Thanks to Samuel and others for an excellent discussion (just below). Though I do not wish to disappoint, I find myself unconvinced that I have gone too far in criticizing Rawls, and in fact tempted to go further.
1. Epigones: Of course Rawls, no more than Strauss, say, cannot be held completely responsible for his followers. Both have projects, which implies a willingness to mobilize followers, who by definition follow and do not altogether rethink. My critique of Strauss’s High Straussian followers is, if not well-known, at least “on the record.” But a certain Straussian narrowing cannot really be compared with the Rawlsian attempt to settle or rather put aside the big questions once and for all. Which brings me to …
2. Liquidation: Rawls’ project is fundamentally Hobbesian, but does he even know this, or fully appreciate it? He cannot because it seems so obvious to him that Hobbes’ dismissal of the Good is … right, that he has no way of appreciating Hobbes’ boldness, or therefore, his (Rawls’) own boldness – or what would be boldness if he knew what he was doing. (Likewise for Rousseau and, most spectacularly, Kant.) And notice that Samuel seems to disagree not only with Strauss but with the moderns he means to defend when he demotes Aristotle to just one star in a rich constellation. All the early moderns, including, very explicitly, Martin Luther, understood perfectly well that everything depended on severing human action from the notion of the natural perfection of the human soul, a notion of which Aristotle’s classic formulation is classic… for good reason. Given this, there is something to the Straussian idea that there’s only one authoritative (ancient) tradition, which includes the (modern) counter-tradition. (I leave to another time the interlinked questions of Christianity and postmodernism.)
But it is not right to describe the Aristotelian core of the tradition as attempting to “derive the right from the good.” To be sure, the good enjoys a certain priority in classical political philosophy, but there is also an awareness of the impossibility of simply “deriving” the right from it. Thus Aristotle suggestively links the intrinsic rightness of action with the good of the soul and of the city, but he is very aware that no definitive “derivation” is possible. Thus the dialectic between theory and practice remains open. This is precisely the dialectic the moderns attempt to close, but claiming that the good can be derived from or altogether subordinated to the right. We see this dream very much alive in Rawls, especially as he succumbs to lyricism on the last page of A THEORY OF JUSTICE: purity of heart, or the heart of the truly best life, is living from the standpoint of the absolute priority of right. Call this modest, if you like, in the way that Calvin or Descartes were modest. In a way, Rawls’ ambition, because it is unknown to himself, is at the same time much smaller and much bigger than those of his great predecessors. One thing it is not, finally, is “intermediate.” This, I think, is a reason to teach about it. Rorty’s charm (considerable, perhaps, though not exactly to my taste) is that he is in some way aware of being a man of ambitions at once tiny and huge (is the ambition that there should be no significant ambitions tiny or huge?).
3. Comprehensiveness: If all the professional political theorists already recognize that Rawls’ apparent modest re. “comprehensive doctrines” is sham, then I’m glad (albeit a bit surprised) to learn of this. But excuse me, would not the whole program collapse if we understood it to be fundamentally “theological?” In any case, Samuel no doubt noticed that I’m not the one arguing for ignoring Rawls. He gets more weeks in my Contemporary Political Theory class than any other author, even though this cramps my style on Heidegger, Strauss, etc.
4. Rawls’ catching the wave of academic liberalism and his providing a plug-and-play research program are two dimensions of the same phenomenon, no?
5. Here I have to disagree massively. I think Rawls’ conceptualization of liberalism has massively penetrated beyond the academy to the legal academy and the public intellectual and legal realms generally. Ronald Dworkin would be one early case in point (is he a has-been already?). Rawlsianism has managed for many academics and therefore for many intellectuals and therefore for the public that listens to intellectuals to suppress the tension between classical liberalism and de facto socialism (in principle unlimited entitlements), encouraging the illusion that one can make individual liberty a first principle and at the same time consider the demands of whatever category might consider itself “least advantaged” to be morally authoritative. Even more conspicuously, have we not all noticed the tendency of even would-be moderates to assume that intellectuals or experts have the right to perform a gatekeeper function separating authorized “public reasons” from what regular (especially religious) people might wrongly consider a “reason.” Thus the sovereignty of the right over the good is close to becoming an effectual truth, and I cannot believe Rawls and Rawlsianism have not played a massive role in making this move respectable and plausible, when it should be considered outrageous.
