MATTHEW SCHERERThough the animus expressed in the piece, not to mention the forum in which it is
published, renders it suspect, there is probably some truth in Alan Ryan’s claim in the
Washington Timesthat ‘‘through the invisible medium of Supreme Court clerks and the
more visible medium of the Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, etc. law reviews, Mr. Rawls’s
ideas have crept into the law of the land.’’^9 Though it circulates only on the level of
hearsay, a somewhat more credible, commonly found narrative attributes to Rawls not
only responsibility for having shifted analytical philosophy away from its concern with
‘‘small-scale problems’’ to return to the care for public problems exemplified by John
Dewey, but also for having shifted a philosophical discourse of governance regulated by
the Utilitarian principles championed by John Stuart Mill toward a discourse that accords
a central place to individual rights.^10
But to say Rawls’s influence has been widespread is not to attest to the sense of
wonder it has created: the latter claim requires a different kind of justification. The most
direct measure of an individual’s status within a given discipline is the extent to which
other members of that discipline feel an obligation to engage with his or her work and
formulate an opinion about it: everyone working in the field of political theory or political
philosophy, it seems, has an opinion about Rawls. What is noteworthy in these opinions
is not their general approval of or admiration for what Rawls has done but the collective
sense that his work has effected a shift in the pathways of disciplinary interest. Stuart
Hampshire is about as guarded on this point as anyone, but, in theNew York Review of
Books, he writes ofA Theory of Justice, ‘‘I think that this book is the most substantial and
interesting contribution to moral philosophy since the war.’’^11 More forcefully, Sheldon
Wolin, writing inPolitical Theory, maintains that ‘‘Insofar as it is possible to attribute to
one man and one book the principle responsibility for both developments, [namely, the
intellectual superiority of liberalism over its critics and the return of analytic philosophy
to the subject of politics] John Rawls incontestably would be that man and hisA Theory
of Justicewould be that book. His accomplishment is nothing less than to have set the
terms of liberal discourse in the English-speaking countries.’’^12 Likewise, according to a
piece written forDissentby Amy Gutmann, ‘‘Political thinking in the academy has
changed since the 1950s and early 1960s in at least three significant ways.... All three of
these changes are attributable to the influence ofA Theory of Justice.’’^13 And even Stanley
Cavell is compelled to admit, in a moment of admiration no doubt tinged with regret,
introducing a series of lectures addressed to the American Philosophical Association, that
‘‘John Rawls’sA Theory of Justice... has, more than any other book of the past two
decades, established the horizon of moral philosophy for the Anglo-American version or
tradition of philosophy (at least).’’^14 In a more personal register, H. L. A. Hart notes in
theUniversity of Chicago Law Review, ‘‘No book of political philosophy since I read the
great classics of the subject has stirred my thoughts as deeply as John Rawls’sA Theory of
Justice.’’^15 Michael Sandel, having made a career out of inciting debates with Rawls’s work,
aptly notes in theHarvard Law Review, ‘‘rare is the work of political philosophy that
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