After the Second World War, political philosophy was dead. This changed in 1971 when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, reviving philosophy and injecting it with normative foundations. Whilst this view has subsequently been subjected to several corrective arguments, they all implicitly confirm the idea that Rawls transformed political philosophy. And they also infer that Anglo-American political philosophy has been relatively static ever since. Meanwhile a second view, held by those interested in the broader history of the 20th century, holds that post-war welfarist ideology was in crisis in the 1970s, with welfarists and collectivists overthrown by various forms of liberalism. How does the view of the 1970s as a great period of re-invention in philosophy correspond to that vision of the decade as a moment of political crisis? In this lecture, Katrina Forrester explores this deep tension.