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Liberalism and Social Theory after John Rawls

  • Katrina Forrester EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 7. Juli 2022
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Abstract

Does neo-Rawlsian political philosophy offer an adequate account of the social conditions of capitalism? In this paper, I present two arguments for thinking that it does not. First, I develop a historicist critique of liberal egalitarianism, arguing that it provides a vision of social reality that is intimately connected to the historical and ideological constellation that I call postwar liberalism, and as such cannot account for social reality since the neoliberal revolutions of the late twentieth century. Second, I explore arguments in Marxist and critical social theory that cast liberal egalitarianism as partial, on account of its inadequate portrait of capitalist society. In surveying responses to these critiques, I argue that merely extending liberal egalitarianism into new domains to account for how contemporary circumstances have changed since the mid-twentieth century cannot address the problem of its partial view of the social world. Taking seriously the insights of critical social theory and the study of capitalism should lead to a challenge to liberal egalitarianism, not an extension of it.


Corresponding author: Katrina Forrester, Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2022-07-07
Published in Print: 2022-05-27

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Heruntergeladen am 8.12.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/auk-2022-2020/pdf
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