Rawls’s Original Position, the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, cannot be the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. The Original Position cannot satisfy Rawls’s own publicity condition, which requires justifications that are accessible to all citizens. I hypothesize that over time Rawls weakened his publicity condition because he saw this tension, but that he could not resolve it. However, Rawls’s work contains a justification for justice as fairness that is publicly accessible: that in a well-ordered society, all citizens can have self-respect. I set up this discussion with Rawls’s critique of meritocracy, which, Rawls fears, sets citizens against each other in a zero-sum competition for self-respect. In a meritocracy, elites display their power and wealth, while the less fortunate may fall into resentment, rancor, and possibly a destructive racial nationalism. A Rawlsian society of self-respect offers a more just and stable model of social unity.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s overall contribution – its examination of white workers’ experience and negotiation of the dismantling of the racial state and the transition to majority rule, thereby inserting white workers into the historiography on late and post-apartheid South Africa; its demonstration of the analytical value of class in gaining new interpretative and chronological insights into South Africa’s long transition and current politics; and its demonstration of how this contributes a white working-class perspective from the Global South to current debates on the insecurities, subjectivities and politics produced by longer processes in the changing relationship between the state, capital, and labour, as they emerge at the current historical juncture.