Ask a Political Scientist Symposium on the Contributions of Danielle Allen: Introduction

Abstract

WhenI entered graduate school at Harvard in 1975 as part of a strongly felt but ill-specified quest for personal and political meaning, I had no clear sense of what constituted “academic success.” Although my family had long prized college education, no one in it had ever pursued an academic career. I soon learned that there were prevailing notions of what we grad students should dream about achieving, but they were disputed. At Harvard, the highest rank was University Professor; but some University Professors were seen as having won fame outside academia, without truly major intellectual contributions. Many in academia regarded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein ended up, as the Valhalla for truly major intellectual contributors. Some, however, disparaged it as a privileged haven for abstract thinkers choosing to disconnect from the real world. The figure who seemed to command the most universal respect on campus, bordering on worship, was John Rawls, who many saw as one of the greatest political philosophers not just of our time but all time. However, the impact of his then-recent magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, remained to be seen. Rawls was best known for proposing the difference principle, holding that all economic inequalities should benefit the least advantaged within the national community. Nearly a half-century later, few would be audacious enough to contend that his work has brought us much closer to that goal in America or the world. Danielle Allen is currently the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, the chair that John Rawls once held, and she was formerly the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She directs Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, to which John Rawls was a seminal contributor. She is a member of the nation’s two oldest academic honorary societies, the American