Comment on Bruce Chapman

Abstract

One might say that there are two core questions of political philosophy: How should society organize itself, including its governmental institutions? And how might society induce its citizens to comply with both its explicit legal commands and its implicit norms? Among the many remarkable achievements of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice was its providing a single answer to these two questions by reviving the notion of a social contract among rational decisionmakers. The institutions of a liberal constitutional democracy¹² might be imagined as the result of an agreement struck among rational decisionmakers who were, at the time of the formation of the agreement, operating without explicit knowledge of what position they or their progeny would occupy in the future society. Presumably, rational citizens who inherited this political culture from the founding generation would adhere to the social contract thus struck.

I should like to thank Prof. Dr. Manfred Streit, Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Jena, Germany, for his hospitality during the Summer, 1998, and Dr. Uwe Mummert of the Institute for his hospitality, including many fruitful conversations, during that visit. I also would like to thank my colleague Richard McAdams for his comments on an earlier draft of this piece.