John Rawls, the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century whose masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971), fundamentally reshaped the field, lived a quiet and – I mean this the best way – boring life. After an eventful and sometimes tragic youth (more on this later), he settled into an academic career and worked at Harvard University for nearly 40 years. There, he developed ideas that transformed our thinking about justice, fairness, democracy and liberalism, and also trained generations of students who are now leading members of the profession. He died aged 81 in 2002, the year I began my graduate studies, so I never had the chance to meet him. Yet every single account I’ve heard from his students and colleagues attests to his genuine kindness. Decent is the word that comes up time and again, in the understated sense of unshowy goodness.
Still waters can run deep, however, and from archival research I’ve discovered charming eccentricities. Every year, for instance, his family would put on a Christmas play that worked in his famous concepts as minor characters. My favourite bit of oddness, though, comes from an interview he gave to mark his retirement. In 1991, he sat down with undergraduate students to discuss his life, work, reception and teaching. But in a draft copy of the interview, included in his personal papers at Harvard, he added a weird and wonderful section that does not appear in the published version (and that, it seems, he wrote only for himself). After answering the questions from the students, he noted down a few ‘Questions They Didn’t Ask Me’ and played the role of interviewer and interviewee. Here’s the addendum in full:
There were lots of questions they didn’t ask me in [The Harvard Review of Philosophy (HRP)] interview. Some of those they could have asked I’ll answer here:
HRP (as imagined): You never talk about religion in your classes, although sometimes the discussion borders on it. Why is that? Do you think religion of no importance? Or that it has no role in our life?
JR: On the role of religion, put it this way. Let’s ask the question: Does life need to be redeemed? And if so, why; and what can redeem it? I would say yes: life does need to be redeemed. By life I mean the ordinary round of being born, growing up, falling in love, and marrying and having children; seeing that they grow up, go to school, and have children themselves; of supporting ourselves and carrying on day after day; of growing older and having grandchildren and eventually dying. All that and much else needs to be redeemed.
HRP: Fine, but what’s this business about being redeemed? It doesn’t say anything to me.
JR: Well, what I mean is that what I call the ordinary round of life – growing up, falling in love, having children and the rest – can seem not enough by itself. That ordinary round must be graced by something to be worthwhile. That’s what I mean by redeemed. The question is what is needed to redeem it?
This is bizarre for many reasons. I mean, first, who does this? Who goes home after an interview and, just for the fun of it, invents and answers hypothetical questions? But stranger still is the content. Readers of Rawls don’t expect him to speak this way. He is, after all, a political philosopher and the main question associated with his work is the following: how is it possible for an institutional order to be just? Yet, what if, when the chips were down at the end of his career, he spoke more directly and plainly, even if only to himself, to state a more fundamental question at the root of his life and thought: how is it possible for a human life – yours, mine, or any – to be worthwhile?
Ordinary life, says Rawls, needs to be redeemed. By what? It depends on what you believe in. A theist will have one response, an atheist or agnostic another. The young Rawls was a believer, and after completing his undergraduate studies had planned to become a minister. But he lost his faith as a soldier in the Second World War. Even so, he never abandoned a conviction that ordinary life needs to be elevated (‘redeemed’ or ‘graced’) by something beyond it.
I believe Rawls found that thing in liberalism and the tradition of liberal moral and political thought he devoted his life to. He never stopped trying to work out how a life based on liberal ideals can be not only happy but worthy of happiness. This makes him the perfect guru for our times.
To see why Rawls fits this role, I need to say something about the peculiar moment we live in. As everyone knows, religion is in decline throughout the Western world. To name only the most populous Anglophone liberal democracies, surveys of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show that 30, 53, 32, 40 and 49 per cent, respectively, of citizens in these countries claim no religion. People who tick the ‘no religion’ box on the census are the fastest-growing population of religious affiliation, or in this case, of non-affiliation.
This raises a tricky question. If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?
