riting in 1962, Sir Isaiah Berlin said that "no commanding work of political theory has appeared in the twentieth century." Within ten years of penning those words, as he himself would have been the first to admit, a commanding work of political theory did appear: John Rawls's book, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971.

 erhaps the reason why no similar work had appeared before Rawls is that for much of the early part of the century the heritage of nineteenth century utilitarianism weighed heavily on political theorists. The utilitarian doctrine had taken shape in the work of English masters like Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and John Stuart Mill. It gained enormous theoretical influence through being taken up—if also transformed—in the thinking of economists about how to track and measure progress and welfare. Those economists gave utilitarianism a practical impact, persuading governments to adopt essentially utilitarian criteria of where public policy should be moving. Cost-benefit analysis and related measures were born directly of a utilitarian background.

 he key idea in utilitarianism was that people should be thought of as consumers in relation to government policy and that the aim of such policy should be to maximize overall consumer satisfaction. This should be the aim, indeed, even if it meant that some did rather better than others.

 

 

Thus a widely endorsed criterion of welfare put forward by two prominent English economists, John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor, argued that any increase in the welfare of some people should be thought of as a gain for all, provided that any individuals who were disadvantaged by the shift could in principle be given adequate compensation by those who gained. The Kaldor-Hicks criterion (advanced in the 1940s) did not require those who gained from a change actually to compensate those who lost out; the idea was that so long as they could in principle offer such compensation, and still benefit from the change, the society as a whole was better off.

 tilitarianism had certainly been exposed to philosophical criticism in the early and middle part of the twentieth century but you can't beat something with nothing and it wasn't until the appearance of Rawls's book that there was a real alternative on offer. Rawls went back to the core assumption in utilitarianism, that it is appropriate to regard people as the consumers of public policy, with the aim of the state being the maximization of net consumer satisfaction. He took issue with the assumption, arguing in a phrase which went into wide circulation, that utilitarianism did not take seriously "the separateness of persons."

It might be fine to think that since someone is the same person throughout their life, the gains they have at a later time can compensate for sacrifices in their early life. But it was not fine, he urged, to suggest that the benefits accruing to one group of people might compensate for losses that others had to bear. And so it was not fine to think after the pattern of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, for example, that one group's gain might make up for another group's loss.

 n stressing the separateness of persons, and using this to criticize utilitarian thought, Rawls would have found support among libertarians who stressed the self-ownership that individuals enjoyed, expressing this in the claim that individuals have fundamental, natural rights and that others are obliged to respect those rights. Rawls made common cause with such libertarians in emphasizing the fact that individuals have a fundamental interest in determining the shape of their own lives and that they have this equally. He argues in his book that whatever happens in social life, and in particular whatever happens under the auspices of the state, it should never involve treating people as less than equal, in particular less than equally free. Those who were made worse off by a utilitarian scheme would have to see their treatment as inequitable and disrespectful, he suggests, and this is enough in itself to show that such schemes cannot be justified—at least not on the grounds of how well off they make the society as a whole. Those whom the scheme disadvantages have grounds for making a reasonable complaint against it: a complaint that anyone who sees them as equal persons will have to acknowledge as well-grounded.

 ut Rawls's agreement with libertarians stopped at this point of emphasizing the standing of separate persons, and consequently his book roused Robert Nozick—a colleague in Harvard and another Princeton Ph.D.—to publish a libertarian rejoinder, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; this appeared in 1974, three years after Rawls's book. Starting with the separateness and the self-ownership of persons, libertarians like Nozick argued that, on the face of it, every coercive intrusion of the state in people's lives represented a violation of their rights. Nozick went on to make an ingenious case for why the minimal, nightwatchman state might be tolerable—this would provide for basic defense and protection—but he insisted that there was nothing to be said in favor of a state with a more intrusive, redistributive brief. Rawls, however, disagreed.

 he divergence between Rawls and libertarians stems from the fact that apart from stressing the separateness of persons, Rawls makes a second assumption bearing on the nature of society. This is the assumption that the rules people recognize and generally respect in relating to one another should serve to establish "a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it." Society, or at least "the well-ordered society," should be understood as a "cooperative venture for mutual benefit." This assumption casts society as an active association of people with a common goal and common resources of action. It is not a juxtaposition of people with nothing in common between them, nor a juxtaposition of people connected only in small-scale patterns of interaction and cooperation. It is an association in which members recognize or should recognize a common goal—the cooperative advancement of their individual interests—and in which they can take jointly organized steps to promote that goal.

 awls's political theory is shaped, in my view, by the project of bringing together the two guiding assumptions we have isolated: first, the assumption that people are separate, equally free centers of agency; and, second, the assumption that society involves people relating to one another with a view—at least, ideally—to advancing their individual good. The question that the assumptions combine to raise is this. How should people organize the "basic structure" of their society, if that structure is indeed to advance their good? How should they do so, in particular, given the free and equal standing that they should be enabled to enjoy in relation to one another?

