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I think it is also useful to point out some other limitations on what Rawls is doing. Not only is he limiting himself to the basic structure of society, but he is actually not discussing societies with all the complexities they have in real life. The 'society' he is ciscussing is limited in several ways: 

• The people in his society have no severe physical or mental disabilities.
• There is relative or moderate scarcity of the things people want; but there is neither extreme scarcity or extreme abundance.
• The people he talks about in most cases are assumed to have been born into a society governed by the basic structure he advocates.

One possible criticism of Rawls is that he doesn't consider the rights of the disabled or the dependent -- which, of course, includes a lot of people in historical societies. I think Rawls would reply that he had to simplify things in order to make his work manageable. I think he would add that if we can develop a theory of justice that applies to idealized situations, then we can probably modify it to apply to more complex, real-life situations.