I conclude – to reconnect with our Great Books discussion below– that one cannot now be a partisan of greatness without first (or in a first moment, at least) being a partisan of the ancients against the moderns. For Hobbes did in a way produce Rawls and Rorty, and I cannot conceive a more devastating critique. I will continue to teach Rawls in order to teach the necessity of arriving at this conclusion. We need now to take Aristotle seriously in order to take Hobbes seriously. But there is no denying that this means finally to take Aristotle’s side against Hobbes (and Luther & Calvin too — I’ll throw them in for free.)
Now, once we’ve taken Aristotle’s side to open the question, we are in a position to make the Christian and postmodern move of confronting the undecidability of the ranking of the good and the right, of theory and practice, of virtue and freedom.
May 10th, 2010 | 1:30 pm
A few things re:
2) What role, if any, does Kant play in this ancients and moderns narrative? In particular, his critique of access to nature or things-in-themselves? On the one hand, this does seem like a “liquidation” of the Aristotelian. On the other hand, Kant saw it, with some reason, as vindication of Plato. The problem with any appeal to “the ancients” is that it obscures the enormous gap between Plato and Aristotle. Stanley Rosen is actually pretty good on this.
3) I never suggested that *all* academic political philosophers recognize the concealed comprehensiveness of Rawls liberalism. But many do. To name some of Rawls’ more prominent students and interlocutors: Brian Barry, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Amartya Sen, Josh Cohen, Christine Korsgaard. I refer here only to those whom I’ve heard so say with my own ears. No doubt there are others.
Whether or not this comprehensiveness is essentially theological is, as I said, more controversial. I myself think so–and agree that this makes the priority of political difficult to sustain.
4) See Peter’s comment below: the SCOTUS really didn’t need Rawls to rule as it did in Lawrence.
May 10th, 2010 | 1:59 pm
Your preference for Aristotle against Hobbes (and Luther and Calvin) skates over Augustine. Augustine’s vision of this world as, at most, the battlefield for man’s salvation, stripped the vigor away from classical political philosophizing. True, a few centuries of barbaric violence necessitated the principle, but the early middle ages was slow to re-embrace political theory due to the period’s Augustinian outlook. The gradual reintroduction of Aristotle in the 12th and 13th centuries was an affront to any consistent Augustinianism. The classical reinvigoration was essentially a re-theorizing of “this life,” in terms of its ends without respect to the salvation of sinners. Cf. the Italian humanists.
Your “Aristotelian tradition” was put underground in the 5th century, re-emerged in the 13th to develop alongside competing traditions in the 14th and 15th (such as the humanist absorption of classical theory).
May 10th, 2010 | 2:52 pm
Great discussion. I do think the problem with Rawls is that he is a secularized liberal- Protestant theologian with a Kantian and Lockean understanding of Christian theology, and a roughly Rousseauian and Hobbesian understanding of social/political order and man’s nature respectively. Put these all together and you have a recipe for abject failure but with an amazing rhetorical plausibility.
