Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2006
The title of this essay might strike some people as odd. Rawls a revolutionary? Could one ever imagine the careful, gentle, and eminently sensible figure of John Rawls manning a barricade? The very strangeness of this image illustrates the uneasy connection between equality and politics in his work. Rawls's egalitarian vision would take nothing short of a revolution to bring about, and Rawls was anything but a revolutionary.Simone Chambers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto (schamber@chass.utoronto.ca). Special thanks go to Robert Amdur for his helpful, careful, and as usual, accurate criticisms of an earlier draft. She would also like to thank Steven E. White for his research, the many reviewers at Perspectives on Politics for their comments, and Joe Carens, Duncan Ivison, and Jeff Kopstein for all the equality talk.