ABSTRACT
John Rawls is renowned for the theory of political justice elaborated in A Theory of justice and subsequently revised in Political Liberalism. For Rawls' theory begins from a liberal conception of justice for a domestic regime and extends it to yield principles for the ordering of inter-societal relations. The terminological shift from 'states' to 'peoples' notwithstanding, something very much like the modern state, with its limited yet still extensive sovereignty, is at the heart of Rawls' utopian construction. One diagnosis of Rawls' minimalism is that it is the upshot of two dubious linkages: between human rights and intervention to prevent their violation and their embodiment in public international law. The former point offers too little, whereas the force of the latter seems to presuppose the defects of Kazanistan to which the internal critic is drawing attention and in any case comes to little in the absence of a duty of liberal peoples to accept immigrants fleeing decent regimes.