The question is whether Rawls’s overlapping consensus can fulfill its required task as providing a theoretical basis for a free, just, and stable political order in a milieu of ideological pluralism. Does Rawls successfully “work out a political conception of political justice for a constitutional democratic regime that a plurality of reasonable doctrines, religious and nonreli-gious, liberal and nonliberal, may freely endorse”? As I see it, there are seven circumstances where Rawls’s overlapping consensus model could fail:
1) The number of citizens excluded from membership in the overlapping consensus is sizeable enough to contradict its claim to be a just, stable and well-ordered society
2) the overlapping consensus is not, as it purports to be, politically grounded, but metaphysically grounded
3) Rawls’s interpretation of the “fact of reasonable pluralism” and his contention that “comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrines . . . cannot be endorsed by citizens generally, and they also no longer can, if they ever could, serve as the professed basis of society” are not included in the set of authoritative beliefs of the public political culture. For then, the specific political exigencies these claims supposedly engender and which determine the particular form of Rawls’s political solution could be disputed by a sufficient number of citizens to render Rawls’s solution, even if philosophically sound, practically impossible
4) Rawls’s interpretation of history and contemporary political reality, even if endorsed by all citizens, is untrue, or, at least, eminently debatable. For if knowledge of its falsity were publicly available (and in a society predicated upon the free use of human reason, there is no reason to think it would not be), it would lead to serious political instability
5) a well-ordered, stable, and morally based democratic government is simply not possible in the midst of what Rawls calls “deep doctrinal conflict with no pros-pect of resolution”
6) politics is by nature intrinsically teleological; for then, a freestanding political system, as well any non-foundationalist philosophical account of politics, would be impossible and false respectively
7) a postmodern, pragmatic, “truth-less” approach to political philosophy must fail because truth cannot be avoided, theoretically or practically, in political philosophizing regarding fundamental political issues.
I believe Rawls fails in all seven ways. The main reason? J. Judd Owen puts his finger on it:
“The difficulty is not that political liberalism is forced to go outside the confines of the political in order to defend a liberalism that is otherwise justifiable on strictly political terms. The more immediate and more important difficulty is that liberalism is challenged by those who dispute its understanding of the political itself.”
If Rawls were to deign to dispute with. and not dictate to, his opponents, he would, like everybody else, have to appeal to a comprehensive doctrine, for such is required to provide definitive answers and arguments regarding the precise constitution of the political, its particular moral values, and its proper relation to other spheres of human reality, including the metaphysical and theological, that is, supra-political realities. Since he does implicitly tell us the place of the theological in the political by the way his politically liberal polity works, he is more of a political metaphysican and theologian than a “political-not-philosophical” pragmatic political theorist.
May 10th, 2010 | 9:47 pm
A few words in Ralph’s support on the damage Rawls does at law schools, or at least my highly policy-oriented law school:
It is almost impossible to get through a course with implications for economics without at least some discussion of Rawls, which I think all here would agree is justified. He is after all the most prominent philosophical defender of the redistribution of wealth, and his views on political liberalism are widely enough read to form a good basis for discussion. That said, I think there are two problems with the way he’s used.
First, he (or something similar to him) is generally taken as the only alternative to a straightforward welfare economics approach in which legal rules should be judged based on their tendency to promote economic efficiency. Redistribution and legal rules that protect the poor are framed as much as possible in terms of justice and rights, which I think distorts the important questions more than it helps, not to mention gives people an effective but utterly fallacious rhetorical tool for attacking those who are skeptical of their project: “They don’t care about Justice.”
So basically, people in economic conversations here are presented with the options of heartless efficiency-seeking and the endless proliferation of “rights” in pursuit of soulless “Justice.” Take your pick.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, something like Rawls’s idea of political liberalism is taken way, way too much on faith. Contemporary Rawlsians may have acknowledged that his vision is not neutral to comprehensive views, but most of the students and many of the professors here haven’t. I’m afraid the very crudest understanding of faith and politics is common currency here: “Catholics only oppose abortion because of their religion,” “Mormon participation in the Prop 8 campaign was an unjust intrusion of religion into the political sphere,” etc., with no real sense of the tricky philosophical problems they run into by making those claims.
Of course, it’s an open question how much of this is due to Rawls and how much is just partisan bias or never having taken the question seriously. My guess is that a lot of people have a vague sense that they don’t have to think about those particular issues because people like Rawls have dealt with them and they trust people like Rawls. So I guess my main point is that I think the title of the thread is right. Most law students at top schools have learned enough Rawls to be influenced but not enough to know how they’ve been influenced or how problematic that influence might be. And now, perhaps, the only way out is through.
