Few components of John Rawls's political philosophy have proven so epoch-making as what he somewhat oddly called the “difference principle.” None has exercised as great an influence outside the circle of academic philosophers. And hardly any has given rise to so many misunderstandings or generated such heated controversies.

The core of the principle is a simple and appealing idea: that social and economic inequalities should be evaluated in terms of how well off they leave the worst off. The idea is simple; it amounts to asking that the minimum of some index of advantage should be maximised. To many, it is also appealing, for the demand that the advantages enjoyed by the least advantaged should be as generous as (sustainably) possible provides a transparent and elegant way of articulating an egalitarian impulse and a concern for efficiency. For it avoids, at the same time, the absurdity of equality at any price and the outrageousness of maximising the aggregate no matter how distributed.

Thus understood, the difference principle bears some undeniable resemblance to the justification of economic inequalities by reference to some notion of the general interest, as in the utilitarian tradition. But aggregate social welfare is not quite the same as the interest of the least advantaged. The idea of using the latter as the benchmark for assessing inequalities had never been given, before Rawls, a powerful explicit formulation that could capture the scholarly imagination. But it had occurred to others before him.

Because John Rawls's work on justice has such fundamental importance, feminists have scrutinized it with particular care and have made many criticisms. Rawls himself has become deeply concerned with these criticisms – in some cases seriously revising his theory in response. In general, he continues to insist, the various feminist objections do not invalidate a liberal approach to the theory of justice: in fact, liberal theories can answer feminist concerns better than other theories. Nor, he believes, is his particular liberal theory wanting: he doubts that it could be shown that justice as fairness does not have the resources to deal with the problems raised by the women's movement. Nonetheless, he concedes, liberal theories of justice have a great deal of work yet to do if they are to make good on this promise, particularly in the area of family justice:

One of Rawls's guiding aims in the development and revision of his work has been to show how a well-ordered society of justice as fairness is realistically possible. Rawls thinks establishing the feasibility, or “stability,” of a conception of justice is essential to its justification. My aim is to discuss the role and import of Rawls's stability argument. To do so, I will concentrate primarily on the second part of Rawls's discussion of stability in Theory of Justice, the argument for the “congruence of the right and the good.” This argument particularly exhibits Rawls's indebtedness to Kant in the justification of his view. After discussing the purpose of congruence (in Sections I and II), I outline in detail what the argument is (III and IV), emphasizing the role of the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness. Then in Section V, I discuss how problems with the Kantian congruence argument led Rawls to political liberalism.

STABILITY AND CONGRUENCE: OUTLINE OF ISSUES

Rawls’s congruence argument has been widely neglected in discussions of his work. Reasons for this neglect are several. First there is sheer exhaustion. The congruence argument begins in Part III of Theory of Justice (TJ), is developed for over 200 pages, and culminates (in Section 86) at the end of a very long book. Second, there is Rawls’s uncharacteristic lack of clarity in setting out the congruence argument: it is interrupted and intertwined with other arguments Rawls simultaneously develops. Finally, there is the feeling among some of Rawls’s main commentators that the argument is a failure.

John Rawls's writings across the last three decades advance the best-known form of Kantian constructivism. During this time his understanding of the terms constructive and Kantian has changed in various ways, which I shall trace in this chapter and contrast with the formof “Kantian constructivism” which (I argue) can most plausibly be attributed to Kant himself.

Rawls offers what might be seen as three ideas of justification: the method of reflective equilibrium, the derivation of principles in the original position, and the idea of public reason. These can appear to be in some tension with one another. Reflective equilibrium seems to be an intuitive and “inductive” method. On one natural interpretation, it holds that principles are justified by their ability to explain those judgments in which we feel the highest degree of confidence. By contrast, the original position argument is more theoretical and more “deductive”: principles of justice are justified if they could be derived in the right way, institutions are just if they conform to these principles, and particular distributions are just if they are the products of just institutions. Justifications that meet the requirements of public reason need not have this particular form, but they are limited in a way that an individual's search for reflective equilibrium is not. The idea of public reason holds that questions of constitutional essentials and basic justice are to be settled by appeal to political values that everyone in the society, regardless of their comprehensive view, has reason to care about. This is more restrictive than the idea of reflective equilibrium, since not all of an individual's considered judgments, or even all of his or her considered judgments about justice, need meet this test.

