8 for Korean readers
Korean Edition Recommendation 13

Introduction 15
Chapter 1.
The Formation of Justice 37
Chapter 2.
Duties 97
Chapter 3.
War and Responsibility 149
Chapter 4.
The New Egalitarians 199
Chapter 5.
Going Global 257
Chapter 6.
The Problem of the Future 307
Chapter 7.
New Right and Left 359
Chapter 8.
The Limits of Philosophy 415
Outgoing Words 465

Acknowledgments 479
Translator's Note 485
Week 506
Search 622

1.
John Rawls and the Revival of Anglo-American Political Philosophy

“In December 1944, soldiers from Company F, 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, established positions on Leyte Island, Philippines.
Those stationed just outside the village of Limon attempted to occupy the ridge overlooking the village.
All they could do was hold their ground against fierce resistance from the Japanese army.
A lieutenant, who was also a Lutheran pastor, gave a brief sermon to encourage the men of his company.
The lieutenant reassured his fellow soldiers that God was directing the American bullets at the Japanese while at the same time protecting them from the Japanese.”

These words were of no comfort to the other soldiers in Company F, at least not to one young soldier there.
Rather, it enraged him.
He thought that whatever God's will actually is, it must conform to our most basic notion of justice.
If nothing else, a just God should be fair and just.
After the war, the soldier, discharged from the military, entered graduate school with these questions in mind, and from the 1950s onwards, he began writing a series of papers on the question of what justice is.
This liberal analytic philosopher named John Rawls finally published A Theory of Justice in 1971.
In this book, Rawls argued that the 'basic liberties' of individuals and 'equality' among citizens are essential to the concept of fairness.
Society can only deviate from an equitable distribution of benefits and burdens if the 'difference principle' applies, which states that inequalities should benefit the most vulnerable.
Otherwise, he argued, a 'just society' would be governed by responsibility, work, suffering, and a fair distribution of the wealth produced by the community, and the fairness of this distribution could be determined behind a 'veil of ignorance', where no hypothetical individual could know where he or she would rank in the hierarchical structure of the society to which he or she belongs.

To put it simply, it was like dividing a piece of cake fairly.
People are free to take any piece of cake they want.
The cake that is freely taken must be distributed fairly to everyone.
To do this, the person who is least fortunate and has to get the piece of cake last must cut the piece of cake.

“This book, ‘In the Shadow of Justice,’ deals with the transformation of liberal political philosophy in the Anglo-American world in the late 20th century.
This book deals with the origins of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
And it explores how A Theory of Justice was accepted, gained a firm position, and became canonical amid the emergence of liberal political philosophy known as 'liberal egalitarianism.'
This book is also about the changing relationship between social conditions and political philosophy.
This book tells the story of how a particular form of liberal political philosophy emerged in the United States after World War II and how that philosophy transformed as the postwar welfare state system began to crack.
In writing “In the Shadow of Justice,” I believed that organizing the history of the rise of Rawls’s theory and neo-Rawlsian political philosophy would help raise various questions about the ideological and political power of ideas, the relationship between theory and practice, and the changes in ideas over time.
- From the preface to the Korean edition

2.
John Rawls and his era from an intellectual historical perspective

Intellectual history aims to elucidate the intellectual background, context, and intention of the author of a specific text in writing it.
Furthermore, this author's intention is to explain how the text was understood and received by fellow researchers as well as by the society in which it was read.
The seemingly highly abstract and complex philosophical system of 『On Justice』, such as the 'original position,' the 'veil of ignorance,' and the 'two principles of justice,' may seem detached from reality by overly abstracting it from the real world.
But in fact, this discussion can be thought of as a direct response to the horrific experiences that shaped most of the first 30 years of Rawls's life.
For example, he experiences the deaths of two of his brothers from diseases he contracted from them as a child.
Also, during his military service, he once missed a mission to donate blood to an injured fellow soldier, but the soldier who was performing the mission in his place was ambushed and killed.
These tragic events had a profound influence on his later interest in questions of luck and fairness.

