Amidst the tributes to John Rawls (see Jacob Levy and Chris Bertram for a catalog), I was struck by a comment from Thomas Nagel’s essay on Rawls from 1999:

It is striking how slowly and deliberately he began. Rawls was born in 1921, and his first article was published in 1951, his second in 1955, and his third in 1958. The latter publication, “Justice as Fairness,” presents the basic idea of his contractualist theory; in the next decade there came six more essays that worked out the conception that would finally appear in 1971 as A Theory of Justice.

Rawls published three papers in his first 10 years out of graduate school. In the current academic climate, he’d have been out on his ear after his sixth year, denied tenure and looking for a job in the toughest spot in the academic job market.

I don’t know whether Rawls’ move from Cornell to MIT in 1960 (after seven years in Ithaca) had anything to do with his productivity. Given the expectations of the time, and the his own talent, I highly doubt it. I wonder how many political theorists—- or philosophers, sociologists, economists or political scientists—- could prosper today with so few publications, even really good ones, and what that says about academia.