Daniel Chandler proposes John Rawls’s theory of justice as a vision for the Labour party (If Labour is to succeed it needs not just new policies, but a whole new philosophy, 14 April). It is a radical and noble vision, but strictly speaking, not socialist. Rawls’s theory is grounded in and a reworking of the “social contract” tradition in political theory.
That tradition constructs a thought experiment with, as its fundamental assumption, self-seeking individuals who bargain and agree on political (and in Rawls’s case social and economic) institutions in order to end the “war of all against all”. Rawls imagines this bargain taking place in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, designed to ensure that the bargain will be fair to all, and that no individual will be able to choose institutions that privilege himself or herself. To reiterate, his theory of justice as fairness is in its foundations an individualist theory.
