© Jesper Ahlin Marceta 2024
No postwar thinker has had a greater impact on liberal political philosophy than John Raws. In her book In the Shadow of Justice, intellectual historian Katrina Forrester accounts for how Rawls’s theory of justice took form and transformed liberal philosophy throughout the latter half of the 20th century. The book is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. It is chronologically structured and split into eight chapters that tell the story of how liberal philosophy developed in light of both theoretical advances and real-world politics. Thereby, Forrester accounts for both internal factors to this development, such as how Rawls’s conceptual apparatus influenced abstract…