A hypothesis about “ideal theory” and justice

a hypothesis about the ideal/non-ideal distinction and about why it has become more of a problem over time. The hypothesis is this: that in 1971 the gap between the ideal and the actual was a lot smaller than it is now. The world resembled Rawls’s ideal of the well-ordered society a lot more than it does now.

I totally buy this. I’m actually vaguely surprised by the idea that there would be serious opposition to this. I’m still a big fan of ideal theory. I’d have to think more to fully spell out why I think it’s important, but briefly: having a clear account of what ought to be is incredibly important, I think. (Which isn’t to deny that at least some people are attracted to ideal theory—myself very much inculded!—because it is in lots of ways a lot easier than non-ideal theory.)

Yes and no. The main problem with that thesis is that, back in ’71, a lot more people were hidden from view/excluded from the count than there are now. (Whereas now, the major issue is that most of our interests are discounted — hurray..) Marital rape wasn’t even recognized yet; people of color’s voices were ignored with even more certainty and unselfconscious-ness than they are now; child abuse didn’t “exist” yet; there was more direct western control over the non-western world (though on a possible bright side, containerization didn’t exist yet, so the people living there were less ‘relevant’ as potential labor forces than they are now — but do read Saharan Journey).. As such, I’d say that if you stick to the west, around that time, it might be roughly excusable to argue that the theoryreality gap was smaller then than it was now (though then too, western actions had non-western consequences, and shipping volumes etc. were rising rapidly); that said, I have no idea why anyone’d want to engage in ideal theory…

As intimated in the article, the world can only be thought of as closer to Rawlsian theory in the past only if we ignore most of the world. I suspect that ideal theory has a much tougher time not because the world for middle-class white people has changed for the worse (although it likely has a bit), but the world that any theory is now expected to address is so much larger.

It’s infinitely harder to come up with theory and solutions that cover the massive complexities of cultural differences, governments, wealth levels and high levels of immigration. What’s a billion people raised out of poverty worth against the destruction of the middle class for millions? What’s the massive increase in welfare for tens of millions through wide-spread immigration worth against the increasing inability to enforce minimum standards of living for all?

It’s not that ideal theory has grown weaker, it’s that the challenges it is now expected to address (and have always been there lurking) have grown exponentially.

Anyway, that’s my fairly uninformed guess.

” The hypothesis is this: that in 1971 the gap between the ideal and the actual was a lot smaller than it is now. The world resembled Rawls’s ideal of the well-ordered society a lot more than it does now.”

I don’t think that’s true. Economically, yes. Distribution is less equal than in 1971. But culturally? Politically? In 1971 we didn’t seriously consider a Black president of the United States, or a woman. That was literally science fiction. We didn’t have to worry about the number of black or Asian or Hispanic faces on TV because that just wasn’t a thing. The number of women CEOs? Also not a thing. Stay-at-home-dads? Even in the 80’s that’s just for comedy. Can you imagine a fraternity being dissolved for singing a racist song in 1971?

That’s the problem with these “ideally” issues. In lots of ways the world IS closer to an ideal world, but in the one way that it really, really matters we are farther away.

PS: there is an asymmetry here between questions of economic justice and other questions of justice (regarding gender, race, minorities etc.). I agree with other commentators about the latter.

Not to mention Vietnam, deindustrialization and globalization, and so on.

This seems right. Rawls was always pretty clear that his theory, oriented by “reflective equilibrium” and all, follows politics, not the other way around. That is, philosophers have to wait for real politics to actually happen in order to have something to theorize. And part of theorizing is always “ideal”- that is, accounting for the ideals implicit in real developments. This is one of the ways in which it’s fair to call Rawls a Kantiam.

Interesting. I’m not sure I buy the whole hypothesis, but it seems pretty clear that Western states in 1971 were a lot closer to the idealised “closed system” Rawls talks about. So if what makes the difference is globalisation, one could even try and leverage these historical considerations to build a slightly different argument for expanding the scope of justice.