When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’. But to this I reply, as politely as possible, that those are not suitable answers. Personal experience, friends and family and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political and cultural contexts. So I ask again: ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’
In my book Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024), I argue that the unchurched in the Western world should point to liberalism as the source of who they are through and through. Liberalism – with its core values of personal freedom, fairness, reciprocity, tolerance and irony – is that society-or-civilisation-sized thing that may well underlie who we are, not just in our political opinions but in all walks of life, from the family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between.
How can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous, despite new temptations not to be?
This argument will not be news for conservative critics who are keenly aware of how hegemonic liberalism has become. Ironically, though, it may surprise liberals themselves, who often fail to recognise how widely and deeply their liberalism runs. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a ‘social and political philosophy’ based on ‘support for or advocacy of individual rights, civil liberty, and reform tending towards individual freedom, democracy, or social equality’, liberals too quickly adopt this narrow institutionalist definition and assume that liberalism is an exclusively legal and political doctrine. Liberals, in other words, fail to recognise not just what liberalism has become today (a worldview and comprehensive value system) but who they are as well: living and breathing incarnations of it.
The founders of liberalism would have been disappointed in us. A newcomer by the standards of intellectual history, it was created in the 19th century by such greats as Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, George Eliot and John Stuart Mill. While there are many differences between them, they all conceive of liberalism first and foremost in ethical terms – a ‘moral adventure’, as Adam Gopnik has called it, for living well in the modern world. As Helena Rosenblatt states in her excellent book, The Lost History of Liberalism (2018): ‘Today we may think that they were naive, deluded, or disingenuous. But to 19th-century liberals, being liberal meant believing in an ethical project.’
What does this mean? Then, as now, the word ‘liberal’ (with its roots in the Latin liber and liberalis) combines two meanings: freedom (liberty) and generosity (liberality). When 19th-century thinkers (and statespersons, journalists, novelists, soldiers and more) claimed this mantle for themselves, they wrestled with a very deep question. How, they asked, can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous, despite all kinds of new temptations not to be? Capitalism, for example, entices us with shiny consumerism; democracy can lull us into conformity; and nationalism ensnares us in unearned partiality. These are social and political dangers to be sure. But early liberals also saw them as bedevilments apt to make us mean, restless, unhappy and just generally shitty people. Liberalism was the ethical and political doctrine they created to try to bring these new forces under political and psychological control.
Which raises an important question: what the hell happened to liberalism? If in the 19th century it was an aspirational doctrine for living well, but in the 20th and 21st century it retreated to a much more staid legal and political project, the question is why and when were its ethical guts stripped out?
Historians and philosophers blame different and complementary causes. Rosenblatt points to early 20th-century thinkers who, dissatisfied with New Deal progressivism, invented a retrenched ‘classical liberalism’. In Liberalism Against Itself (2023), Samuel Moyn names the Cold War liberals who repudiated the progressivism and perfectionism of their forebearers. For my part, I focus on a branch of contemporary political philosophy (‘political liberalism’ – founded, ironically, by Rawls’s 1993 work of the same name, after A Theory of Justice) that eschews questions of the good life to work out a conception of liberalism fit for a pluralist society divided by disagreements between citizens on questions of value and meaning.
Whatever the reason for why liberalism’s ethical side vanished, it is high time to reclaim it. Let me be blunt: liberals are awful at defending themselves. First of all, the global conversation about the current crisis of liberalism tends to fixate on the opponents of liberalism, and how horrible populists, nativists and authoritarians are. Rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up. Moreover, when liberalism is defended, the reasons given are almost exclusively legal or political. Politicians and journalists insist on the indispensability of such institutions as division of powers, rule of law and individual rights. Certainly, that kind of defence is crucial. But by claiming that liberalism not only can be, in general, a way of life, but much more pointedly, may already be the basis of your own, I am drawing attention to a whole other set of reasons – call it ‘spiritual’ or ‘existential’, no matter how jittery such terms make liberals – for why we should care deeply about the fate of our creed.
