Raz as a political philosopher

Philosopher David Owens (King's College, London) offers an illuminating synoptic account, of a kind Raz himself never produced.  An excerpt from near the start:

What most clearly distinguishes Raz's social thought from its surroundings is the absence of justice. The agenda of Anglophone political philosophy of the last few decades was set by Rawls's ‘A Theory of Justice’ when he wrote that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions.’2 Rawls thereby made justice the master value of political philosophy. By contrast, in the index of Raz's most realised work of political and moral philosophy ‘justice’ merits no entry.3 What is at stake here? How does making justice your master value shape your thought about society and why would anyone take a different tack? The notion of justice has long been important to political theory and prevalent in political discourse but its current pre-eminence among Anglophone political philosophers is, at least in part, due to many of them conceiving of it as what I shall call a formal rather than a personal value.4 Whilst I take the notion of ‘personal value’ from Raz, ‘formal value’ is my coinage. Raz's theoretical motivations become clearer once we read him as denying the existence of formal values.