PRESENT AT THE CREATION:

The antipolitical philosophy of John Rawls (Brian C. Anderson, Spring 2003, Public Interest)

The widespread notion--Ben Rogers terms it an "academic legend"--that [John] Rawls "rejuvenated political philosophy" with A Theory of Justice is something of a myth. After all, the two decades or so that preceded the book's appearance saw the publication of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Raymond Aron's Peace and War, Isaiah Berlin's essays on freedom, Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, Bertrand de Jouvenel's Sovereignty, Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, and Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History--hardly a fallow field of political thought.

It is true, though, that Rawls's 600-page tome, 20 years in the making, broke with the then dominant tendency within analytic philosophy to dismiss ethical and political reflection as basically meaningless. People had their value preferences, analytic philosophers said, and that was that. All philosophy could sensibly do was to analyze the use of language and the sense of terms. Rawls's far grander aim in A Theory of Justice was that of the great tradition of political philosophy: to come up with normative principles for evaluating political institutions and for guiding public life. "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought," proclaimed Rawls at the outset of A Theory of Justice. "A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust."

Rawls labeled his imposing theory "justice as fairness." He began with a pre-existing moral sense, an "intuitive conviction" about freedom and equality, that he assumed we all share: "Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Thus no utilitarian calculus that sacrificed the rights of some for the greater benefit of the majority can be morally legitimate. But our intuitions about what it means to be free and equal go much further, claimed Rawls. Individuals' chances in life should not suffer because of things beyond their control-an abusive or impoverished family background, or a violent neighborhood, or their skin color or sex, or even their lack of genetic gifts of good looks or talent. It is society's obligation to ensure that unmerited contingencies affect our opportunities as little as possible. As Allan Bloom once said of Rawls's philosophy, we have not only rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but the right to be happy too.

The original position

To model these intuitions, and to deepen them, Rawls turned to the venerable tradition of the social contract. Rawls's social contract, like those of Hobbes and Locke, is hypothetical: Determining whether an arrangement of institutions is just or unjust requires asking if that arrangement would result from a contract made under fair conditions. But Rawls's version of the state of nature--"the original position," as he called it--is quite different from the dangerous precivilized condition described by earlier social contract thinkers, where life is "nasty, brutish, and short," as Hobbes famously put it. For the original contractarians, the state of nature allowed us to see man's nature unvarnished--unsocial, selfish, driven by fear of sudden death, ever wary of his potentially deadly neighbor. The contractual government the raw men of the state of nature invest with authority has as its sole purpose security and social peace.

Rawls's original position, by contrast, says little about human nature. It describes a perfectly benign place where perfectly reasonable, self-interested people are able to choose the principles of justice that will organize society free of the fear of death that haunts the state of nature of Hobbes or Locke. To make sure the social architects in the original position choose justly, Rawls places them behind a "veil of ignorance," which magically strips them of any advantage over others--even of everything that makes them different from one another.

Behind the moral veil, an individual would not know his talents, his skin color, his family background, his character, his religious or other beliefs, or much of anything else about himself. All he would know is that certain "primary goods"--money, opportunities, various freedoms--are necessary for a successful life, and that the cooperation of others will help him meet his needs. Since the veiled person realizes that he might not possess natural advantages but instead be talentless, ugly, stupid, and burdened with a lousy family, Rawls argues that he will rationally adopt a risk-minimizing strategy in choosing his principles of justice, so that even if he winds up losing in life's lottery, his position will be as good as it can be.

Those in the original position, Rawls explains, would embrace two principles for designing a just society. The first, "equal liberty," is based on John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty. Everyone must have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties consistent with the guarantee of the same liberties for all--rights to vote, to free speech, to association, and other civil liberties. Government is to remain neutral about rival understandings of the good life, but it must guarantee that liberties are equally distributed. The second, "difference" principle stipulates that social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they are to the greatest benefit of the "least advantaged" or "worst off," and if they are "attached to positions and offices open to all." Strict egalitarianism is the default position. The two principles cannot be traded off: Sacrificing equal liberties for an increase in material well-being is unacceptable.

