Taking the Basic Structure Seriously

The theory of justice that John Rawls spent his life developing and refining contains dozens of ideas that each have spurred major scholarly debate. One of these is that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. In his major works Rawls gives slightly different formulations to the concept of basic structure, but the core idea remains the same. Early in A Theory of Justice Rawls proposes to offer “a conception of justice as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.” Political Liberalism devotes an entire chapter to explicating what it means to say that the basic structure is the subject of justice. There Rawls defines basic structure “as the way in which major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arise through social cooperation”. More recently, Rawls reiterates the notion of the basic structure in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:Iris Marion Young is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago (iyoung@uchicago.edu). Among books she has published is Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000. Global Challenges: On War, Self-Determination and Global Justice is forthcoming from Polity Press in 2006.