An awareness of the depth of the critique ranged against liberal theory is what has inspired its late flowering in our own time. Viewed in a wider historical perspective, it is astonishing to see the revival of concepts and modes of thought that received opinion had long declaimed as outré. Even ideas that in liberal circles had not had much play since the eighteenth century, such as the social contract, began to assume a new prominence. A rediscovered pride in the liberal understanding of individual rights, especially by contrast with the dismal record of individual protection within any more expansive construction of rights, led to a new appreciation of the centrality of liberal political order. Protections for the individual and, limitations on the power of government became the currency of political discussion. Even liberal political economy, so long disdained as laissez faire, acquired new respect and influence. The political counterpart is found in the universal embrace of liberal democracy as the only legitimate political model around the globe.

Yet there has been something enormously brittle about this liberal reju­venation, a brittleness that ultimately is the source of the sense of crisis that has reached into public consciousness.

The second related challenge was to find a means of giving concrete content to the moral principles that defined the liberal order. All previous accounts of morality that had escaped the Scylla of contestable foundations, such as Kant's, had perished on the Charybdis of formalism without practical guidance. It was not enough to find a formulation of what is right that could not be rejected without self-contradiction: there must also be a substantial connection with the liberal political order it is intended to support. This lack of specific guidance infects, in Rawls's view, all the more substantive conceptions of morality, including the Aristotelian, the theological, and the utilitarian. Moral principles are themselves in need of a further set of principles to guide their application. If one wants to be virtuous or God­fearing one still has to know what is right in those terms.

These two interrelated problems seemed to have been solved in Rawls's conception of the original position in which human beings meet to formulate the principles that ought to govern their relations with one another. "The crucial thing," he observes, "is not to use principles that are contested" (585). This is accomplished through the thought experiment in which we meet behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing who we are, what our position will be relative to others, or how our particular conception of the good will be defined. Most important of all, he explains, "I have avoided attributing to the parties any ethical motivation. They decide solely on the basis of what seems best calculated to further their interests so far as they can ascertain them" (584). The considerations made in this egalitarian anteroom to politics, which is reminiscent of nothing so much as the egalitarian opening and conclusion of the Republic in the underworld, are all of a prudential nature that presuppose little more than a rational interest in furthering one's own interests.

It is not the individuals who meet that are just but the situation that defines their encounter. "The original position is defined in such a way that it is a status quo in which any agreements reached are fair" (120). There may be a generalized sense of justice that must be conceded to the moral pioneers, but nothing hinges on it. All that is necessary is that they be people who at least are concerned to further their own interests and aware that this will involve some degree of conflict with the self-fulfillment of others. The arrangements they work out will reflect their general sense of justice because the settlement will be "everyone's best reply, so to speak, to the corresponding demands of others" (119). For each one the decision will simply reflect the best arrangement of principles that will serve their individual self-interest.

Rawls has been much criticized by communitarians for deriving everything from such an ideal convention of "unencumbered" selves (516).¹⁵ But he appears to be doing no more than projecting the self-understanding of liberalism back to its beginning. In that sense, we are "mutually disinterested" (129), without many strong ties of affection to one another or at least no such attachments can be assumed. We do have different and often conflicting conceptions of the good; this is the problem that has prompted the develop­ment of the liberal construction. It makes eminent sense to concentrate, as Rawls suggests, on the "primary goods" — rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth — that together with a sense of self-worth constitute those things that everyone will desire irrespective of their ultimate goal. The agreement he maps out aims, therefore, at the just distribution of those instrumental goods.

Individuals, intent on whatever their own understanding of the good turns out to be and ignorant of their social position, would choose to be governed by principles that all would accept irrespective of their eventual status determination. Their interest would dictate that they endorse the most fundamental of all liberal principles. In its simplest formulation, the first principle is that "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others" (60). This is the first principle, Rawls insists, in the order of priority because it represents a distribution of the most significant primary good: the equal liberty to pursue all other goods. It is the basis for the self-esteem that is derived from "the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties" (544), the only way of ensuring equal treatment.

The second principle, which has provoked far greater comment, is often taken as indicative of Rawls's fundamentally egalitarian leanings. His own personal politics aside, however, the second principle can just as easily be read as a more traditional liberal justification of social inequality. Again in its simplest formulation, the principle is that "social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all" (60). Rawls later underlines the insistence that inequalities must be justified in terms of their benefits to the least-advantaged members of society. But this is no more than the resistance that liberal society has always felt was needed against an extension of its own first principle of equality in liberty. Friedrich Hayek makes essentially the same case, in very different tones, when he asserts that the advantages of a few do not injure but rather promote ultimately the welfare of all (The Constitution of Liberty, 88).

Taken together, the two principles provide a fair equality of opportunity that maximizes the well-being of all, not simply a majority, and can be presented as the scheme that is most likely to win the acceptance of all. The principles constitute, Rawls concludes, the best foundation for "consti­tutional democracy" whose major institutions and practices can be derived from them. "My aim has been to indicate not only that the principles of justice fit our considered judgments but also that they provide the strongest arguments for freedom" (243). The guarantees of individual liberties and the rights of political participation, as well as the rule of law, are all more securely grounded in the ordered principles of justice that all must acknowledge. Avoiding both a dogmatic assertion of ungrounded principles and a reduc­tionist admission that all principles are mere preferences, Rawls's principles rely on "weak and widely held presumptions" that can be expected to win general acceptance. "Surely, our liberties are most firmly based when they are derived from principles that persons fairly situated with respect to one another can agree to if they can agree to anything at all" (244).

It is perhaps not unfair to detect in that "surely" the germ of self-doubt that disturbs the whole system. Even the weak stipulations that seem to have made the smooth emergence of agreement possible may turn out not to have been weak enough. Toward the end of the book Rawls reflects on the possibility of individuals who do not find acting from a sense of justice good for them, and concludes that "it is rational to authorize measures needed to maintain just institutions." To those who must be thus compelled "one can only say: their nature is their misfortune" (576). Agreement, it turns out, cannot be counted on to reach all or to form a seamless social whole. There will continue to be expressions of dissent, both with and without malice aforethought, and no amount of liberal thinning of the presuppositions can evoke harmony from the parts.