There is no better guide to this endeavour than Rawls. To use an old-fashioned word, he is a superb moralist, gifted at detecting the underlying moral commitments of a liberal democratic society and showing how we, as its members, understand and comport ourselves. It is as if he speaks directly to our conscience to say: ‘OK, if you see your society and yourself in a liberal kind of way, here is what you can do to live up to it.’ Then he adds: ‘Oh, I almost forgot, great joys and benefits come from living this way. Let me show you.’
We’ll get to these joys in a moment. Every guru, however, has an origin story and Rawls’s is worth telling. A few years before he died, he wrote a short, unpublished autobiography titled ‘Just Jack’. ‘Jack’ was what friends and family called him, and ‘just’ was a play on the meanings of justice and simply. As I said, in contrast to his tranquil decades as a Harvard professor, his youth was eventful and at times tragic. On two separate occasions as a child, he passed fatal illnesses to his younger brothers (diphtheria to Bobby Rawls in 1928, and then pneumonia to Tommy Rawls in 1929) and developed a stammer from the trauma. In 1944, he served as an infantryman in the Pacific, was nearly killed in battle, and got a Bronze Star for bravery. Yet in telling his life story, Rawls dwells on a minor incident from his early 20s, when he had to go out and get a real job. While an undergraduate at Princeton in 1941, he had wanted to go on a sailing trip with friends and expected his family would pay. To his chagrin, his father had other ideas, telling Jack to work if he wanted a holiday. He did, and the experience was formative:
Jobs were hard to find in those days. The depression was beginning to ease by that time, of course, but the best I could do on short notice was a 12-hour job – 6 am to 6 pm, six days a week – in a doughnut factory somewhere in downtown Baltimore, whose location I have conveniently repressed. I was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life …
Ernie was decent and considerate, and never spoke harshly to me. He seemed resigned to the fact that he would always have that sort of job. There was no prospect of advance, really, or much hope of anything better for him. As for me, I decided to look elsewhere. There must be jobs easier than this, I thought, and 12 hours a day breathing flour dust was too much …
I came to feel very sorry for Ernie. Often I’ve felt my days at the doughnut factory and Ernie’s decency and stoicism in view of his fate – or so it seemed to me – made a lasting impression. So that was how most people spent their lives, of course not literally, but to all practical purposes: pointless labour for not much pay, and even if well paid it led nowhere. Even business and law struck me as dead ends. While trying not to forget the plight of the Ernies of this world, I had to find my place in life in some other way. Did these things influence me in proposing the difference principle years later? I wouldn’t claim so. But how would I know?
Who am I to gainsay Rawls? Still, his thought makes a lot of sense when viewed through the prism of this experience. It might even help us learn how to live liberally in the 21st century.
Fairness is the most important concept of Rawls’s philosophy. It is, negatively speaking, the precise quality missing when a person like Ernie must toil endlessly at a job that a college student like Jack can quit after six weeks because he finds it difficult and demeaning. And decades later, when it came time to write A Theory of Justice, Rawls crowned it as the defining ideal of liberal democracy. Society, he states, should be conceived of and run as a fair system of cooperation. Or in the words of one contemporary acolyte, Leif Wenar: ‘Our country is built for everyone.’
How Rawls arrives at this notion is significant. Crucially, he doesn’t claim it as his own insight. Nor does he derive it from first moral or philosophical principles. He believes instead that citizens of liberal democracies by and large already see and structure their societies as fair systems of cooperation. They have, after all, grown up in countries where all major public institutions profess to advance the freedom, dignity and equal opportunity of all citizens. In Australia, for example, politicians of all stripes insist on the importance of a ‘fair go’. That’s why the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation is accessible to a wide readership: not merely because Rawls’s readers ‘know’ or ‘understand’ what he’s talking about, but much more powerfully because they already affirm it as expressing something essential about themselves and their society. It is no surprise that some of Rawls’s best interpreters, such as Samuel Freeman, report that reading him for the first time can elicit strong feelings of déjà vu, a recognition of what we already know.
