The question at the center of this tradition: how do you build a just society given the central and immutable fact of self-interest? Self-interest is the starting premise — every serious political thinker since Hobbes has taken it as given — and a just society is not one that pretends otherwise but one whose laws and institutions are designed so that serving one's own interest generally also means staying within them. A functioning political order, a functioning capitalism, a functioning welfare state: all rest on rules built so that compliance is rational for most people most of the time.
But which laws? Which regulations? Fairness is the standard for designing them — not as a metaphysical foundation but as an aspiration. No set of rules is perfectly fair; every regulation produces winners and losers; trade-offs are unavoidable. What a functioning system needs is law that aims at fairness and can be revised when it misses. Democracy is the mechanism that allows the revision — imperfect, often slow, but the only self-correcting arrangement that has been made to work at scale.
John Rawls is the central figure of this tradition's twentieth-century reformulation. A Theory of Justice (1971) gave fairness a rigorous philosophical defense and reset the terms of Anglo-American political philosophy for two generations. The classical ancestors below — Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Mill — worked out the self-interest-and-consent foundation Rawls inherited. The democratic realists — Madison, Niebuhr, Popper — added the case for institutional self-correction. The heirs — Dworkin, Nussbaum, Sen, Anderson, Habermas — continue the Rawlsian project. The critics — Nozick from the libertarian right, Cohen from the egalitarian left, Sandel and others from the communitarian tradition — test its limits.
The closing section turns to the regime this argument actually aims at. Rawls himself called it property-owning democracy: a political economy in which productive wealth is distributed widely enough from the start that justice-as-fairness does not depend on constant redistribution to correct for unequal beginnings. It is more ambitious than the welfare state, and — as the last two decades of Rawls scholarship have rebuilt — it is the institutional form the tradition most coherently demands.
Annotated bibliography
Classical foundations: self-interest, consent, and the rule of law
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) — the founding argument of modern political philosophy. Without a common power, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and the rational choice for self-interested individuals is to transfer their natural liberty to a sovereign strong enough to enforce peace. Every later social-contract argument argues on Hobbes's turf.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) — against Hobbes's absolutism: the state of nature is already governed by natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and legitimate government exists only to protect them. When it fails, resistance is justified. Jefferson lifted Locke almost verbatim.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and the political essays — Hume rejected the social contract as historical fiction and grounded political authority in habit, interest, and convention. A corrective to the tendency to overread consent: most of the time we obey because we always have.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) — the two books belong together. Smith's markets work because they are embedded in moral norms and the rule of law, not because atoms pursue utility. He warned sharply against the tendency of merchants to combine against the public and against the ways the division of labor could deaden workers' minds.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) — the harm principle: individuals should be free to act as they choose except where their actions harm others. The canonical liberal statement of liberty's limits, and the bridge from classical liberalism toward the twentieth-century welfare state.
Democratic realism: self-interest, institutions, and self-correction
James Madison, The Federalist Papers (1787–88), especially numbers 10 and 51 — the founding American statement of the realist position: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Factions are inevitable, self-interest cannot be abolished, and good constitutional design works by pitting interest against interest and power against power. The American constitutional order is an essay in this tradition.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) — "Christian realism" as the most influential twentieth-century American statement of the view that politics must start from an honest reckoning with human self-interest, and with the stronger self-interest of groups. Niebuhr's epigram: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." He shaped a generation of American public thinkers, from George Kennan to Martin Luther King to Barack Obama.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) — Popper reframed the old question. Not "who should rule?" but "how do we design institutions that allow us to remove bad rulers and bad laws without violence?" Democracy as fallibilism, piecemeal social engineering against grand utopian schemes, the always-imperfect but always-revisable political order.
Rawls
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) — the most important work of Anglo-American political philosophy in the twentieth century, and the anchor of the tradition gathered here. Rawls asked what principles free and rational citizens would choose to govern their society if they did not know in advance what position they would occupy within it — what class, talents, race, or conception of the good. From this "original position" behind a "veil of ignorance," he argued, they would choose two principles, in strict priority: equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged (the difference principle). He called the resulting view justice as fairness: a conception whose test is whether its arrangements could be accepted as fair by every person bound by them, including those who end up at the bottom. Every serious debate about distributive justice in the past half-century is downstream of this book.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993) — the late reformulation, written to address the fact that citizens of a free society will disagree about ultimate religious and philosophical questions. How then can they share a common political framework? Rawls's answer is the "overlapping consensus": a political conception of justice, distinct from any one comprehensive doctrine, that citizens of different traditions can each affirm from their own starting points.
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) — Rawls's own final summary, prepared from his Harvard lectures and published at the end of his life. The clearest single-volume introduction to the theory, and the version most users of the argument now cite.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (1999) — the extension of the theory to questions of international justice. Less widely accepted than the domestic theory and criticized from the left for being too deferent to existing state sovereignty, but the starting point for much subsequent work on global justice.
Samuel Freeman, Rawls (Routledge, 2007) — by the editor of Rawls's Collected Papers; the authoritative single-volume guide and the best book to read after Rawls himself.
Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (2007) — a short, direct introduction by a former student who went on to extend Rawls to global justice.
The contemporary heirs
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (2000) and Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) — the most worked-out post-Rawlsian theory of distributive justice: "equality of resources," with its hypothetical insurance markets and the distinction between option-luck and brute-luck inequalities. Law's Empire (1986) extends the framework to legal reasoning: law as a principled interpretive practice expressing equal concern and respect.
Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (2006) and Creating Capabilities (2011) — the capabilities approach, developed with Sen, extends Rawls: justice requires securing a threshold list of central human capabilities (life, bodily health, bodily integrity, affiliation, practical reason, and six others) for all members of a society. More Aristotelian than Rawls, but within the same liberal-egalitarian project.
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009) — Sen's friendly critique: rather than specify a single ideal set of institutions, compare actual arrangements and ask which are more just than others. Development as Freedom (1999) is the earlier and more accessible application of the capability approach.
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government (2017) and The Imperative of Integration (2010) — the American philosopher most directly continuing the Rawlsian project toward regulated capitalism and workplace democracy. "Relational equality" reframes the egalitarian concern from the distribution of stuff to the avoidance of hierarchy and domination. Private Government argues that the modern American workplace is a de-facto authoritarian state, and that classical liberalism ought to be concerned. Hijacked (2023) is her recent historical argument that the work ethic, originally an egalitarian Protestant critique of idle aristocrats, was captured in the nineteenth century to discipline workers.
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (1992) — the German parallel. Democratic legitimacy rests on procedures of inclusive deliberation among free and equal citizens; laws bind because they could be accepted through reasoned argument. Rawls and Habermas held a famous exchange in the 1990s and converged more than they disagreed.
The critics
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) — the libertarian reply, published three years after Theory of Justice by Rawls's Harvard colleague. Any redistributive state violates Lockean rights; only a minimal state limited to protection of persons, property, and contracts can be justified. The indispensable opposing position.
G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) — the egalitarian-Marxist reply, and the most sustained challenge to Rawls from the left. The difference principle is too generous to the talented, who exploit their bargaining position to extract incentive payments that a truly just society would not tolerate. Justice, for Cohen, applies not only to the basic structure but to the choices of individuals within it.
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) — the communitarian reply. Rawls's original position presupposes an "unencumbered self" abstracted from the attachments that actually constitute moral identity. The Tyranny of Merit (2020) argues that Rawlsian meritocratic liberalism produced the populist backlash.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) — the post-liberal critique. Modern moral philosophy (Rawls included) has lost the tradition-embedded framework within which its vocabulary once made sense.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983) — the pluralist critique. Different social goods should be distributed by different criteria internal to their social meaning, not by a single unified theory of justice.
Property-owning democracy: the institutional program
Rawls was not, in the end, a philosopher of the welfare state — a fact the welfare-state reception of his work has largely obscured. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) he laid out five candidate regimes — laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, state socialism with a command economy, property-owning democracy, and liberal (democratic) socialism — and argued that only the last two satisfy his principles. Welfare-state capitalism fails, he argued, because it permits very large inequalities in the ownership of productive assets (capital, land, firms), which translate into unequal political power and a dependent underclass sustained by transfers rather than equipped to participate as equals.
Property-owning democracy, by contrast, distributes productive wealth itself widely across the population — through inheritance and wealth taxation, broad access to education and capital, strong antitrust enforcement, worker ownership, and the active diffusion of ownership — so that redistribution after the fact is not the central tool because predistribution has already done much of the work. The label is Rawls's; the underlying idea comes from the British economist James Meade. Rawls's principles thus demand a more ambitious political economy than the American welfare state has ever delivered, and the literature below has been rebuilding that position since his death in 2002.
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), §§41–52 — the text where Rawls makes the distinction between welfare-state capitalism and property-owning democracy explicit. Worth reading alongside §§42–43 of A Theory of Justice (1971), where the concept appears in less developed form.
James Meade, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property (1964) — the source Rawls cites. Meade, a Nobel laureate economist of the social-democratic left, argued that neither laissez-faire nor Soviet-style socialism nor the welfare state adequately addressed the concentration of capital, and proposed the broad distribution of productive wealth as the alternative.
Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (2012) — the scholarly volume that pulled property-owning democracy back to the center of Rawls scholarship. Essays by Samuel Freeman, Waheed Hussain, and others on the history of the idea, its policy implications, and its relation to contemporary political economy.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and A Brief History of Equality (2022) — not written in the Rawlsian idiom, but the empirical work most often cited by contemporary advocates of property-owning democracy. Piketty's progressive wealth tax and his case for the diffusion of capital ownership sit naturally inside the property-owning-democracy frame.
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government (2017) — the workplace side of the argument. If property-owning democracy requires that citizens be equipped to participate as equals rather than as dependents, the American workplace — where most people spend most of their waking hours under conditions the American political tradition would never tolerate in the public sphere — is an obvious target for reform.
See also The Welfare State Under Pressure for the political-economy literature on the regulated-capitalist alternative Rawls found insufficient but which this tradition has generally defended against the neoliberal attack.