John Rawls: The path to A Theory of Justice — inside Andrius Galisanka’s PhD dissertation

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is often treated as a fully formed philosophical monument, a sudden intervention that reshaped political philosophy in the late twentieth century. In reality, Rawls’s ideas evolved slowly over decades, through teaching notes, journal articles, abandoned drafts and intellectual reversals. Andrius Galisanka’s doctoral dissertation, John Rawls: the Path to A Theory of Justice, reconstructs this long and uneven journey, showing how Rawls’s mature theory emerged not from a single insight but from sustained engagement with moral psychology, welfare economics, constitutional theory and post-war liberal anxieties.

Submitted as a Doctor of Philosophy dissertation, Galisanka’s work is not a commentary on Rawls’s famous book alone. It is a historical and conceptual excavation of Rawls’s intellectual development, tracing how a young philosopher grappling with utilitarianism, intuitionism and social contract theory eventually arrived at the framework that would redefine debates on justice, equality and legitimacy.

Moving beyond the myth of sudden originality

A central aim of the dissertation is to dismantle the myth that A Theory of Justice appeared as a radical break from earlier traditions. Galisanka shows that Rawls’s project was shaped by gradual revisions rather than abrupt turns. Early in his career, Rawls was deeply concerned with moral reasoning and the nature of justification. His wartime experiences, followed by theological studies and later philosophical training, produced a thinker uneasy with both moral relativism and crude maximisation doctrines.

Galisanka carefully traces Rawls’s early dissatisfaction with utilitarianism, particularly its willingness to sacrifice individual claims for aggregate welfare. This discomfort did not immediately lead Rawls to the difference principle or the original position. Instead, Rawls experimented with alternative ways of grounding fairness, often borrowing tools from economics while resisting its moral assumptions.

The dissertation argues that Rawls’s originality lies less in rejecting existing theories and more in reworking them from within.

The role of moral psychology

One of the dissertation’s strongest contributions is its attention to Rawls’s engagement with moral psychology. Galisanka shows that Rawls did not treat justice as a purely institutional problem. He was deeply concerned with the kinds of moral motivations citizens could realistically possess in a stable society.

Rawls’s early writings reveal a sustained effort to reconcile moral obligation with human psychology. Galisanka traces how Rawls moved away from intuitionist ethics, which relied heavily on moral judgment without clear justificatory structure, towards a constructivist approach. This shift allowed Rawls to argue that principles of justice are not discovered as moral facts but constructed through fair procedures that reflect our considered judgments.

This concern later crystallised into the idea of the original position, not merely as a thought experiment but as a moral device designed to align fairness with human reasonableness.

Economics, welfare and fairness

Galisanka devotes significant attention to Rawls’s interaction with welfare economics, a dimension often overlooked in philosophical readings. Rawls closely followed debates about efficiency, Pareto optimality and income distribution, but he rejected the idea that economic outcomes alone could define justice.

The dissertation shows how Rawls selectively absorbed economic concepts while resisting their normative dominance. The difference principle, Galisanka argues, should be read as Rawls’s response to the limits of welfare maximisation. It accepts inequality only under strict conditions, grounding economic outcomes in moral legitimacy rather than productivity alone.

This framing helps explain why Rawls’s theory appealed not only to philosophers but also to political economists and policy thinkers searching for a moral language to critique inequality without abandoning market systems.

The emergence of the original position

Rather than presenting the original position as a sudden invention, Galisanka reconstructs its gradual formation. Early drafts show Rawls experimenting with alternative justificatory frameworks, including game-theoretic reasoning and constitutional conventions.

The veil of ignorance emerges in Galisanka’s account as a solution to a recurring problem: how to ensure impartiality without assuming moral consensus. By depriving parties of knowledge about their social position, Rawls aimed to model fairness under conditions of uncertainty that mirror real moral disagreement.

The dissertation highlights how Rawls refined this device repeatedly, narrowing its scope and strengthening its justificatory role, until it became the central organising concept of A Theory of Justice.

Justice as fairness and political stability

Galisanka also situates Rawls within the broader political context of post-war liberalism. The Cold War, the expansion of welfare states and anxieties about social cohesion shaped Rawls’s concerns about legitimacy and stability.

Justice, for Rawls, was not merely about correct principles but about creating a social order citizens could willingly support. Galisanka shows how this concern pushed Rawls to integrate fairness with stability, leading to his emphasis on public justification and overlapping consensus in later work.

Seen this way, A Theory of Justice appears not as an abstract moral system but as a response to concrete political fears about fragmentation, authoritarianism and moral scepticism.

Reassessing Rawls’s legacy

A key strength of Galisanka’s dissertation is its refusal to treat Rawls’s later refinements as betrayals of his original project. Instead, it presents Rawls’s intellectual life as a continuous effort to balance moral idealism with political realism.

By tracing the path to A Theory of Justice, Galisanka offers a richer understanding of Rawls as a thinker who revised his commitments without abandoning his core concern: how free and equal citizens can justify the basic structure of their society to one another.

The dissertation ultimately suggests that Rawls’s influence endures not because he provided final answers, but because he reshaped how questions of justice are asked.

Why this dissertation matters

John Rawls: the Path to A Theory of Justice stands out as more than an academic reconstruction. It provides a framework for understanding Rawls as a thinker embedded in intellectual history rather than floating above it.

For readers familiar only with Rawls’s canonical text, Galisanka’s work reveals the depth of struggle, revision and uncertainty behind its polished arguments. For contemporary debates on inequality, legitimacy and democratic fairness, the dissertation reminds us that theories of justice are forged over time, shaped as much by doubt as by conviction.

In doing so, Galisanka restores Rawls not as a distant authority, but as a working philosopher, thinking his way through the hardest moral problems of the modern world.

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