“we might reasonably have expected looking to the future from 1971″ < Maybe; given that the first oil supply dispute was 2 years into the future, and the business roundtable was yet to be founded (but see the road to Mont Pelerin). But (admittedly with the partial benefit of hindsight) given the liberal aversion to acknowledging the political nature of, and taking a stance on issues of political economy, I’d say the writing was on the wall even then. Because so long as people keep allowing others to pretend as though “societies exist primarily to increase the output of things”, rather than that “the manufacture of goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people”, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

from the OP:
The hypothesis is this: that in 1971 the gap between the ideal and the actual was a lot smaller than it is now. The world resembled Rawls’s ideal of the well-ordered society a lot more than it does now. Or at least, the North American bit of the world did.

I think the last sentence in the above passage is important: the hypothesis is mainly about the ‘developed’ world, esp., as I read the OP, the U.S., and with those restrictions (which make some sense in light of Rawls’s own focus) the proposition seems probably right (with the caveats about gender, race etc).

Expanded to the whole world, the picture is more mixed. E.g., child mortality rates are lower than in ’71, average life expectancies in a number of countries are probably longer, and the percentage of the global pop. living in extreme poverty has declined. Percentage of school-age children actually in school is prob. somewhat higher than in ’71. Not to say that any of these figures are now good — they aren’t — but there’s been some improvement. OTOH, ec. inequalities in many places are more marked, forms of labor exploitation (sweatshop, child labor, indentured servitude etc.) still exist on a large scale, many economies don’t generate enough decent jobs, the numbers living in slums and shantytowns in the ‘developing’ world have increased, etc.

b. mcmanus @13 may be right that the entrance of women into the workforce in large numbers in the developed world had to do w ‘rationalizing’ capitalism, but it did represent for some women a (subjectively experienced) liberation. (Which I suppose gets discounted by him under the heading of “individualism.”)

Very interesting post. I wish I had more time to comment rather than just rapidly skim posts and threads here to see what I can learn.

It occurs to me that the debate about “ideal theory” and “real world” considerations might be analogous to the debate we used to have back in the 1960s (and early 70s, when I was a university student) concerning “radicalism” and “meliorism”.

Couldn’t it be about momentum as well as actual current situation?
Things in the 60s were getting better quickly, both in terms of prosaic gdp and wage terms, and in terms of social progress.

The presupposition in the OP is that there are two approaches to political philosophy: one ideal in the sense of being removed from reality, the other non-ideal in the sense of being engaged with reality. But this is not how Rawls understood the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, and obviously if this were the distinction there would clearly be no point in thinking about ideal theory. Rather, Rawls proposed to *divide* political philosophy into two parts, ideal and non-ideal. The first part, ideal theory, seeks to discover what justice requires, and thereby to identify what counts as justice and injustice. The second part, non-ideal theory, seeks to understand how an unjust status quo can be transformed in the direction of justice. Understood in this way, ideal theory does not replace non-ideal theory but in fact serves it by (1) enabling non-ideal theory to identify what counts as an unjust status quo; and (2) identifying the target of transitional reforms. So at least as Rawls understood ideal theory, there is nothing about ideal theory as such that makes it irrelevant. (The specific content and scope of justice as fairness might be irrelevant in the sense of obsolete if there really is no longer anything of special significance about social cooperation within states, but that seems to be a different objection than the more general one that ‘ideal theory’ is irrelevant.)

In 1971, we were three years past MLK, RFK assassinations and the Chicago Democratic convention (hardly an ideal political meeting by any stretch of the imagination!) Nixon was president – three years away from resigning in disgrace. 1971 was one year after Kent State shootings and a year before the Watergate burglary. 1971 was two years shy of the gas crisis that caused rationing in America (remember that?) 1971 was one year prior to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

There is NO IDEAL WORLD. EVER. Trying to shove facts into “ideal models” never works. Never. And yet….

What bothered me most about run up to the 2008 crash was economists’ reliance on ideal theories to become blind to actual, real facts. “Housing prices have never declined, thus will never decline,” etc. and so on. We’ve also, in our devotion to the ideal models of that time, decided that no fraud happened at all – that that crash was just a big, unavoidable oops – that Repo 105 was a nice accounting tool, not a trick, that it’s okay for a bank to sell one client short as it goes long with another client ($GS an expert in this.)

