Comments on: Rawls and ‘Liberalism’

By: josh

josh — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:54:32 +0000

Thanks for the endorsement, Jon! I’ve been doing a bit of work on definitions of the ‘liberal tradition’—in relation to Berlin, rather than Rawls—and it did vary pretty widely (the one point on which everyone agreed being, as you note, that J.S. Mill was a liberal). The seminar that Rawls attended at Oxford looked at Condorcet, Kant, Mill, and G.E. Moore (!) Berlin variously identified Mill, Constant, de Stael, Paine, Bentham, Tocqueville, Kant, Locke, Sismondi, Montaigne, Montesquieu (with qualifications), the young Schiller and Fichte, Humboldt, Erasmus, and even Ockham as part of, or at least contributing to, the ‘liberal tradition’; Plamenatz’s Readings from Liberal Writers included Milton, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Burke, Bentham, Constant, Mill, Tocqueville, Acton, and Tawney.
All of which does not really inspire confident belief in the existence of a coherent ‘liberal tradition’; there certainly doesn’t seem to have been much philosophical coherence to it. I tend to think that the idea of a ‘liberal tradition’ and the use of ‘liberal’ associated with it derived from historical works which projected late 19th and early-20th century liberalism back to Locke—though there were certainly political scientists and economists (notably Hayek) who contributed to this, and you’re probably right that they tended to use the term more than philosophers.

By: Jon Mandle

Jon Mandle — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:56:09 +0000

I think you’re right, Josh. A quick search for entries in the 1960s in philosophy in JSTOR found many references to “the liberal tradition”. There was a consensus that Mill and Locke were part of it, but there was some controversy about Kant. My sense – again, speculative and subject to correction – is that what made a philosophical position “liberal” wasn’t entirely clear, and the dominant use of the term came from political science, policy, and maybe even economics. Barry’s 1965 Political Argument has an explicit discussion where he is trying to pin down a properly philosophical definition of liberalism.

By: josh

josh — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 05:30:04 +0000

On the question of whether Rawls thought of his position as ‘liberal’ during the writing (and re-writing, and re-re-writing …) of ToJ, I don’t think its quite right to say that ‘liberal’ would have been thought of as referring to a political, not a philosophical, position. There were quite a few people applying the terms ‘liberal’ ‘liberalism’ and ‘the liberal tradition’ to positions in political philosophy. And Rawls was certainly aware of this. As we know from Thomas Pogge’s book on Rawls, Rawls’s thinking was influenced by a seminar in which he participated at Oxford in 1953, on ‘The Moral Presuppositions of Liberalism’; the seminar was convened by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, and Herbert Hart participated prominently in it. If memory serves, Hart used ‘liberal’ to refer to a political-philosophical position in print, and Berlin certainly did; I suspect Hampshire did as well, though I can’t think of any instances before the publication of ToJ.
Now, I do think that, given how ‘liberal’ was used by others, Rawls would have likely considered himself as writing from a broadly liberal position; but he may also have thought that characterising his theory as liberal would make it appear more opposed to socialism than it actually was. But that’s sheer speculation on my part (though I think it fits well with the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ equality mentioned by John in the original post—which also suggests that Rawls conceived of liberalism as a political-philosophical position, no?)

By: zdenek v

zdenek v — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:11:22 +0000

There is similarity between the problem Rawls faces in Political Liberalism ( ie in modern society people may hold different philosophical and mtaphysical doctrines which are all ‘reasonable’ and that in the face of this fact we cannot justify political policy on metaphysical basis since such grounds are not acceptable to all ) and what confronts Kant in the opening argument of the 3rd section of the Groundwork when he is looking at the foundation of the categorical imperative : Kant thinks that there is a kind of contradiction here since the will has to be autonomous but it must also be based on a principle but such law / principle cannot be imposed from outside. So he thinks the will must adopt a principle for itself ( but this is a problem because it looks like the free will by imposing a principle upon itself is forced to restrict its own freedom. ).

In other words Kant’s and Rawls’ problems are similar because in both cases we are looking for principles to ground out action/policies but the very set up of the situation forbids us to choose any specific principles.

What is interesting is that Rawls approach to this problem ( PL 89-125 ) is also similar to Kant’s approach : constructivism ( does it work ? ).

