1. Thanks to Ralph for stimulating all this discussion about our political liberalism and in general (with Sam’s help) for raising us all up. We can’t help but admire his nobility in taking on the man whom studies show and leading experts agree rescued “normative” political philosophy from the ashes of the linguistic gaming of analytic philosophy and “value-free” behavioral social science. My own view is that Rawls’ “normative theory of justice,” analytic philosophy, and behavioral [and of course rat choice] social science (as opposed to appropriately modest but still methodical empirical studies–everyone should pay attention to what statistical studies show) are all pretty boring forms of corruption. So I have to admit, for one thing, preferring interesting forms of corruption, such as Foucault and Rorty. And for another, I’m still not sure I have the duty to expose relatively uncorrupt and enthusiastic undergrads to books I really have no interest in reading myself. There are many bad things about Nietzsche and Heidegger and maybe even more about Nietzscheans and Heideggerians, but I have to admit I’m always curious to know more about them. (If I taught in law school or in a mainstream graduate department where people were all Rawls savvy, I would, as I explain below, proceed differently.)
2. As it happens, I am teaching a course in contemporary political philosophy this fall. I will (thanks to Ralph) teach POLITICAL LIBERALISM with corresponding stuff from Rorty. I will also teach the best available libertarian. My call on this so far is Tyler Cowen–but I’m willing to be corrected on that. What else should I teach–keeping in mind I want to have some connection to our TRUE SCIENCE OF BEING STUCK WITH VIRTUE THEME of Descartes, Locke, and Darwin today? Also keep in mind I’m open to literally anything–that’s the advantage of living in obscurity.
3. Another sign that our pay grade is ascending is that the astute and most musical Tocquevillian cultural critic CARL SCOTT will be joining us on this channel. Thanks for Ivan the K for signing him up.
May 11th, 2010 | 10:29 am
Note again the Rawlsickians out there who think that markets are moral, not only as studies show but as empirical experiments will prove right before your eyes. For these folks, being stuck with virtue means being stuck with social market morality.
May 11th, 2010 | 12:03 pm
(1) David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom is very good for the utilitarian form of libertarianism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman This is a book NOT about virtue. His Law’s Order is also very good, and relevant with its theme of how so much of law (due process, rules against fraud, murder, etc.) can be derived from economic efficiency without any need to go to deeper principles.
(2) Rawls might be good for a course to teach students how even an undergraduate can tear apart the arguments of someone a culture’s intellectuals greatly admire for its conclusions.
May 11th, 2010 | 5:24 pm
Great news about Carl!!!
May 11th, 2010 | 9:41 pm
Thanks Peter and Pete. These Rawls threads are pretty great. Sam and Ralph and James Patterson have done some fine work here…still reading through them.
But I’ve been up in Saratoga Springs, searching out new housing. I’ll be teaching at Skidmore College next year.
Thus, I’ve been more concerned about actual construction than with constructivism, and more concerned even than usual with shoring up my bank account as opposed to shoring up justice as fairness! And the computer hasn’t been on much.
My favorite little bit so far has been Sam’s comment about the blue wires and the red wires.
I’m egg-heady enough that once I get going with Rawls, once I get all those wires out and about, that I really do want to make all the connections. And boy does he leave lots of wires about! But it is painful to get going with him, and guys like Peter and Allan Bloom make one suspect it isn’t worth it. And my ego and my common sense often chip in with the same doubts. However, it is not too difficult, even with Political Liberalism, to grasp the main points, points that do have a certain structural beauty. If you think geometry has its own beauty (and you should), you might find it in Rawls. True, it is also, as Ralph indicates, a beauty of a tempting pat-ness, and there is a potential menace in that fact.
Pierre Manent and the late Martin Malia warned us to be on the look-out for a new “Marx” who would someday come: i.e., a philosopher who would hit upon a quasi-philosophic formula that would tap into the everlasting democratic passion for equality in a peculiarly compelling way for a new zietgiest. Only such a philosopher could potentially wreak the sort of devastation that Marx did.
Rawls ain’t that guy, despite having hit upon some impressive (but as far as I can judge, more quasi than truly philosophic) formulas indeed. There’s just no Marseillaise-esque nor Morrison-esque (that’s Jim Morrison) passion in his work. Rawls can’t set you afire.
But maybe…maybe the threat for a new era occurs differently. Maybe it’s wrong to be on the lookout for a “new Marx.” Tocqueville says late in Democracy in America that administrative centralization eventually transmutes revolutionary passions into administrative-bureaucratic ones. In our era of late-modernity and advanced-democracy, perhaps the “beauty” and impressiveness of Rawls really is a menace, albeit in hidden, because un-dramatic and un-poetic, ways. Bit by bit by bit, over the “democratic centuries that are going to unfold,” technocratic souls guided by a Rawlsian-esque elite(one with room in its ranks for Rawls v. Nozick debates?), will put the construction in place.
Still, given stubborn facts about human psychology, I think it would be better to be on the lookout against a situation when a Poetic Philosopher might undergird a revolutionary agenda with Rawlsian-esque “science” the way Marx did with advanced economics and reworked Hegel.
May 12th, 2010 | 12:24 am
OK, let me venture one more comment on all the Rawls discussion (for which I thank all contributors).
