Name: A Theory of Justice
Rating: 4.3 (233 reviews)
Author: John Rawls

What’s in it for me? Meet one of political philosophy’s key thinkers.

What is fairness? What makes a just society? And how should resources and opportunities be distributed? Philosopher John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice attempts to answer these fundamental questions.

Published in 1971, it’s one of the most widely discussed works of twentieth-century political philosophy. It gives us a framework for analyzing and critiquing social structures, and helps us sharpen our views about what’s fair and unfair.

In this very short Blink, we’ll focus on the book’s most influential idea – that a truly just society must be founded on principles that unbiased individuals would collectively accept.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

A new social contract

How should we organize society? How can we reconcile diverse interests and help people live harmoniously?

For John Rawls, the answer to this question is related to the most fundamental building block of all our social institutions: justice. Society and its rules must, above all else, be fair. After all, people don’t get to choose which society they’re born in. And yet, despite the arbitrariness, we expect people to follow society’s rules – on pain of imprisonment.

This expectation is part of what’s known in philosophy as a social contract. A social contract isn’t a real historical contract. It’s a kind of foundational story that rationalizes how society works and specifies what individuals and society owe each other.

For example, seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously held that human life in our original “state of nature” – that is, without government – was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It stood to reason, then, that people would willingly give up some of their freedom to a sovereign authority if it meant they could ensure their own safety and lead decent lives. For Hobbes, this implicit bargain is what gives the state its legitimacy.

Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice centuries later, during the Cold War, and the book speaks to the times. It was an era in which democratic societies faced geopolitical conflict between capitalism and communism, social upheaval, and raging ideological debates.

So what social contract does Rawl propose? What are his specific criteria for justice? Let’s look at that next.

Justice is blind

Imagine you’re writing a tax code, and you want it to be fair. You conduct a poll, asking who should pay and how much, and let people pick from various schemes. You get the answers back – and it’s discouraging. Rich people say the poor should pay. The poor say the rich should pay. Landowners say that stockholders should pay, and stockholders say the landowners should pay. In short, everybody picks the scheme that’s in their own best interest. Back to the drawing board.

The phrase “justice is blind” conveys our basic intuition that a fair judgment is one that’s impartial and unbiased – one that puts aside personal interests and considers the bigger picture. Rawls draws on this. For him, the question is this: What principles would we use to organize a society if we didn’t know in advance what our place in it would be?

About the Author

John Rawls was an American philosopher renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to political philosophy and ethics – in particular, his attempt to reconcile individual rights with social justice. Based on principles of fairness and equality, his ideas continue to shape discussions on social contract theory and the construction of just societies.