May 11th, 2010 | 8:45 am
So Thad and Alan, Thanks for bringing Ralph down from the heights and into the city in different ways. I don’t doubt at all that in sophisticated circles (where you’ll never see ME) such as elitist law school, the choices are efficiency vs. redistribution in economics with an “overlapping conensus” on cultural libertarianism or public neutrality on lifeplans or whatever. This leads both sides to agree on the right to abortion, the right to same-sex marriage, etc., to agree on an evolving conception of liberty standard of judicial activism. The only disagreement is whether that understanding of “liberty” should be applied to economic regulations too. I actually still think, with Sam, that the culture of law school (what forms the soul of Elena Kagan etc.) would be about what it is had Rawls never been born, but now I’m inclined to agree with Ralph that attacking Rawls is one part of the strategy of taking on those basically nihilistic cultural prejudices. Attacking the “deep libertarians” is another part of the path to “a consistent ethic of judicial restraint” or leaving plenty of space for the habituation required for moral virtue etc. (I will get around to explaining why I don’t think, nonetheless, that Aristotle is “the solution.”)
May 11th, 2010 | 3:36 pm
LCD sent some salvos my way in the previous thread, although I find that they were the result of my rather unclear language than the positions he seems to attribute (?). By way of a quick defense, my reference to an economic conception of man was my allusion to Rawls arguing that folks pursue certain goods as “primary” and that those goods are material. Of course, he excludes the comprehensive doctrine that demand different goods be pursued as primary, demonstrating, as others have here argued, that Rawls is engaging in a sort of theological liberalism–asserting the primary goods as normative rather than describing them as such. This assumption is imported in the metaphorical devices found in the original position and the veil of ignorance. They are mere metaphorical devices, meaning they create an image of objectivity where there never was one. Instead, there is a fig leaf for smuggling in one’s prior commitments to the welfare state whose primary function is to tax and redistribute tax revenue as entitlements. They’re the most insidious aesthetic devices, since they confer on those readily accepting them a false of sense of objectivity that gives them a feeling of philosophical superiority to those who, like the aforementioned J. Judd Owen (not to mention the many on the agonists on the Left like Chantal Mouffe), see the entire Rawlsian concept of the political as deeply flawed.
The line of argument in this and prior threads, as well as in the published topics, are well served by reading some rather under-appreciated interpretations of Rawls found in the work of F. R. Ankersmit, especially in his introduction to Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Standford, 1996).
In his introduction, Ankersmit argues against ethics as the starting point for political theory, instead preferring “virtu” or “raison d’etat’ found in the study of history as a “rejection of the clear and transparent world of moral argument, both recognized the ever-present dimension of the unintended consequences of all human action; the former insofar as it cut the ties between moral intentions and the welcome consequences to be expected from their implementation, and the second because the object of historical writing can be identified almost completely with the domain of unintended consequences.”
Ankersmit’s rationale for his position rests on a distinction I see many here would resist making. Ankersmit wants to distinguish between the anti-historical nature of Rawlsian thought from the very historical nature of theories from Hobbes, Bodin, and others seeking to solve their contemporary, very real political crises by referring to the language of natural law only insofar as it offers a legitimation for a real political effort to reestablish peace in Europe. For Ankersmit, reading Rawls as a disciple of Hobbes means reading Rawls as a bad student, since Hobbes meant for his theory to draw from real political experiences, influence real political decisions, and establish a real regime.
Rawls is a bad student because he either ignores the political realities precluding the implementation of his ethics or holds those who would remind him in contempt. Either attitude is that of the “political fool” as Ankersmit describes. Political wisdom, on the other hand leads to governing with decency, “by political decency I mean the following two things: first, the readiness to recognize and to respect that dimension of passive and invincible inertia present in the political domain…and second the capacity to creative adapt one’s political goals to the given of this dimension of inertia, instead of trying to attack it with all means available. This decency can also be considered perhaps the most important part of all political wisdom, if we think of the old adage that in politics the difference between the wise and the fool is that the former does at once what the latter does only in the end, and therefore too late.”
