Rawls, Historian : Remarks on Political Liberalism's ‘Historicism'

John Rawls was not a historian; this much is obvious. What is less obvious is whether or not his political theory does at crucial points rely on essential ly historical arguments. Such a question would once have seemed far-fetched. After all, the standard story of twentieth-century political thought not only holds that Rawls single-handedly revived the discipline of political philoso phy with his 1971 Theory of Justice ; it also claims that Rawls proved that analytical (and essentially ahistorical) philosophy could address real social and political problems. Unlike with Rawls's twentieth-century predecessors thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss or Eric Voegelin, once ridiculed as 'gurus' by Brian Barry his theory did not in any way depend on dubious philosophies of history, or on grand and essentially unfalsifiable (or even undebatable) claims about 'modernity'.2 Instead, A Theory of Justice was famously conceived sub specie aeternitatis it regarded, as Rawls put it, 'the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view'.3 Not least, this meant that the 'veil of ignorance' would deprive those behind it of any knowledge which generation they belonged to, and which 'stage of civilization' their society had reached; it finally would also hide from them any historical memories.4