John Rawls's Political Liberalism

...A Theory of Justice presupposed a historical time and a national space, but abstracted from them to generate ostensibly timeless principles...

...One might say that the history he has let into his theory, like air into a sealed tomb, tends to disintegrate rather than preserve it...

...Political Liberalism no longer speaks of any contemporary order as "nearly just," but rather of a "moderately well-governed democratic society...

...These are not exactly Kantian reasons, but they are consistent with a new inclination to find ad hoc warrants for the objects of Rawls's sympathy, wherever they are at variance with the logic of his theory...

...Rawls's acknowledgment of the extent of their denial by the power of money is the one radical departure of Political Liberalism, where it moves beyond rather than behind A Theory of Justice...

...The needed sequel to his major work had another title—A Theory of Injustice...

...The case for the former, he argues, is not to be qualified in the name of protecting the constitution from revolutionary doctrines, on the grounds that they represent a "clear and present danger" to the legal order—there could be restrictions on free political speech only if there were a general constitutional crisis such as a wellgoverned democracy precludes in the first place...

...Here distance from reality becomes all but absolute: as if the office of the philosopher was neither to interpret the world nor to change it, but simply to change its interpretations...

...In actual fact, of course, most citizens would be bemused by Rawls's short-list of their moral powers, which is essentially a residue of what was once a coherent ethical vision, like one of the broken shards of After Virtue...

...The logical circle betrays the historical petitio principi...

...How satisfactory is Rawls's formula for meeting these...

...142 • DISSENT Books The issues he singles out for critical discussion are free speech and campaign finance...

...How many recollect so much as Sidgwick's name...

...In his original work, Rawls argued that stable realization of the principles of justice required a well-ordered society, in which citizens shared a certain moral outlook— a sense of the good complementing a sense of the right...

...If the modern state is as described, deep in its democratic convictions and traditions, how could there possibly be a deadlock over the realization of freedom and equality for its citizens...

...Protestant religion is manifestly a comprehensive doctrine of the kind Political Liberalism debars from a legitimate role in the discourse of public reason...

...What was a latent and subtle circularity in A Theory of Justice becomes a gross and explicit one in Political Liberalism...

...Treatment of international relations is even more clipped...

...What institutional structures are required, for the first principle of justice to acquire reality, remains unfathomable— here once again, "how best to proceed is a complex and difficult matter," in which "the requisite historical experience and theoretical understanding may be lacking...

...Is it unfair to Rawls to tax this illustration too heavily...

...But his only other examples of the doctrinal plurality prompting the revision of his theory suggest otherwise...

...The principle of liberty, however, "can easily be preceded by a lexically prior principle that citizens' basic needs be met" —without, apparently, further need of adjustment to his scheme...

...Not, he confesses, in any "account of human nature as given by natural science and social theory...

...Perhaps American anachronism here has misled him...

...o work of modern political philosophy, in any language, has generated such a enormous output of learned commentary as John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...

...But the attention proves selective, and the result disconcerting...

...The contradiction between the postulates of consensus, to which Rawls continually subscribes, and the realities of dissensus, to which his best impulses belong, is incurable...

...The misery and despair, the greed and violence of the daily urban scene are far away...

...For this purpose, appeal to theological survivals is futile...

...The "veil of ignorance" draped around his actors is all too diaphanous: beyond lies the familiar landscape of an established—if not enacted—morality...

...He remarks in passing that the tendency of markets is for "background justice to be eroded even when individuals act fairly," without vouchsafing any explanation for this process, and approves of the principle of fiscal redistribution...

...Free speech is not under serious threat in the United States today...

...The latter third of the book, entitled "Ends," explored the shape of such a vision...

...Clearly, both cannot be right...

...Political Liberalism offers abundant— even superabundant—evidence of careful response to the reception of A Theory of Justice, in a forest of footnotes to different readings of it...

...Rawls devotes the two most engaged sections of the book to them...

...Hence "the free public use of our reason in questions of political and social justice would seem to be absolute...

...Twenty years on, what does Rawls have to say about these issues...

...Rawls's pristine theory argued for two fundamental principles of justice: first, equal political rights and liberties for all...

...It would be good to think so...

...There is no starker expression of it than the innocent passage from one key sentence to the next in the agenda of Political Liberalism...

...The "difference principle" — warranting only those inequalities that are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged—is the most memorable single thesis of A Theory of Justice...

...It belongs with that peculiar subset of books in which an author sets out to correct or defend a celebrated earlier work, and succeeds only in producing an arid shadow of it—Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge or Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose Justice...

