It is noteworthy that Westerners' oldest destination of travel, seasonal migration, and colonisation should have received its name only in recent times. The term 'Middle East' is a neologism, invented in 1902 by US naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan to designate the sea and land stretching between a farther East - India - and a nearer one, extending towards the westernmost territories of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. The centre of Mahan's idiosyncratic map was the Persian Gulf - anticipating later US interest in the area. The new epithet was immediately taken up by The Times, put into circulation by officialdom, and gradually extended to include the mass of land under Ottoman rule - stretching from the Black Sea to equatorial Africa and from India to the heart of the Mediterranean.

‘Middle East’ did not supplant the considerably older term ‘Orient’, but was used interchangeably with it, replicating images of the West’s ‘other’ which characterised European discourses on the East. Both terms embody the ambiguous position of this area in these discourses and reflect an ethnocentric and hierarchical view of the world with the West at its centre and as its standard but, at the same time, indicating the relational positions of Europe and the Middle East and of the latter and the Far East. Raymond Schwab captures this relationality in his classical distinction between the Indian Orient discovered by European Orientalists in the eighteenth century and that older Orient, part of the ‘European room’, the locus of Graeco-Roman and Judeo- Christian civilisations which had shaped Europe itself.

While it is commonplace to associate the eighteenth-century traveller with traditional Grand Tourism, this period also witnessed the emergence of a more locally focused form of travel, sometimes described as the Home Tour. Literally cut off from continental Europe at the time of the Napoleonic wars (c.1790-1815), increasing numbers of British travellers turned to their 'own' countries from the late 1760s onwards, visiting the Peak District and the Lake District within England, while the more adventurous journeyed into Wales, and eventually towards the Scottish Highlands and Islands, as well as across the sea to Ireland. In order to give some sense of the cultural background to these developments, this essay provides a brief account of several eighteenth-century travel accounts written about Britain before moving to a fuller consideration of Irish travel, which saw sustained interest during the same decades, but an even greater emphasis after 1800. Throughout the nineteenth century, discussions concerning national identity, security, and the future political relations between these islands permeate travellers' accounts, indicating that geographical distance was not the sole criterion for determining 'strangeness'.

During the period which is the subject of this essay, travel writing became increasingly identified with the interests and preoccupations of those in European societies who wished to bring the non-European world into a position where it could be influenced, exploited or, in some cases, directly controlled. In the case of Britain, the identification was particularly close. There was some political control but more significant were various kinds of relationships stopping short of direct administration which historians have struggled to characterise by terms such as 'informal empire' or 'unofficial imperialism'. Trade, diplomacy, missionary endeavour, and scientific exploration might all contribute to the British expansion and each produced its own travel writing. Increasing European technological expertise provided advantages which made it easier to influence or dominate non-Europeans. With technological superiority came presumed intellectual superiority: Europeans could claim to be able to understand and interpret not only the terrain they entered but the inhabitants as well.

Travel writing, then, has a complex relationship with the situations in which it arose. In this essay it is taken to mean a discourse designed to describe and interpret for its readers a geographical area together with its natural attributes and its human society and culture. Travel writing may embrace approaches ranging from an exposition of the results of scientific exploration claiming (but rarely managing) to be objective and value-free to the frankly subjective description of the impact of an area and its people on the writer’s own sensibilities. There was, in fact, a tension between supposedly scientific discourses on discoveries and travel writing of wider sympathies. ‘Exploration’ and ‘travel’ may indeed be distinguished even if there is a large grey area between them.

Constitutionalism he idea of the subjection the idea of the subjection of even the highest political authority in a country to limits and requirements having the form and force of law he idea of the subjection is a notion of normative political theory. Despite this notion's familiarity to us, theorists continue to puzzle over what, exactly, it means for it to be put into practice or how, exactly, its being put into practice may bear on the moral justifiability of political rulership. Our first general question in this chapter is about John Rawls's contributions to this branch of speculative inquiry.

From a lawyer’s standpoint, a “constitution” is an existent law or statute, the country’s highest-ranking one, which no other legal enactment, opinion, or decision may contravene. What lawyers call constitutional law is a body of learning to be used in specifying the content of this highest-ranking law or statute and applying it to disputed cases. Here, too, we find a field of long-standing debate about how judges and other officials ought to approach their tasks of construing and applying basic-law texts and precedents. The issues prove hard to resolve without getting into speculative questions concerning (a) the ends and reasons for which a country’s basic law imposes limits and requirements on ordinary political rule, and (b) the events and conditions by and under which such legal impositions may legitimately be decided and come into force.

JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice tells us what justice requires, what a just society should look like, and how justice fits into the overall good of the members of a just society. But it does not tell us much about the politics of a just society: about the processes of public argument, political mobilization, electoral competition, organized movements, legislative decision making, or administration comprised within the politics of a modern democracy. Indeed, neither the term “democracy” nor any of its cognates has an entry in the index to A Theory of Justice. The only traditional problem of democracy that receives much sustained attention is the basis of majority rule, which is itself addressed principally in the context of a normative model of legislative decisions with an uncertain relation to actual legislative processes. This relative inattention to democracy – to politics more generally – may leave the impression that Rawls's theory of justice in some way denigrates democracy, perhaps subordinating it to a conception of justice that is defended through philosophical reasoning and is to be implemented by judges and administrators insulated from politics.

So it comes as something of a surprise when Rawls says, in the preface to the first edition of Theory of Justice, that his conception of justice as fairness “constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.” To be sure, the idea that justice as fairness has a particularly intimate democratic connection is prominent from the 1980 Dewey Lectures forward.

In the Preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls observes that “[d]uring much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some formof utilitarianism” (TJ, p. vii/xvii rev.). Critics of utilitarianism, he says, have pointed out that many of its implications run counter to our moral convictions and sentiments, but they have failed “to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it” (TJ, p. viii/xvii rev.). As a result, Rawls writes, “we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism.” In the end, he speculates, we are likely to “settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints.” “Such a view,” he adds, “is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. But this is no reason not to try” (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). Accordingly, what he proposes to do “is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.” Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one “which best approximates our considered judgments of justice.” His aim is to develop this theory in such a way as to “offer an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior . . . to the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition” (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.).

The allegation that liberals neglect the value of community has a long – some would say notorious – history. Rawls's A Theory of Justice, immediately acclaimed as the most systematic and sophisticated statement of liberal theory to date, must have confirmed the worst suspicions of those predisposed to believe that liberalism's emphasis on the individual implied its neglect of the formative significance of their social context and the moral significance of relations between them. For Rawls’s invocation of a hypothetical contract, whereby rational and disembodied individuals, deprived of all particularity and characterised simply as free and equal, are to agree on principles to regulate the distribution of benefits and burdens in society, seemed perfectly to illustrate the claim that liberalism commits a number of fundamental errors:

• Seeking an unavailable Archimedean point from which to construct an abstract and universally applicable blueprint for society;

• Assuming individuals to be fundamentally self-interested;

• Ignoring the fact that people are socially constituted;

• Positing an incoherent metaphysical essence of the person; and

• Claiming to be neutral while sneaking in strongly individualistic premises.

It is not hard to see why many of Rawls’s most influential critics formulated their objections in terms that pointed, in one way or another, to his failure to appreciate the value or significance of ‘community’, a shared line of attack that, despite important differences, earned them and their critique the label ‘communitarian’.

PRELIMINARIES

John Rawls's published works extend over fifty years from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. During this period his writings have come to define a substantial portion of the agenda for Anglo-American political philosophy, and they increasingly influence political philosophy in the rest of the world. His primary work, A Theory of Justice (TJ), has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Only ten years after Theory was published, a bibliography of articles on Rawls listed more than 2,500 entries. This extensive commentary indicates the widespread influence of Rawls's ideas as well as the intellectual controversy his ideas stimulate.

From the outset Rawls’s work has been guided by the question, “What is the most appropriate moral conception of justice for a democratic society?” (TJ, p. viii/xiii rev.). In Theory he pursued this question as part of a more general inquiry into the nature of social justice and its compatibility with human nature and a person’s good. Here Rawls aimed to redress the predominance of utilitarianism in modern moral philosophy. As an alternative to utilitarianism, Rawls, drawing on the social contract tradition, developed a conception of justice “that is highly Kantian in nature” (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). According to this conception, justice generally requires that basic social goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self – respect – be equally distributed, unless an unequal distribution is to everyone’s advantage ((TJ, p. 62/54 rev.). But under favourable social conditions a special conception, “justice as fairness,” applies; it requires giving priority to certain liberties and opportunities via the institutions of a liberal constitutional democracy.

I spoke here approximately five years ago. Then I spoke on Frege and Wittgenstein, [and] so I thought I would continue the series by now talking about Rawls. Some might think there is no connection between Frege and Wittgenstein, on [the] one hand, and Rawls, on the other. For me there is a very close connection, and I hope to bring it out implicitly if not explicitly today.

Everyone knows that in 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, which is very widely considered the most important work in political philosophy and perhaps even in moral philosophy since the end of World War II, and many think the most important work in political philosophy since the writings of John Stuart Mill. But what is not so widely known is that in 1993 Rawls brought out a second book, Political Liberalism, which a few of us believe is even more important. This book did not receive much praise upon coming out and has had [much less] attention paid to it. That I should like to change. (As I told Rawls yesterday afternoon just before I came out here, I view myself as an apostle going west.)

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.