Reconstructing Rawls

Robert Taylor's argument is that John Rawls took a wrong turn. The so-called political turn of the 1980s, with its new attention to pluralism and the accommodation of difference, weakened autonomy-based liberalism and drew it towards cultural relativism. Taylor wants to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment, and the Prussian Enlightenment in particular, by redeeming the comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism he finds implicit in A Theory of Justice.

The results are deliberately unorthodox: a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist account of fair equality of opportunity, and an ascetic, antimaterialist difference principle. What remains is still recognisably Rawlsian, but it follows a road out of Theory that Rawls himself never took. For readers of political philosophy who think later Rawls conceded too much and want a rigorous Kantian alternative.