Le programme rawlsien apocryphe

With A Theory of Justice, John Rawls (1971) revived the Social Contract tradition and influenced the way issues of distributive justice would be addressed for years. One interpretation, born of both Rawls’ own ambiguities and the readiness of its prestigious economists readers (Harsanyi, Sen, Arrow, Buchanan among them) to interpret A Theory of Justice as an economic theory of justice, supposes that Rawls founded his principles of justice solely on the rationality principle as it stood in rational choice theory. It is now acknowledged by all that Rawls never intended to do so. But in the early seventies, this interpretation was shared to such a degree that it gave birth to the Rawlsian Apocryphal Program, which aims to rest the social contract on rational choice theory. This article strives to explain how such a misconception came to be and underlines in what way such a mistake was fruitful