Book Review: Review Essay: Rawls’s Untimely Meditations, or On the Use and Abuse of Rawlsianism for Life In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, by Katrina Forrester

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211052601
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(2) 436 –452

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Review Essay: Rawls’s Untimely Meditations, or On the Use and Abuse

of Rawlsianism for Life

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, by

Katrina Forrester, Princeton University Press, 2019, 432 pp.

Reviewed by: Benjamin McKean, Department of Political Science, Ohio State

University, Columbus, OH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211052601

What on earth is there left to say about John Rawls? Now fifty years after the

publication of A Theory of Justice and approaching the twentieth anniversary

of his death, one could be forgiven for thinking political theorists and phi-

losophers might have exhausted the topic. Instead, the opening of Rawls’s

archives has provided the opportunity for a new phase of reflections on

Rawls’s life and thought. Not only do we now have thoughtful works that

historicize Rawls, but insightful research has already begun on the history of

historicizing Rawls.1

At the forefront of this new phase of Rawls studies is Katrina Forrester’s

impressive In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking

of Political Philosophy, which details the genesis and reception of A Theory

of Justice as well as the intellectual and political context of its publication and

impact. Forrester’s well-received book deservedly made a splash upon its

publication in 2019, prompting another round of reckoning about the political

legacy of Rawls and his egalitarian liberalism. This tradition of political

thought tries to combine individual freedom and equality into a coherent con-

ception of social justice that applies first and foremost to the institutions con-

stituting the basic structure of society; Rawls aimed to elicit support for this

view by using thought experiments like the original position to sharpen intu-

itions about equality we’re already assumed to have.

1052601PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211052601Political TheoryBook Reviews

book-review2021

1. Sophie Smith, “Historicizing Rawls,” Modern Intellectual History. FirstView,

March 9, 2021: 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924432000044X

Book Reviews 437

Forrester takes as a starting point that “[t]he period of flux that followed

the crisis of 2008” made questions about the political efficacy of Rawlsianism

inescapable (277); the financial crisis made vivid the failure to limit the

growth of massive inequality whereas the election of Donald Trump seemed

to eviscerate Rawls’s conviction that his egalitarian liberalism represented a

widely (if implicitly) accepted American consensus. Of course, critics have

questioned egalitarian liberalism since its inception; as Forrester notes, the

identity of political theory as a subfield of political science—indeed, the

founding identity of this journal itself—has been shaped partly by defining

itself negatively “against Rawlsian political philosophy” (241). It might then

seem obvious that a book that traces influences on Rawls so carefully as to

note the specific sentences he read and underlined “with three different pens”

would have little to offer to the many theorists who understand themselves as

anti- or simply non-Rawlsians (13). Yet Forrester’s clear-eyed view of the

limits of Rawlsianism doesn’t keep her from asserting that there is still some-

thing to gain from this tradition because “at moments liberal egalitarianism

has provided the grounds for a radical indictment of injustices and inequali-

ties, and . . . always had the potential to do so” (276). In the service of real-

izing this potential, her book seeks to establish Rawls’s theory as “a par t of

our usable past” (279) and unshackle its condemnation of inequality from

the history of “moderate, reformist” uses to which it has been put (135).

Committed Rawlsians might bridle at relegating his theory to the past,

whereas skeptics might ask: Whose past? And usable for what?

In giving readers material with which to answer these questions,

Forrester’s book does not focus narrowly on Rawls himself but considers the

broader community of practitioners of liberal political philosophy, largely in

elite universities. Forrester charts how these egalitarian liberals extended

Rawlsianism to consider not just freedom and equality domestically but a

host of political issues, including international inequality, environmental

issues, and war crimes. As Forrester shows, Rawls didn’t invent Rawlsianism;

it was the product of a collective effort—one in which Rawls’s particular

views sometimes came to play second fiddle to the idea of “Rawls,” the

symbol and synecdoche for egalitarian liberalism. Rawls’s own ideas were

often stranger than his reputation as the twentieth century’s standard bearer

for liberalism would suggest; Forrester describes Theory as “something of

an encyclopedia of postwar Anglophone thought” (105), but it might also be

described as a highly idiosyncratic pastiche. Part of Forrester’s strategy to

“denaturalize and defamiliarize . . . the broader architecture of contemporary

liberal philosophy” is to mine the archives to reveal these surprising and

unexpected influences on Rawls that cut against the self-understanding of

contemporary liberalism (275).