Rawls and his critics agree on at least this: his theory is liberal. This essay asks, To what extent is it also democratic? Does Rawlsian liberalism denigrate democracy as some critics charge? Despite the enormous literature on Rawls, remarkably little has been written on the relationship between liberalism and democracy in the theory. Critics over the years have suggested that the theory denigrates democracy in one of three ways, which I consider by posing three critical questions about the theory. First, does it devalue the equal political liberty of adults (at any one of three levels of theory formation)? Second, does it devalue the political process of majority rule? Third, does it devalue the kind of civic discourse that relies on more comprehensive philosophies – both religious and secular – rather than on the free-standing political philosophy that Rawls's theory distinctively defends?

In interpreting Rawls’s understanding of democracy, I draw upon both A Theory of Justice (Justice) and Political Liberalism (Liberalism). The two works diverge at points, which I discuss when the differences bear on Rawls’s understanding of the relationship between liberalism and democracy. But together they have more to say about the relationship than either work alone.

The amount of literature written on Rawls is at least equal to that of any other twentieth-century philosopher. The following bibliography is necessarily selective. Rawls's complete works are first cited. Then follows a list of books and anthologies on Rawls. Most of the bibliography consists of citations of articles in philosophy and other journals. I have not attempted to locate and cite the many important discussions of Rawls that appear in others' books. The two largest divisions of the bibliography list articles on A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Other divisions reflect topics of special interest which have stimulated discussions of parts of Rawls's work or its implications. Most of the articles listed are in English. (John Rawls and His Critics: An Annotated Bibliography by J.H.Wellbank, Denis Snook, and David T. Mason (New York: Garland, 1982) provides abstracts for most of the secondary literature on Rawls prior to 1982. See the bibliography to Thomas W. Pogge's John Rawls (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994) for many works in German.)

“Liberalism” means different things to different people. The term is currently used in Europe by the left to castigate the right for blind faith in the value of an unfettered market economy and insufficient attention to the importance of state action in realizing the values of equality and social justice. (Sometimes this usage is marked by the variants “neoliberalism” or “ultraliberalism.”) In the United States, on the other hand, the term is used by the right to castigate the left for unrealistic attachment to the values of social and economic equality and the too ready use of government power to pursue those ends at the cost of individual freedom and initiative. Thus, American Republicans who condemn the Democrats as bleeding-heart liberals are precisely the sort of people who are condemned as heartless liberals by French Socialists.

Both of these radically opposed pejorative uses have some basis in the broad tradition of liberalism as a group of political movements and political ideas, sharing certain convictions and disagreeing about others. It is a significant fact about our age that most political argument in the Western world now goes on between different branches of that tradition. Its great historical figures are Locke, Rousseau, Constant, Kant, and Mill, and, in our century, its intellectual representatives have included Dewey, Orwell, Hayek, Aron, Hart, Berlin, and many others.With the recent spread of democracy, liberalism has become politically important in countries throughout the world.

THREE EGALITARIAN CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY

Egalitarianism is not one idea but many, for there are many different kinds and degrees of equality that people can promote and still lay claim to being egalitarians. Rawls's egalitarianism is complex in what it requires, since his “democratic equality” rests on three principles of justice that interact with and limit each other. Democratic equality is also complex in its justification, since it is motivated by several distinct egalitarian ideas that must be integrated in a justifiable way. Our task in what follows is to better understand this complex egalitarian view by considering three challenges to it. First, I present a brief statement of its main ideas.

Democratic equality guarantees citizens equal basic liberties, including the worth of political liberties, through Rawls’s First Principle. His Second Principle consists of two principles that specify how the benefits of social cooperation are “open to all” and work “to everyone’s advantage.” Its guarantee of fair equality of opportunity requires that we not only judge people for jobs and offices by reference to their relevant talents and skills, but that we also establish institutional measures to correct for the ways in which class, race, and gender might interfere with the normal development of marketable talents and skills. The difference principle (DP) restricts inequalities to those that work maximally to the advantage of the worst-off groups.

For John Rawls, public reason is not one political value among others. It envelops all the different elements that make up the ideal of a constitutional democracy, for it governs “the political relation” in which we ought to stand to one another as citizens (CP, p. 574). Public reason involves more than just the idea that the principles of political association should be an object of public knowledge. Its concern is the very basis of our collectively binding decisions. We honor public reason when we bring our own reason into accord with the reason of others, espousing a common point of view for settling the terms of our political life. The conception of justice by which we live is then a conception we endorse, not for the different reasons we may each discover, and not simply for reasons we happen to share, but instead for reasons that count for us because we can affirm them together. This spirit of reciprocity is the foundation of a democratic society.