Many observers have seen justice as fairness as merely a defense of the modern capitalist welfare state. In truth, Rawls came to believe that even an expansive welfare state permits too much inequality to deserve our full support. In the final summation of his theory, the recently published Justice as Fairness, Rawls maintained that only a "property owning democracy or a "liberal socialism" that used government or judicial power to prevent a small part of society from controlling the economy, and indirectly, political life as well" would meet the criteria for justice. Since people's natural differences and choices inexorably generate new inequalities, government would need to intervene constantly and extensively in economic life to make sure those inequalities directly benefited the worst off, and if they did not, to stamp them out. To equalize liberties, government would, for example, finance all elections, so that money would not be a factor in their outcomes. All must "have a fair opportunity to hold public office and to affect the outcome of elections," Rawls writes. Similarly, a just society would need to regulate freedom of speech and the press (though not the content of speech) in order to ensure fair access to the media. The state looms large in Rawls's scheme. It is the muscular arm that makes things right, which for Rawls meant assuring not equality of opportunity but equality of results.

Later revisions

Rawls happily described himself as a monomaniac, and he returned to his two principles repeatedly in subsequent works, responding to critics, glossing arguments, tinkering and amending. Rawls's biggest shift came in response to the charge, made by "communitarian" theorists like Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, that his theory rested on a controversial, neoKantian view of the good--a secular vision of man as an autonomous chooser of moral alternatives, free from all preexisting moral ties and duties. Most of what we value, the communitarians maintained, is not chosen but given to us by our communities, which constantly need strengthening. Rawls's individualism, it was argued, reinforced all those relativizing tendencies in modern culture that undermined the sense of community.

In a series of essays, revised and published in book form in his 1993 Political Liberalism, Rawls recast his theory, saying that justice as fairness, pace the critics, was not an attempt to articulate an enduring truth about man but instead a reflection of the "traditions of a modern democratic state." The two principles of justice offered the political basis for an "overlapping consensus" among the myriad visions of a good life at work in a pluralistic society. Justice as fairness was not a blow against community, then, but rather the highest moral expression of the liberal ideal of community. [...]

Illiberal implications

Rawls's theory of justice suffers from serious weaknesses--so serious that it is not immediately clear why the theory has been so influential. Consider the questionable method Rawls used to derive his two principles. The people in the original position are not real men and women, but ciphers. They affirm Rawls's idea of justice only because they no longer have the ambitions, the attachments, the moral views, the self-awareness, the passions, and the interests that constitute human identity. Real people would not reach the same conclusions because their hopes and interests and beliefs are different-- and often clash.

Social thinker Michael Novak put it well in an early (1974) critique of Rawls:

We are not ever in "the original situation" of choosing a fair social system, and even a stubborn effort of imagination to construct such a situation is somehow (one might say) a false and wasted effort. Human communities of all kinds are, typically, not fair, and the exercise through which Rawls would put us is far too rational, procedural, and blind to the textures of human passion and quirk and contingency to help to express our actual grievances and hurts.

Or our loves and hopes. In short, Rawls's is a political philosophy without politics.

And as such, it can be troublingly illiberal, replacing the clash of opinion and the necessary trade-offs and compromises of democratic life with what Rawls presents as a purely rational deduction of political morality. Progressive liberalism, it seems, is truth; other political visions only error. Nowhere is this illiberal tendency more evident than in Political Liberalism's discussion of abortion. The overlapping consensus the book defends as central to constitutional democracy encompasses only citizens who hold "reasonable" beliefs, Rawls maintains; unreasonable beliefs have no place at the democratic table. But in a short footnote that constitutes Political Liberalism's entire treatment of abortion, Rawls dogmatically defines reasonable in a way that rules out any arguments that deny adult women a right to a first-trimester termination of pregnancy. We can thus sweep away the views of millions of our fellow citizens from public life, Rawls implies, without even bothering to engage them. This is no way to negotiate differences in a liberal democracy, nor to create an overlapping consensus; it is liberal force majeure. Extend the same exclusionary tactic to defenders of laissez-faire capitalism or welfare reform--as on Rawlsian grounds one easily could do--and one would find that democracy had shrunk to include only John Rawls and those who agree with him.

This temptation to define his preferred political views as equivalent to rationality itself shows up right at the outset, in Rawls's original position. Rawls allows behind the veil only those aspects of human psychology he wants his self-interested, rational choosers to have. Why, after all, are those in the original position risk avoiders rather than risk takers? Why not take a chance that one might wind up, if not Michael Jordan, at least a talented overachiever, and endorse institutions that provided maximum opportunity (while still maintaining a safety net, in case one turned out to be Joe Nobody)? From a self-interested standpoint, the risk-taking attitude seems at least as rational as the risk-avoiding one.

