SAINT JOHNprovokes sustained debate. It is a measure of its greatness that John Rawls’sA Theory of
Justiceinspired not one debate, but three.’’^16 And in more popular publications such as
theNew York Times Book Review, theTimes Literary Supplement,The Economist, theLis-
tener, theNation, theNew Republic, theNew Statesman, theSpectator, theObserver, the
Washington Post, and so forth—all of which, remarkably, published reviews—the ‘‘broad
critical acclaim, even fame’’ ofA Theory of Justicehas been even more pronounced.^17
However they determine its influence and assess its substance, these sources agree that
Rawls’s project has decisively influenced the direction of political thought. They all mark
Rawls’s intervention as a turning point.
Yet the critical reception of Rawls has failed to sufficiently appreciate the significance
of his project’s success as an event in the life of political thought. Apart from my summary
in the preceding paragraph, no theorist or philosopher, to my knowledge, has undertaken
to address, in a serious and sustained fashion, the basic fact of this importance or to
attend to the logic of its miraculous appearance. Instead, commentators note that Rawls
has ‘‘set the terms’’ or ‘‘established the horizons’’ of philosophical discourse and then
proceed to rebut, critique, or repudiate his position as they would rebut, critique, or
repudiate any other. Rawlsian discourse has yet to encounter a form of criticism that,
seeking neither to discern whether or not it truthfully represents something else, namely,
our current political condition, nor whether it provides a serviceable tool with which to
intervene in this condition, seeks rather to discern and describe what its particularity and
its particular appeal consist in. The concern that has been lacking, then, is to articulate
and diagnose Rawls’s work in terms of its capacity to claim and hold one’s interest, in
other words, in terms of its miraculous capacity to fascinate, to incite wonder, and to
effect conversion.
Placing his work in closer connection with the social-contract tradition from which
it departs will help to demonstrate how the claim for the miraculous nature of Rawls’s
works and for his own saintly status can be made serious. A recent survey of the critical
literature, undertaken by one of Rawls’s former students, indicates that the question of
what Rawls’s project was remains open even for internal critics who find themselves work-
ing squarely within the parameters he established.^18 One might begin to examine Rawls’s
relation to his own chosen tradition by recalling that the key moments of this tradition
are Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant.^19 It can reasonably be said that these authors are
concerned with two points: (1) addressing the concrete historical conditions of the emer-
gence and consolidation of nation-states and the extension of suffrage, as well as the
congruent civic turmoil, revolution, war, and conquest; and (2) addressing the ideational
condition of a failure of traditional religious worldviews and the emergence of scientific
and philosophical thought oriented toward and governed by the threat of skepticism
(namely, the threat that our words cannot enable us to reach the world, each other, or
our own selves). This moment in political thought has been treated as coextensive with
either: (1) a new departure given by the age of Enlightenment or, more darkly, as Nietz-
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