SAINT JOHNrational actors, and the like but evinces little attention to the larger political and philo-
sophical significance of such arguments. Critics internal to the project of formulating a
theory of justice tend to produce highly technical and strictly analytical inquiries concern-
ing the coherence, clarity, and consistency of the project. On the other hand, there is an
external criticism that seeks to detect the project’s basic defects, oversights, evasions, or
obfuscations but shows little appetite for engaging with those engaged in the internal
mode of criticism. This division tracks two major pathways of avoidance of the text: one
either quibbles with it or denies that it is worth quibbling with.
Thus, approaches to Rawls have generally ignored the relations established between
reader and text, either, in the terms of political theorists, by assuming that the theory of
justice elaborated in the text has no purchase on the political situation of the reader, in
which case it is at best a distraction, or, in the terms of political philosophers, by assuming
that the reader’s own situation is superfluous to the purposes of articulating a philosophi-
cal theory, because this situation can only introduce empirical confusion into what should
be an endeavor of a priori knowledge. Both assumptions obstruct inquiry into how a
conversation, or circuit, is formed between a reader and Rawls’s text. While most com-
mentators acknowledge that many theorists and philosophers have come to care about
Rawls, nobody asks how they come to care, assuming that the answer is either self-evident
or evidence of nothing worth noting: either Rawlsians are predisposed to find this work
meaningful—perhaps because, in the course of their education, they absorbed the con-
ventions of a community that endorses such work—or Rawls’s work carries its own seal
of meaningfulness, perhaps because, as for Kant, like the starry heavens above, the moral
law inspires awe in its beholders.
One could say, however, that to be convinced of the importance of a theory of justice
one must first be convinced that people act out of a sense of justice; and to be convinced
that people act out of a sense of justice, one must first be convinced of the importance
of a theory of justice. Accepting that, according to what seems a reasonable historical
reconstruction, the mid-century Anglo-American world of political thought was marked
by an absence of concern both for the sense of justice and for the principles of justice,
then it would seem that there is, indeed, an air of the miraculous in the success of Rawls’s
work. Two distinct but internally related points then call for investigation: (1) the me-
chanics by which Rawls’s work comes to seem credible to those working within its param-
eters (call this the element of conversion), and (2) the tenor and limitations of the variant
of liberalism elaborated by Rawls in terms of the kind of thought, sorts of interest, and
fields of sense opened by the project (call this a question of the character of what one is
converted to).
If one takes seriously the suggestion thatA Theory of JusticeandPolitical Liberalism
should be placed in the company of Plato’sRepublicand other great books of the tradi-
tion, one should recognize that approaching Rawls’s texts requires attention to their liter-
ary qualities. What Rawls rhetorically does in those texts lies very close to the practice of
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