A Rawlsian, of course, would point out that the veil supplies the moral constraints within which rational, self-interested choice takes place, and that our intuitions about equality tell us what the veil should obscure. But Rawls simply assumes that we are all egalitarians. He simply assumes that the advantaged recognize that they have no right to the use of their talents and advantages without the permission of an egalitarian society. He simply assumes that justice as fairness will boost social reciprocity and lead to long-term stability. These assumptions ignore both the ambitious drive of the gifted and the corrosive force of envy--two of the basic human emotions. To be plausible, Rawlsian egalitarianism would need argument, not assumption.

Flight from reality

Rawls's rationalist, deductive approach also renders his theory extremely abstract. The reader can range over hundreds of pages in Rawls without meeting an historical example or world-historical figure, a comparative analysis of economic or political institutions, a reference to cultural developments, a discussion of crime, an exploration of collective identification (the strongest political force of our age), or anything else connected to the real world. Rawls describes himself as a realistic utopian. Reality, though, seems to play a limited role in his work.

Rawls is hardly alone though--indeed, it's remarkable that every secular (and too much religious) philosophy of politics--of the Right as well as the Left--goes wrong precisely at its foundation point when it rejects the Judeo-Christian insight about Man's true nature.
Chapter 1: The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness (Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness)

Democracy, as every other historic ideal and institution, contains both ephemeral and more permanently valid elements. Democracy is on the one hand the characteristic fruit of a bourgeois civilization; on the other hand it is a perennially valuable form of social organization in which freedom and order are made to support, and not to contradict, each other.

Democracy is a "bourgeois ideology" in so far as it expresses the typical viewpoints of the middle classes who have risen to power in European civilization in the past three or four centuries. Most of the democratic ideals, as we know them, were weapons of the commercial classes who engaged in stubborn, and ultimately victorious, conflict with the ecclesiastical and aristocratic rulers of the feudal-medieval world. The ideal of equality, unknown in the democratic life of the Greek city states and derived partly from Christian and partly from Stoic sources, gave the bourgeois classes a sense of self-respect in overcoming the aristocratic pretension and condescension of the feudal overlords of medieval society. The middle classes defeated the combination of economic and political power of mercantilism by stressing economic liberty; and, through the principles of political liberty, they added the political power of suffrage to their growing economic power. The implicit assumptions, as well as the explicit ideals, of democratic civilization were also largely the fruit of middle-class existence. The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world.

Since bourgeois civilization, which came to birth in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, is now obviously in grave peril, if not actually in rigor mortis in the twentieth century, it must be obvious that democracy, in so far as it is a middle-class ideology, also faces its doom.

This fate of democracy might be viewed with equanimity, but for the fact that it has a deeper dimension and broader validity than its middle-class character. Ideally democracy is a permanently valid form of social and political organization which does justice to two dimensions of human existence: to man’s spiritual stature and his social character; to the uniqueness and variety of life, as well as to the common necessities of all men. Bourgeois democracy frequently exalted the individual at the expense of the community; but its emphasis upon liberty contained a valid element, which transcended its excessive individualism. The community requires liberty as much as does the individual; and the individual requires community more than bourgeois thought comprehended. Democracy can therefore not be equated with freedom. An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order.

Man requires freedom in his social organization because he is "essentially" free, which is to say, that he has the capacity for indeterminate transcendence over the processes and limitations of nature. This freedom enables him to make history and to elaborate communal organizations in boundless variety and in endless breadth and extent. But he also requires community because he is by nature social. He cannot fulfill his life within himself but only in responsible and mutual relations with his fellows.

Bourgeois democrats are inclined to believe that freedom is primarily a necessity for the individual, and that community and social order are necessary only because there are many individuals in a small world, so that minimal restrictions are required to prevent confusion. Actually the community requires freedom as much as the individual; and the individual requires order as much as does the community.

Both the individual and the community require freedom so that neither communal nor historical restraints may prematurely arrest the potencies which inhere in man’s essential freedom and which express themselves collectively as well as individually. It is true that individuals are usually the initiators of new insights and the proponents of novel methods. Yet there are collective forces at work in society which are not the conscious contrivance of individuals. In any event society is as much the beneficiary of freedom as the individual. In a free society new forces may enter into competition with the old and gradually establish themselves. In a traditional or tyrannical form of social organization new forces are either suppressed, or they establish themselves at the price of social convulsion and upheaval.

