Related Ideas

John Rawls continued to develop his political philosophy for more than 25 years after he published A Theory of Justice. In 1993 he published Political Liberalism, another major work that summarized his thinking at that time. 

In Political Liberalism he did not repudiate the ideas in A Theory of Justice, but he did describe what he regarded as a "serious problem" in the earlier work. He now believed that in A Theory of Justice he had been unrealistic in his ideas about a "well-ordered society."

To explain: the serious problem I have in mind concerns the unrealistic idea of a well-ordered society as it appears in Theory. An essential feature of a well-ordered society associated with justice as fairness is that all its citizens endorse this conception on the basis of what I now call a comprehensive philosophical doctrine. They accept, as rooted in this doctrine, its two principles of justice....

Now the serous problem is this. A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally. Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them, or some other reasonable doctrine, will ever be affirmed by all, or nearly all, citizens. [Political Liberalism, xviii]

Rawls may well have been influenced by the rise of what some scholars have called the "culture wars" in the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Differences in basic metaphysical, historical, and moral views became apparent in heated arguments about abortion, homosexuality, gender, and other issues. In any case, he focused in Political Liberalism on how to achieve agreement on a conception of political justice in spite of many differences in reasonable comprehensive doctrines. For a summary of his ideas, see the Introduction added to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism.

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