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. The Tocqueville 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. The Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1991 were said to brandish a copy of the recently translated A Theory of Justice. His work is now well known and discussed not only in the Anglophone world, but all over the world. There is a wide consensus that John Rawls is one of the major American thinkers of the twentieth century. This introduction to this issue presents the various contributions that have been brought together to achieve this goal. Through an evocation of Rawls’s impact as experienced in the States, in France and Europe, from different disciplines ranging from political and moral philosophy to economics and politics, this issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville will help to understand the complex nature of European-American cultural and political relations, well in the spirit of Tocqueville.
What was so special about it, was that it brought back to the forefront major normative political and moral issues such as the meaning of distributive justice and its value for democracies, as well as a definitive critique of welfarism. At the time, the publication became an immediate success worldwide and its influence has been deemed tremendous, the most commented and quoted philosophy book of the century.
Throughout 2021, numerous celebrations, conferences and events took place to pay tribute to the Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921-2001) and to his most famous book, A Theory of Justice published just fifty years ago in 1971.
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