The order of a community is, on the other hand, a boon to the individual as well as to the community. The individual cannot be a true self in isolation. Nor can he live within the confines of the community which "nature" establishes in the minimal cohesion of family and herd. His freedom transcends these limits of nature, and therefore makes larger and larger social units both possible and necessary. It is precisely because of the essential freedom of man that he requires a contrived order in his community.

The democratic ideal is thus more valid than the libertarian and individualistic version of it which bourgeois civilization elaborated. Since the bourgeois version has been discredited by the events of contemporary history and since, in any event, bourgeois civilization is in process of disintegration, it becomes important to distinguish and save what is permanently valid from what is ephemeral in the democratic order.

If democracy is to survive it must find a more adequate cultural basis than the philosophy which has informed the building of the bourgeois world. The inadequacy of the presuppositions upon which the democratic experiment rests does not consist merely in the excessive individualism and libertarianism of the bourgeois world view; though it must be noted that this excessive individualism prompted a civil war in the whole western world in which the rising proletarian classes pitted an excessive collectivism against the false individualism of middle-class life. This civil conflict contributed to the weakness of democratic civilization when faced with the threat of barbarism. Neither the individualism nor the collectivism did justice to all the requirements of man’s social life, and the conflict between half-truth and half-truth divided the civilized world in such a way that the barbarians were able to claim first one side and then the other in this civil conflict as their provisional allies.

But there is a more fundamental error in the social philosophy of democratic civilization than the individualism of bourgeois democracy and the collectivism of Marxism. It is the confidence of both bourgeois and proletarian idealists in the possibility of achieving an easy resolution of the tension and conflict between self-interest and the general interest. Modern bourgeois civilization is not, as Catholic philosophers and medievalists generally assert, a rebellion against universal law, or a defiance of universal standards of justice, or a war against the historic institutions which sought to achieve and preserve some general social and international harmony. Modern secularism is not, as religious idealists usually aver, merely a rationalization of self-interest, either individual or collective. Bourgeois individualism may be excessive and it may destroy the individual's organic relation to the community; but it was not intended to destroy either the national or the international order. On the contrary the social idealism which informs our democratic civilization had a touching faith in the possibility of achieving a simple harmony between self-interest and the general welfare on every level.

It is not true that Nazism is the final fruit of a moral cynicism which had its rise in the Renaissance and Reformation, as Catholic apologists aver. Nazi barbarism is the final fruit of a moral cynicism which was only a subordinate note in the cultural life of the modern period, and which remained subordinate until very recently. Modern civilization did indeed seek to give the individual a greater freedom in the national community than the traditional feudal order had given him; and it did seek to free the nations of restraints placed upon their freedom by the international church. But it never cynically defied the general interest in the name of self-interest, either individual or collective. It came closer to doing this nationally than individually. Machiavelli’s amoral "Prince," who knows no law beyond his own will and power, is made to bear the whole burden of the Catholic polemic against the modern world. It must be admitted that Machiavelli is the first of a long line of moral cynics in the field of international relations. But this moral cynicism only qualifies, and does not efface, the general universalistic overtone of modern liberal idealism. In the field of domestic politics the war of uncontrolled interests may have been the consequence, but it was certainly not the intention, of middle-class individualists. Nor was the conflict between nations in our modern world their intention. They did demand a greater degree of freedom for the nations; but they believed that it was possible to achieve an uncontrolled harmony between them, once the allegedly irrelevant restrictions of the old religio-political order were removed. In this they proved to be mistaken. They did not make the mistake, however, of giving simple moral sanction to self-interest. They depended rather upon controls and restraints which proved to be inadequate.

II.

In illumining this important distinction more fully, we may well designate the moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest, with a scriptural designation of "children of this world" or "children of darkness." Those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then be termed "the children of light." This is no mere arbitrary device; for evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a subordinate and premature "whole" such as the nation, may of course become evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of mankind. The "children of light" may thus be defined as those who seek to bring self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good.

According to the scripture "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." This observation fits the modern situation. Our democratic civilization has been built, not by children of darkness but by foolish children of light. It has been under attack by the children of darkness, by the moral cynics, who declare that a strong nation need acknowledge no law beyond its strength. It has come close to complete disaster under this attack, not because it accepted the same creed as the cynics; but because it underestimated the power of self-interest, both individual and collective, in modern society. The children of light have not been as wise as the children of darkness.