Rawls isn’t oblivious to real-world injustices. He knows that no society lives up to this ideal. Nor does he think that citizens of liberal democracies wear rose-coloured (or, worse, ideologically tinted) glasses. Still, he bases his theory on the assumption that his fellow citizens recognise that the key purpose of their main public institutions is to ensure that society is seen as, and remains, a fair system of cooperation. Virtually everyone can be expected to know, on his account, that the purpose of a legal constitution is to establish equal and reciprocal rights, the job of the police is to protect them, and progressive taxation is meant to ensure a level playing field.
Rawls is enjoying a renaissance in public philosophy, with several authors applying his conception of fairness to different domains. In Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler investigates education, workplace democracy and universal basic income, while in his recent essay for Aeon, Matthew McManus calls for a revival of liberal socialism on Rawlsian principles. And I’ve tried to bring this notion to bear on psychology and culture to help liberals unlock the best part of themselves.
Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position. Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imagine you are with a group of people who are tasked to select principles of justice to regulate the fundamental institutions of society. The plot twist, however, is you don’t know anything about yourself. You agree to step behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and pretend that you don’t know your sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness or anything that might distinguish you from others.
There are great spiritual goods – great joys – that come from living up to liberal principles
Which principles would you pick? It’s a no-brainer for Rawls: those that favour fairness when it comes to basic rights, self-respect, and resources and opportunities. Why? Prudence, in part: the pie should be divided as equally as possible lest it be revealed that you’re in a less-advantaged position. But the moral oomph of the original position is to remind citizens of liberal democracies – particularly those of privilege – that the dumb luck of social position and natural abilities shouldn’t bear on issues of justice. A liberal person should leave all that at the door.
This may be fine in theory but let’s make it concrete. Suppose this hypothetical society has only two members. Their names are Ernie and Jack, and they’ve been asked to play the game of the original position.
Ernie goes first and, frankly, he’s got nothing to lose. He can happily pretend not to know who he is because, under fair principles of justice, he stands to gain a much better deal in life. No fuss, no muss for Ernie.
Now it’s Jack’s turn. This involves a different calculation. Why should he – pampered Princeton princeling that he is – ever agree to bracket the positional advantages that have worked out so well for him thus far in life? Disgraced or not, a remark by the comic Louis CK is painfully apt. On whether it is better to be Black or white in the United States, the answer for him is obvious: ‘I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option, I would re-up every year: “Oh yeah, I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that. I’m gonna stick with white, thank you.’’’ For Jack to suspend knowledge of his advantages – his good looks, impeccable WASP credentials, upper-middle-classness and all the rest – in reflecting on which principles of social cooperation to affirm might seem positively irrational.
So why do it? What’s in it for Jack? First, it’s the right thing to do. But second, just as importantly, there are great spiritual goods – great joys – that come from living up to liberal principles.
By engaging in the original position, Jack embraces impartiality and autonomy as core virtues. This means liberating himself from the narrow confines of self-interest and positional bias. In a world rife with inequality and injustice, impartiality allows Jack to see beyond his own perspective, fostering empathy and understanding for others. Autonomy, on the other hand, empowers him to act in accordance with his values, free from external coercion or undue influence.
By embodying impartiality and autonomy, Jack also cultivates resilience in the face of temptation and adversity. In a consumer culture where self-restraint and stalwartness are often tested, adherence to liberal principles instils moral fortitude. And if Jack gets good at navigating such ethical dilemmas, we might even say that he will become graceful. He will fulfil the requirements of justice with pleasure and relative ease.
In short, Jack’s decision – and our decision, which can be made at any time – to embrace the original position is not just a thought experiment but a transformative spiritual practice. And now we return to where we began with Rawls: on redemption. Liberalism, it is true, has no metaphysics to speak of. The soul? The Great Beyond? The purpose of it all? ‘Pfffftt,’ goes the liberal. Yet we’ve never given up on the core of religion: to seek meaning in life through something beyond us. Our Beyond is found not on another plane of existence but instead in something worldly just beyond our grasp – an ideal of becoming a free and generous person in a fair and just society. Redemption is not found only in a liberal way of life. Heaven forbid. Yet it’s there too, waiting for liberals to answer its call.
Adapted from Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024) by Alexandre Lefebvre, published by Princeton University Press.
