The Law of Peoples: With "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited"
Rawls extends justice as fairness to international relations by asking what principles liberal and 'decent' non-liberal peoples could reasonably accept as a law of peoples. The central move is to replace the state with the 'people' as the basic unit and to derive a narrower set of international principles—including basic human rights, a duty of non-intervention, and a just war doctrine—that do not presuppose liberal constitutionalism. The result is a deliberately non-cosmopolitan theory: toleration of hierarchical societies that meet minimal decency conditions, and a refusal to impose liberal democracy globally.
Key Insights
✦What is the central innovation of The Law of Peoples, and how does it depart from A Theory of Justice?
The innovation is methodological: Rawls constructs a second original position in which representatives of 'peoples' rather than individuals choose principles of international conduct. This yields a narrower set of principles than domestic justice—basic human rights, self-determination, non-intervention, and jus ad bellum—that liberal and 'decent hierarchical' peoples can both accept. The departure from A Theory of Justice is stark. As Wojciech Sadurski has noted, the universalist theme of the earlier work 'seemed to be further weakened' by The Law of Peoples, requiring liberals to 'abandon all of her missionary zeal' and the ideal of robust liberal rights for all . Rawls no longer asks what individuals owe each other globally, but what peoples owe each other as peoples.
✦What is a 'decent hierarchical people,' and why does Rawls insist on tolerating them?
A decent hierarchical people is a non-liberal society that nevertheless meets minimal conditions: it respects basic human rights, its legal system imposes bona fide moral duties on all members, and it possesses a 'decent consultation hierarchy' that gives various groups a voice in political decisions. Rawls argues that liberal peoples must tolerate such societies because the criterion of reciprocity—the same standard that grounds domestic political liberalism—applies internationally. If reasonable pluralism exists within societies, it also exists among peoples. To insist that all societies adopt liberal constitutional democracy would deny equal standing to billions of people who live under other reasonable orders. This is the most controversial move in the book, and critics have charged that it concedes too much to hierarchy and gender inequality.
✦How did cosmopolitan critics respond to Rawls's rejection of global distributive justice?
The cosmopolitan critique is the most sustained objection to the book. Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge had earlier extended Rawls's own domestic difference principle to the global level, arguing that the arbitrariness of national birth is no less morally arbitrary than the arbitrariness of family background. Rawls explicitly rejects this extension: his law of peoples includes a duty of assistance to burdened societies, but not a global difference principle. The reason is that peoples, unlike individuals, are responsible for their own political and economic institutions. A cosmopolitan reviewer described the book as a retreat into 'political relativism,' where the geographical location of one's birth becomes a morally arbitrary factor that Rawls's theory cannot adequately address . Defenders reply that Rawls was not attempting a comprehensive theory of global justice at all, but responding to a narrower practical question about eliminating the great evils of history .
✦What is the publication history of the volume, and what does its structure reveal?
The book consists of two parts. 'The Law of Peoples' is a major reworking of a shorter 1993 essay published in the Oxford Amnesty Lectures; 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited' first appeared in 1997 . Harvard University Press published the combined volume in 1999, in both hardcover and paperback, running 199 pages . The pairing is deliberate: the public reason essay responds to critics of Political Liberalism and clarifies how religious and secular citizens can share a political conception, which is the domestic analogue of the international toleration argument. Taken together, the volume represents Rawls's final statement on how liberalism can be both principled and non-imperialist. Readers should note that the book is not a systematic treatise like A Theory of Justice; it is a pair of essays, one substantially revised, addressing distinct but related problems.
✦How has the book been received in the two decades since publication, and what is its standing in global justice debates?
The book is widely acknowledged as the text that 'ignited theorists' relatively newly found interest' in global justice, even among those who reject its conclusions . Gillian Brock's survey of the debate describes a 'lively debate between critics and advocates' in which much contemporary theorizing about global justice is framed in terms of its exchange with Rawls. The critics include cosmopolitans who find the toleration of hierarchy indefensible, and statists who find even Rawls's modest duties of assistance too demanding. Defenders, including some contributors to Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?, argue that the book is best read as an exercise in 'realistic utopia'—a theory that takes people as they are and asks what is possible, not what is ideal. Its standing is secure as a foundational text, even if few contemporary theorists accept its conclusions in full.
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