From the OP: “The actual world resembles Rawls’s realistic utopia less in other ways too. In the Rawlsian vision, the co-operative whole – with each citizen finding their dignified role within – was set within an international system composed of similar co-operative schemes.”

Are you kidding me? How can you take that seriously? Please look at WalMart and the university system for how far we are removed from the Rawlsian ideal!!!

In ideal theory, facts do not matter – the theory’s the thing. Spare me the BS… deal with the real world instead. Where to now? Out of the clouds and onto earth…

“Unfortunately, it would seem that Christ cannot let go of John Rawls . . .”

Well, maybe Rawls was Christ’s favorite ideal theorist. “Do unto others . . .”

One thing I love about CT: the commenters are so much smarter than the OPers.*

*Just kidding. Sorta.

“Meanwhile the real web of co-operation corresponds less and less to the national economy: whilst the boss is in Zurich, the factory is in China, and so on. The population on the territory too is more mobile, and the working assumption that nearly all those subject to the state will also be citizens, always a stretch, is more clearly false.
…
The non-ideal correlate of Rawlsian ideal theory isn’t coming back. Where to then?”

Neil Brenner has done work re conceptualising the state and the urban to fit with changes from the 1960/70s.

I was just familiarising myself with his ideas a little yesterday and this morning since he is visiting to give a talk here next week, so I am not very well read. He seems to be influenced by Marx and the Frankfurt school, but given their periods of origin in competitive and Fordist/Keynesian capitalism asks of critical theory much like the OP asks of ideal theory:

“how the conditions of possibility for critical theory have changed today, in the early 21st century, in the context of an increasingly globalised, neoliberal used and financial used formation of capitalism”

I think one thing he is known for is in following others (eg Harvey) in looking at the urban as a process – he then sees the urban as no longer distinct or bounded by the form of the city – as the processes that form the material and society of contemporary cities take place on a planetary scale rather than a city or state scale.

If the problems the OP finds in ideal theory being able to meet the theoretical challenges of the present are that it is both 1. abstract; and, 2. only approximates a way of life in some terrains like the US which was a way of life in flux – then I am not sure how someone who likes ideal theory could fit it to the present – since if those are the problems it would have to change to be 1. less abstract ; 2. more applicable to a diverse but closely interrelated world.

If you changed both of these qualities then I am not sure it would still count as ideal theory, would it?

Chris B. as an academic, as a political philosopher, probably — I’m sort of guessing — reads a fair number of the journals and finds in them a lot of articles whose ties to empirical reality are v. tenuous. They come across as operating in a sort of dream world. And these articles defend their approach by using the label ‘ideal theory’. And I completely get why Chris might find this annoying. If I had to read those articles, which I don’t, I think I might find it quite irritating also.

However, the extent to which this can fairly be ‘blamed’ on Rawls is, istm, an open question at best. R. has his weaknesses as presumably all philosophers do, but I’m not sure the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is esp. one of them. Caleb @24 is, I think, roughly on the right track. R. assumes that people will comply w the principles of justice once they’ve been chosen: this ‘strict compliance’ is partly what he means by ‘ideal theory’. He says (TJ, 1st ed, p.246) that ideal theory “presents a conception of a just society that we are to achieve if we can.” If we can’t achieve it — because of “natural limitations and historical contingencies” — then we get, among other things, to the issue of which aspects of the ideal can be compromised and under what circumstances, and which can’t.

On these issues, as in some other instances, I don’t think R. was particularly well served by his expository style. Maybe he is clearer in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (I don’t know b.c haven’t read it) but in TJ you have to read these passages more than once to see what he’s getting at, and even then it’s not always crystal clear. If the ideas were inherently so complicated that they couldn’t be simply and directly expressed, that’s one thing, but I have the sense that quite often he could have been somewhat more direct.

The ideal theory of the 1970s stems from the elitism of the 1950s, in the soaring aspirations of the postwar miracle. You can build a lot of interstates and new towns if you straightforwardly focus on the middle class and bulldoze the slums. And, indeed, a lot of interstates and new towns were built.

