I address in the following pages the decisive question of "after Rawls", of the legacy of his work and (brutally said) of what will happen to the Rawlsian paradigm. I devote Section 2 to the moralism-realism opposition in political theory. I then discuss - in Section 3 - a complex trend in contemporary philosophy constituted by the postmodern climate and by what I call the new metaphysics. This trend tends, together with the political crisis of liberal-democracy, to make the traditional conception of normativity impossible. This is followed, in Section 4, by an argument that both philosophical-political approaches discussed here, the moralistic and the realist, ultimately need some conception of normativity. But, it is said in Section 5, in light of contemporary criticism, such a conception has to be different from the top-down conception of the past. The last Section 6 is finally devoted to some inconclusive conclusions about the future of political theory and the possibility of reformulating within it a conception of the normative bottom up.
