Since a new survey of political theorists has confirmed the towering, unrivaled reputation of John Rawls, allow me to state briefly why this thralldom is a disaster for political philosophy. Prof. Lawler is of course right that Rawls is boring, but he’s getting bigger rather than going away, and so we must try to do something about it. And, in fact, if you manage to sift through the smokescreen of technicalities you can find a radical and ambitious project (even if it’s not clear that Rawls knows how much he is claiming).
Throughout his career Rawls is very consistent on a kind of absolute separation between the public (Justice, political morality) and the private (“comprehensive views,” whether religious or philosophical). Another way of saying this is that he affirms the absolute priority of the Right to the Good: it must be possible to frame an ethical theory for the public/political realm in complete abstraction from any conception of a good human life. This is Rawls’ central assertion, and one that must be fundamentally contested. (To be sure, a rough and ready separation between private and public spheres, for example religion and politics, characterizes any liberal sensibility. But discerning observers, such as Tocqueville, have always understood that such a practical liberal separation itself draws upon ethical and religious resources that cannot be spun out of any pure theory of Rights. Rawls in effect disdains traditional liberalism’s practical accommodations as mere unprincipled “modus Vivendi.”) For in attempting to emancipate the question of rights from the question of the good, Rawls in effect dismisses the central questions of the tradition of political philosophy (human nature, the authority of reason vs. that of revelation, the best life and the best city, etc.).
Of course Rawls wants it to appear that he is just setting those questions aside to the “private” realm, where individuals can them take them just as seriously as they may be inclined. But this is just a pose, and Rawls doesn’t always sustain it very well. He is too smart and, finally, too realistic to ignore the full practical implications of his project. Particularly in his late didactic synthesis Justice as Fairness, the quintessential spokesman for academic left-liberalism lets down his guard a bit and reveals the effectual truth of his project more candidly than in his other works. For what his project for separating political morality (his Justice as Fairness) from traditional religious or philosophic morality implies is the eventual supremacy of his Justice as the consensual moral ground, thus the rendering at best “optional” or contingent of all “private” moral/religious standpoints.
This is why the retreat of the later Rawls from “comprehensive liberalism” is not really a retreat at all. He says moral liberalism is not required as a comprehensive view – but then political liberalism (not as modus Vivendi but as moral teaching) trumps all comprehensive views, which are now considered strictly malleable, optional. Rawls is quite candid (in the midst of quasi-technical discussions buried in the interior of chapters) in acknowledging that politics is sovereign and must finally exercise a decisive authority over the moral education of humanity. His liberalism is unmistakably a reconstructivist liberalism, one that embraces the task of the moral re-education of humanity. Political values “govern the basic framework of society and the very groundwork of our existence,” he writes.
Political liberalism is described, with apparent modesty, as a mere “module” that can be appended to any number of “personal” comprehensive views. But only the module is mandatory, authoritative – all the comprehensive views of which it is a module are strictly optional; Rawls “respects” them by respecting our capacity to change them – and he says this in so many words: to respect us as moral persons is to respect our capacity to change our fundamental moral or religious beliefs so as to align them with Justice as Fairness. Thus all earlier “comprehensive” views, whether religious or philosophical, become optional “modules” which Rawls asks us to adapt to the only absolute ethical teaching, that is, Rawls’ own liberalism. The requirements of political “fairness” are sovereign over all moral or religious concerns. In the end, Rawls’ project is perfectly Hobbesian in its essential meaning, but more stealthy – and of course without the appeal to “nature,” except, to be sure, the nature of left-liberal professors.
Rawls knows very well that the public and the private cannot be contained in distinct spheres, as many might wish. He knows they interact with each other, and he is quite candid about the direction in which the influence must go. In discussing the question of stability, he thus makes no bones about the fact that “psychological” tendencies incongruent with his liberal society must in the long run be suppressed and the human personality shaped so as to fit permanently with his liberal project.
Thus he leaves it “to individual citizens as part of their liberty of conscience” to settle how they think the great values of the political domain are related to the other values they accept. If they manage to find away to accommodate their non-political values, that’s fine. Freedom of conscience is the freedom to “adjust” one’s “comprehensive doctrine” – in fact, finally, the freedom to be a Rawlsian, one way or another.
Thus, as Allan Bloom argued with such force many years ago (“John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy”), Rawls does not address but effectively liquidates the whole tradition of political philosophy. To excise the question of the good from the question of the right (or of rights) at the outset is radically to truncate political philosophy – in fact to cut off a little contemporary branch and to call it the whole tree. If the problem of what constitutes a good life is banished, then there is no authority but “society” – not actual society, with all its diverse opinions about the good, but the mystical ideal of society uncontaminated by unauthorized “comprehensive views” or “special psychologies,” but the “rational” society represented, of course, by its liberal academic priesthood.