In the frame where government powers are expansive, and the voices of the inconvenient powerless negligible, then it makes sense to conceive of political solutions as predominantly easy but only blocked by the mendacity of (fellow elite) remnants of the old order. Suffering in Afro-Asia? Decolonization! Segregation in the South? Integration! The global threat of nuclear annihilation? Détente and mutual disarmament! Peace and prosperity are but a triumphant declaration obtained in unambiguous political mandate away. The world is awash in 1960s manifestos that seem to be making themselves felt.

And remember, crucially, through the late 1960s this seemed to be mostly borne out by events. Conversely, attempts to defy these trends – confrontation in Vietnam, populist gestures in defiance of integration, etc. – seemed both unmitigatedly evil and doomed to failure.

By the late 1970s this seems mostly reversed. The great post-colonial wave of civil wars in Africa was raging, whereas the unrepentant iron heel in East Asia had transformed from colonial poverty to taking-our-jobs. Integration had been met with white flight and the irreversible collapse of the New Deal tent. The achievements of détente had been met with overwhelming contempt by American voters. Second wave feminism met its equal in Phyllis Schlafly and the moral majority. It turns out that obtaining mandates requires more than empowerment and that obtaining policy requires more than declarations. Worst of all, of course, is that the decolonizers you’ve been cheering for hike up the price of oil, as they do.

Cue neoliberalism – and the exit of the the non-ideal correlated perspective.

@LFC “Well yeah that wd work if you ripped the DP out of its context and ignored the various other aspects of R’s theory that rule out inequalities that the DP, standing alone, might countenance.”

We had this dispute last time, I think, but it seems to me that things are the other way around.
1. The DP alone would call for far more radical redistribution than Rawls is prepared to countenance. No economist to the left of Arthur Laffer would deny this point (in fact, denying it is Laffer’s claim to fame).
2. The other aspects of the theory appear to allow for more inequalities, not to rule them out. I haven’t seen this spelt out, but whenever I make point 1, it’s suggested that I shouldn’t be emphasising the DP so much.

Redistributive justice ended in 1973
Between the end of “The Wicker Man” and the first Springsteen LP

” Thinks have improved for gay people, for women, and, in some limited respects, for non-white people.”

I find kind of cute, and it isn’t exactly wrong, but is it what you meant to say?

[Thanks. Fixed. CB]

JQ @37 “…an ideal theory incorporates an (implicit or explicit) economic theory. Rawls, roughly speaking, reflected a strong view of the neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis, one in which demand management could ensure full employment, conditional on which minimally interventionist micro-economic policies and flat taxation rates would yield the best outcomes for everyone.”

I am not an ecumenist and have not read Rawls – you seem to indicate that Rawls feels businesses can solve the social problems of a nation (demand management leading to full employment, with minimally interventionist policies, etc. Or perhaps you mean demand management as dictated by government?) What would people get paid if there were no minimum wage (a policy which some politicians feel is outrageously interventionist)?

Don’t really know what you mean by “war on poverty was not lost; the government switched sides.” The war on poverty was lost. Horribly lost. Neither government nor businesses are interested in solving the issues of poverty. Just come to NC and I’ll show you what I mean.

Bruce Baugh @41 “but there were also a lot of working- and middle-class white people on board with the idea that those problems could and should be addressed…”

HOW did these people feel these problems should be addressed? Via a business solution (which we’ve seen is in the US as being determined by how to maximize profit and minimize costs of labor – hard to have a consumer-driven economy when consumers wages never grow.)

People looked to government – not business – to solve problems. Since Reagan, that approach has been battered and bashed relentlessly by the party of the wing nuts. We’re at a place now where government is paralyzed and held hostage by the loony fringe of the GOP (#47traitors as an example.) How does ideal theory address that inconvenient fact?

JQ @38

We probably did have the same dispute about the DP last time. Maybe I’ll backchannel you on this point sometime as 1)don’t have a lot of time today and 2)not sure the details of the dispute are of wide interest.