The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will. They underestimate the peril of anarchy in both the national and the international community. Modern democratic civilization is, in short, sentimental rather than cynical. It has an easy solution for the problem of anarchy and chaos on both the national and international level of community, because of its fatuous and superficial view of man. It does not know that the same man who is ostensibly devoted to the "common good" may have desires and ambitions, hopes and fears, which set him at variance with his neighbor.

It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves. The democratic world came so close to disaster not merely because it never believed that Nazism possessed the demonic fury which it avowed. Civilization refused to recognize the power of class interest in its own communities. It also spoke glibly of an international conscience; but the children of darkness meanwhile skillfully set nation against nation. They were thereby enabled to despoil one nation after another, without every civilized nation coming to the defence of each. Moral cynicism had a provisional advantage over moral sentimentality. Its advantage lay not merely in its own lack of moral scruple but also in its shrewd assessment of the power of self-interest, individual and national, among the children of light, despite their moral protestations.

While our modern children of light, the secularized idealists, were particularly foolish and blind, the more "Christian" children of light have been almost equally guilty of this error. Modern liberal Protestantism was probably even more sentimental in its appraisal of the moral realities in our political life than secular idealism, and Catholicism could see nothing but cynical rebellion in the modern secular revolt against Catholic universalism and a Catholic "Christian" civilization. In Catholic thought medieval political universalism is always accepted at face value. Rebellion against medieval culture is therefore invariably regarded as the fruit of moral cynicism. Actually the middle-class revolt against the feudal order was partially prompted by a generous idealism, not unmixed of course with peculiar middle-class interests. The feudal order was not so simply a Christian civilization as Catholic defenders of it aver. It compounded its devotion to a universal order with the special interests of the priestly and aristocratic bearers of effective social power. The rationalization of their unique position in the feudal order may not have been more marked than the subsequent rationalization of bourgeois interests in the liberal world. But it is idle to deny this "ideological taint" in the feudal order and to pretend that rebels against the order were merely rebels against order as such. They were rebels against a particular order which gave an undue advantage to the aristocratic opponents of the middle classes. The blindness of Catholicism to its own ideological taint is typical of the blindness of the children of light.

Our modern civilization, as a middle-class revolt against an aristocratic and clerical order, was irreligious partly because a Catholic civilization had so compounded the eternal sanctities with the contingent and relative justice and injustice of an agrarian-feudal order, that the new and dynamic bourgeois social force was compelled to challenge not only the political-economic arrangements of the order but also the eternal sanctities which hallowed it.

If modern civilization represents a bourgeois revolt against feudalism, modern culture represents the revolt of new thought, informed by modern science, against a culture in which religious authority had fixed premature and too narrow limits for the expansion of science and had sought to restrain the curiosity of the human mind from inquiring into "secondary causes." The culture which venerated science in place of religion, worshiped natural causation in place of God, and which regarded the cool prudence of bourgeois man as morally more normative than Christian love, has proved itself to be less profound than it appeared to be in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But these inadequacies, which must be further examined as typical of The foolishness of modern children of light, do not validate the judgment that these modern rebels were really children of darkness, intent upon defying the truth or destroying universal order.

The modern revolt against the feudal order and the medieval culture was occasioned by the assertion of new vitalities in the social order and the discovery of new dimensions in the cultural enterprise of mankind. It was truly democratic in so far as it challenged the premature and tentative unity of a society and the stabilization of a culture, and in so far as it developed new social and cultural possibilities. The conflict between the middle classes and the aristocrats, between the scientists and the priests, was not a conflict between children of darkness and children of light. It was a conflict between pious and less pious children of light, both of whom were unconscious of the corruption of self-interest in all ideal achievements and pretensions of human culture

III.

In this conflict the devotees of medieval religion were largely unconscious of the corruption of self-interest in their own position; but it must be admitted that they were not as foolish as their secular successors in their estimate of the force of self- interest in human society. Catholicism did strive for an inner and religious discipline upon inordinate desire; and it had a statesmanlike conception of the necessity of legal and political restraint upon the power of egotism, both individual and collective, in the national and the more universal human community.

Our modern civilization, on the other hand, was ushered in on a wave of boundless social optimism. Modern secularism is divided into many schools. But all the various schools agreed in rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin. It is not possible to explain the subtleties or to measure the profundity of this doctrine in this connection. But it is necessary to point out that the doctrine makes an important contribution to any adequate social and political theory the lack of which has robbed bourgeois theory of real wisdom; for it emphasizes a fact which every page of human history attests. Through it one may understand that no matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, or how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2005 11:45 AM