Ralph presents his case against Rawls below. Although I agree with much of it, I think he goes too far. Here are a few rather disordered suggestions intended less to vindicate Rawls than to complicate the picture:
1. We need to distinguish between Rawls an sich (as it were) and what Ralph describes as academic “thralldom” to Rawls. On any open-minded reading, both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism are major intellectual achievements, which should be treated with respect. Problem is, that respect is too often transformed into uncritical reverence. I don’t blame Rawls for this more than I blame Strauss, Voegelin, or other thinkers who have inspired somewhat cultish devotion. Few teachers are well-served by their disciples.
2. It is simply not true that Rawls “liquidates the whole tradition of political philosophy”. That’s because, pace Bloom, the tradition is not univocal concerning the questions to be answered and the right way of trying to answer them. In fact, as Ralph observes, Rawls’ project is related to Hobbes’. According to Rawls himself, it’s even more directly influenced by Bodin and the French politiques. That’s without mentioning the well-known features that Rawls’ thought shares with Rousseau’s and Kant’s. One thing that unites these philosophers is their hostility to Aristotle, and Aristotelian attempts to derive the Right from the Good (their relation to Plato is more complicated). And, with all due respect to Strauss and the Straussians, Aristotle is not definitive of the single authoritative tradition of political philosophy–he’s one star in a much richer constellation of authors and ideas.
3. But what about the substance of Rawls’ doctrine? Here, the criticism that “political liberalism” is much more comprehensive than its supposed is absolutely correct–although, frankly, that’s not very controversial in academic political philosophy. And not only comprehensive. As Thad points it out, it’s also essentially theological–or at least rooted in a specifically protestant conception of religion. This part is more controversial.
Which is why I’ve been looking into this issue recently. Although I’m still working through the texts (including the recently published statements on religion), I’m pretty confident that Rawl’s wasn’t trying to deceive anybody, but systematically underestimated the separability of liberal moral and political concepts from their theological background. That’s a philosophical and historical error that should be criticized, in classrooms and in print. It’s not an excuse for ignoring Rawls.
4. Nevertheless, it’s true that a highly scholastic, historically- and religiously-unreflective brand of Rawlsianism has become popular in many departments of philosophy and political science (although not nearly so popular as it was ten years ago). Why did that happened? Some assume it’s because Rawls justifies the default left-liberalism of most academics. That may be true in some cases. But an even more powerful reason is that Rawls provides a plug-and-play research program, which is just what graduate students and struggling young professors need to publish early and often. It is far easier to master the technical apparatus of TJ than to learn something about, say, Bodin.
5. But has any of this had the slightest practical impact? I must say that I rather doubt it, as Raymond Geuss has argued extensively from the left. What distinctively Rawlsian principles has anyone heard invoked in a politically or juridically relevant way? In fact, does Rawls really say anything that couldn’t be described as Locke outside the Locke-box?
May 9th, 2010 | 7:55 pm
Sam, Nice job. Rawls is better than Rawlsians. Well, how could that not be true? The intellectual popularity of Rawls is due less to what he says (which although quite meticulous I still deny is all that penetrating) than his use as convenient reinforcement of left libertarian sophisticated prejudices. But all that Locke outside the Locke box ideologizing would being going on even if Rawls were never born. The Supreme Court in LAWRENCE didn’t need Rawls, as Sam rightly suggests. Certainly the comfortable view that political philosophy is Rawls vs. Nozick is not about a dispute between fundamental alternatives or even real alternatives. Meanwhile, we see from that APSA theorists poll that Stauss and Voegelin seem less mainstream than ever, certainly less so than,say, in 1960. And despite the manly David Schaefer, our Ralph, and others, some of the more Lockean Straussians have actually allowed themselves to buy into that overlapping consensus stuff.
May 9th, 2010 | 10:15 pm
Well, not all that penetrating compared to what? I mean, sure, Rawls is no Hobbes. But then he didn’t claim to be–and Rawls’ personal modesty was not an act, unlike Strauss’. On the other hand, I’m sympathetic to the aspiration to find an intermediate level of philosophical ambition, perhaps lower than the giants’, but still higher than merely dwarfish commentary. Strauss is not very helpful on this issue, which is one of the things that mainstream political theorists find so frustrating about him.
As I suggested in the post, a big part of Rawl’s appeal, maybe bigger than his politics, is that you can do something, however trivial, with his arguments and conceptual set-up. The Straussians just tell you to read more Aristotle, which is no doubt very edifying, but can also be quite stultifying.
By the way, I can report from the front that I don’t know any graduate students or younger professors who think that Rawls vs. Nozick is a dispute between fundamental alternatives. This may have something to do with the company I keep, but I also think that there’s been some change in opinion probably not reflected in the poll.