I am shocked to hear that, in 1971, the real world as I experienced in then was close to any sort of ideal. I remember it as a period when, it was clear, the ruling class consensus on the care and management of the Bismarckian Welfare state had fallen apart because of its seemingly incurable failures, a sort of low-level civil war was smouldering along in the streets, with a large component of individualistic crime, and an insane tide of imperial ambition was just beginning to break in Indochina. It is true that politically and economically, things were going to get worse for a lot of people (not me), but the ways in which they were going to get worse were already implicit in 1971.

I am not a student of Rawls, but I do think it is pretty clever to propose a fantasy of a inchoately communistic society which then chooses to transform itself into — surprise! — modern capitalism with Welfarist patches. But what function do such fantasies serve in the so-called real world?

This was also happening in or around 1971. But if the grown-ups around me had abandoned liberalism for something else before well into the 1980s, they were keeping the fact well hidden.

It seems to me “ideal theory” is, in some respects, just another word for Platonism: ideas and all are right there in the mind of God waiting for us to discover them, as opposed to Aristotelian discovery through science. There’s a pretense of its being “scientific” just as in the Middle Ages there was a pretense that the Aristotelian tradition led up to an ossified set of concepts as rigid as any Randroid’s. (Later you got Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, which recapitulated the whole thing in a more confusing way; then even later you got structuralism and poststructuralism, though as far as I can tell nobody can tell which side of the Plato-Aristotle divide either of those is even on.) Why do you need non-ideal theory, then, when it’s all there?

And so practical debates are limited to a increasingly narrow range of questions within increasingly abstruse economic theory.

Okay: 2 Journal of Law & Education 1973 Limited Right to Strike Laws – Can They Work When Applied to Public Education, The.

What’s with the sudden tide of reactionary nationalists? Did CT get linked on a ethnonationalist blog somewhere?

“[I]n 1971 the gap between the ideal and the actual was a lot smaller than it is now.”
This hypothesis sounds different, depending on how the “gap” and “actual” are understood.
Rawls’s TJ presents a method of argument in politics, and the ideal theory is part of how Rawls thinks we need to argue on behalf of justice. Rawls in TJ seems to have considered the ideal theory to be a lot closer to politically effective rhetoric in the US than we can today. In the US back in 1971, conscientious objection, civil disobedience, and economic redistribution were legitimate forms of political rhetoric for clearly identified political aims. Rawls justifies these forms of argument. Today in the US, the rhetoric of the Occupy movement was entirely ideal and not closely connected with political aims. That’s one way to understand the “gap” between ideal and actual.
Is this because the gap between real US society and ideal justice was “smaller”? Maybe. But this applies a quantitative metaphor that is foreign to parts of Rawls’s theory (especially priority of liberty and dignity of individuals). So we’re not going to measure the “gap” between reality and theory, if Rawls’s theory is our theory of justice. (Unless we try to turn the difference principle into the main part of the theory. Then maybe we can use an index of income inequality as a measure.)
But maybe the “gap” can be measured in another way.

Oh, I am slow. But compared to the 2011 tiff with Delong, today the ethnic immigration question seems harder and harder to frame appropriate left-wing and populist solutions around. The only people who really seem to believe in a global wealthy conspiracy against the masses – who behave as one would behave if there [i]were[/i] such a conspiracy – are crazy neofascist racists. So one is left with unconvincing rhetoric, a populism of tofu rather than red meat. Not really a recipe for success.

But we’ve actually been here before, haven’t we, at least for Commonwealth citizens – the Commonwealth nonwhite immigration question of the 1960s. The UK Labour Party in that period, sufficiently humiliated by electoral losses, decided that office was well worth compromising on anti-nationalist and anti-racist principles and scrubbed defending free Commonwealth movement from its ambitions. Is contemporary New Labour – neoliberalised social democracy and all its knotting of states around nebulously popular commitments like refugee rights – capable of shutting out baser populism? We’ll see.

