Review on “Political Liberalism” by John
Rawls
(Assignment for Ph. D)
Prepared by:
Presented to:
Shahzad Ahmad
Dr.M.Hammad Lakhvi
Roll #Ph.D 8-15
Professor
Institute of Islamic Studies
Punjab University Lahore
Session: 2015-2020
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland to William Lee Rawls,
"one of the most prominent attorneys in Baltimore" and Anna Abell Stump
Rawls. Rawls attended school in Baltimore for a short time before,
transferring to Kent School an Episcopalian preparatory
school in Connecticut. Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls attended Princeton
University where he graduated summa cum laude and was accepted
into The Ivy Club and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.i
After earning his PhD from Princeton in 1950, Rawls taught there until
1952 when he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ
Church), where he was influenced by the liberal political theorist and
historian Isaiah Berlin and the legal theorist H. L. A. Hart. After returning to
the United States he served first as an assistant and then associate
professor at Cornell University. In 1962 he became a full professor of
philosophy at Cornell, and soon achieved a tenured position at MIT. Rawls
seldom gave interviews and, having both a stutter and a "bat-like horror of
the limelight" did not become a public intellectual despite his fame. He
instead remained committed mainly to his academic and family life. In 1995
he suffered the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to
continue to work and shortly before his death in November 2002
published Justice As Fairness: A Restatement, a response to criticisms
of A Theory of Justice.ii
Three books have been published by John Rawls. First is named as
“A Theory of Justice” whose main theme is distributive justice and
conciliating the contending claims of the values of equality and freedom.
Second one is “Political Liberalism” which is based on the question of how
citizens divided by obstinate religious and philosophical discrepancies
could converge to support a constitutional democratic regime. The name of
third book is “The Law of Peoples” which is riveted on the issue of world-
wide justice.
John Rawls introduced liberalism in A Theory of Justice in the
beginning. Later on it was transformed into a comprehensive theory. Rawls
suggested some maxims of justice in his Theory of Justice which were
named by him as “society’s basic structure”. By the basic structure, Rawls
means a society’s main political, social, and economic institutions and how
they fit to gather into one unified system of social cooperation from one
generation to the next. It was comprehensive until individuals had to accept
that it is related to all aspects of the good life. Later on Rawls brought some
major alternations in it. Rawls’s theory is mainly political instead of
comprehensive in Political Liberalism. Rawls says that people combine on
a political innovation of justice which controls their political life.
Nevertheless, in order to live a good life there is no need of any
correspondence.
John Rawls’s Political Liberalism has four parts. First part consists of
three lectures. First lecture is about fundamental ideas i.e. The Idea of a
Political Conception of Justice, The Idea of Society as a Fair System of
Cooperation, The Idea of the Original Position and The Idea of a Well-
Ordered Society. In Second lecture Rawls describes the powers of citizens
and their representation and the third lecture is about the Political
Constructivism.
Second part also comprises of three lectures. First lecture is about
The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus. In second lecture he discusses
The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good. The third lecture is on the Idea
of Public Reason.
Third part also has three lectures. The topic of the first lecture is The
Basic Structure as Subject. Second one is about the basic liberties and
their priority and the third one is a reply to Habermas. In fourth part Rawls
has revised the idea of public reason.
In his first lecture John Rawls raises two questions, first is that what is
the most appropriate conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of
social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and as
fully cooperating members of society over a complete life, from one
generation to the next? The second question is what are the grounds of
toleration and given the fact of reasonable pluralism as the inevitable
outcome of free institutions? Combining both questions we have: how is it
possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and
equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious,
philosophical and moral doctrines?iii To find the answer of this question,
Rawls presents different ideas.
First idea is the idea of a political conception of justice. The initial
focus of a political conception of justice is the framework of basic
institutions and the principles, standards, and precepts that apply to it, as
well as how those norms are to be expressed in the character and attitudes
of the members of society who realize its ideals. Political conception of
justice is quite different from other moral doctrines because they are
thought to be general and comprehensive. This difference will be more
prominent if we consider that the eminence between the political
conception of justice and other moral conceptions is a matter of scope.
i
"Daily Princetonian 12 April 1940 — Princeton Periodicals".
Theprince.princeton.edu. 1940-04-12.
ii
Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History Monthly, 13 June 2014.
iii
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, page 4