Ankersmit, therefore, divides political theory camps between those sensitive to history—and its knowledge of unintended consequences—and those insensitive—whose ideological commitments blind them to the unintended consequences of decisions made only along ethical reasoning. That distinction redeems Machiavelli and Hobbes as practical theorists wishing to remedy a social problem with political philosophy and condemns Rawls along with his predecessor Immanuel Kant, both of whom Ankersmit condemns as enabling the fool who fails to recognize “that he may sometimes have to sacrifice to reality even his most rational, most praiseworthy, and most cherished goals because under such circumstances the stubborn pursuit of these goals could only prove to be disastrous to all concerned.”
My comment in the previous thread made reference to Greece, and the condition of that state remains an excellent example of what Ankersmit means in his critique of ethics as the starting point for politics. However, considering the corruption and waste that contributed to Greek’s present financial crisis, one might want to consider California, instead. There we see referenda and amendments concerned with only the intended consequences, such as reducing tax revenue (at least on properties but certainly not on businesses) or energy production, while legislative decisions and rogue mayors allow the introduction of new populations, distribution of benefits, and the constant borrowing to sustain it all. The ethical point of view refuses to see the obvious consequences and ignores the historical results for those governments that borrow at the rates to pay entitlements of such a size (such as R. Shep Melnik’s stuff). The ethical demand to provide for a growing number of both of goods qualifying as “primary” as well as those who qualify for such goods overrules the obvious inability for the government to provide those goods to those new recipients.
Rawls has no direction on this because he simply doesn’t care about it; and the extent to which he doesn’t care is the extent to which we should not care about Rawls. In light of the economic crises, we can see why Ankersmit is right to link political wisdom with political decency; a decent statesman knows when to make the hard choice for the benefit of those governed. The fool is indecent, since he ruins the state with invocations of entitlements. What Ankersmit does not mention is how ethics so often conceals the cowardice before citizens hurling stones at police in order to defend their early retirements. But the more important point is that if Ankersmit is right, then where is the political theory addressing THIS crisis concerning the potential collapse of welfare states as a result of unsustainable deficits? It is hard for some even to imagine that one would write a theory with a real political problem as a starting point rather than some third-generation Rawlsian extension into a question no one in real politics ever asks.
May 11th, 2010 | 10:10 pm
James, hear, hear. To the library for the good Dr. Ankersmit!
May 12th, 2010 | 8:33 am
I’m currently enrolled in a well-respected political theory program in the East, and I can say that at among political theorists in my program, Rawls is easily the most important intellectual figure. At a recent grad-student paper presentation on Confucian political thought, one of the professors prefaced his remarks by saying, “Just to show that everything comes back to Rawls [here]. . .” It was half in jest, but half not. I once heard a fellow grad student say “Political theory is finished. Rawls did it.” That may sound like too much, but it is true. Rawls is alive and well.
I agree with many of the criticisms leveled against Rawls by Ralph and others. I will simply add one more to the pot: what I find most disturbing about Political Liberalism is the way Rawls tries to change what can count as a legitimate argument (at least about “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice”). This approach has two huge advantages for Rawls: 1) it allows Rawls et al. to avoid addressing deep “metaphysical” questions while tacitly relying on questionable answers to those questions, and 2) it allows Rawls et al. to ignore those who disagree with them, so long as they do not play by the rules (which is just about everyone). Rawls explicitly says that abiding by the norms of “public reason” is a “moral duty;” (see PL 217) therefore, those who do not follow it are in violation of that duty. Rawls can ignore his critics and feel good about it, too. After all, we know in advance that answers to the deep metaphysical questions cannot be shared by citizens generally, so why try, and why listen to those who do? It is an incredibly deft “political” move.
May 20th, 2010 | 11:39 am
[...] come to think of him as my Rawlsian conscience. I’ve got Matt in mind, because the discussion of Rawls over at First Things clearly suffers from the fact that none of these guys has a Rawlsian conscience–somebody they [...]
June 12th, 2010 | 9:12 am
[...] There is No Way Beyond Rawls but Through Rawls Leave a comment » There is No Way Beyond Rawls but Through Rawls First Things (blog) But excuse me, would not the whole program collapse if we understood it to be fundamentally “theological?” In any case, Samuel no doubt noticed that I’m not … http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2010/05/10/there-is-no-way-beyond-rawls-but-… [...]
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