On the other hand, Rawls's A Theory of Justice is also a product of the 1950s and 1960s, a period that Rawls had to face when he returned to academia with the trauma of war.
In particular, the postwar period was a time of struggle against the Jim Crow era in the United States, and a time of social upheaval represented by the Vietnam War abroad.
In particular, the civil rights movement and the issues of the Vietnam War and conscription during this period raised questions about the extent of the government's power over its citizens and its legitimacy.
In addition to Rawls, philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin, Hannah Pitkin, Michael Walzer, Joel Feinberg, and Brian Barry have participated in the debate on this issue, leading to the emergence of the so-called public issues philosophy.
And it was precisely this social situation and academic movement that helped to create the intellectual atmosphere and context in which Rawls's A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971 and was accepted by both the academic world and the public.
So then, how should we evaluate the debate they had at that time?
"Under the Shadow of Justice" goes beyond simply summarizing the intellectual landscape and debates of the time, but also encompasses evaluations of the various debates that took place at the time.
For example, Katrina Forester, while eloquently summarizing their debates, remarks that many “philosophers have become more deeply involved in politics than ever before, and their theories have moved in the direction of depoliticization” (text, pp. 196, 197).
That is, by focusing “on individuals with the power to make dramatic choices,” discussions of public morality and public ethics have neglected the social, political, and economic contexts in which they act.
Most notably, Forrester sharply criticizes Rawls's views on civil disobedience, saying they reflect "an element of status quo bias" in his thinking.

“If disobedience is justified, it is because the principles of justice are violated in the ‘customs of social life.’
However, Rawls also placed significant limits on the application of the principles and set out the conditions under which disobedience would be justified.
Disobedience is justified only when 'a person has been exposed for a prolonged period to deliberate injustice that cannot be remedied by ordinary political resistance, when the injustice manifestly violates the liberties of equal citizens, and when the consequences of similar resistance in similar circumstances are acceptable.'
In addition, there was another limitation.
Disobedience was justified only when it was a resistance to 'violations of the equal liberty that determines the status of citizenship', or in effect, resistance for the freedom of oppressed minorities or religious groups.
Disobedience on the grounds of unfair tax policies was difficult to justify.
The same was true of disobedience that arose in defense of economic freedom or freedom in the workplace, or disobedience that arose in the name of social and economic injustice, such as poverty, inequality, oppression, and various structural disadvantages.
This view of disobedience implies that resistance that questions economic justice undermines social stability and is therefore unjustified.”
- From the text

In this way, this book meticulously organizes the social, political, and economic context in which Rawls's A Theory of Justice emerged, as well as the fierce debates among contemporary political philosophers surrounding it, while also sharply exposing the limitations and problems inherent in the contemporary debate.
While chapters 2 and 3 address contemporary debates surrounding the Jim Crow era, the Vietnam War, the Just War, and civil disobedience, contextualizing the intellectual and social climate in which A Theory of Justice would be received, chapter 4 examines how a unique and new form of egalitarianism emerged in the process of responding to challenges from both the left and right to reconstruct and reconsider Rawls's framework, which had become canonical since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971.
Chapters 5 and 6 expand our perspectives in time and space, addressing questions of global justice raised in the context of decolonization (Chapter 5) and justice for future generations, including the climate crisis (Chapter 6).
Chapter 7 examines the challenges posed by the New Left and New Right, focusing on the concepts of markets, choice, and responsibility, and examines how Rawls's theory and Anglo-American liberal political philosophers responded and what their limitations were.
The final eight chapters conclude by highlighting the limitations of Anglo-American political philosophy and presenting a timely and powerful argument questioning the relevance of liberal thought since Rawls to understanding the times we live in.

3.
The theory of justice that became a paradigm

One point that Forester strongly points out is that although Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, Rawls's philosophy and the modern Anglo-American political philosophy that followed it are fundamentally products of the 1940s and 1950s.
The postwar period began with optimism about growth and prosperity and the postwar consensus on the welfare state, and it was in this social climate that Rawls honed and refined the basic concepts of A Theory of Justice.
However, by the early 1970s, when 『A Theory of Justice』 was published and liberal egalitarianism was solidifying its dominant position in Anglo-American academia, the conditions of this post-war society were already disintegrating, and new problems, such as stagflation and the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, were appearing.
This situation was not limited to the 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the legacy of the postwar consensus was completely eroding and disappearing as politics shifted to the right, the welfare state continued to disintegrate, public functions were privatized, and globalization spread.
Ultimately, due to this trend, the redistributive liberal egalitarianism advocated by Rawls and others has become increasingly less of a realistic possibility.

Simply put, Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," which appeared against the backdrop of the Keynesian welfare state era and attempted to justify it, had to confront a society that was completely different from the one he had aimed to build immediately after its publication.
Therefore, the creation of a new paradigm was necessary.
Nonetheless, 『A Theory of Justice』 established itself as a powerful paradigm as soon as it was published, and accordingly, discussions in Anglo-American political philosophy have had to unfold under the shadow of Rawls's theory of justice even up to the present day.