Chris Bertram:
the OP wants us to develop a cosmopolitan political philosophy that corresponds to the cosmopolitan world we live in

As Chris B. knows, not long after A Theory of Justice was published some readers began criticizing Rawls for having ignored the global dimension of inequality and having limited his focus to national societies. Beitz’s work along these lines was published in article form a few years after TJ came out, and then in book form in 1979 as Political Theory and International Relations. Henry Shue’s Basic Rights followed a couple of years later. Pogge in Realizing Rawls discussed how R.’s theory could be extended to be global in scope. They didn’t all the say the same thing, but they were all dissatisfied with R’s lack of cosmopolitanism and inattention to inequalities, whether within-country or between-country, that were at least partly a result of global political-economic forces. Now, decades later, there is so much writing on global justice that one person would probably have difficulty keeping up w/ it all (I make little or no effort to do so).

Without TJ and its shortcoming in this respect as a prod, would this huge amount of work on global justice have happened? Probably eventually, but probably not as quickly as it did. So maybe we should give a little credit to Rawls for having, albeit largely inadvertently, helped spark that, instead of, per engels upthread, smugly dumping on R. as “high-minded idealism” that simply abstracted from postwar U.S. liberalism. Even if it was partly that, it proved generative (to use a fashionable word I don’t really like but which seems apt here).

And btw, contra Tom Hurka above, civil disobedience was not just “a 1964-65 topic” but also a ‘hot topic’ into the early 1970s (anti-Vietnam-war movement).

I think the point was not to bash Rawls in particular but to point out an interesting aspect of the kind of perspective that Rawls seemed to be speaking towards, viz., a world where all one had to do as a liberal member of the elite in good standing was to sufficiently exhort conservative members of the elite toward consistency in broadly shared ideals, and the gears of managerial government would obediently turn and immanentize the mandate. Rawls doesn’t seem to worry about a collapse in the legitimacy of ambitious federal mandates, unexpectedly crippling difficulties in realizing those mandates, or the disappearance of a consensus in said ideals. But you don’t have to invoke Rawls in the particular to motivate this observation. Who was Galbraith speaking to? Why does the Port Huron Statement demand that the Democrats expel the Dixiecrats without bothering to perform a quick demographic calculation, as if it’s obviously the case that the party of Lincoln would stand hand-in-hand with integrationist progressives against them?

It’s valid, I think, as an observation. I do want to point out that the gears eventually turned again to anoint a new elite perspective, one with less Anglo-American political philosophy and more Anglo-American economics. Likewise, again: broadly shared ideals, assuming that measures to tamp down politics would actually tamp down politics, etc. In terms of sketching abstract theoretical claims and having Serious People take these Seriously, both on the New Labour/DLC/etc left and gleeful right, it’s a good time to be an economist – I think that much is true, without making any commitments to the truthfulness or falsity of the claims that economists or philosophers make. It’s not the same kind of ideal theory, but it’s idealized theory nonetheless. We just take different things for granted.

(the david of 66, not 67)

That timing seems wrong – the New Left and the embrace of countercultural identity politics far predates the oil crisis.

bianca steele 03.13.15 at 2:26 pm, #52

I have no idea who are the grown-up you’re referring to. You can’t be taking about the man in the street, because the man in the street doesn’t give a hoot about such labels. And you certainly can’t mean the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, because “liberalism” wasn’t what it was about. So I must assume that you must mean white intellectuals, whether academics or not, for only white intellectuals would have a stake at keeping such a fiction alive (see Anarcissie’s comment immediately prior to yours).
To keep the record straight, the counter-culture movement also wasn’t about liberalism; it was a critique of American/Western values and it transcended such political/[philosophical) categories. As to the situation on the campuses at the time, it seems you have also missed the boat. All throughout my undergraduate years in the late sixties and postgraduate studies at NYU in the early seventies, a liberal society was precisely what was being critiqued, both by the students and most of the faculty. The atmosphere at NYU and the New School was one of extreme radicalism, devoted to the writings of the German and French schools of thought. And, need I add, some writings of Foucault were already available in English. Foucault may not have coined the term “Project Enlightenment” (Lyotard perhaps), but all the seeds of the pertinent critique of Western liberal values were certainly present in his work.
My guess would be that liberalism had (again) come into vogue in the late seventies and early eighties, to provide a sort of banner and a rallying cry to the disgruntled and powerless white intellectual, to provide him or her with their raison d’être – certainly not anything to get excited about. And Rawls’s idea of a well-order society fits this bill to a T.

roger,

I’m sorry, you’re complaining that the grade school or high school student in the 1970s and early 1980s who read newspapers would never have heard the world “liberalism” or met someone who called themselves a “liberal”?