May 7th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
I’m sure you all know this, but let me mention David Schaefer’s meticulous take down of Rawls in Illiberal Justice. Smart, sensible, scholarly–but itself also boring only because of the subject matter. Of course, it’s more lively than Rawls himself.
May 7th, 2010 | 4:17 pm
Regarding Illiberal Justice, if the title alone didn’t say it, I should have added to the smart, scholarly, sensible qualities of the book–it is also a spirited criticism of Rawls’ thought when and where it is necessary.
May 7th, 2010 | 4:54 pm
Is Rawls a liberal?
From what I know of him, I think the answer would be no. Of course, he fits the mold of a modern American, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy “liberal.” But I mean a liberal in the traditional sense. He doesn’t seem to subscribe to the idea of self ownership in a meaningful way.
May 7th, 2010 | 6:00 pm
J. Judd Owen has written, “For since the liberal state must act, and since it can’t take any religious prescriptions as authoritative for its actions, the liberal state in princi-ple denies that there are any true, politically relevant religious prescriptions. Liberalism rests on a theological premise.” Rawls implicitly denies the possibility of justly implementing what a citizen might consider a divinely ordained plan for right ordering of politics. Rawls has not just failed to correct the over-reaching he displayed in A Theory of Justice; he has compounded it egregiously. In a philosophical project deliberately aimed at philosophical modesty using a methodology carefully constructed to avoid any claim to universal truth, Rawls has managed not only to employ a particular metaphysics, but also a particular theology.
Roman Catholic political theology, for example, includes non-violent, politically relevant, religious prescriptions, such as the obligation of Catholics to work toward the conversion of all citizens so that they not only recognize the moral and spiritual authority of the Catholic Church, but also accept its supreme authority over political matters where the state’s and the Church’s prerogatives coincide, as in, for example, public education and marriage law. Since the Catholic Church claims to be founded by God Himself and to have a supernatural origin, character, and purpose, it is vastly superior to the state in dignity and authority, and therefore requires and merits the submission of all other social and political institutions to its authoritative spiritual and moral guidance. The Church’s magisterial teaching also includes authoritative, politically relevant prudential prescriptions that can qualify, nuance, and even revoke more absolut-ist prescriptions when the circumstances demand it. For instance, the Catholic Church obligates the state to privilege the Church’s public status in society only if the vast majority of the citizens happen to be believing Roman Catholics, and then only under the condition that the religious liberty and rights of conscience of non-Catholics are secured; otherwise, the obligation is not in force.
Rawls, however, does not permit any other politically relevant, publicly authoritative, and coercively powerful prescriptions to be implemented but political liberalism. Even the mere hope for a situation in which the state would officially recognize the moral and spiritual authority of the Catholic Church and justly implement a political order in light of this recognition would entail, in Rawls’s mind, an unreasonable denial of the permanence of the fact of reasonable pluralism, the burdens of judgment, and the “teaching of history.” What Rawls excludes, then, is any religious comprehensive doctrine that does not conform to his understanding of the inferior and thoroughly privatized and de-politicized place of religious belief and obligation in the political order. The epistemological status of this kind of assertion is high indeed, surely more phi-losophically involved than a mere political conception! Indeed, there is a theological assumption implicit in Rawls: Either God has not revealed any binding, authoritative prescriptions regarding the political order, or, if he has, they are not authoritative in the politically liberal state. However, this kind of theological judgment, if given any political teeth, would attenuate severely the religious freedom of those who deny it, as Olsen suggests: “A full Christian life
is one lived out in one’s art, one’s politics, the form one’s city takes, and any check placed on public expressions of one’s Christianity is an attack on the pos-sibility of living an integrated life, an attempt to disallow Christian perfection.”
In short, political liberalism not only precludes the possibility of an authentic Christian political community, but also deems its mere pursuit by Christians a politically immoral endeavor. As Aidan Nicholas points out, however, the desire for Christian community is grounded in Christian hope: “Those who con-sider that social relations in a pluralist society can only take the form of endless debate have in effect surrendered the unity of society as a now anachronistic concept. That is not an option which Christian hope can take, for that hope is for life not death, and the destruction of the social bond means social death.” The exclusion of one’s religious beliefs and practices from the public realm of politics would only be acceptable for a privatized religion, such as the many forms of Protestantism found in contemporary America, but not for a religion with a formal and public institutional and hierarchical structure, such as Catholicism, as Olsen suggest here: “It [the overlapping consensus] does not clearly see that, because its point of departure is itself theological, lying in the idea of equality, it outlaws all forms of religion which are not ‘protestant.’ Ruled out is all religion which is unwilling to restrict itself to the private and individual, which sees itself as about more then God and the soul.” Any judgment presupposing the knowledge of God’s political will, even if only an agnostic claim that he may not have communicated anything definitive and politically relevant regarding his will to humans, is neither the prerogative of a “purely political” conception of justice, nor political philosophy in general. It is the prerogative of political theology. Rawls’s political liberalism is, since it makes such judgments, is essentially a work of political theology.