...Why should equal liberties always have priority over equal sufficiencies...

...The experience of reading it is one of regret...

...For in the new version the principles of justice require only a loose 140 • DISSENT Books "overlapping consensus" between the various contending doctrines in society, rather than any deeper sense of ultimate ends shared by its citizens...

...The two halves of the statement fall apart...

...The aim," Rawls writes, is "to work out a conception of political and social justice which is congenial to the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state...

...His own retraction is just one more instance of the process he has failed to see, which undermines his grounds for it...

...The attenuated idea of a person is the theoretical plinth of a desirable constitution, determining what count as primary goods "in advance" of any further requirements of social life—yet is also no more than an ideological reflex of the culture it is supposed to generate...

...The more modest aim is a gain in realism, as well as a check against temptation...

...It is this conclusion, Rawls has decided, that was misguided...

...Four stand out as most significant...

...The sentiment is admirable, but the arguments used to support it are often surprisingly lax...

...Material subsistence is a condition of any juridical existence, and its demands have for most of human experience been overriding...

...He believes that his basic theory becomes the stronger for this sacrifice...

...The question is never answered...

...Around this core doctrine, conceived as an updated variant of Kantian constructivism to supersede all latter-day forms of utilitarian calculus, Rawls developed a capacious intellectual edifice, culminating in ethical reflections of noble scope...

...The result is a kind of political cabotage, a critique of existing society that clings nervously to its shores...

...No doubt the same could be said of George Bush's call to prayer as the bombers took off for Baghdad, but it is unlikely Rawls would do so...

...Extracted from their metaphysical seat, they are now assigned inappropriate lodging in the sprawl of public opinion, where they do not belong...

...The idea of the original position, he reiterates, is a device of representation—its outcome thus "hypothetical and nonhistorical...

...But "social and economic inequalities in the life prospects of citizens depending on their social origins" are nevertheless "inevitable, or else necessary or highly advantageous in maintaining effective social cooperation...

...Out of the huge literature set off by this construction, what were to be the most pregnant objections to it...

...By this Rawls means the larger account of values taught by Kant or Mill, and sketched in their spirit by A Theory of Justice...

...It might be said that, within its framework, the difference principle is politically indifferent...

...Where WINTER • 1994 • 141 Books does Rawls find this person...

...Given the relentless advance of secularization in all European societies today, the fate of supernatural beliefs today tells, of course, against rather than for Rawls's assumption...

...Yet the parties to it "must take organizational requirements and economic efficiency into account" —in other words, have internalized modern capitalist imperatives ("thus it is unreasonable to stop at equal division") of an eminently historical kind...

...The imperfect dignity of A Theory of Justice remains...

...namely, that there is no agreement on the way basic social institutions should be arranged if they are to conform to the freedom and equality of citizens and persons...

...Political Liberalism introduces history and sociology directly into its justificatory structure, but in a way that exposes rather than heals the original contradiction...

...The cure is to be found in the title of the new book...

...The point is not that this tradition of thought is necessarily right, but that serious historical evidence and argument is needed to prove it wrong...

...and the warrant of justice as fairness, with its schedule of fundamental principles and primary goods, is that it "protects" the exercise of the two moral powers...

...and second, only such social or economic inequalities as are compatible with equal opportunity and yield most benefit to the least well-off...

...Instead we are invited— inter alia — to patriotic contemplation of "the pride of a democratic people in distinguishing themselves from nondemocratic peoples...

...More likely, however, would seem to be a certain philosophical blitheness...

...But Rawls offers no evidence for this claim, which he seems to think so obvious as to require none...

...For Rawls simultaneously appeals to the natural outlook of a democratic society to found his conception of the person, and to his conception of the person to found the basic structure of a democratic society...

...Rawls's preoccupations lie elsewhere...

...The reality is that comprehensive philosophical doctrines, of the kind of which Rawls repents, have all but vanished from the contemporary scene...

...The social infernos of City of Quartz could be on another planet...

...More than logical error is at issue here...

...For the whole book depends on the thesis that a plurality of incompatible—but reasonable— comprehensive doctrines is a permanent feature of modern societies...

...For Rawls this is no real loss...

...How far the difference principle might mitigate such inequalities is a matter too technical and subconstitutional to detain the reader...

...Not from any comprehensive philosophical doctrine, but from "plain truths now widely accepted, or available, to citizens generally...

...Any attempt to make one of them the basis of public reason must therefore be divisive and sectarian— a project that could only succeed by an intolerant use of state power, canceling the first principle of justice itself...

