Rawls and Walzer on Non-Domestic Justice

This article illuminates the relationship between John Rawls' and Michael Walzer's accounts of non-domestic justice by tracing its connection to their domestic relationship. More precisely, it (a) places the celebrated positional shifts that characterize the latter (i.e., as is generally accepted, Rawls took a hermeneutic ‘turn’, and Walzer a universalist one) within the context of the fundamental justificatory tension between their projects which endures: reason vs trust; and then (b) juxtaposes this justificatory tension and their non-domestic political prescriptions. Such contextualization is important to the clarification of the pair's non-domestic relationship since it enables the observation that despite this enduring justificatory tension these political prescriptions are remarkably similar.