Notes to pages 147–153 ( 233 )
- Thomas Nagel claims (“John Rawls and Affirmative Action,” Journal of Blacks in Higher
Education 39 [Spring 2003], p. 82) that Rawls, in a personal conversation, expressed “his
view of the importance of defending the constitutionality of affirmative action,” but con-
cedes that “he never referred to it in his writings, so far as I know, except obliquely [in one
of the passages cited above from Justice as Fairness].” In a comment presumably meant as
exculpatory, Nagel points out that affirmative action “only began to be a major issue in the
early 1970s ... and the Bakke case was not decided until 1978,” well after Theory appeared.
But he does not answer the obvious question of why Rawls did not address the issue in any
of his essays in the 1980s, or in his 1993 book Political Liberalism, or, for that matter, why
the Justice as Fairness reference is “oblique” rather than direct.
- George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South
African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. xi– xii.
- Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 21.
- Rawls, Political Liberalism (1996), p. lxii.
- Rawls, Law of Peoples, pp. 19– 22.
- David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
- Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1976; orig. ed. 1975); Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest
by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
- Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (New York: Verso, 2011).
- David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness
of International Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 42, 1, 21,
22, 24.
- Keal, European Conquest, pp. 35, 55. See also, more recently, A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire,
Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History
(New York: Bergahn, 2008).
- Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal Peoples
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. xiii. I would, of course, reject Cocker’s “tribal society”
category, a manifestation of his own unconscious Eurocentrism.
- Rawls, Political Liberalism (1996), p. xxvi.
- Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries
and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter- History, trans. Gregory
Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World
Politics: Western International Theory, 1760– 2010 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
- Robertson, Conquest by Law.
- Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
- Rawls, Political Liberalism (1996), p. liii. It is, of course, even more strikingly revealed in his
failure, as earlier pointed out, to condemn the extra- European conquests of the European
empires. Europeans conquering other European nations is bad; Europeans conquering
non- European nations is apparently not even seen by Rawls as conquest (but, presumably,
“discovery,” “founding of a New World,” etc. etc.).
- Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 90.
- Hobson, Eurocentric Conception.
- Rodney Roberts, introduction, to Roberts, ed., Injustice and Rectification (New York: Peter
Lang, 2002).
- See, for example, Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in
