SAINT JOHNof Rawls’s semi-autobiographical sketch, which takes up a mere fourteen printed pages,
is the power with which it conjures this range of feelings. The scenes sketched above are
compounded by further thematic threads: Rawls’s recounting of his childhood exposure
to the racist and classist dispositions of his parents and those of his own privileged, or
‘‘lucky,’’ social milieu; his recollection of following behind an older brother who excelled
in sports and distinguished himself in war, both of which distinctions Rawls markedly
failed to attain; and Rawls’s humiliation by an influential undergraduate instructor in
philosophy, Norman Malcolm, who in an ‘‘unpleasant’’ early encounter subjected ‘‘a phil-
osophical essay which he [Rawls] himself thought rather good’’ to ‘‘very severe criticism,’’
refusing to accept it and demanding its rewriting—oddly enough, Rawls remembers this
event as having led to ‘‘a gradual deepening of... [his] interest in philosophy.’’^56 I would
like to suggest that these accounts can sharpen our focus on how forms of intense social
suffering—from guilt, shame, envy, resentment, humiliation, and so forth—accompany
both our need to appeal to a notion of justice and our attachments to such a concept. I
mean to imply that, far from impoverishing a discussion of Rawlsian liberalism by hinting
that it can be reduced to the personal experience of its author, attention to the affective
registers it engages and the everyday circumstances of the still ‘‘lucky,’’ if less so of late,
political experience of contemporary Western liberal democracies can enrich that discussion.
Consider for a moment the bearing of this on Bonnie Honig’s and Stanley Cavell’s
responses to the modes of exclusion central to the practice of Rawlsian liberalism. Honig
explores the manner in which ‘‘Rawls’s ideal of institutional justice’’ continuously engen-
ders ‘‘remainders’’—criminal subjects, in short—who fall outside the bounds of this ideal
and consequently call for punishment and reform.^57 In a complementary moment, Cavell
engages the implications of Rawlsianism for the practice of democracy, suggesting that a
threat of callousness or, worse, moral blindness inheres inA Theory of Justice’s promise
of allowing privileged citizens to accede to positions ‘‘above reproach,’’ which is to say,
above hearing the claims of injury entered by their less privileged fellows.^58 While both
find admirable elements in Rawls’s project, they seek to supplement it, Honig with a
more agonistic vision of politics, Cavell with the concerns of what he calls Emersonian
perfectionism. Once the desirability of such supplementation has been theoretically estab-
lished, however, the further problem of resistance to its demands remains. I would suggest
that the scenes from Rawls’s life help make plausible the extent to which his, and our
own, affirmations of something like a theory of justice, our commitments more generally
to giving justifications for what we do, and our attachments to a form of liberalism that
depends on legal protections from social injury, despite the limitations of all these, are
bound to individual experiences of the cycles of reproach, guilt, and shame recurrent in
political life. While they find acute expression in his own memoirs, such experiences are
not at all peculiar to Rawls. I would suggest in conclusion, then, that part of confronting
the basis of social suffering in Rawlsian liberalism entails recognizing more generally that
liberal appeals to rights—in particular, the right to draw boundaries that allow one to
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