Unjust context: The priority of stability in Rawls's contextualized theoryof justice

John Rawls has attempted to "contextualize" his theory of justice in his re cent work. Rawls locates the foundations of his revised theory in the tradi tions of western democratic societies. He thus situates his theory within a particular historical community, hence synthesizing communitarian and libe ral theories. By moving to contextual rather than Archimedean foundations, however, stability replaces justice as the primary objective of the theory. Stability is attained by deriving a "political conception of justice" from the intuitions and convictions of a given society; this political concepti on then shapes and transforms the moral and philosophical doctrines of the society to conform to the political conception. Rawls's move reveals a misu nderstanding of the relationship between social context and political conte station, taking a dynamic political process as a fixed and unchanging socia l fact. While offering a solution to the communitarian-liberal debate, Rawl s's revised theory is not appropriate to liberal democratic societies; furt hermore, insofar as he recognizes the fact of indeterminacy ire contemporar y democratic politics, his removal of social context and the background con ditions of politics from political debate has serious negative consequences for the usefulness of Rawls's work to democratic theory.