John Rawls’s Appropriation of Adam Smith

Abstract

In spite of the shortage in Rawls’s work of references to Smith’s later andeven more famous book, the ideas and arguments of An Inquiry into the Nature andCauses of the Wealth of Nations are central to Rawls’s theory of justice. This articleintends to show that without the ideas Smith proposed in The Wealth of Nations,Rawls would not have been able to write A Theory of Justice. Smith’s ideas in TheWealth of Nations supply Rawls with the central question he attempts to answer inhis theory of justice. They also supply him with a key component of his answer tothat question, a component without which Rawls’s answer to the question wouldhave looked sharply different. Smith’s contributions to the set of ideas on which Rawls drew to formulate his theory of justice are as important to that theory asKant’s contributions and are more important to Rawls’s theory than the contributionsof any thinker other than Kant (with the possible exception of Sidgwick).