly, numerous aspects of this situation have to be ex-

pressly ﬁlled in. Otherwise, they are left to be inferred from the nature of

what is agreed to, or from what must be presupposed if the reasoning is to

be sound, and this risks misunderstanding.

We have many items to specify: for example, What is the nature of the

parties involved in the initial situation, and what are their intellectual and

moral powers? What are the parties’ aims and wants? What are their gen-

eral beliefs, and how much do they know about their particular circum-

stances? What alternatives do they face; or what are the several contracts

they may enter into? Answers to these questions and to many others must

in some way be provided. And in each case there are various possibilities.

2. Consider ﬁrst the nature of the parties. Are they persons in a state of

nature, as with Locke? Are they all the members of society, as with Kant?

Are they neither of these but the representatives of the individual citizens

of society, as supposed in justice as fairness?

What is the original contract an agreement about? Is it agreement as to

what is a legitimate form of government, as with Locke? Or is it, as with

Kant, an understanding as to what all members of society collectively could

possibly will, with this understanding to be used by the legislator as a test

of just law? (In Kant this test is to be followed by the sovereign in enacting

laws.) Or is it perhaps, as with Rousseau, an agreement about the content

of what he calls the general will, that is, what it is that the general will

wills?

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Or is it, as justice as fairness says, an agreement about the content of a

political conception of justice—the principles and ideals of justice and the

common good—to be applied to the basic structure of society as one uni-

ﬁed system of social cooperation? And beyond this, as justice as fairness

also says, an understanding about the restrictions of public reasoning con-

cerning fundamental political questions and the duty of civility? Any social

contract doctrine has to decide on these questions and adopt an approach

to them that ties them into a consistent unity.

3. Next consider the question of how much the parties know. One

might think that the most reasonable answer is to suppose the parties know

all that is known to them in ordinary life. We may think: surely it leads to a

worse agreement for everyone when people are deprived of information!

How can a lack of knowledge lead to an agreement that is more reasonable

and better for all?

Now, it is usually correct that in applying a conception of justice al-

ready accepted and on hand, we normally want all the information avail-

able. Otherwise we cannot apply its principles and standards properly.

But

agreeing to, or adopting a conception of justice in the ﬁrst place is another

matter. Here we want to achieve consensus, and full knowledge often

stands in the way of doing this. The explanation is that the kind of knowl-

edge that people often have may lead to endless wrangling and enable some

to drive hard bargains, setting the stage for the nastiest individuals getting

more than their share.

It is easy to see how this happens by looking at cases where people have

too much information. In Elster’s example of the tennis game, rain inter-

venes after the third set with the ﬁrst player ahead 2 sets to 1. How are they

to divide the prize, as the match must now end? The ﬁrst player claims the

whole prize; the second player says it should be divided equally, claiming to

be in excellent shape and always reserving energy and coming on strong in

the fourth and ﬁfth sets; the spectators say it should be divided in thirds

with the ﬁrst player getting 2/3 and the second 1/3. Plainly the matter

should have been settled before the game started, when no one knew the

particulars of current circumstances.

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Remarks on Political Philosophy

16. An exception is in a criminal trial where rules of evidence may exclude some kinds

of available information, as when spouses may not testify against each other. This is to

help ensure a fair trial.

17. See Jon Elster, Local Justice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), pp. 205f.

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Even then, though, it might not have been easy, since the second player

will strongly prefer dividing the prize equally, given the facts above men-

tioned, and especially should the ﬁrst player be older and tend to tire more

quickly, and both know this. Also, if the prize is very large, and one player

is wealthy and the other poor, knowledge of this will make for additional

difﬁculties. Thus, the players need to imagine a situation in which no one

knows their capacities, their physical condition, or their wealth, and many

other things, and settle the rules apart from the particular circumstances,

and for players generally. In this way they are led to something approaching

the veil of ignorance of justice as fairness.

4. I shall note two cases of genuine political importance to illustrate the

same points. Consider the case of gerrymandering election districts. Gerry-

mandering means the drawing up of state, county, or local voting districts

in such a way as to gain partisan advantage. The term originated in 1812

when the Jeffersonian followers of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachu-

setts (an Anti-federalist) sought to keep their political control of the state.

To do this they redrew election districts to include Anti-federalist enclaves.

This resulted in a grotesque shape, suggesting a salamander to one cartoon-

ist of the day—hence, “Gerrymander.”

