한국제도·경제학회

As a saying goes, while there might be a dispute about the second most important political philosopher of the 20th century, there reportedly could be no dispute about the most important: John Rawls. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is now well established as the most powerful logic, justifying redistribution activities of state, and uplifting them even to a certain moral value: justice. This article studied libertarian critiques of Rawlsian justice theory, via the Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and James Buchanan’s perspectives. Except Nozick, these famous libertarian scholars once revealed substantial sympathy toward Rawls, which are rare cases in the history of academic discourse among groups with contrastive views like Rawlsians vs. libertarians. It happened not because Hayek or Buchanan had problem in discerning leftist theory from libertarian one. But because Rawls started with mild position along the intellectual, ideological spectrum and could successfully conceal identity of his research enterprise, or he had started with a little bit of libertarian esprit and then continually proceeded through his intellectual journey to his present rigid socio-democratic redistribution theory. Critiques from Hayek, Nozick and Buchanan on Rawls’s justice theory were derived from wide ranges of their research literature. Three implications were derived from this project. Firstly, Rawls’s theory of justice has nothing to do with liberty or liberalism(in genuine sense), and, so its identity deserves leftist or progressive. Secondly, there is no room for so-called ‘Rawlsekian’ research enterprise, because theories of Rawls and Hayek cannot be mixed up to make it belong to broader sense of libertarianism. Its possibility is, ontologically, naught. Thirdly, seeking Rawls’s justice theory even partly by libertarian is irrelevant research project, when it is tried not for critique but for inference or partial adoption. Rawls’s theory actually is not liberty-orient one. In ‘actual’ lexicographic order of principles, difference principle prevails. Difference principle alone can justify any redistribution of state by saying it corrects the outcome of 1st principle. Rawls’s high fame, which is equivalent to one of his ‘primary goods’, is partly due to the illusion that his theory deals with liberty-oriented theory or it really serves individual liberty. It is kind of injustice, according to his own theory, to obtain such an undeserved ownership for the property of the fame. That injustice needs rectification in Nozick’s sense to move to ‘just justice’.