ABSTRACT
But whatever the times, Rawls’s or any other philosophers’ lack of influence on contemporary events is normal. Judging from the list in the preceding paragraph, it appears that the work of philosophers in one century does not filter into people’s moral and political consciousness (if it does at all) until at least a century later. (Witness Locke’s indirect influence on the revolutions of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s and Rousseau’s indirect influence on (respectively) the classical liberalism and democratic upheavals and social reforms of the nineteenth century, and Marx’s direct influence on twentieth-century communism.) It is fruitless to conjecture whether Rawls will have a similar political legacy at the end of the present century.