Public reason has emerged as an explicit theme in Rawls’s writings only after A Theory of Justice with his turn to “political liberalism” and the pursuit of a common ground on which people can stand despite their deep ethical and religious differences. But the concept itself has always been at the heart of his philosophy. It runs through his first book in the guise of the idea of publicity, playing an indispensable part in the theory of justice as fairness.

Coleridge thought, talked and wrote about poetics and criticism throughout his life. Until 1820, these were often primary concerns; at other times, and later in his life, his ideas about literature were ancillary to his work on philosophy, religion, psychology, history or language. Yet the task of summarising Coleridge's philosophy and practice of literary criticism is a challenging one, because he prepared almost none of his criticism for publication and his notes were left in a chaotic form. Most of what we know about his critical opinions derives from the 'Shakespearean criticism' - not a coherent text, but surviving notes and reports concerning public lectures that Coleridge presented between 1808 and 1819. There is also a multitude of passages on literary criticism in Coleridge's Notebooks and in his copious marginal annotations to editions of Shakespeare and other books. Both the Notebooks and the marginalia overlap extensively with the public lectures, for Coleridge tended to lecture extempore based on scraps of paper and annotated volumes that he brought with him into the lecture hall. Some of his major ideas about criticism did take published form in Biographia Literaria (1817), but examining the notes and fragments that testify to his practice as a critic before and after the publication of Biographia allows us to see how those principles developed, and how Coleridge applied them to the study of Shakespeare, Milton and major European writers.

Throughout his life, S. T. Coleridge was a politically engaged thinker. From his student days as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, when he participated in agitation in support of his hero, William Frend, to his later years as the 'Sage of Highgate' criticising the pervasion of materialist thinking and commercial ethics through all aspects of life, Coleridge was a deeply political man. His writings reveal him as someone who closely followed the contemporary political scene as it unfolded during one of the most turbulent and exciting periods in the nation's history, a man steeped in the leading ideas of European political philosophy. Coleridge gave political lectures, wrote leaders, essays and editorials for the press, in which he commented on the major issues of the time, published journals full of political comment, and produced three substantial political treatises. As a young man he published sonnets on key political figures of the time, such as Burke, Pitt, Priestley and William Godwin; poems of political and religious dissent; and a number of poems about his response to the French Revolution, most notably 'Fears in Solitude' and 'France: An Ode'. All this is remarkable in a writer known chiefly as the composer of several of the greatest poems in the English language.

The concept of the symbol was vitally important to Coleridge throughout his career as a poet, critic and professional man of letters. Although his articulation of this concept varied in emphasis at different moments of his career, the underlying concept of symbol remained important as a fundamental principle throughout his intellectual development. During the last two centuries, the concept of the symbol has become one of Coleridge's most influential contributions to the discourse of literary criticism.

One persistent area of concern throughout Coleridge’s career is the question of the relation between language and thought. Coleridge formulates this question as follows: ‘Is Logic the Essence of Thinking? in other words – Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? & – how far is the word “arbitrary” a misnomer? Are not words &c parts & germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?’ (CLi, 625). Coleridge is here pondering whether the arbitrary signs that, according to such contemporary linguists as John Horne Tooke, determine thought can in some sense be described as ‘natural’. This question is a central one for Coleridge; it recurs at several crucial moments in his intellectual career. The concept of symbol, as it evolved in his mature philosophy of language, was in large part an effort to overcome the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, and to demonstrate that at least in the realm of poetry, language could become the actual embodiment of thought.

Coleridge was not a feminist, although he included women amongst his best friends. Nor was his work directed systematically at issues of gender, definitions of masculinity and femininity, or the relations between the sexes, except as these matters intersected with other topics that fundamentally informed his work such as the French Revolution, social reform, faculties of mind, the professionalisation of poetry and the poet. Still, Coleridge is useful for thinking about gender and its articulation in the early nineteenth century, occasionally in what he wrote and more frequently in what he 'was' as writer and man. To proclaim in the early 1800s that 'there is a sex in our souls' when the revolution in female manners was being conducted on the opposite principle and was barely off the ground was to disassociate oneself from feminist causes and to align oneself with gender essentialists (Friend ii, 209). Most of Coleridge's comments on gender supported the social conservatism that usually follows from essentialist claims. They positioned women in the private sphere, viewed love as women's primary preoccupation, and characterised femininity as maternal, nurturing, dependent, and domestic. Even Coleridge's advocacy of androgyny, regarded ever since Virginia Woolf as his major positive contribution to gender analysis, supported a masculinist agenda, for it was attributed only to the genius of male minds.