Commissioned Book Review: Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Author | Jack Kellam |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920963786 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
963786PSW0010.1177/1478929920963786Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism
and the Remaking of Political Philosophy
by Katrina Forrester. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2019. 432 pp., £35.00, ISBN
9780691163086.
‘Liberal egalitarianism’ dominates contempo-
rary analytic political philosophy – so much so
that, like many firmly entrenched hegemons, the
contingency of its supremacy often passes unno-
ticed. One learns as a student in the discipline
that learning to speak its distinctive language is
often a condition for making oneself understood.
However, for many, this is less commonly
grasped as developing familiarity with a particu-
lar political and intellectual worldview than it is
grappling with political philosophy as such.
Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice
offers an intellectual history of how the con-
stellation of ideas, problems and assumptions
that we now know as ‘liberal egalitarianism’
came to dominate post-war political philoso-
phy in this way, largely in the wake of its high
priest’s magnum opus, John Rawls’ (1971) A
Theory of Justice. In so doing, it looks to resitu-
ate the highly abstract and idealised arguments
with which its proponents are associated back
into specific political and historical contexts:
liberal preoccupation with the overbearing
state in the aftermath of the Second World War,
revisionist debates among socialists about
equality in the 1950s’ UK Labour Party and the
rise of the New Right in the 1980s. This,
Forrester suggests, gives us reason to reflect on
whether contemporary political philosophy’s
basic conceptual tools, seen afresh as the prod-
ucts of particular historical contexts, are best
suited to the changed political landscape of the
twenty-first century.
The book comprises two principal lines of
the argument. The first responds to a growing
literature that approaches Rawls from the
perspective of the history of political thought.
In the book’s opening chapters, Forrester con-
tends that the essentials of Rawls’ argument in A
Theory of Justice were not assembled, as is
often presumed, in response to the turbulence of
1960s North America – Vietnam, Civil Rights
and the Great Society – but primarily the 1940s
and 1950s. Immediately following his wartime
service, Rawls aligned with a form of minimal-
istic liberalism concerned about state overreach,
through which he developed his understanding
of society as structured by game-like consen-
sual rule-following, alongside an early version
of the ‘original position’.
Periods spent in Oxford, exposed to ongoing
Labour Party debates, pushed him leftwards and
brought the concern with equality captured in
the mature Rawls’ ‘principles of justice’. As his
magnum opus underwent its long gestation
through the 1960s, the intervening period’s
challenges to Rawls’ assumptions of stability
and consensus made little impact. A ‘particular
variety of postwar liberalism was [therefore]
preserved in philosophical amber for the dura-
tion of the 1960s’ (p. xiv). By the time Theory
was finally published in 1971, and incessantly
poured over by philosophers through the fol-
lowing decades, it came to represent – for left
and right – the great liberal defence of egalitari-
anism and the welfare state. Its initial birth in a
deep scepticism about both, as Forrester looks
to show, was readily overlooked.
Beyond a specific intervention into Rawls
scholarship, Forrester also develops how ‘liberal
egalitarianism’ congealed in the Harvard phi-
losopher’s ‘shadow’, engulfing the discipline of
political philosophy and shaping it in its own
image. The thematic chapters that cover the
remainder of the book show how the philosophi-
cal orientation generated by ‘Rawlsianism’
(crudely put, balancing our ‘considered convic-
tions’ about ‘justice’ through philosophical
reflection) were put to work by a host of
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