 awls's answer to that question comes at three distinct levels of specification. At a first level, he argues that the principles defining the basic structure of a society—the principles for ordering the society— should satisfy certain constraints that he describes as constraints of right. They should be general in form, not mentioning particular individuals or groups; they should be universal in scope, applying equally to all; and, perhaps the most important stipulation, they should be publicly recognized as the final court of appeal for resolving people's conflicting claims. If the principles breached constraints of this kind, he holds, then they would not define a basic structure in which people related as free and equal persons. Some individuals would be treated differently from others if the principles were not general and universal. And individuals would not enjoy respect under the operation of the basic structure, if the principles determining that structure were not established in public consciousness but were imposed under private, perhaps inscrutable dictate.

 ut the principles for ordering or organizing society might satisfy the constraints of right and still fail to reflect people's standing as equally free persons. They might fail, Rawls thinks, to deal fairly with each person; for example, they might be principles under which those who turned out to be intelligent or strong or just lucky in their circumstances of life enjoyed intuitively unfair advantages over those who were less fortunate. Thus he goes to a second level in characterizing the principles required. He postulates that apart from satisfying the constraints of right, they should be principles that are selected as appropriate on a basis that is "independent from chance and contingency"; in particular, independent from the fact that they represent an appealing gamble for individuals of this or that level of ability, or in this or that social position.

 ow to identify the principles that would satisfy this rather abstractly described, independence condition? Rawls suggests an answer: by asking which principles people would choose for the organization of society were none of them to know what his or her own talents and prospects were. He describes an imaginary, "original position" of social choice in which people are rational and relatively self-interested. And then he invites us to consider the principles that those individuals would choose for the ordering of society, if they had to operate under "a veil of ignorance." This veil of ignorance would allow them knowledge of general psychological and social facts but would eliminate bias and partiality by denying them knowledge of their individual capacities, connections, and the like. It would force them to be sensitive to how people fare in every sector of the society, for they would not be able to tell which sector they themselves belonged to.

 he original position device attracted more attention than the more abstract aspects of Rawls's work but I think it is important to realize that he saw it only as a vivid way of giving expression to the requirements of the independence condition. This, to repeat, was the idea that the principles shaping a well-ordered society ought not to be hostage to the diverse things that people happen to desire in a particular place or time. They ought to be principles that reflect only their shared nature as free and equal persons. In emphasizing this condition, Rawls was making contact quite consciously with Kant. The idea was that the imperative force of the principles ought not to be conditional on the things that people happen to desire; it ought not to derive from how the principles would serve this or that contingent set of desires. Their imperative or commanding force ought to be derivable, in a categorical rather than a hypothetical manner, from people's nature as free and equal persons.

 ccording to Rawls's first level of specification, then, the principles shaping a well-ordered society ought to satisfy the constraints of right in being general, universal, and public. According to the second, they ought to be principles reflecting people's nature as free and equal persons, uninfluenced by contingencies of individual desire and position. But what detailed shape are they to take? Rawls provides the answer when he goes to the third and last level of specification.

 he principles, he says, should do two things. First, they should establish a system of liberties—as extensive as possible—in which each individual is guaranteed an equal share. And second, assuming that such a system is in place, they should organize things so that there is a presumption in favor of social and economic equality. Inequalities should be allowed only when they make for an absolute benefit for those who are least well off in the unequal structure, and only when they arise under conditions of equal opportunity.

 he Rawlsian vision of a well-ordered society turns out, then, to be very different from both the utilitarian and libertarian alternatives sketched earlier. Unlike the utilitarian, it represents society as operating according to public principles that emphasize the equal claims of all citizens. Unlike the libertarian, it represents the society as organizing itself actively—via the state—so that inequalities in the enjoyment of freedom are ruled out, and social and economic inequalities are tolerated only under the strictest conditions.

 hatever one thinks of this image of the well-ordered society, there is no doubting its originality, its ingenuity, and even its beauty. Rawls amended the picture in various more or less incidental ways in the course of his later work, arguing for example that it need not be seen as a picture that is valid for all peoples in all places, only as a picture that expresses the spirit of contemporary liberal society. He never gave it up in its essentials, however, and it will remain forever associated with his name. Not many governments today come close to satisfying the Rawlsian ideal; and not many are likely to do so in the forseeable future. But for many generations to come the ideal will remain a beacon that calls to the political imagination. And—who knows?—it may yet summon into existence the sort of polity in which Rawls would have rejoiced.

 

 

Philip Pettit teaches philosophy and political theory in Princeton University, where he is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics. He is the author of a number of books, including Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford University Press, 1997). He co-authored a short book on Rawls with Chandran Kukathas, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics (Polity Press and Stanford University Press 1991); this is soon to be reissued in a second edition.