May 10th, 2010 | 7:17 am
I can also report that there are plenty of plenty smart ‘Rawlsickians’ out there. But I’ve been wondering a lot lately whether that reveals something interesting and underremarked upon about Rawls, namely, that there might not be very much daylight at all between Rawls and Rorty. Possibly my great love for reading and arguing with Rorty, combined with my great distaste for reading and arguing with Rawls, has led me to miss out on all the work that’s been done on the affinities between the two, and on the possibly inevitable way in which Rawlsian High Theory ‘decays’ into Rortyan cultural politics. If this is the case, I would love to know…
But at any rate, what seems to unite Rawls and Rorty is a certain blindness to the way the liberal worlds they rely on and reinforce secretly, but out in the open, preside over and enable the mass production of folks who are not nearly so gentle and placid and mutually respectful outside of political life — not nearly so ‘bourgeois’ — as they seem to take for granted. Rorty seems to be almost Straussian in his apparent secret awareness of this problem and his desire to draw our attention away from it by a lot of rhetoric and fine speech. But Rawls on this point seems positively lost.
May 10th, 2010 | 7:37 am
My own distaste for reading and arguing with Rawls is due to the fact that it’s like reading and arguing with stereo instructions translated from the original Japanese. Does the red wire plug into the blue input or the green? But the absence of literary merit is not really a good excuse for ignoring him.
But Rawls was a lousy historian and sociologist. Or more accurately, he misunderstood the problem of modernity to be the domination of public life by contending theologico-political sects. Although he doesn’t often tip his hat, Rawls was absolutely obsessed by the Inquisition and Wars of Religion. Asking the wrong question led him to the wrong answer.
May 10th, 2010 | 9:16 am
The popularity of Rawls is more or less self-sustaining. He originally reflected the attitudes among many professors at the time of his original publication. He created an interesting, if not unprecedented, debate with Nozick, a debate which reflected the internal tensions of liberalism. The debate turned into a cottage industry in which one could publish. When publishing became all the more critical for getting jobs and tenure, political theorists took the path of least resistance and simply entered the debate, usually favoring Rawls but with a few reservations or so.
Aside from the professional explanations, there’s the ideological ones. First, Rawls provides a rationale for entitlements overseen and distributed by a bureaucratic state. That rationale provides two points favorable to an average academic. First, the emphasis is on state power, and second, more importantly, the ones wielding state power are academics, since they are the ones determining who gets what when and where. Bureaucrats merely act on those determinations. These two points satisfy an internal fear that political science, as practices in most departments, remains somehow alienated from the practice of politics itself. How? It places the burden on the practice of politics for failing to heed the recommendations of academics.
I’ve come to read Rawls as a theorist of significance in our present but marginal within the larger tradition of political philosophy. His innovation was to seek a rationale for the development of the welfare state, one that would vindicate its loftier goals and rationalize its procedures. Yet, to do so, Rawls left uncriticized the most controversial of his assumptions, most especially that government is primarily in the business of economic redistribution and that human beings are primarily economic entities. In the face of the Cold War, these two assumptions seemed highly suspicious after bearing witness to the events ranging from Holocaust to the Civil Rights Movements. Neither event is comprehended by liberal theory, the former being radical evil and the latter being a religious form of radical goodness. The CRM is particularly vexing for any orthodox Rawlsian, since someone like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. professes all the same ends Rawls would want but with an entirely different, more elevated rationale.
Lamenting the decline or marginalization of Strauss or Voegelin is, in my mind, less useful than merely using either or both to good effect. On the other hand, I agree that raising either up as an demi-god opponent to Rawls is simply playing the same game as Rawlsians and with less success–there isn’t nearly the sprawling cottage industry with these two (well, maybe not Voegelin). With the recent events in Greece, we may be seeing the passing of Rawlsian thought, since the assumptions Rawls made about economic redistribution founder when the state has no reliable context for unbridled economic gain to tax and redistribute. It seems that most Western states did so with heavy borrowing and under the pressure of interest groups, despite the obvious unsustainability in the future (since, in the future, we’re all dead, no?). Perhaps, the era of post-War ideology may experience a re-orientation away from states resting on a mere life of idle retirement at 53 and resume the good life of political responsibility. One can hope.
May 10th, 2010 | 9:52 am
So Rawls stunk as an historian, a sociologist, and (let me add) a psychologist. (It goes without saying that his misplaced moralism caused him not to know the first thing about economics [contrary, say, to Hobbes]. Not only is he all distorted by his obsession over wars of religion in the manner of Hobbes, his understanding of the history and causes of said wars isn’t right. He’s a boring writer in the manner JP describes. Why should undergrads read him? (I agree he was a decent and modest man, but I also agree that Rorty is far superior on at least the sociology, psychology, and being interesting fronts.) It’s true that Rawls vs. Nozick is mostly in philosophy depts with an analytic orientation now–that is, in boring and irrelevant philosophy depts. So it’s not surprising that Sam’s friends wouldn’t think that way. Anyway, good thread and I wish I could devote some real time to it.