“I understand the history of liberal political philosophy as a ‘ghost story,’ in which Rawls’s theory survives ‘like a ghost’ even after the conditions it described and under which it could have emerged have disappeared.
(…) As politics shifted to the right, Rawls's theory was solidified as a representative of left-wing liberalism, a great theory that survived past the mid-20th century.”
- From the preface to the Korean edition

“In this way, Rawls’ theory was continuously challenged and developed.
As a result, Rawls's existence—or at least his ideas—continues to haunt philosophical debate like a ghost, a perpetual object of debate for both followers and critics.
This trend continued into the 1990s, when the theory of competitive democracy gradually gained influence.
Now, to become a political philosopher at a prestigious university, you absolutely had to be well-versed in Rawlsianism or one of several alternative theories similar to it.”
- From the text

What problems might have occurred?
Literally, paradigm means normal science.
It dictates what issues will be addressed and how they will be addressed.
Alternative arguments were deemed unnecessary or should be rejected because they did not fit with the basic assumptions and premises of the paradigm of Rawls's theory of justice.
Alternative visions, such as Brian Barry's redistributionist theory, which emphasizes the role of the state, have been abandoned.
Examples include the fact that Rawls and Rawlsian philosophers only presented limited arguments in contemporary discussions of racism, their ambiguity regarding measures to achieve positive equality, and Bates, who saw the possibility of radical redistribution at the domestic and global levels in the difference principle, ultimately leaned closer to the latter between dependency theory and liberal development economics.
In this respect, 『In the Shadow of Justice』 examines how 『Justice』 established itself as a paradigm after the 1970s, how social changes and the major issues raised by them have inevitably led to the development of Justice theory in Anglo-American political philosophy, and how numerous political philosophers over the past 50 years have accepted, challenged, attempted to revise, and overcome its limitations.

5.
Shadows of Justice: The Ghost of Rawls

“During the last decade of the 20th century, liberal ideas expanded and provoked debate, and were applied to numerous moral and political situations and challenges.
Liberal egalitarianism has been defined as a theory based on moral and political consensus.
It was an ahistorical, institutional, and individualizing theory that relied on the ideal of a relationship between moral persons capable of reaching agreement.
Liberal egalitarianism has placed overwhelming emphasis on issues of distribution and ownership.
Over time, the discussion surrounding the assumptions of liberal egalitarianism has become increasingly closed.
The components of Rawls's thought severely limited the kinds of politics that could be associated with it.
Claims such as coming to terms with the past were rejected, and while ideas about the future were accepted, only a certain kind of abstract and moral future was permitted.
The logic of liberal political philosophy toward higher levels of abstraction and complexity has led political philosophers, when faced with challenging philosophical questions such as those surrounding overpopulation, to focus on what future decisions are acceptable from a present perspective.
But this ignored other intellectually interesting but more politically charged issues that political philosophers might grapple with, such as historical injustice and compensation.
There are many roads not taken in the history of liberal egalitarianism.
“The conceptual structure of the theory Rawls proposed has often justified the [limited] choices of philosophers and provided a mechanism by which liberalism is preserved intact.”
- From the text

Ultimately, what Katrina Forrester is ultimately trying to say in this book is the current validity of Anglo-American analytical liberal political philosophy.
It's not a simple problem.
There are also problems that need to be restored and solutions that need to be inherited from Rolls and liberal political philosophy.
However, we must also pay attention to the truly practical problems that the existing liberal political philosophy paradigm has overlooked or excluded, and find practical solutions to them.
For example, the analytical framework of existing liberal political philosophy has limitations in addressing issues such as refugee issues, racial injustice and reparations, gender inequality, animal rights, disability issues, climate justice, environmental justice, and the dominance of non-state actors.
Ultimately, what we need is to forge, explore, and find a new starting point.
Just like the history of political philosophy, which has faced changing realities, engaged in dialogue, and strived to solve problems.

“Today’s political philosophers need to start anew, as Rawls did, by looking not only to familiar academic disciplines like law and economics, but also to social theory, history, and the political conflicts that unfold in real life.
They must ask new questions that had not been raised before and take note of the many social and political changes that have occurred since Rawls finished his theorizing—such as the new nature of the state, agency in capitalism, gendered power, and racial inequality.
Since the rise of liberal egalitarianism, the state has expanded its role and capabilities while simultaneously becoming privatized.
The nature of capitalism and work has changed and will continue to change in dramatic and unexpected ways.
The characteristics of the least beneficiaries have also changed.
We must now rethink not only their composition, but also their status from beneficiaries of redistribution policies to agents of transformation.
The very meaning of politics is changing as radical social movements and new oligarchies collide amidst irresponsible financial institutions, the rise of new media platforms, technological change, and the climate crisis.
While liberal political philosophers certainly have some useful tools for coping with these changes, the problems of our time demand new frameworks for thinking.
Perhaps it is time to regard the philosophical liberalism that dominated the second half of the twentieth century as one of many available theories rather than as a single, self-evident doctrine, and to understand Rawls's thought as a chapter in the history of political thought.
“It is our ‘useful past’ and, like any political theory, a product of its time.”
- From the text