May 8th, 2010 | 10:40 am
Is it also possible that Rawls might collapse right and good a la Hegel in the Philosophy of Right?
I’ve often thought that we might be able to use Kierkegaard’s (or Johannes de silentio’s, at any rate) critiques of Hegelian political philosophy to critique Rawlsian political liberalism, too. As Kierkegaard (or JS) puts it: “The Hegelian philosophy assumes no justified concealment, no justified incommensurability. It is therefore consistent in demanding disclosure;” whereas Christianity (for K anyway) demands that the single individual have an “Absolute relation to the Absolute.”
May 9th, 2010 | 12:59 am
I failed to mention that a spirited criticism always involves a spirited defense. So what does Schaefer defend? Well, he defends a kind of liberalism that, I think, encompasses both Matt and Nathan’s concerns (and now I’m speaking in my own terms). He describes this liberalism in terms of the best of the American political tradition.
Let me add some remarks.
Nathan–On the one hand one must maintain a concern for the liberty of self-ownership (but perhaps a liberty of self government may be a better term, as self ownership connotes CB Macpherson’s possessive individualism). Is there a “theory” of justice that takes into account the necessity of the practice of governing oneself? Or is one alway subject to fate that cannot be accounted for and hence is always unjust? Rawls says all order is contingent–but we have the technology of the veil of ignorance. Rawls can have no conception of self-government–this would violate the difference principle.
Matt–On the other hand, one must preserve a concern for liberty that the individual has in terms of the relation of absolute to absolute. Is there a “theory” of justice that takes into account the necessity of the practice of keeping fidelity to those most ultimate and infinte things? For Rawls, God is only that which is chosen behind a veil of ignorance with all sorts of “liberal” preconditions surreptitiously predetermining the predicates of God. Protagoras couldn’t have said it better–even though he actually did. BTW, in Rawls I’m not so sure Hegel is the target here, but rather a diluted and decayed form of Kantianism.
Either way, Rawls fails on both accounts–responsible self government and openness to authority in terms of divine revelation do not exist in his theory. Don’t worry he is only offering a theory–but maybe we sould worry.
It is a theory that in nearly Maoist manner restructures–in the most baffling and also soporific manner–the way one thinks of oneself and this thing called living together in community (koinonia). Sandel pretty much demolished him (in my view), but Sandel himself veers too far in a Rousseauvian general will direction of “producing” democracy. So the community can remake whatever it wills in its own encumbered rationality. Sandel’s communitarianism is a Humean non-contractarian version of Rawslianism.
This theory (or at least the terms and parameters of thought it establishes) is now the leading philosophy in political science and legal jurisprudence, let alone what calls itself political philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy departments. So I suppose we should worry because this theory is now the practice amongst a certain segment of elites. How many educated graduates of elite schools place the chains of the Rawlsian difference principle over each and every statement they make? In truth, I have met some people who do this. Their speech has a Rawlsian angel governing it. Bizarre.
When I was younger and immature, i.e., when I was in grad school, I wrote a paper where I had the temerity to title my paper on Rawls after a Devo song called “Freedom of Choice.” I titled the paper “Use Your Freedom of Choice: It’s What You Got.” I put a footnote explaining the source. The paper went on to describe the Rawlsian non-teleogical self-positing constructivist good as sheer nihilism. Needless to say the instructor did not like the paper. Not the least of which was that it used something as silly as Devo to make a point. You watch the video and tell me if this is not an accurate portrayal of what kind of society emerges from behind the veil of ignorance in the original position. Unfortunately I wrote my paper long before Youtube and at the cusp of the cache “cultural studies.” So I looked like an idiot quoting Devo. Nonetheless, after watching the video, I think I’m right, even though cultural studies is for the most part BS–at least in its Manchester Marxian variety.
Luckily I’m not immature anymore. Though I still quote Devo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU
May 9th, 2010 | 1:22 am
BTW, in terms of cultural studies it’s Birmingham not Manchester.
May 13th, 2010 | 4:07 am
John Presnall, the correlation between the value of your thesis and the value of quoting Devo was very strong.
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