chapter 2
...................................................................................................................................................JUSTICE AFTER
RAWLS
...................................................................................................................................................richard j. arneson
Inthe mid-twentieth century John Rawls single-handedly revived Anglo-
American political philosophy, which had not seen signiWcant progress
since the development and elaboration of utilitarianism in the nineteenth
century. Rawls reinvented the discipline by revising the social contract trad-
ition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. A series of essays starting with ‘‘Justice as
Fairness’’ in 1958 culminated in a monumental treatise,A Theory of Justice
(Rawls 1999 a[originally published 1973 ]). That theory of justice was in turn
qualiWed and set in a new framework by an account of legitimate political
authority to which Rawls gave a deWnitive formulation in his second book,
Political Liberalism(Rawls 1996 [originally published 1993 ]). Rawls also pro-
duced an important monograph on justice in international relations,The Law
of Peoples(Rawls 1999 c). Rawls’s achievements continue to set the contem-
porary terms of debate on theories of social justice. This chapter comments
on the present state of play in the political philosophy discussions that Rawls
initiated and stimulated.