Here is a clear case where strict rules about electoral districts are best

adopted in advance. It also illustrates the crucial distinction between what

knowledge is appropriate in adopting rules and what knowledge is appro-

priate in applying them. Different and less information is needed in one

case than the other.

The same point explains why it is so difﬁcult to pass laws reforming

elections and establishing public ﬁnancing. In this instance it is obvious that

the party that can raise the most money will have less desire for reforms of

this kind, and if it is in power, can block reform efforts. If both parties in a

two-party system are corrupt and can raise large funds, such efforts at re-

form may be practically impossible without a major political change via,

say, a third party.

I note also Daniels’s treatment of medical care and Dworkin’s insur-

ance scheme.

Here the general idea is that people should decide how

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18. See Norman Daniels, Am I My Parent’s Keeper? (New York: Oxford University Press,

1988), with summaries on pp. 63–67 and 81f; and Ronald Dworkin, “Will Clinton’s Plan Be

Fair?” New York Review of Books, January 13, 1994 [republished as “Justice and the High Cost

of Health Care,” Ch. 8 in Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2000)].

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much health care society should provide in a situation in which no one

knows their age, but only that they will live through different phases of

life—from youth to old age—during which their need for health care will

vary. They must balance their needs at one time against their needs at an-

other, as well as society’s needs for other things. I follow a similar approach

in discussing the ﬂexibility of primary goods.

5. All these examples suggest the need for something like the so-called

veil of ignorance. Yet there are many veils of ignorance, some thicker than

others (excluding more information) and some excluding different kinds of

information. Note Elster’s meritocratic veil of ignorance, which allows in-

formation about citizens’ natural abilities and skills, and Dworkin’s restric-

tions, which still allow citizens to know their ambitions and aspirations. I

only mention these views, but they may be expected to lead to different

conclusions.

I should mention also that much the same effect as that of a veil of ig-

norance may result from a combination of other elements. Thus, rather

than exclude information, we can allow people to know whatever they now

know and yet make the contract binding in perpetuity and suppose the par-

ties to care about their descendants, indeﬁnitely into the distant future.

protecting their descendants as well as themselves, they face a situation of

great uncertainty. Thus, roughly the same arguments, somewhat modiﬁed,

pertain as with a thick veil of ignorance.

Finally, I call attention to the idea of discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas

and a related idea of Bruce Ackerman.

The thought here is that with cer-

tain rules of discourse restricting the participants in an ideal speech situa-

tion, only norms with a suitable moral content can be generally endorsed

by everyone. A valid norm is one that can be established, or redeemed, as

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Remarks on Political Philosophy

19. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 2001), pp. 168–176.

20. See Elster, Local Justice, pp. 206f.

21. This was actually the form the limits on information took in my ﬁrst articles stat-

ing justice as fairness. See “Justice as Fairness” in Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Free-

man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 47–72.

22. See Jürgen Habermas, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkampf, 1983), esp. 3, entitled “Diskursethik—Notizen zu einem

Begründungsprogramm. Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik” (Suhrkamp, 1991), and esp. 6:

119–222. See also Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1980); “What Is Neutral about Neutrality?” Ethics, January 1983; “Why Dia

logue?” Journal of Philosophy, January 1989.

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Habermas says, in such an ideal discourse situation. There is no veil of ig-

norance, or other restrictions beyond the rules of ideal discourse. It is these

rules that serve to ﬁlter out all norms that cannot be generally accepted

and, in this sense, do not further generalizable interests.

The reason for mentioning these various views is to indicate how wide-

spread is the idea of an initial situation. Indeed, it is not a strange idea, a

philosopher’s fancy, but a rather common and I think highly intuitive idea.

It is clearly foreshadowed, I believe, in Rousseau and Kant, and no doubt in

other classical writers as well.

The initial situation of justice as fairness I refer to as “the original posi-

tion.” It is characterized so that the agreement reached there by the parties,

who are viewed as representatives of citizens, expresses the content—the

principles and ideals—of the political conception of justice that speciﬁes

the fair terms of social cooperation.

As a concluding remark, I stress that the original position, as I have of-

ten said, is a device of representation. Were we to look through the history

of the tradition of the social contract we would ﬁnd many different things

the initial situation has been used to represent, even if the idea of a device

of representation is not made clear, or possibly even understood by the au-

thor. It has been so used whether so understood or not.

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