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43 Tocqueville Rev. 5 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/tocqvr43 and id is 1 raw text is: The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XLIII, no 1 - 2022 RAWLS'S A TH$OR YOFJUSTICE AT FIFTY Introduction Catherine AUDARD and Michel FORSt T here is a wide consensus that John Rawls is one of the major American thinkers of the twentieth century. His work is now well known and discussed not only in the Anglophone world, but all over the world. The Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1991 were said to brandish a copy of the recently translated A Theoy of Justice. The Tocquevile Review/ La Revue Tocqueville is dedicating this issue to an appraisal of his legacy in Europe and in America, as well as of the ongoing debates and controversies surrounding it. His work covers and has reshaped most of the major issues of contemporary political philosophy, from constitutional law to distributive justice, from citizenship to economic efficiency, from global ethics to religious toleration, from cultural pluralism to forms of democratic consensus, etc. (Audard, 2007, 2019). Most of contemporary political philosophy has been nurtured by his seminal ideas and can be understood either as a follow-up or as a criticism and a reaction against them. Thus, no student or scholar of the discipline can ignore them. The main idea of A Theoy of Justice (TJ hereafter) is that of justice as fairness. The ambitions are modest: to define justice, not as based on any philosophical or religious conception of the Good such as <naturab law, but in terms that citizens can agree upon when they think rationally and see themselves as free and equal persons willing