May 10th, 2010 | 11:41 am
Great post and great thread. I think it’s hard to maintain that Rawls’ works are “major intellectual achievements” but also concede that he “didn’t say anything that couldn’t be described as Locke outside the Locke box”. My argument against Rawls is not so much that he attempts to derive Right without the Good–I would say Locke does this and I include him in the tradition of political philosophy. Rather, Rawls starts with a set of fairly superifical political prejudices and constructs around them a massive theoretical apparatus as an apology for them. I agree that he wasn’t merely an apologist–he really seems to think he was genuinely engaged in some kind of real political philosophy-but that actually makes it even worse, in a sense, since he didn’t think deep enough or with enough self-awareness to understand precisely what hos own work amounts to. So Rawls is better than his epigones but it’s not THAT far a leap from what Rawls actually wrote and intended to subsequent appropriations. So Nietzsche was confusing enough and inflammatory enough to be ripe for commandeering by dark forces and Rawls is shallow enough and clear enough to be easy prey for those who are even more shallow and have some affinity for easily digestible systems. Ultimately, i would argue that Rawls’ lack of depth is a function of his dismissal of real political experience and a lack of a sense of history but that’s another comment for later.
I’ve gone back and forth on teaching him–I don’t like to and my students seem to feel the same. However, I sometimes feel like they should know something about him since, even if his influence has been overestimated, some familiarity with a reference to him is so often taken for granted. In a sense, they would learn more from Bodin (certainly) but might not find him as useful since no one ever refers to him. Even if there is nothing all that distinctively Rawlsian, (one argument against his significance) folks use the language of Rawls all the time as a shorthand for this and that.
May 10th, 2010 | 1:09 pm
Well, even if all Rawls did was to articulate formally secular liberal constructivism (=Locke outside the Locke box), I’d still call that a major intellectual achievement. And one worth teaching in its appropriate context.
The pedagogical question is, what is that context? I agree with Peter, probably not an undergraduate intro to political theory course. But very appropriately in a course on liberalism, Kantianism, approaches to religion and politics, or distributive justice. All of which are worthy topics for upper-division lectures or seminars.
Also, of course, students who are considering grad school should have some exposure to Rawls since, as Ivan points out, people use the jargon all the time.
May 11th, 2010 | 12:09 am
I’m not the best person to do it, but some of what is written above really begs for a response.
– Rawls thinks people are “basically economic entities”? I find it difficult to see how anyone who has even glanced at the third part of TJ can say this with a straight face.
– Rawls “stunk” as a psychologist? Same answer.
– Martin Luther King sought the same goals as Rawls, but with a more “elevated rationale”? Rawls’s main goal seems to have been to work out his ideas to his own satisfaction. King’s main goal was to transform one crucial aspect of American society. Those goals are different.
– Rawls was responsible, virtually alone, for the resuscitation of normative political theory in an Anglo-American academic context of the late 50s/early 60s in which, with a few pockets of exceptions, its pursuit had been abandoned or severely downgraded. That in itself is a major accomplishment.
– The notion that Rawls’s works are not major intellectual achievements borders on the preposterous. The writing style is not scintillating and, as with every ambitious intellectual project, there are no doubt flaws and weak points, the debate about which now fills entire libraries. But I think it’s fair to say that the consensus view is that TJ is the single most important English-language work of political philosophy produced in the 20th century. Although the people who contribute to this blog may pass that assessment off to the careerism of certain professors and graduate students, my view is that it is an eminently defensible and almost certainly correct judgment.
May 11th, 2010 | 8:54 am
Thanks to LFC for an eloquent defense of the consensus view, and for reminding us that that view really does exist. It is written from the perspective of analytic philosophy, which is the place where “normative” stuff did fade away. And it’s also true that for a lot of mainstream political science, normative=Rawls=sophisticated and respectable value judgments.
May 12th, 2010 | 8:17 pm
[...] also the comments and follow-up posts, including this partial defense of [...]
May 13th, 2010 | 5:14 pm
This thread is really depressing. Strausseans tend to be excellent close readers, but evidently no one here has bothered to read Rawls closely. Maybe that’s the issue… If it is conceded that Rawls is an important thinker, one would have to actually read his books with attention and care, and who has the time for that?
May 14th, 2010 | 3:50 pm
I’m an economist, not a Philosophy insider, but is it really true that Rawls is respected by analytic philosophers? Economists dismiss him as being naive and wrong in his decision theory in the Veil of Ignorance. My impression, perhaps wrong, is that political philosophy and ethics are the low-prestige areas within philosophy departments, and Rawls is part of the reason for that. (Strauss too, maybe, but that’s a much smaller part of it, and is because Strauss is seen as history-of-thought rather than as trying to construct logical arguments.)
Any comments? As I said, I’m an outsider, so maybe I’m wrong on that.
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