Considerations on democracy in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice

According to some influential interpretations, Rawls’s later turn to political liberalism contributed significantly to the reorientation of contemporary normative political theory from justice to legitimacy – democratic legitimacy in particular. In this paper, I will not delve into whether these assumptions are correct. My main aim here is to show that we can already find the seeds of a later discussion concerning democratic legitimacy and democratic authority in A Theory of Justice. I will also defend the even stronger claim that Rawls’s considerations on democracy in A Theory of Justice are still relevant, both to justify democracy and democratic authority, and for normatively justifying certain democratic decisionmaking procedures. Moreover, I argue that his discussion of the epistemic dimension of majority voting and public deliberation points in the direction of later theories of deliberative democracy and epistemic democracy