Over the past few decades, the “turn to empire” in political theory has powerfully illuminated how legacies of imperialism and colonialism have profoundly shaped the conceptual history of core categories in modern political thought such as democracy, citizenship, freedom, equality, and the social contract. Early on, scholars in this vein of research focused their attention on tracing these dynamics among mostly canonical political thinkers. As the turn to empire has matured, however, a newer generation of studies is fixing its focus more significantly on the contemporary legacies of colonialism and empire in the present and alternative trajectories of political thought mounted by anticolonial activists and intellectuals in the periphery. Picking up on this tendency, the four books under review speak to each other in intriguing ways in both their differences and similarities. Thematically, all four books often share a common set of conceptual concerns despite speaking across an array of imperial and colonial contexts. Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire and Nazmul Sultan’s Waiting for the People are both interested in the entwinement of empire and popular sovereignty, yet in the different colonial contexts of the white settler colonies of the British Empire (in Valdez’s case) and British India (in Sultan’s case). Both Sultan and Sam Klug, who in The Internal Colony is writing about the post-World War II context of racial politics in the United States, are concerned with how anticolonial actors and thinkers enlisted developmental idioms and languages in their struggles against imperial rule and racialized exploitation. And both Valdez and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil grapple with the contemporary prospects of emancipation from and reparation of the harms engendered by the history of imperialism and colonial slavery.

Does John Rawls’s justice as fairness require virtuous citizens to eschew self-interested motivation in favor of motivation by the aim to promote justice when making decisions about their labor or investment participation in their society’s economy? Analyzing Rawls’s ideas of advantage and of legitimate ends and tracing the purpose and implementation of his difference principle, the article shows how G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s allowance of productive incentives reflects misunderstandings of Rawls’s theoretical aims and of the fundamental liberalism of Rawls’s well-ordered society. In that society, political civility permits making such decisions by appeal to each citizen’s self-interested aims and values.

In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.

Rawls suggests that facts about the political virtues must be part of the construction of a reasonable political conception of justice. The thesis of this article is that, if an account of political virtue is a necessary element in a reasonable political conception, then so too is an account of political vice. The political vices are those attitudes, feelings, and dispositions that systematically work against reasonableness or the other cooperative or discursive goals of political virtue. The article concentrates on several epistemic-political vices along with practical-political vices that have epistemic elements. Epistemic-political vices such as close-mindedness or gullibility are especially worrisome in the digital age, given their tendency to undermine practices of public reasoning and deliberative democracy. Each political vice is understood as a characteristic failure of one of the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Each is in this way a more specific form of unreasonableness.