Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

A critical study of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice that became a founding text of the communitarian critique of liberalism, though Sandel himself has questioned the label. Sandel targets what he calls deontological liberalism: the claim that justice is the first virtue of social institutions and that the right is prior to the good. He argues that this priority depends on a particular picture of the person, a self given prior to its ends, able to choose its aims but never constituted by them. Such a self, he argues, cannot account for the attachments and loyalties that partly make us who we are. He then turns to the difference principle and argues that treating natural talents as common assets presupposes a shared, intersubjective self that Rawls's theory does not admit. Justice, he concludes, is a remedial virtue whose primacy marks the limits of community rather than its ideal. Liberal critics reply that the original position is a device of representation, not a theory of the self.

It is the classic statement of the communitarian challenge to liberal theory, and it explains why later debates about identity, community and the neutral state took the shape they did.