The impossibility of a Rawlsian liberal

This article critically examines the role of the neoclassical model of the market within Rawlsian liberalism. Although Rawls claims agnosticism towards particular economic theories, I show how the neoclassical model anchors Rawls’s approach of transmuting distributive efficiency into distributive justice. However, the assumptions underlying the neoclassical model are not descriptively accurate as Rawls’s key construct of pure procedural justice requires. Without the neoclassical model and the pure procedural approach to distribution it uniquely enables, Rawlsian liberalism recreates the very problem of pluralism it is premised on resolving. This article surfaces this paradox for Rawlsian liberalism: it relies essentially on market distribution yet cannot justify these arrangements within the confines of the theory.