Of course I’m not insisting that everyone teach Rawls. I spend two or three weeks on Rawls and his critics (well, mainly Allan Bloom’s ferocious and powerful broadside — but our friend David Schaefer’s comprehensive rebuttal is certainly worthy of attention). Now, I confess I’ve never heard of this Ankersmit, but I’m intrigued. Re. Aristotle: you’ll notice I never said we could like to him for a “solution,” but rather to re-open questions Rawlsians are compelled to insist must be considered closed.
So that leaves me with Kant, Augustine, and Plato to dispose of… But I’ll fall back on Tocqueville, as I tend to do. Tocqueville understood that the “laws of moral analogy,” the sense of some continuity between the Divine and our concrete, practical, representable humanity were threatened, not only by modern rationalism (eg Descartes), but by a kind of Platonic and Augustinian otherworldliness that had been radicalized by the Reformation. This radical transcendence tends in practice to become the accomplice of a radical immanence, because both extremes tend to obliterate the middle ground of prideful human virtue. Under the banner of the priority of the right to the good, Kant takes up the sublime cause of the denial of our practical and particular and prideful and limited humanity in the name of a theoretical, universal and sublime humanity. In Rawls this cause has become at once infinitely sublime and therefore infinitely humble and pedestrian: this is Rawls’ post-Protestant purity of heart. (Thus Rawls’ maddening boringness is linked with his ultra-esoteric claim to sublimity: Divinity is reborn as a simple, stuttering academic philosopher — that’s more humble than a carpenter!) My Plato is still more like Aristotle than like Kant, because, though he lets slip that his Good is “beyond being” (as Levinas loves to insist), it is still a RULING good that is supposed to be capable of ordering the soul and the city hierarchically.
Now, that should settle all possible questions, right?
May 12th, 2010 | 6:58 am
Thanks everybody for the great discussion about Rawls.
Can somebody tell me which Bloom essay on Rawls everybody is mentioning??
Thanks!
May 12th, 2010 | 8:16 am
Sly,
Bloom published a no-holds-barred review of Rawls in the American Political Science Review (of all places!) back in the 70s: “John Rawls vs. the Tradition of Political Philosophy.” It is republished in Bloom’s collection: “Giants and Dwarfs.” Guess which Rawls is. I used to think it was a little uncomprehending on some points; it certainly shows no signs of attempting a sympathetic reading. But every year I read it I am more impressed that Bloom saw immediately to the heart of the matter: if God and the Good and Nature are definitively banished, then the individual has no footing, and Society is the New God.
[Peter: by the way, you may be able to find good selections from Political Liberalism, but as I mentioned in my first Rawls post, I think, I find that he spills his guts or lets down his guard most notably in Justice as Fairness (especially last part on problem of "Stability," i.e., "can this project really work?") Selections available upon request.]
May 12th, 2010 | 11:03 am
Peter,
On libertarians, I can’t argue with your call on Cowen, but might I also suggest Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies.
May 12th, 2010 | 2:53 pm
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May 12th, 2010 | 6:48 pm
Sounds like a decent list, but what from Tyler Cowen? In Praise of Commercial Culture?
May 13th, 2010 | 12:36 am
On pay grades and gay parades see–
http://speleologicalreflections.blogspot.com/2010/05/beneath-my-pay-grade-or-over-my-gay.html
May 13th, 2010 | 9:28 am
It may be beneficial, if your class will consist of mainly evangelical and religious types, to give them a sample of the best evangelicals offer in terms of contemporary theory (though this may be hard to find) so they can compare.
May 13th, 2010 | 3:58 pm
Bloom’s essay on Rawls is excellent. It’s fun to read just as such a crushing and contemptuous put-down, even aside from its target, the Dwarf. It isn’t just Rawls’s conclusions or method that Bloom attacks, but his small-mindedness and complete lack of perception.
May 14th, 2010 | 2:01 am
I agree with Eric, Bloom’s critique of analytic philosophy is a perspective based mode of being which is actually similar to wittgenstein. The whole Kripke project for essence, whether that be political norm essence of the idea that “molecules in motion” = heat, are both painfully foundationalist.
Cheers from Greece Dr. Lawler!
May 19th, 2010 | 12:43 pm
It is unfortunate that discussion of criticism of Rawls in the United States almost never include George Grant’s English Speaking Justice. It makes a similar argument as Bloom (about a year earlier) in the larger context of thinking through “the close relation that there has been between the development of technology and political liberalism.”
I would think this would be a sympathetic crowd for his work and as a lecture it comes in under a 100 pages.
May 19th, 2010 | 12:50 pm
” will also teach the best available libertarian. My call on this so far is Tyler Cowen–but I’m willing to be corrected on that.”
Don’t think Cowen is much of a political philosopher. How about Jan Narveson? Chandran Kukathas? David Schmidtz? Richard Epstein?
May 20th, 2010 | 5:48 pm
I agree with Gene that Dave Schmidtz would be a good choice for the libertarian see especially his Elements of Justice. But, the most important Classical Liberal thinker in the 20th century is clearly Hayek and so it might be worth teaching him. Fatal Conceit has flaws in terms of authorship but it is pretty radical, Constitution of Liberty would be a good choice. The evolutionary nature of the theory might also challenge the religious crowd.
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