Indeed, the intellectual dominance of Rawls has been so complete, for so long, that we have all become desperately bored of talking about him. To provide a sense of the magnitude of the phenomenon, consider that, of the five most highly-cited works of English-language political philosophy published in the past century, two were written by Rawls, and the other three were written in response to Rawls. Political philosophy has basically been all Rawls all the time for as long as I can remember. Every decade or so a new book comes along, promising to shift the paradigm, to give us all something new to talk about. Each one has fizzled out, sending us all back to Rawls.

What explains this extraordinary persistence? How could this unassuming, and in many respects naive, American philosopher have come to bestride the world like a colossus? This is what I shall attempt to explain.

Before getting to that, however, it is important to acknowledge some of the barriers to a proper appreciation of Rawls’ work. Many people have read a few chapters of Rawls but don’t really get why he is such a big deal. The problem is not that he wrote obscurely—his prose is perfectly ordinary, workaday English. He also used footnotes sparingly and spent very little time discussing the work of others, which makes his writing accessible even to those without much background. The major problem with his writing is that it is boring, and much of what he says seems self-evident. Because everything is so understated, it is easy to miss its importance.

Many readers have also been distracted by the fact that Rawls’ most well-known argument, about the “veil of ignorance” and the “difference principle,” doesn’t really work.1 In this respect, he is a bit like Immanuel Kant. Many readers have also had difficulty taking Kant’s work in moral philosophy seriously, because the argument for the “categorical imperative” that he supplies, in the second section of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, does not work either. But it is a terrible mistake to conclude from this that Kant had nothing interesting to say about morality, merely because his supreme principle of morality was wrong. What is important about Kant’s moral philosophy is the way he sets things up. It is his framing of the problem that revolutionized our thinking about morality, not the specific solution that he proposed.

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The exact same thing is true of Rawls. Within my world of academic philosophy I’ve never met anyone who endorses the specific principle of justice that Rawls proposed. In order to understand the importance of his work, one must focus on the way that he frames the problems of modern liberalism, and of liberal political philosophy. (This is also why it is difficult to get a sense of Rawls’ importance from reading one of the many textbook introductions to his work, because these discussions tend to focus on the doctrinal elements of the view, which are the least defensible or interesting.)

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This is the first and most important paradigm shift in Rawls’ view—but it’s easy to miss, because it’s expressed so simply. Classical 18th century social contract theory, which established the basic principles of liberalism, lacked generality, because it was only a theory about the state. It had nothing to say about the rest of society, other than that these domains should be free from state interference. This became an enormous weakness in the 19th century, with the progress of industrialization, urbanization, and proletarianization, because it meant that social contract theory had nothing to say about a very long list of growing social problems, including pretty much anything going on in the economy. This is why liberalism practically died out in the early 20th century—it had abdicated the field when it came to discussing the most pressing issues of the day.

Rawls’ strategy for reviving liberalism was to reconceptualize the social contract in a more abstract way. The familiar story that one finds in Locke or Rousseau, about an initial “state of nature” that people seek to escape by creating a sovereign power, should be considered a metaphor for an initial condition in which individuals are failing to cooperate with one another, and so seek to escape from these collective action problems by creating institutions. Society, from this perspective, should be considered a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” governed by a basic institutional structure, which includes, but is not limited to, the state. Most importantly, the economy—the system of property rights and exchange relations—is a part of this institutional structure.

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This reconceptualization of social contract theory accomplishes several things. First, it offers an enormous demystification of the concept of justice. Rather than viewing these principles as handed down by God, or as grasped through intuitions that we cannot explain or defend, Rawls sees justice arising organically out of our efforts to piece together stable systems of cooperation. This makes our attempts to secure justice part and parcel of the history of the human social world. (To put the point somewhat more philosophically, his normative principles are tied to a specific social ontology.) One can see in the trajectory of human civilization an attempt to create more extensive, more robust systems of cooperation, accompanied by increasingly sophisticated efforts to articulate the principles of justice that structure the more successful of those institutions. Part of what gives Rawls’ view staying power is the fact that this broader picture is so compelling (and the fact that rival views lack any comparable picture).