Rawls's A Theory of Justice at Fifty: Introduction

Throughout 2021, numerous celebrations, conferences and events took place to pay tribute to the Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921-2001) and to his most famous book, A Theory of Justice published just fifty years ago in 1971. At the time, the publication became an immediate success worldwide and its influence has been deemed tremendous, the most commented and quoted philosophy book of the century. What was so special about it, was that it brought back to the forefront major normative political and moral issues such as the meaning of distributive justice and its value for democracies, as well as a definitive critique of welfarism. Through an evocation of Rawls’s impact as experienced in the States, in France and Europe, from different disciplines ranging from political and moral philosophy to economics and politics, this issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville will help to understand the complex nature of European-American cultural and political relations, well in the spirit of Tocqueville. This introduction to this issue presents the various contributions that have been brought together to achieve this goal.