Some on the right wing of the political spectrum condemn Rawls and Rawls’s theory for being “socialist”; some others, on the left side of the spectrum, claim that his theory is a species of “bourgeois ideology” and is incompatible with socialism. Neither of these claims is true. At the theoretical level (before taking actual historical circumstances and realities into account), Rawls’s theory is compatible with certain kinds of socialism but does not require any kind of socialism.

Rawls takes private versus public “ownership of the means of production” (TJ 266) to be the essential difference between capitalist (“private property”) and socialist economies (and societies): “the size of the public sector under socialism (as measured by the fraction of total output produced by state-owned firms…) is much larger. In a private-property economy the number of publicly owned firms is presumably small and in any event limited to special cases such as public utilities and transportation” (TJ 235), while “under socialism the means of production and natural resources are publicly owned” (TJ 242).