Just back to the thread, and Brian at #50 links to my review of Geuss, which actually is more polite than it could be. Geuss huffs and puffs about an alternative view he has but doesn’t do anything to show that it’s even coherent, and his criticisms of Nozick and Rawls are juvenile and unfair. (Those of Nozick, e.g., assume tjat the whole content of ASN is given in its first sentence.) Enough said.

Merry Christmas!

Jacob, I take no position on whether global justice has been the defining issue of the 00’s, but I do think that if you take a broader view of what constitutes the literature on global justice than an intra-Rawlsian debate about the the boundaries of distributive justice, it has drawn a number of people in. Not just young scholars, but notable senior scholars whose work wasn’t directly about global political theory before but have recently turned their attention to the subject include: Fraser, Nagel, Young, Habermas, Miller, Connolly, Benhabib, Singer, Derrida, Connolly, Dallmyar…

Michael Steinberg’s The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning and the Culture of Capitalism, strikes me as being one of the genuinely great books of our era, unifying contemporary cognitive psychology, contemporary political philosophy, geography, history, and moral philosophy in a genuinely stimulating and profound manner.

David Graeber correctly states: that (this book) ‘is a groundbreaking work of ethical theory and a fascinating read. I don’t know if this book will be considered important fifty years from now. But I certainly hope so, because it deserves to be.’

http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/fictionthinkableworld.php

Maybe I’ll give it a third try. (I’m just a layperson, but as a Christian interested, at least in theory, in what Taylor has to say. In practice I just couldn’t get more than 50-100 pages into it.)

Fair enough, Chris; as I said (I think over on Jacob’s original Facebook entry) I think A Secular Age is a complete mess of a book, but a glorious mess, bursting with fascinating ideas. I would add, though, that I would be hard pressed to make an accounting of that book which resulted in it being labeled a “communitarian text.” Those sorts of arguments, however varied, aren’t central to its thesis (or theses) at all. If Taylor penned anything truly “communitarian” (however defined) in the last ten years, it wasn’t A Secular Age, but rather his contributions to the Bouchard-Taylor report on Quebec (which I would argue deserves to be taken seriously as a work of public political theorizing).

Jacob, give us your list!

Having read the book a few weeks ago, it seems to me a wholly fair assessment. The book is an almost complete disappointment, esp. for those like Hurka or myself who are well-disposed towards a Rawls skewering. Much of the discussion of Rawls proceeds at a level of sophomoric mischaracterization. There are two chapters in Geuss’s book “Outside Ethics” which are much better on Rawls than anything in this book. The strongest complaint he musters here is a version of the one Hare first made decades ago about the method of ‘reflective equilibrium,’ namely, that such a method has no way of checking the moral correctness of the intuitions that are baseline data points for the theory (Geuss frames the point in terms of such intuitions being possibly ideological in the pejorative sense).

What I meant was that the keepers of the Rawlsian flame answered “the communitarian critique of liberalism” ™ to their own satisfaction, and moved on. I think, by the way, that insofar as that critique amounted to the specific points made by, say, Sandel, in LLJ, the Rawlsians were basically correct to announce victory (since Guttman, Kymlicka and Pogge – to name but three, hit him for six on his understandings of Rawls). I didn’t mean to suggest that any critique of liberalism that might plausibly be labelled “communitarian” had been seen off.

However, I would also say that the communitarian text most mentioned in the thread (Taylor’s A Secular Age) struck me as an ill-focused historical ramble rather than a decent bit of argument and that Taylor’s yearnings for the enchanted consciousness of the middle ages didn’t enlighten (sorry!) all that much for me.

This would be a great name for a book.