Founded by the Constitution of the year III, and with the executive power divided between five Directors, and the legislative power divided into two houses, the Directory sought political middle ground. It defied at the same time the “Jacobins” of Babeuf’s conspiracy and the constitutional circles, and the royalists of the Philanthropic Institute, who were ready to seize power by means of elections or force. In the name of this double danger, real or supposed, the Directors set up coups d’état to nullify election results by associating themselves with generals haloed by their expeditions and their victories abroad (in Egypt or the “sister-republics”). The Directory tried to muzzle the press, supervise the theater, multiply the official celebrations, and reform primary and secondary education. It tried in vain to spread a national religion (theophilanthropy) to control public opinion, to favor a republican elite, to tie scholars to the regime. In charge of a society marked by strong contrasts between the new rich who benefited from the development of the arts, and those left behind (the downgraded, unemployed, deserters, emigrants), it was confronted with corruption and brigandage.

Kant developed an understanding of justice to enable free and equal citizens to coexist in ways that respected the moral status of each. Individuals owe each other the founding of states to coexist under public law that protects safety and integrity. An account of distributive justice is part of what we need to explain what sort of entity the state ought to be. But even though the modern concept had become available in the late eighteenth century, important intellectual movements organized around alternative responses to the social question arose roughly at that time. Rawls’s theory is a response to them that offers a substantial elaboration of the notion of social justice. Rawls does not merely defend one idea as central to distributive justice but integrates various approaches. Recognizing the breadth of the domain to which considerations of distributive justice apply makes it doubtful that a unitary criterion could guide distribution.