By: James Bourke

James Bourke — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:28:16 +0000

What many of the comments have seemed to ignore, and one aspect of ToJ that seems to me to contribute to a liberal interpretation of the theory, is that for Rawls the first principle is lexically prior to the second, and when he clarifies that in response to Hart the liberties of the moderns take priority over the political liberties, if memory serves (granted the response to Hart comes much later, but it’s to clarify the aim of ToJ). One of R’s motivating concerns in ToJ was to defend the priority of rights against utilitarian conceptions that threatened not to take seriously the distinction between persons. As he stresses here, justice as fairness is a rights-based conception. It seems to me that that counts for something in chalking the early R up as a liberal.

By: Dr Zen

Dr Zen — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:53:59 +0000

He probably didn’t mention it because he felt it went without saying. What else would a liberal believe? I am a liberal because I believe in justice as fairness. As a pragmatic matter, I think equity is more achievable than equality, and arguably more desirable, and Rawls appeals on that basis.

By: SeanD

SeanD — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:58:23 +0000

Ben-

That seems right; I didn’t mean to present it as evidence that Rawls takes his theory of justice to be a non-liberal one. It might suggest, though that at the outset of TJ, unlike the outset of his later work, he doesn’t see what he’s doing as fundamentally a project of developing a liberal conception of justice; since if that’s what he’s doing, one wouldn’t think that he’d have explicitly disavowed the project of saying what a liberal basic structure would look like.

By: ben saunders

ben saunders — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:55:40 +0000

Sorry, #33 is referring to TJ p.9 quoted in #28.

By: ben saunders

ben saunders — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:54:20 +0000

I read that quotation as simply saying that justice and liberalism aren’t the same thing, so it isn’t an a priori truth that the just basic structure will be liberal; though it might turn out (and indeed does) that the substantive requirements of justice have liberal features.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:53:48 +0000

When it became clear that conservatives have no interest in justice as fairness and greatly prefer the personal morality narrative that stems from justice as individual accountablity?

At the dressed-up, philosophical, justification level “accountability” is the buzzword, but at the gut level I think that American conservativism at least only needs the establishment of hierarchies by some sort of comepetition, and you don’t have these hierarchies if the losers and sinners and failures aren’t punished. The people punished might be lazy, criminal, immoral, genetically or racially inferior, untalented, or just unlucky, but their existence is part of the happiness of the successful winner, and their goal is not only to accept their lot, but also to unquestioningly accept that they deserve their suffering.

Meritocratic and moralistic versions of this kind of schadenfreude are easiest to justify, but Calvinistic notions of God’s mysterious grace stress the arbitrariness of God’s judgement, and one major GOP faction—the high-stakes gambler types—live to see someone’s fate decided by the turn of a card or the flip of a coin. That’s how completely profane whoremongers manage to fit so neatly into a Christianist political party.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:30:11 +0000

And what’s ‘decent’ – unjust but with their clothes on?

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:21:21 +0000

“Legitimate”, as I understand, could mean “lawful” or it could mean “just”.

By: Jon Mandle

Jon Mandle — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:55:43 +0000

I didn’t mean to rely heavily on semantics. Justice and legitimacy are not the same, although I believe they are related. To get the sense of the difference, consider the possibility that I believe candidate A will promote policies that are more just than candidate B. But suppose in a fair election, candidate B wins. I might say that justice would have been served better if A had won, but that the outcome is legitimate.

By: SeanD

SeanD — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:54:56 +0000

The following TJ passage might be relevant to the original question; as it seems to entail, at least, the Rawls-of-TJ doesn’t take being liberal and being just to be the same thing:

A conception of social justice, then, is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed. This standard, however, is not to be confused with the principles defining the other virtues, for the basic structure, and social arrangements generally, may be efficient or inefficient, liberal or illiberal , and many other things, as well as just or unjust. (TJ 9)

By: aaron_m

aaron_m — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:46:53 +0000

Matt,

Well Rawls brings in DHS in what he calls “The Second Part of Ideal Theory,” and he uses this reasoning to reject the ideal theory advanced by cosmopolitans, e.g. global distributive justice, because it would limit the primary interests of peoples to self-determination on their own conceptions of the good political order.