ABSTRACT
Walter Lippmann's classic on the necessity of a public philosophy for democratic nations is a helpful starting point for trying to understand the principal functions of democratic theory as a public philosophy. If justice is to serve as an effective guiding standard for modern democracies, and as an arbitration principle for both theoretical and practical political conflicts, then it is justice as such not merely one or a small number of its parts to which appeals must be made. Rawls's conception of justice and its justifying theory are ingenious and skilfully argued, but they contain serious flaws, and are marked by both ideological and Utopian features. The foundation on which the idea of the mean rests, that rational and defensible judgements can be made in deciding between values and courses of action, challenges the irrationalism of dogmatic forms of value relativism.
