Book Notes

The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. By John Rawls. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. 199. $22.50, cloth.

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls lays out a grand and compelling argument for how nations should understand their moral obligations to each other and to human rights. The book is an extension of the project Rawls began in A Theory of Justice.[1] In his first book, Rawls focused on establishing principles of justice for a single society. In The Law of Peoples, he attempts to deal with the more difficult situation of developing norms of international behavior that will apply to vastly different, non-liberal societies. Rawls begins by first trying to establish an international conception of justice for a society of liberal peoples. (Rawls’s “peoples” are different from traditional conceptions of states only in that they lack some of the traditional rights of states such as an unlimited right to wage war.) In order to derive a conception of international justice, Rawls creates a theoretical “original position,” where rational representatives of liberal societies come together to decide on the Law of Peoples.

Representatives in this original position are behind a theoretical “veil of ignorance” and do not know the specific characteristics of the country that they represent. For example, representatives do not know the size, population, military or industrial strength of their country. Rawls argues that these representatives will develop a system that ensures their political independence, civil liberties, and self-respect as a people. These representatives will agree to maintain their independence, observe treaties, not interfere in other people’s affairs, use war only for self-defense, honor human rights, restrict the conduct of war, and assist peoples living under conditions which prevent a just social regime.

Of course, Rawls’s main challenge is not simply to find a theory of international justice for liberal societies, but to find one that is universal enough that it also applies to non-liberal (and non-western) peoples. He starts by arguing that liberal societies have an obligation to respect non-liberal societies that are “decent.” These decent peoples are primarily hierarchical societies that deny their citizens full political equality, but do consult them on policy and guarantee them basic human rights such as life, liberty, property, and formal equality. For example, Rawls envisions a fictional Islamic nation called Kazanistan that allows only Muslims to hold political office, but does allow their citizens to follow other religions. While liberals may not approve of the Kazanistani system, Rawls argues that liberal peoples should not deny them respect, because toleration of other worldviews is an integral part of liberalism and a denial of respect will only create bitterness.

Liberal tolerance, however, has its limits. Decent societies must respect human rights, which are “a special class of urgent rights” that entail things such as freedom from slavery, liberty of conscience, and security from genocide. For Rawls, human rights are the bare minimum required and are not the equivalent of the more comprehensive constitutional rights granted by liberal peoples.

Having established a society of liberal and decent peoples, Rawls sets out to examine how this Society of Peoples would interact with non-decent societies. He starts by dividing these non-decent peoples into outlaw states, which are willing to engage in war to pursue their perceived interests, and burdened societies, which have historical, social, and economic conditions making it difficult to become a well-ordered, decent society. The goal of foreign policy, Rawls says, is to bring these burdened societies into the Society of Peoples.

Rawls lays out three guidelines for ordering foreign policy towards burdened societies. First, he argues that a well-ordered society does not need to be wealthy; it just needs the minimum wealth necessary to create and preserve just institutions. Second, Rawls argues that the political culture is the “all-important” key to reforming political and social institutions. A society’s political values, Rawls writes, are more vital than any resources they may or may not have. Borrowing from Amartya Sen, he sees famine as the result of a failure of political institutions, not natural disaster. Sending money is usually unhelpful and The Law of Peoples rules out intervention, so Rawls argues that well-ordered societies should focus on giving advice. “There is no easy recipe for helping a burdened society to change its political culture,” he admits. Rawls’s final guideline stresses that the primary goal is to allow burdened societies to manage themselves and eventually join the Society of Peoples.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the book is Rawls’s refusal to extend globally the societal distributive justice he defended in A Theory of Justice. Rawls points to the differences between domestic society and the Society of Peoples. For example, inequality in a domestic society can lead to stigmatization and unfairness in the political process, but these are not concerns that affect an international society. If political culture, not natural resources, determines wealth, then global redistribution would not be necessary and could be unfair for societies that choose not to arrange their own societies to produce wealth. While wealthy societies may have a duty to ensure that the basic needs of other people are provided for, there is no justification for a larger redistribution of wealth.

Rawls provides a grand argument for the normative basis of international law. He illustrates a path of thinking about human rights and obligations that international treaties cannot provide on their own. Rawls’s basic assumptions, however, may also raise questions about the fundamental structure of international society and international law. Rawls tries to create a “realistic utopia” that extends the bounds of “practicable political possibil-

ity.” To do this, he takes the world as it is. For Rawls, the world, since Thucydides, has been organized into autonomous units that interact on the world scene. He questions the realist belief that states will necessarily struggle in a quest for power, but he does not question the idea that states or peoples are the basic unit with which he needs to work. In a world of globalization and shifting power structures, it may be fair to at least ask how realistic the idea of “peoples” is and whether there is an even greater “practicable political possibility” than Rawls proposes.

—Mike Wiser

[1]. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Belknap Press 1971).

Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 14, Spring 2001