A Society of Peoples: The Nature and Limits of Rawls’s International Vision

In this chapter, I provide a synoptic reconstruction of John Rawls’s political philosophy with special focus on his contribution to normative international theory. Perhaps the most influential and important political philosopher of the twentieth century working in the English language, John Rawls spent more than fifty years on the question of what any determinate population of human beings (sharing a language, history and so forth) might rationally, reasonably, and realistically hope politically to become and enduringly to be under favorable but possible background conditions. In two now-canonical monographs, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, he argued that one thing it might politically become and enduringly be is an independent and nonfungible liberal democratic people the citizen members of which, as free equals, visibly enjoy and reliably maintain between themselves political relations they publicly recognize as legitimate and so adequate to their together exercising a shared public reason to identify and realize institutionally the most reasonable conception of justice available to them. In a third and shorter, but also now-canonical, monograph, The Law of Peoples, Rawls asked what two or more independent and nonfungible liberal democratic peoples, if ever there are, might themselves together rationally, reasonably, and realistically hope politically to become and enduringly to be under favorable background conditions. He argued that they might politically become and enduringly be a peaceful and cooperative federation of diverse independent and nonfungible liberal democratic peoples each of which also recognizes, respects, and includes in their federation a class of internationally peaceful well-ordered constitutional republics not yet liberal or democratic, and refrains from interfering coercively in the domestic affairs of any polity within which rulers benevolently ensure that the basic interests of the ruled are reliably met. The upshot of Rawls’s three main monographs, then, is that there is nothing irrational, unreasonable or unrealistic about hoping for a world within which determinate populations of human beings (sharing a language, history, and so forth) become and enduringly remain independent and nonfungible legitimate liberal democratic peoples that then federate for peaceful cooperation not just among themselves but with some well-ordered constitutional republics not yet liberal or democratic and without coercively interfering in the domestic affairs of polities within which rulers benevolently ensure that the basic interests of those they rule are reliably met. While this hope is by itself insufficient to inform practical political decisions under all too common less than favorable conditions, it is, Rawls insists, absolutely essential if we, and especially our political leaders, are to bring to practical political decisions the kind of attitudinal orientation essential to our realizing and maintaining ourselves as diverse, nonfungible, independent free and equal human persons and corporate bodies politic.