Rawls introduces the idea of a well-ordered liberal society in the 1996 introduction to Political Liberalism. A liberal society is well-ordered when governed by one or another reasonable liberal political conception. Rawls says: “political liberalism is to be understood as a freestanding family of reasonable liberal political conceptions.” I discuss the main features of reasonable liberal conceptions within well-ordered liberal societies, and the centrality of the criterion of reciprocity. Liberal conceptions are not reasonable if they fail to impose any formal restrictions on permissible inequalities or fail to limit the effects of wealth on democratic politics. This includes not only libertarianism but also a wide range of classical and neo-liberal positions. None of these are reasonable according to Rawls’s criterion of reciprocity, and none satisfy his liberal principle of political legitimacy, since all permit and even encourage unrestricted inequalities and individuals’ unlimited accumulation of wealth and economic powers.

In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.