Political legitimacy as a circumstance of justice

Abstract

The hypothesis defended in this article is the following: within the framework of the original version of justice as fairness, as presented in A Theory of Justice and subsequent works, including Political Liberalism, legitimacy is not explicitly listed as a circumstance of justice. Moreover, where there is no legitimate political community, there is no occasion for the virtue of justice. The hypothesis, therefore, is twopronged. It maintains, firstly, that there are circumstances of justice that are not includedas such in Rawls’ account of them. And secondly, that one of the circumstances implicit inhis work is the existence of a legitimate political community.