Political Liberalism

...Rawls's "political liberalism" is thus a formula not for liberation but for punitive taxation, income transfers, and all the other instruments of paternalistic bureaucracy that have characterized the welfare state since World War II...

...A criticism often addressed to Rawls is that he has a very eighteenth-century conception of rational man...

...He does not see that in the real world, policies of income redistribution have been found to encroach on what he defends as "basic liberties...

...S adly, Rawls's new book Political Liberalism is A Theory of Justice rewritten as ideology...

...Plainly this is to denounce as "unreasonable" a view that at least half the civilized world entertains, and which most moral philosophers down the ages have upheld...

...He does not consider that real people might be motivated less by rational calculations than by passions such as love, greed, aggression, or fear, as most philosophers since the French Revolution have believed...

...there can be no justifying abortion on a theory of natural right...

...Oakeshott puts it, the state has nothing to distribute...

...Political Liberalism is perhaps an odd title, since all liberalism is political...

...On the other hand, his insistence that social and economic inequalities must be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged is a call for the state to transform itself from an instrument of law into a redistributor of material goods...

...It is to denounce as "unreasonPOLITICAL LIBERALISM John Rawls Columbia University Press / 416 pages / $32.50 reviewed by MAURICE CRANSTON 58 The American Spectator January 1994 able" anyone who logically derives from Rawls's own theory of basic rights the conclusion that the right to life has priority over the right to liberty...

...Entry into democratic society is closed, "in that entry into it is only by birth and exit only by death" and "it has no final ends in the way that persons or associations do...

...However, Rawls's theory was not ultimately a theory of liberty but, as he correctly called it, a theory of justice...

...Rawls set out to provide a moral alternative to utilitarianism as a basis for political judgment and to do so at the highest level of academic reasoning...

...He proclaims himself a follower of Benjamin Constant in prizing the "liberty of the moderns" (i.e., the right to live as one chooses unmolested by those in authority) over the "liberty of the ancients" (i.e., the positive freedom of full-time participation in the life of politics...

...Rawls once again.uses the method of reconstructing in imagination an "original social contract" that people might make together if, without any knowledge of the position each would occupy in a civil society, they were to design its social and economic order...

...A formal "distribution" of rights—which is what Rawls seems to agree to be the state's function—in no way involves a substantive distribution of powers, opportunities, or property...

...But no sooner had the book appeared than politicians and publicists took it up as a "philosophical foundation" for the Democratic Party in particular and American progressive opinion in Maurice Cranston, who died in London on November 5, was professor emeritus of political science at the London School of Political Science and the author of books on John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...we would simply stipulate, as rational beings, what the principles of distribution in that state would be...

...Rawls himself seems to have been somewhat taken aback to discover that what he had supposed to be a set of universal principles was being read as a kind of American testament, but instead of refining the academic character of his theory, and continuing to interrogate his immortal predecessors Hobbes and Locke and Kant, he fell into the trap of trading arguments with the ideologues and furthering their political ends...

...He summed this up as "justice as fairness...

...Such is classical liberalism, in its sense as a theory of politics centered on the supreme value of liberty...

...The "rational" or the "reasonable" person is simply the person who agrees with Professor Rawls...

...Indeed, in the earlier sections of that book, Rawls seemed to be re-stating for a more positivistic age the central argument of Locke's thesis, that every individual has a natural right to the most extensive liberty compatible with the same liberty being enjoyed by others...

...Rawls says something very much like this when he insists that a "well-ordered democratic society" is not a community, not a "society governed by a shared comprehensive religious, political or moral doctrine," nor is it an association in the sense of a society to which anyone adheres in order to further a certain purpose...

...I myself think that abortion can sometimes be justified as a lesser evil, but only on the utilitarian grounds that Rawls repudiates...

...It has none of the distinction and originality of the earlier work...

...In short, on this argument, the rational man will opt for a market economy regulated by the state so that there may be no great winners and no great losers...

...171 I n the first chapter of Political Liberalism, Rawls seems to accept the view of the English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, that a state—or "civil association"—must be understood as a moral association and not as an enterprise association, that is to say, as an association which lays down the rules within which its citizens may severally pursue their ends, not an association pursuing specific ends of its own, such as the creation of a better world...

...And by justice Rawls meant "social justice"—that is, a theory of social arrangements and not a theory of law...

...It is strange that in having made this crucial distinction Rawls does not follow Oakeshott in seeing that a state—whether called a civil association or a well-ordered democratic society—cannot, thus defined, promote social justice or perform distributive duties because, as 60 The American Spectator January 1994...

...Any comprehensive doctrine," he writes "that leads to a balance of political values excluding the duly qualified right of a woman to end her pregnancy during the first trimester is to that extent unreasonable...

...His principle was a simple one: that social and economic inequalities in the nation should be so arranged as to be of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged...

...Behind what Rawls calls "the veil of ignorance," neither you nor, I would know what talents we should possess or what riches...

...general—urging that liberals stop concentrating on the ideal of freedom and start promoting "social justice" by government action to level out wealth...

...Let me give one example: his treatment of the question of abortion...

...Rawls argues that we should each and all opt for an arrangement which would ensure the "basic" rights and liberties of each individual and call for material goods to be distributed in such a way that those with the least would be compensated by income redistribution up to the point where the disincentive effects of further transfers would diminish wealth creation...

...Moreover, in this new book the delicately woven reasoning of A Theory of Justice tends to give way to argument by assertion...

...Rawls is not a socialist, nor could he be as an exponent of basic liberties...

...He does not consider that real people might prefer to gamble on a system in which the winner takes all rather than settle for one in which winnings are shared with others...

...Indeed, even if Rawls did not assign such priority to the right to life, a right to abortion must be excluded by his basic principle of the right to liberty, since abortion, if nothing worse, incontrovertibly limits the liberty of the fetus...

...Rawls's chosen audience at the time he wrote A Theory of Justice was one of specialists and students in political philosophy...

...n 1971, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, regarded, with good reason, as one of the most important American contributions to political philosophy of the present century...

...a better title would have been "Social Liberalism," for the liberalism it advocates is that of John Kenneth Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin...