Any comments? As I said, I’m an outsider, so maybe I’m wrong on that.

– 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.