...The point of doing this is to see whether we can resolve the impasse in our recent political history...

...It addresses instead a less obvious one...

...But Rawls's Theory, in which the legitimacy of socialism can be mooted on one page and American society held "nearly just" on the next, leaves space for either view...

...Outside the framework altogether lie the problems of justice conceived on an international scale...

...In the entire book, the only place-name from the geography of contemporary America is Malibu...

...The warrant of the doctrine of two moral powers is that it "suits" a society in which justice is conceived as fairness...

...In a vicious circle, public arrangements are deduced from personal capacities defined as adapted to public arrangements...

...The antonym of "political" here is not—as it once would have been— "economic," a liberalism never mentioned in these pages, but "metaphysical...

...are companion cases that come to mind...

...On closing Political Liberalism, the reader is no nearer a sight of electoral reform in the United States than when opening it...

...On the whole, very little...

...The last of the major criticisms of Rawls's work has always been the anachronism of its territorial assumptions...

...For the political liberalism that is supposed to exclude metaphysical vision rests, as he explains, on a "conception of the person" that is a quite traditional species of ontological construct...

...What are the comprehensive doctrines whose conflict disables the conclusions of A Theory of Justice...

...144 • DISSENT...

...Readers of Rawls might well ask: where is the actual justice in the United States that corresponds to the ideal construct he offers us, if it is based on "plain truths widely accepted by citizens...

...The burden of Political Liberalism is an intellectual renunciation, rather than any substantive addition...

...In order to get the parties in the original position to produce his principles of justice, Rawls had surreptitiously to endow them with sympathies that only the principles themselves could induce...

...This is an amphibious world, which contains just enough land of real social reference to avoid the tricky deeps of first philosophy (the gesture is roughly: let's start out from where we're at—in other words, Bush-Clinton country), while floating carefully enough on the waters of abstraction to avoid contact with the ground of actual political change (for example: what has happened in the United States since the 1970s...

...After some twenty years of uninterrupted critical flow, Rawls's new book is billed as a correction of the original, in the light of subsequent discussion...

...Expressing dismay at Supreme Court rulings that have struck down (mostly nominal) limits on private expenditures in the campaign process, he envisages a measure of public funding of elections to assure "fair value" to each citizen's political rights...

...So committed is Rawls to his conclusion that he maintains—in defiance of the obvious—that the First Amendment could not be constitutionally repealed, since whatever the Congress might do or the Supreme Court might say, it is "validated by long historical practice...

...Is the difference principle a powerful call for an all-but-socialist redistribution of income— since, on one reading, so little of the glaring disparities of wealth that surround us contributes to the well-being of the poor...

...On the other hand, the priority of civil liberty over social equality, Rawls now concedes, is "not required under all conditions," but presumes "reasonably favorable circumstances" of prosperity and literacy...

...Paradoxically, however, Rawls himself is unable to live up to his own self-denying ordinance...

...and to give force to the idea of an "overlapping consensus" as the suitable support for the principles of justice, Rawls is obliged—though not without a tremor of compunction—to declare all major world faiths "reasonable" doctrines that are capable of accepting them...

...Beyond the fiction of their domicile, however, there is a more serious effect of Rawls's move...

...Or is it, on another reading, simply a sensible defense of the normal operation of capitalism— WINTER • 1994 • 139 Books whose constant increase of productivity, raising general living standards, requires precisely the incentive structures, tried and tested by experience, we have today...

...That is all the reader gets—in effect, a keep-off sign to the curious...

...Political Liberalism, in other words, deflects or ignores all the classical difficulties raised by A Theory of Justice...

...Who imagines Kant's imperative is a significant civic inspiration...

...Martin Luther King nevertheless slips past, since his biblical appeals "fully support constitutional values" —likewise Abraham Lincoln, but on opposite grounds, that his pieties have "no bearings on constitutional essentials...

...What guarantees these are truths...

...The social polarization of the last twenty years might never have occurred...

...These are merely "problems of extension," which Rawls "leaves aside" to concentrate on "the fundamental question of political justice...

...Why should this be so...

...Rawls does not seem to have noticed that for political liberties to have equal worth there would have to be the elementary change of proportional representation in the voting system, as well as equitable funding of the campaigning system...

...They are "the conceptions of the person and of social cooperation most likely to be congenial to the public culture of a democratic society...

...Locke's brand of Calvinism, which did not even give birth to a sect, is long forgotten...

...In his "model case," they number a tolerant Protestantism in the spirit of Locke and "liberal moral doctrines such as those of Kant or Mill" —elsewhere subdivided into "Kant's moral philosophy" versus "the utilitarianism of Bentham and Sidgwick...

