Rawls in Portugal and Spain João Cardoso Rosas University of Minho, Portugal abstract: First, this article puts forth a political and cultural explanation for the fact that the work of Rawls and other American liberal analytic political philosophers was neglected in Portugal during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, the article describes Portuguese reactions to Rawls’s ideas in the 1990s, focusing on commentaries by scholars and ‘public intellectuals’. Throughout this period, there was a gradual shift from glib partisan judgements to more careful responses. Third, the reception of Rawls in Portugal is compared with the reception in Spain. This comparison shows that both broad social context and the nature of academia tended to be more hospitable to Rawls in Spain than in Portugal. However, the situation is changing. key words: American, analytic, justice, liberal, philosophy, political, Portugal, Rawls, reception, Spain Portugal: The Context of Reception When addressing the question of John Rawls’s influence in Portugal, the first striking fact is the lack of influence for almost 20 years after the publication of A Theory of Justice, in 1971. 1 However, the absence of references to Rawls in the Portuguese philosophical and political literature of those years is not unique to Rawls as an individual. This quasi-invisibility of Rawls in Portugal epitomizes a long neglect in this country of the entire body of literature that Rawls helped to create and shape since the beginning of the 1970s and that one may call ‘American liberal analytic political philosophy’. Before beginning my account of the late reception of Rawls in Portugal, I will examine the causes of this extended neglect. From 1933 until 1974, Portugal was governed by a right-wing authoritarian regime known as the New State, under which basic rights and liberties were suppressed. The publication of books or any other printed works was tightly controlled by an office of censorship, and universities were under surveillance by the political police. During the New State period, several authors and university 243 article Contact address: João Cardoso Rosas, Universidade do Minho, 4719 Braga, Portugal. Email: rosas@ilch.uminho.pt EJPT European Journal of Political Theory © SAGE Publications Ltd, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi issn 1474-8851 1( 2) 243–255; 0 27821