ePILogue (as PRoLogue) ( 207 )Ideal versus Non- Ideal TheoryAs we have seen throughout, Rawls famously focuses in A Theory of Justice
on “ideal theory,” the normative theory of a perfectly just society, character-
ized by “strict compliance” with its principles of justice. As he acknowledges
at the start of the book, “Obviously the problems of partial compliance the-
ory [including “compensatory justice,” which I am taking to be corrective
justice] are the pressing and urgent matters. These are the things that we are
faced with in everyday life.”^15 Ideal theory, however, was supposed to be the
necessary preliminary to properly doing non- ideal theory. But forty- plus
years later, the transition to theorizing “compensatory justice” has still not
been made, and contemporary Rawlsian discussions of non- ideal theory
are dealing with other senses of the term.
Obviously, for a population historically subordinated in modernity
through slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, non- ideal theory is the impera-
tive. Afro- modern (as it is now called) political philosophy is centrally
shaped by the experience of oppression, domination, and exploitation.^16
So black radical liberalism (like feminist liberalism) is going to be a vari-
ety of non- ideal- theory liberalism, a liberalism concerned with overcoming
group oppression in a nominally liberal society. Indeed, as discussed in
chapter 2, we could think of this as a deep theoretical distinction in liberal
theory that has not received the attention and formal semantic flagging that
it deserves— not merely that there are ideal- theory and non- ideal- theory
approaches to justice but that liberalism itself should be thought of as com-
ing in ideal- theory and non- ideal- theory variants. Many of the problems
standardly attributed by progressives to liberalism as such, liberalism qua
liberalism, are really problems distinctive to ideal- theory liberalism, a lib-
eralism abstracting away from social oppression. Once this is recognized, it
should immediately be appreciated how different a non- ideal- theory liber-
alism would have to be, not merely in its approach to justice but in its radi-
cally divergent social ontology and social epistemology.
Well- Ordered versus Ill- Ordered SocietiesRelatedly, non- ideal- theory liberalism presupposes the ill- orderedness of
society. Rawls, as we saw in earlier chapters, directs us to think of societies
as “cooperative ventures for mutual advantage,” with “well- ordered societ-
ies” of “strict compliance” then being a subset of this category.^17 So there
is a double idealization involved, bringing home how utterly remote this
framework is from even a glancing acquaintance with any actual human
social system. But a white-supremacist state is not a cooperative venture for