ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Rawlsian Apocryphal program
Author: Duhamel David
In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, reviving the Social Contract tradition and framing the way into which questions of distributive justice would be discussed for years. Its immediate success prompted many responses in many fields. One particular interpretation was popular among economists: the idea that Rawls founded his principles of justice solely on the rationality principle as it stood in rational choice theory. This interpretation will be here called the Rawlsian apocryphal program. Because it is clearly not Rawls’s point of view, this interpretation is deemed inaccurate. Not that it diminished its potency. On the contrary it is argued here that many economists mistook the Rawlsian apocryphal program for Rawls’s actual position. Among them were future Nobel Prizes John Harsanyi, Amartya Sen, Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan. It is also argued that this misconception gave birth to Contractarianism, which ultimately would lead Social Contract tradition to take the very political stance it was born to oppose: conservatism. David Duhamel PHARE / G.R.E.S.E. Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne david.duhamel@noos.fr
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