...Equal political liberties, Rawls now stresses, are not enough—they must also be of equal practical worth, which they cannot be so long as elections are fought and won by force of superior wealth...

...But there the matter rests...

...Because, he now argues, in a modern society there will always be a variety of comprehensive doctrines that are reasonable, if incompatible...

...Contrary to his hopes, Rawls's new construction is more fragile than the old...

...In a strict sense, Rawls's new book is thus not a development of his earlier work: it is an amputation of it...

...This is a figure endowed with "two moral powers" (and two only): the capacity for a sense of "justice" as what is "reasonable," and for an idea of the "good" as what is "rational," which together makes possible a society conceived as "fair cooperation...

...But what is its actual import...

...He simply alludes to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notes the growth of toleration that followed them, and then concludes that nevertheless "the fact of religious division remains...

...In effect, far from being a genuinely aboriginal condition, like the state of nature posed in earlier social-contract theory, Rawls's position originates in assumptions possible only with the advent of developed industrial capitalism...

...The category of a nondemocratic people is an unexpected political trouvaille...

...Where is Bentham's calculus respected...

...These principles, Rawls maintained, would infallibly be chosen by us if we were to imagine ourselves deciding the form of a just society from the hypothetical standpoint of an "original position," without any knowledge of what might be our particular lot within it...

...Political Liberalism, as many of its reviewers have found, is a disappointing book...

...It is not hard to resist it...

...For it amounted to a "comprehensive philosophical doctrine" whose effect was not, as he had earlier believed, to fortify the principles of justice, but to jeopardize them...

...In other words, where older doctrines grounded their ideas of identity or value in principled argument, the new dispensation simply appeals to the status quo of our democratic culture—or what purports to be such...

...The massive ambiguity of the Rawlsian theory of justice lies at precisely this point...

...Not just the West, but the nation-state formed the boundary of its imagination...

...By contrast, the state of the "basic liberties" that have priority in the scheme of justice does merit sustained concern...

...First, the device of the original position was widely convicted of circularity...

...Its formal organization is poor, still bearing too many traces of the discrete lectures out of which it has been assembled, with a high rate of repetition and lack of independent direction...

...What, then, of the difference principle...

...If Rawls has taken the wrong turning away from it, a path of reduction rather than WINTER • 1994 • 143 enlargement, the reason lies in part in a parochial self-enclosure of his intellectual world, now populated all but exclusively by like-minded colleagues and pupils...

...If he had pursued the logic of the second, rather than the will o' the wisp of the first, becoming less congenial to the state and more critical of its impasse, Rawls would have written a better book...

...Rather, it is a "normative conception...

...To grasp the full depth of the indeterminacy at the crux of Rawls's construction, it is enough to note that his work has been applauded imperturbably at one extreme by John Roemer on the left and at another by Friedrich Hayek on the right, each contending that its message coincides with his own...

...even pronouncing the Sedition Act retroactively "unconstitutional," whatever its validity at the time, because "it has been tried by the court of history and found wanting...

...Where do the norms, then, come from...

...It is enough to consider this list to see how trifling the claim of grand incompatibilities actually is...

...What the structure of Rawls's argument indicates is a more fundamental feature of his thought...

...In the advanced capitalist countries of today, the claims of absolute need are rarer than those of relative deprivation...

...What does the formula Political Liberalism denote...

...The large body of social theory, from many different standpoints, which insists on increasing cultural homogenization as the trend-line of historical development—it includes names all the way from Kant and Hegel to Parsons and Gellner, not to speak of Bell or Fukuyama, or any number of others—appears scarcely to have registered...

...Which Rationality...

...How persuasive is this change of mind...

...Among the most obvious signs of the restrictive context of Rawls's theory is the "lexical" ordering of the principles of justice themselves, object of the second common criticism of it...

...There is no hint in these pages that in "the oldest democratic regime in the world," half of the population never even votes...

...Fair elections, on the other hand, are all but out of reach...

...Unlike the principle of liberty, we are told, it is unsuitable for constitutional codification, for its interpretation is nearly always contestable, resting on "complicated inferences and intuitive judgments that require us to assess complex social and economic information about topics poorly understood...

...The only real candidates left for the role of all-purpose visions are, in fact, religious...

...But it is also a consequence of the impossible desire that haunts his program, what—adapting a phrase from Kant—we might call his unconforming conformity: the dream of extracting a radical alternative to our existing social world from the lineaments of its own description of itself...