And you’re saying that because at NYU and the New School there was a great deal of radicalism in the late 1970s, there must not have been reaction, then or earlier, in other places? (I can sympathize, having taken classes at Harvard after graduating from Columbia, it took me a while to figure out that when it was said that someone didn’t get tenure because they were too far left, it didn’t mean they were actually a Communist.) You’ve never heard the saying about after 1970 or so, all options for political action and radicalism dried up, so everyone had to move to the right or hide their beliefs to survive? Forgive me for not drawing the vast conclusions you obviously want me to draw from your personal experience.

And you’re saying that we have to use your definition of “liberalism”? And I have to have my memories vetted for terminological and ideological correctness, not only by scholars of history who know the established version, but by every individual person on the Internet who thinks they know what’s correct?

Roger,

I think you’re being disingenuous. It’s very kind of you to note that we probably don’t disagree, but you needn’t have bothered.

You asked me who the grown-ups in question were, whom I mentioned. So those were the people we were talking about. Now it seems that you’re complaining that you weren’t talking about the people whom I mentioned. Whom you asked about. I wouldn’t call this a generation gap, exactly.

http://s-usih.org/2014/07/roundtable-u-s-foreign-policy-and-the-left-chapter-6.html

An excerpt:

In 1968 Rawls spoke to students at Harvard about his sentiments on the [Vietnam] conflict. … Rawls detailed the reasons why the young listeners standing before him had a right to resist the draft. They boiled down to the fact that the war itself was unjust and that [its] claims otherwise were wrong. Rawls recited two grounds for this charge: first, there was no just cause for the U.S.’s initiated entry into Vietnam; and second, that “our armed forces engage in actions which violate the limits on the appropriate means of waging war.” Rawls coupled these grounds with historical facts he deemed essential to evaluating the situation. … Rhetoric casting the war as just—as a defense of democracy against the expansion of communism—was simply morally illegitimate…. Thus students not only had a right to resist service in Vietnam; it was their duty to do so. [5]

This doesn’t in itself show much more than that Rawls opposed the war on grounds that by 1968 a lot of (though not all) liberals agreed on. But that he spoke out in this way at an anti-war rally in the company of, among others, “his friend and former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky” (as the post’s author puts it) is, I think, worth noting.

Roger,

The generous, charitable, courteous thing to do here would be to point out that you seem to have misread @52. It occurred in a discussion of when certain changes had taken place. I said already in this thread, and other times in comments here at CT, that I was in college in 1985. So who “grown-ups . . . well into the 1980s” might be — it really doesn’t seem difficult. All that about an earlier generation? I don’t follow you.

I’m having a hard time finding something to say to you here that isn’t snarky or insulting. There’s really nothing in anything you’ve written that has anything to do with my comments, except that you started off with “bianca, you,” so I really don’t think there’s anything to say.

@78

Sorry, Bianca, but I didn’t realize I was supposed to keep tabs on you, as to when you had gone to college, when you graduated, etc. I didn’t exactly follow your career on CT either, as I don’t with any of the other commenters. I just try to respond as best I can to what I see in front of me. And if being snarky or insulting is the best you can muster at this point, then indeed it is for the better that we call it quits.

In 1971, faking ideals was useful for propagandizing against communism. The market’s collapsed now.

But the notion that academia isn’t building dream palaces any more doesn’t hold water I think. Libertarian and conservative ideal theory seems to be a thriving industry. The ideals of a permanent class society with endless US military domination of the planet may not be attractive to some of us, but they are ideals.

those criteria, stated alone, would include New Labour/DLC transformations of then-existing centre-left/social-democratic parties…!