John Rawls and "Our Tradition" of Democracy

The notion of a clear distinction between Rawls's liberalism and social democracy rests on a caricatured conception of the liberal tradition and Rawls's place in it. From Rousseau, John Adams, and Madison through Tocqueville to Dewey, notable political theorists have sought to balance the two principles at the core of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. In this essay I sketch the ways in which American thinkers and activists escaped the cages in which commentators have tried to confine them, not only the false binary between liberalism and democratic socialism but also that between secularism and religious belief. As Rawls himself tried to make clear in his later writing, his ideal of justice drew from earlier theorists who understood the constitutive role of social interaction and inherited traditions, and he envisioned a society with room for people animated by comprehensive philosophical and religious ideas not shared by everyone else. Rawls's political liberalism, historicist as well as pluralist, was attuned as much to the threat inequality poses to freedom as to the endangered status of freedom in mass society. Rawls's ideas, especially as articulated in his book Justice as Fairness, remain a vital resource for social democrats who prize social and economic equality as well as individual liberty.